Text by Josefina Licitra, Photos by Carolina Camps
Translated by Ted O’Callahan.

Natalia Ferreyra lives in Hidden City, a slum in Buenos Aires.  There a photography workshop run by the nonprofit organization Ph15 supports her use of art to understand and rewrite daily life in a world marked by violence, religion, poverty, and a desperate search for an escape.

I

There was hope here. It was in the 1940s, when thousands of people migrated to Buenos Aires from the interior provinces of Argentina to join the industrial workforce.  Without money, but with the promise of building their future in what was then called Barrio General Belgrano: a neighborhood of narrow winding streets, located beside two large meat markets that still receive, slaughter, store, and sell meat for Buenos Aires.

There, on the western edge of town, in that dark country adjoining an empire of blood, workers came for their chance at greatness.

There was hope in Barrio General Belgrano.  At that time, Argentines listened to the speeches of President Juan Domingo Peron, a mesmerizing figure who spoke of import substitution, a strong country, and a real future.  But within a few years something broke and there began to be more people than jobs.  These workers began to seem superfluous.  And after a while they became an army of people without direction.  With nowhere to go, no place to return to, the crowd ended up crammed into precarious, illegal forms of housing.

Barrio General Belgrano was renamed Villa 15. Villa 15 became Hidden City during the World Cup in 1978 when officials from the military dictatorship erected a wall to hide this unhappy neighborhood from the eyes of foreigners.

Today this place without hope is home to 16,000 people.  One of those people is Nati.

II

All routes into Hidden City resemble each other.  They are mere suggestions of streets that twist deep into the development, branching until eventually petering out.  It is hard to know where any of the streets of Hidden City go.

At ten o’clock on a Saturday morning one of these streets, Alvarez Chrysostom, still seems asleep.  The only signs of life come from bodies slumped on a corner.  They are kids who spent the night taking paco, a cocaine derivative which sells for 25 cents a hit and is decimating the young people of the slum.

Along this street, threading through these people, like a flower that has survived this place, comes Nati.

She has a rare beauty.  Her skin is perfectly smooth. Her long black hair falls to her shoulders with the sensuality of a bygone era.  Even in athletic clothes Nati recalls the Renaissance Madonnas. She walks five dull blocks before finally stopping at a brightly-colored house.  It is the community cultural center, the place Nati has come to take photography classes for the last five years.

Inside the building are eight others like Nati.  They all live in Hidden City and all unknowingly used the language of light to name the broken universe in which they live.  That is precisely the intention of Ph15, a nonprofit organization that for 10 years has offered a photography course designed for kids in the area.

Ph15 exists through donations and online sales of the images taken by students, who in turn receive income from each sale. Every so often the group is invited to show work in the interior of Argentina, in Europe, or in the U.S. One of Nati’s pictures drew attention. It shows a neighborhood scene: a group of residents, including her mother, seeking some fresh air in a narrow alley during a stifling summer afternoon.

That’s all we can see. And then, there is everything else.

III

In the home of 19-year-old Nati there is a black and white photo. It shows her as a child, serious and skinny, giving the camera an empty look. She was 11. She spent her days with some friends who were awful. Some were from her primary school, others had simply shown up there, and if there is no more detail it’s because Nati’s life has certain blank moments: people, places, and disasters. Everything comes and goes quietly.

Nati tells of one afternoon when she was 11. One of those friends drove her to a vacant lot and taught her to drive.  Some weeks later, another friend brought her to buy new clothes. A few days later she was told, “Get ready. We’re heading out.”

Nati was ready. She had shining braids and wore her new clothes. She and her friends set out. The apparent destination was the Parque de la Costa, a sort of small-scale Disney World in a fancy northern suburb of Buenos Aires. But before reaching the park, the car stopped at an automobile dealership and one of the friends said, “Nati, take the wheel for a minute, we will be right out.”

She sat there. After a few minutes her friends came running toward the car. They scrambled in, shouting, “Go!”

