Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture

WORKERS GO SHOPPING IN ARGENTINA

WORKERS GO SHOPPING IN

Argentina

The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture

NATALIA MILANESIO

© 2013 by the University of New Mexico Press

All rights reserved. Published 2013

Printed in the United States of America

18   17   16   15   14   13      1   2   3   4   5   6

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PRINTED EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Milanesio, Natalia, 1974–

 Workers go shopping in Argentina : The rise of popular consumer culture / Natalia Milanesio.

    p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8263-5241-5 (cloth : alk. paper) —

       ISBN 978-0-8263-5243-9 (electronic)

1. Consumption (Economics)—Argentina.

2. Consumers—Argentina—History—20th century.

3. Working class—Argentina—History.

4. Argentina—Economic conditions—20th century.

I. Title.

  HC180.C6M55 2013

  306.30982—dc23

2012032707

COVER: A shoe store in Buenos Aires and a grocery store run by the

Eva Perón Foundation. Photo courtesy of Archivo General de la Nación.

To César

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

Industry, Wages, and the State: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture

CHAPTER 2

Surveys and Campaigns: Discovering and Reaching the Worker-Consumer

CHAPTER 3

Commercial Culture Becomes Popular: Advertising and the Challenges of a Changing Market

CHAPTER 4

How Can a Garbage Collector Be on the Same Level as We Are?: Upper- and Middle-Class Anxieties over Working-Class Consumers

CHAPTER 5

Love in the Time of Mass Consumption

CHAPTER 6

Tales of Consumers: Memory and Working-Class Material Culture

EPILOGUE

Consumer Culture Today

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During my time as a graduate student at Indiana University, I benefited from the expertise of a group of talented historians of Latin America. Arlene Díaz, Jeff Gould, Peter Guardino, and Danny James made graduate school unceremonious and intellectually stimulating. I want to thank Danny especially for supporting my choices throughout my studies and Peter for his frank advice in all things academic. Konstantin Dierks was truly generous with his counsel and encouragement throughout graduate school. I would like to thank him for being an avid and thoughtful reader from the start. Mike Grossberg offered his invaluable advice at a key moment during the final stage of graduate school.

I am also grateful to Matt Karush, Eduardo Elena, Rebekah Pite, Katharine French-Fuller, and Oscar Chamosa for sharing their enthusiasm and knowledge of Argentine history in conferences and conversations, and to Julio Moreno, Jeffrey Pilcher, Ricardo Salvatore, and Donna Guy for their comments on my work at different stages of this project. Thanks also go to William Ratliff at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University; to Rosario Bernatene, Karina Ramacciotti, Fernando Remedi, and Pablo Gerchunoff for answering my queries; and to Cecilia Wingerter for her help with research in Rosario. I greatly appreciate the constructive comments Monica Perales and Sandra McGee Deutsch made after reading chapter 6. I owe thanks to Wendy Gosselin for proofreading my writing and to Beatriz Tati Muñoz at the Communist Party Archives in Buenos Aires for her kindness and aid over the years. I am truly grateful to Giovanna Urdangarain and Craig Wayson for their endless generosity, friendship, and unfailing support both in Bloomington and beyond.

I want to express my profound gratitude to all the men and women who spent days sharing their memories and stories with me. Their generosity, thoughtfulness, and insights made me think of the past in a different way and contributed to my understanding of methodology, ethical research, and the subjectivity of knowledge in ways I could not have imagined before meeting them.

I also want to convey my appreciation to the several institutions that have provided generous financial assistance throughout many phases of my research: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John W. Hartman Center at Duke University, the Social Science Research Council, the American Historical Association, the Indiana University Department of History and Graduate School, the Indiana University Graduate and Professional Student Organization, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies also at Indiana University. At the University of Houston, I want to thank the Department of History, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Provost Office, and the Division of Research.

