Maybe you can gauge a city’s soul from those it chooses to worship. Buenos Aires has three eternal heroes, whose ranking fluctuates according to fashion and caprice.
The tango singer and film star Carlos Gardel was the city’s first cultural icon, in the 1920s and 1930s. Eva Peron, who, depending on your viewpoint pitches somewhere between Mother Teresa and Imelda Marcos, became arguably the first globally famous Argentinian in the 1950s. Diego Maradona is one of the the greatest footballers the world has ever seen.
The three have characteristics in common. The most important is their status as proletarian icons, worshipped by the portenos (as the Buenos Aires citizens style themselves). Evita was the hustler, singer and radio actress who beguiled an (already married) demagogue of fascist inclination. Gardel emerged from the barrio (neighbourhood) of Abasto to become the first and greatest tango singer.
Maradona was the pibe (street urchin) born in the Evita hospital in Avellaneda who became the hero at Boca Juniors, one of South America’s most culturally-resonant football clubs.
To get the first inkling of an understanding of Buenos Aires, you have to at least make a token pilgrimage to the shrines of the city’s saints. Better still, allow them to be your guides around three of the capital’s passions: politics, tango and football.
The obvious place to start is the Plaza De Mayo, the grandiose centre-piece of the city, familiar to most of us from news reports from Argentina’s turbulent late 20th-century tragedies. The pink presidential palace, the Casa Rosada, features the balcony (the lower one) from which Peron and Evita would seduce the masses with their tendentious and calculated oratory.
The Plaza still witnesses the protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, now augmented by the Grandmothers. Initially lamenting the countless dissidents eradicated by the military junta of the 1970s, the Mothers have now become the nation’s conscience and defenders of its fragile democracy. They used the recent 30th anniversary of the military coup to remind Argentina of the horrors of the past and the necessity to ensure it happened “Nunca Mas” — never again.
Looking up at that balcony and across at the marching Mothers, you get a pithy impression of Argentina’s bitter passions.
Evita’s tomb is sited, inappropriately for the original “People’s Princess”, in the Recoleta Cemetery, otherwise last resting place of the city’s illustrious upper-classes. Her bones made an impromptu global tour before arriving back in the Duarte family tomb, decorated by fresh flowers placed every morning by worshippers.
If Evita was the ultimate embodiment of the connection between sex and politics, the tango is her cultural equivalent. Outside Buenos Aires the tango might be merely a quasi-erotic dance for menopausal sorts attempting to relight their fires. In the city it is infinitely more, a complex melange of Latin and African influences, with lyrical laments that touch on deprivation and frustration that are not solely sexual.
It’s no exaggeration to suggest that the songs are the Argentine equivalent of the blues. Visit Gardel’s tomb at La Chacarita cemetery and you’ll find fresh flowers for him too. His memory though is better maintained in the milongas or tango clubs of the barrios (although not in the countless “tango experience” bars and kitsch souvenir shops for tourists).
Purists will congregate at venues like Salon Canning in the upmarket central area of Palermo Viejo with its antique wooden floor, and veterans who exude a weathered reverence for the ancient tango classics on the sound system.
The less traditionally-minded might also be enticed by some of the hip new bars offering tango nights as an alternative to their regular sounds. These aren’t particularly reverent but nor are they as tacky as some of the tourist cash-ins. The trendy La Catedral in the suburb of Almagro is the most popular example, artfully decorated with salvaged furniture and artworks designed to replicate the barrio origins of the original tango clubs.
