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 4 Needs, Wants, and Comforts By assigning new political meanings to ordinary purchasing acts, Peronist campaigns illuminated the material aspirations of working households. There was much more, however, to the pursuit of the vida digna than buying plentiful wares in a regulated marketplace. State intervention was necessary in other areas where the play of capitalist forces failed to provide for the citizenry’s well-being. Beginning in the early 1940s, authorities responded by extending social services on a scale never before seen in Argentina.Perón’s administration presented itself much like other “welfare states”of the era: as an agent defending the common weal against overextended market forces and lessening catastrophic risks. It was no secret that such programs aimed to enhance the regime’s standing, for propagandists blanketed Argentina with images of benefactors hard at work.Among these depictions was a 1949 newsreel titled Señalando rumbos (pointing the way), which oVered a tour of housing projects being built by the Ministry of Public Works.1 The Wlm’s narrator extolled the agency’s accomplishments as the camera provided aerial views of the planned barrios being built outside the capital city. Public housing projects were spaces, it seemed, far removed from the pressures of buying and selling. Yet these projects, like Peronist welfare initiatives more generally, were not completely beyond the orbit of the marketplace. Señalando rumbos lingered over one Buenos Aires neighborhood in particular, Barrio Presidente Perón, which consisted mainly of detached,single-family houses built in the “California style”(a trendy adaptation of Spanish neocolonial architecture complete with barrel-tiled roofs and whitewashed exteriors).Cared for by the state in their fashionable homes, smiling residents were dressed “respectably” according to the dominant conven-  I Needs, Wants, and Comforts tions of the day—adult men in coats and ties, women in elegant patterned dresses, children in new outWts—and shown pleasurably eating meals and entertaining visitors . In contrast to most Argentines, who confronted messy familial relations and tight domestic spaces, the barrio’s inhabitants enjoyed a “spacious and comfortable ” life. Each family member fulWlled a crisply demarcated role, from the male breadwinner returning from work to the female homemaker attending to her children .The homes had clearly deWned areas as well,a conjunction of gendered spaces each of which showcased dimensions of household consumption: separate bedrooms for adults and children, complete with new furniture; a living room perfectly appointed for listening to the radio and socializing; and a modern kitchen with the latest appliances for the housewife. One family proWled in the Wlm even had a gas stove and electric refrigerator, items that remained beyond the means of most working-class consumers.2 As a Wnale to this pageant, the Wlm closed in on a framed portrait of Perón that hung above their living-room mantle, making it all too clear to whom the bounty was owed. This vignette of the well-attired family in the chalet californiano was so frequently repeated by propagandists that it remains a familiar symbol of the era. Among historians it has, in fact, become something of a visual shorthand for the Peronist model of social justice.3 But the idealized family can serve another purpose in the history of consumption, for it oVers a starting point to probe the unexpected points of contact between the marketplace and justicialista experiments in social welfare. As revealed in Señalando rumbos, the Perón regime’s interventions were freighted with multiple meanings. On the one hand, oYcials intended state assistance to remove “at-risk” populations from cramped, unhealthy housing and provide an alternative to an urban real estate market driven recklessly by the proWt motive. On the other hand, as suggested by the newsreel, oYcials also deWned uplift in terms of access to consumables supplied typically through market channels and, more broadly, as a “lifestyle” based on mainstream consumer practices, conventional judgments of taste, and patterns of sociability associated with the middle class. As part of social services, Peronist agencies distributed millions of consumer goods—clothing, toys, foodstuVs, and most famously, sewing machines —directly to the populace through channels that bypassed markets. The regime thus positioned itself as a nonmarket means for pursuing a range of aspirations related to household consumption,from the relief of pressing needs to the satisfaction of a higher order of material wants and commercialized comforts. Social assistance constituted another example of the Peronist double movement in redeWning modern citizenship, one that complemented the similar thrust [18...

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