Many colleagues at the University of Houston have read proposals or chapters and offered me valuable advice and guidance about several aspects of this project and academic life in general. Thanks go to Susan Kellogg, Thomas O’Brien, John Hart, Kathleen Brosnan, Martin Melosi, Catherine Patterson, Monica Perales, James Schafer, Landon Storrs, Nancy Young, Xiaoping Cong, Todd Romero, Guadalupe San Miguel, Philip Howard, and Eric Walther. I am also very grateful to Lorena López at the Department of History for her valuable assistance.

Special thanks go to W. Clark Whitehorn, editor in chief of the University of New Mexico Press, for his engagement with this project from the very beginning, his sound guidance, and his enormous patience. I also extend thanks to Liam Utz Wiegner for the editing and to Elise McHugh, Felicia Cedillos, and Elizabeth Hadas for their assistance at the Press. I would also like to thank the two outside readers for their constructive suggestions and kind assessment of my work.

My friends in Argentina—Vanina Broda, Julieta Viglioni, Mariela Rodriguez, Julieta López, María José Ceruti, Milena Paglini, and Gabriela Terrazino—helped me reconnect with real life after too many hours in the archives and provided unconditional reassurance, optimism, and a lot of fun. Finally, I could not have completed this book without the love and encouragement of César Seveso. I owe him many things, from incisive readings of my work and domestic multitasking to the laughter he always managed to bring to my desk, with the help of our dog Fredo, when writing became frustrating. César is a true example of honesty and dedication. His passion for life and his integrity have encouraged me to never stop searching for what I believe is important and right.

INTRODUCTION

In 2005, Juan Carlos Legas was seventy-three years old. He grew up in a small town in the province of Santa Fe where he lived until he moved to Rosario, the second largest city in Argentina, at the age of seventeen. It was 1949. That year, wages reached a record high in the country, workers’ rights were included in the national constitution for the first time, and Juan Domingo Perón successfully completed his third year as president. Upon his arrival to Rosario, Juan Carlos was employed in several workshops and soon got a job he cherished deeply in the largest textile factory in the city. Life as a well-paid industrial worker, Juan Carlos remembered more than fifty years later, was full of possibilities. In the next five years, Juan Carlos got married, bought a small plot of land where he built a home he then diligently equipped, and went on vacation for the first time in his life. His tale of uprooting, hard work, and fulfillment was not exceptional. In 1947, 17 percent of Argentines had migrated from the provinces where they were born in search of a better life in the big cities of the pampeana region where most industries were located. In fact, Juan Carlos was following others who had set the example a few years earlier, going on a journey that many remember as one of discovery and prosperity. With nostalgia, Juan Carlos recounted that

life was much better for everyone back then. People ate well, dressed well, went out to eat, and went to the movies. As workers, we had money in our pockets for the first time, and this was evident. I will never forget the first boy who left my town for Buenos Aires. His name was Gregorio Valdéz, and we all admired him because he came back three months later in a suit and tie . . . His salary was so high that none of us could believe it. Many more followed.¹

The stories of young workers like Juan Carlos and Gregorio are snapshots of a historical period marked by industrialization, high purchasing power, internal migration, and consumption. This book is a study of the exceptional experience that lay at the center of it all: the emergence of the working-class consumer as a powerful force that transformed modern Argentina. This book explores the mid-twentieth-century conditions that triggered the transformation of the national market culture, but the aim of the analysis is to reveal what changed when vast sectors of the population became consumers of industrial goods and participants in spaces and practices of consumption they had rarely or never enjoyed before. Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture points to the historical novelty of the worker-consumer based on the idea that mass consumption developed incrementally by increasingly incorporating different sectors of the society over time. While the Argentine middle classes opened the doors of the marketplace in the 1920s, I maintain that the lower-income sectors of the population had to wait until the middle decades of the twentieth century to gain full access to the world of consumption.² Workers Go Shopping in Argentina demonstrates that, when the time came, these sectors made a grand entrance, stretching the limits of inclusion to impressive new levels. My argument does not dispute that the working classes had participated in the consumer market in the past but suggests that this participation did not become a massive phenomenon until the mid-twentieth century and, most importantly, that this was the first time that the worker-consumer became a definitive historical agent of enormous cultural and social visibility and unprecedented political and economic influence. Thus the consumer society that arose from this incorporation was novel in nature as well as extent.

