To a lesser degree, the dichotomy between vaqueros and blue jeans also served to signal distinctions between young women. In the late 1950s, Alpargatas launched its Lady Far West brand. It targeted girls, for example, in ads that appeared in September, when secondary school students organized picnics to celebrate Students’ Day.111 The images of girls in vaqueros, as had happened with the boys, conveyed a sense of Americanness. An ad for Far West jeans appeared in 1959 showed a drawing of a couple composed of a young man with a ducktail and a blonde, short-haired young woman drinking Coca Cola: they both encapsulated the Americanness represented in the rock teenpics that flooded into the Argentine movie theatres.112 As the 1960s wore on, however, the “authentic” Americanness of the jeans came to the spotlight for some young women as well, who would not accept the local vaqueros. María Ester recalls that, as a middle-class young woman, though she did not wear jeans regularly, she used to spend hours trying to fade the “excessive blue of the Lady Far West” with a stone. Although she knew that it would be the subject of quarrels, she also took her brother’s Lee jeans and wore them. When I asked why she worked so hard on her vaqueros and dared to clash with her brother over wearing his jeans, she said, “The vaqueros were vulgar: as people said, they were mersa.”113
It was not until the second half of the 1960s that young women fully embraced jeans, in the process of total renovation of feminine fashion that was also signaled through the spread of the miniskirt. In its first years in Argentina, thus, jeans served to carve out a specifically masculine youth fashion, which instilled itself between a childhood fashion dominated by the short pants and an “adult” fashion marked by suits and grey clothes. Certainly, as with rock and the twist—and in connection to the spread of that youth music through movies—jeans were the first dress item to be targeted to and appropriated by young people, especially boys. Just as it happened with youth-led music, jeans also served to shape a sense of generational belonging at the same time that they functioned as a means through which young people built up class and cultural distinctions. Ironically, it was perhaps more evident with regard to jeans than with regard to music that Americanness acted as an avenue to display cultural, class-based distinctions among youths. In terms of clothing, many youths appropriated the American item par excellence, yet its “authenticity” became the center of controversies that helped make clear that “youth” was far from being a homogeneous category in early 1960s Argentina.
In June of 1964, President Arturo Illia officially greeted seventeen-year-old Italian pop singer Rita Pavone: he invited her to visit the government house and congratulated her for her far-reaching success among the Argentine youth audiences. In Illia’s words, Rita Pavone represented the “healthy values of what we have come to know as ‘new wave.’”114 By no means was Illia the first president to receive “stars”: Juan Perón, for example, had done the same in the early 1950s when he welcomed actresses like Gina Lollobrigida in the government house. Yet the difference is worth noting: Illia did not receive “stars” that appealed to an intergenerational audience but rather those who embodied “new wave” values. The anecdote signals the symbolic importance that youth had acquired in the public milieu by the mid-1960s. In fact, “youth” largely created itself and became publicly recognized through musical styles, leisure practices, and consumption. These realms were key to the creation of a sense of generational belonging among young people, and constituted the arenas in which youths from different social strata could act their age. In the same movement, though, these arenas acted as sites whereby young people elaborated distinctions. As had happened before, the building of cultural distinctions was played out in mass culture: in the early 1960s, however, mass culture had become juvenilized.
The juvenilization of mass culture was triggered by the arrival of rock to the Argentine media and cultural landscape. In contrast to other Latin American countries such as Mexico, where rock first appealed to middle-class young people, in Argentina it came as a musical and dancing form that cut across class and gender lines to become the baseline for a new, specifically youthful, sociability. Rock served to organize the leisure practices of young women and men, at the same time that it incited reactions related to the dangers it posed to youth “morals” and the “national traditions.” Geared to limit the spread of rock, the opposition fell substantially short: it could only set temporary limits on the advance of a musical form that young people embraced as their own, with the frequent consent of their parents, and the “contribution” of a considerable segment of the cultural industries. Culture and entertainment entrepreneurs—perhaps to thwart the opponents—soon targeted rock to young people within the family. As the promotion of Bill Haley demonstrated, rock would serve to connect the Argentine youths with their peers abroad without any danger of losing local “traditions” or challenging sexual mores and family values. Haley and other visitors, however, could not satisfy the seemingly voracious demand for “rockers,” and in that context the first local talents emerged. Local and transnational companies took advantage of developmentalist policies enacted in the late 1950s to expand their facilities and activities in the country. In that expansion, youth-led music acquired a prominent role: young people were the ideal music consumers. As the 1960s continued, however, it was apparent that young people integrated their consumption of rock and the twist with other musical forms, such as “folkloric projection.” Appropriating and expanding that hybrid consumption, El Club del Clan would gravitate to the center between 1963 and 1965.
