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 Introduction Peronism and the Midcentury Moment Juan Domingo Perón reached a crossroads in November 1951. Facing reelection , Argentina’s president desired a strong showing at the polls to remind supporters and critics alike of his enduring popularity. To this end, Perón and his legendary wife, Eva Duarte de Perón, addressed massive audiences at open-air rallies, while speeches broadcast on the national radio network reached a larger public still. The couple oVered a panorama of their administration’s accomplishments during the preceding six years: public works projects, nationalizations, social programs,and labor reforms—the types of initiatives that now feature prominently in histories of Peronism. Yet they also spoke about smaller but no less signiWcant improvements in everyday life. In one radio speech, Perón contrasted the poverty of previous decades with the bounty of the present: “Today one eats well and four times a day. Those who in the past had one suit of clothes now have a closetful.Those who in the past went to the cinema or theater once a year now can go every week. Those who in the past spent their summers sitting in the doorway of their tenement [conventillo] now go to the mountains, or to the sea shore, or if not, to the comfortable resorts around Buenos Aires itself.” At the same time, Perón lashed out at his enemies, arguing that only egotistic elites could bemoan the lack of imported goods, such as whisky, perfume, and refrigerators (frigidaires ). He assured his listeners that, thanks to government action, the popular majority lived with true “liberty and dignity.”1 This historical juncture inspired appraisals from other commentators,among them individuals far removed from the commanding heights of the state. A few  I Introduction weeks after Perón’s reelection triumph, Hilda Benítez de Maldonado, a workingclass housewife from a small town in the western province of Mendoza, wrote a letter to the nation’s leaders.2 Like hundreds of thousands of similar petitioners, this woman recounted daily struggles. She lamented that her husband, who belonged to a rural workers’ union, earned wages too low to meet the family’s needs. Rising prices threatened, and by her estimate the cost of living in town had increased threefold during the previous year alone. Benítez de Maldonado accused local merchants of buying oV state inspectors assigned to crack down on proWteering and of plying them with cold drinks and favors. Moreover, her family’s attempts to secure relief through other channels had been unsuccessful: “I’ll tell you, my general, that my mother stayed for three months in Buenos Aires to see if she could speak with Our Compañera Evita, but they did not give her an audience .” Nevertheless, she described herself as a “good Argentine and good Peronist” who prayed tearfully for Eva Perón’s recovery from illness. Her letter expressed her gratitude for having received consumer goods as holiday gifts from the regime’s authorities (a fruitcake, a bottle of cider, and a toy for her son). “Many thanks and forgive the errors and the boldness of having contacted you both,” she declared in closing to the president and First Lady. What should we make of these two contrasting accounts from late 1951? On the surface, Perón and Benítez de Maldonado seem an unlikely pairing. One was the leading Wgure in twentieth-century Argentine history,a man who held the reins of the state and positioned himself at the apex of one of Latin America’s most powerful mass movements. The other was a poor and barely literate woman from a provincial backwater.Despite the gulf between them,however,Perón and Benítez de Maldonado shared certain inclinations that suggest much about the changing political landscape of this historical moment. One may have extolled national plenty and the other recounted personal troubles, but they were joined, however loosely, by a preoccupation with the ordinary stuV of life. Both Perón and Benítez de Maldonado considered getting and spending as matters worthy of public attention and state intervention and thus vital to understandings of citizenship. While neither invoked consumo (consumption) explicitly, each viewed popular acquisition and the satisfaction of household-level needs as crucial to living with “liberty and dignity.” Perón and Benítez de Maldonado were not alone. They were joined by a host of other actors who grappled,in their respective and sometimes competing ways, with the quandaries posed by this era...

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