Endings...

This is my last post from Argentina. We had our final banquet last night, at La Caballeriza in Palermo, where we shared large parilladas of all kinds of meat and all kinds of vegetables, pasta, fish, bread, wine, and scrumptious desserts. We had a dance-off between Keith and Ruthie, Kimal sang for us, and everyone seemed to have a great time. It was a good finale to a very successful trip.

One more day...

It's Saturday, which means it is our last day in Argentina! Some of the students will stay and travel for a while longer, but most of us are packing up and leaving tomorrow. The two weeks have flown by.

No scheduled activities today, just a couple of optional tours: Max and his friend Stella took some students on a tour of Palacio Barolo, and after that they plan to see Teatro Colon, which was recently renovated after over a decade of work, and is the architectural preservation gem of the city. The rest of us are hanging out, shopping, visiting sites we missed, seeing friends, and getting in those last churros, mates, and helados. Tonight is our closing banquet, at a parilla (of course) in Palermo. I can't believe it's that time already.

Imprenta Chilavert and the Museum of the External Debt

Photos from Friday's adventures. We started at a book-making factory called Chilavert. We had a delicious lunch at a Korean restaurant called Bi Won, went shopping in the Once neighborhood, and met for a tour of the Museum of the External Debt, at the Economics Department of the University of Buenos Aires.

Grissinopoli and the Madres

Thursday's excursions were interesting and created much heated debate. In the morning we went to another recuperated factory/worker's collective, called Grissinopoli. They make breadsticks (grisines) and it smelled a whole lot better than the metals and plastics at IMPA. We talked for a while with Mari, who works as an administrator there and has been at Grissinopoli for many years -- she was married to the owner's son back in the 1980s when it was a family-owned business. Like many recuperated factories, the workers took over Grissinopoli in 2002 after the business started bankruptcy proceedings during the 2001 economic crisis. Unlike other factories, Grissinopoli had a fairly smooth path to legalization. Following the advice of Luis Caro, their lawyer and a leading figure in the Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (MNER), they built support after occupying the factory in 2002, and began production in 2003. They were granted a two-year legal right to the building, and when that law was up for renewal in 2004, they won a permanent expropriation law transfering the ownership of the building and its contents to their cooperative. That was possible because the community supported them and the owner was not asking for anything or contesting the workers' claims.

Also in 2004, the MNER split and Luis Caro led a group called the Movimiento Nacional de Fabricas Recuperadas (MNFR). This alliance has more than 100 cooperatives as members now. They have a different ideology than the MNER, whose slogan is "ocupar, resistir, producir: - occupy, resist, produce. The MNFR sees itself as less confrontational and more working within the law (its leader is a lawyer), and its factories are managed differently. At Grissinopoli, 52 workers held full-time jobs before the economic crisis. Since the takeover, they have 14 partners in the cooperative, 12 in production and 4 in administration. As their workload has risen, they have hired outside workers in temporary positions. This year they have 19 contract workers who work for 3 months without formal benefits and for lower wages than the cooperative partners. Expanding the partners of the cooperative would take a majority vote and so far they have not been willing to take that step -- a position that has stirred much controversy and with which Mari clearly disagreed. Unlike the IMPA spokesperson, Eduardo, who was very clear that their goal was to create a new economic system outside of the logic of capitalist markets, the Grissinopoli spokesperson said that this was not an ideological choice but simply a way to save the jobs of older workers who would have been unemployed otherwise. All of them were over 40 at the time of the crisis, and some had been working since the factory first opened in 1962. Worker ownership was their only hope for a livelihood.

We asked Mari some hard questions and then went on a tour of the production floor. The workers talked with us a bit and gave us large bags of breadsticks to take home with us. Then Eric (one of our interpreters) led us to Pizzeria Guerrin, known as one of the best pizza places in Buenos Aires, on Avenue Corrientes, and we tried pizzas with some unusual combinations of toppings.

