The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla

Introduction

1 Introduction the age of youth In September 1966, the weekly magazine Confirmado published a long “report on youth” to explore whether or not a “unified youth consciousness and experience” had spread in Argentina like, the reporter posited, it had in postwar Europe. The answer was not conclusive. On the one hand, the reporter claimed that “only by fantasizing could one view a link between Rubén, twenty-five, a construction worker who migrated from Santiago del Estero to the Greater Buenos Aires area, and Ricardo, twentyone , an entrepreneur from downtown Buenos Aires.” Moreover, he found even fewer connections between them and Ana, seventeen, a secondary school student from the lower middle class. On the other hand, the reporter did find commonalities. First, although their choices differed, the interviewees showed a particular engagement with “young music idols” and were willing to “spend their money and time following them.” Second, while the construction worker had stated his “fondness toward Peronism,” and the entrepreneur his taste for “social democracy,” the reporter thought that young people held a similar “moderate and rational” attitude toward politics. Third, if there was one realm about which young people agreed (and diverged from their elders), it was sexuality: “they accept premarital sex without prejudices,” the reporter argued, “but they keep tying sex to love and marriage.”¹ Only one among a myriad of reports the media ran throughout the 1960s, this one was unique in its interrogation of the category of youth (la juventud) by pointing out class and gender differences among young people (los y las jóvenes). As most reports did, however, this one also emphasized three key aspects that “youth” invoked and that young people helped transform in Argentina: culture, politics, and sexuality. Youth as a category and young people as actors had at times a potent presence in Argentina’s politics and culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Argentina was the cradle of the University Reform Movement, 2 Introduction launched in 1918 and largely coded as an antihierarchical youth revolt against what reformist students identified as the academic and political conservatism of most professors, their elders. Besides generating the conditions for a self-ruled university system, the reform movement paved the way for increasing student engagement with politics and helped fuel the creation of the youth branches of the Socialist and Communist Parties (in 1919 and 1921, respectively). Yet the language of youth revolt vanished as Reformism became a platform for the building of a cultural and political identity for the “progressive” middle class that cut across party and age lines.² On a different level, the expansion and diversification of mass culture ushered in the spread of specific youth fashions and leisure practices. The transnational “modern girl”—the slender, short-haired, independent young woman that Americans labeled the “flapper”—had its Argentine embodiment. At least magazines and tango lyrics produced that imagery and incited concerns about the sexual mores of youth in the modernizing Buenos Aires of the 1920s and 1930s.³ Moreover, in the late 1940s, groups of middle-class boys, the petiteros, challenged patterns of neighborhood sociability in cafes, street corners, and social clubs where men of all ages interacted. Pouring into downtown Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Rosario, the petiteros shaped a stylized fashion, listened to jazz instead of tango, and avoided intergenerational intermingling altogether.⁴ By the mid-twentieth century, Argentines were familiar with the politicized university student, the “modern girl,” and the iconoclastic boy among other youth figures that evoked challenges to the prevalent political, cultural, and sexual order. Yet it was only in the mid-1950s that an age of youth really began. This book studies how youth became a crucial cultural and political category, and one of the most dynamic cultural and political actors in Argentina , from the 1950s to the 1970s. With an equal focus on the adults who spoke about and interpellated youth (from psychologists, educators, parents’ leagues, and politicians to music producers and advertisers) and on young women’s and men’s experiences, the book investigates what the making of youth reveals about how Argentines imagined themselves during times of sweeping cultural transformation and political turmoil, which were suffused by a yearning for newness and change. It 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. Over those decades, the working- and middle...