The Argentine Folklore Boom: Ethnicity and Class Identities in Post-Peronist Argentina.

Between 1958 and 1966, during the proscription of Peronism, music and dances of the rural mestizo Argentines experienced a boom in Buenos Aires. Shows devoted to this genre populated radio and TV signals, sales of folk music records outpaced those of tango and international pop, and peñas, neighborhood clubs where members met to learn and enjoy folk dances, multiplied across the city. In the interior, several provinces competed to attract tourists from Buenos Aires by staging large folk music festivals. It is assumed that the main market for folk music records in Buenos Aires was composed of the internal immigrants of mestizo ancestry, a sector noted for its loyalty to Perón and his party. Constrained from freely express their Peronist identity, internal immigrants may have turned to the music and dance from their home provinces as a coping mechanism. Although this is an interesting proposition, in this paper I attribute the success of the folk music boom to its appeal to the urban middle class of European descent. Evidence shows that middle class sectors, usually suspected of holding strong prejudices against the Peronist working class, were just as involved in peñas and festivals as the criollo migrants. Based on magazine and newspaper articles as well as personal memoirs and interviews, I reconstruct the social ambiance of peñas and folk music festivals. I argue that, in those gatherings, motifs such as the cult of the "traditions of the motherland” and the search for the “authentic soul of the Argentine people” were consciously used to play down sharp political dissonances and displace social and ethnic prejudices. This paper helps build understanding of how cultural nationalism factored in the flow of collective identities in Argentina in the period of transition from Peronist hegemony to an era of ideological confrontation.