Populism, Melodrama, and The Market. The Mass Cultural Origins of Peronism Karush, Matthew.

Matthew B.
Karush
.........................
P O P U L I S M , M E LO D R A M A , A N D T H E M A R K E T
The Mass Cultural Origins of Peronism
Our doctrine is simpler. I can now explain it with an example given to me by

five boys in Paraná. Our doctrine embraces that first great humanitarian
principle. They were in the port, and one of them had no boots. From on
board, we threw him five pesos, which fell into the hands of one who was well-
dressed. The four boys who witnessed the scene said: ‘‘No, that’s not for you;
that’s for him, who’s barefoot.’’ And the boy gave the five pesos to the barefoot
kid. This is our doctrine; we want one of those great gentlemen (grandes
señores) to learn how to give to those who have no boots. We want that one
day those who have everything sympathize with their fellow man, so that
there are no more barefoot people and so that our children learn to smile from
the moment they are born.
JUAN PERÓN, ∞≠ FEBRUARY ∞Ω∂∏ ∞
You don’t charge for such things. You do them for free, or you don’t do them.
LUIS SANDRINI IN THE FILM CHINGOLO (DEMARE, ∞Ω∂≠) AS THE HOBO CHINGOLO,
REFUSING COMPENSATION FOR HAVING SAVED THE LIFE OF A MILLIONAIRE’S SON
As historians have long recognized, Peronism cannot be understood on

purely instrumentalist grounds. The movement’s transformative impact
on Argentine politics as well as its impressive longevity reflect the fact
that it provided workers with much more than a higher standard of
living; it offered them both an identity and a convincing interpretation of
the society in which they lived. Thirty years ago Ernesto Laclau argued
that the power of Peronism lay in its ability to mobilize already existing
cultural elements and rearticulate them in defense of the class interests
of Argentine workers. For Laclau, ‘‘populism starts at the point where
From The New Cultural History of Peronism by Karush, Matthew B.. DOI: 10.1215/9780822392866
Duke University Press, 2010. All rights reserved. Downloaded 01 Feb 2016 10:51 at 130.58.64.71
popular-democratic elements are presented as an antagonistic option
against the dominant bloc.’’≤ Yet we still lack a cultural history of these
‘‘popular-democratic elements,’’ a convincing account of the ideological
transformations that made Peronist consciousness possible for Argentine
workers. In the now classic first chapter of his history of Peronism,
published in 1988, Daniel James laid the essential groundwork for this
project. Stressing Peronism’s ‘‘heretical’’ meanings, James revealed how
the movement enabled workers to contest traditional cultural hierar-
chies.≥ Historians now need to revisit the period before 1943 to uncover
the cultural elements that provided the discursive material out of which
this heretical appeal was built; they need, in other words, to write the
cultural prehistory of Peronism.
Since most Peronist workers were not union members before the
advent of Perón, any such prehistory will have to look beyond the realm
of organized labor. A handful of scholars have called attention to Perón’s
debt to the tradition of popular melodrama, visible for example in his
tendency to draw on the language of the tango.∂ This insight reflects a
much deeper, more pervasive indebtedness. Peronism was built in large
part out of discursive elements made available by the commodified mass
culture of the previous period. The 1920s and 1930s saw the explosion in
Argentina of mass culture on an unprecedented scale: it was in this
period that the radio, the cinema, spectator sports, and mass-circulation
journalism transformed daily life. Thanks to the recent work of schol-
ars in cultural studies, anthropology, film studies, and other disciplines,
we know a great deal about the cultural products disseminated by the
new media. Tango songs, soccer, domestic films, the popular press, and
pulp fiction have all been the object of sustained research and analysis.∑
Nearly all these mass cultural forms appropriated the generic conven-
tions and narrative strategies of Argentine melodrama, a literary tradi-
tion with roots in the late nineteenth century. In this chapter I trace the
connections between the melodramatic mass culture that thrived on the
radio stations and movie screens of the 1930s and the political appeals
crafted by Juan Perón in the period between 1943 and 1946, when the
movement took shape. The focus here will be on the radio and cinema of
Buenos Aires, since so much of Argentina’s mass culture was produced
there and introduced to the rest of the country by radio networks and
cinema distributors.
22 Karush
My attempt at a cultural prehistory of Peronism is not a tautological
quest for precursors. While the pervasive mass culture of the 1930s must
have had a dramatic effect on popular consciousness, this effect was
multivalent. It did not lead inevitably to any particular political outcome.
Moreover, Perón did not simply adopt a philosophy already formed in
the mass culture of the previous period. Rather, in the specific con-
juncture opened up by the coup of 1943, Perón was able to appropriate
discursive elements that circulated in mass culture and refashion them
into a powerful political appeal. These existing elements represent what
Laclau referred to as ‘‘the residue of a unique and irreducible historical
experience.’’∏ They helped determine the universe of the possible within
the political arena of the 1940s. Recognizing the central role of mass
culture in producing this discursive universe sheds important new light
on Peronism. Although the cinema, radio, and the press experienced
significant government intervention during the 1930s, the content of
mass culture reflected the logic of the marketplace rather than any offi-
cial ideology. As this chapter will demonstrate, commercial imperatives
—in particular the need to compete with North American imports like
jazz and Hollywood movies—reinforced the heretical meanings implicit
in Argentine melodrama even as they encouraged conformism and the
quest for individual upward mobility. Both the powerful appeal of Pe-
ronism and its internal contradictions reflect its origins in mass culture.
Populism in Argentina was not merely a byproduct of industrialization
or a reflection of labor politics; it was also the outcome of a particular
pattern of mass cultural development.
T H E M E LO D R A M AT I C T E N D E N C Y I N E A R LY P E R O N I S M
Historical analyses of Peronist rhetoric have stressed the essential bi-

