AMERICAN GIRL (2001)

The Argentine writer Manuel Puig was the first to discover the effect of the Hollywood silver screen on the hearts and minds of Argentine women living during the 40s and 50s in big houses in small towns or in small houses in big towns. In those times when Evita and the always neglected criollo workers were the absolute stars in a too Peronist Argentine public life, provincial and porteñas –from the capital port of Buenos Aires— middle class women couldn’t dream but of a better place to live. A place with blond people with blue eyes that would restore them as the worthy people they had –as European immigrant daughters-- struggled to be. A place where they would be recognized as different from the crowd of half Indian dark workers that invaded those days the national scene, and where they would be loved by loving men –who always seemed to be far away from that country where men had more important things to do than to love. These women thought they had no room for any further class ascension if those little dark heads, the cabecitas negras, were in the heights before them, though later as a middle class they would replace the old upper aristocratic class. Also repressed as women --even if the hated-by- them- and loved- by- Perón Evita gained for them the right to vote—middle class women began to live an imaginary movie life. This life happened to be, without these women being too conscious of that fact, a Yankee life. In love with Tyrone Power, Clark Gable or William Holden, they helped the writer of great talent and intuition that Puig was, to build a series of extraordinary feminine characters, where the hidden lust for sexy men was as meaningful as the distance from where the Argentine middle class women lived, to paradise.

When Perón was thrown out of government by middle class military men –the husbands of the dreaming women— a new golden age of the forbidden fruits of the always distant United States started. I was eleven years old then and at the same time I went with my mother to see Eva Perón’s rich clothes and hundreds of shoes –what my mother blamed and what I saw as the necessary outfit of the popular queen she was-- I got my first Parker pen. My mother could buy her first pair of nylon stockings while a new present arrived into my hands: a bunch of small violet envelopes with bubble-gum that tasted like root-beer and came with colored pictures of Hollywood actors to whom you could write to get their autographed artistic pictures, which I did. Before and after obtaining those fragments of American real life, I sat close to my mother every Saturday in front of the literally pearled screen of the neighborhood movie theaters and fell in love with Anthony Perkins. I was obviously another generation who didn’t enjoy too much the macho type, too close to the military with big moustaches and their scornful look towards the always-inferior women.

With the new open market following ten years of protected Peronist customs, a new kind of goods came in to keep the dream alive: the glossies. My father got himself a subscription to Popular Mechanics and to the Readers Digest. My mother got House and Gardens, and I was included in the package with a subscription to American Girl. My youngest brother didn’t get any and that may be why he was the only one to desire to actually live in the United States, which he succeeded in doing through endless summers competing on waterskiing teams.

I was an avid reader, besides being an eager movie spectator, and the Popular Mechanics soon provided me the plans for a home where I should live when I would meet Bob or John and have with him four kids with English names. Meanwhile the Readers Digest gave me the directions on how to think, though with little success, because the more refined Frenchmen in the private school I was sent to during Perón’s government to avoid the obligatory Peronist doctrine in public schools, got my soul first. The silver bullet of the commercial empire did reach me, though, by way of American Girl in a section called Pen Pals.

My letter must be still there; it was the second time I was published, the first one was in La Semaine de Suzette, the French magazine for nice girls. I was looking for friends abroad, maybe real people beyond the screen. While I got some answers from the clients of the remains of the cultural French empire, and wrote for years to people in North Africa and in borderland French provinces like Alsace and Provence, I was inundated with letters of young American girls and boys. I couldn’t feel more happy and loved, getting attention from strangers like Blanche DuBois, and being finally a star just because of a tiny bit of paper, a letter written in English, an envelope and a stamp. I selected of course the boys, as Mae West would have done, and I remember having corresponded lastly with a young charming boy, Danny T. McCarthy, from Springfield, Illinois and, because of his friendship and sympathy, I began to love forever and beyond any silver screen, those United States impersonated by these real people who addressed to me tender and kind letters. With the first teen rebellions and the bloody Argentine history that followed, that love would be buried, though, in the deepest bottom of my heart and forgotten till more favorable times.

