Our apartment building

Our apartment building
"Home away from home" in B.A.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Remembering Evita Peron...



I was almost eight years old, living in Argentina the winter that Evita Peron died of cancer at the age of 33, on July 26, 1952. My Spanish textbooks were full of lecturas (readings) about Evita Peron and her good works. She was Santa Evita for the Argentine working class people. Portraits of Evita smiling angelically alongside her husband, Juan Peron, hung everywhere in buildings throughout Buenos Aires as if she were royalty. The day she died and for several days afterwards, everything in Buenos Aires stopped. Our school was closed, there was nothing on the radio except mournful music, long speeches praising Evita, and reports of the lines of people waiting to see her body lying in state. Downtown Buenos Aires was thronged with people and funereal flowers reminiscent of Princess Diana's funeral. I was not downtown and yet I remember the sense of gloom and quiet that descended eerily in the suburbs where we lived.

We decided to visit the Eva Peron Museum this week. Perhaps I thought it might trigger the memories of that long ago time when I was a child living through this historical event. The Evita Museum is housed in a mansion built in the Italian Renaissance style in the early 20th century in upscale Palermo district. Today it is considered a National Historical Monument but in the late 1940's under Evita Peron it was bought and used as a shelter for homeless women and children. Evita's grandniece, Cristina Alvarez Rodriguez, inaugurated this site as the Evita Museum in Buenos Aires in 2002, exactly fifty years after her great aunt's death.

Eva Peron has been popularized throughout the world because of the musical show and film about her life. What makes visiting this museum unique is that there is original black and white film footage of Evita as a young woman during her acting career in Argentine films from 1934 to 1945, and later addressing the people of Argentina from the balcony of the Casada Rosada (the Pink House) just as I remember seeing her on our first television set. There is also news coverage of Evita lying in state and the massive state funeral that took place in Buenos Aires in 1952. In addition there are showcases full of her elegant dresses, hats, and shoes that she wore throughout her short life as First Lady of Argentina, a few photos and many quotes from the book she wrote about her life, La razon de mi vida (Evita: In My Own Words).

What is striking being in Buenos Aires right now is that the government and the President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, are peronistas which is the leftist people's party founded by Juan Domingo Peron in the 1940's. One evening, while watching local television news, all stations were preempted for a speech by "Cristina", as she is called, from the Huracan Stadium in Buenos Aires. She was addressing about 60,000 Argentine supporters and workers and invoking the exact emotional rhetoric used by Evita. Although not blonde, but a dyed redheaded middle aged woman, Cristina seemed to be embellishing her speech to the nation with similar gestures taken from those Evita used so long ago. Her aligning herself with this movement of the 1940's and 50's is deliberate. There is a unique poster that caught my eye, near the Casa Rosada (see photo at the beginning of the blog) of Evita Peron superimposed on the balcony next to President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

It is fascinating to be here at a time when it seems that history is repeating itself. The newspapers are full of comparisons between Cristina and Evita and it remains to be seen what impact the legacy of Evita will have in the upcoming October presidential election and what the future holds for Argentine politics.


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