Evita and the evitista myth, today

It arrived uncontaminated. What this adjective designates matters a great deal in the “system of images” of the Peronist myth. In this configuration (which supported different ideological contents: from the populist traditionalism of the female branch to the violent radicalization of the seventies), the avoidant myth today it seems deactivated. In the sense that George Sorel it refers to the myth, as an impulse for political action, as a condensation of what must be done, as a synthesis of wills and not as an “expression of a state of things”, avoid It was a myth and it is no longer. His potential for action has vanished; the name of avoid it retains only a residual power in the rite or in the illusory force attributed by those who use it to remind current Peronism of the unfinished tasks.

This deactivation of the political myth (which reduplicates the decline of utopias: as Sorel stated, although myth differs from utopia due to its synthetic and performative character, it contains some of its elements), marks the distance between two literary representations. In the early sixties, in “That woman”, Rodolfo Walsh reinforced the political significance of Evita’s corpse, which is valid both for her kidnappers and for the people: “If I find her, fresh high waves of anger, fear and frustrated love will rise up, powerful vengeful waves, and for a moment I will no longer feel Alone, I will no longer feel like a dragged, bitter, forgotten shadow. In the nineties, the “Santa Evita” by Tomás Eloy Martínez it is a funereal baroque construction, a theme park where nothing is missing and which can hardly arouse an idea of ​​political action.

Avoid mania, promoted by the cultural market, participates in the “camp” taste, which has passed from the intellectual elite, precisely through actresses like Madonna before making “avoid”, to a larger audience that watches clips from MTV and follows the recycling of fashions. The Webber and Rice Opera He anticipated this “camp” revival with great originality, that is, an aesthetic and stylistic revival that, as such, opposes the idea of ​​a Sorelian myth that is voluntaristic and linked, in an indissoluble way, to action.

Today, if we continue to use the word myth to refer to Eva Peron, we should at least make a historical precision: Evita was a myth, in the political sense and not only in the media of the term, until the eighties. She was deactivated in the democratic transition and, even though all Argentine women politicians still pay her verbal tribute, her strength is greater in the field of cultural consumption and styles than in politics. She only retains power in one or another secondary battle inside and outside of Peronism, when some political or union cadre thinks that it is still possible to define a true Peronism of which Evita would be the foundation.

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