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 6 The Counterpolitics of Voice The average worker awakens refreshed just before 5 a.m., eager to begin a new day. After washing up and breakfasting with his family, he leaves a house in the suburbs of greater Buenos Aires and commutes to the city, where he earns his wages through skilled manual labor. Once the day is through, he journeys home again,pausing now and then to admire the displays at bookstores and newsstands. Unlike the downtrodden laborer of the past, this worker is happy to return to a restful domestic life, and he is greeted at the front door by a “smartly dressed and likeable” wife and a “loving, healthy, and tidy” son. Although the cost of living has increased, the male breadwinner’s income still allows the entire household to enjoy a robust meal with all the trimmings. After dinner, the family goes out for a stroll around town,popping into a shop to buy women’s shoes and a café for some refreshment.Seeing this man dressed in a pinstriped suit and a tie and surrounded by his conWdent family, a passing tourist might mistake him for a business magnate. And when the weekend arrives,this proud man spends his leisure time in pleasant but industrious pursuits: helping his son with homework, going to church, tending to a home garden, and Wxing up the house to make room for a growing family.1 Part of a magazine piece titled the “Un día en la vida de un obrero argentino” (a day in the life of the argentine worker), the foregoing account was one of countless representations of the Peronist vida digna that circulated in the 1940s and early 1950s.These portrayals of the satisWed working-class family reveal much about the outlook and designs of state authorities. But the ubiquity of such propagandizing presents a serious interpretive barrier to historians, for it obscures how working Argentines and other subaltern sectors engaged with ideals of just living standards  I The Counterpolitics of Voice and social citizenship.Understanding the inXuence of state power from the perspective of its subjects is notoriously diYcult, and it is a particularly acute challenge in cases of mobilizational mass politics, oriented around myths of seamless coordination between leaders and followers. Scholars have employed multiple means to get behind the façade of unanimity.Oral history has oVered a crucial method for exploring popular mentalities; studies in this vein, however, are necessarily restricted to a given individual, community, or occupational group and thus typically aVord a detailed but closely cropped portrait showing how the past is remembered.2 A careful reading of the era’s public correspondence oVers an alternative approach—in the present case, one facilitated by an unusually rich collection of letters that shed light on the cultural dimensions of state planning. On December 3, 1951, Perón informed the public that his government would entertain suggestions for the upcoming Second Five-Year Plan.Under the slogan “Perón Wants to Know What the Pueblo Wants,” the president called on the populace to mail in their policy recommendations and commentaries to the Ministry of Technical AVairs (MAT).Tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Argentines responded to this letter-writing campaign. The petitioners represented a virtual cross-section of society : women and men of all ages; residents of urban centers and rural hamlets; manual laborers and professionals, farmhands and housewives; and members of neighborhood,civil,and political organizations.Their letters oVer invaluable perspectives on everyday life at the beginning of Perón’s second presidential term (1951–1955). The Perón Wants to Know documents resemble other public correspondence from this era (such as the entreaties sent to Eva Perón),and individuals used this forum to voice pleas for succor. But petitioners did not limit themselves to requesting small-scale relief. Rather, most had other ambitions in mind. They took stock of the accomplishments and failures of Perón’s regime, comparing oYcial ideals of the vida digna to personal aspirations and understandings of justice rooted in local conditions. The documents generated by this unusual epistolary campaign do not, of course, allow us to peer into the hearts of their authors. The letter writers’ demands were shaped by the structures of communication with state authorities, and petitioners fell into roles common to the genre of public letter writing: the dutiful worker, the meek supplicant, and the suVering mother, among others.3 The opinions expressed in these documents are largely sympathetic...

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