narism at its heart. Juan and Evita Perón explained their political proj-
ect through a series of basic oppositions: national versus antinational,
pueblo versus antipueblo, workers versus oligarchs. The logic that the
Peróns used to make these distinctions between us and them was always
deeply moralistic; by opposing sacrifice to egotism, austerity to frivolity,
solidarity to treachery, and hard work to idleness, Peronism depicted
class struggle in essentially moral terms. Perón frequently denounced the
exploitation of the working class, but he described it as part of a historic
contest between good and evil.π In a speech before the railroad workers
Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 23
union in 1944, Perón, then labor secretary, described his agenda as a
‘‘revolution of the poor . . . The country was sick of important men; it is
necessary that the days of simple, working men arrive.’’ He then de-
nounced his opponents as representatives of ‘‘the eternal forces of ego-
tism and avarice, that make the pocket into man’s only sentient organ.’’∫
The conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat was initially described
as a battle between rich and poor, ‘‘important men’’ and ‘‘simple, working
men,’’ before being boiled down to a struggle against a particular form of
immorality, namely greed. As Eduardo Elena has recently demonstrated,
Perón’s promise to control the cost of living was central to his political rise
in 1943–46. And when he turned from the sphere of production to that of
consumption, Perón continued to operate within the discourse of moral-
ism and binary oppositions. As he put it in another speech in 1944, ‘‘We
are a dignified and proud country; and none of its children should have to
tolerate ever again that Argentine workers be converted into shabby
people [gente astrosa] so that a group of privileged individuals can hold
onto their luxuries, their automobiles, and their excesses.’’ According to
Perón, rising prices, like capitalist exploitation, were the product of im-
morality, in this case the selfish greed of merchants and speculators.Ω
As many scholars have noted, Perón rejected class conflict and prom-
ised to achieve not the triumph of the proletariat but a state of harmony
between labor and capital. Conflict and struggle characterized the past;
Perón would bring about ‘‘the union of all Argentines so that that strug-
gle is transformed into collaboration and cooperation, so that we can
create new values and not destroy uselessly, in a sterile struggle, values
and energies that are the only forces capable of making men happy and
nations great.’’∞≠ To create this harmonious national unity, Perón prom-
ised to do two things. First, he aimed to reduce the gap between the
haves and the have-nots or, as he put it in a speech in Rosario in 1944, to
‘‘equalize a little the social classes so that there will not be in this country
men who are too poor nor those who are too rich.’’∞∞ But redistribution
of wealth was not enough. Class reconciliation and social harmony also
required a process of moral education and rehabilitation. The rich had to
learn to behave morally, to renounce their greed and egotism and em-
brace the spirit of cooperation and solidarity. As Perón made clear in the
speech quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the ‘‘grandes señores’’ had
to learn to give to those in need, and this was a virtue they could learn
24 Karush
from those beneath them on the socioeconomic ladder. Throughout
Perón’s speeches one finds constant praise for the noble, dignified poor
as ‘‘simple,’’ ‘‘humble’’ people without pretension. In this discourse the
socially inferior are morally superior; national unity and class recon-
ciliation can only occur when the rich learn to follow the example of
the poor. The idea of the poor as teachers of the rich is one aspect
of Peronism’s heretical inversion of hierarchy and of a broader anti-
intellectualism characteristic of the movement.∞≤
If Perón’s major goals included defending the poor and achieving
national unity, he made those promises through a rhetoric filled with the
vocabulary of work and production. According to a recent linguistic
analysis, ‘‘politics is work’’ is the one ‘‘major metaphor’’ that Perón intro-
duced to Argentine discourse. His repeated use of verbs such as to build,
to construct, to employ, to produce, and to earn extended this basic
metaphor.∞≥ This language clearly had resonance for those Argentines
who earned a living through manual labor. It lent concreteness and
familiarity to abstract concepts like progress and justice. But the power
of this discourse lay above all in its moral connotations. Perón pledged to
‘‘humanize capital’’ and ‘‘dignify labor.’’∞∂ If the rich would be taught the
virtues of solidarity and generosity, the poor would be publicly recog-
nized as dignified, virtuous, and respectable. Honest, hard work was in
fact the ultimate proof of moral superiority: ‘‘We struggle so that labor
may be considered with the dignity that it deserves, so that we all may
feel the desire and the impulse to honor ourselves by working, and so
that no one who is able to work may live only to consume.’’∞∑
The binary moralism of Peronist discourse is essentially melodra-
matic, and its roots, I would argue, lie in the mass culture of the 1930s.
Argentina’s radio programs and domestic movies, both major attractions
during this period, were infused with the aesthetic conventions and
narrative structures of melodrama. These conventions and narratives
crossed lines of genre, informing tango lyrics, nativist dramas, urban
tragedies, and comedies of all types. But although melodrama came in
various forms, its distinctive hallmark was a particular vision of society.
In all of its guises, melodrama presupposed a Manichean world in which
poverty was a guarantor of virtue and authenticity, and wealth a moral
flaw. Hundreds of songs, radio plays, and films presented Argentina as a
nation irreconcilably divided between rich and poor. Perón’s essentially
moralistic view of class conflict had clear precedents in this mass culture,
as did his utopian promise that class reconciliation could be achieved
through the moral education of the rich. The moral categories that Perón
deployed to distinguish poor and rich—us and them—are all integral to
mass culture of the 1930s, in which the rich were almost unfailingly
egotistical, greedy, and frivolous, while the poor were hard-working prac-
titioners of sacrifice and solidarity.
Throughout the mass culture of the 1930s, wealth functioned as a sign
of malice. The prototypical tango plot, revisited in dozens of songs,
describes the tragic demise of the milonguita—the poor, innocent girl
from the barrios who is tempted by the bright lights and wild life of
downtown.∞∏ Seduced by a bacán (a wealthy playboy) or niño bien (a rich
kid), the milonguita is usually abandoned once her looks have faded. A
typical example is ‘‘Pompas de jabón’’ (‘‘Soap Bubbles,’’ Cadícamo, 1925),
in which the singer sees a girl from his barrio riding in the car of a bacán
and warns her that her luxurious lifestyle will not last long.∞π In ‘‘No
salgas de tu barrio’’ (‘‘Don’t Leave Your Barrio,’’ Rodríguez Bustamante,
1928), a female singer tells a young girl to marry someone of her class,
using her own life as a cautionary tale:
Como vos, yo, muchachita Like you, little girl, I
era linda y era buena, was beautiful and good
era humilde y trabajaba I was humble and worked
como vos en un taller; like you in a workshop;
dejé al novio que me amaba I left the boyfriend who loved me
con respeto y con ternura, with respect and with tenderness
por un niño engominado for a hair-creamed boy
que me trajo al cabaret∞∫ who brought me to the cabaret.
Here, as in so many tangos, the journey from barrio to cabaret, from

