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| "Portrait of Argentine Actress Eva Duarte" (later Eva Perón) by Annemarie Heinrich. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain. |
Currently I'm reading this biography of Eva Perón, Evita: The Life of Eva Perón by Jill Hedges, which is really very good, painting a more more nuanced portrait of Evita than you might get from other sources (such as musicals), but not shirking from her stridency, score-settling, and authoritarian tendencies either.
There is lots to recommend the book--it is thoughtful, sympathetic but clear-eyed, well written and well researched. But for now I want to focus on my favorite anecdote so far, one that brings into glorious flower (or do I mean feather?) the Peróns' mid-20th-century pro-level trolling. This anecdote has both a literary connection (Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges) and a library connection (Borges worked as a librarian for a time during the Perón era and then immediately afterwards, too).
Apparently, during the Perón era, Borges made many ugly public and private statements about
Eva's origins--as did many Argentinians on the right, left, and center. If you were shocked how mean people, pundits, and politicos were to Hillary Clinton as a woman in power, really, you will fall to the floor in a faint when you read stories about the vitriol directed at Eva.
Eva Perón's origins were indeed poor, murky, and humble--one of five children born out of wedlock, her mother, Juana Ibarguren, was the paramour of Juan Duarte, an Argentine landowner and rancher who had another, legal family. By all accounts, he kept Eva's family to the side and never really provided for them in a significant way, especially not after his death.
Imagine growing up like that--fatherless, shunned, hungry, treated like trash, your mother working constantly to provide for five young children. Imagine how hungry for justice, sincere kindness, and social acceptance that you would feel as an adult.
Then imagine having to hear famed author Jorge Luis Borges, a man in the 1940s with an international literary reputation, a man of the oligarchy, claim--based on no evidence then or now--that your mother at one point ran a brothel and that you and her sisters were prostitutes in said brothel for a time.
Hedges argues that it was likely quite the opposite, that Eva's mother worked hard, overcompensated, and raised her children to be as good, clean, and proper as possible so that they would not be tarnished for life by their illegitimacy and poverty.
Borges kept telling these tales throughout his life, including (and especially) when Eva and Juan were in power in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Coincidentally, in those days Borges had a government or quasi-government job as a librarian in Buenos Aires. Of the good, the bad, and the indifferent that the Peróns did during their reign, they tended to practice "clientelism," awarding the spoils of war--i.e., government jobs--to their supporters, poor, middle class, and wealthy.
Borges was not one of those supporters, obviously. So they offered him a "promotion": A plum position as an inspector for poultry and rabbits at the Buenos Aires municipal market.
I don't know if he took the job, but he likely wasn't happy about the offer. I imagine that he thought his privilege would excuse his being a jerk but surprise! No.
I do know that there are a number of librarians I've worked with that, if I were in charge, I would promote to poultry inspector in a heartbeat. Who knows? They might be good at it, better than they were as librarians, colleagues, and human beings, but I fear incidents of salmonella and bird flu would skyrocket during their tenure, nonetheless.
All's well that ends well, I guess: When Perón was ousted, Borges became head of la Biblioteca Nacional de la Argentina, the Argentine national library. Years later, he still repeated those stories and continued to display his right-wing, oligarchic street cred as a big supporter of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Maybe a little more time in the chicken coop, stepping around and through all that chicken shit, would have adjusted Borges' attitude some. But probably not.
Eva Perón's origins were indeed poor, murky, and humble--one of five children born out of wedlock, her mother, Juana Ibarguren, was the paramour of Juan Duarte, an Argentine landowner and rancher who had another, legal family. By all accounts, he kept Eva's family to the side and never really provided for them in a significant way, especially not after his death.
Imagine growing up like that--fatherless, shunned, hungry, treated like trash, your mother working constantly to provide for five young children. Imagine how hungry for justice, sincere kindness, and social acceptance that you would feel as an adult.
Then imagine having to hear famed author Jorge Luis Borges, a man in the 1940s with an international literary reputation, a man of the oligarchy, claim--based on no evidence then or now--that your mother at one point ran a brothel and that you and her sisters were prostitutes in said brothel for a time.
Hedges argues that it was likely quite the opposite, that Eva's mother worked hard, overcompensated, and raised her children to be as good, clean, and proper as possible so that they would not be tarnished for life by their illegitimacy and poverty.
Borges kept telling these tales throughout his life, including (and especially) when Eva and Juan were in power in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Coincidentally, in those days Borges had a government or quasi-government job as a librarian in Buenos Aires. Of the good, the bad, and the indifferent that the Peróns did during their reign, they tended to practice "clientelism," awarding the spoils of war--i.e., government jobs--to their supporters, poor, middle class, and wealthy.
Borges was not one of those supporters, obviously. So they offered him a "promotion": A plum position as an inspector for poultry and rabbits at the Buenos Aires municipal market.
I don't know if he took the job, but he likely wasn't happy about the offer. I imagine that he thought his privilege would excuse his being a jerk but surprise! No.
I do know that there are a number of librarians I've worked with that, if I were in charge, I would promote to poultry inspector in a heartbeat. Who knows? They might be good at it, better than they were as librarians, colleagues, and human beings, but I fear incidents of salmonella and bird flu would skyrocket during their tenure, nonetheless.
All's well that ends well, I guess: When Perón was ousted, Borges became head of la Biblioteca Nacional de la Argentina, the Argentine national library. Years later, he still repeated those stories and continued to display his right-wing, oligarchic street cred as a big supporter of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Maybe a little more time in the chicken coop, stepping around and through all that chicken shit, would have adjusted Borges' attitude some. But probably not.
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