The values of discipline, respectability, and respect for hierarchies were supposedly learned and internalized in conscription and, for an increasing number of boys, in the secondary school. These were also the keystones for the ideal responsible worker. The labor market showed two novelties related to young men’s changing experiences and expectations. First, census data show that boys remained longer in the education system and that reduced their participation in the labor market: 73 percent of the young men ages fifteen to nineteen held jobs in 1947, but by 1970 the figure had dropped to 55 percent. An increasing segment of young men in the 1960s, thus, were better educated than their fathers, and began working for pay later in their life cycle as well.24 Second, young men in urban areas had an increasing opportunity of finding jobs in what became the most dynamic sector of the economy: the tertiary, or service, sector. With the important exception of Córdoba, which attracted a vast young male population to its industrial belt, the jobs created in the industrial sector paled in comparison with the tertiary sector. The service sector accounted for 47 percent of the employed population in 1947 and 52 percent in 1970.25 Even though the bulk of those positions was in commerce-related jobs, the second largest area was in administration, that is, office clerks in public and private areas. The quintessential representation of the white-collar employee, the oficinista (office clerk) came to occupy a prominent position in the imagination of the young men attracted to rock.
Rockers created dystopian ideas vis-à-vis their potential futures, and the oficinista embodied their most feared prospects for life. For rock poets, the office clerk incarnated the monotony and conservatism that the large cities required of their workers. In their first single, for example, the folk rock duo Pedro y Pablo (Miguel Cantilo and Jorge Durietz)sang:
Yo vivo en una ciudad I live in a city
donde la gente aun usa gomina where people still use hair wax
donde la gente se va a la oficina where people go to the office
sin un minuto de más . . . without a minute to lose . . .
Y sin embargo yo quiero a ese pueblo And, yet, I love these people,
porque me incita a la rebelión. because they lead me to rebel.26
In the lyrics, the city’s people are all male and they are the oficinistas, always in a hurry, still using “gomina,” the hair gel that the older generations used to slick back their hair as a sign of respectability. City people elicit ambivalent reactions: The singers love them, but only because they lead them to “rebel.” The beloved and despised oficinista was rockers’ counter-figure: he illustrated, in a pathetic way, the “system’s success.” As some rock fans pointed out, the orderly behavior and respect for authority required in the schools and the barracks resulted not in a “warriorlike man” but in the office clerk who “has included these values into his life: poor little thing!”27 The oficinista, then, came to represent the end point of a process that many young men confronted and that resonated worldwide. In the 1950s, in North America, for instance, the “organization man”—in David Riesman’s formulation—who purportedly aimed to conform to prevalent cultural norms was met with oppositional figures such as the “young rebel” and the bohemian young poets.28 In the Argentina of the 1960s also the “square” oficinista and the “hip” rocker, as public figures, took shape in a concurrent fashion.
Through their vilification of the oficinista, rockers also engaged in a broader criticism of the middle classes. In the 1960s, essayists popularized the image of an individualistic, conservative, and moralistic middle class. Juan José Sebreli, thus, focused on the oficinista as the embodiment of “petit bourgeois alienation.” Manipulating paperwork instead of producing, Sebreli claimed, he “navigated the surface of things.” His structural position explained his obsession with order and appearances, applied also to other spheres of his life, from the family to sex. The nationalist essayist Arturo Jauretche also touched upon how the medio pelo (parvenu) struggled with his or her appearance and with living an inauthentic lifestyle pervaded by superficiality and emulation—which Jauretche found problematic since it created a divide between the middle classes and “the people.”29 As other scholars have noted, the criticism produced by nationalist and leftist middle-class writers worked as a literature of mortification, as self-revenge for the political role that class played during the Peronist regime and its aftermath.30 Although they were less politicized, rockers also framed their criticism using mortifying rhetoric. However, their criticism pointed to a cultural and generational rebellion against becoming an oficinista, like the fathers of many of them.
