My story's quite usual, local girl makes good, weds famous man
I was slap in the right place at the perfect time
Filled a gap--I was lucky
But one thing I'll say for me
No one else can fill it like I can.
--Evita

Argentina--Land of Silver?

The fierce pride of the Argentine people has survived intact from the Spanish conquistadores who settled the area nearly five centuries ago. Death and disappointment marred those early days, from the time Juan Diaz Solís anchored on the banks of the Rio de la Plata and was killed and eaten by Indians. His crew fled, but took with them a legend about a great mountain of silver at the source of the river.

The rush was on, with waves of explorers and fortune hunters descending on the Plata area, named for its nonexistent silver. They died in large numbers, from the harshness of the land, at the hands of vicious Indians who were determined to retain possession of the area, and from disease. When the gold in Peru became accessible in the 1530s, Spain transferred her interest to rhe oonquersd Incas· and Argentina was of only secondary importance as a colony. Her riches were not the riches Spain wanted.

Despite this, Spain ruled the La Plata area with an iron hand, setting up what amounted to feudal lords with absolute power over the people in their settlements. These despots were eventually replaced by salaried governors, but the colonies were kept in a position of total dependency.

The La Plata colonists left Spain in search of wealth, but not because of political persecution or overcrowding, so there was no real incentive for them to create a system of laws or policies designed to fit their particular circumstances, as would be done in the North American colonies in the 17th century. The governors did their tours of duty and went home, and the colonies did not develop a spirit independent of Spain.

On the contrary, Spain did everything possible to stifle local production, local government, and the creation of anything which would threaten her markets in the New World. Life consisted of planting, harvesting, and fighting the Indians. Peon and adelantado worked side by side on the frontier, but this spirit of democracy would not last long in the Spanish Colonies.

As laws were passed and government became more formalized, the lines of class distinction were carefully drawn. Only sons of the Spanish conquistadores were allowed to own land or horses, and they had the only rights and privileges in the courts. The creole population was larger than the pure Spanish, but they were kept in line by Spanish troops.

Buenos Aires, with her fine natural port, was the obvious choice for a population center, but it was the most difficult area to settle. Fierce battles with the Indians necessitated the abandoning of the colony once, and it had to be founded a second time when the Spaniards finally routed the native population. The rivers were not used to spread a contiguous frontier, as happened in North America, and the colonies were scattered all over the interior, making central administration difficult.

Buenos Aires was always the center for all arrivals and departures, imports and exports, for the entire southern half of the continent. With the creation of a customs house in 1779, Buenos Aires gained a monopoly on all port revenues.

This is why there have always been "two Argentinas" with the port and the interior pitted against each other. The porteños and the campesinos differ in their speech, manner of dress, customs, and politics. There were two more groups completely without representation, the gauchos and the Indians. Gauchos generally resisted all attempts to integrate them into any administrative center. The Indians were pushed further and further south in a series of wars which all but eliminated them.

The British attempted to conquer La Plata in 1806 and 1807. The colonists repelled the first invaders in eight weeks, but the threat was clear. They quadrupled the size of their military and threw a corrupt government out. The colonists managed to repell all further attacks.

Then on May 13, 1810, news reached Buenos Aires that Seville had fallen to the French. This forced a revolutionary spirit to the surface, and a young group of patriots demanded another new government. Denied, the incensed the patriots gathered in the plaza outside congress on May 25th, standing in the rain waiting for something to be done. This huge, vocal and passionate group forced the congress to surrender, and a true junta was born. Legend has it that the sun broke through the clouds as the announcement was made, and two patriots wearing blue and white ribbons threw their caps in the air as they shook hands. This is the inspiration for the great seal of Argentina: two hands clasped around a staff surmounted by a rebel cap against a blue and white field crowned by a rising sun.

Emancipation created new problems of national organization and the next forty years were filled with internal upheval, civil war, and the inability of the founding fathers to set any national policies or draft a constitution. The republic’s name, Argentina, was first used when a national anthem was composed in 1813. This use of the Latin term for silver continued the great silver legend, but Argentina’s wealth truly lay in her land and her people.

