The Experience of Children in Perón's Argentina: Recent Interventions and Future Directions

Abstract

Peronism, a populist movement headed by Juan Domingo Perón that swept through Argentina in late 1940s and early 1950s, has emerged as one of the more heavily studied and contentious periods in both the English-and Spanish-language historiography. Studies of the populist movement, the controversial president, and his First Lady Eva Duarte de Perón, began in the early 1950s while Perón was still in power. These earlier studies, however, focused almost exclusively on the agency of Juan Perón, and to a lesser extent Eva, and obscured many of the nation's more marginalized actors. Although more recent scholarship (since the 1980s) has incorporated more actors and groups into the historical spotlight, the experience of children in Perón's Argentina is a currently expanding historiography. Scholars have begun investigating the role of children during the Peronist era through a variety of individual case studies. It is the aim of this paper to underscore this emerging subfield within the study of Peronism, bring these case studies into conversation with one another, and place this emerging scholarship into a larger discussion regarding the experience of children across the 20th-century world.