Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture by Natalia Milanesio (review)

Natalia Milanesio’s book on popular consumption adds to a growing literature on the subject in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America. Unlike Eduardo Elena in his recent Dignifying Argentina on a similar subject, Milanesio’s concern is not the constitution of citizenship through consumption but the history of consumption itself.

Though she devotes the major part of the book to the time of Perón’s governments in the 1940s and 1950s, her periodization is broader overall, beginning with the early twentieth century and ending with the Kirchner governments of the last decade. Such a long sweep of history is useful in placing the Peronist years in a fuller context that highlights what was unique about Perón’s policies, and also demonstrates the extent to which subsequent periods, particularly over the course of the three and a half decades since the 1976 coup, have represented a break in the democratization of consumption. The impoverished Argentina of recent years, with its clubs de trueque, cartoneros, and piqueteros seems a world away from the palmy days of material abundance and economic prosperity of the 1940s and 1950s. Consumerism has run rampant since those years, but policies fomenting popular consumption have largely disappeared, in spite of efforts to the contrary during the Kirchner years. The Kirchners’ policies of subsidies and work programs for the poor were more about alleviating misery and defusing social conflict than about democratizing consumption.

The first half of the book is devoted to the history of advertising in Argentina. These chapters provide a detailed and interesting survey of the techniques and methods adopted over time as market conditions changed and new opportunities for business emerged. The text is nicely complemented by a number of well-chosen graphics—magazine ads mainly—that illustrate and enhance Milanesio’s theme. The chapters on advertising do at times leave the nation’s political context a bit too much in the background; the social and economic changes of the 1930s and the particularly peculiar political situation of those years for example barely enter the narrative, and the result is a history of advertising somewhat uprooted from the vicissitudes of the national story.

However, the background comes into much stronger focus in the chapters that deal with Peronist consumption policies, and those chapters address a number of related issues, interesting but heretofore ignored. The most important item in any family budget, food, experienced a significant transformation under Perón, in terms of dietary changes and the role of the regulatory state. The author’s discussion of this facet of popular consumption is original and most insightful. She also is careful to consider the history of consumption in distinct regional contexts, which, although it does not radically depart from the trends found in Buenos Aires, does correct the somewhat monochromatic rendering of the history in Elena’s fine study.

Milanesio’s most important contribution is her attention to the gendered content of consumption, and it is here that the book makes an outstanding contribution to the historiography. She looks at advertising techniques that targeted women and examines the material culture in which consumer durables such as the SIAM refrigerators—the essential symbol of Peronism’s democratization of consumption—held particular significance to the managers of the household economy, the guardians of hearth and home. She insists rightly that the story of consumerism cannot be told without considerable attention to its gendered dimension. The democratization of consumption changed women’s role, as did its language, its advertising, and the efforts of the contemporary government, as Milanesio richly demonstrates.

The book’s final chapter is based on women’s memories. While the oral histories of women who lived through the period offer some interesting testimonies, they fit together oddly with other chapters of the book. Since Milanesio did not employ this approach elsewhere in the study, this chapter may be more suited...