In the afternoon we went to the Universidad Popular de las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (www.madres.org). They started this university as a way for working people to get an education -- all the classes begin after 7:00 p.m. so that workers can attend after their jobs. They have formal curricula and degrees in law, human rights, political economy, and a couple of other subjects, and they also offer non-credit courses in subjects like Simon Bolivar, Marxism, and drama. Alejandra gave us a tour and also introduced us to the professor who runs a new program designed for prisoners who are being released and are in the process of transitioning back into society. The Madres teach these prisoners in a drama-based popular education program, that uses their experiences as a starting point to explore the challenges of transitioning from incarceration back into the community. After the tour the Madres served us a lovely "merienda" -- Argentina's version of afternoon tea, or a pre-dinner meal -- with lots of fresh fruit, fresh orange juice, sandwiches, and coffee (below).

Dinner was at a new restaurant called Las Pizarras and it was very delicious (above). It is a little-known restaurant that is by invitation only -- luckily Julia is friends with the chef, Rodrigo, and we were able to get a reservation for 20. Marcelo Brodsky and Fabio Grementieri joined us to talk about their work and their new books on architecture and history.

Independence Day

Today (May 25) is a national holiday in Argentina. It celebrates the "May Revolution" of 1810, which was the beginning of Argentina's independence from Spain. Schools, banks, and offices were all closed, and there was a grand fiesta in the Plaza de Mayo (where the central statue is labeled 25 de Mayo). They erected a huge stage for ballet folklorico, contemporary dance, tango, and all kinds of music.

In the morning it was raining but an intrepid band of students accompanied Max down to the Casa Rosada (the Presidential palace) -- only to discover that it had been closed for the day, despite promises just a week earlier that we would have a tour at noon. Apparently when they decided to hold the festival in the Plaza, they closed the Casa Rosada. So they headed to lunch, past a protest by a neighborhood group, and then over to Recoleta. In Recoleta, the wealthiest and grandest neighborhood of Buenos Aires, they met Sergio Kiernan and Brent Federighi. They had coffee at the famous cafe La Biela, surrounded by huge gum trees that have been there since Jesuit priests planted them in the 17th century. They are great for climbing.

Sergio and Brent took the students on a walking tour of Recoleta architecture and historic preservation. They saw many homes of the rich and famous, they toured the Plaza Vicente Lopez and the building that sparked Argentina's first historic preservation law, and they met with the legislator who created that law, Teresa Anchorena, in the photo with students above. They ended the afternoon with a traditional May 25 treat: churros y chocolate (basically doughnuts and hot chocolate). You can see Keith enjoying his.

Meanwhile, my kids and I visited some old friends. Here's Ruthie with Florencia on the left and Azul Violeta on the right.

Rain in Uruguay

Tuesday was our big excursion to Uruguay. All of us except Elizabeth and Jennifer came along -- they had a plan to visit with Marianela, to learn about her organizing with unemployed workers. Our destination was the city of Colonia del Sacramento, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. (http://www.coloniadigital.com/) It is a beautiful colonial town with some original buildings from 1680, museums, a lovely town square, the original fortified walls and cannons, rough cobblestone streets, palm trees and orange trees, and miles of sandy beach just outside the old city.

We took the colectivo (public bus) to the Buquebus terminal near Puerto Madero and, after going through passport control to leave Argentina, we boarded the fast ferry (one hour each way). The morning started out perfectly warm and sunny, and we thought we were in luck. Then the clouds started rolling in. By the time we got off the boat it was gray and overcast, and by the time we walked into the old city, it was raining. Then it started pouring. We split up -- some people wanted to see the museums, others wanted to shop, and others wanted to have a nice lunch. A group of us started by climbing the very narrow spiral staircase to the top of the faro, the 19th century lighthouse. We had a good view of the old town and the coastline, and we took photos (above). We could see the results of the 100-year war between Spain and Portugal over this territory -- the Spanish buildings have flat roofs, while the Portuguese used rounded red tiles (the architects among us could tell you the correct terms). Colonia was the object of much conflict between the two empires -- it went back and forth between Spain and Portugal for 100 years, then after a treaty in 1777 it belonged to Spain, until Brazil seized the territory in 1816. After some fighting between Brazil and Uruguay, Colonia became part of Uruguay, and has stayed that way since 1828. Next to the lighthouse are the ruins of an old convent, the oldest remains of a building in all of Uruguay, from the original settlement in 1680.