Although they surface throughout the book, the qualitative or quantitative aspects of working-class consumption are not the focus of my study; instead, I seek to understand its social and, above all, cultural consequences. In other words, this is a history of consumption that places the working class at the core of an interpretation of postwar Argentine consumer culture rather than a labor history linking consumption, work, and labor politics. The central premise is that working-class consumers were a new modernizing social actor who shaped a different commercial ethos, transformed social relations and collective identities, and redefined the role of the state as a mediator between business and consumers. From the new language and aesthetics of advertisement to the new form and content of consumer goods, from the rise of middle- and upper-class anxieties to the changes in gender expectations, from the redefinition of working-class standards of living to the creation of new government institutions, I show that the transformations fueled by the worker-consumer were remarkable and far-reaching.

The story this book tells unfolds at the juncture of a unique process of economic development, social modernization, and nationalistic populist politics that peaked during Juan Domingo Perón’s government between 1946 and 1955. Peronism changed the course of twentieth-century Argentina so profoundly that this period became a critical turning point in national history whose legacy still shapes the country today. Following its entry into the international market as a free nation after gaining its independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, Argentina experienced a long period of economic expansion based on the exportation of agricultural products. This growth was made possible by fertile lands, British capital, and manual labor provided by European immigrants attracted by the prospects of abundance. Until 1916, however, the landed oligarchy whose wealth was amassed on the export market not only exercised full political control over the country but also refused to concede a fair share of the economic pie to the masses. The upper social sector not only kept the working population socially and economically marginalized but also excluded them from the political system by means of electoral fraud and coercion. In 1916, the Radical Party gained power after a law opened political participation by establishing secret ballots and mandatory universal suffrage for all males over eighteen years of age. Although the state took on a more active and interventionist role in social issues than it had in the recent past, political and economic power remained concentrated among the agro-exporters and their foreign allies and, increasingly, among a small group of industrialists who had close personal and commercial ties with the landed elites.

The First World War and the Great Depression exposed the vulnerability of Argentina’s export-based economy and contributed to consolidating the industrial sector. At the same time, the growing urban working class and communist and anarchist leaders began to challenge the reigning social order, actively demanding better working and living conditions. Still, the fight for their rights was unsuccessful. Activists were frequently persecuted, and the labor movement was constantly subjected to government harassment. In 1930, economic difficulties and a climate of increasing political and social unrest prompted a military coup backed by the most traditional sectors of the landed elites. The coup inaugurated a period known as the Infamous Decade characterized by fraudulent elections, widespread government corruption, and repression of any form of protest. In 1943, a group of military officers allied with new industrialist sectors whose interests and power had grown during the Second World War led a military coup in an effort to redefine national politics and economic development. Colonel Juan Domingo Perón was one of the members of the new government. From the Ministry of War, the vice-presidency, and especially the Secretariat of Labor, Perón was able to rally a vast political movement, winning the presidential elections in 1946 and again in 1951. The epitome of Latin American populism, Peronism was founded on a multiclass alliance that included industrialists, some sectors of the military, and, most significantly, labor organizations. The working class provided Peronism with its main base of support as wage earners became rapidly attracted by Perón’s strong nationalistic and antioligarchic discourse and his promises for a better life.³

