Content area
Full Text
There is something singularly pathetic about a national dream based on an aging one-time dictator and the memory of a woman who has been dead for 20 years.
Time, November 27, 1972
Long Live Germany! Long Live Argentina! Long Live Austria!
Adolf Eichmann, gallows statement, 1962
In February 1999 a New York Times article appearing in the annual magazine supplement entitled "The Sophisticated Traveler" noted, with some amazement, that Buenos Aires was a modern city.1 What explains the surprised reaction of the American author and his assumption, as indicated by the name of the special edition, that this would also be a startling revelation to his presumably well-educated audience? The short answer is that the author's serendipitous discovery of Buenos Aires' modernity is a reflection of a dominant narrative about Argentina wherein most cultural references to Argentina in the United States revolve around events and personages of five and six decades ago. But the placement of Argentina outside the temporal boundaries occupied by the United States requires a more complex set of questions. Why is Argentina frozen in the Peronist moment in the U.S. popular imagination and why would a static cast of characters, most long dead, from the Peron era still provoke interest and controversy in the United States after 50 years?
This essay seeks to explain the continuing cultural relevance of Peronist Argentina in the U.S. popular imagination by examining the evolution of the mythology and iconography of Peronist Argentina since 1955. In the absence of any open conflict between the two nations, the American media in the late 20th century concentrated, sometimes obsessively, on two ultimately related phenomena: Eva Peron and the existence of escaped Nazis in Argentina. This focus dwarfs all Argentine leaders subsequent to Peron as well as the compelling saga of Argentina's ongoing, frequently violent struggle to define itself. I argue that the post-1955 American commodification of specific myths and images has preserved Argentina in a cultural amber while simultaneously utilizing Peronist Argentina, or an American version of it, as a source of ever-changing signifiers, adaptable to marketing strategies and current domestic debates ranging from the United States' obligation to uphold Western civilization, to the battle over properly remembering the Holocaust, to the role of women in the public...