Nati went. Stunned, deaf, dumb, she drove through the streets as if she were turning her confusion into choreography. Someone, at some point, told her to stop. The next scene found everyone in the house of a member of the group, dividing the spoils. Only when she saw the $ 55 in her hand did Nati finally understand. “That was fun,” she said. “When do we go again?”

They had fun for four years, until her friends began to end up in jail or get married. Leaving her, as she saw it. Eventually Nati began to change.

One afternoon, for something to do, Nati accompanied her boyfriend’s sister, Mariela, to a photography workshop. Mariela left after two months and found happiness in Christ. But Nati has stayed for the last five years.

So, sometimes, with little fanfare, good things happen. Just the same way bad things happen.

IV

Cumbia plays loudly in Nati’s home which is also her boyfriend Juan’s. The room, where they have lived as a couple for two years, is on the first floor of a cold, damp building where there is more people than space. In the basement, where Juan’s mother and some of his twenty siblings live, there are a couple of small rooms. In dim light, little kids, perhaps siblings or the children of siblings, play, hiding under cushions.

Above you can climb a ladder to reach four rooms.  In one that opens onto the street Nati and Juan are drinking maté and talking.

“You have to travel, Nati.  You have a future in photography.”

The problem these days, these months, is that Nati doesn’t want to go. Some time ago the Ph15 workshop chose her for work that involves travel to the interior of Argentina, where she teaches pinhole photography. The traveling team also goes to Brazil, the Netherlands, and Ecuador, but she has turned down offers to go abroad. She feels uncomfortable when she is far from home, she says. Bored.

“I don’t want to go to other countries. Three months away is a long time. It’s a lot. When I go to another province for a week, I can already feel boredom getting me, and melancholy.

It is raining outside. Now and then, drops make their way inside.

“I don’t understand why it upsets you, ” Juan says.

“It’s nothing. It’s just that I’m bored. I need my music. And you’re not there.” Nati turns her head. She says, “We go everywhere together. Together we’ll go out and jump on the first city bus we see, wherever it’s going. I’ll go anywhere then.”

Nati and Juan met five years ago, while she was still having fun stealing. Juan used to get drunk and high in front of Nati’s house, when she still lived with her family. One summer evening when Nati and her sister were out on the sidewalk Juan and Nati noticed each other. And Nati, despite everything, liked what she saw. Once they were together she asked him to stop with the vices and he ended up doing that.

“She rescued me,” he says. “I had no family.”

Juan was born in Chaco, in northern Argentina, one of the poorest provinces in the country. His family moved to Buenos Aires when he was two months old. At eight he began working with his father, and at twelve he left home. He slept in plazas, on corners, under bridges. He did that until he was 22 when, in 2004, he met Nati. In 2007 they moved into this room together. There is a great deal more than the two of them. There are bags of clothes and toys (which Nati purchased to sell at a fair in the village), ornaments, wet towels, a fan, odd shoes, and a frosted glass lamp that hides a gun. Juan never goes out without his gun.

“You pull out a piece and they don’t mess with you,” he says. “Nothing is certain in this neighborhood, but a piece is always respected.”

Nati also carries a weapon, a knife that Juan made for her. The handle has grooves to fit her fingers, and the edge is curved in a way that makes it particularly deadly. “If you stick the knife in and turn it, ” Juan says, rotating the blade in the air to demonstrate, “the person dies on the spot. I taught Nati that the first thing is to defend yourself. If they go looking for you, you have to give them what they deserve. A lot of them here have been to prison. I say, you may know prison, but I know crazy.”

Nati listens to all of this as if it is no different from the sound of the rain. Her face appears expressionless, detached from everything.

“I have to be armed, ready to go 24-hours a day,” continues Juan. “A while ago police chased some young guys into Hidden City. Good guys, not bothering anyone. The cops were in a 4×4 truck, but even then they didn’t want to come into the neighborhood.  If they had come ten feet farther, I would have started to shoot,” Juan points out the window. “Look. That’s where they shot from.”

Hidden City alleys all seem faded.  There is something much too gray here, a fatal tone.  Everything from the bricks and street signs to the broken bicycles and mountains of garbage inhabited by rats ends up turning gray.

