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By Elizabeth Hall ’10
Rebekah Pite, assistant professor of history, is currently performing research for an upcoming book about 20th century Argentine history that focuses on daily life in the domestic realm, primarily in the areas of cooking and consumption.
For the project, she will be traveling to Argentina June 18-July 9 to study in various libraries and archives across Buenos Aires.
At the center of Pite’s study is Argentina’s most influential domestic leader and a national female figure, Dona Petrona C. de Gandulfo (1896-1992).
“Dona Petrona rose to national prominence through her ubiquitous cooking lessons in conference halls, print media, and radio and television programs,” says Pite. “Her cookbook, El Libro de Dona Petrona, first published in 1934, is still one of the three best selling books in Argentine history.”
By tracing Dona Petrona’s career and comparing her changing portrayals of domestic practices with Argentines’ actual experiences, Pite uses cooking as a lens through which to view the dynamic relationship between the national political economy and everyday life in Argentina from 1928 to 1983. Pite believes that Dona Petrona’s success during this economically uncertain period suggests that Argentina’s process of modernizing was as much about female domesticity and consumption as it was about the better known dynamics of male political participation and industrialization.
“This narrative opens up a more dynamic understanding of women’s and gender history not only in Argentina, but also across Latin America,” she says. “While most Latin American labor histories that have included women have focused on their experiences as factory workers, the majority of Latin American women have worked in the home. Further, as my project suggests that Dona Petrona and her cuisine came to represent ‘Argentine-ness,’ this history broadens our understanding of the ways in which ideas about national community develop through daily life.”
Pite has gained special access to Dona Petrona’s granddaughter’s private archive, which includes cookbooks, her magazine clippings, radio and television transcripts, conference pamphlets, manuscript recipes, photographs, and unpublished memoirs. In addition, from 2002-2004, Pite taped formal oral histories with over 80 Argentines during multiple visits to Buenos Aires.
During the winter interim, Excel scholar Amalia Berardone ’09 (Buenos Aires, Argentina) secured and photocopied a rare edition of all of former Argentine first lady Eva Peron’s speeches. Over the summer, Berardone, a history major, will read and summarize these speeches. This research will help Pite to expand her analysis of Argentina’s two leading ladies–Eva Peron and Dona Petrona–in light of one another.
Pite’s research in Buenos Aires this summer will focus on exploring the concept of a “shared table” as a recurrent metaphor for national belonging. She will be identifying concrete examples of people eating together by analyzing images in the national archives and also searching for family albums and domestic advice manuals at various bookstores and markets. She will also conduct research on the legal and political history of domestic service in Argentina, and observe the current political and social climate of the country, which has recently elected its first female president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
Pite believes this summer research will “help me bring new ideas and energy to the classroom. I enjoy sharing sources, experiences, and perspectives from the field with my students, whether in my surveys or seminars of Latin American history or in more specialized courses on Argentine history or food history. I hope to acquire some primary and secondary sources at book stores and fairs that I will integrate both into my scholarship and my classes.”