Argentina

"Generation X in Argentina: One Person’s Snapshot"

"While speaking for others in a group of individualists feels unfair, I guess I can say that as teenagers in the early eighties in Argentina, we came of age facing the abyss. On the one hand, it was the physical emptiness left by the generation preceding us, the terrible, darkest, extremely painful absence of the “disappeared.” In the way of heroes impossible to emulate, their absence marked our own worthlessness. On the other hand, in a horizon loaded with horror, who could really endorse any “great narrative”?

Not much characterized my generation, I guess, other than this pain, a sense of loss, of not being worth much, and of lacking anything like an epic. Even the tragedy targeting our group’s males, those thousands of youths drafted and sacrificed to fight in the Malvinas War, proved to be a masquerade, a call to sacrifice lives in defense of patriotic ideals, launched by military dictators as a last, grotesque, desperate move to stay in power.

Our older ones took themselves very seriously. They still do. In recent years, I have learned how the young at times romanticize the past, even ours. Confronting accusations of being nihilist and postmodern, we just laugh. It is a dark but honest, skeptical but caring laughter. Generation X? It was an American film, right? What do these stories from Argentina have to do with that?"

~Guillermina Seri, Excerpt from Generation X Goes Global