The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

In The Age of Youth in Argentina, Valeria Manzano studies how youth as a category of historical analysis and young people as actors became crucial elements in the developing of Argentina’s cultural and political scene from 1955 to the 1970s. Under the premise that politics, culture, and sexuality all influenced one another, Manzano analyzes these intersections through a multilayered history of how young people thought about themselves and how they were viewed by adults. While Manzano ascertains that young men and women did not share a unified experience, she proposes that the urban youth from the middle class or upper strata of the working classes shared fundamental traits. She argues that young men and women enjoyed a constant yearning for newness and change. According to Manzano, it was during the 1960s and 1970s that youths, particularly young women, became the carriers of sociocultural modernization as “they created new spaces and styles of sociability; reshaped consumption practices; and challenged deep-seated ways of social and familiar interaction” (3).

In each of the eight chapters that form this book, Manzano reveals the different ways in which youth itself shaped the dynamics of sociocultural modernization in the 1960s and most of the 1970s. This process, bookending with the beginning of the military regime in 1976, was marked by three critical junctures characterized by rapid political, social, and cultural change. It was particularly during these moments that youth emerged as a visible category framing debates that touched upon democracy, authoritarianism, and modernization. Youth not only participated in politics through their engagement with student, political, and guerrilla groups, but they also advanced a political culture of contestation.

Manzano further adds a nuanced approach to the study of cultural productions and youth. Looking at youth-led music, leisure practices, and consumption, Manzano reconstructs the emergence of a juvenilized mass culture crucial to the making of “modern Argentina.” The author points to the arrival of rock music as the triggering mechanism for such phenomena. Contrary to the traditional historiography that discusses youth consumption practices in Europe [End Page 331] and the Americas, the author points toward the distinctions that mass culture generated among the young, thus debunking the idea of a possible homogenous youth. She further points to the unusual case of Argentina in comparison to other Latin American countries. Only in Argentina did rock cut across classes and gender.

Regarding sexuality, the third of the book’s main contributions to the literature of youth in Argentina, Manzano focuses on how young women and men’s sexual lives were debated and shaped by themselves and how they cut across adults’ debates. For instance, Manzano analyzes debates over premarital sex to shed light on the dynamics of sociocultural modernization that Argentines experienced during this period. It was particularly young women who more fully embodied and shaped sociocultural modernization as the contested ideas of domesticity and challenged patriarchal authority through various mechanisms. The author also looks at the emergence of rock culture to analyze the ideals and debates it sparked over masculinity as rockers questioned already established models. Manzano further analyzes the making of the “youth body” during this period as a political and cultural category.

Finally, Manzano places her work within a transnational dimension assuming that, as any other category or concept, it occupied different identities and modalities in different parts of the world. As a transnational phenomenon, Argentine young people participated within a larger network of ideas, images, and sound that defined them across the world. Yet, the Argentine case adds a new perspective to youth studies as, contrary to most studies based on the United States or Europe, it presents a case of young people growing during a time of economic instability and political authoritarianism.

The Age of Youth in Argentina enters into conversations with studies of youth and youth culture in different settings and times, especially...