The ruins of the new Argentina: Peronism, architecture, and the remaking of San Juan after the 1944 earthquake

In less than a minute on a summer evening in 1944, an earthquake reduced the city of San Juan to rubble, leaving ten thousand dead and half the province homeless. This devastation marked the final collapse of a corrupt political order, and spurred the new order to come. Here the recently-installed military regime had its first chance to deliver on promises of social justice, launching a massive relief campaign and commissioning in short order plans for a new city. Modernist architects and the centralizing national state mapped their ambitions for a model society onto the ruins, and their schemes to remake and industrialize the province won the support of the local poor. Yet these plans for radical transformation from above would ultimately break apart, riven by design disputes, political rivalries and the tenacious resistance of local elites. Once an inspiring vision of future development, the reconstruction of San Juan would became instead an embarrassing reminder of present impasses, a messy provincial worry rather than a symbol of national renewal.; By concentrating closely on long-ignored provincial events and showing their intimate connections to national dynamics, my account of the unmaking and remaking of San Juan ultimately casts the seemingly familiar landscape of mid-century Argentina in a new light. For the national political transformation of these years was led by the same man who first appeared on the national stage directing earthquake relief for San Juan, who later failed there even as he succeeded nationally, and founded the movement that dominates Argentine politics to this day: Juan Domingo Peron.; This dissertation is a cultural history of rebuilding, centered on struggles over state power, technical authority, urban form and housing. It is a cultural history because it is concerned above all with meanings and practices, with struggles between competing visions of an ideal city and a just society. Drawing together regional, architectural and labor history, I explore these struggles waged on the gendered terrain of respectability and class resentment, making use of a wide range of visual, oral and written sources.