Viviendas para el pueblo: Espacio urbano y sociabilidad en el barrio Los Perales, 1946 – 1955

Abstract

This work analyzes the three-way articulation involving the individual, domestic space, and the state at the start of an era of state-sponsored programs of economic advancement for the needy: specifically, the construction of public housing for workers, starting early in the Peronist administration. While his 1946 electoral victory was based on a cross-class coalition, Juan Perón’s public discourse aimed especially at articulating the aspirations of workers as they sought to improve their lot. New state-subsidized housing encompassed a wide spectrum of such advancements, representing what upper-and middle-class urban dwellers had long taken for granted, such as heat, running water, and durable structures. The study focuses on Los Perales, a multiple-family housing project completed in 1949 on the western edge of the city of Buenos Aires in the area of Mataderos. Sources include federal and municipal archives and official publications, newspapers and architectural periodical literature, a wide array of secondary sources, and, finally, interviews with residents of Los Perales.Rosa Aboy is careful not to credit the Peronists with exclusive originality on housing matters. Instead, she carefully documents the historical and incrementalist nature of ameliorative housing plans, particularly those that, coming from the Catholic Church, sought to allay revolutionary sentiment among workers. Beyond political ideology, moreover, the church felt that certain types of housing — in particular, the single-family dwelling — would perpetuate and solidify traditional domestic roles for men and women. In sum, the Peronist program of social justice overlapped with the Vatican’s, as Pius XI expressed in Quadragesimo Anno in 1931. Indeed, by joining temporal with spiritual objectives, a corporatist state offered both the best defense of ecclesiastical interests and the neutralization of social rebellion or fascist demagoguery, in the eyes of church authorities. In Argentina, these coincidences of intellect and strategies did not translate into actual church-state cooperation in housing construction programs.Housing was more than an emblem of social justice. It also represented a pressing issue for urban planners, as the migration of thousands of Argentines from the interior to the periphery of the city of Buenos Aires in the postwar years posed significant demographic pressures. Housing shortages became critical, and pragmatic responses were needed. We are presented with a populist mechanism designed in part to strengthen the government’s standing in the eyes of the masses but which, in practice, responded to exigency and need for responsiveness. The public face of affordable housing for workers was Evita Perón and the foundation established in her name. While Evita represented the state’s graciousness, state planners competed to promote their diverse array of housing paradigms. Thus, the hegemonic populist discourse contrasted with pluralist and competitive approaches to the housing challenge.The pluralistic nature of state planners created a strategic advantage, representing both Perón’s calculating strategies to keep himself as ultimate arbiter and the relative absence of a dominant urbanist ideology. Peronism’s efforts were not motivated by a conscious wish to change urban forms away from the liberal city; its goals were driven by the politics of social justice, democratization of welfare, and broadening of citizenship rights as implemented by the state. Los Perales appears as a working-class neighborhood that regulated dwelling forms and created conformity among its residents in the midst of a city that integrated and provided social mobility. This barrio was intended to be different from both the collective premodern residential style of the old tenements (conventillos) and the single-family dwelling. The three-story horizontal structures were neatly arrayed on a grid, with open spaces in between rows of apartment buildings designed in the austere and monotonous style of the Siedlungen (colonies) of Weimar Germany. Two-and three-bedroom/one-bath units were aimed primarily at nuclear families.Despite its class-based discourse, Peronism did not look to exalt the working-class lifestyle; on the contrary, it sought to achieve a middle-class lifestyle for workers in exchange for their passive support while avoiding revolutionary militancy. Housing efforts, as portrayed by the Peronist popular literature, led to the paradox identified by Tulio Halperín Donghi in “El lugar del peronismo en la tradición política argentina” (Perón, del exilio al poder, Cántaro, 1993): passivity and social obedience. Space for workers’ actions was narrowly constructed through slogans such as “from home to work and from work to home.” Rosa Aboy emphasizes that the consistent positioning of Juan and Eva Perón as the agents of benevolence and material well-being instilled submissiveness. In this way, Peronism and traditional social hierarchies promoted by the church overlapped; the coexistence and reconciliation of the laboring and middle classes rested on a model of assimilation to bourgeois values and acquiescence to a personality cult.This well-written work combines aesthetics, urbanism, ideology, and administrative history with the voices of those who recall the excitement of the era when modern dwellings became part of their lives.