The residents of this grand, old 34-room house in La Boca call it the last 'conventillo’ or tenement.

We have the pleasure of presenting these two essays about San Telmo and La Boca—the oldest neighborhoods of Buenos Aires—that were created by AdriĂĄn PĂ©rez and MarĂ­a Mansilla for the Latin American edition of National Geographic Magazine. We have reprinted the texts as they originally appeared, but the photo edition, done for Nuestra Mirada by Susan Welchmann, is completely different.

AdriĂĄn, photography editor for the newspaper PĂĄgina 12, has continued with this project with the goal of publishing a book about the city in which he resides. This simple multimedia feature shows a more complete version of his photographic essay.

Heart in the Mouth

Photographs by AdriĂĄn PĂ©rez, Text by MarĂ­a Mansilla

Translated by Kate Macfarlane

There is a place where the word “mouth” does not refer to anatomy or to hunger or to kisses. At the 56^th parallel, below the Tropic of Capricorn, the word boca — Spanish for “mouth” — is always capitalized. There the word refers to a neighborhood of Buenos Aires and an Argentine soccer club, each of special caliber. The history that unites the two stretches more than a century, although it is no longer encountered at first glance.

From the main boulevard of La Boca it is difficult to imagine that this terminal of rusty ships was once an international port; that this sluggish river, the Riacheulo, once fed its people. But if you submerge yourself in the alleys, La Boca reveals its other face: bohemian, working-class, anarchist, provincial, and, above all, reminiscent of the Little Italy built by nineteenth-century European exiles. The houses of wood and sheet metal are proof of this Italian heritage, but its true legacy, and the heart of the neighborhood, lies in the soccer stadium. Every time the Boca Juniors plays at home, passion for the team accelerates the pulse of the 43,413 neighbors.

The club, founded in 1905 by five Italians, has the international fame of Manchester United and can count Maradona among its fans. But there is a that secret sets the Boca Juniors apart: the unconditional loyalty of its fans. In fact, according to legend, at the end of the nineteenth century residents of the neighborhood founded the Republic of La Boca in opposition to a repression of workers’ rights unleashed by the sitting president. Their attempt at independence would not last even a day, but the residents of La Boca still behave as though they inhabit a separate world, perhaps that of imperial Rome.

Bombonera. Minute zero. Boca plays at home.

“One does not have the right to die without having seen a sĂșper clĂĄsico between archrivals Boca Juniors and River Plate. Of course, this culminating act cannot become reality just anywhere; it must occur in La Bombonera,[1]” writes The Observer. It is truly an experience to be located amidst the crowd; the chants, songs, and whistles of the fans make the whole stadium tremble. “When there is a goal, it is terrible. I try to ensure that it does not get out of control, but I am the first to get up on top of the table to celebrate,” says Augusto Randazzo, owner of the ancient Bar Roma, a kind of ‘parallel venue’ that takes bets on the game. On the days of the clĂĄsico there are never enough tables and many would-be patrons clamor outside with their noses pressed against the glass.

Augusto is descended from Sicilians and he is very proud of his heritage. In 2001, in the middle of a national economic crisis, he decided to rent and reopen the bar. “My friend asked me, ‘How are you going to make money here?’” Randazzo recalls. But he persisted with his plan, which included a major renovation, until the neighbors began to express their worry about the planned modernization. “How is he going to do that?’ they said, ‘it’s the Bar Roma!” To these, Augusto listened. After removing twenty-five coats of paint from the doors, he began to collect pieces of history. One piece of uncovered graffiti reads “Carlos Gardel was here,” evidence of the tango superstar.

RaĂșl Bozzo, known around here because he speaks zeneizi, the Genoese dialect that was once more common than Spanish on the streets of La Boca, is a patron of the bar. “I tried out for River, and made the team. My grandmother, a Boca fanatic, cursed me: U se ga de rumpe a gamba (For this, your legs will break),” Bozzo recalls. “During my first game I tore my meniscus, and I could never play again.”

One hundred meters from the Boca stadium, another game is played.

