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

Introduction

1 introdUction In 2005, Juan Carlos Legas was seventy-three years old. He grew up in a small town in the province of Santa Fe where he lived until he moved to Rosario, the second largest city in Argentina, at the age of seventeen. It was 1949. That year, wages reached a record high in the country, workers’ rights were included in the national constitution for the first time, and Juan Domingo Perón successfully completed his third year as president. Upon his arrival to Rosario, Juan Carlos was employed in several workshops and soon got a job he cherished deeply in the largest textile factory in the city. Life as a well-paid industrial worker, Juan Carlos remembered more than fifty years later, was full of possibilities. In the next five years, Juan Carlos got married, bought a small plot of land where he built a home he then diligently equipped, and went on vacation for the first time in his life. His tale of uprooting, hard work, and fulfillment was not exceptional. In 1947, 17 percent of Argentines had migrated from the provinces where 2 Introduction they were born in search of a better life in the big cities of the pampeana region where most industries were located. In fact, Juan Carlos was following others who had set the example a few years earlier, going on a journey that many remember as one of discovery and prosperity. With nostalgia, Juan Carlos recounted that life was much better for everyone back then. People ate well, dressed well, went out to eat, and went to the movies. As workers, we had money in our pockets for the first time, and this was evident. I will never forget the first boy who left my town for Buenos Aires. His name was Gregorio Valdéz, and we all admired him because he came back three months later in a suit and tie . . . His salary was so high that none of us could believe it. Many more followed.1 The stories of young workers like Juan Carlos and Gregorio are snapshots of a historical period marked by industrialization, high purchasing power, internal migration, and consumption. This book is a study of the exceptional experience that lay at the center of it all: the emergence of the working-class consumer as a powerful force that transformed modern Argentina. This book explores the mid-twentieth-century conditions that triggered the transformation of the national market culture, but the aim of the analysis is to reveal what changed when vast sectors of the population became consumers of industrial goods and participants in spaces and practices of consumption they had rarely or never enjoyed before. Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture points to the historical novelty of the worker-consumer based on the idea that mass consumption developed incrementally by increasingly incorporating different sectors of the society over time. While the Argentine middle classes opened the doors of the marketplace in the 1920s, I maintain that the lowerincome sectors of the population had to wait until the middle decades of the twentieth century to gain full access to the world of consumption.2 Workers Go Shopping in Argentina demonstrates that, when the time came, these sectors made a grand entrance, stretching the limits of inclusion to impressive new levels. My argument does not dispute that the working classes had participated in the consumer market in the past but suggests that this participation did not become a massive phenomenon until the midtwentieth century and, most importantly, that this was the first time that the worker-consumer became a definitive historical agent of enormous cultural and social visibility and unprecedented political and economic influence. 3 Introduction Thus the consumer society that arose from this incorporation was novel in nature as well as extent. Although they surface throughout the book, the qualitative or quantitative aspects of working-class consumption are not the focus of my study; instead, I seek to understand its social and, above all, cultural consequences. In other words, this is a history of consumption that places the working class at the core of an interpretation of postwar Argentine consumer culture rather than a labor history linking consumption, work, and labor politics. The central premise is that working-class consumers were a new modernizing social actor who shaped a different commercial ethos, transformed social relations and collective identities, and redefined the...