Most of these promises depended on an economic plan aimed at developing the national industry and consolidating the internal market and on unparalleled policies of income redistribution. Although business and economic historians have studied these processes, we know little about their implications for consumer culture. To expand our knowledge, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina is focused on consumption, a multifaceted phenomenon that involves a vast range of practices like shopping, buying, using, displaying, and desiring, all of which entail complex relations among subjects and between subjects and goods. As a particular historical form of consumption, mass consumer culture represents the unprecedented inter-penetration of economic and cultural forces: the intersection of growing markets—resulting from increasing manufacturing and the democratization of goods—with new cultural logics of commercial advertising, mass marketing, and new forms of merchandising.⁴ Here consumption is defined as more than an economic act intended to satisfy needs and wants through the acquisition and use of commodities. It is, in fact, both a subjective and a sociocultural practice that individuals and groups use to validate existing identities or create new ones, express a sense of selfhood and otherness, and manifest membership and social standing. In other words, consumer culture is a system of signification. This argument, put forward by theorist Jean Baudrillard, became highly influential in cultural anthropology and the sociological study of consumption, a body of scholarship that has deeply shaped my understanding of consumption. This book is then a historical examination of the meanings that consumers, producers, businessmen, advertising agents, and state officials assigned to and conveyed through experiences of consumption and consumer goods.⁵

As the analysis delves into processes of self-definition and personal and collective fulfillment, the creation of stereotypes, and the construction of social distinction and political legitimacy, it also dissects what sociologist Robert G. Dunn has termed the economic and signifying apparatuses of consumer culture, most notably, production, advertising, and marketing.⁶ The mid-twentieth-century market culture was indeed not only marked by the emergence of new social actors, or of old actors in new roles, but also by new structural conditions that included growing national industrialization, expansive commercial infrastructure, state regulation of the economy, and innovative forms of publicity. My analysis positions the worker-consumer at the center of this transformation, both as a cause and as an outcome. Interdisciplinary in nature, this book combines theories of the anthropology of consumption, cultural studies, and gender studies with the methodologies of cultural, social, and oral histories. The result is a complex object of study: the worker-consumer emerges as many sided. First, the working-class consumer is a social subject who worked, shopped, and desired, a historical actor consciously seeking to satisfy material needs and wants but whose actions were, at the same time, largely contingent upon independent economic, social, and political forces. Still, in this book, the worker-consumer is, in particular, a historical cultural category that was studied, imagined, invented, and debated in the mid-twentieth century by industrialists, ad-makers, the press, the state, and the middle and upper classes for a broad range of purposes. Thus, in this cultural history, the worker-consumer takes on multiple forms, materializing differently in diverse settings: a concept resulting from market research, the icon of a political movement, the personification of progressive social policies, the leading character of advertisements, a social type disseminated in the media, and a stereotype born out of class resentment. Finally, the worker-consumer is also embodied by the individuals who, in the last chapter, remember their past as young working-class men and women who longed for and purchased consumer goods in the mid-twentieth century. In their recollections, a new form of worker-consumer arises, this time as the product of personal and collective memories.

The Historiography of Consumption

A history of consumption, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina belongs to a body of historical scholarship that is novel, exhilarating, and extremely diverse. The research topics, the methodologies, the theoretical frameworks, the historical arguments, and even the conceptualization—ranging from consumerism and consumption to consumer society and consumerist behavior—are wide ranging, and thus the discipline has both suffered and benefited from its fluid contour. Yet, in contrast to this multiplicity, the initial focus on the United States and Western Europe conferred upon the history of consumption great geographical uniformity as well as two traditional lines of inquiry. One of these examined the origins of consumer society, tracing its birth in Europe (and some more broadly in the Atlantic world) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and arguing that consumption even predated the Industrial Revolution. The periodization of consumer society has been central among historians of early modern and modern Europe, although it has remained largely unresolved.⁷ If the beginnings of consumer culture have sparked much debate, it has been even more challenging to establish a proper chronology for its later evolution, both in regional and national contexts, and to determine which factors have prompted the transition between phases.

In spite of differences in time, place, arguments, and scope, this scholarship drove me to examine the development of consumer culture in Argentina while trying to thoroughly comprehend what was really novel about mid-twentieth-century consumption in terms of social and cultural actors, politics, and structural economic conditions. Although my study is not a genealogy, I understand consumption in terms of stages and, as a result, question how massive mass consumption was before the mid-twentieth century. This premise led me to constantly go back in time to assert the originality of this period in a compelling way. To this end, and because of the few studies on consumption in Argentina—a subject I address below—I conducted extensive research on the early twentieth century and wove the patterns of historical change within each chapter. This strategy has allowed me to offer a broader narrative of historical change while keeping the analysis focused on the 1940s and 1950s.

