¡Feliz Día de la Primavera!

Today is the first day of spring and it´s gorgeous. All the restaurants have flowers and signs saying ¡Feliz Primavera! and high school students have the day off, go to the park, and go crazy. My plants are beginning to open their buds. I´m doing my seasons out of order this year: I had winter in Boston, then came to South America for fall, then summer in Boston, now spring in Buenos Aires. I´ve got a bit of a cold now. Guess it serves me right.

La Noche de los Lápices

Thirty years ago on September 16th, 1976, a group of nine high school students went to the government to protest a new law that would make students have to pay for bus tickets to get to school. This was during the time of a brutal military dictatorship in Argentina, when about 30,000 people were disappeared, tortured, and killed. Eight of the nine students were taken from their homes and killed that night, the ninth, Pedro Diaz, was spared for his parents´ connections in the government, and lived to tell the story. The program for free bus tickets for students was reinstated just 2 years ago.

Thirty years later, on the night now known as "La Noche de los Lápices" to commemorate the disappeared students, thousands of students, professors, and supporters, marched from Plaza Houssay (near one of the universities), through the city center, to the Plaza del Mayo, where many important rallies, protests, and presidential addresses have taken place throughout Argentine history. This past Friday, they marched to protest a new law proposed by President Kirchner to privatize the university system, meaning universities that are now public and free would be sold off to private corporations, and become expensive and inaccessable for many Argentinians.

This proposal initially surfaced during the presidency of Carlos Menem, before Kirchner. Menem instituted many policies of privatization across the board, taking in recommendations from the IMF and World Bank for a neoliberal economy, a move which led to a drastic economic crisis in 2001, where people were locked out of their bank accounts, lost everything, and took to the streets chanting "Que se vayan todos," or "Throw them all out": the politicians, the corporate crooks, everybody that has been involved with implementing the neoliberal economic model. The Argentinian economy is still recovering, and Kirchner was elected as an alternative to Menem, but that doesn´t mean he is immune to the pressures of neoliberalism.

I went to the march with Juan Pablo (mi novio), who is very involved in the movement against neoliberalism here. The march was inspiring and energetic, and Juan Pablo was excited that so many youth participated as they are not always so engaged in politics. It seems to be a typical dynamic of the left, however: youth show up when they can define the terms and take a hard-line against the president, whereas a number of more mainstream groups of an older generation declined to join the march because they did not want to directly oppose Kirchner. They organized a smaller, tamer rally the next evening to commemorate La Noche, which the hoards of dancing, shouting youth did not join, as it did not fully express their desires. It seems both are necessary, the participation of everybody is necessary, but it would be nice to find some way where everyone would want to be involved together. I´ve wrestled with these questions back home as well.

I´ve read or heard a fair amount about Argentian politics and social movements back home, but being here and being peronally impacted by it is a whole other thing. It is one thing to know from a far off place how global trade policies propelled by developed nations affect people, or how corrupt governments can be, or how the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, has been training Latin American military leaders in methods of brutal oppression and torture since the Cold War, and still does . . . It is quite another thing to see students passionately defending their rights to equal access to education; to experience the effects of increased crime in a city still suffering from economic crisis and have to bar my door at night, and then go to Spanish school the next day to discover the door has been smashed, the computers stolen, and nobody is surprised; and to know and care about people who have been tortured, and who have family members that have been disappeared, all for their political beliefs.

I cannot really go into such details here, but there are things that I have heard and seen in the past week that turn my stomach. Things that are very real. I don´t mean to be a downer, there´s actually a lot of optimism and good things going on here: a democratic government where there wasn´t one before, a president that is at least "the lesser of the evils" so to speak and is indeed doing some good things, and a vibrant social movement that is working toward many positive changes, and fighting to hold onto things they´ve got right.

I guess I´m just saying how easy it is to detatch oneself from the plethora of news we get bombarded with everyday. And to get jaded with the thought of all those who die in war, who are held political prisoners, who suffer torture. But when it´s real, tangible, it´s not so much jading as it is both sickening and motivating. All you want to do is love the people who have been treated with such coldness, to stand up to stop good things from being taken away, to create good things where everything seems to have fallen apart.

I don´t really have all the words to say what I want to right now.

La Vida en Buenos Aires...

So after a couple of weird and frustrating days of dealing with dysfunctional bank cards, being imprisoned in my apartment waiting for lost luggage which finally arrived at 10 o´clock at night soaking wet, and adapting to leafless trees and the surreal slant of winter sunlight in the southern hemisphere, I´ve embraced the chaos and am settling quite well into life in Buenos Aires, excited for the oncoming spring.

It´s a bit intimidating being here, and yet, not at all. I don´t feel like a tourist, I know my way around, and my Spanish is bouncing back, however clumsily. Buenos Aires has apparently been dubbed ¨The Cool Capitol of the World¨and I´m pretty convinced it´s true: people don´t go out on the town until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, most of the good places don´t even have signs--you just have to know somebody to know what´s going on, and once you find them, you are surrounded by some of the trendiest, artsiest, and also most sincere and friendly people--a combination I´m not always accustomed to. The city is full of art, theater, music, cafés, European architecture, affordable prices, and Latin American openness and amiability. I feel like everyone´s so cool and I´m the geek trying to fit in, and yet, absolutely nobody has made me feel like I don´t.

My apartment is simple but cute and adequate. There´s a little kitchenette in a closet, a sunny balcony where I can watch the birds nesting in a little hole in the roof of the brick buildig across the way, cable TV to watch Gilmore Girls and West Wing, a quaint café/sweet shop on the corner where I have already become a regular for café con leche in the morning, a fresh pasta shop and fruit stands down the street, a huge park nearby, and a botanical garden full of stray cats. Yesterday I bought a couple little plants for my balcony and some flowers for my room.

I spent my Sunday at an artisan´s fair full of street performers and locals taking in the sun on blankets and sipping yerba máte. I also revisited the Cementario de Recoletta to wander amongst the sculptures in the sunshine and hang out with the stray cats there and write. (There is one black and white cat, I´ve discovered, who claims a bench for his own and like to pose for tourists´ photographs and pretend he´s not). Speaking of writing, this brings me to a bit of an announcement for those of you I haven´t told: I am writing a novel. Gulp. There, I´ve said it. And now that I have, don´t ask me how it´s coming along or what it´s about! I share things when I´m ready, thanks for your patience. . . it´s scarey enough to be serious about doing this!

At the cemetary I also ran into a new friend, Florencia, who was selling maps outside. I had met her when I was here last May and regretted non having exchanged information, but was happy to run into her again! She was happy to see me and have someone to talk to about all the rude people she´s had to deal with all day. And it turns out she´s the same age as me and has a birthday 5 days before mine (which is September 25th, by the way, in case anybody doesn´t know or wants a reminder :) so now I have somebody to celebrate with! She´s so sweet and has told me if I need anything I can count on her. . . this is the kind of hospitality I´ve received frequently in Buenos Aires, and in South America in general thus far. And as I miss you all, too, I hope you come down here to visit so you can get in on this yourself!