Out of Place: Students, Workers, and the Politics of Encounter in Argentina

Abstract

This chapter studies the practical and theoretical ways through which a cohort of young students in Argentina engaged with politics. Following Jacques Rancière, I will discuss these dynamics as part of a -political subjectivation [that was] primarily the result of disidentification.- In their political socialization, scores of middle-class youth, especially students, expressed a profound willingness to disidentify themselves in terms of class origins and cultural backgrounds. In doing so, they questioned the narratives of social modernization, which in 1960s Latin America focused on the processes of upward social mobility made possible by transformations in the industrializing labor markets and the exponential expansion of enrollments in secondary schools and universities. Although likely having benefited themselves from those socioeconomic changes, for the middle-class students who came of age politically during the 1960s and 1970s, the dynamics involved in the social modernization narratives reinforced social inequality. In that dual movement of criticism and disidentification, middle-class youth aligned themselves with the socially oppressed. Unlike what Rancière and others argue for the French middle classes in the 1960s, their "Other" was not geographically distant-namely, the peoples of Algeria first, and the fighting Vietnamese afterwards. For young middle-class Latin Americans, the social "others" were closer: the Guatemalan and Salvadoran peasants, or the Argentine blue-collar workers. Thousands of middle-class youth in Latin America formed the basis of a new politics when-through a series of practical decisions, both individual and collective-they moved away from their legitimate, established "place" to forge ties and identify with their social and cultural "others".