Ezequiel Adamovsky and Esteban Buch have produced an outstanding and original historical work. They have recounted the story of the three most representative symbols of Peronism in Argentina – the Justicialista emblem, the Peronist marchita, or marching anthem, and the drum, or bombo – from their origins in the 1940s through to the present. In doing so, they have explored crucial aspects of Argentine history: they use the tropes of emotions, sounds and symbols to look into modern popular culture, the plebeian dynamics of Argentine politics and, above all, the everlasting tension between unruly masses and authoritarian control that lies at the heart of Peronism.

The book is unique in many ways. It's an academic, deeply researched work, yet it is written for general audiences and published by a large trade publishing company. Also, its authors delve into the heart of Peronist identity, but they offer glimpses of Argentine cultural battle allegiances at large. And even if the book is mostly a cultural history of Peronism, it is also, as the authors claim, an intervention in the fields of sound studies and the history of sounds, and a deep reflection about the role of perceptions, emotions and feelings in politics.

A decade ago, Bolivian scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui argued that, under colonial thinking, words do not designate things, but hide them. Indigenous images help her to illuminate social context and meanings of Andean history that written language conceals (Ch'ixinakax Utxiwa: Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores, Tinta Limón, 2010). Her claim can be extended from indigenous populations to subaltern subjects in capitalist societies at large. The authors of La marchita resort to sounds, music and images to unveil a world that words don't fully explain, as the growing body of work on politics and affect confirms. The book is divided into three chapters, each about one of the Peronist symbols and written by one of the authors individually. Chapter 1, by Adamovsky, is the story of the escudo justicialista, or Peronist emblem. Chapter 2, written by Buch, is about la marchita. And, in Chapter 3, Adamovsky tells the long story of the bombo. The three chapters can be read together as a whole or separately. Either way, they make an interesting contribution to the long historiography of Peronism and can be assigned in a graduate or upper-undergraduate class on Latin American culture and Argentine history.

The reward of this journey into sounds, music and feelings is an examination of the tropes of Peronist identity. One of them is the remarkable ways in which the vicious opposition to Peronism by elites shaped the meanings of these symbols. Adamovsky wisely sees this in the transformation of the bombo into a Peronist symbol: ‘the first who noticed its presence and turned it into a Peronist instrument par excellence were the anti-Peronists’, who, early in 1946, described workers’ rallies in articles and cartoons which gave a prominent role ‘to the bombo as something vulgar, misplaced in serious politics’. As Buch also makes clear in his description of the Peronist marchita, middle-class opposition to Peronism was as fixated with the anthem as those who sang it. Writers Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares went to the point of adding some sentences about the song to their short story ‘The Feast of the Monster’ many years after its original publication. This is not necessarily new for those studying Peronism: its historiography offers plenty of examples of this symbiosis between elite hatred and workers’ enthusiasm. Yet the research shows clearly the relative autonomy of this cultural battle, a confrontation ingrained in the social fabric of Argentine politics rather than a simple secretion of a struggle over the distribution of material resources.

Another topic present throughout the book is the historical continuity of Peronism and its symbols (and the revulsive effect they generated among opponents) with the popular culture that preceded it. If the Peronist emblem is inspired in the national coat of arms and the marchita’s origins can be traced to popular music and labour activism well before 1945, the bombo connects Peronist liturgy more directly with Argentine popular culture going back a century before the arrival of Perón. Adamovsky travels in time – as did Alan Lomax to Haiti in the 1930s – in order to trace the first references about the effects of bombo sound to Afrodescendant supporters of Governor Juan Manuel de Rosas celebrating the 1810 May Revolution in 1838, connecting its history to that of the carnival and of the usually effaced legacy of black culture in Argentine politics. ‘Decent’ people came to consider the sound a ‘scandal’, both under Rosas in the 1830s and a century later during Peronism. As much as Perón inaugurated a new era in Argentina, traces of the country's past and its conflicts over low and high culture were evident everywhere.

Yet, for all of its revolutionary effects, Peronism is better deciphered as a space of perpetual tension between the push of supporters for the democratisation of social relations and the efforts by Perón to restrain them. The ambivalence between collective action and subordination is clear in the history of the Peronist emblem. Inspired by the two horizontal shaking hands of the national coat of arms, the hands are crossed diagonally in the Peronist one, leaving a rich field for interpretation as to whether it emphasised solidarity or dependence between those below and those above. Buch's exhaustive description of the marchita allows us to see how a top-down imposition by some of the members of Perón's closest circle (those more closely associated with Fascism) converged with a popular re-appropriation of lyrics that insistently demand adoration of the leader. His vivacious efforts at alternate history help him to explore the potential outcome of those battles. For the Argentine working class, this conflict between democratisation and authoritarianism was as much a productive field for its identity as a limit for advancing its demands for equality, economic and otherwise.

The authors follow the journey of these symbols through to the current period. We see the encounters and mismatches between politics and culture (it would have been interesting to read a bit more about how Argentina ‘sounded’ in the 1960s and 1970s). The stories end with the uses of these symbols under the administrations of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner between 2003 and 2015. Appropriately, embrace of the marchita and the Justicialista emblem reinforced the Kirchners’ allegiance to Peronism, but also marked their failure to lead a more radical and modern political project.