CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Basedon memoirs, oral interviews, press reports, and declassified police reports,this paper is divided into three parts. First, I explore some of the initialtraces of the ?going-to-the-people? movement in 1960s Argentina, showing thatit had multiple roots (Catholic, Marxist, Peronist) and crystallized in myriadinitiatives, which nevertheless converged in a key point: the practicalquestioning of the narratives of sociocultural modernization that swept acrossthe intellectual and political elites that, beginning in 1955, had illegalizedthe most popular political movement (Peronism) and, starting in 1966, hadagreed on the imposition of a military coup d?état (the so-called Revolución Argentina) that promised bothnational security and economic development. Second, I briefly reconstruct thesequence of popular revolts that made the Argentine May of 1969 by payingespecial attention to the types of ?encounters? they entailed, chiefly betweenuniversity students and workers. I argue that those encounters wereinstrumental in the process of disidentification: many student activistsattempted to erase the markers of their student?and, even, youth?condition, tocompletely merge within the people. In this context, students and intellectualsengaged in debates on the convenience to dissolve what they called a ?corporatist?position in order to give themselves to a deeply different form of politicalinvolvement. Finally, the paper follows some of the embodiments of the movement?out of place??or ?to the people??by accounting for experiences ofproletarianization. In contrast to other Latin American and Europeanexperiences, in the immediate aftermath of the Argentine May of 1969, anintense process of politicization and radicalization unfolded, one in whichdroves of young people understood that they were participating from a socialrevolution tout court.

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