Calle Caminito

Caminito
Calle Caminito, a street in the barrio of La Boca, is the most popularly used image on postcards from Buenos Aires. A photo of Caminito, whether of the cobblestone streets, the colorful buildings or the live tango shows, is always picturesque. Visuals of the street, which is one of the most touristic attractions in the city, typically suggest it is a place with a unique history, rich with culture and vibrant arts. Walking down Calle Caminito on a Tuesday afternoon, mid-Argentine fall, I am surprised to find that the street is only sparsely occupied by tourists photographing the colorfully painted buildings. On weekends and during the months of Spring and Summer the street must attract many more visitors. Regardless, the realization that this attraction--one the few popular tourist destinations in Buenos Aires--still has "offtimes" during which it draws little attention, seems to say a lot about the city and the country.

A stroll down Caminito feels ironic and artificial. Overpriced restaurants line the street and each one is identical to the previous, consistently offering the same mediocre-quality Italian influenced foods and cheesy decor. As you pass, men approach you with no concept of personal space to stubbornly push flyers into your hands. They aggressively speak into your face insisting that "they have the best food, the best deals, the best shows". They are relentless and their persistence is annoying, suggesting that they are likely paid by how many tourists they successfully lure into their employer's trap.
Tables for outdoor dining line the cobblestone streets, the seating organized around various elevated stages where couples perform La Boca's famous open air tango shows. Melodies of traditional milonga music radiate from scratchy speakers intending to transport listeners to the time and place of tango's birth. Since each tango show is only storefronts away from the next, one show's music inevitably becomes part of another . Thus a walk through Caminito is like walking through a tunnel of sound. The drifting tunes of traditional, time-specific tango conflict with one another and Caminito becomes confusing.

On this Tuesday afternoon, the outdoor dining spaces are barely occupied. Of the few there, there is a lonely couple sipping cafe, ignoring the live tango dancers with their noses buried in their Buenos Aires tour guides. At another tango show, all but one of the surrounding tables are empty. Still, men in kitschy suits and women in cheap fishnets continue to dance on their stages, performing the same routines over and over again despite the lack of an audience. The dancers are not the only aspects that seem staged. The famous brightly painted houses made of wood and metal that line the streets are difficult to grasp-- they begin and end abruptly and walking amidst them you feel as if you are living inside the artistic set of play. A close look at the buildings reveals pealing paint and poor quality construction; the street is aged. The artificiality makes it feel timeless and surreal, as if the entire street is incapsulated, frozen in time. Calle Caminito is like a broken record. The music keeps playing, the dancers keep dancing, and the buildings, the souvenir shops, the restaurants, will never change. It is depressing and backwards. Few would expect that an attraction like Caminito, frequented by crowds of of tourists, is actually located just steps away from some of the poorest and most neglected areas of the city. Beyond Caminito, the streets become dirt and the buildings become increasingly deteriorated. On a quiet Tuesday afternoon, the surrounding poverty of La Boca seems evident through an underlying sadness of Caminito. I assume that the entertainers that spend their days dancing relentlessly and that the people that work the souvenir shops and the restaurants are likely local inhabitants. To me, there is something very twisted and ironic about this and about Caminito in general. It is the most artificial of places, but it is located right in the middle of reality.