Their first biographical recollections started in the early nineties. Four settings embrace their childhood memories: home, the streets, kindergarten and travelling.
The first recurrent topic within the family space was the remembrance of playing.
Although an obvious attribute of childhood, respondents often identify some qualities of ‘their’ mode of playing. For instance, some young respondents stressed that their games were more ‘natural and simple’ than present technological ones.
Asserted as a generational distinction, they represent themselves as the last human beings growing up in a much simpler world. Natalia even reported such a circumstance as ‘the loss of childhood’:
“I remember my sister and my friends … playing like (…) things like acting improvisations, dressing up, to be a princess, a teacher, things that I sense that you don’t see anymore (…) It’s like I feel that childhood has been lost, let’s say, being … being a child... I see this mainly in toys and consumption. It’s like, nowadays, consumption is more homogeneous, it’s like children have fewer toys, there are actually many fewer toy stores. When I was a child, Buenos Aires was full of them (…) And really now there are fewer toy stores, because I feel that today children play (…) more with computers and computer games.” (Natalia, 1987)
As part of a shared generational lexicon, people (even young people) usually claim some sort of loss in new generations. Yet, the emergence of digital media in normal daily-life activities plays an interesting narrative role here. At least in middle- and upper-class memories, a recurrent story at their generational site is the continuous emergence of new technological devices. Without effort they remembered when cable television arrived, their first mobile phone, computer (including stories related to the speed and sound of their first hardware), their first time on the Internet, and their first email. They can draw a clear before-and-after picture, thereby separating their times from those of their parents. Nonetheless, digitization is difficult to appropriate as a generational mark: newer generations are more ‘native’ (my respondents indeed lived a childhood without computers or the Internet) and older cohorts quickly ‘digitized’ themselves.
A second aspect of these ‘playing’ memories is the relationship between home and public spaces. Respondents maintained that while they had the opportunity to play in the streets, for their younger brothers and sisters (or future generations) such a
possibility is (or will be) lost due to street insecurity. A particular template is provided by María Luisa who grew up in a closed private neighbourhood from her fifth birthday onwards. She is part of the first upper-class cohort that grew up ‘in the Countries’ (private residences on the city outskirts). She recounted that her parents’
decision to move to a private area was prompted by mounting feelings of insecurity;
in her experience, the city has always been a space of risk, while her neighbourhood offered a privileged, safe and natural environment. Certainly, in those private areas the image of the city is reinforced as a space of risk, crime and insecurity by distinguishing an inner world with a ‘natural environment and peaceful relationships’ versus a dangerous urban outer-world (Svampa 2001). I have already analyzed both Argentinean (3.7) and Chilean (4.8) stories about the emergence of street insecurity in the nineties, generating a strong cognitive map that includes dangerous places (downtown – the poor outskirts), times (night) and people (the poor).
The majority of young interviewees do not share the scare stories of older cohorts, although references to insecurity can be found. In fact, I detected a more pragmatic way of perceiving insecurity (‘you must be aware’). The experience of those living in poverty is, nonetheless, entirely different. Hugo has been violently robbed several times in his neighbourhood, and often beaten by his father. Fabiana clearly evoked her childhood through the image of her father trying to kill her mother with a knife, and later her uncle – five years older – being assassinated at a party. An increasing amount of daily life violence is experienced in the streets and at home, a scenario well described by Auyero and Berti (2013). For a great many poor areas in Latin American cities, the incapacity of a (failed) state together with the drugs market brought about (again) experiences of violence and fear.