Nati and Juan want to leave the neighborhood.  But their reasons don{t have to do with comfort. “There are so many foreigners here, ” Juan says.  “Too many Paraguayans.”

Hidden City is inhabited by about 60 percent Argentines and 40 percent Bolivians or Paraguayans. This division is one of many reasons why gangs are fighting inside the neighborhood.  Another reason is that Hidden City is divided into four parts: the Center is the oldest and most dangerous, the fondo where Nati and Juan live, the bajadita is right by the community cultural center, and the Barrio Nuevo is an area beside Avenida Eva PerĂłn built during the military government in an effort to move the families in the area from temporary buildings into more “organized” spaces. Theoretically it was a transitional step toward permanent apartments.  But none of that actually happened.  Today it is clear that the Barrio Nuevo did nothing to improve life there. All it accomplished was to dissolve some of the social bonds that had developed in the older areas.

The Barrio Nuevo has a more individualistic approach than the rest of Hidden City.  Therefore there is a special animosity toward the residents of the Barrio Nuevo. Sometimes, according to Nati, they shoot their shotguns randomly with the scattered shot pelting whatever house is around.  And sometimes the shots are much more localized. Nati and Juan’s building, for example, bears the mark of two shootings on the facade.  The shots were not necessarily directed at Juan.  He has twenty siblings, seven from his mother, twelve from his father, and one that came from outside and never left, and somebody always has accounts to be settled.

Juan’s siblings roughly fall into two groups.  One of them solves wrongs in a direct manner, and the other is headed by Mariela, Juan’s older sister, a woman who became a catechist in a local church and pushed two other siblings to have a “meeting with God” where they were exorcised, spoke of the past and the future, and received an invitation to change.

They changed.

Soon they began to talk better, to greet with hugs, and to put Christ in almost everything they said.  Eventually, when there was a problem with someone outside the family, all the siblings met (the evangelicals and the others). They all stood together in front of the “problem” individual and the Christians presented a Solomonic solution, “You can do what you want, but I am going to pray for this man.”

Nati, who was present, found in those words deep truth, free of evasion. She decided then that her photographic work for the Ph15 workshop would be called “Bibles and Guns.”

Since early 2009 Nati has tried to document the paradoxical world in which she spends her days.  But she hasn’t been able to take many pictures. Every time every time she wants to take a candid shot of one of Juan’s brothers, he notices and poses for the camera.  The attitude is always the same: the brother takes his gun and puts it to his temple.  Nati has lots of pictures like this.  But there is a photo, a single shot, that she hasn’t taken.

Sometimes, when he is drunk, Juan points his gun at Nati’s head.

On this image there is silence.

V

Nati sweeps and straightens the house. She moves the furniture around.  Every week they change things up in their tiny home.  Now, sitting there with expressionless eyes, Nati says her biggest struggle is with boredom.

“I would like to start a bookstore,” she says. “It isn’t the same thing to be working in a shop as it is to be here all day, alone and bored.  I always finish cleaning and go home to my mom, but I get bored there too.”

Nati gets up and leaves the house, just to have something to do.  To get to her mother’s house she has to walk seven blocks toward the center of the neighborhood.  The street is always the same: dust, children, dogs, cumbia blaring, fetid water in the gutters, and as narrow as the aisle of a store.  In one of those passages, in a house made of metal and wood, lives her mother, Pity.

She greets Nati saying, “Hello, baby.”

Pity is 34. Her hair is as long and black as her daughter’s.  Beside her is Antonio, Nati’s father, who mumbles “Hello” without taking his eyes off the TV.  Minutes later he stands, takes a toothpick, and disappears behind a curtain to lie down on the bed. He will soon have to return to his job at the supermarket, where he works fourteen hours a day as a stock clerk.  Mother and daughter are in the dining room.  The table is overflowing with leather belts that Pity decorates.  Each is sold in Puerto Madero, the most expensive neighborhood in Buenos Aires, as an “ethnic handicraft” for twelve dollars.  Pity is paid 15 cents for her work on each belt.

“Come, baby,” she tells Nati.  “Sit and help me a bit.”

