Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  While conservative Catholic groups and the CNPM worked within already existing legal frameworks when censoring print materials, they helped create new ones concerning the censorship of other forms of visual media. The Leagues of Mothers met with television producers to discuss the shaping of “moral codes” and repeatedly convened in workshops with parents to train them in “appropriate ways of watching” television.64 Their lobbying efforts crystallized in 1965, when a presidential decree mandated that television programs that showed “the dissolution of the family, sexual deviancy, and eroticism” would be automatically discontinued.65 These groups replicated similar censorship programs with television that had worked so well in film. In 1959, they had lobbied the executive power to create a Committee of Film Qualification that was in charge of rating movies according to their content for minors. The representatives of the CNPM and the Catholic groups comprised ten of the nineteen voting members, and they mandated harsh decisions throughout.66 In late September of 1963, moreover, the de facto government of Dr. José M. Guido (1962–63) issued a decree that broadened the scope of a new Board of Film Qualification, which was allowed to cut movies that affected “our national security, threatened by the ideological infiltration that weakens the internal front through the corruption of morals, the scorn of tradition, the dislocation of the family, and the relenting of spiritual values.”67 The vagueness of the decree eventually made all movies subject to censorship. For instance, the board approved the discontinuation of Frédéric Rossif’s Morir en Madrid—which contained footage of the Spanish Civil War—because it gave “a good impression of the Communists” and then mandated scenes of Lars Lindgren’s film Dear John be cut because they showed “a hand between one woman’s legs.” Argentine distributors, producers, and filmmakers knew that it was not safe to import or produce movies anymore.68 Mobilizing a rhetoric centered on the “defense of minors,” in fact, these conservative groups set some of the most restrictive conditions of the 1960s in Argentina and affected adults as much as they affected youths.

  It was in the educational milieu, significantly, where the imposition of restrictive conditions produced overt clashes between the psychological professionals and the Catholic groups, as these two examples illustrate. In 1958, the UBA decided to make the two secondary schools they ran coeducational. Representing the beliefs of Reca and Giberti, among others, pediatrician and UBA vice-rector Escardó defended coeducation as a way of building up a more “natural interaction between the sexes.”69 The League of Fathers was afraid that the establishment of coeducation at the UBA schools would pave the way for its generalization in all public schools. So they sent a press communiqué where they drew upon an encyclical Pious XI issued in 1929 to condemn coeducation because “its naturalism” did not acknowledge “original sin” and the “fact that the sexes are different.”70 The Leagues of Fathers and Mothers interviewed the minister of education, who assured them that he would not “innovate”: the secondary schools in the “modernized” Buenos Aires of the 1960s continued separating the sexes.71 The success of the conservative voices did not stop there. In 1959, the League of Mothers denounced the hiring of psychologists by the principals of several secondary schools, who planned to discuss with female students their school and family problems. These initiatives, the League of Mothers claimed, represented the tip of the iceberg for the erosion of family authority and were “Communist by nature.”72 A secret report sent to Frondizi reproduced the same ideas: “The girls engaging with this initiative end up questioning their role as students, daughters, and mothers: these are seeds for Communist infiltration.”73 The ideas of “dislocation of family authority” and “Communist infiltration” reinforced one another to signal how serious the situation was. In that case also, the minister left no doubt and did not authorize the psychologists’ participation.

  As if a symbolic exchange were taking place, however, while the conservative voices successfully participated in policymaking that set some of the cultural conditions for youth sociability in the 1960s, the psychological professionals became the experts on youth and family and were regarded as the most legitimate voices. Psychological professionals instilled the idea that adolescence and youth were a convoluted period within the life cycle, a crisis that individuals might normally overcome in their transition to adulthood. That discursive normalization of the youth crisis, along with the guidance to avoid authoritarian practices within the family, reached broad segments of the population, especially among the middle classes. Parents who were willing to “modernize” parenting strategies read advice columns and participated in workshops. Youths meanwhile not only had appointments with psychologists, but also took advice from them on negotiating with their parents on issues related to authority at home, as Giberti proudly noted.74 Most basically, when emerging in public discourse, youth became a conduit for larger anxieties vis-à-vis the modernization of society, the meaning of change, and the visualization and imagination of the future.

  Toward the Argentina of 1980

  As the 1960s unfolded, the public interest in youth did not lessen, but the ways and intensity of addressing it changed. In contrast with the 170 lectures that La Razón reported in the preceding triennium, it only reported 39 during the period between 1962 and 1965. Giberti likewise was given gradually less space within the daily, and her column was discontinued in 1966.75 The psychological professionals kept working to provide clinical treatment, yet their presence in the public arena decreased along with the anxieties that youth had awoken in the past years. By the mid-1960s, psychological professionals and sociologists also showed a degree of satisfaction: they observed that the harsher forms of patriarchal authority seemed to have vanished among urban families, in which children enjoyed greater respect and more liberties. The picture was promising and reflected well upon youth, or “the Argentina of 1980,” as a journalist deemed it. In fact, a new journalism and a new cinematography further shaped the images and data that showed a “modern youth” that in turn became the cipher that displayed their own modernization.

