The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake (review)

Much like the earthquakes that struck Haiti and Chile in 2010, the disaster that befell the province of San Juan, Argentina in 1944 revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of social, political, economic, and physical structures. By the 1940s, landowners in San Juan, San Luis, and Mendoza had transformed the Cuyo region in the central-west part of Argentina into a successful wine-producing area. A small number of elite viñateros, or winemakers, employed the majority of the population as sharecroppers, hired hands, and seasonal laborers.

In the city of San Juan, the provincial capital, most residents lived as poor tenants with their viñatero landlords in a densely packed city of adobe buildings and narrow streets. Just before nine in the evening on January 15, an earthquake measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale destroyed the city. Few structures remained standing, the loss of life was staggering, and most residents suddenly found themselves homeless, in the dark and in desperate need of help to survive. Just as the distinct responses to the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile underscored the dramatic differences between those two countries, the disaster in San Juan revealed the realities of the world that the viñateros, who had managed the region’s economic development, had made. The earthquake exposed dramatic social and economic inequalities that lay hidden beneath the seeming prosperity of the region, and the crisis the disaster created also provided an opportunity to redress them. This, at least, is how citizens across a broad political spectrum—except perhaps the viñateros—interpreted events, and Healey’s newly published work provides a detailed analysis of the earthquake, the local and national responses to it, and its connections to the political career and legacy of Juan Perón.

Even after more than five decades of scholarship, this book shows that Peronist Argentina remains a fertile field for historical study. The result of many years of careful research, Healey’s book re-examines Peronism by revisiting the moment when that movement arguably first took shape—not in the mythical days of October 1945 but in Perón’s response to the earthquake in San Juan nearly two years before. This is a project with many thematic angles, including architecture and engineering, economics, elites, and popular politics, and Healey engages them all through a narrative account of the earthquake and its aftermath.

The book makes two compelling arguments. First, Healey explains how the San Juan earthquake created a unique and fortuitous conjuncture of events through which Perón seized effective control of the military government. Most historians before Healey have stopped at this point, making the earthquake an interesting footnote to the Peronist mythology—like the celebrated fact that Perón first met Evita at a fundraiser for disaster victims. However, Healey’s analysis convincingly interprets Perón’s response to the earthquake as analogous to the later Peronist approach to Argentina. That is, Healey uses the disaster to study Peronism at work, complete with its messy combination of soldiers and professionals, elites and populists, and local and national forces. This is especially important for a historiography that has focused on Peronism in Buenos Aires and ignored its formation beyond the capital. Healey’s work is at once a tightly argued, well-sourced, and incredibly detailed account of mid-twentieth century San Juan and a nuanced and persuasive analysis of Peronist Argentina.

Accordingly, Healey’s metaphor of “ruins,” while evocative, is perhaps misleading. In his narrative of San Juan’s eventual reconstruction after the nation—and Perón—had moved on, Healey documents what Peronism actually accomplished, the reality of Peronist Argentina, and the differences between the prevailing rhetoric and that reality. The rebuilt San Juan did not completely fulfill bold plans for remedying the inequalities of “the world wine made” (p. 25) and Healey...