shadowy. It is this part of Eva's life that I find the most intriguing. This is the time of Eva's life that helped define who she was. These are the events that made her 'Evita'.
             There are many small villages breaking up the plains of the Argentine pampa. If you went to sleep in one village and woke up in another, it is doubtful you would notice right away. An Argentine writer, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, made this observation:
             "It is not so much that the houses are small, as the fact that they are dwarfed by the immensity of their surroundings. The smallness is an optical illusion; it is the pampa that makes them seem so.
             These villages are like meteorites...fallen to earth in the countryside. One can enter one of them and believe one is entering the village one has just left.... There is no real distinction between the village and the countryside; the village just depends on the latter and that is all. It is there but it could be to the right or to the left, indeed, it could even not be there at all..."
             The unsurfaced streets of Los Toldos were hot and dusty in the dry season and impossible to navigate during the rains. Surrounding the plaza of Los Toldos was the church and two stores. The village stopped about four blocks, in all directions, from the plaza. The houses tended to all look alike and were made from brick. They were boxes all laid out in a perfect grid pattern. Outside the village boundaries, cattle grazed on the fertile grasses of the pampa.
             Juana Ibarguren had lived in this village all of her life, her mother had been born here too. On 7 May 1919, her youngest daughter, Eva made her appearance in Los Toldos.
             Juana met Juan Duarte when she was fifteen years old, and fell madly in love. It did not matter to Juana that Duarte had a wife and children in another town. Together Duarte and Juana had five children, Eva being the youngest. To this day, no re...