Saint Evita

a photo of young Eva Duarte, before she dyed her hair blonde, married Juan Perón, and became Evita

My elementary school’s library had a series of books that were little collections of illustrated biographies. Fifty great woman, fifty great composers, fifty great artists. Each biography was a few pages long and accompanied by an illustration of the person with an absurdly large head. Because every eight year old needs to know about Mary Cassatt and Catherine the Great.

Those books also introduced me to María Eva Duarte de Perón, also known as Evita, the beloved, tragic, and much-mythologized First Lady of Argentina. She’s been stuck in my head since then, along with her picture in the book: pink suit, tight blonde bun. Maybe even as a little girl I instinctively understood what her story said about the relationship between power, femininity, and politics.

Let me sketch a quick biography of Eva Perón for you, at least the parts that historians generally agree upon. She started life in 1919 as an illegitimate child in the Argentine countryside, the youngest of five. When she was fifteen, she moved to Buenos Aires alone to become an actress, and by the time she was twenty, she found some success performing in radio soap operas. She met Colonel Juan Perón at a fundraiser when she was around twenty-four and he was forty-eight and the Secretary of Labor. They married a year later and by the time she was twenty-six, he was elected president and she became the first lady. When I turn twenty-six in November, I’ll still be an unmarried law student (different times).

I listened to a five-part podcast about Evita, and the hosts—sardonic British guys—remarked that the Peróns didn’t have a coherent political worldview. There were leftist Perónists and right-wing Perónists. Juan Perón campaigned on a vague promise of a new, populist Argentina, but how that was to come about was unclear. Evita started a foundation that would go on to open a nursing school, halfway houses, and schools. She went on a diplomatic tour to Europe and came back proclaiming that all she had seen were examples of what Argentina’s social welfare system should not look like. She also did successfully campaign for Argentine women to receive the right to vote.

But ideologically speaking, the Peróns were much more about the delivery than the message. Evita was the heart and the public face of the movement, giving fiery speeches in which she said things like “all I have ever wanted is to be loved by you, the people.” There was much talk of devotion, passion, abiding love. Evita talked to the Argentine people as though they were her children, telling them over and over again how dear they were to her and pleading with them to love her and love Juan Perón. I imagine the people loved her the way the British public loved Princess Diana: as the paragon of beauty and kindness, a sort of younger fairy godmother whose early death cemented her as forever young, forever beautiful, forever beloved.

Evita has become much more than a historical figure in Argentina; after her death, she became a public saint, so much so that children in schools recited prayers to Evita promising good behavior and loyalty to Argentina.

But here is where the two women aren’t similar: Eva Perón always believed that her place was beside her husband. The second-wave feminist in me hates this. For Evita, it always did come back to Perón—she believed in him and believed that he was what Argentina needed, when arguably Perón only came to power because of Evita’s ability to rouse the crowd in his favor. And once she died, he could only ride her coattails for a few years until he was overthrown. He would go into exile and all memory of the cult of Saint Evita would be wiped away by his successors, the rumors started that she was a prostitute, that she dominated a weak Perón and was really the one running the country. In this way, the new leadership could insult both Eva and Perón; after all, if you want to insult a woman, call her a whore, but if you want to insult a man, call him a woman.

And because Evita is a woman, this conversation ultimately has to come around to her looks. Nobody ever talks about how handsome Perón was (or wasn’t…), but any great and powerful woman that history remembers is noted as beautiful or not beautiful. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, to me Evita wasn’t stunningly beautiful, not like Diana. She was a normal kind of pretty. She dyed her dark hair blonde and it clashed with her features. As many successful woman do, she cultivated her looks to aid in her messaging, wearing neat but not extravagant dresses, dainty hats and gloves adorned with small flowers, and pulling her hair back into a neat bun. She tried to destroy most of the pictures of her from the time before she became First Lady, when she was much less buttoned up, free in a very different way. I could make a lot of her decision to dye her hair blonde—after all, Argentina didn’t not like Nazis—but I don’t know if racism is actually why she dyed her hair or not. It makes a convincing theory. Speaking as a lifelong blonde, blonde privilege is real in a place where blondes are rare.

The final reason that Eva Perón remains in the Argentine imagination, the reason that there is an entire museum devoted to her in Buenos Aires (one that reminded me a little of the Stalin Museum in Georgia in that it highly praises Evita and admits none of her faults), is her death. It was tragic and perhaps preventable: cervical cancer. Perón’s first wife had also died of cancer, and some speculate that he did not tell Eva she was dying. She was in such pain in the last few years of her life that he ordered doctors to perform a lobotomy in an attempt to alleviate her pain. When she did die, at age thirty-three (Jesus and Alexander the Great also died at thirty-three), the authorities did not announce it as her death, but her “passage into immortality.” The country absolutely exploded in mourning, people sobbing in the streets, thousands showing up in the rain to her funeral. Creepily, Perón had her body, like Stalin’s, embalmed and displayed for over a year.

What is even stranger is what happened to her body after Perón was overthrown in 1955: it was first hidden in the offices of Argentine military intelligence, where flowers and candles would mysteriously appear in whichever room it was kept. It was then smuggled to Italy and buried in a cemetery in Milan under a different name. Evita’s body was not returned to her former husband until 1971, when it was smuggled to his home in exile in Madrid, where he lived with his much-younger third wife. In 1976, she was finally laid to rest in Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.

I had so many thoughts while I walked through Museo Evita in Buenos Aires. Is it fair, or even possible, to view Eva Perón through the lens of modern feminism? Evita was used by her husband, but she also used him. She had power in a way that few women at the time did, but that power was tied to the public persona she cultivated based on a specific performance of femininity. She was essentially beatified, symbolizing the—can we call it love? obsession? devotion?—between her and her people, but also flattening her into a caricature. Everything that happened after her death cements her status as a symbol and an icon, not as a person.

And still, she gave speeches in a powerful voice. She used beautiful language. She furrowed her eyebrows and held up her fist.