By the time we came down from the lighthouse, it was pouring rain, and most of us were not prepared; some were wearing flip-flops, no one had an umbrella or rain gear, and Ruthie (who is 7 and a half) was still in tears about leaving her favorite jacket on the public bus in Buenos Aires, never to be seen again. So we found a tour guide with a van, and she called her friend with a taxi, so that all 16 of us could have a driving tour of the city. They took us around the old city, and also up the coast to see the white sandy beaches and new housing developments (built mostly by foreign investors, some costing up to $800,000 US, which almost no Uruguayans can afford). She showed us the old horse racing track (hipodromo), which is still used on Sundays, and the famous old bullfighting ring. This huge stadium with Moorish architecture was built in 1910 and held bullfights until 1912, when the president of Uruguay decided that killing bulls was barbaric and closed it down. It has been empty ever since, with each successive president vowing to restore it for use as a theater, but meanwhile the walls are starting to crumble.

Our tour guide, Beatriz, was a character. She made us laugh with her description of a tree that they call "borracho," translated as "the drunken tree." As she told us, "it has those pink flowers that look like orchids, and Spanish moss hanging on it, and in the spring it grows those big fruits that look like avocados, but they're not, you can't eat them, they have something like cotton in the inside, and in Chile and Bolivia they make pillows out of it, but here it is useless." She said these things very quickly and definitively, as if it was all obvious and we knew all about it, and then she moved on to the next thing and we were left scratching our heads.

After the tour, we ended up in the new city of Colonia, at a restaurant called Mercosur that served "chivito," that local specialty -- I think it typically consists of fried potatoes on the bottom, then a piece of beef, fried egg on top of that, and finally bacon, and lettuce and tomatoes on top. Some of the students enjoyed it. Since we still didn't want to venture into the rain, we stayed at the restaurant, and for dessert we got the biggest slices of cake I have ever seen. We took the 9:30 p.m. ferry and got back to the hotel just before midnight, slightly soggy but with a "Uruguay" stamp in our passports.

Fabricas recuperadas, and Congress

Today was a very full day. We left the hotel at 9:00 and headed to the subway. Apparently there had been a stoppage on the D line (it happens all the time) and so the subways were unbelievably crowded, to the extent that you start to wonder if there is enough room for your lungs to expand so that you can keep breathing. Everyone survived.

Our destination this morning was a metal factory called IMPA, which is perhaps the oldest "recuperated factory" in Argentina. (http://www.impalafabrica.org.ar/) In 1998, it was closed by the owners, and the workers occupied the factory, took over, and kept the production lines going. For 13 years the workers have been running the factory themselves. In a large space on the second floor of the factory, they have created a cultural center, a performance space, and space for meetings and lectures and "charlas." They have regular performances of dance and music, and discussions of political and social issues. They have also started a school, which now teaches 200 children as well as adults who never had the chance to complete primary school. The school is run by volunteers but is recognized by the government and accredited.

IMPA is in the Almagro neighborhood, and it's a huge building where they make mostly aluminum products, as well as some plastics. We saw them make aluminum tubes, the kind you'd use for glue or paint, as well as very thin foil that covers champagne bottles or alfajores (the traditional Argentina cookie with chocolate and dulce de leche). We watched the workers do their jobs, some of which looked very dangerous (cutting the aluminum with huge machines, breathing the aluminum dust). The factory is at least half empty, as they don't have enough orders at the moment, and they don't have enough money to buy new machinery or raw materials. We sat down with two men from the cooperative and heard the whole history and current debates.

After IMPA, we took the subway to Congreso and ate lunch at a Peruvian restaurant. It was so delicious I forgot to take any pictures. Then we rushed over for a tour of the Congress. It is an imposing building (top photo above) with incredible stained glass, marble everywhere, and hand-carved furniture and woodwork. We sat in the Chamber of Deputies (House of Representatives) and learned how their voting system works. We saw the original library of Congress, which is now a reading room and research library for legislators and their staff.

From there we walked to Hotel BAUEN, which is another worker self-managed business. The hotel has an infamous past, as the place where the military dictators used to house their friends. They kept it open under huge debts through the 1970s and 80s. Finally it closed during the economic crisis, and in 2003 the workers decided to go back in (literally) and take over the hotel. They succeeded, and over a period of three years they attracted enough investment that they were able to open for business. The hotel now employs 170 workers, with no boss. It operates illegally -- like IMPA, Hotel BAUEN has been served with eviction notices, because the workers do not own the hotel nor have legal rights to it. But because of their strong political support, both cooperatives continue to survive and stay put. Salaries are not high, but they are able to pay the workers. The building looks lovely, including a bustling cafe on the first floor and many meeting rooms that they allow different activist organizations to use. The hotel workers have also started a school just this year, after realizing that many of the workers never finished elementary school, and some could not read or write. Like IMPA, Hotel BAUEN sees itself as very much a community cultural center as well as a self-managed cooperative business.