honest work to frivolity, results in the loss of goodness and love. The
culprit—the rich kid with slicked-back hair—is such a familiar charac-
ter that his class affiliation and lack of virtue can be evoked in just
two words.
With the introduction of sound technology in 1933, the domestic film
industry took advantage of the popularity that tango music had already
achieved on the radio. Popular tango singers like Carlos Gardel and
26 Karush
Libertad Lamarque became stars in films that enabled them to showcase
both their acting and their singing. Since many of these films lifted their
melodramatic plots directly from tango songs, they often featured the
same stock characters. The niño bien, for example, became a staple of the
domestic cinema. A selfish, spoiled young man, he typically frustrated his
parents by dedicating himself to drinking and dancing instead of working
or studying. In films such as Gente bien (Romero, 1939), Mujeres que
trabajan (Romero, 1938), Chingolo, and La ley que olvidaron (Ferreyra,
1938), a niño bien initiates the melodramatic plot or subplot by impreg-
nating a woman and failing to take responsibility for the child. Other films
used tango to figure class division in a different way. Argentine film-
makers often denounced class prejudice by depicting elite disdain for this
allegedly disreputable, popular music. In El alma del bandoneón (Soffici,
1934), Besos brujos (Ferreyra, 1937), Puerta cerrada (Saslavsky, 1939), and
Yo conocí a esa mujer (Borcosque, 1942), Libertad Lamarque plays a tango
singer whose romance with a wealthy suitor is opposed by his élitist
family.∞Ω These melodramas leveraged the popularity that Lamarque had
already earned on the radio as a symbol of porteño popular culture. In
this way they not only assured that the audience would identify with
Lamarque but gave that identification an anti-élitist cast.
Even when it avoided tango, the Argentine cinema abounded in
wealthy villains and humble heroes. As the film historian Domingo Di
Núbila points out, Argentine movie makers in these years did not spend
much effort fleshing out the characters of their villains: ‘‘it was sufficient
that they be rich.’’≤≠ In addition to tango melodramas, this period also
saw the emergence of a cinema of social critique. Films like Maestro
Levita (Amadori, 1938), as well as the classic works of Mario Soffici—
Viento norte (1937), Kilómetro 111 (1938), and Prisioneros de la tierra
(1939)—denounced the exploitation of poor Argentines in rural settings
far from Buenos Aires. Soffici’s films in particular depicted the life of the
rural poor with realist detail, while using melodramatic narrative struc-
tures to highlight the contrast between rich and poor.≤∞ Even comedies
tended to play out against a melodramatic backdrop. Luis Sandrini, one
of the era’s biggest comedic stars, played the same character in virtually
every film he made, an essentially kindhearted simpleton prone to mala-
propisms. In films like Don Quijote del Altillo (Romero, 1936), El cañonero
de Giles (Romero, 1937), and Chingolo, Sandrini’s character was posi-
tioned on the lower end of the class divide and forced to confront the
bad intentions of the rich and powerful.
The cinema of the 1930s elaborated a vision in which poverty and
hard work were ennobling. Like so many films in this period, La vida de
Carlos Gardel (de Zavalía, 1939), a fictionalized biography of the singer
made five years after his death, establishes the audience’s identification
with its protagonist by depicting his humble origins and his resistance to
class prejudice. After being treated shabbily by a group of wealthy party-
goers, Gardel (played by Hugo del Carril) declares, ‘‘We may be poor,
but we have dignity.’’ In addition to their commitment to hard work,
what makes the poor morally superior to the rich is their capacity for
solidarity. While the rich are selfish, the poor stick together; they take
risks and make sacrifices to help those in need. This message is nowhere
clearer than in the work of Manuel Romero, who made some thirty-four
films for the Lumiton company between 1935 and 1945. In this vast body
of work Romero offered a melodramatic yet optimistic vision of an
Argentina divided between rich and poor, in which unity could be forged
through interclass romance. Just as Perón would later insist that the
rich must learn the values of generosity and solidarity from the poor,
Romero’s films repeatedly enacted this process of moral instruction. In
Gente bien, a community of working-class musicians come to the rescue
of the poor girl abandoned by the niño bien. In films like Mujeres que
trabajan (1938), La rubia del camino (1938), Isabelita (1940), and Elvira
Fernández, vendedora de tienda (1942), a spoiled young woman learns
both the value of hard work and the capacity to care for others under
the tutelage of working-class characters. Perón’s insistence on the dig-
nity and moral superiority of the poor echoes the central message of
these films.≤≤
Mass culture also provided a great deal of source material for Perón’s
depiction of the poor as the most authentic representatives of the nation.
In announcing his resignation from the army in the highly charged
atmosphere of October 17, 1945, Perón made this vision explicit: ‘‘I leave,
then, the honorable and sacred uniform given to me by the fatherland in
order to put on the coat of a civilian and join with that suffering and
sweaty mass that produces with its labor the greatness of the country . . .
This is the people; this is the suffering people that represents the pain of
28 Karush
the mother earth, which we must vindicate. It is the people of the
fatherland [Es el pueblo de la patria].’’≤≥ Perón’s insistence on equat-
ing workers, pueblo, and nation reproduces mass culture’s depiction of
the hard-working, long-suffering poor as the authentic Argentines. The
melodramatic opposition between rich and poor was often figured as an
opposition between the foreign and the national. In film after film, well-
to-do dancers prefer the foxtrot and shun the tango. In La rubia del
camino the spoiled protagonist prefers the foreign name Betty to her
given name, Isabel, and even more glaringly, she has never tried mate, the
popular tea that symbolizes Argentine national identity. The association
of Argentine authenticity with the poor was also visible in the popular
fascination with the nation’s rural past. Beginning in the early 1930s with
the enormously successful show Chispazos de Tradición, radio stations
endlessly revisited the days of the gauchos. These programs combined
conventional, melodramatic plots with rural, pre-modern settings and
featured frequent breaks for performances of folk music. Building on an
old trope in Argentine culture that associated Buenos Aires with foreign
influence, these programs implied a nationalist affiliation with rustic,
plebeian culture, a preference for the authenticity of the countryside over
the fanciness and foreign influence of the modern city. Likewise, the epic
film La guerra gaucha (Demare, 1942) narrated Argentina’s war for inde-
pendence against Spain as a tale of anonymous heroism; as the film con-
cluded, ‘‘Like this they lived, like this they died, the nameless, those who
fought the gaucho war.’’ Whereas the book upon which the film was
based, an episodic account by the modernist poet Leopoldo Lugones,
stressed the leadership of General Martín de Güemes, the film version
imbued the story with a more democratic vision that emphasized the
contribution of the poor in creating the nation.≤∂
Even beyond his apparent debt to melodrama and his association of
national identity with the poor, Perón’s rhetoric bore the traces of mass
cultural influence. Perón’s famously lowbrow language—his use of lun-
fardo, the popular porteño slang, and his invocation of familiar tango
tropes—expressed an overt affiliation with popular culture. This gesture
of pride in the culture of poor Argentines was in itself a staple of mass
culture in the 1930s. In the film Los tres berretines (Susini, 1933) an
immigrant shop owner chooses Argentine popular culture over educa-
tion and hard work when he embraces his sons’ dreams of success as a
tango composer and a soccer player. Throughout these years entertain-
ment and sports reporters celebrated these cultural practices not just as
Argentine achievements but as the achievements of working-class Argen-
tines. Thus the fan magazine Sintonía emphasized the lower-class origins
of the tango orchestra leader Francisco Canaro: ‘‘He represents the
emotional superstructure of that human and grey, humble and com-
bative belt that encircles our capital.’’≤∑ Similarly, the popular daily Crítica
celebrated the soccer played by ‘‘our ordinary boys [nuestra muchachada
vulgar]’’ as the nation’s greatest export.≤∏ Coursing through mass culture
was populist nationalism—a celebration of the achievements of authen-
tic, plebeian Argentina.
In crafting his own version of populist nationalism, Juan Perón did
much more than simply embrace a discourse provided by melodramatic
mass culture; as I will argue, he appropriated and rearticulated discursive
elements, and in so doing transformed them. Melodrama was hardly
Perón’s only mode. Still, when he celebrated the moral superiority, dig-
nity, authenticity, and cultural inventiveness of the poor and attacked
the egotism and avarice of the rich, Perón was drawing on the well-
established melodramatic tradition that permeated mass culture in the
1930s. Of course the discursive affinities between Peronism and mass
culture do not prove that Perón self-consciously imitated the movies and
radio programs of the preceding decade. The moral superiority of the
poor was an idea circulating in the larger cultural milieu that Perón
shared with Argentine filmmakers and radio programmers. Catholic so-
cial thought in particular offered one possible source for this notion, as
well as for Perón’s rejection of individualism and bourgeois materialism.
Catholicism experienced a resurgence in Argentina in the 1930s, and
Catholic intellectuals played a prominent role in elaborating Nationalist
ideology.≤π Further, melodramatic and quasi-populist cultural forms cer-
tainly existed in Argentina before the age of mass culture.≤∫ Yet it was in
the cinema and on the radio that these forms were most widely diffused,
and it seems likely that it was the mass cultural versions of popular
melodrama that had the most direct influence on Peronism.
Perón clearly recognized the political potential of mass culture. Not
only did he enable and encourage Evita, a radio and movie actress, to
play a major public role, but his regime invested heavily in controlling
the media. The Peronist state effectively expropriated the country’s most
30 Karush
important newspapers and radio stations, cultivated ties to celebrities,
imposed censorship, and made extensive use of the radio and cinema for
the diffusion of propaganda.≤Ω Many of the architects of Peronist cul-
tural policy were men with extensive backgrounds in mass culture. Raúl
Alejandro Apold, who as undersecretary of information and the press led
the regime’s massive propaganda efforts from 1949 on, had been a film
critic and the publicity chief of one of Argentina’s most important film
studios. Eva Perón’s speechwriter, Francisco Muñoz Azpiri, had written
many of her scripts during her career as a radio actress. And while many
artists were prevented from working during the Perón years because
of their antipathy to the regime, others made key contributions to Pe-
ronism. Established filmmakers like Manuel Romero and Luis César
Amadori thrived by producing movies that seemed to advance the gov-
ernment’s ideological agenda. Within the world of tango, the long-time
bandleader Francisco Lomuto was an outspoken Peronist, while the
composer and lyricist Enrique Santos Discépolo applied his biting sar-
casm to the vigorous defense of the regime on a recurring radio pro-
gram.≥≠ Given Perón’s obvious interest in the political utility of mass
culture, the echoes of mass cultural melodrama in his rhetoric likely
reflect purposeful borrowing. But regardless of his sources or intentions,
Perón’s message resonated with the meanings already made widely famil-
iar by movies, music, and radio theater, and this resonance helps to
account for the power of his appeal. In fact, the omnipresence of populist
elements on Argentine radio waves and movie screens before the advent
of Peronism suggests that populism was as much the result of mass
cultural capitalism as of industrialization, political development, and
labor history.
T H E P U R S U I T O F A N AU D I E N C E :
M A S S C U LT U R A L P O P U L I S M A N D T H E LO G I C O F T H E M A R K E T
If Argentine populism was built in part of mass cultural components,

