How did desire, attraction, and affect influence the revolutionary praxis of Argentine militants in the 1970s? And what was the relationship between romantic love and love of “the people” in the emergence of the revolutionary left, as well as in its decline? These questions drive Isabella Cosse’s examination of the interweaving of erotic and political passions in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party-People’s Revolutionary Army (PRT-ERP) and Montoneros, the two groups that “hegemonized the radicalization of young people” at the height of the Cold War in Argentina (15). In six elegantly crafted chapters, the book demonstrates that love and affect are key to understanding not only the rise of the armed left and Argentina’s descent into state terror, but also contests over the social, political, and cultural status quo on a global scale in the 1960s and 1970s. Rotos corazones [Broken Hearts] is socially grounded political history at its best, attuned to the main events of the era but focused on the intimate relationships, connections, and encounters that gave political struggles their texture and meaning.

The book begins in the 1940s and 1950s, when the customs of courtship and marriage were already being remade during the first Peronism. Compañerismo, a concept which linked political and romantic ties for the left, began to challenge bourgeois notions of marriage, influencing, for example, the decision of young couples like Mario Roberto Santucho and Ana María Villareal, of the PRT-ERP, to forgo a traditional honeymoon in favor of a trip around South America with a final stop in Cuba, where the recently ascendant revolution had introduced the idea of a “new man” and a “new woman.” This effervescent moment had its limits, however. Santucho’s comrades later condemned his affair with Clarisa Lea Place as counter to revolutionary fidelity.

The policing of revolutionary sentiment and the machismo of the armed left’s main leaders are well known in the scholarship, and Cosse does not shy away from these details. But she continually challenges us to rethink the dominant vision of the revolutionary left and its discipline of sex and the body. Thus, as student and working-class activism accelerated in Córdoba and Tucumán between 1969 and 1971, Cosse focuses our gaze on photographs of fashionably dressed young women in miniskirts at marches and at university protests, one in particular showing a woman with a sly smile on her face as she is arrested, evidence of how joy, desire, and pleasure were inseparable parts of militancy. The book is full of these “small anecdotes”: wedding celebrations in churches and courthouses, fragments of romantic ballads, memories of the betrayal of infidelity. These, Cosse concludes, “confirm that there was not a single way to rebel, and that the revolutionary left cannot be detached from Argentine society as a whole” (151).

State violence increased with the massacre of prisoners at a naval airbase near the city of Trelew in 1972, followed by the creation of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance in 1973, and culminated with the military coup in March 1976. In this context, affective bonds became essential tools to survive and endure terror, even as those same bonds were used against militants by the armed forces. María Antonia Berger, one of the few survivors of Trelew, wrote in her own blood a celebrated phrase of the Argentine liberator José de San Martín followed by “Papá y Mamá.” This example, among others like it, crystalizes the guerrilla sensibility that Cosse expertly reconstructs, one marked by heroism in the face of death yet inextricably tied to the most intimate emotional bonds.

Rotos corazones draws on photographs, films, biographies, and correspondence, but most importantly, dozens of oral histories that Cosse conducted herself or accessed through the human rights organization Memoria Abierta. These sources, along with Cosse’s aptitude for narrative attuned to shifting scales, temporalities, and rhythms, contribute to the cinematic nature of the text, mirroring Cosse’s own arguments about the draw of revolutionary romance for a generation of Argentine young people. Readers will find this book compelling and hard to put down. For classroom use, the book is a model for teaching about the creative possibilities of historical writing and craft, and I hope that an English translation will be available soon.

Cosse’s book is in dialogue with several fields, among them the history of affect and emotion; family, gender and youth; and historia reciente—all areas to which Cosse has made significant contributions. Indeed, Cosse wonders in the introduction what more can be said about such well-trodden histories. As this book makes clear, there is still much to uncover about the daily dramas and intimacies of Latin America’s Cold War. Rotos corazones is a major achievement, a fresh and vital look at the history of the 1970s in all its promise and heartbreak.