Evita

The Life of Eva Perón

Jill Hedges

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784533274
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786720238
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Eva Perón remains Argentina's best-known and most iconic personality, surpassing even sporting superstars such as Diego Maradona or Lionel Messi, and far outlasting her own husband, President Juan Domingo Perón - himself a remarkable and charismatic political leader without whom she, as an uneducated woman in an elitist and male-dominated society, could not have existed as a political figure. In this book, Jill Hedges tells the story of a remarkable woman whose glamour, charisma, political influence and controversial nature continue to generate huge amounts interest 60 years after her death. From her poverty-stricken upbringing as an illegitimate child in rural Argentina, Perón made her way to the highest echelons of Argentinean society, via a brief acting career and her relationship with Juan. After their political breakthrough, her charitable work and magnetic personality earned her wide public acclaim and there was national mourning following her death from cancer at the age of just 33. Based on new sources and first-hand interviews, the book will seek to explore the personality and experiences of 'Evita' and the contemporary events that influenced her and were in turn influenced by her. As the first substantive biography of Eva Perón in English, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern Argentinean history and the cult of 'Evita'.

CHAPTER 1

Los Toldos

Y pienso en la vida,	[And I think of life,
Las madres que sufren,	The mothers who suffer
Los chicos que vagan	The children who wander
sin techo y sin pan,	With no roof and no bread,
Vendiendo La Prensa,	Selling the newspaper,
Ganando dos guitas…	Earning two cents...
Qué triste es todo esto,	How sad it all is,
Quisiera llorar!	I feel like crying!]

(Acquaforte; tango, Marambio Catán and Horacio Pettorossi, recorded by Agustín Magaldi in 1932)

THE TOWN OF Los Toldos (‘the tents’), some 300 kilometres from the city of Buenos Aires, was originally settled in 1862 by a Mapuche tribe led by Don Ignacio Coliqueo, an ally of newly elected President Bartolomé Mitre, who as a general had succeeded in uniting the Argentine Republic following the 1860 Battle of Pavón. The current town, with a population of close to 15,000 in 2010, was re-founded in 1892, and its official name was changed to General Viamonte after it became the seat of the newly created county of that name. The town now boasts two attractions for visitors: the house that is the purported ‘birthplace’ (and now the museum) of Eva Perón, and a monument to its most famous native daughter, inaugurated in 2011. This in a town that held her and her family in contempt and that she never visited after ‘escaping’ to the city of Junín in 1930.

While Los Toldos, like most small towns isolated across the Pampas, has limited public entertainments, the options on offer in the early years of the twentieth century were even more reduced, and focused on the church and gossip about the neighbours. The famous tango singer Carlos Gardel, then a little-known folkloric artist, appeared in Los Toldos in September 1913 with his then singing partner, José Razzano, described in the local press as ‘a delightful and agreeable evening’.¹ Other struggling troupes crossing the Pampas undoubtedly also visited Los Toldos, but such delightful and agreeable evenings must have been the exception rather than the norm. The Pampas itself, a vast, flat, unvarying expanse that stretches for miles, with an infinite horizon, represented a virtual barrier to the world: small towns like Los Toldos sat in the middle of that vastness, with roads often cut off by flooding, no electric light and nothing but the vast sky at night. Life in such a place was nothing if not a reminder of one’s insignificance; even today, with electricity and paved roads, the sense of isolation is remarkable.

Even more isolated than Los Toldos was the nearby estancia (ranch) of La Unión, administered for the Malcolm family by Juan Duarte (who according to some reports in fact bought the property), a solid citizen of the larger town of Chivilcoy some 150 kilometres distant. Duarte (originally Duhart, of French Basque descent) was born in 1858 and married to the respectable Adela Uhart, with whom he had eight surviving children: María, Adelina, Catalina, Juan, Pedro, Magdalena, Eloísa and Susana Elvira. Duarte, a local political operator who gained influence through relations with local conservative politicians (becoming a justice of the peace in 1908), would take with him to La Unión, in 1908, an 18-year-old girl from Los Toldos, Juana Ibarguren, to act as cook there, while his wife remained in Chivilcoy with his legitimate family. This was far from an unusual arrangement at the time and, whether she was aware of her husband’s parallel family or not, Adela would most likely not have been shocked, or prepared to make a scene, over the existence of a mistress as long as she was kept at a distance and out of sight, away from the legitimate family and social circle. However, while the contemporary understanding of ‘men’s needs’ meant that the situation was not uncommon, social norms were harsh for those second families, who were regarded largely as non-persons to be shunned by ‘decent’ people. This despite the fact that around a third of all children born in Argentina at the time were illegitimate.