  Shot from Los jóvenes viejos. Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken Archive.

  As the 1960s went on, perhaps the last powerful representations encoded in the “crisis-of-our-time” motif were provoked by the movies of the movement called the “Generation of 1960”, which made youth one of its thematic cornerstones. Although they did not share a common filmic language and did not make the same choices in generic and formal patterns, many of the filmmakers who gained access to the domestic film industry around 1960 did effectively cultivate similar attitudes against the previous “commercial” model of production and engaged in a serious commitment to renovating the local scene.76 Admirers of directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard, these filmmakers were under thirty years old and represented, or self-represented, what they depicted as a “new youth.” That was the case with one of the most prolific members of the “Generation of 1960,” director and producer Rodolfo Kuhn. He devoted his three first movies, Los jóvenes viejos (1962), Los inconstantes (1962), and Pajarito Gómez (1965) to representing youth.77 Los jóvenes viejos (The Old Youth) tells the story of three young middle-class male friends: one of them works as a television producer; another is a law student, and another attempts to make a movie “on guys just like us.” Always dissatisfied, their worries revolve around finding any meaning whatsoever in their existence, which is marked by the habits of hanging around Buenos Aires and listening to jazz. They travel to Mar del Plata, where they meet three girls whose attachments to the social and affective worlds appear as elusive as theirs. They conceive of love and sex as possible ways to escape from their senseless lives, but they can barely communicate. In one of the many self-reflective dialogues that permeate the movie, the friends only find a response to their feelings: “What are we?” one friend asks. “We did not have two wars,” another responds: “No, but we had Perón.” The comparison to European and North American youth is obvious, and the dialogue suggests that
Peronism had had the same effects on Argentina’s youth as war had had on the major powers.78

  Los jóvenes viejos helped instill the image of a weary, unsatisfied, but “authentic new youth” on the center stage and attempted to portray a generation marked by Peronism and the frustrated projects geared toward overcoming its legacies. Like many movies of the “Generation of 1960,” Los jóvenes viejos made use of several formal traits to produce a sense of authenticity, like the avoidance of studio settings and the use of unknown actors. The movie strove to create naturalistic ambiance to document the existence of a youth characterized by its purposeless, its tiredness, its self-absorption, and its inability to contribute to a better future. Movie critics for the most part welcomed and praised the authenticity. While some pointed out that the movie reflected certain groups of youth, others directly argued that it depicted the common life and feelings of a “generation that was born in the years of collective anguish we experienced.” This was precisely the movie’s argument.79 In that vein, Kuhn’s Los jóvenes viejos shared a common theme with the beliefs of some intellectuals, most notably writer David Viñas: that is, seeing young people as members of a shared generation that came to life in the controversial political and cultural Peronist years and that was frustrated, if not betrayed, by the failure of Frondizi to democratize and develop Argentina. To Viñas, it was a “frustrated generation” that could not reinvigorate Argentina, and its goal was to “save its dignity, its face.”80

  The movies of the “Generation of 1960” and Los jóvenes viejos in particular stirred up public discussion over the authenticity of that “frustrated generation” they sought to document, and over the ways of overcoming it in political and cultural terms. Catholic and Leftist critics shared a negative reception of Los jóvenes viejos. A renowned Catholic critic deemed the movie pretentious and accused Kuhn of “falsely showing an anguished youth only interested in sex.”81 Leftist essayist Juan José Sebreli, for his part, dismissed the movie because of its “mystifying” attempts at portraying a “false alienation” among the petit-bourgeoisie, and denounced the “blame-it-on-Perón” attitude that it endorsed.82 Leftist militants, mainly youth leaders, reacted as well. Socialist Elías Semán, for example, stated that “our youth is not what our ‘colonized’ filmmakers show: the problems of our youth are the problems of our people.”83 The Communist youth press, for its part, offered a different twist: it kept the term jóvenes viejos as shorthand to refer to the youths they envisioned as already “lost.” The jóvenes viejos were identified as those emulating fashionable trends from abroad, and they were thought to represent a moral crisis that impinged on certain segments of Argentina, against which Communists might ideologically fight.84 The reactions to Los jóvenes viejos resembled what historian Richard Jobs has hypothesized about Marcel Carné’s The Cheaters (1958) in France. In both cases, the debates over the movies involved anxieties about the chances of “reinvigorating” the culture. If the depictions in those movies of new youth were “authentic”—and that was a major point of the arguments—then the collective future looked as uncertain as the youths on the screens.85

  Intense as they were, the appeal to a “frustrated generation” as well as the cultural and political debate it awoke lasted only a short time. That appeal had been at the center of a renovated intellectual scene—with David Viñas as its star—and of a new cinematography; the “frustrated generation,” though, vanished with the “Generation of 1960” and its jóvenes viejos.86 As the decade went on, other cultural materials made of youth a critical subject of attention, but imbued with more optimistic characteristics. Certainly, one of the features of the dynamics of cultural modernization of the 1960s involved the emergence of newsmagazines like Primera Plana, Confirmado, and Panorama, which helped to configure a new and enlightened readership. Addressed to a middle-class audience, these magazines, which followed patterns similar to Time and L’Express, forged a distinctive journalistic writing, became beacons of taste and cultural legitimacy, and incorporated other areas of social and cultural life into the realm of “news.”87 They promised, for instance, to unravel the behaviors, feelings, and expectations of youth. Since youths were allegedly difficult to communicate with, the “experts” writing in the new magazines used sociologically informed techniques that would allow them to overcome the obstacles and then portray how youths “actually” were. Echoing the psychological professionals, the magazines represented youth as the silent agents who would modernize Argentina’s culture. They therefore depicted a youth far from any idea of rebellion or feeling of dissatisfaction.

