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Evita Per
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73 Evita Perón Santa with a Soundtrack Guillermo Castro With her iconic chignon in place, Evita beamed from a postcard taped just above the windshield inside the cabin of my uncle’s 1937 Chevrolet truck. I spent many hours under her gaze pretending I was driving through the Alps, possibly transporting Juan Perón’s Nazi treasure to a secure Swiss vault (or so legend has it.) Actually, the only treasure in the cargo cage was my uncle’s fresh fruit and produce business. For supplies he’d go into the Abasto Produce Market and let me tag along. I’d stay in the truck though, ostensibly to “help” load the crates that Tío and his usual—hands down, my favorite—helper, Jara, would carry back from the market on 74 very able shoulders. Jara was the kind of poor, dark-skinned fellow for whom Evita fought so much. While waiting for Uncle’s return, through the slats between the boards encasing the cargo bed, I’d catch glimpses of penises belonging to the men pissing beside the truck. Fresh fruit indeed. Uncle was only a boy when Evita came to the barrio dispensing gifts like a fairy godmother; he received a bicycle (to think that he gave me my first bicycle on my tenth birthday, and helped me ride it). Despite his family—single mom and two brothers— never getting a free, furnished residence in the housing project so demurely called Ciudad Evita, a bond was forged between them and the lady with the blonde locks and elaborate hats. But it wasn’t only devotion that María Eva Duarte de Perón inspired long after her death in 1952 from cervical cancer. In a zealous attempt at suppressing her memory from Argentine audiences over a quarter century later, anti-Peronist military censors excised a few seconds from a scene in Superman II that showed an ad for the musical Evita on the side of a bus. How ironic that this movie’s three vinyl-clad villains—led by a general, no less!—reflected their three real-life counterparts, the heads of an authoritarian regime hell-bent on erasing their adversaries by any means necessary. During this period I’d gotten my hands on a smuggled cassette of Lloyd Webber’s Evita: An Opera Based on the Life of Eva Perón. I was serving in the army when, in April of 1982, a war broke out with Great Britain after Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands . And here I was listening to la música del enemigo! About a woman whose husband had had few friends in the armed forces. But I was hooked on something other than the music. Private Rodríguez. He’d been the one who got me the English Evita, and that alone was reason enough to fall in love with him. And the fact we took showers together—and he seemed to prefer it that way—didn’t hurt either. He also gave away mix tapes featuring the material banned by government censors. To my eyes that was badass, with a touch of Robin Hood (again the English!). Sitting on his bunk bed, we’d try our hand at translating the lyrics Evita Perón [3.88.114.76] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:42 GMT) 75 to “Oh, What a Circus,” “High Flying, Adored,” and, naturally, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” (Quick side note: When I first moved to the United States someone asked me if this song was Argentina’s national anthem. I swear this is true. I answered, “No, ‘La Bamba’ is.”) My love for Rodríguez was never consummated, much less expressed . I kept my queerness deep inside a closet that not even a whole army of juntas could pry open, a closet a whole nation seemed to have retreated into. It was one more thing, sexuality, I—we—learned you had to be quiet about if you valued your life. Not that it was safe otherwise: you could still get sent to a war. Speaking of the unspoken, my parents and I knew to leave politics out of the conversation whenever visiting with Uncle. He would not tolerate disparaging comments directed at Juan Perón or Eva. Not that he would ever get physical and throw you out of his house. As a former boxer he certainly had, so to speak, the upper hand. But he was too sweet a person to...