Looking for Alicia: The Unfinished Life of an Argentinian Rebel

Looking for Alicia: The Unfinished Life of an Argentinian Rebel is a personal exploration of the life and times of Alicia Raboy, the journalist and political militant who was disappeared by the Argentine armed forces in June 1976. Marc Raboy, whose Ukrainian grandfather spent a year in Buenos Aires before emigrating to Canada, had always been intrigued by his family's connection to Argentina. But he did not know about Alicia until preparing for his first trip to Buenos Aires in 2018. Moved by Alicia's story, Raboy soon discovered that he had more in common with his distant cousin than their shared last name. They were born a month apart in 1948, and their families were shaped by the persecution of eastern European Jews that that led to waves of migration to the Americas. In their teenage years, both felt the pull of New Left movements, though Alicia's revolutionary commitments took far deeper root than Raboy's. After connecting with members of Alicia's family, Raboy embarked on a quest to reconstruct Alicia's life.Who was Alicia? What did it mean to be a revolutionary woman in deeply patriarchal movements? How were Raboy family members linked across generations throughout the Americas? Raboy frames his study around these questions. Drawing on biography, autobiography, and family history, Raboy interjects memories of his political activism in Quebec with the history of Alicia's life in Cold War Argentina and the dramatic ways that their paths diverged.As Raboy quickly learns, Alicia's story has been overshadowed by that of her famous partner, the poet and journalist Francisco “Paco” Urondo, who was killed in the same ambush that led to Alicia's disappearance. The details of Urondo's militancy, his involvement with Noticias, the newspaper of the revolutionary group Montoneros, and his death in Mendoza are well known. By contrast, Alicia's life has received far less scrutiny. When she was disappeared, Alicia and Urondo's infant daughter, Ángela, was abducted with her. Through Ángela, herself the author of a memoir about her parents, Raboy contacted Alicia's brother Gabriel, who facilitated introductions with an array of Alicia's surviving friends and acquaintances.Alicia grew up comfortably in a Buenos Aires defined by eastern European migration and middle-class Jewish identity. She came of age in an era marked by the rise of Peronism and the fissures in national life that it produced. By all accounts a smart and precocious student, Alicia underwent a gradual political awakening. In high school, she read widely and was expelled for writing a provocative essay about thalidomide. According to her friends and family, this constituted a turning point in her radicalization and her “rebellious” nature, the word most used by Raboy and others to describe Alicia. As a student at the University of Buenos Aires, she joined the Frente Estudiantil Nacional, the only woman among the group's ranks in the Engineering School. Following the 1969 Cordobazo and mounting opposition to the Juan Carlos Onganía regime, Alicia was drawn into the orbit of revolutionary Peronism, much to the dismay of her anti-Peronist family. Her growing commitments to clandestine armed struggle and her eventual recruitment into the Montoneros contributed to the fraying of her marriage. It was through her work as a journalist at Noticias that she met and fell in love with Paco Urondo, who was also married at the time, and gave birth to their daughter. Following the military coup in 1976, Alicia and Urondo were sent by Montonero leadership to Mendoza to rebuild the ranks of the organization there, a move that many former militants regarded as a punishment for their violation of the group's strict moral codes. Mendoza sealed the couple's fate. Shortly after their arrival, Urondo was killed and Alicia disappeared. Her remains have never been recovered.At the end of the book, Raboy concludes that Alicia is “unknowable” (p. 237). In part this is because few details about Alicia's death have emerged in the decades since her disappearance. Yet Raboy leaves some tantalizing questions unexplored. What might it have meant for Alicia to be one of the first women to enroll at the Engineering School in the late 1960s? How might Alicia have felt about her marriage and the conventions of romance and sex in the context of armed revolutionary movements? Recent scholarship has begun to address these themes in ways that could have added texture to Raboy's conclusions. At times, Alicia's story is still dominated by the voices of the more famous intellectual and revolutionary men in her circles.Raboy's rapport with Alicia's family and the access he was granted to details of their domestic lives are wonderfully rendered, especially the vivid descriptions of Alicia's youth in the environs of Jewish Buenos Aires at midcentury. Though specialists may not glean new information about Noticias or the Montoneros, Raboy's intimate and moving study illuminates the making of a revolutionary life and age.

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