Age of Youth in Argentina
Page 18
The modernizing discourse that gained favor in the 1960s served to further destabilize those notions of “home” premised on domestic femininity and on the imagery of women as virgins until marriage, while men were free to sexually experiment. By drawing on a discourse centered on love and responsibility, 1960s youth helped redefine sex and the contexts in which it could be practiced. It bears noting that this attitude was seen as a sign of the cultural modernization Argentines underwent collectively, yet also as not totally disruptive to domestic ideals. What became publicly accepted was premarital sex: sexual intercourse in a heterosexual relationship that ideally led to marriage. In the increasingly tolerant landscape, young women—especially in the middle class—dared to experiment further with premarital sex, although they continued to fear unwanted pregnancies and relied on their partners for contraception. It is worth noting that many young men expressed anxieties vis-à-vis the potential “promiscuity” of young women once the so-called “taboo of virginity” began to fade. Toward the late 1960s, it became apparent that the sexual double standard had not vanished but had been redefined within a profound eroticization of Argentina’s culture that also put young women at center stage. Yet these were other cohorts of young women who perhaps did not suffer from the same familial and cultural dilemmas that their predecessors did in the early 1960s. Both cohorts, though, may have had the chance to listen, in 1967, to Lennon and McCartney’s “She’s leaving home”—off the memorable Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Young women in Argentina had already begun to do so: The Beatles just offered the most suitable soundtrack.
5 A Fraternity of Long-Haired Boys
ROCK AND A YOUTH CULTURE OF CONTESTATION
Some days after the coup d’état led by General Juan Carlos Onganía in 1966, the rock trio Los Beatniks recorded a simple album with Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). The leading voice, Moris, composed the lyrics, including those to the song “Rebelde.” “People call me the rebel,” he wrote, “because rebel is my heart/I am free/and they want to make/a slave of tradition/out of me.” As CBS was not interested in promoting their work, Los Beatniks moved ahead and organized a promotional party that ended with all of its members semi-naked at a public fountain in downtown Buenos Aires. The press reported on the event, though not in the culture section but rather in the police section: the trio went on to spend three days jailed in a police station.1 This foundational episode outlines the contours of the first decade of Argentina’s rock culture (1966–75). First, it introduces the main actors, who were rockers—poets, musicians, fans—the culture industry, and the state. Second, this episode shows rockers’ most common attitude: an iconoclastic reaction against the rules and perceived authoritarianism of everyday life. Finally, it shows how rock culture was viewed in the public arena, which was as an epitome of cultural, gender, and sexual disorder.
Argentina’s rock culture was among the liveliest in Latin America and offers a vantage point for analyzing the dynamics of sociocultural modernization and its discontents. The scholars who have studied Argentina’s rock culture have thus far tried to understand its specifics and have shown that it is hardly definable in solely audible and linguistic terms—even though it is not irrelevant that the local rockers (like their Chilean and Colombian but unlike their Mexican counterparts) produced songs written and performed in Spanish.2 As cultural critic Lawrence Grossberg notes for the United States, rock was the basis for a cultural politics that attempted to transcend the limits of everyday life and “articulate a sense of anger, dissatisfaction, occasionally protest.”3 The Argentine rockers appropriated practices and styles from a transnational repertoire and used them to cope with their everyday lives, which they often viewed as meaningless and dehumanizing. As it happened in other Latin American countries, the Argentine rockers’ rebellion against their everyday life was over-determined by their practical opposition to authoritarianism.4 Rock culture sensitized young people, especially young men, to cultural and political authoritarianism, hence crucially contributing to the shaping of a heterogeneous, multilayered, and radicalized youth culture of contestation that was full-fledged in the 1970s.
That youth culture of contestation became one of the markers of Argentina’s history in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Onganía and the military that imposed the so-called Revolución Argentina did so under the premises that the political system could not guarantee the “order” that Argentines needed to develop and, in turn, to prevent the spread of Communism. As a result, they restricted all political activity—from party politics to student activism—at the same time that they tried to infuse a traditionalist moralistic ethos into the citizenry in an effort to forge individuals respectful for social and cultural hierarchies. Although the military tried hard, they could neither pacify the country nor stop the cultural rebellion associated with youth. Young people, in fact, were key protagonists of the concatenated popular revolts that, in May of 1969, marked the political finale of the Onganía regime. Moreover, between 1969 and 1973—when elections were held and Peronism could for the first time in seventeen years freely compete—Argentines lived an intense cycle of political participation pervaded by increasingly radicalized projects. Guerrilla groups represented the most extreme examples of that radicalization, and at least five of them staged actions at a national level promising to move the country toward national and social “liberation.” Those promises seemed closed to fulfillment in 1973 when Héctor Cámpora, with the Peronist ticket, won the elections and set the stage for a short democratic spring, a powerful juncture of political and cultural openness that many young people experienced with passion. That spring lasted a short time, though. Juan Perón led the turn toward the right during his third and final presidency (from October 1973 to his death on July 1, 1974). His government ended with the launching of a political project meant to reconstruct authority at all levels of social life. A broad youth culture of contestation spread from Onganía to Perón, from authoritarianism to revolutionary projects. It finally suffered from state repression and social scorn. Rock culture made up one strand of that culture of contestation.