The experience of El Club del Clan, crucial to the juvenilization of mass culture, incited heated debates about the culture industry, the “masses,” and cultural taste. El Club del Clan emerged from and contributed to the expansion of a media network. As a youth-led, musical-based text integrating local and international sounds filtered through a patina of “youthfulness,” El Club del Clan endorsed family values, the consecration of deeply rooted gender roles, sexual containment, and restrained fun: it promoted cultural conservatism. In many ways, fans seemed to have “consumed” it within these parameters. The unprecedented irruption of youth idols and fans, which permeated the media, incited the first systematic reflections on the changes in mass culture. Cultural critics, left-wing militants, filmmakers, and journalists focused on what they thought of as a process of “manipulation” and “cultural alienation.” In doing so, they conflated the images of idols and fans, conceived of as “masses,” and deployed gendered language that spoke of passivity and inferiority, unleashing also struggles over cultural taste. In the mid-1960s, those struggles took place on the cultural terrain of youth consumption, where the term mersa served as an organizing principle. A term that rapidly spread through popular vocabulary, it was allegedly used among youths from the upper and middle classes to designate the cultural, purportedly “bad” taste of youths from the lowest social strata. In the mid-1960s, it metonymically invoked the “new wave” idols and fans alike.
The battles over cultural taste were reinforced in the realm of youth fashion, an arena for the daily elaboration of class-inflected, cultural distinctions. The jeans interpellated broad segments of young men and—more limitedly—women, thus becoming a marker of a generational identity. Among youth, the main controversy over jeans revolved around the dichotomy between the local vaqueros and the American imported brands. In the case of young men, jeans helped to open up a loophole between childhood and adult dress codes, thus paving the way for a youth fashion. They helped signal the emergence of youth as a visible category. Working-class young men were the vanguard of vaquero wearers and were represented as embodying cultural and sexual disorders, expressed in their “tightened” and “rustic” pants. Middle-class youths—whether men or women—dubbed the vaquero wearers as mersa and sought out Lee or Levi jeans, which they could afford and recognize. Through wearing “authentic” jeans, they elaborated class-based distinctions, thus replicating, upon the terrain of fashion, similar developments that took place in the realm of you
th-led music. Most youths did create and participate in new, and properly youthful, cultural consumption and leisure activities in early-1960s Argentina. As it happened in the realm of fashion, however, youths neither wore the same jeans nor endowed them with the same meanings.
4 She’s Leaving Home
YOUNG WOMEN, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY
On May 29, 1962, Norma Penjerek, age seventeen, left her apartment in a traditional lower-middle-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires to attend a private English class. Her class ended at 7:30 P.M., yet she never came home. On June 1, her parents filed a missing-persons report. In mid-July, forensic tests confirmed their worst fears: a body found in the outskirts of Buenos Aires was identified as hers. What had happened to Norma Penjerek? After a year had passed with no significant news, in July of 1963 a sex worker declared to a judge that Norma had fallen into the “trap” of one of the groups devoted to drugs and pornography—or, as contemporaries would say, invoking the title of Federico Fellini’s movie, into the “Dolce Vita”—and that the leader of the group later decided to kill her. The declaration was false, and the police never found Norma’s murderers. Perhaps because it went unresolved, the “Penjerek case” caused the most intense moral panic in 1960s Argentina. As the sociologist Stanley Cohen put it, moral panics emerge at times of social uncertainty, becoming events for “drawing the line” between those mores and behaviors that will be tolerated and those that won’t. Moral panics, he argues, are at the same time transparent—that is, anyone can know what is happening—and opaque, since their broader meanings are usually mediated.1 The moral panic constructed around the Penjerek case served to address anxieties regarding the perceived vanishing of patriarchal authority and domesticity. More precisely, it constituted a response to the awareness that young women were metaphorically—and sometimes literally—leaving home.
