Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  The fraternity of rockers that Pelo sought to enact was bound by a search for authenticity, and it continued to exclude women. While Pelo might have merely reflected the marginalization of women from rock’s performances, it also contributed to those dynamics. In its first two years only one report focused on women: it was devoted to the fans, or “groupies.” The report argued that these women hardly knew about music: they dreamt of being a musician’s romantic partner, including “ironing their pants before the concerts,” as one groupie told a reporter.82 In so doing, Pelo assimilated women to caring mothers, at best, or superficial fortune seekers, at worst. In any case, young women did not fully belong to the “authentic” fraternity. As Pablo Vila has noted, the quest for authenticity was crucial for defining Argentina’s rock: rather than qualifying good or bad music—as in the Anglo-Saxon context—it was the criteria to belong and stay. Musicians complied with the quest for authenticity in myriad ways, beginning with the fact that when they were at the peak of their popularity—when they were becoming stars—they disbanded.83 When Almendra disbanded and rumor spread that Manal and Los Gatos would do the same, Pelo foresaw an auspicious future: the progresivos would avoid the commercial trap, create new bands, and move forward. Equally important, Pelo delved into rockers’ personal styles to assess their pledge to authenticity. When interviewing Los Gatos, a journalist noted that they looked “un-prolix”: they were not “stars but street boys, as we are.”84 Pelo’s project revolved around shaping a fraternity without distinguishing musicians from audiences, enacting what sociologist Simon Frith has dubbed the “folk myth” fueling rock’s claims of authenticity and community. As one editorial stated, “For the first time, a link ties an entire generation,” and explained that, “Now, musicians don’t wear shiny suits; now, there are less idols, and more human beings.”85

  The imagery of an age-based fraternity of male “equals” was at the core of Argentina’s rock culture, highly visible in the occasions of its public gathering such as the three successive annual Buenos Aires Rock (BAROCK) festivals. The refusal to validate any project of stardom came along with the praise of authenticity—as opposed to superficiality and commercialism—and of a vague yet nonetheless undeniable celebration of “human individuality.” Alongside the prevalent antiauthoritarianism, these values—humanism, authenticity, equality—informed the effort to build community ties that would ideally transcend class differences and would express an alternative version of masculinity, centered on loving friends, romantic partners, and fathers. These were the images that the national press selected to portray the BAROCK festivals that Pelo organized beginning in 1970. The festivals showed that the rockers’ fraternity had enlarged considerably since the days of “La Balsa.” The organizers estimated that six thousand people attended each of the five afternoons when the festival took place in 1970, a figure that tripled in the years that followed.86 Reporting on the 1971 festival, journalists agreed that it was “musically poor” but striking in terms of attendance. A journalist wrote, in an impressionistic fashion, that the audience was composed of “boys from suburbia, wrapped in long, waving hair,” noting that the “fuel to rock culture” came not from “the pseudo-hippies of Barrio Norte” but from the “industrial belt of Buenos Aires.” Similarly, others signaled that the audience was made of “secondary school and long-haired boys from the workshop floors.”87 The BAROCK served to gather a cross-class fraternity in search of the “authentic” experience of rock.

  Perhaps because of the ubiquity of rock, in 1971 two entertainment impresarios decided that the time was ripe to bring the acclaimed rock musical Hair to Argentina. Hair’s impact was felt before and beyond its actual theatrical performance. Hair had played off-Broadway in 1967, though it quickly moved to Broadway and became the “first love-rock musical,” in

  A new fatherhood, Buenos Aires Rock Festival, 1971. Archive Diario Clarín.

