Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920–1946

Culture of Class CULTURE OF CLASS Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920–1946 MATTHEW B. KARUSH DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham & London 2012 ∫ 2012 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. For Eli and Leah, with love CONTENTS ix Acknowledgments 1 Introduction 1 19 Class Formation in the Barrios 2 43 Competing in the Transnational Marketplace 3 85 Repackaging Popular Melodrama 4 133 Mass-Cultural Nation Building 5 177 Politicizing Populism 215 Epilogue The Rise of the Middle Class, 1955–1976 225 Notes 251 Bibliography 269 Index ACKNOWLEDGMENTS would like to express my gratitude to the vari- Ious institutions and individuals whose financial, intellectual, and moral support enabled me to com- plete this book. Both the National Endowment for the Humani- ties and George Mason University provided crucial research funding for the project, enabling me to make several trips to Argentina over the years. In Buenos Aires, the staffs of the Archivo General de la Nación, the Biblioteca Nacional, and the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken provided useful guidance to their collections. Fabián Sancho, the director of the library at the Museo del Cine, was particularly helpful in securing images for the book. Julia Choclin of Arte Video helped me assess the availability of Argentine films from the 1930s. Valerie Millholland, Gisela Fosado, and Fred Kameny at Duke University Press have been a perfect editorial team: encourag- ing, responsive, and constructive at every turn. Parts of chapters 2, 3, and 5 were published in dif- ferent form as ‘‘The Melodramatic Nation: Integra- tion and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 2 (2007), 293–326, and as ‘‘Populism, Melodrama, and the Market: The Mass Cultural Origins of Peronism,’’ in Karush and Chamosa, eds., The New Cultural History of Peronism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). I am grateful for permission to republish. At George Mason University, I have benefited enormously from being around a group of talented and supportive colleagues. In particular, I would like to thank Joan Bristol, Jack Censer, Michele Greet, Deborah Kaplan, and Mike O’Malley. The late Larry Levine and Roy Rosenzweig were both models of scholarly collegiality. Over the course of many mem- orable conversations, they taught me more than I can say about doing social and cultural history. This book is better for having been conceived in their presence, but it would be better still had they been around to read the many drafts that I certainly would have sent them. Over the years, many people read or heard sections of this work and made insightful criticisms and suggestions. Oscar Chamosa, Christine Ehrick, Eduardo Elena, Florencia Garramuño, Mark Healey, Joel Horo- witz, Andrea Matallana, Natalia Milanesio, Mariano Plotkin, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Barbara Weinstein were particularly helpful. I also benefited from research assistance from Patricia Inés Conway, Ludy Grandas, and Damián Dolcera. Federico Finchelstein and an anonymous reviewer, both assigned by Duke University Press, gave the manuscript an exceptionally close reading. Their numerous suggestions substantially improved the final product. Having been trained in labor and political history, I embarked on the study of mass culture with trepidation. The brilliant Alison Landsberg inspired me to pursue this topic despite my utter lack of preparation. Luckily for me, she did not then abandon me to sink or swim on my own. Instead, she patiently guided me through the enormous scholarship on Classical Hollywood cinema and on film melodrama, and she graciously consented to read draft after draft. I am afraid that I still ‘‘write about film like a historian,’’ as she once gently observed. Yet insofar as I have managed to avoid an entirely reductive approach to mass culture, she deserves most of the credit. An inexplicable case of filial insecurity led me to neglect my parents in the acknowledgments section of my first book. To their credit, they never complained about the oversight, but let me set the record straight here: x| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful to Drs. Ruth and Nathaniel Karush for their love and support as well as for setting such a high standard of intellectual integrity. Finally, even though they probably do not realize it, my children, Eli and Leah, have made a substantial contribution to my scholarship. Not only are they tons of fun to be around, but they also ask great ques- tions. Their curiosity is an inspiration, and it is to them that I dedicate this book. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |xi INTRODUCTION n 1932 the writer Roberto Arlt described the chal- Ilenge facing Communist organizers in Argentina: ‘‘Out of 100 proletarians, 90 have never heard of Karl Marx, but 90 can tell you how Rudolph Valentino used to kiss and what kind of mustache [the Holly- wood actor] José Mojica wears.’’