The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan After the 1944 Earthquake by Mark A. Healey (review)

The Latin Americanist, June 2013 students of the Cold War, US-Latin American relations, and revolutionary movements in the global south. The book also provides a major insight into the foreign policy goals of the UP, revolutionary Cuba, and Brazil’s military regime at the start of the seventies. John R. Bawden The University of Montevallo Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences THE RUINS OF THE NEW ARGENTINA: PERONISM AND THE REMAKING OF SAN JUAN AFTER THE 1944 EARTHQUAKE. By Mark A. Healey. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 416, $25.95. Of all the shortcomings in the historiography of modern Argentina, none is more frequently bemoaned than the failure to pay adequate attention to the nation’s interior. And indeed, entire library shelves are filled with books that claim to address Argentine history but in fact only examine events in Buenos Aires. Although provincial histories exist, far less common are works that use a regional perspective to shed new light on national narratives. Mark A. Healey’s impressive study of the rebuilding of the Andean city of San Juan after the earthquake of 1944 does just that, offering an innovative account of the advent and consolidation of Peronism, Argentina’s most important political movement. Along the way, Healey uncovers the key roles played by bureaucrats, politicians, engineers and architects, provides an illuminating history of architectural modernism and city planning, and convincingly demonstrates the centrality of the San Juan earthquake in Argentine history. The earthquake of January 15, 1944 destroyed most of the adobe buildings that comprised the colonial city of San Juan and killed some 10,000 people. The disaster is well known to historians as the raison d’être of the Buenos Aires benefit concert at which Juan Perón met his future wife, Eva Duarte. Yet beyond this event, the earthquake is invisible in most accounts of the rise of Peronism, which typically limit their focus to Buenos Aires or, at best, the nation’s industrial core in the cities of the littoral. Healey argues convincingly that Perón’s vision of a “New Argentina” was first elaborated in response to the challenge of rebuilding San Juan. But Perón’s most ambitious plans for the city and province never came to fruition. Healey carefully charts the struggles between the winery owners who constituted the local elite, anti-Peronist engineers, modernist architects committed to a radical reinvention of the city, and local political bosses anxious to come to terms with the new political climate. The result is a fascinating political history that is particularly sensitive to the importance of tactical maneuvers and alliances. Elites seeking to preserve their property and power opposed proposals to relocate the city, arguing instead that the way to prevent future disasters was to replace adobe with concrete. For 142 Book Reviews their part, the architects who sought to use the rebuilding effort as a laboratory for modernism and planning were defeated by their professional rivals, engineers, in alliance with the local elite. In the end, the Peronist state was forced to scale back its plans for San Juan. Unable to transform regional politics, Perón pursued an alliance with the local caudillo, Federico Cantoni. The Peronist state enshrined housing as a basic right but accepted a modest reconstruction plan for the city that did not fundamentally challenge the power of the wine elite. The full reconstruction of the city would not be achieved until after Perón’s overthrow in 1955. By exploring the rise of Peronism from the perspective of San Juan, Healey’s book transforms our understanding of the movement. Inevitably, though, other elements of the story fall out. For example, while he demonstrates the intersection of electoral politics with the world of design and architecture, Healey pays very little attention to mass culture or consumption , two areas that have recently drawn the attention of many historians of Peronism. More interestingly, workers, typically seen as the protagonists of Peronist history, play only a bit part in Healey’s account. Healey argues persuasively that the centrality of labor in the Peronist movement was not pre-determined. In fact, he claims, it was partly the failure to construct a broad, multiclass...