The second traditional approach to consumption has prioritized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while looking at the mechanisms, institutions, and practices that made it a true mass phenomenon. With an interest in the combination of ever-expanding goods and desires rather than the origins of consumption, these historians have looked at the many manifestations of consumer culture, particularly department stores, advertising, and leisure.⁸ Most of these scholars have firmly grounded their arguments on social history and gender studies, except for historians of advertising who have been more inclined to cultural analysis and to the study of representations.⁹ Scholars within this group questioned the feminization of consumption and considered the impact of commercial culture on notions of femininity and masculinity. They also explored the tensions between retailers and consumers, reconsidered racial issues, and reassessed the power of the purse interrogating the oppressive and liberating aspects of consumer practices.¹⁰ Rich and original, this body of work reached illuminating conclusions. In many cases, however, rather than prompting historical and geographical comparative analysis and remaining open to critical questioning, some of these conclusions became ossified truisms and standardized and axiomatic analytical lenses. This occurred, for example, with the equation between consumption and consumerism (the modern principle that consumption is an end in itself and that material possessions bring happiness and personal fulfillment) and between consumption and abundance. It also occurred with the focus on conspicuous or spectacular forms of consumption to the detriment of necessities like food. Similarly, the favoring of commercial settings over less strident spaces of consumption like the household became commonplace while attention to politics and social solidarities born out of consumer practices was rare.

The explosion of studies on the politics of consumption moved history away from the shop counter and began to address this last omission. Historians began to examine the political organization of consumers and the definition of consumer rights and then turned to the role of the state in creating different consumption regimes with their distinct marketplaces, forms of representation, and interpretation of needs and wants.¹¹ Yet this scholarship pushed the boundaries of the political further by asking broader questions about the creation of a civic culture organized around consumption. Issues of civic identity, the meanings of nationalism and democracy, and the conflation of spending with voting became central topics of inquiry, and the citizen-consumer came out as the sovereign historical character in the field.¹² These questions produced a protean and provocative scholarship in spite of the fact that, in many cases, consumption was not so much a primary object of study in its own right but more of a means to explore the foundations of political culture, especially in terms of the connection between liberal democracy and capitalism.

While gender, race, ethnicity, and increasingly age have figured prominently in histories of consumption, class has played a far more obscure role in the analysis.¹³ Insofar as consumption was about class, it particularly referred to the bourgeoisie in modern Europe and the American middle class, both of which became paradigmatic consumer classes and strengthened an archetypical notion of consumption based on plenty, conspicuousness, and emulation.¹⁴ While many labor historians criticized historians of consumption for their emphasis on a consumer society where wage earners were invisible and others regretted the emphasis on consumption over production, most labor historians evaded the study of consumption, at least explicitly. Paradoxically, subsistence, moral economy, cooperativism, and standard of living have been a traditional part of their research agendas since the 1960s.¹⁵ Ultimately, the interest in consumption that has grown in other fields also reached labor history. For the most part, labor historians stayed within the boundaries of social history and avoided the arguments and methodologies of cultural studies. Consequently, they approached consumption through the discipline’s traditional focus on work and distributionist policies and, from this angle, conducted outstanding studies about the gendered spending patterns of the working-class household and the historical significance of the living wage in consolidating consumer society. Furthermore, labor historians drew attention to the impact of consumption practices in working-class community life and sociability as well as to the transformation of leisure when workers had to choose between higher income and more free time. In contrast to those who had dismissed consumption as a threat to working-class agency, labor histories of consumption avoided sterile dichotomies between producer and consumer, explaining how consumption facilitated unionism and showing the vast political and social effects of the consumer power of labor.¹⁶ Due to its methodological focus and conceptual interests, the labor history of consumption has largely overlooked issues of identity and cultural meanings—which anthropologists and sociologists have thoroughly examined—and has rarely gone beyond the union hall and the working-class neighborhood. For this reason, class relations and the role of consumption in social stratification have remained largely unnoticed in this scholarship which, by and large, has not provided an interpretation of the broader social and cultural impact of working-class consumption.

