Two Months Porteña: Thoughts on Buenos Aires
From Backpack to Buenos Aires: New Home, Language, Life
It’s happened a few times that Diego and I have been in some public space in Buenos Aires—the wine aisle in the grocery store, the Bosques of Palermo, walking down Santa Fe—when, upon hearing someone speaking English, I immediately rubberneck in their direction, my ears straining to catch those whispers of my native tongue. A little inside joke has developed around it: Diego will lean close to me and whisper “your people!”
My Spanish is getting good. Really good. The other night, while trying to figure out if I had written something correctly, I ended up explaining to Diego the differences between the imperfect subjunctive and the preterite indicative of Spanish, in Spanish; I get by just fine. I still get such a lovely high, though, stumbling upon snippets of my native language and understanding them without having to try.
But aside from the fact that my brain is wired in a different language than the one predominantly spoken in my current country of residence, I feel so at home in Buenos Aires.
I just hit my official two-month anniversary of actually living here—more time than I’ve spent in one place since a month in the Galapagos, in May, and several years in New York before that! It’s been strange going from moving my worldly possessions to a new city every three days to becoming a person who has a list of her top three vegetable stands (and has mastered three different types of banter with each of their three different proprietors). But it’s been wonderful, and settling in Buenos Aires has made me really happy.
Here, I have all of the joy of being in a big city, full of art and diversity and a hundred different places to go out on a Tuesday night (if I still went out on Tuesday nights, which I mostly don’t; upon turning 25, my appetite for weekday drinking shrunk at a rate commensurate with the increasing severity of my hangovers). But it’s a big city in a different country, on a different continent, with a different set of joys and pitfalls, all blanketed by the use of a different language. I love it.
Let me tell you a little bit about my new home in the way I know best—deeply passionately, in a structure that may only make sense to me, and with enough run-on sentences to make you feel like I’m sitting across from you, telling you all this live and talking too fast as I go. Then, missing me and inspired by all I’m about to tell you about Buenos Aires, you’ll buy a ticket to come visit me and Diego. (Introducing all my friends to tango and medialunas is my end goal here, and I won’t be shy about it.)
Buenos Aires & New York: Port Cities & Pizza
Think of a city that’s very proud of what it is (and the kind of pizza it makes). That has a thick accent that separates it from the rest of its country and region. That provides its inhabitants a sense of anonymity at the same time that it surrounds them with millions of others all hustling, creating, and making a life for themselves. That has an underground metro system that connects its collection of distinct neighborhoods. That has museums and theaters and restaurants renowned the world over. That owes a big part of its cultural identity to being a port city populated by generations of immigrants hailing from all corners of this earth, sharing their food and languages and art and traditions with their new home.
Maybe you’re thinking of New York. Or maybe you’re thinking of Buenos Aires.
I’d be doing Buenos Aires a disservice if I compared it point-by-point to New York. It’s its own place with its own way of life. But the connection is a good place to start, because it puts in your head a sense of Buenos Aires, of what playing field it’s on.
Related note: New York may have Broadway, but Buenos Aires has the most theaters of any city in the world.1
I liked a lot of the places I visited in South America. Santiago had gorgeous mountain views, and Medellin had the nicest subway I’ve ever been on, and Lima’s food scene was insane. (Quito and Bogota were cool, too, but are located at relatively high altitude, and even after applying the rigorous acclimation routine that I had to adopt after going to the hospital in Cusco, they were hard for me to adjust to.) I’ve even been in love with a city here before—see my infatuation with Montevideo—which means you should take everything I’m about to say about Buenos Aires with a grain of salt; I feel about cities the way I feel about ice cream: there’s something to love in each scoop, even the ones I wouldn’t order again.
But each of those cities felt a bit too small and/or a bit too homogenous. They often made me feel decidedly foreign. Obviously other. I felt eyes on me, occasionally leering and often just curious, almost all the time that I was in public. Vendors noticed and approached me, or switched to a labored and impatient English for me, or charged me higher prices. Men called out comments about my blonde hair and blue eyes and children pointed. None of that’s bad, necessarily; it’s part of traveling, and it reminds you that you’re far from home, which prompts introspection, which is, if you travel like I travel, why you left home in the first place.
