Anarchy in BA

Buenos Aires is starlingly cosmopolitan. As in you can quite literally find yourself having facinating person interactions with a wider range of characters than you though existed in the world, let alone Argentina. My first taste of this was the first tango club that I found in BA- in the underground basement of an Armenian Community Culture center in the SoHo (yes, named after and thoroughly resembling the SoHos of NY and London) part of Palermo. That mix of cultures was already far more exotic than the Italian-Argentine mix that characterizes the rest of the country, but Buenos Aires, like the other great cities of the world, is a mixing point of culture from every corner of the world.

What I found on Friday Night, however, made me feel as if I had stepped right out of this area and into underground activist world of the 1910s. A Finnish girl from the hostel took me to a secret Anarchist library, bookstore, schoolhouse and meeting place that served as the center of a local anarchist community of Buenos Aires. We found it behind an unmarked door in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of the city, exhibiting at aevery corner the evidence of widespread crack addiction and petty crime. Several moments after we rang, a pair of eyes peeked through the peephole and demanded to know who we  were. My Finnish companion had been there before, so she had only to show her face before the door swung open and a small woman in a cooking apron swept us in with kisses while offering food. Another older gentleman, one of the patriachs of the establishment, showed us around the facility, which occupied an old hopuse and included a regular circulation library, biblioteca especifico (which was under lock and key and contained only anarchist texts), a large meeting room, an area for in-house printing and publishing, and in a large attic above a gigantic Archive of Anarchist newspapers, flyers, and newsletter stored in cardboarrd boxes marked with their country of origin. The boxes occupied almost every inch of wallspace of the very large, dusty room from floor to ceiling except for a 6 by 10 foot painting of a voluptious woman, entirely naked except for a nun's habit, lying on her stomach and touching herself. We then spent several hours with the some of the Archivists going through there collections of Swiss, Norwegian, and Finnish publications, some of which dated as far back as the 1940s. The leader meanwhile described the tensions in the Argentine Anarchist community as well as their plans to create a cooperative clothing factory to sustain themselves in an anarchist community. They were truly some of the sweetest and most hospitable people I had met in the country, and appear to be entirely dedicated to the intellectual pursuit of anarchist ideas.

Leaving the bookstore in the middle of the night, we were on our way home when a homeless Uruguayan man who was making metal scultpures of crabs and spiders to sell stopped us to talk. He lectured about the importance of respect, the beauty of every moment, and gave me my horoscope (a cryptic "vas a sufrir mucho para amor") for a long time before he invited us to get a beer. Oddly, he'd been asking for money from all of the pedestrains, but here he was buying beers for us in a tiny slum bar down the road. We passed another few hours meeting the characters in this bar, who were an odd mix of local laborers and tattooed teens, at this bar, before leaving close to 4 in the morning and having to kiss every person in the place on the way out. Our uruguayan friend accompanied us as far as he park, gave the girl a wire crab scultpure, and admonished us "¡disfruta de la vida!" before finally letting us go. All in all something a little different from the standard tourist fare.