In Workers Go Shopping in Argentina, Natalia Milanesio has produced a vivid and imaginatively researched portrait of popular consumer culture in mid-twentieth-century Argentina. Offering a fresh contribution to the recent ‘cultural turn’ in studies of Peronism, this work examines the social and cultural transformations that followed when millions of Argentines found themselves suddenly able to buy consumer goods and participate in commercial leisure activities on a mass scale during the populist government of Juan Domingo Perón. Unlike other scholars like Mariano Plotkin and Eduardo Elena who have brought a cultural reading to official Peronist rhetoric and policy, Milanesio emphasises the ways in which a variety of non-state actors also contributed to this new mass consumer culture. She convincingly portrays the period between 1946 and 1955 as a watershed moment in Argentine culture and, in the process, both illuminates and challenges some of the most resilient clichés about what Peronism meant to working people.
Milanesio's analysis focuses on the cultural dimensions of consumption, rather than on the political economy of import substitution industrialisation. Though she provides sufficient economic data to illustrate the expansion of purchasing power under Perón, she draws on cultural theory, gender analysis and material history to explore the changing social behaviours and debates that accompanied mass consumption. As she demonstrates, working-class people engaged in a whole new set of cultural practices when they suddenly found themselves with the means to buy household appliances, follow fashion trends and enjoy commercial amusements like the cinema. In so doing, they captured the attention of advertisers, industrialists, policy-makers and middle- and upper-class observers. New social tensions and stereotypes emerged as working people became more visible in once exclusive public spaces and a variety of ‘experts’ sought to teach them about proper forms of consumption.
Milanesio traces the emergence of what she terms the ‘worker-consumer’, a new social type that made a ‘grand entrance’ into the marketplace at mid-century (p. 2). In her first three chapters she convincingly delineates her periodisation, using a variety of sources to reveal how this ideal of the worker-consumer took shape under Peronism. Although retail shopping districts, department stores and fashion magazines had been well established in Argentina since the 1920s, these had catered to consumers from the middling to upper ranks of society and were out of reach for most people. Yet retailers and advertisers reacted quickly when Perón's redistributive economic policies drove up real wages in the second half of the 1940s. Advertising agencies multiplied and professionalised, and ad men collaborated with social scientists to study and shape the habits of ordinary people. They sought to mimic Peronism's informal language and nationalist rhetoric in their campaigns and used popular magazines to instruct working-class women in particular about rational forms of household consumption.
Chapters 4 and 5 explore more fully the class and gender tensions provoked by the new mass consumer culture. Milanesio argues that consumption became ‘a site of class conflict over the distribution and appropriation of commodities, spaces, and their meanings’ (p. 126) as more than a million internal migrants settled around Buenos Aires and worker-consumers gained unprecedented access to urban shopping and leisure spaces. While official rhetoric championed popular spending as proof of Peronist ‘social justice’, middle- and upper-class observers complained about the decline of deference and the difficulties of marking class boundaries in a democratised marketplace. Stereotypes of working-class consumers in the popular media also revealed concerns about the ways in which individual consumer choices were undermining traditional gender roles and household power structures. Working-class women came under particular scrutiny and pressure; advertisements, editorials and advice columns urged them to practise disciplined household spending, yet also exhorted them to uphold new standards of beauty and fashion.
Milanesio relies mainly on middle- and upper-class sources to track the social meanings associated with working-class consumption, but she makes the most of these sources thanks to her careful use of gender and cultural theory. Her final chapter draws on oral interviews with workers who lived through the Peronist period. Observers have long relied on paternalism to explain popular loyalties to Peronism, treating workers as grateful beneficiaries of Perón's generosity or, worse, as pawns who handed over their political loyalty in exchange for trinkets. Yet Milanesio offers a more subtle and generous reading of working-class nostalgia by carefully analysing workers’ memories of the new commercial amusements and consumer goods that they experienced under Peronism. As she notes, her interviewees describe themselves not as charity cases but as savvy consumers who used hard work and discipline to make the most of the new opportunities opened up at mid-century. The book's epilogue further contextualises these happy memories by tracking how military repression, neoliberal economic policies and financial crises ‘[unmade] the mid-century definitions of worker and consumer’ (p. 220) in the decades that followed Perón's overthrow in 1955.
With Workers Go Shopping, Natalia Milanesio opens up promising new areas of research such as the cultural history of advertising; she also enriches Argentine debates about class formation and identity with her confident command of the literature on global consumerism and material culture. The introduction and early chapters read slightly self-consciously and there are a few awkward problems of translation, but the writing and analysis improve steadily across the chapters, and Milanesio's clear explanation of theory and vivid choice of examples make this an excellent text for the classroom. All in all, this book constitutes a major contribution not only to the voluminous literature on Peronism, but also to the relatively uncharted field of Latin American material history.