An infusion of foreign capital began in 1824 when a British banking combine loaned the government one million pounds, taking public land as security. The loan was not repaid until 1894, tying up some of the best land in the country. This territory and a vast majority of the remaining land suitable for agriculture was thus leased and worked by tenant farmers who cared nothing for crop rotation or sophisticated farming methods. The land in private hands was leased, sub-leased, and sub-sub-leased. The owners were so happy with the escalating land prices that they were unconcerned with productivity.

Between 1822 and 1830, 538 men owned 20,000,000 acres, acquired by a combination of time and profession. Less restrictive ownership was instituted by dictator Juan Manual Rosas in the 1830s and an oligarchy of absentee landlords was created which exists to this day.

Perón’s Role Model

Until Perón, Rosas was Argentina’s most infamous example of a caudillo, a man who rules by the force of her personality. He was a unique individual who rose to power in the 1820s over the heads of the wealthy landowners.

Rosas was 27 when he entered national politics in 1820. At that time, the national government was on the verge of collapsing and Rosas brought his personal army of gauchos to the capital to smash the rising anarchy. He made sure everyone knew just who’d saved them and then headed back to the interior. Civil war continued and governments came and went during the next 15 years. At each crisis, Rosas was called to bring some peace to the seat of government Meanwhile, he was involved in the battle of the provinces to win representation in Buenos Aires.

This conflict split the country, with the Federalists demanding a centralized government and the Unitarians wanting strong localized governments with only general administration from the big city. The continuing state of anarchy forced both groups to unite and they called on the only man who had ever been able to put down civil strife--Rosas.

At first, Rosas was nominally governor only of the province of Buenos Aires, but he wanted a popular mandate as well, and called for elections in 1835. He won, and upheld the laws of the land for the first few years, but his penchant for resigning and being reelected convinced him that he could do exactly as he wanted.

Rosas began a reign of terror in 1840 that continued for 12 years and affected every phase of life in the country. Rosas and his wife kept a vast network of informers who spied on their fellow countrymen, and torture and execution were the rule of the day--at the dictator’s whim.

He even tried to invade neighboring Uruguay. This action threatened then entire territorial balance in South America, and a strong opposition led by General Justo Urquiza finally toppled Rosas in 1852, and the dictator fled the country.

The monumental task of nationalization began and a constitutional congress met and ratified the document still in force today on May 1, 1853, which proposed a federal, republican, representative government. Urquiza was elected president the following November and the Republic of Argentina began to assume shape as a nation.

The next 30 years were occupied with more peaceful tasks than Argentina had ever seen--building education, railroads, national institutions, public works, economic and judicial foundations. The 1880s were a time of prosperity, industrialization and growth. Immigration figures soared as new areas were made habitable by the deafeat of the Indians. New railroad networks opened up the interior, though they were an example of the stranglehold Buenos Aires had on the provinces.

The tracks were laid in a giant pattern of spokes with Buenos Aires as the hub and little was done to aid the development of major cities in the provinces. It was easy to move cattle or grain to the port city, but it was nearly impossible to get from one provincial city to another, unless each was in a direct line to the capital. The road system came much later, and was more designed to move people around the country.

The rule of the country by the wealthy, Conservative party ended in 1916, when the middle class in Buenos Aires elected chief of the Radical party, Hipólito Irigoyen, president. But that same middle class was made up almost entirely of immigrants. It wasn’t Argentines working their way up the social ladder, it was a group simply superimposed from the outside on top of the rich/poor traditional Argentine society.

Immigration and Industrialization

The peak years of immigation and world-wide industrialization had a tremendous impact on Argentina at the end of the 19th century. Little land was available for the immigrants, so they flooded the labor force in the burgeoning industrial sector, displacing many small industries which had traditionally been run by women.

Women had been important during the colonial period and records relate many instances of their bravery, courage and ingenuity in the trials of frontier life. They were vital to their communities, running the entire tobacco industry and controlling the manufacture and sale of bread, water, candles, soap, oil and textiles.

