Workers go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture

Citation

Joseph Leonard Scarpaci (2016), "Workers go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 122-126. https://doi.org/10.1108/QMR-07-2015-0066

Introduction

Argentina’s political economy in the new millennium is a pale version of its economic and consumer prowess in the past century. Driven by beef and grain exports, it established strong international trade with Great Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An empowered working-class fomented under the administrations of Juan Domingo Perón (1936-1955) set in place a culture of advertisement, language and aesthetics that resonated with working-class and middle- and upper-income Argentines in ways never before seen. Social historian Natalia Milanesio tells this marketing history by enlisting archival analyses, cultural studies, oral histories and an historic economic anthropology of consumption using an inviting and engaging style. The Argentine case about worker-consumer culture differed from the North Atlantic and western European examples because it was tethered so strongly to the Peronist labor movement and political parties. It is as much of a window into post-World War II Argentina as are post-war suburbanization in places like Levittown, the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System and the introduction of TV advertising in the USA.

Structure and scope

Milanesio’s social history of consumer culture develops in six chapters, an epilogue, some 40 pages of notes and over 200 primary and secondary sources. She captures an often-overlooked but rich collection of mundane sources of popular culture by reviewing nearly 60 Argentine periodicals and conducting over a dozen interviews with key informants who hold vivid recollections of this heady period in Argentine culture. The author argues that:

While the Argentine middle classes opened the doors of the marketplace in the 1920s, I maintain that lower income sectors of the population had to wait until the middle decades of the twentieth century to gain full access to the world of consumption […] this was the first time that the worker-consumer became a definitive historical agent of enormous cultural and social visibility […]. From the new language and aesthetics of advertisement to the new form and content of consumer goods, from the rise of the middle- and upper-class anxieties to the changes in gender expectations, from the redefinition of working-class standards of living to the creation of new government institutions, I show the transformations fueled by the worker-consumer were remarkable and far-reaching (2-3).

And it is precisely these anxieties of advertising and rising consumer expectations that the author illuminates so clearly. Milanesio draws on theorist Jean Baudrillard’s (1981) use of culture as a system of signification (or semiotics) to understand how consumption exceeds the basic economic premises of satisfying needs and wants. Instead, the framework and research here interprets commodity acquisition as a deeply defined sociocultural practice to create both group and self-identity. Reference groups (in marketing parlance), not surprisingly, give meaning to consumers, advertising agents, public servants, producers and consumers who participated in this defining period of Argentine consumer culture. Not surprisingly, the worker-consumer profile is multifaceted and the author sidesteps the problems of examining the history of advertising and its tendency to feminize consumption and redefine masculinity. Although the consumer regime created by the Peronist movement would eventually lead to strife, class demand-making, several coup d’états and huge consumer and public debt (not addressed until the epilogue), the book is exemplary in anchoring a case study that lends itself to comparative analysis, yet avoids idiographic findings that have no nomothetic home.

Half of the book’s chapters help the reader understand how Argentine workers increased their purchasing power and shaped the nation’s “modern” consumer culture. State regulations played a key role in this process by giving consumers new rights and even defending them in unprecedented ways, especially lower-income groups. Readers familiar with the Mad Men TV series (2007-2015) that has been globally franchised will see similar themes of the Buenos Aires advertising scene of half-a-century ago. But unlike the Manhattan and suburban New York foci of the US-based series, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina gives insight into how low-income (e.g. even “poor”) Argentines were targets of marketing research, and went beyond the colossal Buenos Aires metropolitan area and into the far reaches of the provinces, prairies, Andes and pampas of the country. Whereas Rosie-the-Riveter became an icon of US women working to support the war efforts of the 1940s, Argentine advertisers celebrated the virtues of working-class women who as savvy shoppers were wise to advertising gimmicks, puffery and false advertising.

A notable shift takes place in mid-century Argentine advertising as attributes of the working-class yield to more nationalistic discourses that enlist humor, colloquial sayings (for which the country is well-known in the Spanish-speaking world) and what might be considered more (sexist) visual female clichés. The author’s careful selection of 20 figures (print advertising retail photographs) complements the text. In what might be considered a reverse marketing and positioning strategy, “ad-makers portrayed men as emasculated, subjugated, and miserable, removed from traditional male occupations, and unprepared to fulfill domestic roles” (112). The comic effect chipped away at Argentine machismo and possibly strengthened the nation’s women’s liberation movement and high female-labor force participation rates. Paper shortages in the 1940s prompted creative radio and outdoor advertising that enlisted clear heuristics to capture the consumer’s imagination. (Even today, visitors to Argentina will notice many Post-it™-like tabs that plaster walls and utility poles, announcing going-out-of-business sales, local night clubs and related retail promotions). By the 1950s, long gone were the days of admen merely copying foreign ads, and instead:

Admen expanded street publicity in line with the explosive urban development, created funny ads in the midst of commercial boom of comics, and privileged visual appeals to rapidly attract the audience in time which life had become increasingly hectic […] the unadorned message, and the emphasis on quality and low price over prestige […] [symbolized] massiveness and egalitarianism (122).

The last three chapters of the book return to the notions of consumer anxieties by drawing on political and advertising examples that point out how Argentines fretted about upward social mobility. Going to the theater, opera, movies and restaurants increasingly mixed many income and social classes and added an element of socioeconomic homogenization that was reinforced by the speeches of Juan Domingo Perón and his wife, Evita. Still, themes of upward mobility and success became evident as Argentines dated, married and planned for retirement; materialism seemed to trump family life and family values, even if it meant being a proverbial bachelor or bachelorette. The penny-pinching stay-at-home housewife and the male breadwinner are redefined, if not debunked, as normative consumer lifestyles. While the author presents evidence that excessive female spending was often a source of marital strife, women frequently dominated public spaces in the late 1940s and 1950s:

In the Peronist iconography, working-class women always put the consumer needs of their families first, managed the household budget judiciously and devotedly fulfilled their housekeeping responsibilities. However, beyond Peronist ideals, the image of married women who felt more at home in the department store than in the kitchen was ubiquitous (180).

