Rita Martes, an Argentine single mother and furniture store worker, wrote a letter to the Eva Perón Foundation describing her dire living conditions and asking for a bicycle for her son. To her surprise, Rita found that Eva Perón not only answered her letter and had the bicycle delivered to her son but also arranged for the installation of a prefab house for her. Eva's disposition to respond to similar requests is a well-known fact, but actual epistolary evidence is hard to come by as the Eva Perón Foundation archives are missing, apparently destroyed by the military that ousted Juan Perón in 1955. What rescued Rita's letter from oblivion was the fact that Eva's office forwarded the case to a separate dependency for its fulfillment. Sifting through the scattered records hosted in the Archivo General de la Nación, Donna Guy was able to recover hundreds of similar letters, reconstructing a...

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