Eva Perón’s rise in Peronist Politics and Argentine culture during the 1950s and the 1960s

Abstract

This article studies the pathway of Eva Perón’s figure in Argentine culture  during the period that goes from the early commemorations of her death, organized by the Peronist state initiative, to the time of larger impact in other spheres of Argentinian culture, by the second half of the 1960’s. In the first place, the article analyses the survival and the changes that those homages experienced since Peronist government downfall in 1955, when the tributes were carried out by different Peronist actors, and later when the purposes and shapes of the funerals became more diverse, with an increasingly defiant political significance. In the second place, the article analyzes the features of Eva Perón that were rescued in those rituals, with the aim of understanding the varied circumstances, demands and specific memories and actors to whom those appropriations were related. At the end, the article considers the publishing and press markets as one of the contexts of production and circulation of meanings about Eva Perón. The article states that those fields became a privileged space where a new revolutionary figure of Eva Perón emerged, inside the contentious modernization process, which took place during the Argentinian sixties.