Natalia Milanesio. Workers Go Shopping in Argentina

Natalia Milanesio offers a detailed and insightful analysis of the rise of consumer culture in Argentina linked to the demographically enlarged and politically empowered working class during Juan Perón's administrations (1946–1955). Milanesio is careful, however, to avoid a narrow consideration of consumption either as derivative of labor politics or from a business perspective. Instead, she draws from a comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary framework to argue that the development of mass consumption in Perón's Argentina, with the worker-consumer at its center, is “the key to understanding the formation of a new commercial culture, class and gender identities, and a new relationship between society and the state in Argentina” (p. 11). Using this approach, the book's first three chapters trace the history of mass consumption and points out its significant expansion related to the economic and social policies of Perón's administrations such as industrialization and income redistribution. More significantly, Peronism expanded the regulation of consumer goods and practices and made consumption part of its ideal of social justice. At the same time, advertising companies flourished in the period, with ads now targeting working class consumers and, especially, women. Indeed, the book argues that this new consumer market involved significant changes in advertising in order to reach the worker-consumer, including the use of more popular language, humor, stereotypical images of workers and women, and outdoor publicity in the form of street advertising. The development of mass consumption was not a process without tensions, however, as Milanesio shows in chapters four and five. Middle- and upper-class people perceived mass consumption, linked to Peronism, as a threat to their privileges and consumer spaces that they had previously monopolized, and they reacted with stereotypes of workers as ostentatious and prone to spending on unnecessary goods. Moreover, mass consumption upended traditional gender roles and relations, linked to the male provider and stay-at-home wife, over issues such as money management and marriage expectations. The last chapter analyzes workers' testimonies, showing how consumption was “an arena of subjective self-creation and representation” (p. 15). Indeed, testimonies reveal that although workers now had access to new spaces and articles for consumption that had formerly been out of their reach, they did not reject but asserted their identities as workers.

Advertising · Business · Consumer Culture · Consumer spending · Consumption (sociology) · Economics · Industrialisation · Media studies · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Popular culture · Publicity · Redistribution (election) · Social science · Sociology · Working class · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies