The Argentine Middle Classes in the 1970s: The Crisis of an Idea (1969-1983)

Argentina went through the most unstable and violent period of its recent history in the 1970s. An emerging literature on the middle classes is departing from a prevalent scholarship that has focused on the main actors of the period: the military, political parties, leftist armed organizations, and victims of repression. However, it reproduces the "order v. chaos" framework, arguing that representations of violence are key to understand the middle-class reaction against democracy. Likewise, it has prioritized the years of the last military dictatorship (1976-1983). From a cultural history perspective, I propose a different approach: the 1970s represent a crisis of the idea of the middle class. Exploring both the material and the symbolic dimension of the Argentine middle classes, I will trace their crisis of expectations and their moral panics through archival research and oral interviews, bringing the historical methodology into scholarly discussions on the breakdown of democracies.