In one of my Spanish classes at Georgetown in the semester before I decided to spend five months abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I did a short research project on masculinity in Latin America. In my mind then as I hopped on a plane in mid-July was the idea that I was travelling to the land of machismo—of gender stereotypes, of catcalls, and generally of a place where men are deemed superior.
In many ways, however, I soon found out I was wrong.
In the 1970s, Argentina underwent a time of significant social change due to the military dictatorship, the terrorism of the state, and the clear violations of human rights throughout the period. As I learned in one of my classes, “Body, Gender, and Sexuality in Argentina,” this period then gave rise to the new prototype of the youth, representing the resistance: independent, rebellious, and liberated. The same sentiments also then applied to the situation of the women. Women rose up in the ranks of the opposition, but fighting against the subjectivity in both the country and in the home. There was thus the feminization of the movement, in which the return to democracy stood against the traditional, masculine image of the military dictatorship.
Even beyond that, it has been women that have taken charge and publicly demanded justice in this country. Not more than a few weeks after I arrived in Buenos Aires, all the newspapers one day were covering this one story: the granddaughter of the president of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) had been found. Argentina’s history of disappearances, with babies taken from the rebels and put into the hands of other families, had been ingrained into the country’s collective memory, all due to the rise of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. These women were among the first to politicize the notion of maternity, in which they transformed into the protectors of not only the homes but also of the morality of the country. They demanded justice in the political sphere, and in many ways, they succeeded. Motherhood thus became a powerful concept in the collective memory of the country.
According to your typical machismo, however, maternity is not powerful. The men rule the household, and women need to be dependent on men in order to succeed. My host mom proves all of those notions wrong. She’s a single mom, a successful psychologist who works out of her home, and she’s one of the strongest and most amazing individuals I have ever met. She’s long since separated from her husband, lost one son a couple years ago, but still insists on not letting the world bring her down. She never needed a man to get her through anything or to make her as successful as she is today. And I love her for it.
And she is only one person of the many other Argentinian women that I’ve met here that I have genuinely inspired me. In class, for example, it is never the men who speak up but the women who are apt on questioning anything that the professor says. You can see it in the streets, in the bars, in the buses. Women are not conceived as inferior here, but as strong, ambitious, and independent. They will go after what they want in life, and they won’t take no for an answer.
Don’t get me wrong: all my notions weren’t wrong. This is still the place of gender stereotypes and of catcalls, but it most definitely is not a place where men are superior. Rather, it’s a place where women have decided to step outside their homes—be it from the Plaza de Mayo to the (Mrs.) president’s desk in Casa Rosada—and decide to take on the world that seemed so pressed on pushing them back down.
But from what I’ve seen in the past two and a half months here, in this dynamic between “women versus the world,” the world doesn’t stand a chance.
Jessica Uy graduated from the Walsh School of Foreign Service in 2016. She is originally from Silver Spring, Maryland. She participated in the Berkley Center's Junior Year Abroad Network while studying abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina in fall 2014.