then its internal dynamics must have reflected the logic of the capitalist
marketplace. Compared to the heavy-handed censorship of the military
government after the coup of 1943 and the massive media apparatus built
by Perón after 1946, the state played a much smaller role in shaping mass
culture during the 1930s. The conservative governments of this period,
particularly the administration of Agustín P. Justo (1932–38), did see the
value of controlling the mass media. Justo secretly purchased the coun-
try’s most important mass-market newspaper, Crítica, and exerted sub-
stantial influence on press coverage of his administration.≥∞ However,
despite a series of campaigns for media nationalization, the vast majority
of radio stations and film studios remained in private hands throughout
the 1930s. While these media were subject to meddlesome regulations
and to occasional censorship, they were not enlisted to serve an offi-
cial propaganda campaign, as they would be under Perón.≥≤ On the
contrary, commercial interests dominated both radio broadcasting and
the cinema. It was the pursuit of profit, more than any overt political
ideology, that shaped the decisions made by mass cultural entrepreneurs
and artists.
Argentine film studios and radio stations, like mass cultural industries
elsewhere, depoliticized earlier cultural traditions to make them accept-
able to a broad, multi-class audience.≥≥ But Argentina’s ‘‘peripheral mo-
dernity’’ lent this process some distinctive features.≥∂ Attempting to build
a mass audience, cultural producers confronted a marketplace in which
foreign imports enjoyed substantial popularity and prestige. This com-
petition produced a dialectic of emulation and distinction. Argentine
producers tried to live up to the high technical and artistic standards set
by their North American and to a lesser extent European competitors. At
the same time, they needed to distinguish their offerings, and they did so
by appropriating existing popular culture and stressing its Argentinidad.
The attempt to wrest wealthier consumers away from imported products
encouraged producers to sanitize and ‘‘elevate’’ their offerings, to purge
them of depictions of the urban working class, to emphasize the pursuit
of upward mobility rather than the political potential of working-class
solidarity. Yet the use of authenticity as a marketing strategy tended to
deepen mass culture’s affiliation with plebeian Argentina. These conflict-
ing market pressures produced an ambivalent mass culture that trans-
mitted both subversive and conformist messages. As a result, the ele-
ments that Perón would appropriate from mass culture contained deep
and pervasive contradictions.
During the 1930s between nineteen and twenty-two radio stations
broadcast simultaneously in Buenos Aires, the great majority of them
commercial enterprises.≥∑ To a certain extent these stations distinguished
themselves through specialization, with some variously offering mainly
32 Karush
tango, opera and classical music, jazz, radio theater, and programming
for the city’s immigrant communities. But by the early 1930s one station
owner dominated porteño radio: Jaime Yankelevich. In addition to his
flagship station, Radio Nacional (renamed Radio Belgrano in 1934),
Yankelevich ran three other stations from his studios in Buenos Aires, the
so-called ‘‘Palacio de los Broadcastings,’’ and he assembled Argentina’s
first and most important radio network so that he could sell advertising
in the Argentine interior as well. To boost the size of their audience and
attract advertisers, his stations specialized in all things popular: they
emphasized jazz and other foreign music, but their prime time slots were
reserved for tango and radio theater. It was on Radio Nacional that
Chispazos de Tradicion had aired, earning opprobrium from critics who
considered the program lowbrow and full of inaccurate caricatures, but
establishing a model that dozens of other radio theater companies would
imitate. Similarly, the station promoted its commitment to tango as a
sign of its adherence to popular tastes. In 1937 Sintonía reported on a
popular contest organized by Yankelevich, an ‘‘expert in popular psy-
chology.’’ Having asked listeners to select the best new tango song played
on its airwaves, Radio Belgrano had allegedly received 1,835,235 votes
through the mail.≥∏ Yankelevich’s use of popular contests like this one
continued a tradition that had begun in the early days of tango recording
and helped cement the music’s reputation as the people’s choice.≥π
The success of Yankelevich’s formula was ratified by the speed with
which his competitors rushed to copy him. The entertainment maga-
zines were filled with columns complaining about the legions of imita-
tors who filled the airwaves.≥∫ While niche programming did exist, tango,
jazz, comedy sketches, and radio dramas dominated on virtually every
station. Tellingly, the one station that emerged in the 1930s with suffi-
cient economic backing to challenge Radio Belgrano’s dominance saw
no alternative but to adopt its rival’s approach. In 1935 Editorial Haynes,
the company that owned El Mundo, one of the top-selling daily news-
papers in Buenos Aires, launched Radio El Mundo with the intention of
creating ‘‘the leading station in South America.’’ Toward that end it
named as its artistic director Enrique del Ponte, one of the founders of
Radio Cultura, a station long praised by critics of Radio Belgrano’s vulgar
populism.≥Ω El Mundo bragged of del Ponte’s commitment to the ‘‘con-
stant improvement of the cultural and artistic level of the radio,’’∂≠ and
the director himself announced plans to assemble a house orchestra as
skilled in symphonic music as those that played in the prestigious Colón
Theatre in Buenos Aires.∂∞ Yet within a few weeks the station had re-
versed course, firing del Ponte and replacing him with Pablo Osvaldo
Valle, the former artistic director of Radio Belgrano. For the rest of the
decade Radio El Mundo employed an approach distinctly inspired by
Yankelevich as it competed with Radio Belgrano. Through their em-
phasis on programming with mass appeal, these two stations dominated
the radio market, absorbing some 60 percent of all the advertising reve-
nue on Argentine radio by 1939 and alarming observers who worried that
without state intervention, radio would become an effective monopoly.∂≤
The popularity of their programs crowded out alternatives. While critics
continued to call for an improvement in the quality of broadcasts, and
most program directors committed themselves at least rhetorically to
that pursuit, all the major radio stations offered their listeners a steady
diet of tangos and radio melodramas, while relegating more ‘‘serious’’
offerings to a subordinate role.
The predominance of tango and radio theater revealed the pressure
on radio programmers to deliver a mass audience, but the competitive
environment brought conflicting pressures to bear on the producers of
these cultural commodities. Even as composers and performers aimed to
give their listeners what they wanted, they also sought to attract more
educated, higher-class consumers who might appreciate more ‘‘sophisti-
cated’’ material. This tension affected all the major cultural products of
the day, but it was particularly apparent in tango. Confronting extensive
foreign competition, most tango performers, composers, and lyricists
tried to elevate the genre while preserving its authenticity. They hoped
to purge tango of its dangerous and immoral associations, without aban-
doning the music’s ability to represent the nation.
Various foreign musics attracted popular interest and secured air time
on Argentine radio stations in the 1930s, but tango’s biggest competitor
was undoubtedly American jazz. Already popular in the 1920s, jazz and
the foxtrot, as porteños typically referred to the dance music played by
jazz bands, gained a new prominence in the 1930s. Local tango bands—
the so-called orquestas típicas—responded to this challenge in various
ways. As early as 1920 the tango orchestra leader Roberto Firpo included
several foxtrots in his repertoire.∂≥ But in the 1930s, the presence on the
34 Karush
porteño airwaves of jazz bands like the Dixie Pals, the Santa Paula Sere-
naders, and others inspired more defensive reactions from tango’s de-
fenders. A cartoon in La Canción Moderna in 1933, playing on the shared
surname of Firpo and the great Argentine heavyweight Luis Firpo, de-
picted the bandleader as a boxer and proclaimed that he had launched ‘‘a
bloody fight against the American fox trot.’’∂∂ And Firpo was not alone in
his desire to see tango triumph over jazz. The letters-to-the-editor sec-
tion of the radio magazine Sintonía was filled with diatribes against the
omnipresence of jazz on the radio. As one tango fan put it, ‘‘I cannot
conceive how eight of the ten stations currently broadcasting can simul-
taneously be playing fox-trots.’’∂∑
Not all porteños saw jazz and tango as implacable antagonists, and the
two musics coexisted in the same magazines and on the same radio
stations and bandstands throughout the period. Still, the popularity of
jazz encouraged tango artists to define themselves against the American
import. And because jazz was foreign, proponents of tango boasted of its
Argentinidad, its ability to represent the nation. In other words, the
pressure to compete with jazz reinforced a discourse of tango authen-
ticity. Thus the tango star Azucena Maizani was not just a talented singer;
she was ‘‘the greatest, most exact and popular expression of porteño
sentiment, which condenses the psychology of our race—sentimental,
emotional and melancholy like no other on earth.’’∂∏ Depictions like this
one celebrated tango stars as symbols of Buenos Aires and Argentina, and
the music as the expression of certain essential qualities of Argentine
national identity.
The discourse of tango authenticity involved three claims: tango was
located in the past, it was melancholy, and it was rooted in popular rather
than elite culture. All three of these elements were well established by the
1920s, when the advent of the phonograph and the radio turned Gardel
and other singers into major stars. Tango’s creation myth—its birth in the
brothels and dance halls of the turn-of-the-century slums of Buenos
