22nd Jul 2010

I recently went for dinner with an English friend here, who was at the end of a trip through South America and on her last night in the city before flying back to London. What was immediately striking was her wild enthusiasm for the city...

By View From Down South

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She found it beautiful, cool, quirky. When she has got some money together she is coming back here, to find work, to learn Spanish, and so on. I have met other foreigners here who have talked the same way. A friend of mine who came here a few years ago and came home full of similar stories is one of my principle reasons for being here. But they are talking about a city that I just do not see, that I have never seen.

Perhaps it is something to do with the difference between coming here as a tourist and coming to live here more permanently. For me, Buenos Aires is a city of many contradictions. This can make it a very interesting, if sometimes uncomfortable place to be. Its contradictions still have the power to shock, to surprise, and to fascinate. It can also make it a tough, tiring place to be. Buenos Aires has a split personality. It is a condition – those less kind might say a disorder - which will always prevent me from falling in love with the city as irrevocably as many others seem to. Yet in the nine months I have been here I have learned much from it, and it continues to intrigue as much as it frustrates.

It is a common observation that Buenos Aires is a mixture of high culture and the gutter, which is really just another way of saying that the city has a problem with class division. Argentina has recovered relatively well since the financial crisis of 2001, and poverty levels in Buenos Aires – despite what porteños will tell you – are not to be compared with other cities on the continent, such as Rio de Janeiro, La Paz, Lima and Caracas. Nonetheless, there is still a lot of visible poverty around; filthy, barefoot children begging for change on the Subte, young men sleeping outside on tattered mattresses, young mothers cradling children in their arms at the side of busy shopping streets.

For the middle classes the poor are a problem. They spoil things for everyone else. They ruin the aesthetics of the city, serving as a constant reminder that Buenos Aires is far from being the slick European metropolis many want it to be. Last month the residents of Villa 31 – one of the city’s largest and most impoverished slums – took to the streets, blocking one of the main motorways into the capital, disrupting traffic for several hours. They were protesting at the city government’s failure to comply with a judicial order, that obliged it to solve the serious sanitation problems that exist in several areas of the community.

This is the first comment that appears below the article covering the protests on the website of La Nación, one of Argentina’s bestselling daily newspapers:

VAGOS!!!

QUE MAS QUIEREN? VIVEN EN PLENO CENTRO SE HICIERON CASAS DE DOS PISOS,¿PORQUE NO BUSCAN TRABAJO?

(Lazy good-for-nothings! What more do they want? They live right in the centre, they built themselves two-storey houses! Why don’t they look for work?)

What is particularly breathtaking about this comment is its representation of the demand for pipes that do not leak human waste everywhere as something totally unreasonable, as if in fact the residents of Villa 31 were demanding an Xbox 360 with a plasma screen TV for every member of the community. This attitude is as typical as it is depressing amongst the middle-class of Argentina.

The responsibility for urban poverty is placed firmly upon the shoulders of those who suffer from it most severely. People try to avoid seeking explanations in less visible and more complex causes. Argentina has a long history of economic mismanagement, which came to a head in 2001. The peso had been artificially pegged to the US dollar since 1991. This overvaluation, together with widespread corruption, and massive foreign debt thanks to some reckless lending on the part of the IMF, resulted in the financial crisis of 2001. The crisis – still the largest ever default on public debt in global financial history – plunged many already vulnerable people into total destitution. Argentina has come a long way since then, but the effects are still being felt, by people who had nothing to do with the development of the crisis.

If class is the main social fault line down which the city is split, there are several others, not least race, nationality and culture. Porteños often proclaim, with great pride, that Buenos Aires is a very multicultural city. It is, like New York, a city built on mass European immigration, predominantly from Italy and Spain. There are also Syrian-Lebanese, Armenian, Korean and Chinese, not to mention the Jewish community, which is the largest in Latin America. On more than one occasion I have heard people claim that as a result of this cultural and racial mixture, racism does not exist in Buenos Aires.

This is, of course, a very long way from the truth. The Asian communities are not particularly well integrated and are viewed with hostility by some. Meanwhile the growing numbers of poor Bolivians, Paraguayans and Peruvians who have come in search of a better life are spoken of with contempt: they are commonly known as the negros de mierda (shitty blacks). There is a busker on the Subte who plays upon this prejudice; between songs he jokes with evening commuters that he is ‘un negro, pero bien entrenado’ (‘a black, but well trained’). It is a smart joke, brave and close to the bone.

Buenos Aires is a happily multicultural city insofar as the cultures it incorporates are European, but the presence of immigrants from other, poorer Latin American nations seems to expose the limits of its tolerance. I couldn’t attest to how much of this racism is extreme, or physically violent. I am sure that it must exist. Most of the racism I see and hear is casual, off the cuff, of the ‘I’m not racist but…’ variety. Yet in a way it is no less sad, especially when it is so widespread. Physical violence is the most extreme and obvious way of discriminating against someone on the basis of their skin colour or nationality, but it is not the only way. There are many others, more subtle and yet just as damaging.

Many of these immigrants wind up living in places like Villa 31 or sleeping rough on the streets. Buenos Aires also hosts, to its shame, thousands of illegal and clandestine textile sweatshops in which the immigrant (predominantly Bolivian) workers are forced to work 16-hour days in dangerous and unhygienic conditions, in many cases having to sleep by their machines. The city government has made some progress on this issue, and has tried to legitimise the textile sweatshops by forcing them to meet labour regulations; but the law does not go nearly far enough, only penalizing the managers of the sweatshops – many of whom are also poor immigrants – rather than going to the root of the problem by penalizing the clothing labels that make use of sweatshop labour.

Buenos Aires is a city with some very beautiful areas that cosy up against areas of real ugliness; a city with a famously languid, lazy atmosphere, yet in which many people are out of the house for fifteen hours a day; a wealthy, modern, important global city, in which many thousands of residents live and work in dangerous and unhealthy conditions; a diverse and multicultural city that at the same time resents and fears the new waves of immigration that drift down from the country’s northern borders; a cosmopolitan and progressive place that also retains strong traditional and religious features. So much conflict can be exhausting, but then again perhaps harmony would be dull.