Where’s That Confounded Bridge?? – The embodiment of both front and back regions

(The Art of Travel, post 7, Authenticity

required reading - "Staged Authenticity:

Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist

Settings" by Dean MacCannell)

As students in our respective locations, do we act as tourists? And what is the distinction between that and a traveler? At what point in our four-month stays do we finally ‘assimilate’ and reach the “back regions” of a certain place?

Dean MacCannell’s deepening on Erving Goffman’s theory about “front” and “back” regions of a visited place provides a structural view of just how tourism functions. Reading this text brought me back to my first week here in Buenos Aires, where everything was new and I embodied everything that was a tourist. I got the cheesy bus tours and guided visits to certain quintessential spots in the city, the so-called stage settings of front regions. But I don’t think that labeling them this way can discount my genuine experience and excitement while visiting them. My initial days here, I just wanted to get to know my way around to gain confidence that I could function in my new home. After the first two weeks or so, I started to crave something more, something beyond those first feelings of enthusiasm, weariness, and wanderlust in the city.

I finally began my “religious pilgrimage,” my “quest for authentic experience” as a way of fixing this craving (593). I wanted to enter new social settings, true porteño ones, the back regions of Buenos Aires.  I wanted to leave “false fronts” and enter “intimate reality” (592).  After a full month of living here, it’s hard to say if I have accomplished this mission or not.  Certain experiences are to my satisfaction, but if it is “very difficult to tell for sure if the experience is authentic in fact” as an outsider (597). So who is to say if my craving has genuinely been fulfilled?

My questions then continue with the following: can a space be both a front and back region? As in, not a front region that appears to be an authentic back region, nor a back region that is “set up to accommodate outsiders” (602), but rather a space that has both poles flowing through it, where the bridge that exists between them can be walked while within one’s surroundings. I sense that some of my time in different places around the city have been of this sort: a social structure where both the tourist (or the traveler, the student) can coexist with the native, where one is not invading the other’s designated space, but rather enjoying each other’s company. I have found porteños to be extremely welcoming, helpful with my Spanish and general functioning, and even telling me of places that could be considered a back region, and thus, by suggestion, a region for everyone.

So perhaps it’s better to resist the “touristic motivation” driven by a desire for the hidden, authentic spaces and just meander until you find a place suited to you, whether it be a front or back region, or a mixture of both.

(The above photograph is of La Puente de la Mujer, a bridge by famous Spanish architect and structural engineer Santiago Calatrava. I love this bridge because it is a little piece of my hometown in Buenos Aires; the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin was also designed by Calatrava [I recommend looking it up to see the similarities, to really get a grasp on his unique style]. Crossing it was so comforting, it was like being on Lake Michigan, but with dirtier waters; it was a back region of Wisconsin placed in a front region of Argentina.)