The Prehistoric Left Wing at the End of the World: A Protest from Argentina’s Last Dictatorship

“Rock is dead” is rarely a good place to start. But so begins a black-and-white mimeographed magazine, The Zangandongo: An Organ for Artistic Expression, published by teenagers midway through Argentina’s last, deadly military dictatorship (1976–1983). “Zangandongo,” a word that in Spanish means “lazybones-lay about-ne’er-do-well,” is used by a group of young writers who tried to make shocking statements but who also reiterated old news. “The di Tella is dead,” the first page continues, referring to the legendary Buenos Aires institute that was the heart of the Argentine avant-garde throughout the 1960s. “Dada is dead. Surrealism is dead. BUT THEY DID NOT DIE IN VAIN! . . . They gave birth to The Zangandongo” (Folletin de Zangandongo, 1).

Caught between a gleeful disdain for everything that comes before them and a need to stoke kindred passions wherever they may be found, The Zangandongo is stuck watching Argentina’s dictators loot the country’s history in the name of national purity while attempting to carve out a place for their own goal: “Total freedom of the imagination.” From the first publication of The Zangandongo in October 1979 until its breakup in 1982, The Zangandongo had many incarnations, all of which came out of the Taller de Investigaciones Teatrales (TIT, Workshop for Theatrical Research), a Buenos Aires theater group started by a former di Tella student, Juan Carlos Uviedo, before he was arrested in 1979 and jailed for two years, charged with possession of seven seeds of marijuana. TIT was formed as a group for autodidacts interested in theater and art. Its participants numbered about twenty-five. No one was older than twenty-three. Some had spent time in jail. Most found their educations interrupted by the 1976 coup; some were forced to leave the university, while others found nothing there that they wanted to learn.

With political activity impossible and work scarce, members of TIT instead dedicated their time to studying Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, absurdist theater, dada, surrealism, the nineteenth-century Uruguayan writer Isidore Ducasse, also known as the Conte de Lautrémont, Jean Genet, Louis Aragon, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and Sigmund Freud. Making the most of the links between the European avant-garde and political dissidence that grew out of May ’68 protests, TIT turned to writers and art movements that were weird enough to not make their way onto official lists of banned work (and whose products were thus more readily available) and that had a semblance of revolutionary history. TIT’s members wanted to study art made in a state of emergency, and in surrealism TIT found art that went toward “a new way of life that opposed a world that pitted man against man . . . ultimately opposing a society that devours itself” (Folletin de Zangandongo, 14).

Even in 1979, at the height of the dictatorship’s violence, kidnappings, and murders, surrealist books could still be found in bookstores or circulating in study groups. Further, surrealism had its own Latin American tradition, and even when it was impossible to even mention the Cuban revolution, barely possible to utter the name of the Martinican poet and dramatist Aimé Césaire or the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, or the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, or the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillén or the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier—all of whom in one way or another were linked to surrealism—it was possible to draw on the European sources that had so profoundly influenced Latin American writers and artists. Surrealism was a way to connect to avant-garde traditions that was both Latin American and politically committed.

The Surrealist Encyclopedia, Volume 1, was TIT’s most extensive publication. A second volume was never produced. Its introduction is a collectively signed, sober explanation of the group: “Here we present some of the internal writings of the group, excerpted and summarized,” they write. “At another time, we will publish them fully, but for now, our objective is to initiate the study of the positions developed by the group” (Taller de Investigaciones Teatrales, 5...