∞ Arlt’s pessimism regarding the revolutionary potential of the nation’s workers was prescient. To the immense disappoint- ment of a generation of leftist intellectuals, the large majority of the Argentine working class would reject Socialist and Communist parties, embracing instead the populist movement built by Juan and Eva Perón in the mid-1940s. But more illuminating than Arlt’s assessment of working-class consciousness is his reference to the movies. Arlt recognized not only that workers made up a substantial proportion of the audience for mass culture in Argentina, but also that the mass culture they consumed must have had a significant impact on their consciousness, one po- tentially as decisive as their experience of exploita- tion or their participation in class struggle. That Arlt used two Hollywood stars to make his point is also revealing. By invoking Valentino and Mojica, he drew attention to the powerful influence of North American commercial culture in Argentina. Arlt’s suggestion that mass culture tended to dilute class consciousness anticipated the arguments of contemporary historians who have described the 1920s and 1930s as a period in which the militant working- class consciousness of earlier years gave way to a less class-based identity. For these scholars, Argentina’s expanding economy effected a kind of national integration, in which radical ideologies were replaced by the pursuit of upward mobility. At the start of the twentieth century, politi- cians and intellectuals were haunted by the specter of a largely immi- grant working class enthralled by anarchism and syndicalism. Yet within a few decades these fears had been dispelled. The new ‘‘popular sectors,’’ largely the Argentine-born children of immigrants, were focused on self- improvement and were far less hostile to the state and the nation than their parents had been; they embraced integration into Argentine society as the means to a more comfortable life.≤ The radio and the cinema are typically seen as contributors to this process. Through film distribu- tors and radio networks based in Buenos Aires, Argentines throughout the country were increasingly exposed to a common national culture. Moreover, this new mass culture allegedly encouraged consumerism and middle-class aspirations, thereby reinforcing the trend away from working-class militancy. Yet despite these dynamics, Argentina was, if anything, more divided in 1950 than it had been in 1910. Although a generation of workers had turned away from orthodox leftist ideologies, their enthusiasm for Pe- ronism revealed that they were still inclined to embrace a working-class identity. The Peróns mobilized the nation’s workers behind a project of state-led industrialization and corporatist social organization. They ad- dressed their followers as workers, celebrating their proletarian status. Peronism polarized the country along class lines, creating a fragmented national identity that would persist for decades. Somehow, a society characterized by ethnic integration and the decline of orthodox left-wing ideologies also contained the seeds of this populist explosion and of the intense, class-based polarization that followed. This book argues that the key to understanding this paradox lies in a reassessment of the mass culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Arlt was right to emphasize workers’ enthusiasm for the movies, but 2| INTRODUCTION he was wrong to assume that this pastime came at the expense of class consciousness. The films, music, and radio programs produced in Argen- tina during the 1920s and 1930s trafficked in conformism, escapism, and the fantasy of upward mobility. But they also disseminated versions of national identity that reproduced and intensified class divisions. Facing stiff competition from jazz music and Hollywood films, Argentine cultural producers tried to elevate their offerings in order to appeal to con- sumers seduced by North American modernity. At the same time, the transnational marketplace encouraged these cultural producers to com- pete by delivering what foreign mass culture could not: Argentine au- thenticity. Domestic filmmakers, radio and recording entrepreneurs, lyri- cists, musicians, actors, and screenwriters borrowed heavily from earlier forms of popular culture such as tango music and the short, comic play known as the sainete. The result was a deeply melodramatic mass culture that extolled the dignity and solidarity of the working poor, while deni- grating the rich as selfish and immoral. Despite myriad efforts to mod- ernize and improve domestic mass culture, the Argentine media tended to generate images and narratives in which national identity was proto- typically associated with the poor. The profound classism of this mass culture has been overlooked by historians who have depicted the radio and the cinema as instruments of national integration and middle-class formation. Instead of unifying national myths, the Argentine culture industries generated polarizing images and narratives that helped pro- vide much of the discursive raw material from which the Peróns built their mass movement.

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