The questioning of the oficinista intersected with the perception of a link between working and consuming: for youth attracted to rock, the oficinista seemed imprisoned in an oppressive routine meant to satisfy a never-ending consumerist drive. Arguments about consumerism swept across rock cultures worldwide. Although scholars differ in their assessment of the extent of rockers’ confrontation, most agree that rock culture itself stemmed from and reacted against the rising of affluent societies and of consumption as a key arena for the building of identities.31 In not-so-affluent Argentina, sarcastic reflections on the efforts to achieve “status” through consumption prevailed, and the oficinista evoked both the desire and the failure of these efforts. That was the crux of La fiaca (Laziness), Ricardo Talesnik’s play first staged in 1968 and then adapted as movie, directed by Fernando Ayala, and released in 1969. The focus is on the story of Néstor, a middle-aged office clerk, who surprises his wife and his co-workers when he decides not to go to work anymore because he tiene fiaca (became lazy). In a telling sequence, the movie mixes images of Néstor’s leisured life with the disappearance of the appliances from his home: as he is unable to pay the monthly installments, he loses the washing machine and the television set. Such an offense to the family’s status is unbearable to his wife, who pushes Néstor to go back to work. In 1971, journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez also wrote ironically that the oficinista held three jobs at the same time and, in order “show others that he is doing great,” was willing to “sell his house to buy a car.”32 The localization of the relationship between working and consuming reverberated in the rockers’ milieu. One of trio Manal’s blues touched on these cultural mandates imposed onto men: “It is not necessary to have a car/or four well-paid jobs/no, no, no pibe/for having someone to love you.”33 Appealing to the child, the songwriter cautions him about the risk of becoming a man who overworks in order to overconsume, the result of the boys-will-be-men process.
The young men attracted to rock culture in Argentina contested the sites and practices whereby the values of discipline, respectability, and consumerism were supposed to be learned. Their contestation was premised on the symbolic potential of the pibe as a source of authenticity. As in Manal’s song, the pibe should not become that man or, for that matter, not become a man at all. In fact, rockers seemed to call for being pibes forever and thus keeping the spontaneity and freedom associated with boyhood. This link resembled what the anthropologist Eduardo Archetti found among football fans, who singularized an “Argentine style of play” by drawing on ideas of boyhood, creativity, and authenticity.34 Stemming from and reacting against the process in which hegemonic masculinities were shaped, rockers proposed to remain pibes and, moreover, they practically created an imagined fraternity of boys.
A Fraternity of Long-Haired Boys
In June of 1967, Los Gatos recorded the simple “La Balsa” (The Raft) with the local subsidiary of Radio Corporation of America (RCA). Composed by José Alberto Iglesias, aka Tanguito, and Litto Nebbia, it called on young men to drop out, to build an imaginary raft, and naufragar (be shipwrecked). “La Balsa” achieved immediate success, selling 250,000 copies in six months. Moreover, it indicated that Spanish would be the language for Argentina’s rock, in contrast to Latin American countries with active rock cultures, such as Mexico, where mostly English was used. Most important, it became the first anthem for a group of young men it helped identify as
náufragos: like shipwrecked sailors, they would live adrift or, rather, against the current with their imaginary raft. As their counterparts abroad did, these early rockers were also recognizable because of their long hair. In late 1960s Argentina, wearing long hair and engaging in rock sociability entailed the risk of police detention. The homophobic reaction that informed the police raids cut across other social spheres as well. Rockers did create homosocial spaces and fraternal bonds, which excluded women and served to carve out ideals of masculinity centered on companionship, pleasure, and hedonism. In doing so, they reelaborated previous projects of cultural revolt.
