Espadrilles, yes; books, no!

“Espadrilles, yes; books, no!” is Juan Perón’s slogan for a political order that promised working people dignity and material improvement while suppressing independent intellectual life. Its memorable contrast condenses the tension between Peronism’s populist appeal and its authoritarian methods: the state claimed to speak for the people, but also narrowed the space for dissent and independent thought.

The slogan and its political setting

By 1946, Juan Perón and Eva Perón had become Argentina’s dominant political figures, supported by the church, the military, nationalists, and workers. Perón presented his project as an aesthetic and industrial revolution: a proletarian regime that would end humiliation and dependency and give Argentina a new beginning. The slogan belongs to this language of transformation, in which material goods and popular belonging were set against the authority of established elites.

Perón’s government also altered the country’s economic and institutional landscape. As secretary of welfare, he had cultivated workers; as president, he strengthened public services and brought the General Confederation of Labour into the state apparatus. His government nationalized the railways, the telephone network, and other strategic sectors held by foreign interests, while promising growth, self-sufficiency, pride, and dignity. Against that program, the slogan’s espadrilles stand for a tangible, working-class claim on the new order; its books point toward an intellectual sphere the regime sought to discipline.

Material appeal and popular allegiance

Eva Perón made the regime’s material promises visible through public acts of distribution and assistance. She received trade-union delegates in evening dress, visited hospitals and factories, opened new road sections, and distributed dentures and sewing machines. Through her foundation she assisted poor and underprivileged people, while her travels and public appearances carried Peronist messages to cheering crowds. The slogan’s emphasis on a basic, useful object resonates with this politics of provision, where state legitimacy was expressed not only in speeches but in goods and services offered to ordinary people.

Perón’s broader creed claimed to reconcile opposing needs. He portrayed humanity as divided between body and soul, and rejected both capitalism, which he said exploited the individual, and communism, which he said enslaved him. Peronism, in his account, offered a popular compromise between those systems and promised a national, social, and Christian Argentina. The slogan gives that expansive claim a sharper, more classed edge: it elevates the material needs of workers, but does so in language that makes books appear opposed to their interests rather than part of their emancipation.

Authoritarian force behind the catchphrase

The slogan was not merely a celebration of workers. Peronists consolidated a nationalist, authoritarian order by purging universities, the press, legal institutions, and administrative systems, while expanding the secret service. The government censored newspapers and prohibited defamation of the authorities; La Prensa was closed, expropriated, and turned into an instrument of the labour confederation. Dissidents were imprisoned, military personnel increased, and propaganda intensified. In this context, the contrast between espadrilles and books reads as a compact declaration of political priorities: popular material benefit was loudly affirmed, while independent institutions capable of challenging the regime were brought under pressure.

The treatment of Jorge Luis Borges gives the slogan a pointed human counterpart. Dismissed from his post at the National Library in Buenos Aires, Borges was promoted to the national inspectorate of poultry and rabbits. The reassignment makes the slogan’s opposition more than a rhetorical flourish: a writer associated with books was displaced into an incongruous administrative role as the regime reshaped cultural and public institutions.

Reappearance amid intensified rule

The slogan’s implications sharpen as Perón’s government strengthens its grip. After Douglas MacArthur was relieved of his command in the Far East and the front stabilized, Perón’s hopes for a wider conflict were postponed; he turned instead toward re-election. In 1951, censorship, imprisonment of dissidents, increased military power, and intensified propaganda accompanied that campaign. Eva Perón’s foundation budget had grown tenfold, and immense crowds gathered to see her. When the General Confederation of Labour called for her vice-presidential candidacy, she hesitated under the crowd’s pressure, finally promising to announce her decision on the radio that evening.

That scene shows the popular politics surrounding the slogan at once as a source of allegiance and as a spectacle shaped by authority and mass pressure. The phrase’s enduring force lies in its unresolved contradiction: it speaks in the name of the worker and material need, yet appears within a system that restricted books, censored the press, and removed an author from the National Library. Rather than simply opposing culture to welfare, it exposes how Peronist rule could present material inclusion as a popular achievement while constraining the independent institutions through which its promises might be questioned.