The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla

MANZANO, VALERIA

The University of North Carolina Press

Lugar: Chapel Hill; Año: 2014 p. 410

978-1-4696-1161-7

A social and cultural history of youth, this book reconstructs the dual dynamics of sociocultural modernization and political radicalization in Argentina from the mid twentieth century to the last military dictatorship (1976-1983). During this three decades youth became a crucial cultural and political category, and young people one of the most powerful cultural and political actors. Protagonist of cultural and sexual transformations as well as of a profound renovation of Argentina's political culture, young people were at the center of a public conversation about democracy, authoritarianism, and ultimately revolution. Often overlooked in the prevalent accounts of the 1960s and 1970s is the fact that Argentines experienced their "age of youth". This book investigates what the "age of youth" reveals about how Argentines imagined themselves during times of sweeping cultural renewal and political turmoil. It shows that youth, as a concept, embodied hopes and anxieties projected onto claims of change and that young people inhabited, with varying degrees of intensity, a culturally and politically loaded category.