In the hotel, we had such an interesting discussion with Marie Trigona, who has written extensively about the recuperated factory movement in Argentina. She showed us clips from three movies made by a collective that she has joined, about the history and current social movements. We talked for over two hours about the hotel, and about other factories, and what is happening with the movement. It's too much to discuss here, and we were all wiped out by the end of the day, but the conversation will continue as we visit more places later this week...

Sunday

Today was a "free" day for the students. We woke up to a rainy morning -- we've been so lucky with the weather until today. We had planned to go to San Telmo to see the famous Sunday street fair and open-air market, but with the rain that didn't seem like a good idea. So the students chose different activities -- some went to museums, some to an art exhibit around the corner at La Rural convention hall, and some waited a little while until the rain stopped and they made it to San Telmo after all.

At 4:00 many of us met in the lobby to get on a van to the day's big event: the FUTBOL (soccer) match between River Plate and San Lorenzo, two of the "top five" best teams in Argentina. This was a very important game, because River Plate has won more championships than any other Argentinian team, but they've had a bad season and were in danger of losing their spot in the first division of the league.

Argentina soccer fans are passionate about their teams, and it was a cultural experience to be in the middle of a crucial game. This game was at La Monumental, the biggest stadium in Argentina - it holds 85,000 and most of the seats were full, as well as all of the standing room. La Monumental is also infamous as the site of the 1978 World Cup that Argentina won, in the midst of the worst dictatorship in its history. The stadium is only a few blocks away from ESMA, the clandestine detention and torture center that we visited on Wednesday. Our guide to the soccer game, Pablo, pointed out that, back then, the screams of the prisoners would have mixed with the screams of the soccer fans.

But tonight it was all singing and chanting and shouting (much of it unprintable), mostly for River Plate, the home team. River scored first and the game was 1-0 until the ball bounced off the goalie's hand and San Lorenzo tied the score. The River fans were very disappointed -- it seemed like a bizarre way to score a goal. The game ended that way, in a tie. River still has to win 3 out of the next 4 games in order to keep its spot in the first division, so the fans are still very nervous.

Most of Argentina's futbol teams have English names, because the British first brought the sport here. River Plate is a weird translation of Rio de la Plata (literally, river of silver), which is just next to the stadium. We weren't sure whether we were rooting for River, which has the reputation of being the wealthy team -- its nickname is "Los Millionarios" -- the millionaires. That name actually comes from the team being the first in the country to pay one million pesos for a player, many years ago. We thought it was funny that some of the chants were "yo soy millionario!" (I am a millionaire!) and "vamos millos!" (go millionaires!), as well as the predictable "vamos vamos vamos River Plate."

La Boca and Parque Espana

(I still can't get Blogger to do the n with the ~ on top; just so you know, that should be Espana with a ~ above the n.)

On Saturday morning we headed down to La Boca on colectivo (public bus) #152. During the week, this can be a very long ride, since the bus goes from the north all the way to the south of Buenos Aires, through the busiest traffic routes. Fortunately, on Saturday it was not bad at all and we got there in about 30 minutes.

La Boca is famous for its street of brightly-painted houses, Caminito, probably the most touristy street in Argentina. It's the old port from the 1500s, and the story is that the fisherman used the leftover paint from their boats to paint their houses. It's a poor neighborhood (outside of the Caminito, which is all restaurants and shops). Benito Quinquela Martin is an artist who grew up in La Boca, made a lot of money as an artist, and came back to build a school, a community center, and to help revitalize the area.

After wandering around, watching some tango dancers on the street, and shopping a little, we had lunch at Fundacion Proa, a lovely contemporary art museum -- that is the famous sculpture of a spider in front.

