Prosperity, Performance, and Leisure: Marketing Automobiles in Mid-20th-Century Argentina

In 1954, Argentina’s president Juan Domingo Perón signed an agreement with US industrialist Henry Kaiser to form the country’s (and the region’s) first automobile manufacturing plant, Industrias Kaiser Argentina (IKA). The same year, the recently formed Asociación Argentina de Carreteras (Argentine Highway Association) published the first edition of their bulletin, Noticias Camineras and choose “for more and better roads” as their tagline. During the next decade and a half, Argentina began a period of infrastructure and manufacturing expansion that mobilized ideas of prosperity, leisure, connection with nature, and national identity to sell not only cars but also roadway construction.

This paper analyzes popular depictions of roadways and automobiles from the establishment of IKA in 1954 through 1967, when Renault purchased the company. It shows how, during this period of Argentina’s first car company and growing investment in the network of highways, advertisements and the popular press combined the competing values of affordability and luxury with a focus on performance and speed. It particularly examines how advertisements and popular depictions deployed imagery from two of Argentina’s popular middle-class leisure pastimes: touring and motor racing sports, both on circuit as with the Argentine Grand Prix, and on roads in the case of the Turismo Carretera, the world’s longest continuously running motor race. This paper examines how Perón’s support for the accessibility of national vacationing and the country’s longer relationship with motorsports shaped images of automobilism to create consumer car cultures.

The paper builds on previous scholarship, which has examined the role of Argentine motorsports on the development of national identity, roadways, and technologies before the Second World War. To these conversations, this paper adds a focus on how broader marketing of leisure activities, including vacation touring, shaped not only automobile consumption but also the expansion of roadways in the mid-twentieth century.