Aires, or arrabales, were repetitively explored in the song lyrics. Tango
singers always located themselves within this marginal, plebeian world,
an affiliation made more explicit by the lyricists’ extensive use of lun-
fardo, the popular porteño slang. The immortal opening line of Pascual
Contursi’s ‘‘Mi noche triste (1917),’’ ‘‘Percanta que me amuraste (Woman
who abandoned me),’’ inaugurated tango’s obsession with stories of ro-
mantic betrayal as well as its self-conscious break with proper Spanish
and its explicit affiliation with the popular culture of the urban plebe. But
all three elements of tango authenticity were reinforced by competition
with North American popular music. Given its associations with the
United States and in particular with Hollywood movies, jazz conveyed
the promise of modernity.∂π At the same time, the many Argentine films
featuring wealthy foxtrotters suggested that jazz and the swing dance that
it accompanied were the frivolous pastimes of wealthy, happy-go-lucky
partiers. In this context tango proclaimed its Argentine authenticity by
insisting on its sadness, its resistance to modernity, and its affiliation with
plebeian popular culture.
This discourse produced a contradictory populism. As I have sug-
gested, tango musicians were often celebrated as working-class heroes,
and tango lyrics proudly proclaimed the music’s plebeian roots. But this
populism hardly embraced progressive social change. Tango, like other
melodramatic texts, systematically depoliticized social conflicts and con-
tradictions by transposing them onto stories of frustrated love. In addi-
tion, the songs were essentially conformist, since they suggested that
happiness could be attained so long as one avoided certain transgres-
sions: ‘‘Don’t leave your barrio,’’ and all will be well.∂∫ In fact many tangos
went well beyond this sort of conformism, expressing a fatalistic skepti-
cism toward any possibility of improving one’s lot in life: as the lyricist
Francisco Bastardi put it, ‘‘to be poor is not a crime / And it is a glory to
know how to suffer.’’∂Ω Further contributing to this conservatism was
tango’s persistent nostalgia, its evocation of a pre-modern golden age. In
Tango, Argentina’s first sound film, the final words belong to Azucena
Maizani, singing ‘‘Milonga del novecientos,’’ a song made famous by
Gardel: ‘‘I do not like paved streets / Nor do I get along with the
modern.’’ Here, at the very moment when Argentine producers appropri-
ated the sound cinema, that symbol of technological modernity, Maizani
gave voice to tango’s classic opposition to modernity.∑≠ Nostalgia was
omnipresent in the mass culture of these years. Serialized radio dramas
often set their stories of love and political intrigue among the gauchos of
the preceding century, and recreations of the Rosas period of the early
nineteenth century were extremely popular. This nostalgia neatly ex-
pressed the dislocations felt by those bearing the brunt of Argentina’s
rapid modernization, but it also suggested that these problems could be
36 Karush
ameliorated not through social transformation but through an escapist
recreation of a golden age.
Just as tango combined populism with fatalism and nostalgia, it ex-
pressed similarly conflicting attitudes toward the pursuit of upward mo-
bility. As La vida de Carlos Gardel suggests, the enormous appeal of
tango’s biggest star was related to his personal rise from humble ori-
gins. That ‘‘El morocho del abasto’’ (the dark-haired kid from the mod-
est Abasto neighborhood) was now an international celebrity who per-
formed in black tie must have thrilled a working-class audience that
dreamed of similar success.∑∞ And tango lyricists took explicit pride in
the genre’s popularity among sophisticated, international audiences. Yet
tango also expressed suspicion about the pursuit of upward mobility,
which many lyrics condemned as petty striving or even fakery.∑≤ To cite
one example, the tango ‘‘Mala entraña’’ (Flores, 1927) criticizes a guy
from the neighborhood for putting on airs:
¡Compadrito de mi esquina, Tough guy from my corner
que sólo cambió de traje! who only changed his suit
..................... . .......................... .
se murió tu pobre madre, your poor mother died
y en el mármol de tu frente and on the marble of your forehead
ni una sombra, ni una arruga neither a shadow nor a wrinkle
que deschavara, elocuente, which might eloquently reveal
que tu vieja no fue un perro, that your mother was not a dog
y que vos sabés sentir.∑≥ and that you know how to feel.
Here upward mobility is a perversion: the poor man who puts on a nice
suit has lost the capacity to feel anything at the death of his own mother.
Tangos like ‘‘Mala entraña’’ redirect the genre’s fatalism toward a critique
of upward mobility. This skepticism amounts to more than simple resig-
nation. It is an explicit embrace of a set of values associated with the
poor: solidarity, true feeling, honesty. It is for abandoning those values
that social strivers are condemned. Thus while tango tended to discour-
age any attempt at social transformation, its discourse of plebeian au-
thenticity did offer the elements of a populist critique of the status quo.
Market pressures pushed the tango in many directions at once. Even
as the competition with jazz reinforced tango’s claims of authenticity, the
effort to make tango more acceptable for middle- and upper-class audi-
ences led some lyricists to sanitize the genre in an attempt to elevate it
from its humble origins. While Contursi’s plebeian language remained
the dominant model, it was not the only available tango aesthetic. Dur-
ing the 1930s a new type of tango became common, one that replaced
lunfardo with a more universal, lyrical idiom and told stories of love
and betrayal less rooted in the social world of the suburbios. This ten-
dency gained prominence with the emergence of Alfredo Le Pera in 1931
as the screenwriter of Carlos Gardel’s films. Produced by Paramount and
marketed to an international, Spanish-speaking audience, these movies
needed to avoid references that would be accessible only to Argentine
viewers. Le Pera responded to the challenge by elaborating less localist
and less insistently plebeian tango stories. Since Le Pera also wrote the
lyrics to the tangos that Gardel sang on screen, his more universalist
aesthetic had a major impact on the tango canon.∑∂ These countervailing
tendencies produced an ongoing discussion about how tango could both
preserve its authenticity and lift itself above its plebeian roots. The
magazine La Canción Moderna, for example, attacked one radio station
for playing classical music, fit only for ‘‘distinguished girls,’’ instead of the
more authentic and popular tango.∑∑ But the magazine also railed against
tango lyricists who relied on ‘‘vulgarity and lunfardismo,’’ praising Le Pera
for writing tangos with a universal message and refuting critics who
argued that he was ‘‘foreignizing’’ the genre.∑∏ The attempt to improve
the tango without destroying its authenticity was widespread. Francisco
Canaro, for example, was careful to qualify his praise for what he saw as
the steady improvement in tango lyrics: ‘‘The primitive lyric has given
way to the deeply poetic lyric . . . But with this I do not mean to praise
pretentiousness, which is the worst vice of literature.’’∑π Tango’s advan-
tage over jazz and other imports was precisely its Argentine authenticity,
and since that authenticity was bound up with the genre’s plebeian
origins, any effort at improvement faced the charge of élitism.
Similar efforts to reconcile authenticity with modernity and artistic
improvement were visible in the case of Argentine folk music. Although
not nearly as commercially viable as tango, several musical genres from
the Argentine interior received air play on radio stations in Buenos Aires,
which packaged them together under the rubric of ‘‘folklore.’’ As a sym-
bol of the nation, folk music enjoyed certain advantages over tango: since
it came from the rural interior of Argentina, folklore was untainted by
38 Karush
any association with either the immoral underworld or the immigrant
culture of the big city. As with tango, however, folk music’s claims of
authenticity relied upon its roots among the suffering poor. Radio maga-
zines celebrated folk musicians for their ‘‘humble’’ origins and lauded a
music ‘‘in which each note is the expression of a thousand sacrifices.’’∑∫
Like tango, folklore was pushed in various directions at once. On the one
hand folklore was even more backward-looking than tango. Proponents
demanded that folk music be preserved as a bulwark against moderniza-
tion, ‘‘the civilization that advances, represented by the locomotive, the
automobile and the radio, destroying the past.’’∑Ω Yet on the other hand,
critics insisted on the need for composers and lyricists to expand and
improve the folk repertoire.∏≠
The tensions visible in the realms of both tango and folklore—
between nostalgia and modernity and between authenticity and im-
provement—revealed the deep contradictions that shaped the mass cul-
ture of these years. Themselves the product of the countervailing forces
in the mass cultural marketplace, these contradictions were visible in the
cinema as well. The domestic film industry, which had been virtually
obliterated by Hollywood during the silent era, recovered impressively
after the introduction of sound technology in 1933. Although Argentine
film companies were small, undercapitalized firms lacking any significant
protection from the state, they achieved success by responding to local
tastes. Hollywood films were technically and artistically impressive, but
they were for the most part spoken in English and set in remote locales.
While the local studios could not hope to meet North American stan-
dards in production quality, their films featured local performers well
known from their careers on the stage and the radio, speaking Spanish in
Argentine accents and acting out stories in recognizably Argentine set-
tings. Sensing their advantage, the first two modern film studios, Argen-
tina Sono Film and Lumiton, pursued a strategy similar to the one that
Jaime Yankelevich had used on Radio Belgrano. The first two domestic