The third setting for childhood memories is preschool. That site represents a novelty in terms of life-course paths. Whilst only two upper-class respondents among the adult cohort mentioned kindergarten, 16 out of 18 respondents mentioned or even started to remember with this educational space. This is the first Argentine age cohort that was enrolled not only very early, but also in an almost universal way at the level of primary school (Alzúa et al. 2010:20). Still, social differences remain salient. Agustina began by mentioning kindergarten when describing her private bilingual school in which she spent her entire school life. By contrast, for Hugo, nursery is related to his mother’s necessity to work and leave
him somewhere. He attended different public (state) preschools and primary schools – some of them, according to him, resembled a violent favela.61
Both Agustina’s and Hugo’s paths crystallize the structural character of Argentinean education today: upper-class respondents normally stay in one school for the whole of their school life (private and bilingual), while lower social respondents enrol in several public or semi-private institutions. That is, low-class respondents often change schools due to violent experiences or their parents’ precarious economic circumstances (down-up sequences). Those differences became even more salient when upper-class respondents reported choosing a private university in order to avoid those ‘political and conflictive’ public universities (‘full of strikes’). Although people may not have to pay in Argentina when enrolling at university – in contrast to the private system in Chile – the main criterion for access to private establishments seems to be marked by both political polarization (see 5.5 below) as well as strategies of distinction and elite closure.62 Ultimately, this age cohort experienced both the universalization of the education system and the increasingly social segmentation and devaluation of the public system at primary and secondary levels (Vior and Rodriguez 2012).
Travelling memories constitute the last setting of their childhood recollections. This might be regarded as a very ‘banal’ remembrance (and also a very middle-upper-class memory), but it is quite informative. Consider Enrique’s account:
“If you ask me about my memories from the period between 6 and 10 years old, I remember a country in which people lived very well (…) It seemed like there were few poor people in Argentina, many people travelled abroad, even my family – thank God – could afford to travel abroad several times – to Uruguay, Brazil and the USA. We had a fixed exchange rate of 1 to 1 – one dollar, one peso – therefore it was quite convenient for Argentineans who travelled abroad. However, I also remember that, when I was a bit older and more knowledgeable, the financial situation in Argentina became very unstable (…) What happened then was that decade, in which people in Argentina had the habit of wasting money,
61 Hugo used the term ‘favela’ instead of ‘villa’. Both words describe poor shantytowns, but the first one is used in Brazil while the second is used in Argentina. The nomination of the
‘terrible school’ as an ‘outside’ site not only shows a national ‘imaginary’ of the violent other (poor Brazilians), but might also narrow down one’s ‘own’ difficult circumstances.
62 Santiago, from a private school but studying economics at a prestigious public university, also draws this distinction within public universities: there are more ‘exigent’ and ‘semi-private’ faculties (e.g. economics) and more ‘leftist’ and ‘noisy’ faculties (e.g. social sciences).
travelling abroad, buying cars and so on, with this fixed exchange rate, was pretty much a lie.” (Enrique, 1988)
Enrique’s narration is suggestive partly because of its extreme metonymic character.
When he claims widespread welfare or maintains that many people could afford to travel abroad, this is of course an upper-middle-class respondents’ story. Certainly, many of the middle-class respondents remembered travelling abroad (and those who did not travel even regret their parents’ decision) as Argentina during the nineties sustained – as Enrique explained – a regime of ‘convertibility’ (the Argentinean currency was converted into dollars by Menem’s government in order to halt inflation), which benefitted exchange rates abroad. Still, this is just part of the
‘winner’ story of the nineties (Svampa 2001), whilst others in the country suffered a mounting process of pauperization (the loser story). Yet such a feature is quite obvious in terms of class memory. What must draw the attention is Sebastián’s final evaluative clause: in spite of all the benefits experienced, the nineties proved to be a
‘waste’ or simply a ‘lie’.
Remarkably, the ‘lie’ is the final narrative point of view for winners and losers, without exception. In fact, there exists no positive assessment of this period in terms of the national story. The negative terms employed to characterize the nineties, such as ‘neoliberalism’, ‘corruption’, privatization’, ‘consumption’, ‘lie’ and ‘bubble’, are revealing. Luisa warned me – a common joke – not to mention ex-President Carlos Menem’s surname as my recorder could be damaged.63It might be assumed that after the economic meltdown of 2001 (see 5.3 below) such a conclusion seems undeniable: the country was led into the abyss by a corrupt political elite. However, the widespread and homogenous negativity characterizing the nineties and Menem’s government augmented after the economic crisis of 2001.64 Even some of the older upper-middle-class respondents longed for a period of ‘triumphant’ Menemism. The young homogenous negativity indeed is part of some sort of narrative hyperbolization triggered by new governments (Kirchner’s narrative, see 5.5 below and Novaro
63 The nineties are often equated to the political period of ‘Menemism’ stemming from Carlos Menem’s double government from 1990 to 1999.
