“Rock Nacional” and Revolutionary Politics: The Making of a Youth Culture of Contestation in Argentina, 1966–1976

On March 30, 1973, three weeks after Héctor Cámpora won the first presidential elections in which candidates on a Peronist ticket could run since 1955, rock producer Jorge Álvarez, himself a sympathizer of left-wing Peronism, carried out a peculiar celebration. Convinced that Cámpora’s triumph had been propelled by young people’s zeal—as expressed in their increasing affiliation with the Juventud Peronista (Peronist Youth, or JP), an organization linked to the Montoneros—he convened a rock festival, at which the most prominent bands and singers of what journalists had begun to dub rock nacional went onstage. Among them were La Pesada del Rock’n’Roll, the duo Sui Géneris, and Luis Alberto Spinetta with Pescado Rabioso. In spite of the rain, 20,000 people attended the “Festival of Liberation,” mostly “muchachos from every working- and middle-class corner of Buenos Aires,” as one journalist depicted them, also noting that while the JP tried to raise chants from the audience, the “boys” acted as if they were “untouched by the political overtones of the festival.”¹

Rather atypical, this event was nonetheless significant. First, it briefly but directly spoke of rock culture’s social and gender dynamics, showing that it had amassed a constituency that crossed class lines, yet was overwhelmingly male. Second, it showed the keen desire, albeit fraught with apparent difficulty, to create a common space for youth articulated through the notion of “liberation.” As it unfolded in Argentina and most other Latin American countries during the 1960s, “liberation” encompassed both political and cultural meanings, for example, “national liberation from neocolonialism” in its left-wing Peronist version, and “individual liberation from conventions and repressions” in the sense that rockers gave it.² This article argues that in Argentina rock culture sensitized young people to cultural and political authoritarianism, thus crucially contributing to the shaping of a heterogeneous, multilayered, and increasingly radicalized youth culture of contestation, organized around different meanings of “liberation.”

The historicization of rock culture offers a vantage point for analyzing the relationship between culture and politics in the Latin American 1960s. In the late years of the decade, Argentina’s rock culture showed a marked dynamism, becoming a mass phenomenon. The scholars who have studied rock nacional’s first decade—approximately 1966 through 1976—have aimed at unpacking its specificities. In a pioneering work, sociologist Pablo Vila has shown that, musically speaking, rock nacional blended rock’s beat and harmony with other forms of popular music, notably tango and “folklore.” The classification of a song as rock depended on the relative position of singers within the rock movement, which, in turn, relied on their compliance with claims of authenticity. In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon rock context, authenticity worked aesthetically and ideologically: in rock nacional, Vila argued, between being a star and an artist, rockers always picked the second term.³ Sociologist Pablo Alabarces has also pointed out the importance of authenticity claims in defining rock nacional over time, as an embodiment of youth culture centered on notions of rebellion.⁴ More recently, literary critic Claudio Díaz has incisively noted that the “rebel I” was the most persistent trope in the poetics of rock nacional.⁵ Rock nacional, thus, is not to be defined solely in sonic and linguistic terms—even though it is not irrelevant that Argentine musicians and poets, as did their Chilean and Colombian counterparts, produced songs that were written and performed in Spanish. As a form of cultural politics, in any case, rock gained national credentials when musicians, poets, and fans—until the 1970s, almost invariably young men—appropriated practices and styles from a transnational repertoire and used them to cope with the dynamics of cultural change and authoritarianism that permeated Argentine life.

The study of rock culture and the attention to its gendered dimensions help us to revise the narrative of modernization in the Argentine sixties. In the era that began with the military coup that overthrew Juan Domingo Perón’s first governments (1946–1955), civilian and military...