For Argentina, I read Eva Perón: A Biography by Alicia Dujovne Ortiz. This book gave me a rich glimpse into not only Evita’s life, but the story of Argentina, and it humbled me, making me realize how little I learned about the world as a history major in college.
Why I Chose This Book:
If you google authors from Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges usually tops the list. I’ve read Borges before and adore his work, so I was very tempted to read him again for this quest. But since I already read Borges, I wanted to try reading something by a female Argentinian author. While I was at a children’s museum with my kids, I googled and searched for a female author and though there were many options, I could not find any English translations. Then I thought, if I can’t read a book by an Argentinean female, maybe I can read a book about one? Eva Perón immediately popped into my head, and boom, I quickly found a biography about Eva that was written by a female journalist from Argentina.
The Book Itself:
This is a chunky tome with a lot of detailed history about Argentina. I learned A LOT, and I felt like I was back in the college library stacks, meticulously gathering information for a research paper. It’s dense, packed with political and social history. I’m glad I picked this biography, but if you’ve never read Borges, he’s an amazing pick for anyone on a Read Around the World quest.
Eva Perón:
As I started this biography, my knowledge about Eva Perón was limited to the musical Evita, specifically the movie version with Madonna and Antonio Banderas. (Spoiler alert: Evita never danced the waltz with Ché). Not surprisingly, the musical portrays a romantic mythical version of the Eva story. Eva and her husband Perón hustled to craft this mythology, destroying documents and even films that starred Evita when she was an actress. (Of course, you could also argue she never stopped being an actress…) For example, the musical has an entire sequence that shows how Eva made her way to Buenos Aires, but actually, no one knows how she got there. Did she go with the tango singer? Alone? With her mom or an older sister? Did she go, come back, and then try again? Eva’s origin story is shrouded in a lot of mystery.
Argentina And My US-Centric Education:
As I read this book, I was astonished by how little I knew about Argentina. I was a freaking history major! But alas, I took classes that focused on the United States and Europe. I really only knew this much about South America: (1) it took a long time to sail a ship around its tip so the Panama Canal was kind of a big deal; (2) at some point, the pope drew an imaginary line on a map and divided South America between Spain and Portugal; and (3) the Mayans were pretty awesome.
But Argentina’s history is so much more complicated than that! Now, if I sit down with someone and they ask me to tell them about Argentina’s history, I won’t be able to give them a precise description with dates. I’d say something like, there was so much upheaval and scheming and corruption and I had no idea that so many Nazis fled there. Obviously, I’m not going to be teaching any courses on Argentina in the near future! But I now know enough to say, There is a lot to learn about Argentina and I’d like to learn more about the history of the world that goes beyond the events that directly involved the United States.
That’s my big takeaway from this biography about Eva Perón: the world is complicated, interesting, and messy, and there’s a lot more to modern history than the stories of the United States. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, there’s a lot more to history than the version typically taught in U.S. classrooms.