Our plan had been to walk from Fundacion Proa to visit a workers' collective in La Boca, Eloisa Cartonera. But in the morning we learned that their building would be closed for the day because everyone was out at the Feria del Libro Independiente y Alternativa. So we hailed five taxis and headed to Parque Espana, in the Constitucion section of the city. The feria (festival) was full of hippies, drummers, booksellers, beekeepers selling honey, and people who make all kinds of creative things by hand -- clothes, food, books of all kinds.

Eloisa Cartonera is a collective that started after the economic crash of 2001. It was started by a group of "cartoneros" -- people without jobs, who spend each evening pushing huge carts through the streets of Buenos Aires and sifting through trash to find paper and cardboard. They bring their carts to a recycling factory at the end of the night, and are paid a small amount per pound of paper. Several of these cartoneros decided instead to use the cardboard they found to create little books. They began by choosing Latin American authors whose work they wanted to publish, and contacted the authors for permission. The authors agreed, and the cartoneros used the cardboard and recycled paper to make works of literature. They were able to sell the books for low prices (most are 10 pesos, or $2.50 US), so that people who usually cannot afford to buy books (which are extremely expensive in Argentina) were able to own these titles by great authors. Now they employ eight people, and are an official cooperative, so the workers are eligible for health benefits, social security pensions, and other state programs. They sell their books at their factory and also at fairs like the one we visited. The brightly colored covers are hand-painted, so each one is unique and they stand out among traditional books (the top photo here).

In the evening, we returned to the hotel to watch two films and talk with the two filmmakers, Julian d'Angiolillo and Carolina Andreetti. Max had met them both when we were here last time. Julian made a movie about an outdoor market organized by a new immigrant community in the southwest of Buenos Aires -- "the largest illegal market in South America." Carolina made a short film about her research uncovering the history of one house in Parque Chacabuco. They both discussed their work, and then joined us for dinner at Oro y Candido, where some students ate exotic meats like alligator and wild boar, and others settled for pasta and salad.

Two more tours

This morning started with a group meeting over breakfast (until I was reprimanded by the hostess and we had to leave!). We have such a full schedule, and we are being invited to more and more events and meetings, so we're trying to figure out how to juggle all of our activities. Everyone is tired after these long days, but there is so much to see and do, it's hard to cut out anything.

We had an organized tour this morning, led by Diego from the organization Eternautas. He took us back to Plaza de Mayo for a more detailed discussion of Argentina's political history, focusing especially on Peronism and all of its various incarnations. From there, we went to the CGT (Confederacion General de Trabajadores), the federation of Argentina's trade unions. Evita had an office there, which has become a combination shrine and museum in her memory. We learned about her history and her impact on Argentinian society. We loved our tour guide there, who cried when he talked about Evita's funeral and had to pull out his white handkerchief to dry his tears. Afterwards, the students posed in the main auditorium of the CGT with the famous mural of workers before and after unionization.

After the CGT, we stopped at the site of a clandestine detention center, Club Atletico. The prison itself was demolished when a new highway was built, but it is being excavated for evidence of the torture and possibly murder that took place there. There are memorials to the disappeared on both sides of the highway.

We said goodbye to Diego and took the bus up north, to the Parque de la Memoria. It is the national monument to the estimated 30,000 people who were disappeared and murdered during the dictatorship period. It is right on the river, and it looked especially bleak today, with the gray stone of the memorial blending in with the gray river and the gray sky. There are several different installations in the Parque:

-- a long row of street signs depicting the atrocities committed by the military government

-- a huge sculpture that says "pensar es un hecho revolucionario" -- "Thinking is a revolutionary act"

-- a statue floating in the river of a boy of 13 who was kidnapped and murdered along with his mother

-- the face of the artist's disappeared father, which changes and even disappears depending on the angle from which it is viewed

Our guide, Luz, did a terrific job explaining some of the thinking behind the installations, and some of the conflicts around the history. The monument itself is a series of four stone walls with the names of the disappeared and murdered, and it changes every year as more names are confirmed. Inside the pavillion, a Uruguayan artist has created an installation of pages from the Uruguay phone book, with the names of the disappeared added in, but without phone numbers or addresses. Another exhibit displayed actual cards from a library card catalog, of the books that were banned by the dictatorship -- some with titles like "All About Chile," or "Latin America." We were impressed and moved by the exhibits and especially by the idea that a government would fund an exhibit that is this honest about the horrors of "state terrorism."