The women who managed to remain in the labor force during the initial years of immigation now found that they were working for subsistence wages in someone else’s shop. They were never allowed to fill a supervisory post, and were paid much less than a man doing the same work. Women were removed from the socially and economically active position they had held for two centuries and placed in positions of dependency. Those who did not work in the new industries were trapped in their homes and they lost day-to-day contact with their peers.

Women in Argentina

Industrialization fostered the beginnings of the feminist movement in Argentina, as it did elsewhere. The paternalistic Argentine men idealized women, but by the turn of the century, the only role models women had were in the oligarchy (the wealthy, landowning and ruling class), where a woman had the money to be a wife, mother, and genteel social butterfly. Middle and lower class women were increasingly forced to leave their homes in search of sufficient income to clothe and feed their familities. A woman working at home could also be a mother, but now there was little left in the way of home industry.

Argentine women were the most literate in South America, but the structure of the educational system and the subjects available for their study were all oriented toward training them for the traditional roles in the home--teaching elementary school, entering domestic service, and the like.

The male population tried to ignore the fact that the societal structure was changing. They saw the femists as troublemakers who were responsible for every ill plaguing the country from droughts to inflation.

Since a man might make four times the wages in Buenos Aires he could in the provinces, the whole interior was constantly drained of its youth. What remained were the great estancias and clusters of tiny mud huts around them, housing the peons. The wealthy owner of this vast land, the estanciero, spent most of the year in Buenos Aires and when he did come to their country estates, brought everything with him--clothing, food, servants and entertainment--and thus contributed nothing to the country seat, which became little more than small market towns, existing solely for the buying and selling of crops. There might be a small cafe and a few tiny shops, but little else.

Difficulties in transportation and the lack of fee simple land created an absence of community feeling on the pampas and life had a transient feeling. Common-law marriages often didn’t last from the planting until the harvest. The gauchos roaming the country never put down roots.

In 1919, there were only three cities in Argentina (other than Buenos Aires) which boasted populations greater than 30,000. The rest of the country lacked electricity and paved roads, stranding the average tenant farmer in his own hut with dirt floors and one room which housed both people and livestock.

The people of Argentina had always been ruled by a powerful minority and a middle class scarcely existed outside Buenos Aires. The oligarchy and the peons had little or no contact so the poor seemed to accept their fate and never sought a better life. Survival was an all-consuming task which occupied every waking hour.

A Nobody from Nowhere

Deep in the country, 150 miles west of Buenos Aires, the mayor of the little town of Chivilcoy had a brother-in-law, Juan Duarte, who was active in local politics and owned a little land. Duarte also indulged in a practice common to men of his standing--he kept a mistress.

Juana Ibarguren had caught his eye in Chivilcoy, but a more permanent arrangement wasn’t possible until he was sent to manage a large ranch outside a small town 40 miles away. The district was called Los Toldos ("the tents") after an Indian emcampment built there during the frontier wars of the 1880s.

So Juan and Juana set up housekeeping at the ranch and though Duarte was only there part time, he was evidently a personable and popular man who won a seat on the Los Toldos district council. Unlike his brother-in-law, he survived the political party change from Conservative to Radical in 1916. His farm prospered and he and Juana had a growing family: Bianca was born in 1908, Juana Elisa in 1910, Juan Ramón in 1914 and Erminda Luján in 1916. Eva María was born on the ranch in the early hours of May 7, 1919.

Though the society of the small pueblo never accepted this large, illegitimate brood, the problem seems to have been accelerated when Estela Grisolía de Duarte and her children would come stay at the rancho. Juan Duarte would then pack up Juana and the kids and hide them in the nearest town, a village called General Viamonte, until Sra. Duarte went back to Chivilcoy.

Duarte’s insensitivity in this matter is a reflection of his general attitude toward his mistress and her children. He spent less and less time with them as the years went on, but he was evidently a good father when he was there and things were going well for him. But he enjoyed socializing with his chums more than he enjoyed working, and his mismanagement of the ranch would have serious consequences.

It was Juana who taught the children a few traditional social values and she was the one most hurt by the social ostracism. Around the time Erminda was born, in 1916, Duarte’s fortunes began to falter. He was forced to give up one ranch he had rented and many of his laborers. Several years of drought compounded the problem, and Duarte found it convenient to be in Chivilcoy most of the time. He lost the Los Toldos ranch about the time Eva was born.

