Hace Calor, and my posts are suffering

The Argentina Reader does not have many in-depth selections. I am a little more than half-way through the 550 page book which is a collections of readings on what its editors term the history, culture, and politics of Argentina. I think that one of the fundamental problems which the compilers of this collection dealt with was that of the separation of the history, culture and politics of Buenos Aires and those of the Interior (i.e. the rest of the country). Since Argentina became united as a country Buenos Aires has stood alone as the most progressive, prosperous, and Parisian (sorry, pardon the alliteration) city in the country and South America as a whole. It is where immigrants and Argentines alike aimed their sights if they wanted to move beyond or out of their present lives.

There are a few major cities besides Buenos Aires but Argentina is immense and mostly made up of dizzyingly large planes and mountains to the west. There is a lot of history, culture, and politics out there. In the 1840s Domingo Sarmiento, one of the county’s first major intellectuals and leaders, tried to describe the organization of gaucho culture in La Pampa. Gauchos were the descendents of the Spanish and the Amerindian indigenous peoples, and have been compared to cowboys in the United States. Sarmiento realized and respected these people’s way of life though he thought it was inferior to the European culture of enlightened thoughts and democracy. He also saw how geography deeply impacts how a country develops and how Argentina’s topography lent itself to solitude and stoicism and, in a few small parts protected by mountains or connected to the world by a river, progress and civilization. Almost one hundred years later Ezequiel Martinez Estrada wrote “X-Ray of the Pampa,” an essay about Argentine identity which circled around the same themes as Sarmiento had. A selection from a chapter about the railroad is in the Reader.

In 1933, when Estrada published his essay, railroads stretched hundreds of miles out from Buenos Aires connecting it, purportedly, to the rest of the nation. The government hired an English building company to lay down the tracks which would bring culture to the “depths of country life”. Yet Estrada realizes that the railroads are strips of wealth and European imitation which do not bring anything to the countryside and instead centralize Argentina around Buenos Aires. While the trains connected agriculture and cattle-raising to the ports Estrada writes that the railways are not ‘strategic or commercial….[but are] responses to panic, products of eagerness for greatness and the fear of losing it.” The disconnect between the government’s claims of modernization and real modernization is expressed best by Estrada when he explains that the railroads were built instead of roads which would have made much more sense. Instead of a few long lines of tracks thousands of roads could have been built. This would not have necessarily brought culture to the un-cultured, a view which Estrada disagrees with in a similar way to Sarmiento, but it would have served the function of creating a more unified country (as roads had done for Rome). The railroads were an idealized reaction, not a solution.

I am just beginning to get a first-hand look at the separation between Buenos Aires and the rest of the country. We have learned about the different regions and my host family has pictures of their visits to beautiful mountains and lakes. I have also talked with them about the terrible floods which have destroyed many villages in the mountainous regions as well as equally devastating droughts—the worst in fifty years—that are destroying key crops and the lives of the farmers who grow them. The largest problem I have heard of in Buenos Aires, besides that of vague and continuous corruption, is a shortage of coins. The disconnection that I felt when I saw the impact of Hurricane Katrina on TV has resurfaced in a very different context. I am enjoying my time here, going out to bars, thinking about school while another world is falling apart.

Last semester I wrote a paper where I talked about Sarmiento and tried to express what has changed about the concept of center vs. periphery. Where as the Buenos Aires was once the center where all prosperity was concentrated away from the “peripheral” of the Interior which Estrada, voicing the bourgeoisie mentality, called the “background,” the white, empty space on the map. Now the periphery seems to have come right to the walls of the city which, including surrounding areas, contains a third of the country’s population. Most of the four million people who live just outside the city limits are the urban poor inherited from the end of industrialization. According to Javier Auyero these Villas are functionally disconnected from Buenos Aires and the rest of the country both culturally, politically, and if change doesn’t come, historically. Estrada writes that the “fundamental problem of our economic life is transportation because the fundamental problems of our existence are distances, quantities, sizes and solitude.” It seems that his words are still true today as far as these poor urban communities are concerned.

Estrada also describes the trains as “luxury lines for tourism under the pretext of development”. The word luxury reminded me of the buses we have been told about which can take you anywhere in the country. If you buy a first-class ticket (inexpensive for tourists) you basically have your own bed on the bus as well as wine if you want it. These bus lines aren’t funded by the government; they are commercial ventures which take advantage of the roads and highways of this modern country. I plan to ride one of these buses during my stay at which time I’m sure I will see a very different country from the one I’m seeing now. Estrada writes:

Viewed from the train, all this truth appears to be a game of words, but it must be seen with the eyes of those who remain when the train goes. One should contemplate the railroad from the outside and realize that it it’s a living three-dimensional body and not a net of black lines on a white background as it appears on maps.

I don’t know if I can see with those eyes—maybe because I’m not argentine or because I have not lived life from anything but a privileged viewpoint—but I’ll try.