Abstract
Accounting for more than 50 percent of primary energy consumption, gas is used more extensively in Argentina than in the Netherlands, the United States, or the United Kingdom. However, the importance of natural gas in the everyday life of Argentines has a short history. In the early 1940s, almost all gas was coal gas provided by private companies that served only 200,000 customers, a minuscule group of clients in a country whose population was nearing 17 million by the end of that decade. But in 1947, Juan Domingo Perón's government (1946–55) undertook the construction of the first gas pipeline in the country and one of the longest in the world at that time. As a result, in the early 1950s, the number of gas consumers reached 700,000, and more than 70 percent of these consumed natural gas. This article examines the democratization of gas in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, a process marked by the state's active role in the sphere of production, the market, and the environment. The article demonstrates that the Peronist government transformed gas into a culturally meaningful object through a web of discourses and images that evoked representations of nature conquered, national prowess, economic liberation, and a better standard of living. Furthermore, to make the pipeline socially and economically relevant, the government needed to encourage consumers to adopt natural gas as their fuel of choice at home. This article shows how the gas stove was both the engine and the outgrowth of the push for gas.
Published Version
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