Making Third World Argentina: Place, Emotions, and Revolutionary Politics, 1966--1976

MANZANO, VALERIA

Boston

Congreso; 125th Annual Meeting, American Historical Association; 2011

American Historical Association

On the eve of the 1970s, in Argentina, as in most of Latin America, large numbers of young people engaged with anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist revolutionary political projects. In their efforts to carve out those projects, young women and men built up a new narrative of place and nationhood that contested the dominant tropes of a racially and socially homogeneous nation, that at the same time was cosmopolitan, urban, and modern. Combining the examination of political and student presses, documentaries, music, and oral testimonies, this paper reconstructs how young people produced a displacement, both in geographical and socio-cultural terms, towards an Argentina that was the antithesis of those hegemonic representations. I argue that those geographical and socio-cultural displacements constituted a key arena through which young militants and activists shaped a new sensibility, dominated by the emotions of indignation and shame. That new sensibility was articulated with the ways in which young people discovered and imagined a new place: an Argentina that in social, racial, and cultural terms was not exceptional among its Latin American neighbors and that, moreover, fully belonged to the Third World.