Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture

4. “How Can a Garbage Collector Be on the Same Level as We Are?”: Upper-and Middle-Class Anxieties over Working-Class Consumers

123 chApter 4 “How Can a Garbage Collector Be on the Same Level as We Are?” Upper- and Middle-Class Anxieties over Working-Class Consumers Agifted chronicler of the 1930s, the journalist and writer Roberto Arlt contributed an extremely popular column to the daily El Mundo in which, with a plainspoken style, he portrayed everyday life in Buenos Aires. In “La tristeza del sábado inglés” (“The Misery of the English Saturday”), Arlt described the weekends of workers as pointless and pathetic, “with no money, no place to go, and no desire to go out.” Arlt recounted that I was out walking one Saturday . . . when I spotted a worker, stooped shoulders, walking down the sidewalk slowly, on the sunny side of the 124 Chapter 4 street, leading a three-year-old child by the hand. [. . .] Suddenly I had a vision of the rented room where they lived, and the young mother of the child, withered by penury, ironing the ribbons of the little girl’s hat. The man walked slowly, sad and bored. Looking at him, I saw the outcome of 20 years inside a sentry box, working 14 hours a day and living on a miserable salary, 20 years of privation, of absurd sacrifice, and the unholy fear of being thrown out onto the street.1 For Arlt, the sorrowful worker and his child embodied a gloomy life of exploitation and dissatisfaction, a life without amusement. Life, however , would change for the characters of the story. Almost two decades later, headlines suggested that the penniless boredom and monotony that had characterized the free time of the working-class sectors was a thing of the past. “Buenos Aires has fun,” announced Aquí Está in a 1947 report on the record-high numbers of spectators of movies, concerts, and sport events; the millions of visitors to zoos, parks, racetracks, and public pools; the animated crowds on streets lined with shops and in restaurants ; and the tourists traveling en masse to the beach.2 The image of vivacious working-class multitudes enjoying their leisure time made a long-lasting impression on historian and journalist Félix Luna, an incisive eyewitness to the mid-twentieth-century transformation. Luna affirmed that high wages “gave people a new and magical purchasing power that was used to acquire many things that had been impossible for them in the past. In many cases, these were unnecessary items: fancy clothes to show off, superfluous or impractical household items, and especially entertainment —entertainment in its myriad forms, from movie theaters to bailongos [dance halls].”3 The new clothes and the movie tickets that Luna considered superfluous were visible venues of access to mass consumption that gave the Peronist ideal of social justice—solidly grounded in welfare programs— a conspicuous commercial edge. Official propaganda boasted about the good life with statistics that measured happiness through the numbers of suits and tickets to soccer matches that a factory laborer could buy after a day’s work.4 Most significantly, for the first time, a government had recognized that having time and money to devote to recreation and consumption was a legitimate and inalienable right. In 1947, for example, a decree regulating the prices of movie tickets and ordering discounts in movie theaters considered leisure and recreational activities as basic needs and, as such, as indispensable for the well-being of all social classes.5 125 Upper- and Middle-Class Anxieties While full employment, minimum wages negotiated through collective agreements, yearly bonuses, and rent freezes made admission to this world of shopping and amusement more affordable, other legal measures ensured workers enough free time. Paid vacations, new public holidays, and the effective observance of the eight-hour working day and the “English Saturday,” which let workers out on Saturdays after noon, transformed the working calendar of many occupations, effectively making room for leisure . So much so that industrialists began to complain about the increasing absenteeism of workers who took free days beyond the legally recognized holidays. The practice of the “lunes criollo” (Argentine Monday) became popular among many workers who, according to the business community, took Mondays off after heavy partying over the weekend or because they stayed in recreational facilities outside the city past Sundays.6 While absenteeism concerned factory and store owners, the increased participation of workers in consumer culture had broader repercussions among some sectors of the urban upper and middle classes. These sectors encompassed individuals...