  which youths danced and sang the now memorable lyrics of the “Age of Aquarius.” Hair achieved immediate success and elicited debate, chiefly about its theatrical characteristics and the decision to show nudity.88 Scandal accompanied Hair worldwide. Buenos Aires was not an exception. The local producers, like their counterparts in other countries, also pursued their casting call by unconventional means; that is, they posted ads in record stores and at rock concerts rather than in theater schools. For the casting call, five hundred youths competed for thirty-five acting positions, and at least ten of the selected ones belonged to the “rock world.” When the rehearsals began, members of the cast “took over” the theater and its adjacent streets and turned them into a “hippie enclave.”89 Hair attracted self-identified hippies to the area. Former náufrago Mario Rabey, for example, recalls that he followed his girlfriend—an actress and dancer who had been selected as a cast member—and began to live in a cheap hotel on the same block where the theater was located: “everything was crazy there,” he recalls, “people arrived, played music, danced, chatted. It was a liberated zone.” Most of the initial cast, however, did not make it to the premiere: after clashing with the impresarios, many were fired and headed toward other places to initiate communal living. Rabey’s group, for example, went to Patagonia. Some months after the premiere, director Roberto Villanueva, choreographer Marilú Marini, rocker and music director Carlos Cutaia and his wife Carola—one of the few female rock performers—headed to Córdoba province to set up a short-lived “artistic commune.”90 While the staged musical incited criticism focusing on its failure to account for “Argentina’s reality,” its “soft” treatment of sexual and political issues, and its representation of the hippies, Hair had served, unintentionally, as an experience from which overt countercultural practices emerged.91

  The hippie countercultural experiments articulated around Hair were neither the first nor the only ones in Argentina, though. The rock band Arco Iris, for example, began a project of urban communal living in early 1970. A former beat quartet, Arco Iris had recorded one single with RCA and achieved instant success in 1969 when they found their muse: a young woman named Danais Wynnika, aka Dana. She was trained in yoga and acquainted with Eastern religions and so became the band’s spiritual leader. Arco Iris rented a house in a suburban neighborhood where they followed a quite monarchal routine. As the band’s voice and guitar player, Gustavo Santaolalla, explained, they woke up early, took shifts doing the domestic chores, and together thought up their music and lyrics. They performed yoga exercises, quit smoking, and became vegetarians.92 As the 1970s wore on, the band familiarized itself with imagery related to indigenous communities, which reverberated in its most remembered record, Sudamérica, o el regreso de la aurora (South America, or the Return of Dawn). They became more radicalized in their rejection of the “commercial machinery” of the music business and organized alternative circuits for producing and distributing records. Yet they also radicalized their spiritual claims: like some religiously inspired communes in the United States did, the members of Arco Iris also abandoned sexual activity to lead all energy to create. “Our Civilization,” Santaolalla stated, “has succumbed to sexual desire and narcotics.”93 These antisexual and antidrug claims did not inform other countercultural experiences.

  In addition to Arco Iris, one of the lasting communal-living experiments was La Cofradía de la Flor Solar, in La Plata. This city hosted the second largest public university in the 1960s as well as a School of Fine Arts, which attracted a vast student population from all over the country. In 1967, several art students abandoned classes and paying jobs to rent a house. When a group of musicians from Entre Ríos joined them, La Cofradía de la Flor Solar was born, naming both the commune and the rock band the musicians created. By late 1969, Mono Cohen, age twenty-six, told a reporter who visited the “hippie house” that they spent their days working on artisan goods and the evenings discussing “how to modify our limited environment.” The group made a living through the sale of artisan goods, the painting they did in the neighborhood, and the money the band
received when it performed. In 1971, Cohen was interviewed again, this time about whether or not the group practiced “free love.” He responded that they were “freer than the rest of the population, but not promiscuous.”94 More recently, Meneca Hiquis, who engaged in La Cofradía in 1971, clarified that sex was free to the extent that it took place between couples not formally married, but there was not “group sex.” In addition, she recalled that the group only occasionally used “LSD or acid,” because even when they would have desired it, it was expensive and hard to get in Buenos Aires. The same held true for the commune that former La Cofradía’s members and Miguel Cantilo built in El Bolsón in 1974.95