Rivera Sur is another corner dive. There the waiters lower the shutters as soon as the game begins, as if following the secret orders of some referee. The only thing that glitters is a Carnaval costume worn by a boy named Diego (like his idol, Diego Maradona) who occupies the best table in this den of large men who smoke and mash their nerves against the floor. Before the television announcer yells “Goal!” the 400 meters that surround the stadium are flooded by the roar of the crowd; the intensity of the seismic activity indicates which team has scored. At Bar Roma Randazzo surely celebrates atop one of his tables.

The flag of Sweden can be seen everywhere in La Boca; its colors, which arrived at the coastline of La Boca on the mast of a Swedish boat, inspired the identity of the club. Blue and yellow can be seen in the clothing of the people, the facades of houses, and even in the atrium of a church. All surrender to the color scheme. Even Coca Cola had to change its colors in order to enter the stadium — it renounced red, synonymous with Boca’s rival, for the neutrality of black.

In the conventillo, an old tenement house, it is impossible to escape the sounds of the game. The commentary leaves the radio and floats down to the laundry on the clotheslines that, like pennants, cross the patio where the Majolica ceramics once trembled from the volume of the zarzuela. Matilde Orellana endures the noise with patience, just as she responds to the accordion player who sings in his window to attract tourists. “My husband and I came from Salta in the nineties because we got jobs in a supermarket; we were fast food waiters,” recounts Matilde. Before long they lost their jobs, and they ended up at Villa 31, the largest settlement in the city. Later they arrived here, at the “last conventillo,” so called because it is the only building of its kind overlooking Caminito, the heart of La Boca, to survive the voraciousness of the tourist industry.

La Boca continues to be a neighborhood of tango, anarchism, and provinciality—a neighborhood at the margins.

The businessman Mauricio Macri, a former president of Boca and the mayor of Buenos Aires.

“We live with our hearts in our mouths,” Matilde says sharply. “The conventillos are being emptied, and it’s what they want to do with us. But they do not have an argument yet, because here they owe mountains of taxes. The city government and the nephews of the owner must have massive fights; they are losing money with us inside. My problem is that I have seven children, and nobody will rent to me.”

La Boca is a patchwork of clashing paradigms. Around Caminito, the most touristy hundred meters of the city, conventillos restored “for export” rub shoulders with the real ones, which withstand the threat of demolition as best they can. The old bridge joins Capital Federal, the richest district, with the province of Buenos Aires, one of the poorest. The club gleams with murals by famous artists while, across the street, the wall is stamped with soot. Parallel worlds coexist in La Boca, and they shout at each other, attract each other, and reproach each other.

“My father was a worker at the docks in the golden ages of La Boca. I was his assistant. I remember that, for a time, there was no space to moor the boats. This has changed almost completely. They are stealing our neighborhood from us. Before, we were all one family, and we lived in the wooden houses they called conventillos. Now we live in cement tenements,” grumbles Antonio Accinelli, sitting next to the emergency telephone of the Volunteer Firefighters of La Boca. According to them, they are the world’s most active firefighter association; they put out a fire per day, the majority of them in dwellings made of wood or cardboard.

Want to go from one shore of the Riachuelo to the other? Just climb on the public boat.

What future awaits this old immigrant neighborhood?

The blood in the arteries of La Boca is being revitalized. According to the official count, the majority of its residents are between 20 and 30 years old. “When you tell people that you moved here, they scare you,” tells Nora Mouriño. She lives 50 meters from the stadium and is already accustomed to sweeping away the confetti that the wind blows onto her patio. She and her husband MartĂ­n Otaño make up the Catalinas Sur theater company, which was born after the neighbors got together to stage a school play. Since then, they have spent 22 years together telling the stories of immigrants. “In this piece, I play a Galician, and my mother is Galician,” explains Nora. “I had never been interested in her history, and the group permits you that. And more — I use her wedding gloves, her shawl. She always comes to see me, and how she cries when she arrives…”

These days, the first generation born and raised in La Boca — the descendents of the boats, as they say around here — is fading away. And the man in charge of giving them their final farewell is Federico Cichero, president of La Boca’s oldest funeral parlor, founded in 1889. Cichero is 98 years old and this is the only job he has ever held. He sold the family business with one condition: that they let him continue working as long as he can. Because money is not the only currency in La Boca, the new owners naturally agreed.

