“Mis queridos descamisados” a.k.a “María Eva Duarte de Perón” a.k.a “Evita”

If you’ve ever seen the Madonna and Antonio Banderas movie and wondered at the scene where the First Lady dances a tango with the revolutionary, let me make one thing clear: this did not happen in real life, in fact there’s no evidence that the two ever even met. So what’s the deal with this blonde Madonna (the Virgin, not the one with the boy-toy) that many Argentines seem to worship? The movie actually did a good job at portraying how people felt about her: you either loved her, or you hated her. If you go to the Recoleta cemetery and see her tomb, you will notice there are fresh flowers every day, for even though more than fifty years have passed since her death, her memory still has a firm hold on the hearts of many.
    Brief history: “she was born out of wedlock in 1919 and moved in 1934, at the tender age of 15, to Buenos Aires in the hopes of becoming an actress. She met Colonel Juan Perón in 1944 and the two were married the following year. In 1946 Perón was elected President of Argentina, and over the next six years she became powerful within the pro-Peronist trade unions, speaking on behalf of labour rights.” Once again Wikipedia has come to my rescue and smartly summed things up.
    Obviously I wasn’t around during Evita’s time (remember, I am a ‘pendejo’), but my grandparents and many people I know were. My grandmother told me once about how when Eva died, she was a schoolgirl in the province of Corrientes, and she and the rest of her classmates were forced to walk around an empty casket (symbolizing Eva’s body) in silence. Try and picture it: a bunch of 15-year-old girls walking around an empty box with a ‘what-the-fuck?’ look on their faces, compelled by officials to mourn for someone probably irrelevant to their adolescent lives when time was better spent day-dreaming about Cary Grant and Gregory Peck. My grandmother came from a family of land-owners in the northern province, so of course she was going to be biased against Evita, since, arguably, the working class saw her as this peroxide-angel coming to champion for their rights and represent their interests, while on the other hand the middle and upper classes saw in her a ruthless and bitter uber-bitch desperate to climb the social ranks and destroy them for not inviting her to their country-club tea-parties. You’d think the two views are totally conflicting, but I feel it would be safe to say both views have some truth in them. I wouldn’t be able to undermine all her charity work, and her fight for women’s suffrage and the amounts of schools and hospitals she opened and discard them as merely strategy by a manipulative genius intent on brainwashing the masses, but I also have to admit that her clear-cut dispatching of any and all that stood in her way has a bitter taste of the ‘facho’ about it.
    Some have called our beloved (not) current president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the modern Evita, but I think this is total bullshit since Evita did not look like a crack-whore and did not deserve to be the poster-child for warning against plastic surgeries gone wrong, and I think this bitch (Cristina) is pure evil, but hey, that’s just my humble opinion.
    So yeah, Evita is a divisive and delicate subject, but you shouldn’t be afraid of talking about her, she’s not a taboo like the-islands-that-must-not-be-named, but one should always tread carefully and respectfully around the topic of the actress-turned-martyr. Her life was cut short at the age of 33 in 1952, and one can only wonder at how differently Argentina might have turned out had she continued in power. Or, she might have been lucky to kick the bucket early as three years later, in 1955, a military coup overthrew Perón’s regime and the widower had to haul his ass out of the country ‘a los pedos’. Three years of military dictatorship followed, and another one from 1966 to 1973 and finally the infamous one from 1976 until 1983, but this is the subject for another post.
    To my ‘descamisados’ and ‘descamisadas’, don’t cry for me
    El Pendejo Porteño
PS: ‘Descamisados’ was the pejorative term used by the elite to name the followers of Perón, but the origin of the word is still debated, and some say it meant those who were too poor to afford shirts while others say it was used because a couple of Perón groupies were waiting for him to be released from prison on a hot summer day and took their shirts off. During Perón and Evita’s regime the word was adopted by them as something to be proud about, like ‘yeah, I don’t have a shirt, so what? I’m too cool to wear a shirt. I’m a peronista!’. Again, Wikipedia, I thank and salute you.