The stories, imprints and legacy of the women of “argento” rock, present at the Book Fair

(By Camila Alfie for Télam) Fans, groupies, showgirls or, in their most “romantic” version, muses. Since the genesis of rock, this genre has been marked by a patriarchal story that relegated women to the margins of its narrative and its practice. Renarrating from a gender perspective how they managed to compose and interpret, live and cement a career in different eras, defying rules, censorship and all the obstacles that the industry itself placed on them is to break “the invisibility and silence” and realize how “juicy ” are the stories of those musics, agreed the three co-authors of “Al taco, history of Argentine rock made by women”, the book that inspired the talk organized yesterday by Télam at the 47th Buenos Aires International Book Fair.

The table “Women of Argentine rock: stories and 40 years of democracy” addressed the central passages of “Al taco”, the book that traces a chronology of Argentine rock made by women from 1954 to 1999.

Those behind this project are the journalist Gabriela Cei, the translator Silvia Arcidiacono and the literature professor Carolina Santos. They, in addition to exercising professions related to language practices, are three friends who met while attending high school in Quilmes. This is not a minor fact, since it was during those teenage adventures that they discovered together the rock scene in the south of Buenos Aires in the ’80s and ’90s.

In the Book Fair talk, which was moderated by the journalist Gabriel González, Santos recalled how he joined the dots between rock and feminism when he was barely in elementary school. “The teacher asked us to draw our mothers. I saw that everyone drew their mothers sweeping and I did the same, although that did not represent her. I wanted to do the same as the other boys. We were under a dictatorship and we felt that there was no I had to be different. When I got home my mom, who was a feminist ‘from when feminism was a dirty word’, told me: ‘how beautiful!’, and she erased the broom and replaced it with a guitar”, she says. “A short time later, in a record store, I see the back cover of Celeste Carballo’s album where she is holding a brush as if it were a guitar. That is where the line that ends in this book begins,” she reflected.

“I can’t forget what happened to me when I heard ‘Me vuelvo más loca día’, by Celeste Carballo,” said Cei, about that song that marked her the most as a girl, when she was just poking her head into the universe of rock made by women. “I was ten years old and it seemed completely out of the ordinary, outside of what was questioning me; even without understanding what it was about. And that happened to me right away with Sandra, because my first cassette (was a gift from my friend Patricia de Quilmes ), was ‘I am what I am’. And I was ten years old singing to Sandra and Celeste all over the house, not knowing what was coming with the two of them together,” he added.

At the dawn of Alfonsinismo, Quilmeño rock was a punk landscape full of underworld mystique, creativity, stickers, poor quality sound, and chairs flying through the air. They went through it in the streets and at night, lying to their parents to go to concerts and listening to cassettes that invited them to discover liberating and rebellious views on the world.

It was in this adolescent context that they began to be passionate about rocker women, understanding them as a political subject with their own power within a genre that, by nature, always operated as a rebellious spring. But that, nevertheless, was not – and is not – exempt from its own oppressive and patriarchal logic.

“Al taco” is the result of all these decades of desire to investigate, record and explore this world. An unpublished book that contributes to an alternative historiography of popular music and that “demystifies some assumptions about the lack of presence of female musicians” in Argentine rock, as Liska says.

“One of the things I value most about this book is that here is something that belongs to all the women who are getting on stage today. And they are also in the book, because today they continue making history, they continue composing, They continue to make records, they continue to be part of the construction of rock. They will not find shooting stars, but women who kicked in doors, opened spaces and today are building rock in Argentina. With which this history is recent and is present” , Arcidiacono maintained.

“In these stories there is a whole epic. Women are used to hearing the epic of the masculine in rock (and everywhere), but you do not know the quantum of epic that is in these stories! How is it possible that a band that never debuted has had its debut in Obras? Obviously there is an invisibility and a silence, as if these things were not worth telling. Quite the contrary. They are very juicy”, he assured.

“Al taco”, in this sense, compiles how the permanent encounters of these women were, both in time and space, intertwining through different generations. As stated in one of her chapters by Juliana Gattas, who reveals with emotion how Fabiana Cantilo marked her creative sensibility. “I had to do a lot of research in the ’90s. And in those years the mainstream place was reserved for men,” recalls Cei. “At that time, the women multiplied like an unstoppable network, with Rosario Bléfari at the head, but there were many more. And for those girls who began to move very quickly and never stopped, there was already a Celeste Carballo, there were some Widows and Daughters, one María Gabriela Epumer, one María Rosa Yorio. Many saw these women holding a guitar and wanted to get on stage to play and be like them”.

In turn, the authors record how the women of rock assumed an activist position by setting up committed debates about disruptive themes. In this sense, the authors recall the emblematic album by the She Devils “Illegal abortion kills my freedom”, which provided information on this taboo practice. A true punk gesture, especially when remembering that they invited to photocopy and sticker their content. A conceptual work that, as Pat Pietrafesa remembers, turned the Cro-Magnon baths into a hot meeting to discuss it.

Anecdotes of stage shows, archeology of home recordings and stories of nights out with friends circulated in this presentation, which was attended by artists such as metal guitarist Carina Alfie; Pilar Arrese, from Cumbia Queers and Claudia Sinesi, from Viuda e Hijas del rock. Women who have always been there. Because as Rosario Bléfari, a pioneer of the independent rock underground movement, reflects, women are not the future of this genre, but are also the present and the past; because they were fundamental, yes, but also foundational.