How to Fit into the Third World? New Left Culture and Politics in 1960s Argentina

This presentation, in reconstructing the emergence and spread of ideas in the 1960s that understood Argentina as part of the Third World, contends that “Third Worldism” was a key component of the ideas and practices of Argentina’s New Left. The political and cultural actors that coalesced into that New Left—coming from different ideological backgrounds—focused on the contrasts between “modernizing” spaces and phenomena (such as the cosmopolitan cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario, and the rising enrollments in the universities), and the grievous living and working conditions in the provinces of the Northeast and the Northwest. These latter cases sparked critiques of the modernizing narratives of the 1960s at the same time that they contributed to an approach that aligned the case of Argentina with images of the “geography of rebellion” of the Third World. The focus on these contrasts also allowed for the shaping of a collective emotion, indignation, which in turn heightened ideological beliefs and politico-cultural practices.

In this presentation, I will first explore the making of the parameters of “indignation” in its linkages with emphases on social, geographical, and economic contrasts. Secondly, I will reconstruct the travel practices and cultural consumptions of a cohort of young people that experienced their political socialization in the intersection of the 1960s and 1970s, and who came to firmly believe that their country belonged to the Third World. In this respect, I will also interrogate how some experiences of rural guerrillas in Argentina, thus far analyzed in terms of left-wing miscalculation, were actually of a piece with a commonly held “Third Worldist” perspective, and this interpretation perhaps signals its most dramatic political effects.