  These experiences sought to materialize the utopias of hippie countercultures worldwide: to create a community from the onset, endowed with rules and values separated as much as possible from those of the “mainstream society.” These experiences heightened some of the values that articulated rockers’ fraternity, such as the praise for equality, respect for “human individuality,” and search for authentic expression. Unlike rockers’ fraternity, these experiences did include young women. The available testimonies suggest that some of the commune’s men upheld a “hippie princess” approach that—as one strand of rock lyrics did—confined young women to the roles of ethereal lovers. Those beliefs, as scholars have studied for the United States, did not entail the pursuit of sexual equality but did lessen the more overt forms of machismo that cut across other youth cultural and political realms.96 In comparison to the hippie experience in the United States and Mexico, likewise, the experience in Argentina was more limited and less dependent on a psychedelic imagery related to drug use. The multilayered hippie trends in the United States attracted a “hard core” of almost eight hundred thousand youths who, in 1970, had had some communal living experience. American hippies crossed the border and helped enlarge communes in Mexico as well, where local and foreign hippies engaged in psychedelic trips with hallucinogens.97 Hallucinogenic drugs were hardly available in Argentina and—as Arco Iris showed in an extreme fashion—drugs were not a reference point for the building of identities. Similarly, it is evident that the “hard core” of the Argentine hippies comprised a tiny minority of youths. Miguel Grinberg—manager of the rock band La Cofradía—stated that by 1970 about two thousand youths had engaged in “removing energies from the system.”98

  To help shape the removal of energy from the system, Grinberg launched the magazine Contracultura, which offers insight into the ideological materials on which some groups drew as well as, fundamentally, on the challenges that any countercultural effort found in appealing to a broader constituency. An active cultural organizer, Grinberg translated and published documents from experiences abroad—and some local—that, he believed, could be useful to invigorate a radical movement. Contracultura published fragments of Guy Debord’s “situationist” texts, the “thirty theses” that French students agreed on in May of 1968, and some lectures by Herbert Marcuse on “student power” along with texts of the antipsychiatry movement, the manifesto of the Living Theater group, and even a document drafted by Third World priests in 1969. Grinberg also pushed to create communes as venues for “fighting here and now.” As he had done in Eco Contemporáneo, he sought to carve out a space between the commercialized and the politicized youth. Grinberg expressed a reaction against the politicized groups as they existed in Argentina: “Those of us who, by principle and will, cannot be Leninist,” he stated in an editorial, “do remember that the duty of any revolutionary is to create alternatives and defend them as liberated zones.”99 In early 1970s Argentina, the hippie groups in particular and rock culture at large were neither the only nor the most influential discourses and practices to interpellate youth. They represented one layer in a broader culture of contestation articulated through the notion of “liberation”—in its collective and/or individual inflections. The overtly political subset of that culture, epitomized by the revolutionary Left, claimed a political and ideological definition to the “unaffiliated” young men attracted to rock culture, whose rebellion was viewed as insufficient.

  A Time for Definitions

  In May of 1969, a series of popular revolts spread through several Argentine cities, including Corrientes, Rosario, and especially Córdoba, and marked the beginning of the political finale of the Onganía regime. It was only in June of 1970, though, after the Peronist guerrillas, the Montoneros, kidnapped and killed former president General Pedro Aramburu, that Onganía finally resigned. Guerrilla activities had caught up with a broad and radical societal politicization. In that process, rising numbers of young people engaged with revolutionary projects aimed at forging a Socialist future—either in its classless, Marxist form or in its national, Peronist version, which reached its height between 1972 and 1974. In that biennium elections were called, and in them a Peronist formula triumphed, allowing Juan Perón to return from exile, becoming president until his death. That was also the juncture in which rock gained momentum: in 1972 thirty-two records were launched, the highest number thus far and for the ten years to follow. How did rock culture interact with the dynamic of politicization of increased numbers of youth? While each constellation of discourse and practice developed their own ways of appealing to youth, there were points of overlap. Although many leftist intellectuals and militants did not deploy a harsh criticism of what some began to call “rock nacional”—rather the opposite was true—they did ask rockers to clarify their ideology and abandon their sensibility, a claim that was all in all more intense with the “hippies.”