I was fifteen and a little more advanced in the study of the English language at the French school than when I wrote letters to my American new pals. I was then summoned by my English teacher to make a speech in front of the class and this is how my first political speech in any language was “The growing importance of Communist China”. It was the year of the Cuban revolution, which was probably the start of the last battle between the United States and the Latin American countries. Che Guevara was an Argentine and was pictured with Fidel Castro on Life magazine’s cover, as admired young rebels, when it was still a thorough continental truth that they had to replace the dictator Batista. Following the new trend, I was becoming a revolutionary Latino American, a Communist because my father was rich and I was not and that seemed unfair to me. And also a Peronist because my mother didn’t like Evita or me, and because the workers communism was supposed to help were all Peronists. I had, like the biggest part of my generation, an emotional answer to an era that in many senses was about to end, though nobody really could predict what the change would be. I was just for a quick move to a better world, whatever this might mean in the future, like all the Argentine baby boom generation.

This generation defined itself as Peronist as a reaction to the powerful and repressive military, and as Socialist because baby boomers had been --thanks to Perón-- massively well fed and well educated, and had an access to books and to the Marxist international movement. Even the middle class who rejected Perón had to give their kids a better education, and this meant an upper class foreign private school to split them from the modest dark newcomers who invaded the public schools. Both breeds, the dark and the European descent whites, would meet in the following years --with their new gained books and their youthful strength-- in the greatest revolutionary movement in Latin America. Hollywood missed the story and it was a British author who would write later a famous and incongruous Evita addressing in English the Argentine people and asking them not to cry for her, which we couldn’t help doing, watching both opera and film.

When I finished my French double Baccalaureate, I started to teach French in an English school. I was Miss Ferraro for two years, living some days a week a real Anglo life that had little to do with my Italian and Spanish roots. When Kennedy was shot, I was teaching and pupils and school staff had to gather in the courtyard to pray in English for his soul, our Father thou art in heaven. And so God, who usually spoke to me in French because of the Catechism taught at school, became an Anglo-Yankee divinity, confirming that Atheism could be safer for an independent and national spirit. After all, Perón had also quarreled with the Catholic Church, and the Argentine military who subjected him to a coup d’état were Catholics, reaffirming the fact that they didn’t like women to be sexy.

The projection of a film lent to the school by the US embassy about life in the colonial times opened a window in my heart while I watched the green lands of Virginia and the so cute farmers battering butter in a wooden bucket on their cute little wooden farms, as ancestors of a rural romantic life that could have been lived in any country of America, including mine. The film ended and I was in love again for a while with the luminous land as if it were mine. This film had a fingerprint of destiny, but then I didn’t know that.

After two years working as a teacher, I entered a Film School and began to work in movies as an assistant producer, and later as a producer and director. I had a battle to fight: Hollywood had to be replaced by Argentine films, like in the past, when the Argentine movie industry conquered all the Spanish- speaking countries. It was a worthy cause and I couldn’t feel more comfortable in that kingdom of images, where I didn't have to use my mother language as an expressive instrument and where I wouldn’t have to face the unpleasant question of which language spoke God.

As my teenage speech had predicted, China became important, as did Cuba and Russia, and soon the same Latin American kids who dreamt cow-boys dreams in their childhood and who died for Bazooka bubble-gums, became rebellious against any power, parents, military, rich ruling classes and of course against the too powerful antagonist in the Continent, the United States, supporters of all the military anti-socialist and anti-peronist movements. I joined the energetic crowd and cried Yankees, out of Santo Domingo, and felt that all Latin American countries should get together, with Cuba, of course, and fight the Yankees who were the friends of our enemies, the local militaries. I danced though with Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker, and my lasting love affair with Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra continued to grow in the most secret channels of my soul as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Joe Cocker found a place there too.

The public story is well known: the military trained in the United States to fight all the continental guerrillas in the frame of the Cold War organized more and more coups d’état with the help of the United States who wanted to make sure that the Soviet Union didn’t go beyond Cuba on the American Continent. The Beatles sang, and there were also the hippie times with the demonstrations against the Vietnam war, with the French May calling imagination to power, and with the whole planetary baby boomer generation blaming the United States for being the cruel rising empire after World War II. Real life was in those years definitely more interesting than films, and when Perón came back to Argentina --after eighteen years in which the military could neither unite nor rule the country-- a new chapter began. The Argentina hidden behind the screen appeared then for the first time to our already adult eyes, and with the leading of Perón, a new consciousness about what was ours and what was others' suddenly emerged. I became the proud owner of a now luminous Argentina –as luminous as the Yankee land of the screen -- where my roots had their regular place and my language was my mother’ s language and not the school's language or the language of any foreign group.. I left the films and began to write in Spanish for small union magazines, in a lasting political writer career. With a new born love for my country, I discovered a nation and a history as worthy as others. I was no less than a French or a British person, and Spanish was just as worthy a language as theirs. Perón had a very talkative relationship with the youth, and we soon learned that Marxism was as foreign a thing to us as the Yankee obeisance to the military. Neither Yankees nor Marxists, just Peronists, was the most popular cry, with the opposition of course of the Marxist guerrillas, which began then to fight Perón. The Perón doctrine considered that there were two empires at war on the planet and that we were a different thing between them, a Third World, for which they were struggling. Perón soon died, and the military –who didn’t listen to him-- went behind the guerrilleros as well as behind the Peronists, considered by them the most dangerous because of their bright nationalism. The seven years of military government are known all over the world, because of the thousands of missing young and not so young people, and because of the world famous Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, no longer the Manuel Puig heroines but the suffering women whose kids had been taken away and killed by the military.