It was raining that night when the local Indian midwife came to assist Juana in the early winter’s dawn and mother and child were moved to a one-room house in General Viamonte several days later. Men who worked for Duarte remember that he left the area permanently around this time, so it seems Eva had few, if any, memories of her father. Duarte was not in Los Toldos for either Eva’s birth or christening. There was some disagreement about Eva’s name and parentage, because Juana was forced to baptize her last child Eva María Ibarguren, though her four siblings had been legally acknowledged and used the name Duarte.

Juana was pretty, well-mannered and very attentive to her children, dominating their family life. She had taken in sewing when Duarte left them, and she took special pride in dressing them as well as she could and making sure they were well groomed. She held onto her pride and composure in the face of snubs by mothers who would not let their offspring play with the Duarte children. There was further animosity when several of Juan’s friends helped the family in small ways, one getting Elisa a job in the post office. Blanca was in school, studying to be a teacher, while the others helped with the sewing Juana took in.

On January 8, 1926, Juan Duarte became the first traffic fatality in Argentina when his car was forced onto the road shoulder and rolled over, killing him. Juana dressed the children in their best and took them to Chivilcoy to pay their respects. Funerals in Argentina are high in religious and cultural significance and are rigid exhibitions of the deceased’s social and financial position. Estela could not have allowed the participation of her husband’s "second family" in this formal event, and barred them from the service. However, her brother took pity on them and arranged for Juana and her children to view the body in private after the service and trail along at the end of the procession to the burial.

Several of her biographers have wondered why Eva was so resentful of her early life when her brother and sisters were not, but her childhood was actually quite different from theirs. The three oldest children had memories of food on the table, happy family gatherings with both mother and father, and a large ranch to play on. Eva had little of this and was even denied Duarte’s name, though there seems no reason for this. Eva’s resemblance to her sister Erminda is so startling, it seems impossible they had different fathers. Yet, she was rejected from the beginning.

Even in her propagandist biography published to support Juan Perón’s triumphant return to Argentina in 1972, Erminda acknowledged the hand of fate in their lives, writing (as if to Eva) "Your childhood and mine were different in most ways. Different even from Juan’s. The problem of subsistence created a constant day-to-day burden."

Erminda’s veiled allusion to the true situation in a book which otherwise pretties up their lives is a rare, first-hand look into this period. The truth about the Duarte family life will never be known, since by 1945, Eva had destroyed all records of the past so that she could rise again, reborn, to take her place on the stage of Argentine politics.

Eva began school in 1927 in General Viamonte, one year late because of the death of her father and the resulting financial crisis. Schools in Argentina require their students to wear uniforms and shoes and Juana was probably hard-pressed to supply these for her youngest child. Eva was sickly and missed 48 days of school that year, though her grades were fairly good. The next year she was ill even more often and an additional blow fell when her grandmother, Petrona Núñez, died in 1927. Eva did so poorly that year she was forced to repeat the second grade, this time earning excellent marks in an ambitious variety of subjects including geography, geology, physics and botany. Her strongest subjects were music and sewing and Eva always received the highest marks for conduct.

Eva’s classmates and teachers remember her as a well-behaved child, unusually quiet and withdrawn except for flashes of anger. Her reticence is easy to understand; she had no father and had been branded as a bastard. It must have been simpler to be as inconspicuous as possible and avoid confrontations with those who could hurt her. Her anger, however, once raised, could smolder until it finally exploded.

Women were still dependent upon men for everything in 1920s Argentina, though a law had been passed giving them equal civil status with men. To get this, though, they had to go to court and demand it.

The worldwide depression was felt in Argentina by the end of 1930, and the Conservatives forced the Radicals out of office. Gen. José Uriburu led a provisional government of oligarchs in an uneasy alliance with the military. They declared a 1931 provincial election null and void when a group of Radicals won office, and they staged a highly fraudulent national election a few months later which made Agustín P. Justo the president.

