Her story
began on May 7, 1919, in Los Toldos, Province of Buenos Aires,
when Juana Ibaguren gave birth. Four siblings preceded her: Elisa,
Blanca, Juan and Erminda. Her father, Juan Duarte, had arrived in
Los Toldos at the beginning of the century and had leased the
farmland of La Unión with the goal of making it prosper. Everyone
knew that the soil of the region was good for livestock and for
agriculture. Juan Duarte belonged to an influential family in
Chivilcoy and he and Adela d'Huart had several children there.
Prosperous
and prestigious among the Conservatives of the area, patrón of an
estancia, typical leader in the political struggles of the time,
Juan Duarte was named Deputy Justice of the Peace in 1908.
But 1919
was not a good time for Conservatives. After long years of
struggles, revolutionary in the beginning and abstentionist later,
assured of electoral victory by the Saenz Peña Law after years of
electoral fraud, the Radical Party headed to the polls and walked
away with the power.
After the
Radical Party President Dr. HipólitoYrigoyen dismantled the
machinery which had prevented freedom of expression in the
provinces, the Conservatives lost their last bastion in the
Province of Buenos Aires. The Conservative Mayor and personal
friend of Juan Duarte was replaced by the Radical Jose A. Vega Muñoz.
Juan
Duarte's star began to decline and economic difficulties appeared
on the horizon. When he was offered the job of administering
fields in the neighboring vicinity of Quiroga, the family moved
there but only stayed for a year. Erminda attended first grade in
Public School Number One, but Evita was still too small to don the
obligatory Argentine schoolchild's white smock.
Since
Quiroga did not offer them the opportunities they had hoped for,
the family returned to Los Toldos. While the older children had
enjoyed their father's times of economic bonanza, the younger ones
knew only the times of scarcity. Their situation became even more
serious when Juan Duarte died on January 8, 1926, after a car
accident in Chivilcoy.
Juan
Duarte's funeral has been presented in both literary and dramatic
form many times over. The rejection that Eva's family supposedly
experienced is at the core of these presentations. Blanca and
Erminda, Evita's surviving sisters, categorically deny these
scandalous versions. Their half brothers and sisters had already
lost their mother. Eloisa Duarte (their half sister) has a son, Raúl
Guillermo Muñoz, who has stated in a document witnessed by a
notary public that the two families have always maintained a
cordial relationship.
From that
time on, the problem of survival "became a struggle which
took on a new aspect each day," as Erminda Duarte remembers
in her book, My Sister Evita (pg. 20). Doña Juana sat at her
Singer sewing machine day after day, sewing and sewing, never
complaining, ignoring her doctor's orders to rest her ulcerated
legs. "I have no time. If I rest, how can I work, how can we
survive?" (ibid, pg. 31). Elisa worked at the post office.
Blanca studied to be a teacher in the pampas town of Bragado.
Eva began
primary school when she was eight. She attended first and second
grade in Los Toldos. Her childhood was spent in contact with
nature, climbing trees, raising silkworms, playing hide-and-seek,
hopscotch and tag, wearing homemade costumes which replaced store
bought toys and made her into whatever she wanted to be.
Her
sister Erminda was her inseparable playmate and her brother Juan
fulfilled their wishes: he made kites and even a piano with keys
that moved; he was the architect who constructed their playhouses
and the ringmaster of their circuses. Elisa and Blanca nourished
their childhood fantasies with bedtime stories.
