Content area
Full text
The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics & Sexuality from Perón to Videla. By Va l e r ia M a n z a n o . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. 354. $34.95 (paper).
Valeria Manzano's detailed analysis of the history of youth in Argentina offers a culturally and anthropologically informed perspective on the complexities of social life in Argentina from the second government of Juan Domingo Perón to the last military dictatorship under Jorge Rafael Videla, which ended in 1981. She relies upon an impressive array of primary sources, including files from public and private archives, interviews, newspapers, popular magazines, books, government statistics, Catholic publications, and psychological and pedagogical journals. Her book asks two fundamental questions: How did young people in Argentina experience their lives between the 1950s and 1980s? How did they become socially involved in cultural and political changes during these decades? Her main thesis is that during these years, youth as a category and young people as actors stood at the center of discussions about how relations of authority were thought of, built, and enforced in familial, cultural, and political terrains.
The book investigates the histor y of youth as a strategic device to explore political, cultural, and sexual changes in Argentina in...