Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955-1973 (review)
Unless one views the neoliberal 1990s in Argentina with favor (rather a tall order), it is questionable that the last halcyon period in that country was the 1960s or, more specifically, the period between Peron's exile in 1955 and his return in 1973. Although the years immediately following Peron's overthrow were not without problems, including the often lawless persecution of his adherents, and while the military actually began a neofascist cycle in 1966 (lasting until the brief and tenuous democratic spring of 1973-76), the ten-year period between those two chronological markers saw relative political and economic stability. It also framed the country's participation in the much vaunted new left sensibility provoked by the Cuban revolution and other interesting experiments on the continent and beyond. Even though Argentina had by 1968 fallen under military rule, the spirit was there: the Instituto Di Telia continued to function, theater was engaged in an impressive programming, and Gabriel Garcia Marques came to town in late 1967 to promote the launching of Cien anos de soledad by Editorial Sudamericana, at the time one of the most innovative publishing houses in Latin America. Many years later, a theatrical production based on the popular comic strip Buenos Aires en camiseta by "Cale" (Alejandro del Prado), part of the permanent legacy of Peronismo in its discovery of the lower middle class, opened with a nostalgic evocation of the 1960s: "Ah, Argentina in the 1960s: when God was Argentine and the trains ran on time."