Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption by Eduardo Elena (review)

Peronism is a perennial interest of scholars of politics and society in Latin America. After the publication of Daniel James’s Resistance and Integration (1988), different culturalist approaches have laid emphasis on the dynamic nature of Peronism. Through a study of the complex interactions of culture and politics, they have avoided simplistic explanations based on domination and counteraction. As a result, academics have shifted their focus on intellectuals, government officials and union leaders to mass culture, conceiving the state and popular consciousness as mutually constitutive spheres. Dignifying Argentina is a cultural history of consumption in the Peronist era that follows this pattern. This book explores the relations between the state, the market, and society to explain how Peronism changed the notion of citizenship, moving away from the previous liberal paradigm to reshape the concept following the integration of the working class to mass consumption.

In the first two chapters the author goes back to the representations and ideas about mass consumption in the interwar and World War II period to reexamine the origins of Peronism. Thus, his research nuances the self-attributed revolutionary character of the movement by tracing the ideological background of mid-century redistribution policies to the previous epoch. For the author, in the late’30s, inequalities in spending power revealed the limits of the prevailing ideals of modernity and democracy. Social scientists from different political strains started to worry about those inequalities and agreed that household consumption should become a public issue. Despite these arguments, for most contemporaries consumption was a private matter that required no political intervention, but a moral commitment from property holders. As a result, the state in this period did not address the social inequality produced by the expansion of the marketplace. Anyway, the rise of new inquiries and research about consumption introduced a set of concepts that helped to rethink the relationship between the state, the citizens, and the market. Nivel de vida (standard of living) was one such concept which made its way into the popular realm. During the Word War II years, the experts concern with household deficiencies resulted in debates about national economic policy. Government officials adapted international welfare programs to the national context which, in combination with the prevailing ideas, aimed to incorporate the popular sectors into modern mass consumption by forcing an increase of the workers’ spending power, expanding social services and providing new consumption possibilities unbound to market forces. For Elena, these formulations meant a shift from previous liberal traditions, mainly because they equated citizenship with workers’ right to meet their material aspirations, and thus justified the state’s tutelary power over them.

The author also argues against the official Peronist myth when he shows how the plans for national income redistribution and popular consumption’s expansion had, to say the least, severe implementation problems. The third chapter shows how, in the late ’40s, due to inflation, the government faced the double challenge of minimizing the reactions of property holders to antispeculation measures and fulfilling the created expectations of “vida digna” (dignified life) of the popular sectors. Indeed, government restricted the civil rights of property holders through price controls and inspections, moving the state away from Liberalism. Peronists’ officials defined these measures as a crusade against the “nation’s economic enemies”—a vague notion that included any non-Peronist property holder. As a result, the measures and the discourse defending them reinforced political identities and the bonds of loyalty between Perón and popular consumers. Nonetheless, social assistance—provided either directly by the state or through institutions like the Fundación Eva Perón—established a complex relation with the market-driven economy. In creating representations of dignified life, Peronist leaders and propagandists were constrained by the social mainstream defined by the market forces. The ideal Peronist household reproduced rather than defied urban, middle-class norms of gender and sexuality, as well as hierarchies of taste and fashion. This ideal generated expectation that could not always be...