Tales Told Out on the Borderlands: Doa Maras Story, Oral History, and Issues of Gender

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Tales Told Out on the Borderlands Doña Marías
Story, Oral History, and Issues of Gender

• by Daniel James
• presented by Brittany Jablonsky

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Background information

• Berisso, Argentina
• Multinational meatpacking industry
• Unionization and Peronism
• Decline
• Changing markets
• Changing consumer demands
• New regulations
• Aging plants

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Doña María Roldán

• New wife and mother, 1931
• Began working in meat plants in 1944
• Elected shop steward for her section
• Helped establish the Sindicato Autónomo
• Peronist
• Worked with Cipriano Reyes

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Oral history

• James interviews Doña María
• 30 hours over 9-month period
• Problems with oral history
• Not objective or factual
• Limited by memory, knowledge
• Rather, a reconstruction of a life
• Doña María has control over her own story
• Selects parts that legitimize it to James and
  make sense of it to herself

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A progressive woman?

• Doña María explains the role of the good wife
  in terms of traditional gender ideology
• Frames her activism in similar way
• Reyes came to see me in my section, the picada,
  I come on behalf of your husband, he is already
  in agreement, and if you want to be the delegate
  for this section, because you have the qualities,
  your husband says it is fine. . . . I said to
  him, If you have spoken to my husband and he has
  said yes, then Ill also say yes.

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A progressive woman?

• Doña María cites traditional womens interests as
  reason for activism
• To give a piece of bread to our children
• Uses role of the nurturing, self-sacrificing
  mother
• This conforms with representation of women in
  Peronist ideology

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Gender contradictions

• Indications throughout that Doña Marías story is
  unconventional
• I gave my family a little bit of concern
  because I had the rebelliousness that my father
  had, for me to be shut up inside with a needle
  sewing and hemming and that sort of thing was a
  waste of time, I thought that you had to go
  beyond that, do other things.

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Making sense of contradiction

• James 2 important points about contradictions
• Establishing prior adolescent rebellion
  rationalizes decision to leave life of marital
  bliss and become labor organizer
• Decision to enter workforce phrased in solidly
  material terms
• Not to get out of the house, etc.
• Pay sons medical billsallows her work to be
  gender-appropriate

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Constructing a narrative

• Anecdotes about confronting authority
• Fundamental to life story
• Symbolic significance
• Mythologized
• Often include Doña María defying gender
  stereotypes
• Why dont you get involved in the schools, in
  something else, not in politics, not in unions,
  you should leave that sort of thing to the men.

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Constructing a narrative

• These anecdotes not historical data
• Doña María moves them around, elides them
• Function in plot of her narrative their
  symbolic assertion of her self-definition as a
  rebel, as an uppity woman, la intrusa, la
  impulsiva, la delgada brava

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Fundamental question

• Taylor If the plot that Doña María constructs
  establishes her heretical status as a rare bird
  whose life history clearly breaks with the
  conventional script of womens biography, how are
  we to read the far more conventional themes and
  more standard forms of self-representation
  mentioned at the beginning? Is one set of images
  true and the other false?

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Peronist contradictions, 1945-1955

• Traditional subordination of women to men
  denounced
• Traditional ideas of gender and domesticity
  reinforced
• Womens work outside the home was condemned
• Womens political activity was encouraged, but
  distinctly separate from that of men
• Derived from unique virtues as mothers and wives
• Too virtuous and moral to be in politics

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Peronist realism

• Peronist rhetoric reinforced by literature
• Characteristics
• Women absent from narrative, or present as
  suffering mothers and housewives
• Emphasis on heroic masculinity
• Physical labor
• Male camaraderie

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People live by stories

• Doña María must frame her story in terms she is
  familiar with
• Peronist folklore excludes women entirely
• Richardson Women can overcome the textual
  disenfranchisement embodied in cultural stories
  that are inadequate to their needs and
  experiences by creating new collective stories
  with new roles, stereotypes, and resolutions

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A new story?

• James too simplistic to simply think of Doña
  Marías story as a new discourse challenging the
  dominant set of images about working-class
  womens lives
• Instead, her story is disruptive of the central
  one but not available in ready-to-use form,
  waiting to be appropriated

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Conclusions

• Contradictions within Doña Marías story reflect
  unresolved tension between official discourse
  concerning gender relations and one that is far
  less palatable and legitimate within the terms in
  which Doña María had to live out her life
• Do as I say, not as I do

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Conclusions

• Must assume that direct historical experience
  will find expression in an individuals testimony
• We owe it to Doña María to believe her story
  fully reflects the way in which a working-class
  woman experienced gender and class relations in a
  particular historical era

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Conclusions

• Self-representation through stereotypes of
  traditional female roles should not be taken at
  face value
• Rather, these reflect both the power of dominant
  ideologies and the capacity of the storyteller to
  imbue these forms with her own meanings, her own
  subjectivity