Throughout its first decade, rock culture was almost exclusively male. It was nurtured by the discontent of rising contingents of young men with the new and old institutions that punctuated their passage to adulthood—secondary schools, conscription, and paid jobs—as well as with the values of respectability, discipline, and respect for hierarchies. Rock culture was one of the venues through which middle- and working-class youth delineated a practical, rather than self-conscious, opposition to the ways in which hegemonic versions of masculinity were shaped.5 In the “pioneering years” of Argentina’s rock—coincident with the Onganía regime—they built up an iconoclastic, cross-class fraternity of long-haired boys, which incited not only police repression but also a wide-ranging homophobic reaction to uphold a defense of patriarchal authority and so-called correct “manners and morals.” The study of rock culture thus offers a lens for viewing how young men confronted the values that premised the hegemonic constructions of masculinity as part of a cultural politics that privileged the pursuit of hedonism and companionship.
It became apparent that rockers’ fraternity had expanded both onstage and offstage as the 1970s went on. The fads and body styles that originated among rockers and filtered through the market now transformed the aesthetics of masculinity and paved the way for redefining how it could be performed. Those changes, however superficial, were one avenue for modernizing masculinity. Most fundamentally, young men attracted to rock encouraged that modernization by focusing on values such as equality and authenticity, which allowed for imagining and eventually enacting new projects of love and family—values more evident in the hardcore countercultural projects linked, also, with rock culture. In a context of rising politicization and radicalization in which youth occupied the center stage, rockers’ alternative masculinity and their reaction to the cultural authoritarianism pervading everyday life were seen as insufficient.
Rock culture’s interaction with the overtly political subset of the youth culture of protest during the 1970s was porous yet tense. In the symbolic confrontations between these subsets, there was a competition over the interpellation to working- and middle-class young men.
Boys Will Not Be Men
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, popular singer Palito Ortega, who reached the top of the charts with each single he recorded, was the protagonist of a long series of movies chronicling the allegedly common pattern of coming of age for young men in Argentina. Ortega, thus, fulfills his military service and learns to love his country and his fellow soldiers, encounters his first girlfriend, exchanges blue jeans for grey-flannel suits, gets married and joyfully copes with his in-laws, and still remains faithful to his old friends. For the young men attracted to rock culture at the time, Ortega as a popular idol as well as a role model for coming of age personified exactly what they did not want to be. Rock culture sprang from and expressed young men’s discontent with the cultural sites that organized the dynamics of boys becoming men and the ways in which these sites enforced the values of respectability, discipline, and consumerism. Rockers instead called for individual authenticity, which they believed was embodied by the pibes (boys).
Throughout the 1960s, the process of growing up for young men—as for young women—incorporated their rising enrollment in the secondary schools, critical spaces for the organization of their daily life and venues for experimenting with new and old forms of authoritarianism. While 23 percent of boys in the fifteen-to-nineteen age group were enrolled in a secondary school in 1960, the figure doubled in 1970. In Buenos Aires, though, the figure jumped to 65 percent.6 Young men were evenly distributed into baccalaureate colleges and technical schools, which were the “stars” for policy makers interested in promoting socioeconomic development.7 Yet during the 1960s the authorities viewed young men less as contributors to development and more as potential defenders of the nation from so-called internal and external enemies. Since the imposition of military rule in 1966, educational authorities asked school principals to have male students above sixteen years old practice shooting guns.8 For many boys, shooting guns was merely the most evident example of how the school enforced a militaristic order, which transpired also in the daily school routines. In 1968, a survey of five hundred students showed that a majority complained about “senseless routines.” In subsequent years, boys expressed similar feelings: “at the school you are subject to what others want to make of you,” one boy argued. In what was a common belief worldwide, many youths in Argentina also believed that “Everything I am is out of the school.”9
Young men frequently noted a bifurcation of their school and their out-of-school life, which was expressed, for example, in body styles. The schools acted as a major arena for the battles over the length of boys’ hair. The Reglamento (bylaws) prescribed that students “should always attend in a hygienic condition and wear pertinent clothing.” As the authorities clarified, boys were required to wear grey pants, a jacket, and tie.10 Moreover, in 1969 the principals of twenty-five schools in Buenos Aires, Rosario, La Plata, and Córdoba addressed the new fashions by sending notes to parents detailing that their boys’ hair should be no less than eight centimeters above their shoulders. Otherwise they would be unable to enroll.11 Because many boys aspired to wear their hair long, this prohibition represented the schools’ arbitrariness and elicited countless battles. For example, in 1971 the authorities of a school in Buenos Aires expelled an eighteen-year-old boy because, in their view, he did not wear appropriate clothing and had his “hair too long.” The boy’s classmates protested in solidarity, and twenty-five of them were expelled as well. A similar episode took place at the start of the 1972 school year, when four hundred students of another school in Buenos Aires refused to comply with the clothing and hair requirements and called for a student strike until they were allowed to wear their hair longer. The long hair battles then intersected with other struggles over the disciplinary system. While some students at the Colegio Nacional planted a bomb at a sentry box from which the caretakers controlled them, others entered the schools en masse to avoid being expelled for wearing their hair long.12
