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

Abstract

In her book The Age of Youth in Argentina, Valeria Manzano studies youth as a social and cultural category from its first appearance in national debates with Juan Perón's establishment of the Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios through the subsequent explosion of secondary school and university enrollments under Arturo Frondizi and other democratically elected governments to the development of a nonconformist counterculture with the onset of the Juan Carlos Onganía dictatorship in 1966 and, finally, its history under the last military dictatorship. The book's early chapters analyze new trends in sexuality and such subjects as changing attitudes toward premarital sex and birth control. Argentina followed global trends on these matters but with some characteristics of its own, including the notable influence of the burgeoning psychology profession in those debates. Manzano weaves in the book's first chapters a rich story of youthful rebellion but also of adolescent angst and consumption desires, along with the class tensions revealed within these, including the petty snobbism of adolescents who could afford imported Levi and Lee blue jeans over those produced domestically. Blue jeans as a social marker, the ability to flaunt a label, apparently made the difference between being one of the in crowd or being condemned to the ranks of the uncool, the mersa.Manzano's study largely concentrates on Buenos Aires and especially the experiences of youth at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She narrates the evolution of a rebellious and nonconformist youth in which rockers had a tense relationship with political organizations such as the Juventud Peronista and the Montoneros. Many interesting stories are recounted here, including the history of Argentina's hippies and rock subculture. Her brief forays into youth cultures in other parts of the country are made only in passing and lack the same wealth of detail. Arguably the most influential, and certainly the most politicized, university in the country in these years (as it had been during the 1918 University Reform Movement) was the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC), whose history has been examined exhaustively in the recent two-volume study edited by Daniel Saur and Alicia Servetto, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba: Cuatrocientos años de historia (2013). Manzano's book adds little new to that history on such subjects as the role of the students in the Cordobazo and student radicalism there in the 1970s. Indeed, years before the events of May 1969, the transnational culture she so persuasively depicts takes on a different character if examined from sites other than Buenos Aires. Youth from Buenos Aires may have discovered the interior and its social realities in the late 1960s, but young people there had their own agency and representations well before the Cordobazo.Students elsewhere in the country looked less to the United States for cultural influences than they did to the rest of Latin America. Musically, the most important cultural event of the 1960s in the interior was not rock or Beatlemania but the annual Cosquín musical festivals in the Cordoban sierras first held in 1961, which launched the careers of Mercedes Sosa, Víctor Heredia, and other musicians and where a pan–Latin American musical culture merged with a pan–Latin American radical youth politics. While students in Buenos Aires, as she tells it, were apparently enthralled with the twist, Palito Ortega and El Club del Clan, and the British invasion, caravans of integralista Catholic students were traveling from Córdoba to Tucumán on literacy campaigns and student peñas were bringing together Che's writings and the songs of Víctor Jara and Atahualpa Yupanqui; for these groups, Cuba, not swinging London, was the cultural touchstone. Manzano herself essentially notes this difference, as her rockers exit the story in the chapter devoted to radical youth politics and social protest under Onganía only to reappear again with the boom of rock nacional and big stadium rock concerts during the final years of El Proceso. In the book's final chapter, she astutely problematizes this idea of rock as a form of resistance to the dictatorship. It also remains to be seen whether the changes in sexuality that she so cogently explores in various chapters, including the book's most original (and polemical) chapter on the intersection of sexuality and revolutionary politics, were as pronounced in the provinces. In the interior, paradoxically, a deeper political radicalization seems to have been accompanied by the resilience of traditional patriarchal values and practices. Many student activists and radicals in Córdoba and other provinces were also practicing Catholics.Well researched and written in clear, straightforward prose, Manzano's book is one of the more interesting to appear recently on Argentine history. The Age of Youth in Argentina makes its own important contribution to its subject and also opens new areas of research on the history of youth elsewhere in the country, part of the ongoing effort to recast the narrative on the national story.