Buenos Aires is defined by immigration, particularly Italian immigration, and its culture is composite, cosmopolitan, its face, quite literally, turned towards Europe. La Boca, a tough working-class neighbourhood, site of the old port, is now a tourist trap, or at least the slice that is El Caminito, a small, as its name suggests, pedestrian path. Restored at the end of the s, El Caminito has brightly painted houses, restaurants and tango. El Caminito is great fun. I confess, only slightly shamefacedly, to posing for a picture with my wife, a fedora placed as rakishly as possible when you consider I was hunched over with my head squeezed through a cardboard hole.
If you go on a guided tour, your guide will warn you of the dangers of La Boca, of the very real prospect of being mugged or assaulted if you wander from the police protected confines of El Caminito. Even on a small wall, erected mysteriously on a patch of scrubland near the stadium with rusting, listing goalposts, the nets if there were ever nets long disappeared, you will find a perfectly executed mural of Maradona — graffiti as religious iconography.
Messi, a little like Sachin Tendulkar, is an unimpeachable sportsman: gifted, polite, rigorously professional in his conduct and lifestyle, an ambassador for his sport. His people love him because he plays and lives as they would if they could. Maradona is a Rabelaisian figure, a man of outsize appetites and capabilities: a man who can win the World Cup by himself, who through sheer force of personality can lead an unfashionable team like Napoli to the Italian title over the likes of AC Milan, Inter and Juventus; a man who can nearly eat himself to death; a man who can resurrect himself so completely from cocaine addiction and links with prostitution and the mafia that he goes on to host a television show of unsurpassed popularity, interviewing the likes of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez who look honoured to be in his presence.
The gauchos were key figures in the struggle for independence from Spain. And is his life not a picaresque to rival even Don Quixote, a statue of whom can be found on Avenida 9 de Julio? Of course, Borges himself, whatever his feeling for the gaucho, was resolutely urban, a creature of Buenos Aires as much as Woody Allen, say, is a creature of Manhattan.
Borges wrote not of the pampas, nor the hardscrabble lives of gauchos, but of Buenos Aires taverns and the demimonde. He made epic the fraught lives of gangsters and tango dancers, of working-class Italian toughs making new lives on the streets of a new Palermo, thousands of miles from the Palermo they had left behind. And the food is terrible.
The square, named after the month in which the revolution that led to independence from Spain began, is the locus of all political protest. Among the imprisoned were pregnant women who gave birth in captivity before they were slain. Their babies were not given to their fathers if alive or grandparents but to families connected to the military. These immigrants constructed tenements made from scrap metal and used leftover paint from the shipyard to liven up their ramshackle homes.
By the end of the s, La Boca was to Buenos Aires what Montmartre was to Paris—a vibrant enclave of immigrant artists, that maintained its own identity within a large and sophisticated city. After eating meal upon meal of dehydrated food in Patagonia , it is difficult to describe the satisfaction of digging into a plate of impeccably-cooked, medium-rare steak.
The meal was a perfect sendoff for Dan, who had to return to Seattle for work the following day. Walking through the cemetery is like walking through a neighborhood of the dead. Passageways lead through a collection of over 6, ornate marble mausoleums that tower above the narrow streets like intricately carved buildings. Regarded as one of the most impressive cemeteries in the world, the Recoleta Cemetery contains the graves of military generals, Nobel Prize Laureates, writers and presidents.
Revered and beloved by many, she spent her life fighting for the dignity of the marginalized classes in Argentine society. To her political and social opponents, however, the actress-turned-political-figure was a controversial individual met with equally fervent disapproval. Various accounts suggest that her body was passed around from hiding place to hiding place before being smuggled out of Argentina and buried in Milan.
After touring the cemetery, we headed back to our hostel so that Dan could catch a bus to the airport. Argentina has a history of foreign ethnocentrism, in which throughout the past Spaniards and later governments alike went on campaigns to try and attract Europeans to immigrate to the country, while oppressing and killing the poor, indigenous, and minority populations of the country.
So far, I am very pleased with not only my fellow classmates on the program, but also with the professors who came along to teach us. Visiting the district of La Boca was interesting because the colors, architecture and history of this barrio neighborhood of Buenos Aires resemble much more those of Central American cities and other South American cities.
I would list a few, but many different Latin American countries have cities with the same names from country to country. Either way, the neighborhood of La Boca is where the Tango dance originates from, which is very characteristic of Latin American culture in general. On Friday, we went out to the town of Tigre, right outside of Buenos Aires, and then took a boat about an hour and half up through a string of rivers to a little villa along the water with horses, canoes and trails galore.
Tigre is located in the delta between Argentina and Uruguay, and similar to the Mississippi Delta of Louisiana, I felt as if I was on the bayou.
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