In all its variants, the history of consumption collectively contributed to the creation of influential arguments about modernity, capitalism, democracy, the marketplace, and collective identities. Many of these arguments took the form of definitive historical conclusions and paradigmatic interpretations applicable to different geographical locales worldwide while others have been employed as proof of the historical exceptionality of particular case studies. However, both historical generalizations and claims of the distinctiveness of Western European and American historiographies have been frequently postulated without real comparative or transnational analyses to substantiate or enrich them. Although the history of consumption in the non-Western world is proportionally smaller than in Western European and American historiographies, the main problem has been what historian Craig Clunas illustrated by arguing that in the history of consumption, China must be just about China; what is about England must be about the world.¹⁷ Historians of consumption in Africa, Asia, Canada, and Eastern Europe have responded by setting original research agendas and studying forms and functions of consumption and types of consumers that can hardly be explained by using American or European models. Although they have actively engaged with the history of consumption in European countries and the United States, these scholars have also defined consumption on their own terms, in relation to scarcity, nonmonetary exchanges, and socialism, thus challenging old-standing characterizations. Recently, others have shaken arguments about American consumption from within by looking at the borderlands as a site for a distinct consumer culture while rethinking the reified distinctions between Mexico and the United States. Furthermore, through a transnational perspective, new historical research has contested the supposed secondary position of colonies or the periphery in the world of goods, opposing a simplistic interpretation of consumption in these regions as mere reception or resistance. Works of this kind have showed that, in many cases, local consumers not only developed tastes and practices independent from colonial powers or foreign companies, but also had a dramatic impact on the production and consumption that took place in the metropolises or, more generally, in the Western world.¹⁸

Workers Go Shopping in Argentina joins this scholarship by studying consumption in an overlooked and thus unexpected historical setting: a traditional export economy in search of a future as an industrial power and a populist government that, profoundly pervaded by the idea of social justice, employed income redistribution as a political weapon and proposed an original strategy of development conceived as an alternative to capitalism and communism. Most importantly, this book shows that the making of a consumer culture is not only about the volume of goods produced, the numbers of consumers, and the size of the stores, but also about the cultural manifestations and social perceptions of these changes.

Consumption in Latin American and Argentine History

In the last few years, historians of Europe and the United States have disapproved of the inflation of consumption that is making its definition inconsequential—if everything is consumption, what makes it distinct?—and others have asked for some breathing space arguing that consumption has threatened to engulf other subjects.¹⁹ However, while the history of consumption has flourished across geographical fields, historians of Latin America have lagged far behind. As a result, consumption in Latin American historiography is incipient, small, fresh, and full of challenges and opportunities; it is a nonconformist newcomer rather than an overpowering colonizing force. It is difficult to understand why historians of Latin America have taken so long to ask questions about consumption, particularly in a field traditionally interested in modernity and economic development, one that has been characterized by a strong tradition of social history and the study of popular culture, and which has been receptive to the theoretical influences of cultural studies, especially issues of identity construction. The paucity of archival materials, the constraints of the publishing market, and the prevalence of other research agendas might explain why historians of Latin America have shelved the study of consumption. Still, I think that the main problem has been the persistent mistake of equating consumption with rich countries and expensive goods, the incorrect assumption that poor people and peasants are not consumers, and, more generally, the even more problematical supposition that Latin America is, unequivocally, a region of poor people and peasants. Interestingly, as scholars have analyzed the transition between modes of production and Latin American participation in the world economy and interrogated the limits and effects of industrialization, the proletarianization of former campesinos, and the economic outcomes of land reforms, the many complex consequences of these processes for consumers both in cities and the countryside have remained largely unexplored. Two notable exceptions are Arnold J. Bauer’s Goods, Power, History, a rich social history of material culture in the region from precolonial times to the present day, and Julio Moreno’s Yankee Don’t Go Home!, an illuminating examination of the intersection among U.S. business, consumption, and nationalism in Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century.²⁰

