Between Agency and Authority: towards a Cultural and Political History of Youth in the Twentieth Century

MANZANO, VALERIA

Lethbridge

Workshop; International Workshop: A Cultural History of Youth in the Twentieth Century; 2019

University of Lethbridge

This paper explores the relationships between agency and authority by drawing on examples from Latin America and Western Europe, from the early twentieth century to the early twentieth first century. In the subfield of the history of youth, the concept of ?agency? has been widely used in relation to young people?s choices, their capacity to act, and their resistance to adult-centered mandates and expectations. As some historians have recently argued, the concept has flaws: it entails an a priori understanding regarding resistance to different forms of cultural and political authority; it supposes (at least implicitly) a binary model that opposes youth versus adults; and it is monolithic and ultimately ahistorical (Gleason, 2016; Alexander, 2015). Prompted by those discussions, this paper focuses on public political and politico-cultural experiences (not accounting for other milieus, such as family relations) and understands ?agency? as the willingness of autonomy in terms of the repertoires of demands and actions that young people deployed throughout the twentieth century. As the example above suggests, these dynamics neither excluded ?adults? nor stood in stark opposition to authority. Moreover, in the process of becoming political and cultural actors, young people reproduced and created a wide range of intra-generational authority relations, based on class, gender, and regional differences. The paper first reconstructs the experience of the University Reform Movement that swept across Latin America in the 1920s, which the students represented as an anti-hierarchical youth revolt. Besides generating the conditions for self-ruled university systems in Argentina, Peru, and Cuba, the University Reform Movement paved the way for increasing student involvement with politics both within and outside the universities, chiefly on the centre and left of the political spectrum. In the latter, in Latin America and elsewhere, the rise of communism was largely based on youthful participation, associated with the more radicalized positions and willing to ?push forward? revolutionary activities (See Chapter X on Ideology and Belief). The paper next explores diverse experiences of state-sponsored organizations of youth. By drawing on the examples of Fascist Italy and Peronist Argentina, I reconstruct the ways in which authoritarian regimes sought to mobilize (and often de-radicalize) youth, while creating the conditions for the political and cultural indoctrination of ?new generations?. However, these state-sponsored organizations could not completely subsume young people?s agency. Furthermore, in 1940s and 1950s Argentina, the Peronist government authorized young people?s autonomy, as far as it related to experimentations with mass culture, while it also delegitimized youthful political mobilization. The paper then assesses the manifold ways in which agency and authority were at stake in the ferment of 1968. The massive involvement of young people in radical politics was perhaps the single most distinctive occurrence in the global political scenario of the 1960s. Youth came to epitomize a culture of contestation that questioned well-entrenched forms of authority in the political and cultural realms, as demonstrated in the two examples the chapter explores: Italy and Mexico. Albeit with rather different modalities and intensities, the governing elites embarked upon ?authority-reconstitution? projects aimed at setting limits to both young people?s agency and, more prominently, to what youth as a category came to signify in political and cultural terms. However, this chapter will demonstrate that young people in 1968 and beyond also produced forms of intra-generational authority linked ? among other issues ? with gender and sexuality. Finally, the chapter will use hip-hop cultures in 1990s Latin America and late twentieth-century anti-corporate globalization movements to consider how young people?s more recent involvement in politico-cultural initiatives combined cultural, countercultural, and political activities and experiences with transnational resonances.