Young women experienced, carried out, and suffered from the consequences of the changes that the dynamics of sociocultural modernization entailed earlier and more dramatically than their male counterparts. The scholars who have studied the history of gender and sexuality in 1960s Argentina have thus far accounted for the opening up of new horizons for young women, chiefly among the middle classes, as well as for the prudent liberalization of sexual mores.2 While most of these studies have focused on mid-term patterns of change, they have overlooked a more situational analysis of how change—as it related to young women’s lives—was shaped, understood, and debated. This chapter shows that las jóvenes (young women) or chicas (girls)—exchangeable terms in public vocabulary—practically contested prevalent ideas of “home” by remaining longer in the education system, fully participating in the labor market, helping shape youthful leisure activities, daring to experiment with new courtship conventions and to acknowledge publicly that they engaged in premarital sex, and marrying later in life. In doing so, young women in the 1960s challenged dominant ideals of domesticity premised on separated spheres for men and women and on equating womanhood with wifehood and motherhood. That ideal became normative for the middle classes in the first half of the twentieth century and, as scholars noted, for the working classes as well, chiefly during the Peronist regime (1946–55).3
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, young women occupied a problematic space: while their pursuit of renewed educational, labor, and cultural expectations signified a collective yearning for change, the resistance they faced revealed how entrenched the status quo was and how difficult change would be. In particular, young women’s changing experiences destabilized deep-seated notions of patriarchal authority; in the process women created countless dilemmas within their familial and cultural milieus. When young women’s expectations and experiences began to expand and shift, their choices of vocations, their leisure preferences, or their courtship practices became arenas of confrontation in many families. Although advisers in popular and feminine magazines and psychologists tried to help parents navigate this new reality, the dilemmas persisted and sometimes led to young women running away, perhaps as a rejection of what they perceived as parental authoritarianism. In a sensationalist fashion, the media and conservative Catholic sectors embedded the “tide-of-runaways phenomenon” with sexual, cultural, and political meanings: the Penjerek case confirmed their fears, becoming an avenue for many unaffiliated parents to try to curtail their daughter’s growing autonomy and thus recuperate their perceived lost authority. In an extreme, heightened way, the Penjerek case also served to catapult discussions about young women and sexuality into the spotlight, and to respond to ongoing “liberalizing” attitudes and practices. Young women indeed stood at the center of the most significant change in Argentina’s sexual culture in the 1960s—the public acceptance of premarital sex—further destabilizing domestic ideals based on a double standard of sex requiring men to have their first sexual experience before marriage and women to preserve their virginity. The cohorts of women who came of age in the 1960s were the first ones to voice their approval of premarital sex in the public arena, and did so in the frame of a discourse connecting sex with love and responsibility. This helped represent the novelty as “modern” and prudent at the same time.
Leaving Home
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, young women’s life experiences and expectations began to differ remarkably from those of previous generations of women, like their mothers’. Young women comprised the majority of the thousands who left their provinces to migrate to large urban areas, beginning in the 1930s and increasing in the decades that followed. Young women likewise swelled the enrollment in secondary schools and universities, and they made new career and vocational choices, thereby gaining better and more diversified access to the labor market. They also helped shape youth leisure activities, which were vital to the development of a sense of generational belonging and to forging new modes of interaction between the sexes. As had happened in the 1920s with the “modern girl,” the growing autonomy that young women were gaining conflicted with the persistent and restrictive norms enforced at the family level.4 “Leaving home” was a metaphor for young women’s life experiences and for public perceptions about them: it was an index of change in family and cultural terrains.
Young women in rural areas and provincial towns had begun to leave their homes in the 1930s as a part of the process of mass migration to industrializing cities. That movement continued in the decades that followed, and young women, whose average age when migrating was twenty, were the majority of the newcomers in Rosario, Mendoza, and Buenos Aires.5 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, many young women wrote to President Arturo Frondizi’s young daughter, Elenita, stating their migration desires. This was the case for Marta, a nineteen-year-old letter writer from northern Santa Fe, who tried to convey to Elenita her despair. She had a primary school education and a “talent for accounting,” but could find neither a job nor “any incentive to live” in her hometown. Adelaida, age twenty, concurred: in her “miserable town,” she wrote, she was “wasting her life.” Both letter writers asked Elenita’s help for getting any job, assuming it was in Buenos Aires.6 One of the few ethnographic studies focusing on migrant populations in the early 1960s depicted similar feelings among young women in a northwestern province. The anthropologist concluded: “they could not work because they didn’t have jobs, were isolated in a depressing family life, poorly dressed, and bombarded with the images of another way of life through the radio.” Most of the interviewed young women wanted to migrate to large cities to find jobs, enjoy themselves in leisure activities, and continue their education.7
While by the 1950s most migrants had become integrated into networks of family and friends already established in major cities, representations of the lonely, dreamingly innocent, and “at-risk” provincial girl haunted the public imagination. Released in 1958, Lucas Demare’s movie Detrás de un largo muro (Behind a Long Wall) narrates the story of Rosa and her widowed father, who, after losing their farm, are left with no choice but to migrate to Buenos Aires. They soon discover th
at their lives would be far from the fantasy that the city lights in movies had promised. Like their relatives, they go to live in a slum, or villa miseria. Rosa finds a job in a factory and spends time in the company of a young man who ultimately rapes her. One of the most popular melodramas of the 1950s, the movie examines some of the key motives regarding young migrant women who were “at risk” of losing their innocence, namely their virginity, by coming to the city. These notions were also crucial to the Obra de Protección de la Joven (OPJ, Organization for Protecting Young Women), an international Catholic organization. Founded in 1951, OPJ’s most pressing goal was to place social workers at train stations in Buenos Aires to prevent migrants from “falling into vice-related organizations.”8 Convinced that the arrival in large cities was tantamount to a dangerous rite of passage, these social workers sought to identify girls arriving alone, foster them for weeks in an elegant house the government gave to the institution in 1957, and (if the young woman’s moral sense was adequate enough in the eyes of the Catholic social worker) place them as domestic workers in the homes of upper-class families.9 At the same time that it helped enforce relations of social subordination, OPJ also attempted to build “homelike” environments for the young women.
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