Spectacle and Suspicion:

A Brief Understanding of Evita Peróns My Message

&  Jorge Borges’s A Celebration of the Monster  

Evita Perón

Historical Context:

Wife of the Argentine President Juan Perón, served as the First Lady from 1946 until her early death in 1952.

• Champion of labor rights
• Women’s suffrage
• Widely admired by the masses (not without critics)
• My Message

 “Recently, in the hours of my illness, I have thought often of this message from heart. Perhaps because I didn’t manage to say all that I feel and think in My Mission in Life, I Have to write again…”

Perón’s My Message, reads as a sort of final provocation and political endorsement of her husband. She proclaims that she wants to, “incite the people” and “to ignite them with the fire of [her] heart”. (This brings into the forefront the “masses” Borges is critical or suspicious of). She speaks passionately from the perspective as someone who came from poverty but alludes to the contradictions of the government systems she participates in.  “Everything that the cliques of men with whom I happened to live – as the wife of an extraordinary president—wanted to offer me, I accepted, with a smile, using my face to guard my heart. But smiling, in the middle of the face, I learned the truth of all their lies.” She speaks openly about the support of her husband while describing the misgivings the “cliques of men,” which leaves readers with a strange set of contradictions. The duality of her writing continues. “I can now say how much they lie, all that they deceive, everything they pretend, because I know men in their greatness and in their misery.”

Her choice of words throughout the piece as particularly interesting as it works to both include herself amongst the masses and somehow distances and contradicts herself. In her conclusion she offers an end to class struggle: To avoid a class struggle, I do not believe, as the Communists do, that we must kill all the oligarchs of the world. No.

The path is to convert all the oligarchs of the world and turn them into the people of our class and our race. How? By making them work in order to join the only class that Perón recognizes: the class of men who work.

However, she concludes: “Every exploiter is the people’s enemy. Justice demands that they be destroyed. “Her rhetoric here works simultaneously to promote the politics of her husband, while offering inconsistencies. Despite this, My Message is clearly an impassioned, nuanced, and informed by the historical contexts and conflicts. She clearly is in favour of the the power and strength of the masses. She states that “The Nation belongs to the people.”

A Celebration of the Monster

Jorge Borges

 Historical Context:Borges was an Argentine writer who laid the foundation for magical realist literature. He was also a critic of Juan Perón and his political ideologies. Laura Podalsky author of Specular City: Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, helped me better understand the relationship and history between these two texts: “In the late 1940s and early 1950s, authors likes Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Julio Cortazar, all penned short stories critiquing ‘unseemly’ public displays by the masses” (39). “One of the harshest anti-Peronist tracts was Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casare’s “La fiesta del monstruo”, which denounce the Peronists for their grotesque misappropriation of the capital city (40).