Pity gave birth to her daughter in a school where her parents sent her. The decision to put her there has never been questioned. Her father was alcoholic and her mother worked all day. They believed it was a reasonable choice.  And of course, fourteen-year-old Pity felt isolated and alone. She met Antonio, who became her boyfriend, and, though locked away, Pity got pregnant.  She gave birth to a girl she named Natalia in honor of a school employee.

“My mom always tells me that once, when she was pregnant, she fell down a circular staircase.  But I was born fine,” Nati says.

Nati doesn’t know much more than this about her mother’s pregnancy or her own birth and infancy. She has not been told anything and she remembers nothing. She doesn’t remember the school or the weekend outings with her mother. Nor does she remember the day Pity left the school, leaving Nati there when she was four.

“Pass me the thread, baby,” Pity says.

Nati bears no grudge against her mother.  She doesn’t try to interpret the past.  There are lives like hers, without symbolism, without room for questions. Nati left the school when her maternal grandfather, who visited her on weekends, took her out for a day and never brought her back.  Instead he brought her to Pity. Life took a new turn.  At five Nati began to go with her grandfather and uncle collecting cardboard in the city every day.

From confinement to the streets: that is Nati’s idea of paradise.

While Nati was collecting cardboard Pity had another daughter. At 19 she now had two children (to which she would add a third child at age 25).  This is comparatively few for Hidden City or for any of the country’s poor areas where girls begin to give birth at 12.  Nati, childless at 19, is seen as an oddity.  Even her own family says she should get pregnant.  But she refuses.  Before having children, she says, she wants to have a future, a job.

“I want to have a plan,” she says.

VI

It’s Saturday morning and Nati is cleaning, while “Fat Luis” her favorite cumbia singer is on the TV screen.  Order and cleanliness are unfathomable in such households.  Trash is a bourgeois concept — much like the verb “to choose.” Generally absolutely everything must be kept because it might be needed at some point in the future.  Nati, however, fights this logic: she gets rid of junk with such fervor that Juan’s toolbox was thrown out because it looked messy.

Now, on the white tablecloth in the recently cleaned room there is only the gun.  The morning light bounces off the metal, sparkling darkly.  In a corner, there is a bag of new toys bought in the Buenos Aires suburbs.  Nati is good at reselling. There are jokes about it at Ph15.  They say it’s impossible to spend half an hour with Nati without buying something.

In the future, Nati imagines making and selling shoes.  Or toys.  Or cutting hair in her own salon. Or running a bookstore (there are few in the village).  Or taking photos.

For the last one, she would need to polish herself.  For example, she would need to learn to speak better. “At Ph15 they say that I must learn to explain things more clearly. Sometimes when we give classes and I am teaching pinhole photography I will curse.  Words just abandon me. At one point they asked me if I want to be a regular teacher, and I said yes. Then they told me it would be good for me to finish high school. And learn English.”

One memorable Saturday morning, Nati recalls, a U.S. delegation that included Anthony Wayne, Ambassador of the U.S. in Argentina, came to the center.  The man was very friendly and invited everyone to take pictures of the embassy. That wasn’t a problem, but the U.S. Ambassador in Argentina did not speak Spanish.

“He talked as if we understood.  And the only thing I understood was ‘Hello.’ So I’d better learn to speak English,” she says.

A translator appeared and, with help, Wayne asked Nati to show him her photos.  She did.  With each image, the Ambassador said, “Oh.”

“Oh, oh, oh,” Nati remembers and laughs.  “He called me Natalie, Natalie, Natalie until I got tired of it and said, ‘Not Natalie, my name is Natalia.  Natalia Ferreyra.  Natalia.’”

Nati repeats her name aloud. She says it; she spells it letter by letter, as if there are many versions that all become Nati and her quiet, bright smile.

Note: if you want to give a donation to PH15, or help them in any way, please contact the Foundation at +5411- 47738126 / info@ph15.org.ar and visit their web site.

Tags: Buenos Aires city, Millenium Goals, photo coops, photojournalism, poverty

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 03:48 and is filed under Assignments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.