There is an interesting reading here about how the media referred to these Argentines in public spaces as callejeras (literally, females in the streets, but with a double entendre of “streetwalker” as well). But the author shows how alluring and convivial the Argentine market was. And the male counterpart to these women was the average guy who might spend more time at a café, sports club or bar than at home. Accordingly, there was targeted messaging across product and service categories that tried to connect with these public, private and gendered personas.

The final chapter, “Tales of Consumers: Memory and Working-Class Material Culture”, draws on in-depth interviews of Argentines born mostly in the 1920s and 1930s who viewed themselves as workers (trabajadores) and were able to reflect on the past century’s rise of working-class consumption. Almost all informants agree that it was an exceptional period, one that was unlikely to be repeated (Argentine historical exceptionalism). There was also consensus of sorts that achieving greater consumption did not automatically erase patronizing local shops (vs chain department stores) or thriftiness: “workers interpreted consumer goods and practices in terms of social achievement and personal gratification that reinforced their class belongings” (193). Peronism provided instructions about how to live modern life. One informant remarks:

[b] efore Perón, no one taught people how they should live […] Perón and Evita […] taught people [to stop wearing sandals and] start wearing shoes […] high-society people just couldn’t believe that they would be walking along Córdoba Street […] they would walk by workers wearing nice sweaters and shoes (195).

What strikes this reviewer is that post-War Argentina under Perón, with its populist and even socialist support of unions and state intervention, is markedly different from, say, the Cuban socialist period of and 1980s; the key informants in the Argentine see themselves as untethered to the state, even though the state played a major role in driving modern consumption (Morales and Scarpaci, 2012). The author argues that when the informants reflected on consumerism during Peronism, “they discursively removed the Peronist government and repositioned themselves as the main characters in the acquisition of goods and the attainment of a comfortable life” (197). In other words, the consumer is not beholden to the Peronism for their material comfort as the Cuban consumer would have been. There is even a photograph of President Juan Domingo Perón (Figure 3, p. 47) getting briefed by business executives about the advantages of using a shopping cart in a self-service grocery store. Perón appears to be happy for the photo opportunity because, after all, the grocery store sold government-inspected food in modern, sanitary packaging mandated by Peronist regulations. Indirectly, then, the Peronist government drove individual consumption but stepped aside to allow the tastes of the consumer (a word previously of unheard of in Castro’s Cuba until recently) to prevail. To be sure, Fidel Castro would never have been photographed in a similar setting because it would have extolled the virtues of individual liberty (e.g. self-service shopping, once existed in Cuba but today is uncommon) and possibly “non-essential consumer goods”.

The books’ epilogue aims to fill the six-decade gap between the main historical period of the book, and “consumer culture today”. Peron’s highly protective and nationalistic policies fell by the wayside as military juntas of the late 1960s and into the early 1980s championed neoliberalism and foreign investment. Iconic images of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were launched after the 1976 coup d’etat when military henchmen attacked Argentine civil society and claimed roughly 30,000 civilian lives. Civil governments (Peronist and others) after the military tenure ended in 1983 sought allegiances with free-market International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies that left the Argentine workers –and their purchasing power – in rapid free fall, with high inflation, and a purchasing power that paled compared to the Peronist era. Similar liberal reforms and welfare state dismantling took place in neighboring Chile, Brazil and Uruguay under authoritarian military regimes (Scarpaci, 1990). In the early 2000s, after a run on the banks, huge capital flight and a flurry of five successive presidents in a few weeks, Argentina defaulted on its largest debt ever. Nearly half of Argentina officially fell below the poverty line in 2002, which led to huge out-migration (e.g. brain drain ensued) and the worker-consumer lifestyle of the past melted away. Barter clubs emerged in which nearly one-sixth of the Argentine population participated, and not only afforded the acquisition of limited essential goods, but provided a space for socialization at a time of double-digit unemployment. The author’s recounting of the transformation of La Salada neighborhood, originally a sewing district set up by Bolivian immigrants, portrays how informality, contraband, knockoff and copycat brands, counterfeited goods and the like provided a means of survival for thousands of workers a week (228-229). Industry, services and advertising responded to the new market by using cheap packaging, cutting costs and using inferior inputs (which prompted consumer backlash). The poorest of the poor in Buenos Aires created catchy and pretentious names of products like Fierita bubble gum, Pirulo ice cream, and Alfajores Cachafaz that offered consumers sweet, salty and inexpensive foods, and at prices up to two-thirds of standard brands. Today, the poor – or what Perón might have called, the shirtless ones (los descamisados) – have managed to create their own consumer culture, one in which they pay, on average, 5 per cent more for the nearly ubiquitous cell phones of the new millennium, but only because the devices include digital cameras, MP3 players, other devices and larger memory cards since they are less likely to have Internet service at home than their middle-class counterparts.

Conclusions

Workers Go Shopping in Argentina adds to the rich literature on Latin American consumption that stems back at least to Moreno’s (2003) Yankee Don’t Go Home and Bauer’s (2001) Goods, Power, History, landmark studies of material culture spanning from colonial times until today. Practitioners in advertising and international marketing, as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, marketing, business administration, social psychology, cultural geography and cultural theory, will find much to savor in this book. It will serve as a template for novices and seasoned scholars alike about how to meld economic anthropology and social history into a culturally infused and theoretically anchored field of marketing. Understanding these historical threads is essential in approaching consumer behavior appropriately.