Historians of Latin America have generally privileged the examination of the region as a producer of goods—from cocoa beans and bananas to cocaine—for consumers in other parts of the world.²¹ When they have studied Latin American consumers, the focus has been either on food consumption—an incipient subfield that holds many promises and thus should be developed much further—or the elites. In this case, scholars have been particularly interested in how the upper classes have prioritized imports as markers of modernity and distinction. In other instances, historians of the middle classes have explored their consumer practices in order to offer a broader understanding of social identity.²² In this scholarship, consumption is thus instrumentalized; it is not the principal question that historians examine but a necessary facet of a broader subject, from business culture, pawning, tourism, and fashion writing to the construction of racial and national categories and the masculine self-fashioning of political leaders.²³ Consequently, historical knowledge about consumption in Latin America is restricted and incomplete. In contrast, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina positions the consolidation of mass consumption at the center of the story, as the key to understanding the formation of a new commercial culture, class and gender identities, and a new relationship between society and the state in Argentina.

In so doing, this book combines the history of consumption and of the working class in a unique way. While labor historians who specialize in different parts of the world incorporated the study of consumption in their research agendas, their colleagues studying Latin America have disregarded it. Conscientious about gender, ethnic, and racial dynamics both in industrial and nonindustrial settings, the new labor history of Latin America born in the late 1990s moved from the factory and the union hall to the household and community but disregarded consumer issues. Although these scholars contested long-established historical arguments about the working class in Latin America by examining sexuality, civic culture, the state, and communal solidarities, they persisted in the conventional analytical division between producers and consumers.²⁴ The omission is particularly notable in Argentine historiography, which has been fundamentally shaped by social and institutional history, and thus reluctant to look beyond the labor unions and labor parties, both before and after Peronism. Even proponents of a new labor history that includes cultural sensibilities and that is more concerned with everyday life have overlooked the forms and functions of consumption among workers.²⁵ Although Workers Go Shopping in Argentina has not been conceived as a study of this sort, it is my hope that by examining the major influence of working-class consumption in market culture, the state, and the political and social imagination, it will shed light onto workers’ history while encouraging others to follow the many research and theoretical paths I did not pursue.

Finally, the study of advertising, which has carved out a niche for it-self in other historiographies, remains embryonic in Latin American history. In fact, there is still no book-length study on the topic, and with the exception of Moreno’s analysis of advertisements produced by the J. Walter Thompson Company in Mexico, historians of Latin America have been primarily interested in the institutional history of major advertising agencies and the success and failure of foreign admen and their clients in the region. The content of ads, advertising as a cultural artifact, and its complex relationship with consumers, all aspects I explore extensively in the first part of this book, have been generally overlooked.²⁶

In comparison with the general pattern in Latin American historiography, the historical study of consumption in Argentina is even more limited and fragmented.²⁷ The lack of attention to consumption in Argentine historiography is especially surprising among historians of the Peronist years, when workers enjoyed the highest rise in their standard of living in the history of the country. Only recently a small number of historians in Argentina have started examining the Peronist democratization of wellbeing—that is, the improvement of living conditions based on new forms of government planning for housing, education, tourism, and health.²⁸ Notably, these scholars have generally overlooked the consumerist edge of many of these subjects, privileging a political and institutional approach over research on cultural and social aspects. The few analyses that have explicitly engaged the topic of consumption have addressed it as inevitably dependent on Peronism, as part of the efforts of the government to control the economy, build the state, and appeal to its constituency.²⁹

In contrast, my book moves from the state to culture and from political clients and citizens to consumers. Workers Go Shopping in Argentina offers a cultural and social analysis that privileges the perspective of buyers, admen, and business. This study cannot (and should not) elude Peronism, one of the most historically resilient and analytically captivating phenomena in Latin American history and thus under thorough and innovative reexamination.³⁰ Yet, rather than making consumption secondary