On the Revolutionary Road: Youth, Displacements, and Politics in the ?Long? Latin American Sixties

MANZANO, VALERIA

Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century

Palgrave

Lugar: Nueva York; Año: 2015; p. 167 - 187

From the entry of Fidel Castro?s troops in Havana in 1959 until the military coup d?état that overthrew the socialist democratic experience of Salvador Allende in Chile, in 1973, the Latin American ?long? 1960s were pervaded by a feeling of imminence, of ?change about to happen.? Young women and men from the Southern Cone countries (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay) sought to shape change, ideally a new ?revolutionary road.? That road was political, cultural, and also geographical. Emulating Ernesto ?Che? Guevara?s model journeys in the early 1950s, thousands of anonymous middle-class youth, instead of heading towards Europe or the United States, privileged to visit the most impoverished regions, especially the Andes. As it had happened with Guevara, in many cases the traveling experiences marked their increasing involvement with projects of social and political revolutions aimed at ?liberating? the Latin American nations. This article reconstructs the collective production of that cultural and political ?road?. It contends that those travel experiences were crucial for many middle-class young people ?discover? and reinterpret Latin America. In particular, many of them searched for and eventually found what was ?hidden? behind the images of the modernizing cities in which many of them had been raised. Supplemented with new practices of cultural consumption, those travel experiences constituted a key arena through which politicizing middle-class youth shaped a new sensibility, dominated by the emotions of indignation and shame. Coupled with the feeling of imminence, that new sensibility was articulated with the ways in which young people ?discovered? and imagined a new place?a Third-World Latin America?in their process of becoming leading political actors.