Cichero is busy; his telephone rings continuously. “We work with people who had left La Boca but who never lost the custom of returning home,” he says coolly. “Many have asked me to scatter their ashes in the stadium. My son-in-law was one of them. Because in that time they did not permit it anymore, his ashes were stored in a tomb for two years. His boy, also a huge Boca fan, never stopped looking for a way to fulfill the last wish of his father. Eventually he found someone to help; an employee of the club scattered the ashes behind the goal, although he couldn’t tell my son-in-law how he did it.

“And you, do you dream of the same?”

“But it would have to be on River’s field. Because I am not from Boca.”

A religious service at the Orthodox church

San Telmo

A journey through the streets, the neighbors, and the profound dilemmas of San Telmo, the oldest neighborhood in Buenos Aires.

It would be full of heretics. If melancholy were a cardinal sin, as it was during the Renaissance, then San Telmo — considered the historic center of Buenos Aires—would be full of people burning at the stake. Not because of the sacred name of the neighborhood or because the zone is filled with churches — Catholic, Lutheran, and Russian Orthodox — but because the modern changes that arrive here (beginning with the grand old casona houses erected during the seventeenth century) twist the spirits of more than one resident. For some, the melancholy injects them with the necessary impulse for reclaiming the territory. But for others, prodigal sons of a city saturated with tango and psychoanalysis, the yearning is converted into anguish for what has been lost. “You love San Telmo because you live in it, but also because it is the root. When you begin to understand that this is where things began, it gives San Telmo new meaning as your place,” explains Pablo Ortiz, of the Association of Friends of the Plaza Dorrego, a national historic monument that is considered the heart of the neighborhood.

The tourist guidebooks — which are more widely read than the Bible here — affirm that without Sundays there is no San Telmo. It is true. On that day, the cobblestones of Defensa Street, the oldest in the city, bear witness to a cultural, sexual, and ethnic diversity suitable to the Frankfurt airport —the only differences are the shared bar tables and the lack of VIP lounges — and are present at unclassifiable situations. In October 2006, one of George W. Bush’s daughters was eating so relaxed that neither she nor her Secret Service bodyguards noticed that her purse had been stolen.

“Polanski and Buñuel would be happy! They could find characters in the people that they would see walking around this neighborhood,” declares Manuel AntĂ­n, director of the University of Film, which landed in San Telmo sixteen years ago, back when the area was so dangerous that nobody was keen to insure the film crews. Today 46% of AntĂ­n’s students are foreigners, more than half of whom come from Europe. “We arrived searching for a space with spirit, because cinema relies upon scenery,” explains AntĂ­n. “There are other places that have charm, but this place has a charm that is deeper, more ancient.”

“More melancholic?”

“It could be, but everything valuable is melancholic. Happiness never produces works of art.”

“San Telmo is a work of art?”

“I believe so.”

A souvenir to bring back to Italy: an Argentine sombrero.

In this case, restoring the pieces of yesteryear is the family trade.

“I ask myself if I could be like the Cuban that plays salsa in the international hotel,” reflects Lucas Frontini, a 24-year-old contrabassist with combed dreadlocks. Lucas plays with the Traditional Imperial Orchestra, which performs around here on weekends, after cruising in search of parking to unload the piano and then pushing it to the old street. “At first it’s horrible, everyone comes to talk to you. After a while, you get used to it,” advises Lucas. “It’s an opportunity, it gets you more work. This changed my life; it introduced me to tango, music that I used to refuse because I am a jazz lover. But suddenly, tango began to enchant me because it’s yours, it’s your language.”