The town of General Viamonte had become an impossible place for the Duartes to live. Young Juan was constantly in fights when he heard sllurs against his sisters, and Juana’s Radical friends were no longer in a position to help the family. Elisa lost her job in the post office. Juana negotiated a transfer for her to the post office in Junín, a city of 30,000, some 50 miles east.

This was a wonderful opportunity for the whole family to get out of the oppressive atmosphere of General Viamonte, and Juana rented a truck and moved her children away from the gossip and bitter memories. She now called herself the "widow Duarte" and there was no one in Junín to contradict her. She supported them by sewing and cooking and then started a boarding house on San Martín Street; Elisa was working, Blanca was going to high school, Juan got a job working for a household products firm and Erminda and Eva helped out at home.

The boarding house on San Martín St. has excited a lot of controversy over the years. Most of Eva’s detractors insisted it was nothing more than a brothel, but there is no evidence that it was any more than a place where paying guests--single men with no female relatives to cook for them--could take their meals. "Boarding" in Argentina meant just that, not room and board as it generally means in North America. Juana and the children cooked and ate in the kitchen while their boarders ate in the front room. The men who patronized Juana’s house were all respectable professional men who lived nearby. In addition, the Duarte women were all exceptionally attractive. Finding good husbands for them wouldn't have been difficult.

However, Juana was never one to miss an opportunity, and fostered romances between these bachelors and her daughters, but it was all properly done. Elisa married a local military man, Lucas Arrieta, and Blanca made a very good match with a lawyer, Lucas Rodríguez, and life in Junín seemed to be enough for them.

Eva’s life was normal for the first time and she blossomed a bit, acting in school plays, going to the movies and swooning over Norma Shearer and Tyrone Power. Juan tended to look after his youngest sister, though he had a reputation as a local lothario and was spoiled rotten. Eva might have been impressed by the marriages her sisters made, but when Erminda married a local elevator operator, Eva decided it was time to get out of Junín, where there was little future for her except the conventional one of marriage and children.

Bright Lights, Big City

Juan and Eva set their sights on a wider horizon and were aching to go to Buenos Aires. At 15, Eva had no training for any career, but she was tough and determined enough to risk everything in order to avoid the sort of life her mother lived and she decided she would be an actress.

Eva was tough, choosing to rebel against the rigid social structure and patriarchal society of Roman Catholic Argentina, where women were still unable to vote, own property or have personal bank accounts. A "nice" woman still did not go into a public place with a man who was not directly related to her. Because of Juana’s traditional upbringing, Eva must have felt some qualms about flouting these conventions, which is probably why she went to such great lengths later to cover up her past.

The personal tragedies and privations of her young life could never be obliterated from her mind, though, and Eva always tried to compensate herself by surrounding herself with luxury. Cowed by the oligarchy, few Argentines who suffered as she did dared to challenge the system. Few believed that it could be challenged, or that they could escape from the life of squalor they had been born to.

Before Eva could be an actress, she had to get out of Junín. Tango singers were idolized and the prevailing story is that Agustín Magaldi was performing there on tour and Juan helped Eva maneuver herself into Magaldi’s dressing room, and she convinced him to escort her to the capital city. Recent research shows no records of Magaldi or any other tango singer playing there at the time. Several people have reported that Eva by herself, or possibly with her brother, was put on the train by Juana, and sent off. Eva's sister Blanca says, in the family's official website newsletter, that Juan had been drafted into the army and was already in Buenos Aires when Juana took Eva there. In any event, she arrived in Buenos Aires on January 3, 1935, and moved into a lodging house recommended by a friend of her mother.

The drive and determination were prominent in her 15-year-old eyes, and it took sheer guts for Eva to survive the next few years in a strange city. Buenos Aires was filled with poverty but also with Paris shops, traffic, noise, exclusive clubs, theatres and cinemas. Eva made the rounds endlessly and got tiny parts in stage productions fairly regularly. This conspicuous lack of success did not deter her, and she never ran home when things got really bad. Eva’s dogged determination eventually paid off, bringing her all the things she wanted, but the price was high.

Go to: Chapter 2. EVA DUARTE (1935-1943)

Bibliography



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Text© 1980, 1999 by Sylvia Stoddard