7KH$JHRI<RXWKLQ$UJHQWLQD&XOWXUH3ROLWLFVDQG

6H[XDOLW\IURP3HUQWR9LGHODE\9DOHULD0DQ]DQRUHYLHZ
&DUROLQD=XPDJOLQL

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 8, Number

2, Spring 2015, pp. 331-332 (Review)

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/hcy.2015.0029

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hcy/summary/v008/8.2.zumaglini.html

Access provided by University of California , Santa Barbara (15 Mar 2016 16:45 GMT)
 Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 331

The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and

Sexuality from Pern to Videla.
By Valeria Manzano.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 354 pp. Paper $34.95,
e-book $29.99.

I n 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 Argentinas 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 con-
stant yearning for newness and change. According to Manzano, it was during
the 1960s and 1970s that youths, particularly young women, became the car-
riers 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 dif-
ferent ways in which youth itself shaped the dynamics of sociocultural modern-
ization 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 produc-
tions and youth. Looking at youth-led music, leisure practices, and consump-
tion, 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 tra-
ditional historiography that discusses youth consumption practices in Europe
332 BOOK REVIEWS

and the Americas, the author points toward the distinctions that mass culture
generated among the young, thus debunking the idea of a possible homog-
enous 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 books main contributions to the litera-
ture of youth in Argentina, Manzano focuses on how young women and mens
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 mecha-
nisms. 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 assum-
ing 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 in the United States
and Europe. Manzanos main contributions are to gender studies and sexuality,
cultural studies of consumption, and youth and politics during the twentieth
century. Drawing from a wealth of sources that uncover the voices of adults
and young people alike, the author presents a compelling case about the central
role that youth played in Argentina from the 1950s to the 1970s. Her book is
an important addition to the growing historiography that studies the lives and
experiences of young people and is a must read for Argentine scholars dedi-
cated to the twentieth century.

Carolina Zumaglini
Florida International University