“In 1947,” as we learn in Natalia Milanesio’s impressive first book, “the International Advertising Association (IAA) published a study on the Buenos Aires market sponsored by the American Export Advertising Association” (p. 58). Given the fact that 1947 was Juan D. Perón’s second year as president, one wonders whether American advertisers were really expanding business in such a hostile political environment, as this published study suggests. The answer is that not only was US-led advertising expanding in Argentina, but it also helped create the myth of the happy worker-consumer that stands at the center of Peronism’s enduring power. Milanesio covers this topic and others, each one important in its own right, in order to provide a complex and rich account of how citizenship as well as social, gender, and national identities formed around, and together with, the development of a worker-consumer culture in Peronist Argentina.
Central to her argument is...