Buenos Aires isn’t like that. Porteños, or natives to this port city, fill the entire range of the human color spectrum, though in ratios very different to cities of similar size in the States. (A fellow expat recently told me that Buenos Aires was “diverse how a European country is diverse,” and he’s right; there’s a noticeable lack of black people.) A big section of the population claims roots in Spain and Italy, two of the many European countries that sent over ships of settlers in the 19th century and whose citizens have been welcomed with open arms continuously since (the Argentinian Constitution contains pretty wide-reaching preferences and protections for foreigners2, Europeans especially3). Buenos Aires has the largest Jewish population in all of South America4 (which means that yes, I’ve finally found good bagels on this continent), and a significant amount of Chinese immigrants (who famously run a monopoly on corner grocery/convenience stories, to the point where one of those stores, located approximately every two blocks in the city, is referred to as simply el chino 5) came over beginning in the 1980s. Alongside a sizable mesitzo, or mixed, population (Argentines with a blend of European and indigenous heritage), a significant community of indigenous tribes6 remain in Buenos Aires, though like in neighboring Chile and Uruguay, their numbers were greatly reduced by the government slaughter of indigenous tribes in the late 19th century, and indigenous persons often face significant discrimination, particularly outside of the capital city itself 7. And Buenos Aires’s population of non-Argentine Latinos is growing as refugees fleeing Venezuela’s 12,000% inflation and 85% poverty rate head to Argentina to find a better life, particularly after Colombia and Brazil tightened their borders earlier this year8.
All this to say: Buenos Aires is its own mixing pot of cultures and colors and languages. I don’t feel out of place walking down the street with blonde hair and blue eyes, and I’m not surprised to see two schoolkids in the park chattering in Mandarin, and while I can’t yet identify the differences between a Venezuelan and a Colombian and a Bolivian accent, I know that they can all be found in the capital’s borders.
Important note: Argentines aren’t blind to racism, and many members of Buenos Aires’s upper classes (who, genetically speaking, have on average 76% European ancestry and 20% Amerindian ancestry; those percentages are reversed in other Argentinian providences farther away from the capital, like the north-west region of Salta)9 are proud of their European heritage and its physical markers (lighter hair, skin, and eyes) and discriminate based on them. It’s not right nor fair, but it exists, and in a way, I benefit from it. Acknowledging that is an important first step to changing it; talking to my Argentine friends about their perspectives and biases is my second.
It’s Not All Sunshine & Empanadas: Downsides of Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is so cosmopolitan that it can sustain a weekly stand-up comedy show, in English, hosted in a formerly-private-residence-turned-arts-space mansion retrofitted with a stage and a bar and decked out in avant-garde prints and graffitied walls and a bathtub filled with empty wine bottles. (It feels like the setting for a Broad City episode.) I went a few Thursdays ago and was charmed by an American comic who opened her very funny set by confessing that although she’d lived in Buenos Aires for two years, she had yet to step in dog shit or get her phone stolen, so she didn’t feel like a real porteña.
Everyone laughed, because those are two things that really do happen in Buenos Aires on a depressingly frequent basis. They’re two of my least favorite parts about the city.
The dog shit is everywhere. Literally. And that in and of itself wouldn’t be too bad, maybe; perhaps it’d inspire me to develop a more nimble, attentive gait while strolling through the streets of the city.
But it’s what the dog shit represents (beyond the functioning digestive system of the tens of thousands of dogs that populate this city): a deeply ingrained, selfish attitude of passing the buck on to the next person.
Some background: Buenos Aires, and all of Argentina, is entering a recession (more on this in a second). Businesses owners are losing money (a baker at my favorite French panadería told me that they saw revenues drop by 40% over the last two months, as Argentines spend less money eating out as the buying power of their salaries depreciates and inflation runs rampant, and that the currently owner doesn’t have enough cash to pay his suppliers on time).
But no one’s freaking out, because Argentina has gone through this before, many times, and has come out alive every time. All of the Argentines I’ve talked to about the economy aren’t happy about it, but they also aren’t particularly stressed. I think constant exposure to a see-sawing currency has led them to adopt a kind of passive, get-your-kicks-where-you-can kind of attitude. They understand that they’ll probably be okay, but it’s frustrating to feel powerless in the face of global economic forces and a sometimes inept central government, so they act out that frustration by levying power on things that are within their control. Like their dog’s excrement. Why stoop down, cup its warmth in a plastic-bag-shielded hand, and carry it to the next garbage can, an entire half-block away? Leave it there. You deserve a break. The city deserves to be coated in shit. Someone else will come around to clean up your mess. Or they won’t. Who cares? Life’s short.
I ascribe that kind of worn-down collective psyche as to why Buenos Aires drivers can be such demonic almost-murderers, as well. The other day, Diego and I were walking home from dinner at a friend’s house at 11 p.m. There were almost no cars on the road, no traffic to speak of. We were crossing Cabildo, the big street a few blocks from our apartment, when a driver turning left onto Cabildo from a parallel street completely ignored the red light and careened into the crosswalk where we were. Less than two feet of space kept Diego from getting flattened. The driver, upon noticing he’d almost clipped a human being, started guffawing, his laughter ringing out across the night as he sped down the street. And this was a fairly normal driver-pedestrian exchange.
