Avant-Garde Argentina: Seeing the nation through the kaleidoscopic lens of Buenos Aires

(The Art of Travel, post 6, Book #1 [of choice]
for this class we had to chose two books about
our site from a list and do one post discussing
each choice -- this is the post I wrote for my
first book, which I highly recommend for anyone
who wants to learn more about Argentina via
brilliant primary sources and literature that has
all been translated into English very well)
   

All of the courses offered at NYU in Buenos Aires are very site specific; I plan on receiving a minor in Latin American studies because everything I’m studying here is relevant.  And it’s so interesting to be learning about South American history, culture and politics in the context of location, of my physically being here.  I feel that as a foreigner, it is the only way to truly learn it all, by experiencing it despite my estadounidense view.  And with my classes and my encounters so far, I feel like I’ve learned so, so much.  And on the seventh of March, I will have only been here for a month (it doesn’t seem so).
   
“i am thus in each of these ways
spanish french indian who knows
warrior farmer merchant poet perhaps
rich poor of all classes and of none
and well i’m an argentine” (xi)
  

The above poem, entitled “Argentine to Death” written by César Fernández Moreno in 1963, expresses and delicately summarizes Argentine sentiment and reality for its entire history, a social and cultural image that prevails today.  It is a beautiful and simple illustration of what it is to be Argentine, a concept of confusion to both exteriors and interiors.  It can be found on the inside cover of the book The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics edited by Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo.
  

The Argentina Reader is a compilation of different essays, poems, paintings, song lyrics, photographs, articles and other forms of text (both written and visual) presented in chronological order and grouped according to important themes in history.  It is extensive in the amount of authors and figures’ views it provides, all together working to challenge the “schizophrenic view” (6) that the international public has for Argentina, and that Argentina perhaps has for itself.  This book will continue to be useful as a supplement for my studies here, as well as a book that can be read for pleasure, for it includes Borges, Cortázar, and so many more brilliant and renown Argentine authors.
  

I feel so much more aware of different facets of Argentine life that were only rumored to me before and upon my arrival.  Psychoanalysis is more than just a fad here, politics will forever be affected by the era of Perón and the subsequent military regime of the Dirty War, people are proud of their European descent in the city considered the “Paris of South America,” etc.  It is all evident in their everyday lives, and all embedded in their past.  And Argentines are proud to be Argentines.  Even if it is hard to say just exactly what it is to be Argentine.  In one essay within the book entitled “Argentina as Latin American Avant-Garde” by Nicaraguan poet Ruben Darío, we are given an outside view of the nation at the start of the twentieth century: a glorified and hopeful outlook.  Darío never explicitly labels Argentina as avant-garde as the title does, but it is evident that Argentina was the epicenter of all things experimental, mixed together, new and leading the way in art (especially literature), society, politics, and more.  The country is a mix of “all the qualities and defects of the conquistadors, together with a collection of new ingredients” (206), all that is traditional alongside all that is non-traditional, the avant-garde.
  

A foreigner’s view can so easily be blurred.  A foreigner’s view of Argentina via Buenos Aires is especially blurred.  Somehow “the postcolonial mirror is cracked” (3) and thus the capital city and the more prosperous eastern provinces hold the most population and wealth, while everywhere else is “backward and chronically poor” (4), an idea that started with the revolutionary leader Sarmiento during the rise to independence at the start of the nineteenth century.  So this “cultural and economic schism” (4) that cracks the mirror makes the reflection of the whole nation impossible to see genuinely.  Yet somehow the cracks make the image as genuine as it can be, because all the shattered pieces add together to make someone “spanish french indian” or all of the above, “of all classes and of none” and thus, with this eccentric mix and awareness of its presence, can be what one may call “an argentine” (xi).
  

(The photo above is one I took of the most famous bookstore in Argentina, called El Ateneo Grand Splendid that used to be a theater but was transformed into a beautiful and unique librería.  My camera had trouble focusing when attempting to take this shot, perhaps a sort of metaphor for my perspective of not only knowing, but also understanding Argentina.  And perhaps the best way to manually focus the camera is to delve into the writings that were in my vicinity of those that came before and struggled in finding yet reveled in having a unique national identity.)
  

Nouzeilles, Gabriela, and Graciela R. Montaldo, eds. The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Print.