Making Third World Argentina: Place, Emotions, and Revolutionary Politics, 1967–76

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. This paper will analyze how young women and men, in their efforts to carve out a revolutionary project, built up a “Third World Argentina,” that is, a new narrative of place and nationhood which contested the existing hegemonic 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 to reconstruct how young people produced a “displacement,” both in geographical and psychological terms, towards an Argentina that was the antithesis of the hegemonic representations. In this respect, I will pay especial attention to the travel experiences of different youth groups—some of them related to the Catholic Church, others to student groups—from urban areas such as Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Mendoza to the most impoverished rural regions, such as Chaco and Santiago del Estero. These traveling experiences were crucial for many of them encounter a different Argentina—presumably “hidden” behind the images of the modernizing cities that permeated the country's public culture in the early 1960s—and constituted a key arena through which they shaped a new sensibility, dominated by the emotions of indignation and shame. Coupled with the feeling of imminence of change cut across the youth political culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that new sensibility was articulated with the ways in which young people “discovered” and imagined a new place—a “Third World Argentina”—in their process of becoming leading political actors.