Remembering Evita.

• Author: Murphy-Larronde, Suzanne
• Position: !Ojo! on Tourism - Biography

THE FAMILIAR FACE peeks out from atop a stack of vintage pamphlets at San Telmo's Sunday flea market, graces book covers in store windows along busy Calle Florida, and greets customers from a hand-colored poster at the entrance to a boutique in the trendy Palermo Soho neighborhood. As a matter of fact, just about anywhere you wander around the high-powered metropolis of Buenos Aires, you're bound to run into at least one iconic image of Evita Peron, the charismatic, controversial figure who served as Argentina's first lady from 1946 until her death in 1952.

Although more than a half century has elapsed since Maria Eva Duarte de Peron succumbed to cancer at the age of 33, her memory still holds sway over the public imagination in Argentina. "Her legacy," admits Pablo A. Vasquez, "is very hard to measure and depends on the people who are doing the measuring--on their age, their experiences, and their social class. Everyone has his own ideas.... But with the passage of time, even her detractors are viewing Evita's life and work with other eyes." As coordinator of the library and archives at the Museo Evita, Vasquez is in a good position to gauge any shifts in opinion. Fueled by a spate of books, movies, and stage productions over the last decades, interest in the former first lady has ballooned far beyond Argentina's borders, he notes, drawing tourists and researchers from across the globe to have a closer look themselves.

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Housed in a handsome, early twentieth-century hotel particulier in the city's upscale Palermo district, the museum and its historical research library were inaugurated in July 2002 by Eva Peron's grandniece, Cristina Alvarez Rodriguez. A kind of reverential valentine to the first lady's memory, it features more than a dozen permanent exhibits tracing the shooting-star trajectory of her life, from formative years on the pampas through big-city triumphs and early death. Born out of wedlock in 1919 to parents descended from Basque immigrants, Evita made her way from rural...