Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A
villa miseria,
one of the urban slums in the Puerto Nuevo district of Buenos Aires
(Archivo
General de la Nación)
Bolivia had always provided seasonal labor for the sugar industries of
Tucumán and Salta, and the Mapuche of southern Chile crossed the
Andes to harvest grapes in Mendoza and shear the sheep of Patagonia.
Now these neighbors were settling down permanently in Argentina, the
young
marochas
(dark-skinned women) taking up positions as maids in
middle-class households and the men in factories. It was as if the criol-
los were reclaiming Argentina.
These new immigrants and migrants from rural Argentina, who
settled in the working-class neighborhoods south of Buenos Aires,
in addition to the children of Peronist workers of the 1940s, were to
burnish Perón's image. The military, too, inadvertently helped them.
It soon became apparent to workers that the generals in power wished
to carry out their development schemes on the backs of the work-
ing class. They repressed strikes, jailed militant union leaders, and
permitted industrialists to reorganize production without consult-
ing workers' delegations. Most of all, the generals promoted a kind
of trickle-down agenda that encouraged the accumulation of profits
among employers while holding down industrial wages. After 1955,
Argentina's laborers lost all income gains they had made under Perón.