  Many left-wing intellectuals and young activists plainly rejected what they understood as the “hippie” phenomenon. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as intellectuals in Mexico or Chile did, some Argentines also thought that the hippies in the “central countries” represented a progressive movement against consumerism and bureaucratization, but discredited their counterparts in the periphery as a bad copy: “what there means healthy unconformity,” an essayist wrote, “here is alienating marginality.”100 Two other intellectuals explained that “the Latin American hippie movement is fueled by clothing firms” and argued that the pacifist slogans just distracted youth from “more effective rebellions.”101 These intellectuals viewed the local hippies as emulative, fabricated, and politically demobilizing. These arguments reverberated among many politicized youths as well. In 1972, in a roundtable with secondary school students, for example, a young woman affiliated with the Montoneros-oriented Juventud Peronista (JP, Peronist Youth) argued that the local hippies were “all snobs, the product of the cipaya [sold-to-imperialism] propaganda.” A Trotskyist boy, age sixteen, said that through the hippies “the yanquis colonized youth and make them drowsy.”102 These youths amplified the stereotypes of the náufragos in the days of “La Balsa,” yet they adapted the criticisms to represent the hippies as obstructive to a revolutionary project.

  However, as some memoirs allow us to infer, there was a zone of intersection in which some youths articulated their political activism with their involvement in countercultural projects and practices, and vice versa. For example, the journalist Martin Granovsky recalls that one of his best friends, Pablo, was a militant with the ERP at the same time that he was a rock guitar player. Trying to reconstruct his friend’s life before being kidnapped by the military, Granovsky found that Pablo, while hiding from state repression, spent nights within a “hippie house” where he found not only a refuge but access to a creative, musical life. It bears noting that the ERP leadership and many of its militants were strict in their judgments of both the “hippie” and rock lifestyles: as former members recall, they were sanctioned as “petit bourgeois and escapist” when going to rock concerts, which did not prevent many youths—like Pablo—from being attracted to them.103 The historian Alejandro Cattaruzza recalls also an experiment of communal living in Santa Fe, wherein a dozen youths participated in artistic endeavors while engaging with the JP or the Communist Youth.104 The line between activism and countercultura
l projects was crossed from the other direction as well. In 1973 the “hippie artisans” who had poured into Buenos Aires plazas organized a union affiliated with the JP. They argued that instead of “peace-and-love hippies,” they were “creative workers” producing apart from the “imperialist circle.”105

  Yet even broader than the encounter between hardcore countercultural projects and political militancy was, at least for a time, the intersection between rock culture and political activism. In their memories, some former young militants created a life narrative characterized by a passage from “rebellion” to “revolution” in which rock had an important role. Thus, Carlos recalls that in the late 1960s he crafted his “rebellion” through wearing long hair, playing in a rock band, and attending “Manal concerts,” where he “ended up in jail several times.” He was already “a rebel,” he says, when he found his path to a “sophisticated revolutionary thought” and affiliated with a Trotskyist group. While he kept attending rock concerts, he quit playing and had his hair cut “for security reasons.”106 Other former political activists shaped different memories. Luis Salinas, for example, ironically recalls that, in the early 1970s, “I wanted to be exactly what I was: a blend of guerrilla and Rolling Stone.” There was not a passage from rock-rebellion to politics-revolution: as a former member of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR, Revolutionary Armed Forces) and as a “fan of música progresiva,” Luis believes he embodied both. Yet Luis is self-reflective regarding the limits of the zone of intersection he inhabited. He comments that, on the one hand, the FAR’s leaders were “very strict with discipline,” especially as related to the prohibition of drug use. On the other hand, Luis asserts that el circo (the circus)—as the unaffiliated rockers were known—was “hermetic and skeptical with politics.”107 These stories illustrate the possibilities and limits of the encounters between rock culture and political activism. Security reasons, party discipline, and self-discipline conditioned the involvement of militants with rock culture as the 1970s went on. In a context of intense politicization, revolutionary militants were required to “define” themselves by privileging their allegiance to one of the strands that constituted the youth culture of contestation. The “circus” was also required a definition.