64 Nevertheless, human rights organizations had already linked Menem’s neoliberal policies to the previous dictatorship, thereby extending the human rights tragedy to the economic and social crisis of the nineties (Crenzel 2008, Jelin and Sempol 2006; for a criticism of this stance, see Vezzetti 2001).
2004). In order to intensify the sensation of political renewal, the nineties have to appear as non-political and strongly dominated by harsh individualism.
As such, this is the same narrative mechanism employed to evaluate the period of dictatorship (3.2). Meanwhile, society appears as the victim of a ‘lie’ or living in a
‘bubble’ (especially asserted by the winners’ heirs), and so the blame falls on some special groups or characters (especially, the evil and corrupt figure of president Menem). In other words, such a narrative template functions as a common evaluative mechanism (victimization) in spite of social differences.
The homogenous evaluation of the nineties is ultimately intensified by key features of childhood memories of public events. These memories are normally blurry biographical recollections as people barely develop some sort of societal perception.
The narrative settings of childhood memories are the home and primary school, whereas the main activities are family meetings and games. Nonetheless, when people offer some sort of narrative focalization, as for example when describing the nineties as a ‘lie’, they employ available narrative templates and evaluative codes.
Numerous episodes of the nineties were not mentioned or commented on. If I had interviewed those who spent their youth during the nineties, another events might have been mentioned. A case in point is the commemorations of the coup d’état.
While a good proportion of young respondents remembered the 30th anniversary in 2006, nobody mentioned the 20th anniversary in 1996, which is regarded by Argentine memory studies as a crucial turning point (Lvovich and Bisquert 2008).
Thus the thesis of the ‘reminiscence bump’ (Welzer and Markowitsch) or Mannheim’s ‘formative years’ may wellinvolve a thesis of generational forgetting:
some periods are poorly narrated from a generational point of view.
Schuman and Scott’s work (1989) on generations and collective memories expanded on Mannheim’s thesis of the formative years by demonstrating both that age is a crucial predictor of collective remembering, and that there are some events that are primordially recollected by certain groups and disregarded by others within the same age group. Drawing on an American national survey, they noted that the black population and women respondents from the 60s generation often mentioned social conflicts involving civil and women’s rights, respectively. Conversely, white people and males from the same age cohort hardly mentioned those events. A very similar case is those stories related to the terrorist attack against the Asociación de Mutuales
Israelitas Argentinas (AMIA), the most important centre of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires, in which 85 persons were killed in 1994. None of my sixty interviewees recollected this catastrophic event, with the exception of two young Jews born in Buenos Aires.
Daniel and Paulina, both born in 1990, not only mentioned that dreadful episodic, but also started their interviews by recounting it. The importance of such narrative beginnings reflects upon the value attributed to the bombing by the Jewish Argentine community – one of the largest worldwide – whereby a sense of belonging has been elaborated (Cohen 2009). Indeed, Daniel and Paulina hardly remember the bombing, but they brought together their fuzzy memories along with family accounts and school commemorations.
Now, the absence of other references to this event is not only due to age-cohort mechanisms (too young or too old to remember the bombing), but also because of the media and political framing of the terrorist attack (Feldstein and Acosta-Alzuru 2003). In spite of the fact that the majority of victims were Jewish-Argentine citizens, they were framed only as ‘Jews’ (or Israelis), while the Argentine state appears as a spectator (although for Daniel, the state is rather accountable for the attack due to a supposed ‘local’ connection between terrorists and Menem’s government). The framing of the tragedy as a ‘Jewish issue’ might have fostered impunity (‘it is not an Argentinean issue’). As nobody was held accountable for that criminal act, weekly commemorations by the victims’ relatives – and a related, strong civil society movement – emerged over ten years (Memoria Viva; see Cohen 2009).