As for any true dramatic instruction or development, though, Junín was barren. The alternatives for a young girl in Eva’s position were few and unappealing: a low-level job or, in Eva’s words, the “inevitable domestic slavery” of marriage. She described her desire to leave for Buenos Aires in terms of her own personal freedom. “At a very early age I left home, left my town, and I have been free ever since.” Indeed it was a tender age. At only fifteen years old, having struggled through primary school, Eva had made her decision, and she delayed acting on it only for as long as it took to obtain her mother’s permission. This could not have been easy, and there are several accounts of her departure from home. The most persistent legend involves the tango singer Agustín Magaldi, who would have accepted responsibility for the aspiring young artist, but the more plausible story is the one told by her family: Dona Juana took her daughter to Buenos Aires to audition at a radio station, and Eva arranged to stay on at the home of family friends, the Bustamantes.
Buenos Aires in the 1930’s was the continent’s most cosmopolitan and elegant metropolis and soon became known as the “Paris of South America.” As in any great European capital, the center of the city was filled with cafes, restaurants, theaters, movie houses, shops, and bustling crowds. Eva was one of many people from the provinces, attracted by the process of industrialization, who came to the capital during the 1930’s. When she arrived in 1935 with little more than a cardboard suitcase containing her few possessions, the bold teenager must have a wrenching sense of vulnerability and solitude. In direct contrast to the glamour of the city, the 1930’s were also years of great unemployment, poverty, and hunger in the capital, and many immigrants from the interior were forced to live in tenements, squalid boardinghouses, and in outlying shantytowns that became known as “villas miseria.”
One must assume that young Eva Duarte was possessed of uncommon strength of character, enormous pride, or driving ambition; perhaps it was a combination of the three. Despite the early hardships she endured, she did not return home to her family; she did not give in to temptation of finding work in an office or shop, nor did she choose the simplest way out, marriage. Instead, she embarked on the first tentative steps of her acting career, which would last ten years. Shortly before her sixteenth birthday, she was cast in a small role in a light stage comedy, “La Senora de los Perez (The Perez Woman), performed at the Comedia Theater by the troupe of Eva Franco, a leading actress. The following year, in 1936, she toured the interior with the Pepita Munoz company, and that summer, in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, she appeared in an adaptation of a play by Lillian Hellman.
After two years, Eva was still trying her luck on the stage, but never played anything but very minor roles. What she learned from her acting jobs, though, became only a small aspect of her rapidly accelerating education. While not an exceptionally talented actress or particularly successful, she acted in theater of all kinds, appeared briefly in a few films, modeled for commercial photographers, and endured long periods of unemployment. These experiences, while sharpening her determination and forging a foundation for her later endeavors, provided only a precarious living in rented rooms or modest apartments shared with coworkers. Friends who knew her at the time recall her as withdrawn, serious, exceeding thin, and not very pretty, although they all mentioned something remarked by everyone who knew Evita: her perfect skin. One of her greatest opportunities, however, also came at this time in the form of another medium, radio.