Eva María (Ibarguren) Duarte de Perón's ascent from nobody to somebody is the stuff of legends. Her transformation from a poor, uneducated country girl into the elegant and powerful wife of the president of Argentina is the fairy tale that continues to fascinate Argentina and the world long after her death in 1952. Perhaps most compelling is the legacy that Evita, the nickname she cultivated and was popularly known by, left behind her. Her multifaceted image represents simultaneously all points on the moral spectrum, and she is equally admired and despised. In the small 5’ 2” body that traveled from the pampas to Buenos Aires, to Europe and back, and through all sorts of political struggles, rests the myth of a nation: it lives on in an embalmed body that defies time, resting in a mausoleum in the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires – or does it?

A great mystery for fans and critics alike, the question of the true whereabouts of Evita's body continues to haunt the Argentine nation. The compelling stories of embalming, secret wax models, unmarked graves, and burials in Europe still provoke morbid curiosity in much of Argentina's population and beyond the Argentine borders. How could one woman and her body cause such scandal more than a half a century after her death? To answer this question it is necessary to understand the varying ideologies that Evita came to embody in her lifetime and beyond. Evita, her detractors, and her supporters all contributed to the fashioning of myths surrounding her life and work. These myths are often contradictory, and it is the combination of incongruous portrayals that most closely characterizes the image that Evita created for herself. The public's opinion of Evita was the direct result of her own active participation in the creation of roles that were frequently oxymoronic. The duality that Evita perpetuated has made her an attractive figure for discussing oppositional forces within Argentina. Dramatists and citizens in Argentina and outside its borders recognized how Evita employed the slippery performance of identity and seized it as a metaphor for illuminating Argentina's uneasy performance of national politics. The concept of the double, or the stand-in, that Evita created through her roles provided the nation with an incorruptible “saint” that they could worship during moments of turmoil, and she, in turn, came to represent instability as well as its possible solution.