That attitude is also why I think some parents here take such a lackadaisical approach to child-rearing. Buenos Aires has the brattiest kids of any city I’ve ever been in; every time I find myself walking outside between the hours of 2 and 4 p.m., when schools get out and schoolchildren run rampant on the streets of Colegiales and Belgrano, I’m shocked by how terribly behaved they are (I’ll never get used to hearing five-year-olds addressing their parents with “dumbass” and the parents just accepting it and continuing to look at their phones). But maybe the moms and dads have a hard enough time eking out an existence in this city and have decided to cut themselves a break on the responsible-parenting front.
Those’re my reflections on dog shit; now let’s move on to petty crime. It really does happen. Buenos Aires isn’t a particularly dangerous place; its 2017 murder rate was just under 5 in 100,00010 (for reference, Atlanta, Georgia and Columbus, Ohio both have murder rates of about 16 in 100,00011).
But there is a ton of pickpocketing, particularly of small technology like phones and cameras. Argentina’s high import taxes make it almost impossible to get affordable new technology (iPhones routinely sell here for almost twice their going rate in the States), and Buenos Aires does make the list of top ten cities in the world for pickpocketing12.
I saw it live for the first time a few weeks ago. Ned and Kerianne, two former coworkers and current friends, were in Buenos Aires, and Diego and I had met up with them downtown for an evening out. We were crowded into the standing section of a bus. A woman was sitting in the middle of a row of seats in the very back that stretched the width of the bus, flicking through her phone. As the bus pulled to a stop and dragged open its doors, a man nimbly leapt up, swiped the phone from her hands, and jumped out the door. She bemoaned the loss, gave herself a hard time for being so stupid, and continued on her journey.
Seeing it happen has changed a few of my habits—I never have my phone in my back jeans pocket or leave it on the table of a restaurant if I’m eating outside or next to a window—but I don’t feel unsafe in Buenos Aires. It feels the same as living in New York—I need to be careful, of course, but it’s not an inherently dangerous place.
And when I think about it, it’s actually much less dangerous in general than the United States is. The other morning I stirred flour, baking soda, and salt into my bowl of butter, sugar, eggs, and grated zucchini while listening to the NYT’s The Daily and NPR’s Morning Edition (both the baking and the podcast-listening are two habits I now actually have time for) and crying quietly as I listened to accounts of the Thousand Oaks shooting that happened in California last week. Twelve people shot. The 307th mass shooting of the year in the United States.
I want to write more about what it’s like being an American living abroad during a Trump presidency, so I’ll save more thoughts on that for later.
Económicamente: Let’s Talk Money
A graph of the value of the Argentinian-peso-to-US-dollar exchange rate over the last year looks like the profile of a portly pope—we start off long and flat (that’s his hat), a bit of incline (that’s his face and neck), and then in September (when I got here!), we shoot up mightily to give him a big, round, indulgences-sponsored belly. The peso lost 40% of its value in about four months.
Argentina has a long and complicated financial history (they’ve wiped out the wealth of their citizens by defaulting on loans six times, most recently in 2001); it gives its citizens a kind of gristly hardness to them, where they don’t really trust the government but they also aren’t really thrown by an impending recession, as they’ve lived through worse.
The Argentinian economy is another topic worth of its own in-depth treatment, but in short, living in Buenos Aires right now means living with inflation. It means watching the price of a café con leche and two medialunas go from 30 to 50 to 60 to 75 to 85 to 90 pesos in the span of three months, of developing a rolodex of fruit and veggie prices to compare the weekly offerings of each verdulería on my block and making grocery shopping choices based on what’s gone up the least, and of preparing for rent and utilities and apartment fees to go up by hundreds of pesos every other month.
It’s not a huge deal for me, since my freelancing clients pay me in US dollars; my purchasing power doesn’t change weekly like Diego’s does. Argentines and people paid in pesos have watched their salaries lose 40% of their value in the last year (and Argentina is in for at least another year year of a recession—the World Bank suggests GDP won’t be positive until 202013—so there likely won’t be raises to keep up with the devaluation and inflation). It’s another example of the privilege that I have in living here as a foreigner with bank accounts in a stable currency. I hadn’t ever thought of earning dollars as a marker of privilege, but it clearly is. Can you imagine how different your relationship with money would be if you couldn’t rely on the $20 bill in your wallet to be worth more or less the same amount whether you spent it today or in a week or in a year?
En Fin
Having left New York to go see what else was out there, it’s a bit ironic and entirely wonderful that I ended up settling down (for a bit, at least) in South America’s answer to the Big Apple.
Here, in my new neighborhood, just like there, in my old one, my favorite thing to do in this city is walk. I love to set out in a direction, no particular end point in mind, and see what there is to gawk at along the way. Maybe it’s colorful streets with colonial corners and big, leafy trees creating dappled shade on sidewalks; maybe it’s hulking embassies with gleaming brass nameplates; maybe it’s rows and rows of lush cubes of produce pulsing with life; maybe it’s graffiti crawling up brick and unfurling over concrete. Whatever it is, it’s beautiful and it’s alive and I have the privilege and the pleasure of witnessing it.