Often overlooked in the accounts of youth politicization of the early 1970s, those battles nevertheless showed that many young men were willing to confront new and old forms of authoritarianism, which in this case was geared toward creating bodily signs of respectability. The secondary schools were privileged sites for generating discontent among young men. Not coincidentally, the band that made of rock a mass phenomenon in the 1970s, Sui Géneris—namely, Charly García and Nito Mestre—formed while they studied at a military school. Sui Géneris appealed to a school-based audience by interpreting adolescents’ concerns (like their first sexual encounters) and by deploying school metaphors and language. For example, in “Aprendizaje” (Learning), García wrote, “I learnt to be/formal and polite/I had my hair cut/once a month”; the boy “failed in formality” because “[he] never liked society.”13 The school provided the rules that governed boys’ daily life, perceived as senseless and authoritarian. While in times of rising politicization García never identified his poetical work as political, he acknowledged that it had an ideological dimension: “writing about the school,” he said “is writing about repressive ideology.”14 In the vanguard of the anti-institutional and antiauthoritarian cultural politics that rock represented, García also wrote “Botas locas” (Crazy Boots), a denunciation of what he viewed as the most absurd of the institutions punctuating the boys-will-be-men dynamics: conscription.15
Conscription had long represented a rite of passage to adulthood and had long elicited criticism. Established in 1902, conscription was first widely implemented in 1911 when the immigration process was at its height and a radicalized labor movement had emerged as well. From the elites’ perspective, it was supposed to forge patriotic sentiments and mold citizens to be respectful of the principles of order and hierarchy. It was met with opposition during the first half of the twentieth century, both from individuals and collectively: for example, anarchist militants rejected the repressive and militaristic ethos it endorsed.16 Conscription, however, was naturalized in the public milieu until at least 1968, when Law 17,531 slightly changed the terms for its fulfillment. Until that point, all young men age twenty participated in a lottery; then half of them were excluded while the other half underwent physical examinations and, if acceptable, joined the military. It didn’t matter if they held jobs or studied. Law 17,531 stipulated that young men could finish their degrees before complying with the conscription. But delay did not imply exemption, the only one of which was being the head of a household. Argentina’s terms for conscription were comparable to those of Brazil and Colombia, while Mexico and Chile had more flexible legislation.17
Moreover, amid rising political radicalization in which young men played a vital role, the military and at least one guerrilla group, the Marxist Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP, People’s Revolutionary Army), endowed conscription with new significance. Beginning in 1970, the army updated its lectures on ideological training given to its low-ranking cadres and conscripts. Five out of the fifteen lectures revolved around the alleged dangers that “Communism” posited to the nation and to the family. The lectures showed an enemy, depicted as monstrous, already acting within the geographical borders of the nation, infiltrating schools, colleges, parishes, and also the military.18 In September of 1973, or four months after the resumption of civilian rule and weeks before Juan Perón became president, an ERP unit tried to take out an army commando unit. In that misadventure, which ended with all the guerrillas imprisoned, the ERP had the logistical support of one conscript within the commando unit. Interestingly, though, it was another conscript who stopped the guerrillas’ success.19 Both the army and the ERP claimed this episode for propagandistic ends. Thus, the army depicted its loyal conscript as a patriotic and bold young man who saved the nation and his group of “future m
en of the fatherland.” For its part, the ERP described its conscript as “the people’s soldier” and celebrated his courage.20 In 1974 and 1975, as the military was called to stifle popular protest and guerrilla activities, the ERP addressed the conscripts to avoid their involvement with repressive actions. The ERP developed a tactics of recruitment and recommended that the conscripts take advantage of military training for the “popular war”—suggestions that did not actually work.21
For many young men, though, conscription was an arena ripe for shaping discontent with authority. Interviewed after the passing of the Law 17531, sixty-five conscripts from every corner of the country stationed in Buenos Aires complained about the daily routines, the bad food, and the unhealthy conditions of the barracks. Finding nothing like the imagery of conscription as the egalitarian space for the mingling of young men from different regions and social backgrounds where they learned to become patriotic and courageous citizens—ideals posited by the movies featuring Palito Ortega and the military alike—the conscripts expressed anger for the humiliation they suffered from their superiors.22 Subsumed into the “subordination and courage” required (as the military slogan mandated it) to forge men out of boys, those humiliations were seen as outrageous for the youth attracted to rock culture. In one of the few memoirs by a rock fan, then poet and musician, Miguel Cantilo commented that, for him and his friends—who had already chosen “a life opposed to conventions [that] collided with the military model”—conscription represented a “death trap.” Yet Cantilo also points to their families who, “hypocritical accomplices with the military,” thought that conscription would be useful to “make a man out of you.”23 In his view, there was a continuum between the “death trap” set by the military and the expectations that parents projected onto it to instill discipline and obedience among their boys.