sound films established the formula. Lumiton’s Los tres berretines was
based on a popular sainete, or comic play, while Sono Film’s Tango
(Moglia Barth, 1933) featured many of the most popular radio stars of the
day and a plot recycled from tango songs; both films included tango
performances and plot elements drawn from the tradition of popular
melodrama. For the next decade the local film studios appropriated
existing popular culture to capture an audience willing to choose Argen-
tine authenticity over Hollywood’s technical virtuosity.
Through this strategy the Argentine cinema effectively acquiesced in
the segmentation of the film audience. The insistently popular orienta-
tion of domestic movies—their inclusion of tango music and local radio
stars—made them attractive to poorer Argentines, who preferred not to
read subtitles and presumably enjoyed seeing their world depicted on
screen. Meanwhile, as the U.S. Commerce Department put it, ‘‘The so-
called better class Argentine . . . has a predilection for American films.’’∏∞
In Buenos Aires first-run North American and European films were
shown for high prices at fancy downtown theaters, while dozens of
more modest theaters in the barrios screened domestic films at prices
that were accessible even to manual laborers. Ordinary Argentines still
saw plenty of Hollywood movies, since the major studios continued to
flood foreign markets with their products. But the disdain that elites
showed for domestic films reinforced their popular orientation, leading
the studios to specialize in films that the local trade magazine labeled as
‘‘suitable, preferably, for popular cinemas.’’∏≤ In the same way that com-
petition with jazz deepened tango’s claim to plebeian authenticity, the
market power of Hollywood tightened the local cinema’s embrace of
Argentine popular culture.
Nevertheless, the same countervailing pressures that pushed tango
lyricists to elevate their poetry and eliminate lunfardo encouraged Ar-
gentine filmmakers to moralize their offerings and purge them of threat-
ening and lowbrow elements. Signs of these pressures were apparent
everywhere. For one thing, even if movies celebrated the moral virtue of
the poor, they tended to avoid depicting the struggles and challenges fac-
ing their contemporary working-class audience. With a handful of impor-
tant exceptions—Riachuelo (Moglia Barth, 1934), Chingolo, La maestrita
de los obreros (de Zavalía, 1942), and especially the urban realist films of
José Agustín Ferreyra—the Argentine cinema rarely included the grow-
ing industrial workforce in its plots. The dignified poor who served as
victims in the melodramas of the period were far more likely to be tango
singers than factory workers. And while this tendency partly reflected the
cinema’s reliance on tango and popular melodrama for its source mate-
rial, it also followed from the studios’ marketing goals. For example,
Ferreyra abandoned his realist explorations of working-class life in 1936
40 Karush
at the behest of the side company, which preferred musical melodramas
that would showcase the star power of Libertad Lamarque. In the words
of Ferreyra’s biographer, ‘‘the reality of a cinema with aspirations of
industrialization was closing in on him.’’∏≥ The relative absence of the
urban working class on Argentine movie screens was a byproduct of the
local studios’ pursuit of a mass audience.
Not content with being relegated to the inexpensive barrio theaters,
Argentine film companies engaged in an intensive effort at market expan-
sion targeted at wealthier moviegoers. The companies used various strat-
egies to wrest these consumers away from Hollywood films. Argentina
Sono Film specialized in ‘‘films for the family,’’ pursuing middle-class
audiences by avoiding or sanitizing the morally dubious, plebeian world
of the tango. La vida de Carlos Gardel, a Sono Film product, carefully
avoided any depiction of the gritty, working-class milieu in which Gar-
del was raised and focused instead on the singer’s ascent to stardom.∏∂
Even Lumiton, the company most closely associated with films based on
tango, sought to clean up its movies. Critics praised the studio’s adapta-
tion of the popular sainete Así es la vida, specifically for having eliminated
its lowbrow jokes. In another effort to attract more affluent viewers, new
film studios such as baires and Artistas Argentinas Asociadas emerged
in the late 1930s with the goal of making sophisticated films and raising
the artistic level of Argentine cinema.∏∑ In their desire to compete for the
higher-class audience that preferred North American films, the studios
also engaged in open imitation. By the early 1940s films modeled on
Hollywood’s so-called white telephone comedies became increasingly
common. With lighthearted stories set in luxurious interiors, these mov-
ies offered viewers the same escapist entertainment they had come to
expect from Hollywood.
Yet despite all these efforts, the melodramatic tendency in Argentine
cinema persisted. Throughout the 1930s most domestic films, regardless
of genre, depicted a society divided between the selfish rich and the
noble poor. To film critics who longed for an improvement in the quality
of the local cinema, this melodramatic orientation was problematic not
only because it was lowbrow but also because it had clear, populist
implications. One critic denounced the enormously successful Manuel
Romero as ‘‘an interpreter of the simple tastes of the masses that attend
these homegrown productions . . . He has [not] tried to do anything
other than to reach his audience directly, using elements of simple melo-
drama, in order to tip the balance in favor of the humble masses.’’∏∏ As
this critic recognized, Romero’s films used melodrama to appeal to the
non-elite audience that filled the barrio movie theaters. The enduring
commercial viability of his style indicated that even as the market en-
couraged the studios to try to pry well-to-do audiences away from for-
eign films, it also continued to reward filmmakers who remained loyal to
their roots in local popular culture.
As with tango music, the conflicting forces at work in the mass cul-
tural marketplace shaped a domestic cinema that sent contradictory
messages. Competition with Hollywood encouraged both emulation of
North American practices and the adoption of discourses of national
authenticity. Filmmakers attempted to expand their audience into the
middle and upper classes while holding on to their base in the bar-
rios. Romero’s films in particular reveal the effects of these conflicting
pressures. Often borrowing quite openly from Hollywood hits, Romero
transformed class conflicts into morality tales, but he insisted on identi-
fying national authenticity with the poor. His interclass couples model
national unity, but it is a unity that is only possible when the rich
character adopts the moral virtue and cultural practices of the poor. As a
result, the happy endings and moral resolutions offered by these films
often fail to silence their critique of class prejudice and persecution.∏π Yet
perhaps betraying his roots as a tango composer, Romero’s vision of
Argentinidad was fundamentally nostalgic. Films like Los muchachos de
antes no usaban gomina (1937) imagine an Argentine identity rooted in
the tango golden age and threatened by North American influence. In La
rubia del camino a working-class truck driver resists the efforts of his
wealthy girlfriend to incorporate him into the modern, cosmopolitan
world of elite Buenos Aires. In the end their romance is saved when she
turns her back on that world to join him in his authentic, rustic, tradi-
tional milieu. In Romero’s cinematic universe the poor represented the
nation, but they also represented the past.
Like tango music, the Argentine cinema expressed contradictory atti-
tudes toward upward mobility. Films like Los tres berretines and La vida
de Carlos Gardel peddled rags-to-riches fantasies, yet as La rubia del
camino shows, national authenticity often required that the poor reject
social striving. In Chingolo Sandrini’s character refuses a life of leisure
42 Karush
and privilege because it would require him to adopt the selfish, hypocriti-
cal, and exploitative practices of the rich. More broadly, by setting so
many of their movies in the luxurious homes and fancy cabarets of the
rich, Argentine filmmakers, like their Hollywood counterparts, offered
their audiences a chance to indulge their envy for elite lifestyles. Yet even
the most benign white telephone comedies often trafficked in the popu-
list messages of melodrama. In Soñar no cuesta nada (Amadori, 1941) a
poor girl, played by Mirtha Legrand, gets to experience how the other
half lives for a day. Legrand’s character is an innocent who poses only
mild critiques of the rich around her, yet since she is the only avail-
able object of identification, she is a sort of proxy for the audience.
Her innocence and moral virtue—among other accomplishments, she
teaches the niño bien to appreciate the opportunities that his class posi-
tion affords him—are possible precisely because she stands outside the
moral universe of the wealthy. This film, like the Argentine cinema more
generally, allowed popular audiences to fantasize about wealth even as it
reinforced the idea that we, the poor, are morally superior to them, the
rich. The persistence of these elements in the mass culture of the 1930s
undoubtedly had many causes. But in large part they responded to the
logic of the market. With foreign cultural imports marked as the prefer-
ence of elites, it made good commercial sense to embrace the populist
discourses that circulated in vulgar tangos and popular films.
F R O M T H E CO M M E R C I A L TO T H E P O L I T I C A L :
T H E T R A N S F O R M AT I O N O F P O P U L I S M
As Juan Perón began building his mass movement in the wake of the
coup of 1943, he confronted a public that had been shaped by the
explosion of mass culture in the previous couple of decades. Needless to
say, other developments had been important as well: industrialization,
migration, the resurgence of the labor movement, the political frustra-
tions of the década infame. But the entertainment offered on the radio
and in the movie theater had by this time become a significant part of the