Beginning in the early 1960s, young poets and artists pointed to the need to build a space for a rebellious youth, halfway between the commercialized and the politicized. Poet Miguel Grinberg had a pioneering role. He was one of the first translators of the Beatnik poets in Argentina and a regular pen pal with Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Through his literary magazine Eco Contemporáneo, Grinberg tried to mobilize a generation of mufados (exasperated). They would be youth who, unlike those engaged in politics, “psychically revolutionize their own territory.” Likewise, the mufados would differ from the youth linked to commercialized cultures, epitomized by Palito Ortega and his celebration of “squareness.”35 Grinberg was hardly alone in his interest in cultural experimentation. By the mid-1960s, a series of new spaces and practices emerged in relation to the Instituto Di Tella (IDT), an art center that praised novelty and youth as key values. In the public arena, most of the experimentation in the IDT and nearby was viewed as scandalous. Often compared with the Swinging London, although more similar to the Zona Rosa in Mexico, the streets adjacent to the IDT—the manzana loca (crazy block)—comprised a cosmopolitan enclave, where the “unconventional” prevailed: there, the first miniskirts were sold and worn, and stores imported the records by Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix.36 As portrayed in the movie Tiro de Gracia (dir. Ricardo Becher, 1969), that area exerted a pull on artists such as Sergio Mulet, the director of the literary magazine Opium, who proclaimed that he and his fellows were “apolitical revolutionaries.”37
The rhetoric centered on the “unconventional,” the iconoclastic mood in some enclaves, and the will to build a cultural space between the commercialized and politicized youth—all of these reverberated in the nascent rock culture in Argentina. As narrated countless times in stories, everything began at La Cueva, a pub in Barrio Norte, where young men gathered to listen to jazz and then to informally play rock music. La Cueva was a site for the would-be “pioneers” of Argentina’s rock to interact, and they included Moris—trio Los Beatniks’ leader—Litto Nebbia and other members of the quartet Los Gatos, Tanguito, Javier Martínez, and poet Pipo Lernoud. Around twenty years old, most of those young men had detached themselves from their family settings. Los Gatos, for example, migrated to Buenos Aires from Rosario with a contract to play music at social clubs organized by an entertainment company. As Nebbia recalls, they barely made a living and could only afford to rent rooms in humble hotels, where they mingled with Moris, Martínez, and Lernoud. These were middle-class boys from Buenos Aires: moving to the hotels entailed, for them, forging lifestyles other than those connected with the family, schools, and paid jobs. Familiar with the Beatles and Rolling Stones, they had scarce expert musical training but learned in an autodidactic fashion, within the continuum of the hotels, La Cueva, and La Perla, where Nebbia and Tanguito allegedly composed “La Balsa.”38
While “La Balsa” was climbing to the top of the charts, some náufragos organized an event that positioned them as bearers of a new cultural politics, conveyed through bodily styles, and organized across unconventional and antiauthoritarian sentiments and practices. Poet Lernoud and other fellows called for a celebration of the coming of spring in Plaza San Martin, near the manzana loca. They invited all young men wearing long hair and requested that they “dress as [they] would dress if [they] lived in a free country.” To the organizers’ surprise, on September 21, 1967, about three hundred long-haired boys wearing colorful clothes showed up. Tanguito—among others—played the guitar and they all walked along the main commercial streets in downtown Buenos Aires, intermittently singing “La Balsa.”39 The “we” that these early rockers articulated was anchored in a common taste for rock music and in bodily styles—colored clothing and, chiefly, long hair. Borrowing on anthropologist Greg McCracken’s apt expression, hair for these young men had become “transformational”: it helped shape individual and collective identities.40 For example, Tony—who did not attend Plaza San Martin—recalls that only two other boys and he wore long hair in his working-class neighborhood: “we were not friends,” he says, “but we began first to say hello, then to listen to music, and finally to play together.”41 For these boys, long hair acted as a conduit to build up fraternal bonds and to express attitudes further cemented through rock music. Shaped and displayed in late-1960s Argentina, these styles, attitudes, and sociability involved contesting cultural and political authoritarianism.