Juana (later to be known invariably as ‘Doña Juana’) was the daughter of a Basque carter, Joaquín Ibarguren, and the local woman Petrona Núñez (herself also apparently an illegitimate child). Despite being ‘white’, and therefore socially less marginal than the Indians of the village, the Núñez family reportedly lived on the edge of Los Toldos and were not considered acceptable to even poor polite society. According to some later accounts, Juana’s mother ‘sold’ her to Duarte in exchange for a horse and buggy.² If true, this would seem to be an extremely high price for a young woman of marginal family in those times, although the story would later be used to humiliate her offspring. According to her nephew many years later, Juana was the only young woman brave enough to take up the offer of work at La Unión, alone with the overseer and the workmen.³

Whatever the case, Juana and Juan would soon form a closer relationship, which would lead to the birth of five children: Blanca (born in 1908), Elisa (1909), Juan (1914), Erminda (1916) and Eva María (1919). Whether the decision to form such a relationship with her boss was due to genuine affection, necessity or the protection it provided against the attentions of his workforce, it was an enduring one and lasted until around 1922. Juana’s nephew later attributed the prolific nature of the relationship loosely to the fact that ‘there was no television in those days’. Although amusing, the comment does contain considerable truth: with perhaps no electricity, no radio, no near neighbours, life at La Unión must have consisted largely of work, food and sleep, doubtless punctuated by drink, cards and perhaps cock-fighting for the ranch workers. In keeping with Duarte’s political ambitions, convivial nature and pretentions of importance, he appears to have opened La Unión to offer food and drink to the local gauchos and other residents, creating further work for his cook and mother of his numerous children.

Although no birth certificate is extant (first Eva herself and then the dictatorship that overthrew Perón in 1955 would destroy documents and historical records), Eva María was born on 7 May 1919 at La Unión, where her mother was attended by an Indian midwife. Eva would be the last of their five children, and there are rumours that Duarte questioned her paternity, as he recognised the first four children but not Eva. Whether the paternity issue is the case or not, it can only be said that she bore a strong resemblance to her siblings and to Duarte himself. Eva was registered as Eva María Ibarguren and, like Erminda, baptised on 21 November of that year in Los Toldos. However, documentation would later be removed; at the time of her marriage to Perón in 1945 a forged birth certificate appeared, stating that María Eva (not Eva María) Duarte had been born on 5 July 1922, daughter of the married couple Juan Duarte and Juana Ibarguren de Duarte – an attempt to conceal the fact of her illegitimacy and demonstrate that her parents had been legally wed. The date would appear to coincide with the birth certificate of a child who had died as a baby and whose birth certificate was ‘replaced’ by the false record of Eva’s birth. However, the year reflects the fact that Duarte was by 1922 a widower, Adela having died in 1919, and could plausibly have remarried.

Within a short time, Duarte would return to Chivilcoy, leaving his second family behind. Again, the reasons are disputed: some say that La Unión was no longer profitable, or even that Duarte was dismissed by the Malcolm family, while others attribute the return to Chivilcoy to the fact that Duarte had lost political influence with the decline of the conservative powerbrokers to whom he was attached following the rise of the Radical Party and the election of President Hipólito Yrigoyen in 1916. Most likely, the return related to the death of Adela.

With the loss of both her protector and her employment, Doña Juana returned to Los Toldos with her ‘tribe’ of five, where they faced not only poverty but the stigma of their illegitimacy. A small and isolated, and hidebound, community of around 3,000, Los Toldos and its residents were largely poor, as Eva would note years later (‘in the place where I spent my childhood the poor were much more numerous than the rich’⁴). Few had electricity or a radio, although the state Radio Nacional began broadcasting in 1924 and it was common in those years for companies to send trucks with loudspeakers to broadcast in the plazas of such places as Los Toldos, offering an interval of entertainment beyond that of local gossip. ‘Small town, large hell’ is still a common Argentine phrase today. The means of stratifying society included seeking to define oneself as ‘better’ than one’s neighbours (whose business was one of the few sources of interest beyond the home), despite having no evident economic, cultural or ethnic ‘advantages’.

The Duarte/Ibarguren children provided a convenient target, although their poverty and living conditions were no worse than those of most of their neighbours. Not only illegitimate (or ‘natural’) children in the sense that their parents were not married, they were also ‘children of adultery’ (or bastards), the lowest rung. This distinction would persist for years to come. ‘Natural’ children were common among the poor, who often did not marry; those who aspired to the middle class sought to imitate the mores of the aristocracy (or oligarchy, in the Peronist vocabulary) and normally contracted respectable matrimony, even if in other respects their lives may have differed relatively little from their ‘social inferiors’.

