Happy Anniversary to me! Yep, I can’t believe it but exactly two years ago today I retired. Friday March 9, 2018, a day that will live in infamy! Lol. It’s been a fun two years traveling the world. Can’t wait to see what the next 30 bring!
Today I decided to go on two more “Free Tours”. Buenos Aires is so big (population 15 million) and has so many different neighborhoods that I couldn’t get to all of them. So I chose La Boca in the morning and a different part of Palermo in the afternoon (other than the parks area I did yesterday).
La Boca (which means mouth in Spanish) was named that because it was at the mouth of the river. It’s sort of the sketchier side of town and they say to only come during the day and stay on the main tourist streets. For a little background history, the great wave of European immigration to Argentina from 1876 to 1925 brought workers from the docks of Genoa Italy to the port of La Boca, where they found work at the shipyard. Here they constructed tenement shacks using corrugated zinc and other materials found discarded at the shipyard and brushed the makeshift houses with leftover paint from the ships. It was in the shared patios of those brightly colored conventillos (tenements) in La Boca that tango music first emerged. In 1959, they took one of the streets and made it like an open air museum and called it Caminito (“little path”). All the artists that display their artwork there are local and are allowed to have stalls there for free. It’s a very colorful cobblestone Street!
I then took the bus across town to Palermo Soho and Palermo Viejo to see the street art. Even the Palermo area is so big they split it into several different sections. These sections are more of the young, hip areas and have drawn (no pun intended!) lots of artists.
Buenos Aires turbulent history, its passion and its creativity have driven the growth of an internationally acclaimed street art scene. In the years following the 2001 economic crisis, a generation of artists took to the streets to reclaim public spaces. At first, graffiti and stencils delivered scathing criticism of the government, but then gradually a new style began to emerge, bringing humor, color and creative experimentation.
Some of the street art memorialized one of the really sad times in Buenos Aires history. During the 1976 to 1983 military dictatorship, up to 30,000 people were “disappeared“ by the state; kidnapped and taken to secret detention centers where they were tortured and killed. I included a pic of two of the young men that “disappeared”.
One of the funny murals was of the character from the movie The Joker poking his finger into the Statue of Liberty’s eye. But if you look closely, the joker is actually Donald Trump!
Today was a fun day of seeing lots of colorful buildings and artwork. Hope everyone’s week started off great. Happy Monday.
The Wandering Italian 