  The new magazines represented youth as a homogeneous category, which they associated with a prudent relaxation in sexual mores and also, as a whole, with a prudent attitude toward politics. After conducting an in-depth interview with six adolescents from different social strata, an “expert” from Primera Plana pointed out that they spoke of sexual issues in a rather natural way, and most approved of premarital sexual relations, yet not all of them were willing to agree that they had engaged in sex.88 Another survey, conducted by Panorama, reached similar conclusions: while “90 percent of the surveyed adolescents” approved of premarital sex, boys were still reluctant to accept that girls lost their virginity before marriage, and girls emphasized that they could dare to have premarital sex only in a frame of “seriousness, responsibility, and proven fidelity.”89 The “expert” of Confirmado completed the picture by concluding that “without class distinctions,” youths approved of premarital sex, yet sexual relations “almost always” took place “in contexts that lead to marriage.”90 The surveys thus built up a representation of a sexualized but prudent youth: they talked about sex, broke some prejudices, but kept associating sex with marriage. The magazines brought tranquility to their readerships. Unlike the “liberality” of the European youth, the local variety promised a discreet transformation of the sexual mores, far from any revolution.

  If the “new youth” of the first half of the 1960s was not revolutionary in sexual terms, it was even less revolutionary in its political interests. The reporter of Confirmado argued that “their profound disinterest in politics” was the only discernible generational marker. The local youth, he concluded, “Tends toward a conformist position, accepting the world as it is.”91 Other journalists preferred to equate that seemingly apathetic attitude to a rational mindset. In a youth roundtable organized to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Argentine independence, an observer noted that the mid-1960s youths had forgotten “past animosities,” which was a clear reference to the divide between Peronism and anti-Peronism. The attendees, he noted, had a “pragmatic approach” to that issue, which promised to dissolve the divide altogether.92 Another survey concurred with that finding. While interviewing youths from different social strata who were born on October 17, 1945—the birth date of Peronism—the journalist found that just a few totally discarded or wholly praised the Peronist experience. Many valued, for example, its politics toward childhood and criticized its “lack of civil liberties.” To the journalist, youths were able to reevaluate Peronism and rationally differentiate “what was best from what was worst.”93

  The construction of a representation of a politically inactive youth went hand in hand with the creation of an imagery of the “revolutionary minority.” In early 1964, after the gendarmerie dismantled the guerrilla group Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (Guerrilla Army of the People), some analysts pointed to the relation between the guerrillas’ age and the spread of “terrorism.” By drawing on pseudo-psycho-sociological jargon, for instance, a journalist constructed a hypothetical, generalized interpretation of youth involvement in radical politics. He stated that while the majority remained apathetic, a minority was driven to the “armies of terror” by a mix of “resentment, non-conformism, and youth rebellion.”94 Likewise, the magazines represented a segment of the university students as the counter-image of the mainstream “new youth.” In the context of a mounting campaign to get the state to intervene i
n the universities, the students were viewed as the loci of political radicalism.95 An editorial writer from Primera Plana clearly established the split: a minority of university students looked for a “refuge in Marxism or in the far-right,” but the majority remained apathetic.96 The “new youth,” to the editorial writer, could potentially become a stabilizing force in politics as well.

  By the mid-1960s, the optimism that pervaded the representation of a “new youth” went hand in hand with a generalized confidence in the possibilities of bridging the gap between the “adult” and the “young” generations in the realm of prudently modern families, and it found an echo in sociological and expert commentary. In 1965, one sociologist published the findings of a survey she conducted among middle- and working-class mothers on childrearing practices. She asserted that urban mothers tended to be sincere, open-minded, and affectionate, did not demand blind obedience from their children, respected their desires, and promoted family dialogue on issues like sex and vocations.97 Another sociologist, for her part, after conducting a survey with male industrial workers, noted that they were willing to collaborate with their wives in performing domestic chores and childrearing, and that they highly valued family dialogue and respected their children’s personalities and decisions.98 The celebratory visions of the familial changes were apparent. In a roundtable that joined Germani and psychoanalyst Armando Bauleo with the priest Moledo—the League of Mothers’ counselor—the participants concurred that the “turning point” in the “youth crisis” had already passed. Likewise they all agreed that “modern families” were preferable because they allowed for honesty and companionship between the generations. They could not agree, though, on the issue of premarital sex.99