The indomitable Doña Juana, still eye-catching and proud, was widely rumoured to have found herself other ‘protectors’ in short order (who purportedly provided useful but somewhat undignified services like supplying the family with chickens). Whether or not this is true, she would appear to have used the connections to gain work, rather than to live as a ‘kept woman’. After taking a course in dressmaking at the local technical school, Juana began to earn her living by sewing, gaining the concession to provide the smocks worn by all schoolchildren. Although the long hours at her sewing machine left Doña Juana exhausted and with varicose veins, she would refuse to rest even on the doctor’s advice, insisting that she ‘did not have time’ given the family that depended on her – a phrase that would be repeated endlessly by Eva later in her life as she struggled to work at a frenzied pace despite her advancing illness.

The sewing machine allowed Doña Juana to rent a two-room house (literally) on the wrong side of the tracks and to keep her children fed and clothed – indeed, they were said to be better and more cleanly dressed than their schoolmates, although they wore canvas, rope-soled alpargatas rather than leather shoes, and clothes handed down from older siblings. The house was small and mean, but made of brick rather than the metal sheets and cardboard that would become common in shantytowns later, and food was sufficiently cheap to ensure that the family did not actually suffer hunger. Having worked as a cook for over a decade at La Unión, Juana unquestionably knew how to prepare fairly abundant meals for large numbers from cheap raw materials, and stews and meat pies (puchero and empanadas) would have sufficed for basic needs. As late as 1938, a report by the director of the Labour Department would note that children in the north of Argentina ‘who do not die in their first months, begin their development in deficient conditions […] when the mother cannot feed them and receives no assistance from the state.’⁵ Doña Juana’s children were not in that situation.

Significantly, Juana made sure to provide for her children herself, rather than seeking charity from the ‘beneficent societies’ of the better-off, which would have implied accepting humiliation together with alms – something that would underlie Eva’s later obsession with ‘social justice’ (‘alms for me were always a pleasure of the rich: the soulless pleasure of exciting the desire of the poor without ever satisfying it […] For me alms and charity are the ostentation of wealth and power to humiliate the poor.’⁶). Nor was the ‘welfare state’ even a distant dream at the time; state institutions were not in place for the benefit of the poor, who were left to their own devices and to their own family networks for support.

However, luxuries were not the order of the day: Erminda, writing many years later, recalled that little Eva had yearned for a doll for Christmas, and that the only doll her mother could buy was cheap because its leg was broken. Juana explained that the doll had fallen from the camel of one of the Three Kings and hurt herself, and that they had left her for Eva to look after. According to Erminda, Eva loved the doll to desperation and looked after her like an invalid.⁷ On another occasion, when she was four, Eva overturned the pan of hot oil with which her mother was cooking onto herself, burning her face black until the scab fell away to reveal the ivory skin she retained.⁸ Her bravery on this occasion, like her love for the mutilated doll, are cited as giving an insight into her future obsession with helping the afflicted and her courage in the face of her final illness. While too much can be read into this, there is no doubting her courage or the empathy she gained for the poor in the course of her difficult and sometimes harsh childhood. In her ghostwritten autobiography, years later Eva would refer to her ‘indignation when faced with injustice’:

I remember very well that I was sad for days when I discovered that in the world there were poor people and rich people; and the odd thing is it was not the existence of the poor that hurt me so much, but rather knowing that at the same time there were rich people.⁹

On 6 January 1926, Juan Duarte suffered an automobile accident in Chivilcoy (supposedly on his return from taking Epiphany gifts to Los Toldos), and died two days later. The funeral on 9 January possibly provided a key opportunity – one of many – for Eva to experience injustice at first hand, although the circumstances of the event have been over-dramatised. Determined that her children should have the opportunity to see their father for the last time, and perhaps to prove that their existence was as important as that of the lawful family, Doña Juana hired a car and driver and took her five children off to Chivilcoy, a not inconsiderable journey considering the state of both roads and vehicles at that time. As noted above, Duarte’s wife had predeceased him and the famous versions that have her ejecting her rival from the funeral are thus inaccurate. Indeed, some sources claim that the two families were acquainted and maintained ‘cordial relations’, although this seems somewhat unlikely given the circumstances and the geographical and social distance between them.¹⁰ However, the appearance of the mistress and the illegitimate offspring was not in line with the norms of social behaviour. Upon the intercession of a relative, the Ibargurens were allowed to kiss their father’s forehead for the last time, and allowed to walk behind t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Los Toldos
• Chapter 2 Junín
• Chapter 3 Buenos Aires
• Chapter 4 Radiolandia
• Chapter 5 Perón
• Chapter 6 Political Earthquake
• Chapter 7 Los Muchachos Peronistas
• Chapter 8 First Lady
• Chapter 9 Europe
• Chapter 10 Enter Evita
• Chapter 11 Las Muchachas Peronistas
• Chapter 12 The Foundation
• Chapter 13 Mortality
• Chapter 14 Immortality
• Chapter 15 Life After Death
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates