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

The book opens with the tragic evening of January 15, 1944 when an estimated ten thousand sanjuaninos died and many more were left injured and homeless after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck. Today, such a quake would probably result in minor damages but on that evening of 1944 most, if not all, of the buildings of San Juan were made of adobe. Had they been built of concrete or other types of structural reinforcement, the materials would have deterred the almost total collapse of the city. In a few seconds an estimated one hundred thousand people found themselves without a roof over their heads.

Mark Healey argues in this book that this event would only have marginal interest for the social and political sciences (and we may add for human geography) were it not for Juan Domingo Perón. The earthquake marked a key event in his fast ascendance to power and the subsequent foundation of Peronismo, a political movement that still is the most important movement in Argentina and perhaps one of the most intriguing to both national and foreign observers. The emergence of Peronism also marked a major chapter in the unfolding of urban and economic planning in Argentina.

A soldier by training, Juan Domingo Perón was born in 1895 and was elected President of Argentina in three occasions: 1946, 1951, and 1973. He was overthrown in 1955 by a military coup d'etat and spent 18 years in exile. He died in 1974. The political movement he initiated known as Movimiento Nacional Justicialista, or Peronism, is still very much alive in Argentina (it is even the basis of the current national government), despite years of proscription and persecutions (1955-1973) and despite the many internal divisions and reinterpretations of Perón's ideas, particularly after his death. Over the years Perón proposed a number of key ideas that have since then been associated with Peronism: a third position between communism and capitalism, social justice, an active role of the state in the economy.

The city of San Juan is the capital of the province of the same name, located at the foothills of the Andes, about 1140 kilometers west of Buenos Aires. The province of San Juan together with that of neighboring Mendoza are part of a semiarid region whose landscape is punctuated by the cultivation of grapes and the production of wine. Winemaking is only possible because in both provinces scarce river flows have been tamed by dams, and complex irrigation systems operates around the cities of San Juan and Mendoza. Although both provinces have diversified their economic bases through the decades, winemaking continues to have a major presence in the landscape, in the regional culture, and in regional politics.

The book unfolds in four parts and twelve chapters. It includes 46 very well chosen pictures and ten maps. The mass of bibliographic and archival sources plus a number of personal interviews used as empirical foundations of the text is impressive. The major topics treated in the text include: a description and analysis of the situation in San Juan and Buenos Aires before and after the quake; a thorough analysis of the urban projects and initiatives to rebuild the city and of the political forces supporting each one of them; an original description and analysis of the roles of the technical professions (architecture and engineering) behind the reconstruction in Argentina and San Juan at the time; and, woven into the details of the text, a narrative that tells the story of the beginnings of Peronism. The book describes in a very detailed manner a number of hitherto unknown information about how Peronismo was born. In these pages one can follow Perón as a secondary state official (he was the Under-Secretary of Labor) who was faced with...