La Boca (BA Day 7 - Part 3)

Also on Sunday, after Plaza de Mayo & San Telmo, we went to La Boca. It's in the middle of a pretty bad neighborhood, so we took a taxi in & out. Here's the history of La Boca: Around 6 million foreign immigrants poured into Argentina between the years 1880 and 1930. About 50% of these people were Italian, and many of those were from the port town of Genoa, Italy. Italian immigrants in La Boca worked in the port, just as they had done in Genoa. The Genoese proudly brought their unique identity to La Boca, and one of their old traditions was to paint the outside of their homes with the leftover paint from the shipyard - as nothing else was available or could be afforded. There were not enough homes for all of the people in Buenos Aires, so conventillo (tenement / shared) housing was created. Conventillos were long houses with small rooms that opened out onto a central outdoor common patio (also known as casa chorizos (sausage houses). In La Boca, the conventillos were hastily constructed from scrap corrugated metal and wood from old ships, and to spruce them up a little, the façades, doors and windows were then decorated in the famous bright color combinations with the leftover paint from the port, that tradition brought from Genoa. By the late 1950s, La Boca had drastically changed from the turn of the 20th century - most of the colorful, ragtag conventillo housing that had been spread throughout most of the barrio had been pulled down, being replaced by dull houses and blocks of flats. Benito Quinquela Martin, an abandoned orphan who was adopted by a Genoese immigrant couple in La Boca, had become the most significant painter in Argentina, with his dramatic paintings of the port of La Boca, and achieved worldwide recognition. In 1959, he and his artist friends created the street of Caminito, as a means of recreating the way old La Boca used to look - a reminder of where everyone had come from, not just in La Boca, but Buenos Aires, and Argentina, because this barrio and its port had been the gateway for many immigrants into this city and country (up until Puerto Madero & then Puerto Nuevo were built as replacements in the early 1900s), who then went on to make Buenos Aires and Argentina what they are today. And so Caminito is really a boiled-down representation of the old immigrant La Boca, recreated by a master artist raised just around the corner. It is an exhibit, and so nobody actually lives in the Conventillos along Caminito.

a mural

It is believed that some of the roots of Tango are from La Boca. Hence, the name - named after a very popular 1926 Tango, by a famous La Boca musician and resident.

Tango music was born in Buenos Aires in around 1870. It is still open to debate exactly where in Buenos Aires the tango originated. It is agreed that tango music first came out of the environment of immigrant-packed conventillo houses, where many different cultures and their respective types of music mixed in such close proximity, and from the melting pot of styles from around the world, tango music arose. It was on the outdoor patios in the center of the conventillos, where immigrants socialized together and played their musical instruments to each other after a hard day’s work, that this most probably occurred.

There were live Tango dancers

Sutton loved watching the dancers and wanted to stay to watch more

Hudson, on the other hand, found more interest in rocks

& Doug was making sure we were 'on schedule'