everyday lives of Argentines of all classes. It would be an exaggeration to
say that this mass culture had prepared working-class Argentines for
populism. As I have tried to show, mass culture was ideologically ambiva-
lent, oscillating between conformist and heretical messages. Neither can
one claim that Peronism was a straightforward case of selective appropri-
ation, that Perón simply adopted the subversive elements circulating in
mass culture while leaving aside its conservative aspects. On the con-
trary, Perón’s political success was due to his ability to overcome some of
the central contradictions reproduced by mass culture in the 1930s. To
do that he could not take mass cultural populism as he found it; in
politicizing commercial culture, he transformed it. At the same time,
Perón did not manage to overcome all of mass culture’s contradictions.
As the remaining chapters in this book will make clear, Peronism was a
profoundly ambivalent movement, its discourse marked by numerous
points of tension. Many of these ambivalences originated in the commer-
cial culture of the previous period.
Among the most persistent tensions in Argentine mass culture was
the apparent contradiction between the goal of individual upward mobil-
ity and the celebration of working-class solidarity. Rags-to-riches fan-
tasies thrived alongside melodramatic narratives that contrasted the gen-
erosity and self-sacrifice of the poor with the egotistical greed of the rich.
Carlos Gardel was a hero for having achieved fame and wealth, yet tango
lyrics condemned social climbing as petty and doomed to fail. In this
way mass culture promoted both the pursuit of individual achievement
and the defense of collective interests. Perón appropriated this discursive
material but introduced new elements that enabled him to overcome the
contradiction. In particular, by introducing a novel conception of the
state as the ultimate guarantor of social justice, he was able to reconcile
the quest for upward mobility with an insistence on collective solidarity.
In Daniel James’s words, Peronist rhetoric envisioned the state as ‘‘a
space where classes—not isolated individuals—could act politically and
socially with one another to establish corporate rights and claims.’’∏∫
Perón constantly trumpeted the state’s capacity to provide the poor with
a comfortable standard of living and to enable them to enjoy material
benefits previously reserved for the rich. The upward mobility he offered
was fundamentally collective. Thanks to the intervention of the state—
and of Perón himself, as the personification of the state—the poor could
attain concrete improvements without acting selfishly. Perón thus appro-
priated both the dream of upward mobility and the celebration of the
generosity of the poor, but his capacity to use these discourses toward
political ends entailed substantial innovation.
Another of Peronism’s key innovations was to place workers, and
44 Karush
particularly urban workers, at the center of its melodramatic vision of
Argentine society. As we have seen, the mass culture of the 1930s tended
to erase urban workers. The cinema of social critique concentrated on
the plight of the rural poor, while popular melodramas often cast tango
singers in the role of victim. Perón appropriated melodrama’s Manichean
depiction of a society divided between noble poor and hateful rich, but
he applied this vision to the travails of actual, contemporary workers. By
persistently invoking the suffering and pain of Argentina’s workers he
lent greater specificity and relevance to mass cultural melodrama.
More important, though, Perón managed to overcome the fatalism of
melodrama, suggesting that workers need not accept the status quo.
Perón appropriated the discourses of authenticity that made the poor
central to Argentine national identity. Yet in mass culture this vision of au-
thenticity tended to lock the poor in a position of stasis. Since poverty was
a sign of moral virtue and true Argentinidad, upward mobility and prog-
ress were problematic goals. Both the absence of factory workers in the
movies and the omnipresence of nostalgia reflected a deep disjuncture
between authenticity and modernity. If jazz was the music of modernity,
then tango was authentic to the extent that it remained focused on the
past. Argentine mass culture depicted the poor as authentically Argentine
by virtue of their affinity with either the rural past of the gauchos or the
turn-of-the-century urban underworld of the tango. This authenticity
compensated the poor for their fatalistic acceptance of subordination.
Perón overcame this fatalism by articulating mass culture’s discourses
of authenticity with a modernizing discourse of industrialization and
economic nationalism. These commitments were hardly unique to Pero-
nism. Calls for economic independence were central to both left- and
right-wing nationalism in the 1930s, and by 1943 virtually every political
party accepted the need for a state-led program of industrialization.∏Ω
But by combining these arguments with the melodramatic vision that he
drew from mass culture, Perón positioned the poor as the primary bene-
ficiaries of industrialization. Economic nationalism and the promise of
industrialization gave him a way of connecting the poor to a particular
vision of modernization. He could appropriate melodrama’s Manichean
worldview without its fatalism. In effect, by fusing these very different
discourses, drawn from very different sources, Perón managed to articu-
late authenticity and modernity.π≠
By overcoming these various contradictions, Perón built a political
appeal that successfully mobilized thousands of Argentine workers. Nev-
ertheless, several of mass culture’s other contradictions persisted within
Peronism. One example is the tension in Peronist discourse between the
critique of elite greed and the expression of working-class envy. James
has suggested that one of Peronism’s advantages over traditional leftist
parties was its ability to express workers’ desires for expensive consumer
goods. In particular, he argues, the figure of Evita provided working-class
women with a model that legitimized their feelings of envy and resent-
ment.π∞ Yet the contradiction persisted, coming to the fore in moments
when the state was unable to deliver on its economic promises to work-
ers.π≤ Perón’s attacks on greed and his endorsement of the working-class
desire for material goods were both drawn from mass culture. In film
after film and song after song, it was greed, along with frivolity and
hypocrisy, that defined the moral shortcomings of the rich. Yet at the
same time, the cinema’s tendency to revel in the luxurious interiors of
elite mansions undoubtedly played to the audience’s envy. In fact, poor
people’s resentment of the rich—visible in the tango singer’s complaints
about the bacán whose wealth enables him to steal the singer’s girl—
drove much of Argentine melodrama. It was Perón’s debt to this tradi-
tion that distinguished his brand of populism from a more orthodox
leftist appeal. This debt also helps to explain why, as Eduardo Elena’s
chapter in this book demonstrates, official Peronism often endorsed
bourgeois standards of propriety and taste even as it celebrated working-
class culture, offering its followers both ‘‘cultural orthodoxy’’ and heresy.
Perón appropriated mass cultural discourses that expressed both popular
resentment over social inequality and popular desires for the trappings of
wealth. This discursive framework imposed limits on the utopias that
Peronism might imagine. In a sense these limits were the consequence of
having built his movement out of melodrama rather than Marxism.π≥
At the heart of Peronism was the contradiction between liberation
and control, between mobilization and authoritarianism. Peronism in-
vited workers to play an active role in history, but it also asked them to
obey their leaders and stay off the streets. It represented both a heretical
challenge to hierarchy and a self-conscious attempt to discipline the
masses. Obviously these different faces of the movement responded to
the exigencies of different historical moments. When he was seeking
46 Karush
power, Perón emphasized mobilization and heresy. Once in control of
the state, he reverted to discipline and social control. Yet here too one
finds the traces of mass culture. It seems plausible that the contradiction
between conformism and populist heresy so central to the cinema and
radio of the 1930s is one source of Peronism’s fundamental ambivalence.
Argentine mass culture articulated a visceral anti-élitism, even as it de-
politicized class conflict and suggested the futility of social transforma-
tion. Peronism’s simultaneous commitment to a frontal assault on the
oligarchy and to social harmony and class reconciliation betrays its ori-
gins in melodramatic mass culture.
N OT E S
I would like to thank Oscar Chamosa, Eduardo Elena, and the anonymous
readers for their many useful suggestions.
1 Juan Domingo Perón, Obras completas, vol. 8 (Buenos Aires: Fundación pro
Universitaria de la Producción y del Trabajo y Fundación Universidad a
Distancia ‘‘Hernandarias,’’ 1998), 24. All translations are mine unless other-
wise noted.
2 Laclau, ‘‘Towards a Theory of Populism,’’ 173.
3 James, Resistance and Integration, 7–40.
4 Once again Daniel James has led the way. See James, Resistance and Integra-
tion, 26–27. To a great extent the present chapter is a response to James’s
recent suggestion that ‘‘in order to understand the sources of Peronist dis-
course’s power and resonance we should pay more attention to its use of
melodramatic form.’’ James, Doña María’s Story, 255.
5 A small sample of the best of this scholarship would include Archetti, Mas-
culinities; Armus, ‘‘Tango, Gender, and Tuberculosis in Buenos Aires’’; Es-
paña, ed., Cine argentino; Saítta, Regueros de tinta; Sarlo, El imperio de los
sentimientos.
6 Laclau, ‘‘Towards a Theory of Populism,’’ 167.
7 Sigal and Verón, Perón o muerte, 72–74; Bianchi and Sánchis, El Partido
Peronista Femenino; Caimari and Plotkin, ‘‘Pueblo contra antipueblo.’’
8 Juan Perón, El pueblo quiere saber de qué se trata: discursos sobre política social
pronunciados por el secretario de Trabajo y Previsión durante el año 1944
(Buenos Aires, 1944), 238.
