(The 1944 San Juan Festival: The Expression of New Relationships Between Politics and the Field of Entertainment)

Abstract

This article reflects on the political and cultural meanings of the Festival for the San Juan earthquake, held at Luna Park and broadcast on the radio in January 1944. It aims to define the emergence of new forms of connection between politics and the world of entertainment, developed during the military government that came to power following the coup d’état of June 1943. The San Juan Festival marked the first time that the military government was able to politically translate the symbolic capital acquired by figures from the entertainment field, applying it to both a cause and its protagonists. The article argues that different factions within the dictatorship developed a broad and complex policy toward the media, through which they attempted to construct a discourse and their own interpretation of reality. However, it also proposes that Colonel Perón and his press team developed a distinctive understanding of the scope of radio and entertainment, one that ultimately prevailed over that of his fellow officers. This perspective enabled Perón and his team to organize the Festival, which successfully turned the Secretary of Labor into a mass figure. The article draws on sources such as state documents, the entertainment magazines Sintonía and Radiolandia, as well as mass-circulation newspapers such as La Nación and La Prensa. It concludes that the new relationships forged during the San Juan Festival later transformed the world of cinema and radio by intertwining it with politics, to the extent that it even acquired a political logic of its own. The Festival also marked the emergence of a new way of understanding and doing politics—one that appealed to the popular sectors through the languages, forms, and aesthetics of spectacle and mass culture.