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

In the past few decades, a prolific historiography on Peronism has shed light on some of the most significant aspects of one of the most important social and political movements in twentieth-century Latin America. However, few economic or cultural studies have incorporated the recent contributions on the history of consumption, and little is known about the relationship between workers and consumption. In Workers Go Shopping in Argentina, Natalia Milanesio explores the social and cultural consequences of the massive incorporation of workers into the consumer market during the 1940s and 1950s. She looks at urban workers not at as producers—as they have traditionally been studied—but as consumers, analyzing the ways in which workers’ irruption into the consumer market shaped social relations and class and gender identities.

During the Peronist years, the state actively supported the manufacturing sector. In this context, Argentina experienced extraordinary industrial growth, the consolidation of the internal market, and income distribution. To protect consumers, the state created a new institutional framework, enacted laws and decrees, organized new state agencies, and reorganized old institutions. In addition, the government started to oversee the quality of consumer products and the accuracy of the information available to shoppers, making efforts to protect the rights of consumers. In doing so, it redefined its role as a mediator among consumers, manufacturers, retailers, and publicists. The state also sponsored an extensive educational campaign that, as the author demonstrates, incorporated the contributions of publicity agencies.

Milanesio carefully examines the deep transformations experienced by publicity. Facing an increasingly inclusive consumer market, they developed tools to reach out to this new audience of consumers. As they entered the socially and culturally unfamiliar world of workers, publicists and the written media adopted a popular language and a new esthetic and made efforts to communicate new values. They had to expand their publicity strategies and reach out to urban centers located in the interior of the country, and, more fundamentally, they had to make efforts to connect with working-class women.

According to Milanesio, this new working-class consumer was, on the one hand, a result of a structural process, social changes, and the impact of state policies. On the other hand, this consumer was also a social and cultural category created by experts in publicity and other social actors such as the middle and upper classes. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the author’s analysis of the reactions, anxieties, and fears of the middle and upper classes toward a process that they perceived as a real “invasion” over consumer goods and spaces previously exclusive. Both the middle and upper classes perceived this process as a dangerous blurring of class boundaries, making downtown streets, leisure spaces, and the big stores spaces of class dispute around consumption. This book also contributes to understanding how new consumption practices influenced the relationships between working-class men and women. Her analysis centers on the ways in which the media promoted gender stereotypes, and she shows how these images shaped men’s and women’s expectations and desires and couple relationships.

The book makes a valuable contribution to the cultural history of consumption and Peronism. Based on a wide range of available sources, archival and library materials located in Argentina and the United States, it incorporates both government and business sources. Especially relevant is her use of a multiple number of periodical publications such as newspapers, popular and women magazines, and, particularly, the advertisement and caricatures that became common in the written media at the time.

To analyze how workers understood their new access to consumer goods, the author successfully incorporates oral history. The stories told by the interviewees showed the common perception of Peronism as a “Golden age,” a past that was better, and in which access to products and the market played a very important role. The analysis of...