The saying goes: The Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, the Peruvians from the Incas, and the Argentines from the boat. At the turn of the [20th] century, over 70 percent of Argentina's population was composed of first-generation immigrants, including "Russians" and "Turks" but mostly Spaniards and Italians.
in 1946 . . . the first (non-British) cars with left-sided steering wheels arrived
[In the middle decades of the 20th century] Latin America constituted a large percentage of Hollywood's foreign audience. Hollywood had, in some ways, more impact in Latin America than at home because it presented both "the real world" (New York, Chicago, London, Paris) and a romanticized paradise, a comforting universe of familiar faces. . . . Hollywood had adopted Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America as an exotic other world, a place of tropical exuberance, romance, sin, and decadence. . . . The film industry in Argentina, more developed than in other Latin American countries except for Mexico, made every effort not only to market these Hollywood melodramas but to reproduce them. . . . Before she became Evita Perón, Eva Duarte was a second-rate actress who attempted to imitate, first for radio soap operas, heroic roles immortalized by the likes of Norma Shearer . . . or Vivien Leigh.
Most Hollywood movies were embargoed in Argentina under Perón's policies to promote national industries
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| radio comedienne Niní Marshall as Catita |
Perón's . . . fatal error in Argentina was his anticlerical attitude. Both he and Evita had suffered the humiliation of illegitimate births. Perón took his revenge by instituting reforms in the legal organization of the family so as not to favor legitimate over extramarital offspring, but his ultimate slap in the face to the Church was to authorize remarriage by divorcées.
Argentina, in hard economic times, would always fall back on its feudal Spanish past: The cursi pretensions of an insecure, never-quite-Europeanized middle class, the machismo inherited from Mediterranean grandfathers and fostered by the harsh life of the pampas, and the colonial overlay of British decorum produced a stifling society, one that valued elegant facades and proper appearances more than civil liberties. Up until the late forties and even fifties, when Perón's shirtless workers movement marked a new populist era, men were obliged by law to wear jackets in public places, and could be fined if they appeared in their shirtsleeves.
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| La Boca, southside barrio of Buenos Aires |
La Boca, the traditional southside barrio [of Buenos Aires] on the western bank of the mouth of the river . . . was the barrio of sin, where the tango had originated as an obscene sexual rite which only guapos, tough guys, could dance in public; a barrio of compadres, or gangsters, Italian pederasts and prostitutes, putos and putas from all over Europe, often Polish or Jewish, but also always associated with Italian gangsters . . . the ships entering and leaving port, the bustle of people, the colorful tenements with clothes hanging out the windows, the gulls screaming, the flea market in San Telmo, vendors hawking their wares, the old cobblestoned streets and dark winding staircases, the noises of ship horns and buses, the foul smells of the big muddy river.
