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

摘要

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 Peron. 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 cliches about what Peronism meant to working people.