The bitch goddess and the Nazi Elvis: Peronist Argentina in the United States popular imagination

This dissertation examines the unique placement of Peronist Argentina in the United States' popular imagination as a fantastical space/place of over-consumption and over-civilization and as a repository for Nazi evil. The immediate goal of the dissertation is to re-contextualize the two most recognizable images associated with Peronist Argentina---the Cinderella-with-a-death wish story of Eva "Evita" Peron and escaped Nazis---within a broader interpretive framework. I argue that the current media fascination with Evita Peron and Nazis-in-hiding is the latest manifestation of the United States' periodic efforts to understand Argentina within a paradigm created in the 1870s. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century American imaginings of Argentina as both a proto-United States and as a devolving "white" nation, in turn, helped shape the portrait of wartime Argentina and, later, of Peron's "New Argentina." I posit that a Nazified Peronist Argentina exists in the U.S. collective memory as an incubator for a Fourth Reich because, alone among the other neutral countries during World War II, the U.S. media and foreign policy makers depicted Argentina as fighting an internal war against fascism. The wartime construction of an Argentine democratic majority oppressed by a fascistic, Nazi-phile minority led by Colonel Juan Peron created a (media) spectacle centering on a "battle" for the Argentine soul. This heavily publicized battle was a lucrative commodity as well as the only viable way for the United States to assert its ideas about the "proper" manifestations of abstract notions such as justice, freedom, and democracy during the Good Neighbor Policy era.; A significant component of this dissertation is an exploration of the intersection of media, celebrity, and foreign relations, construed in its broadest possible sense as the interaction between nations, through an analysis of the U.S. media's treatment of Juan and Evita Peron during and after their lifetimes. I argue that the intense U.S. media focus on the personal and public lives of the controversial couple, and the continual allure of the assumption that Peron was establishing a Nazi-fascist state, superceded dispassionate analyses of their impact on Argentina. The tabloid-esque media treatment of the Perons as stereotypes eventually led to their de-Argentinization. Today, Evita Peron and a Nazified Peronist Argentina are commodities reflective of societal beliefs about "white" evil and feminine beauty and ambition.