By playing around Defensa, the orchestra makes three times more money than it would covering parties. Foreigners – members of their temporary audiences – have hosted the orchestra during their seven tours through Europe. (In fact, when this account was written there was a band member visiting Toulouse, where he had been invited by an audience member.) Opposite their urban stage, the panorama includes a tin toy shop, a bank, an art gallery, four (of San Telmo’s 83) antique shops, a space for the products of young designers, a grill, and an ‘Office of Santeria and Parapsychology.’  On one corner, a flagstone reads, “Here lived Paloma Alonso, who was arrested and disappeared on July 30, 1977 by the terrorism of the State.” (The emerging neighborhood association put it there in early 2002, after the Argentine economic crisis). On another corner, downhill, a torch burns outside the headquarters of General Confederation of Labor. This fire indicates that the embalmed body of Eva Perón once rested there.

The drums of La Llamada (The Call), the traditional Uruguayan carnival, are tuned by the fire.

Mario de Caro, 92, was the star pianist at Bar Sur.

Flamenco, when rock and roll sleeps.

Without the Sunday flea market, there is no San Telmo. It is true: this is where the index fingers of the devout who keep their memories in photographs work the hardest. At the Antiques Fair, in addition to porcelain plates, they nonchalantly sell an AK-47, a mink stole, a 1000 afghani bill with the image of the last king Zahir Shah, and a doll of Mafalda (from the famous comic strip). The historic buildings of San Telmo are important, as are its restaurants. But according to the government of Buenos Aires, the third draw that attracts travelers here is the people — its social heritage. What about the residents of San Telmo is so special? “The mix,” responds JosĂ© MarĂ­a Peña, 76 years old, who studies the architecture of San Telmo. “Some say that we have to be careful because new people are entering, but I tell those people, ‘The transfusion is necessary! A neighborhood cannot freeze, it has to keep living.’”

I do not see the advantages of the hoards of tourists. Take, for example, the case of a man who was going to a meeting; he did not have the address, but he thought, “I will get there anyway, I will ask.” In two blocks, everyone answered him in English. “I didn’t understand anything!” complained the neighbor at the Popular Assembly of San Telmo Plaza Dorrego, the neighborhood association that installed the memorial flagstone. The group survives not only through its sense of self-importance, but also because it is still necessary; many eat thanks to its popular cookpot or learn to read in its literacy courses. “In reality, I am fed up with the tourists! Everything is for them,” says an assembly-member, until a woman interrupts him to defend “social tourism,” and they begin to debate. Summer is beginning in Buenos Aires, but the neighbors shiver. In the face of the real-estate furor, even this symbolic group fears being evicted from the land that the government granted them.

El Dorrego, a classic Buenos Aires corner cafe, abuts the San Telmo antiques market.

Once you cross the perimeter of the Area of Historical Protection, San Telmo continues to be, according to the official census of 2001, one of the ten poorest neighborhoods of the fifty that make up the city of Buenos Aires. But perhaps not for long: the hoteles familiares, which for decades have lodged entire extended families in each room, are saying goodbye to those people with the aim of attracting tourists and charging rates in foreign currency.

The revitalization of San Telmo began at the end of the seventies, in step with the speeches that called for the recovery of historic quarters. In those days there were no builders able to meet the challenges of these facades, so set designers from the great Teatro ColĂłn lent a hand with the restoration. Later, the Trade School of the Historic Quarter was established with the sole purpose of caring for this zone, which contains 40% of the architectural patrimony of Buenos Aires. There they not only work and learn the vocation of restoration, they also train the unemployable. Because of that, men who sleep in the street and women who are patients of the neuropsychiatrist Braulio Mayno take part in the refurbishment of these proud buildings. San Telmo still thinks about how to be a new old city, and consequently it has not finished defining its destiny; it does not know if it will grow or mature. Like always, the neighbors get excited in front of antique shop windows and hug artists who, signs in hand, offer “free hugs.” They never get bored. Anything can happen here. For example, NĂ©stor Kirchner, then the nation’s president, had to call the historic Bar BritĂĄnico to find the sociologist Horacio GonzĂĄlez, one of the illustrious residents of the neighborhood, in order to name him director of the National Library.

San Telmo also was and continues to be the cradle of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Adolfo PĂ©rez Ezquivel. And if I state all this in hardly any pages it is not because it has been told to me, but because I too live in San Telmo.

Tags: Buenos Aires city, culture, photojournalism

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 03:28 and is filed under Galleries. 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.