The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla by Valeria Manzano (review)

Book Reviews THE AGE OF YOUTH IN ARGENTINA: CULTURE, POLITICS, AND SEXUALITY FROM PERÓN TO VIDELA. By Valeria Manzano: University of North Carolina Press, 2014, p. 338, $34.95. In The Age of Youth, Valeria Manzano studies youth as a category and young people as actors from the fall of Perón’s first administration to the last military dictatorship. Her well-written monograph demonstrates how Argentine youth and their developing sexual and cultural identity functioned as a crucial element in Argentine culture and politics. Through her research, she shows the influence that youth (including upper, middle, and working class backgrounds) had in influencing sweeping cultural transformation and political turmoil. Her study “shows that youth, as a concept, embodied hopes and anxieties projected onto claims for change, and that young people inhabited, with varying degrees of intensity, that politically and culturally loaded category” (2). To advance her argument of youth agency in developing Argentina’s political and cultural history, Manzano’s approach combines testimonies ranging from governmental agencies to psychologists to the youth themselves to their family members and to the Catholic Church. Her sources include archives such as the Consejo Nacional de Protección de Menores Archive, the Liga de Madres de Familia, the Obra de Protección de la Joven, the Partido Comunista Argentino, and selections from the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History; government publications; educational and social statistics; periodicals; magazines including those of youth and counterculture; political-cultural journals and magazines; pamphlets; and political press publications to name a few. In addition, she offers interviews and personal communications with former students at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and with former working class young men and women from the neighborhood of Lanús in the greater Buenos Aires province. To complement the findings from these sources, the book analyzes different works of fiction and movies to show the attitudes reflected in Argentine youth (as well as the institutional attempts to politically impose correct attitudes) in popular culture. Her skillful interweaving of oral histories, archival information and cultural artefacts to reveal the story of Argentine youth represents one of the strengths of Manzano’s work. The book follows a loose chronological order of Argentine history, focusing on specific youth-related themes and problems between the 1950s1970s . With the first chapter on Peron’s government, she traces the governmental campaign to provide leisure activities and group meeting places for youth. With growing youth independence, dialogues about the “new youth” emerged, revolving around family authority between youth, their parents and the Catholic Church. She highlights the counter-discourse of disenchantment presented in films and how media restrictions were established to reinforce authority. In Chapter Two, she turns to education where the secondary schools and the universities became a space for 579 The Latin Americanist, December 2016 reactions against authoritarian practices. She chronicles the modernization of youth in the 1960s, showing the movement of youth from traditional gathering spaces to the streets, heralding the emergence of the revolutionary youth—a “golden era” of youth. Chapter Three examines youth-led music and consumption, exploring night life, fashion, media and rock music . Chapters Four and Five delve into gender ideals and sexual mores. She references the moral panic of 1963 with runaway girls in Argentina and the institutional responses. In this chapter, she also devotes time to the most significant change in Argentine youth culture: the public acceptance of premarital sex—the ultimate “measure” of modernization. She also returns to the actively emerging rock culture in Argentina and its insertion into political and cultural arenas, exploring the advent of the long-haired rockers and their inversion of defined categories of Argentine masculinity. In Chapter Six, Manzano discusses the growing political student participation , highlighting active student involvement in student, party and guerrilla groups. The next chapter is outstanding in its articulation on the emergence of the concept of poner el cuerpo (to put their body) in service of the revolution. Chapter Seven effectively demonstrates how the youth body quite literally came to embody political and cultural categories in Argentine history. Finally, Chapter Eight follows the reactions of political assertion on the youth body during the last military dictatorship. Through...