9 Elena, ‘‘Peronist Consumer Politics and the Problem of Domesticating Mar-
kets in Argentina,’’ 118 (translation by Elena).
10 Quoted in Sigal and Verón, Perón o muerte, 66.
11 Quoted in James, Resistance and Integration, 24 (translation by James).
12 On Peronist anti-intellectualism see James, Resistance and Integration, 22.
13 Berhó, ‘‘Working Politics.’’
14 Perón, El pueblo quiere saber de qué se trata, 10–11.
15 From Perón’s speech on Labor Day, 1 May 1944. Perón, El pueblo quiere saber
de qué se trata, 49. On the centrality of working-class respectability within
Peronism see Gené, Un mundo feliz.
16 Armus, ‘‘Tango, Gender, and Tuberculosis in Buenos Aires,’’ 112–22; Ulla,
Tango, rebelión y nostalgia, 33–44.
17 Eduardo Romano, ed., Las letras del tango: antología cronológica, 1900–1980
(Rosario: Fundación Ross, 1998), 84–85.
18 Canción Moderna 1, no. 9 (21 May 1928).
19 Diana Paladino, ‘‘Libertad Lamarque, la reina de la lágrima,’’ Archivos de la
filmoteca 31 (February 1999), 69.
20 Di Núbila, La época de oro, 305.
21 On Mario Soffici’s films see Tranchini, ‘‘El Cine Argentino y la construcción
de un imaginario criollista’’; Falicov, ‘‘Argentine Cinema and the Construc-
tion of National Popular Identity.’’
22 Some scholars have gone so far as to describe Romero’s films as precursors to
Peronism. See Donatello, ‘‘Manuel Romero y el peronismo.’’
23 Quoted in Sigal and Verón, Perón o muerte, 50.
24 Maranghello, La epopeya trunca, 67. On Lugones’s hierarchical and aristo-
cratic vision of patriotic heroism see Fürstenberger, ‘‘Güemes y los de abajo.’’
25 Sintonía 6, no. 298 (4 January 1939).
26 Crítica, 29 May 1928, 12.
27 On the Catholic Nationalist intellectuals of the 1930s see Spektorowski, The
Origins of Argentina’s Revolution of the Right, 109–23; Zanatta, Del Estado
liberal a la nación católica. On the influence of Catholic Nationalists on
Peronism see the chapters by Chamosa and Elena in this volume.
28 The popular poetry of Ernesto Carriego, the sainetes of the Argentine the-
ater, the circo criollo, and the criollista pamphlets that narrated tales of
gaucho heroes for a popular audience all contained melodramatic elements
that were reconfigured in the mass culture of the 1920s and 1930s.
29 On Perón’s mass media policies see Ciria, Cultura y política popular; Sirven,
Perón y los medios de communicación. On the expropriation of the newspapers
see Cane-Carrasco, The Fourth Enemy.
30 On Apold see Sirven, Perón y los medios de communicación, 122–31. On the
efforts of Amadori and Argentina Sono Film, the studio that had employed
Apold, to ingratiate themselves with the Perón regime see Ricardo Manetti,
‘‘Argentina Sono Film: más estrellas que en el cielo,’’ España 1, 189–205. On
Discépolo’s radio program see Pujól, Discépolo, 366–85.
48 Karush
31 Cane-Carrasco, The Fourth Enemy, 58–93.
32 On the rise and fall of projects to nationalize the radio see Gallo, La radio,
62–71. On the dominance of commercial radio stations see Claxton, From
Parsifal to Perón, 26–73. On official censorship of the cinema see César
Maranghello, ‘‘Cine y Estado’’ and ‘‘Orígenes y evolución de la censura,’’
España 2, 24–183. The dominant role of the market may not in fact dis-
tinguish Argentine populism from other Latin American cases. Bryan Mc-
Cann’s recent study of Brazilian popular music demonstrates that even
under the Estado Novo dictatorship of the late 1930s and early 1940s, com-
mercial imperatives shaped the music far more decisively than did direct
ideological manipulation by the state. See McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil.
33 For an account of this process of depoliticization in the development of
Hollywood cinema see Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film
and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998). Ross argues that in 1910–30 a working-class cinema gave way to one
that fostered class reconciliation and an inclusive middle-class identity.
34 ‘‘Peripheral modernity’’ is Beatriz Sarlo’s suggestive and influential phrase.
Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica.
35 Dirección General de Correos y Telégrafos, Reorganización de los servicios de
radiodifusión (1939), 91.
36 Sintonía, 23 September 1937.
37 The most important of these contests were those organized in the 1920s by
Max Glucksmann’s record label Nacional-Odeon. Even before this the popu-
lar theater in Buenos Aires was a testing ground for new tangos; those that
impressed the audience earned the right to be published and recorded.
38 One magazine, for example, argued that the single-minded pursuit of profit
had led stations to imitate any popular program, resulting in a lack of variety
and originality for listeners. Caras y Caretas, 28 December 1935.
39 De Paoli, Función social de la radiotelefonía, 22.
40 El Mundo, 29 November 1935, 10.
41 Sintonía 3, no. 135 (23 November 1935). For a description of the station’s
programming plans see El Mundo, 28 November 1935, 8.
42 Sintonía 6, no. 298 (4 January 1939), 38.
43 Pujól, Jazz al sur, 20–21.
44 La Canción Moderna 7, no. 289 (2 October 1933).
45 Sintonía 3, no. 91 (19 January 1935).
46 La Canción Moderna 7, no. 295 (13 November 1933).
47 See Pujól, Jazz al sur.
48 On the fatalism of tango lyrics see Matamoro, La ciudad del tango, 117.
Beatriz Sarlo has stressed the conformism of the sentimental pulp fiction of
the 1920s. See Sarlo, El imperio de los sentimientos, 176–78. Many scholars of
Latin American film melodrama have pointed out its conservative implica-
tions. See Jesús Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony:
From the Media to Mediations, trans. Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White
(London: Sage, 1993), 167. See also Oroz, Melodrama; Monsiváis, ‘‘Se sufre,
pero se aprende.’’
49 ‘‘Muchachita loca’’ (1923), cited by Ulla, Tango, rebelión y nostalgia, 39.
50 Adrián Gorelik has commented on the irony that tango, whose immense
popularity was enabled by the emergence of the modern mass media, re-
tained this hostility to modernity. See Gorelik, La grilla y el parque, 361–73.
51 Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, 65–66.
52 Matamoro, La ciudad del tango, 124; Ulla, Tango, rebelión y nostalgia, 33–
44, 92.
53 Romano, ed., Las letras del tango, 111–13. For another tango expressing the
same sentiment see ‘‘Niño bien’’ (Fontaina and Soliño, 1927): Romano, ed.,
Las letras del tango, 110–11.
54 Ulla, Tango, rebelión y nostalgia, 76–79.
55 Canción Moderna 7, no. 295 (13 November 1933).
56 Canción Moderna 7, no. 289 (2 October 1933). Five years later the magazine,
now renamed Radiolandia, reiterated the point: ‘‘The author has a respon-
sibility: to write seeking to improve. Those who do not fulfill this obligation
are attacking popular song.’’ Radiolandia 11, no. 545 (27 August 1938).
57 Radiolandia 11, no. 541 (30 July 1938).
58 Sintonía, 26 April 1939.
59 Sintonía 1, no. 22 (23 September 1933), 7.
60 Radiolandia, 16 April 1938. For more on folklore see Oscar Chamosa’s chap-
ter in this volume.
61 Nathan D. Golden, Motion Picture Markets of Latin America (Washington:
U.S. Department of Commerce, 1944), 24.
62 See for example the descriptions of Riachuelo (Moglia Barth, 1934) and
Ayudame a vivir (Ferreyra, 1936) in El Heraldo del Cinematografista, 11 July
1934 and 2 September 1936.
63 Jorge Miguel Couselo, El Negro Ferreyra: un cine por instinto (Buenos Aires:
Freeland, 1969), 76.
64 This sanitizing of the Gardel myth drew praise from reviewers. See La
Razón, 25 May 1939, 15. For Sono Film’s commitment to family films see
Ricardo Manetti, ‘‘Argentina Sono Film,’’ 167.
65 See Félix-Didier, ‘‘Soñando con Hollywood’’; and Maranghello, La epopeya
trunca.
66 La Razón, 29 June 1939, 13.
50 Karush
67 I make this argument in more detail in ‘‘The Melodramatic Nation.’’
68 James, Resistance and Integration, 18 (emphasis by James).
69 Spektorowski, The Origins of Argentina’s Revolution of the Right, 128–32,
181–83.
70 Nevertheless, Mariano Plotkin’s analysis of Peronist textbooks reveals the
persistence within Peronism of a tension between tradition and moderniza-
tion. Plotkin, Mañana es San Perón, 189–92.
71 James, Doña María’s Story, 240–41.
72 See Elena, ‘‘Peronist Consumer Politics and the Problem of Domesticating
Markets in Argentina’’; and Milanesio, ‘‘ ‘The Guardian Angels of the Do-
mestic Economy.’ ’’
73 Elena’s chapter reveals that the Peronist magazine Argentina catered to work-
ers’ interest in ‘‘window shopping,’’ or indulging the fantasy of luxury and
wealth, in much the same way as the mass culture of the 1930s.

Populism, Melodrama, and The Market. The Mass Cultural Origins of Peronism Karush, Matthew.

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Populism, Melodrama, and The Market. The Mass Cultural Origins of Peronism Karush, Matthew.

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Populism, Melodrama, and The Market. The Mass Cultural Origins of Peronism Karush, Matthew.

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Matthew B.

Our doctrine is simpler. I can now explain it with an example given to me by

REFUSING COMPENSATION FOR HAVING SAVED THE LIFE OF A MILLIONAIRE’S SON

As historians have long recognized, Peronism cannot be understood on

Historical analyses of Peronist rhetoric have stressed the essential bi-

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 23

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 25

Here, as in so many tangos, the journey from barrio to cabaret, from

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 27

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 29

If Argentine populism was built in part of mass cultural components,

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 31

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 33

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 35

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 37

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 39

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 41

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 43

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 45

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 47

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 49

Populism, Melodrama, and the Market 51

You might also like