I survived, and in between I was married and had my own children and I even had time to divorce, when I woke up a morning at war with Great Britain because of the Malvinas Islands. A new milestone in the complicated US- Argentine relationship was set: the United States, a friendly country to Peronism by then because of the common war against the Soviet Union, was supporting Great Britain and not Argentina, in spite of all the treaties of common continental defense. The military lost the islands as well as the government. With more young people dead on the altar of a war which was rather a British secret service plot than a nationalistic Argentine epopee, a new bleeding wound was inflicted on the US –Argentine relationship. Most Argentines felt betrayed by the United States, and I perceived in this the final result of the war: Great Britain would never allow The United States to rule in a country which had been before Perón and since the times of Independence, their informal colony. I suspected that something like a different war was running in Argentina, which had to do more with Europe than with the Soviet Union or the United States. After all, the United States had been divided at the beginning of the war between their European colonial obedience to Great Britain and their continental American identity shared with Argentina. In my increasing perception, against the predominant opinion, that Argentina and the United States were meant to be partners, I was influenced neither by the silver screen nor by memories of Hollywood stars, but led by the same nationalistic attitude that Perón brought to my life. I saw Argentina widening , and lengthening to its Continental dimensions and making the United States of America more than a neighbor, an American brother living in the same common house, son to the same mother Europe we both had to fight in the past and we both should fight in the future to assert our own American identity.

The rest of the recent history is more than well known-- how the Wall of Berlin fell and how the United States won the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Also how Argentina became, during the first Peronist government after Perón’s own, a political and a military friend to the United States, and how both countries support nowadays a Free Trade Area as a first step to a Continental Union, as predicted by Monroe, by Perón and by every American patriot from Martí to Bolívar. A union where an American girl could be either a US American girl or an Argentine American girl, making of America a country the size of a continent, and of eight hundred million Americans, the wealthiest population in the world, a happy ending that Hollywood hasn’t dreamt yet.

Two years ago, I met a man on the Internet, the new tilting seductive screen. He lived in Virginia. After a couple of hundreds of emails, which brought up the forgotten experience of American Girl, I met him. If Puig was alive, he could write an epilog to his novels. Real life has changed since the times of Peron. The distant and desirable tall handsome man, blond with blue eyes, has left the screen and walks, taking me by my arm, in the Buenos Aires streets. The girl who wrote letters to the people behind the screen lives now some months of the year in a cute little home in a cute neighborhood in the always green Virginia, writing now scenes from her Argentine life, read maybe by dreaming US American women, tired of their cute screen life and wanting something which looks as passionate as the Hollywood films promised to dreaming Argentine women of the past.

The nightmare of misunderstandings of the past seems to be over and the wind of history blows, bringing now the Free Trade Area for the Americas and with it, the beginning of an unavoidable Continental Union where Argentine and Yankees will be co-stars in the same film with thirty-five other countries, counting Cuba which has to be there to have a real Hollywood happy end.

In Virginia or Buenos Aires nights, love and written dreams don’t stop and ask now about the next step for us Continental Americans and how we shall arrive later, when the Continent is united, to the universal one land, where we will be just human being owners of a multitude of countries, a multitude of languages, a multitude of cultures.

Like Puig's heroines, unhappy women all over the planet could now be dreaming and seeing themselves through a Continental American film—made or written in the US or in Buenos Aires-- promising an era of friendship and love that will become again, after history weaves its material, a foreseen reality. Also, another American girl could be, without knowing, in her way to be more than she ever dreamt, a universal girl, writing letters to her future.