In the spring and summer of 1967 and 1968, droves of long-haired boys became náufragos, developing a sociability based on hedonism and companionship. In Córdoba and Mendoza, for example, the main plazas served as places of congregation. Alvin, the “leader of the Córdoba beatniks,” pointed out that his group of twenty boys wanted to transform the “sounds” of a city ruled by “priests and military bureaucrats”—a reference to the main ideological and political alliance represented in the Onganía regime and also to a city famous for its clericalism and militarism.42 In Buenos Aires, the Plaza Francia was the náufragos’ reference point. They attracted some young women, like Silvia, who told the reporters that she had run away from her home, tired of her “father’s tyranny.” Silvia’s story offers a glimpse of the difficulty that young women had in fully engaging with the emerging rock culture: without overtly confronting their parents, they had little chance of participating in rockers’ street-based sociability. Young women comprised a minority of the three hundred “hippies” that, according to the press, gathered in Plaza Francia or in Plaza San Martin every day. What did they do? In one onsite report with the náufragos at Plaza Francia, a journalist commented that the “eccentric youths,” besides sharing cigarettes and food, chatted all night long and “played rock music” until they “fell asleep under the trees.”43
Cartoon of náufragos. Atlántida No. 1213, December 1967.
The mostly homosocial routines of these náufragos resemble other eras in the history of masculinity. In turn-of-the-twentieth-century Buenos Aires, demographic, social, and cultural factors converged in the crystallization of an active street-based male sociability. Cutting across social strata and joining men from different national origins—40 percent of the population of Buenos Aires was foreign-born in 1910—that sociability was made of young men. Whether they were married or single, these young men spent their spare time in cafés, taverns, and on the streets, in the company of friends and occasional acquaintances. Among them, masculinity was defined vis-à-vis physical strength and sexual prowess, obliterating values such as responsibility and arenas such as the family.44 By the 1920s, that sociability had begun to vanish. New sociodemographic and cultural conditions favored the spread of a form of domestic life in which the ideal of masculinity revolved around attaining the ability to support “well-constituted” families. For the working and middle classes, being a “good” breadwinner required learning the obedience, responsibility, and respect for hierarchies that the dynamics of boys-will-be-men aimed to instill. Some of the old sociability did persist, though. The corner cafés, which could be found in most neighborhoods by midcentury, served as the institutions for informally upholding masculine ideals, sites where old and young men gathered to discuss football and “women’s issues,” as tango and literary pieces portrayed.45 That was a confined sociability, which supplemented domestic life centered on the roles of husband and father and the labor arenas that consecrated the figure of the responsible
worker. As those nostalgic of the bygone era complained, even the cafés and the groups of friends who congregated on street corners were disappearing in the 1960s, when the náufragos re-created a type of all-male sociability. Theirs was nonetheless premised upon the questioning of the domestic ideal of masculinity in the authoritarian context of the 1960s.
The náufragos’ sociability and their bodily styles were markers through which they turned into a target of harassment and repression, just as in other countries at the same time, like Italy and Mexico.46 On November 30, for example, La Razón informed its readers that a “group of 21 loud hippies” had been detained at Plaza San Martín after neighbors complained about their “scandalous songs and behavior.” In the first weeks of January, at least 120 youths were detained not only in the “hippie enclaves” of downtown Buenos Aires but also in lower-middle-class neighborhoods of the city, such as Paternal and Villa Crespo.47 Some náufragos also stated that young men known as the “Pompeya group” (for living in that working-class neighborhood) often went to Plaza Francia and beat them. When twenty youths organized a “rock happening” in Mar del Plata, at least “one hundred short-haired boys armed with sticks and stones” launched their attack against them.48 In addition, the tiny but visible Federación de Entidades Anti-Comunistas de la Argentina (FAEDA, Federation of Anti-Communist Groups) carried out a rally where they asserted that the “hippies” were part of a “worldwide network of Castroite guerrillas,” and accused former Socialist deputy Juan Carlos Coral of helping free them from police stations. Coral replied that he would “never help a hippie” because “they were well-to-do, effeminate.”49 While Coral stressed the hippies’ alleged class standing as the reason why he rejected them, he drew on a prevalent belief: federal police, the “Pompeya group,” the “short-haired boys,” and FAEDA, each employed homophobia to ostracize the long-haired boys.
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