Representing the Street: Buenos Aires 1900 Through the Eyes of Travelers

By Anton Rosenthal Fuelled by waves of immigrants from Western and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Buenos Aires grew at an unprecedented pace, expanding toward the pampas and developing new neighborhoods along with an enormous streetcar network and a subway line. Historians often refer to the Buenos Aires of 1900 […]

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Adelante: From Buenos Aires to Travelogues, by way of Buenos Aires Travelogues

By Avigail Oren This summer, The Metropole is departing from its Metropolis of the Month format and will instead feature travelogues from globetrotting urbanists. We’ve asked some great contributors to share photos, reflections, and lists of their favorite things to do in the cities they’re visiting. But before we bid Buenos Aires adios, we actually […]

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A Tale of Two Cities: Buenos Aires, Córdoba and the Disappearance of the Black Population in Argentina

By Erika Denise Edwards The recent explosion of black studies in Argentina has been a welcoming effort of various scholars and activists that have refused to accept the old and tired categorization that Argentina is a country of European descendants.[1] For instance, most recently activists challenged Argentine president Mauricio Macri’s association between Mercosur and the […]

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Cities of Exile and Other Crossings: Buenos Aires and Montevideo’s Shared Histories from the 19th to 21st Centuries

By Daniel Richter Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the capitals of Argentina and Uruguay, are located approximately 120 miles away from each other across the Río de la Plata. Over the decade from 2003 to 2013, I traveled by boat between Argentina and Uruguay approximately 20 times while living in the two cities for an aggregate […]

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Popular Theater in Buenos Aires:  The Madrid of South America?

How many times have the city, its architecture, and the theatre been intertwined, for the theatre is often a foil for the representations of public life, and public space frequently is arranged as if for a theatrical performance. Both the theatre and urban space are places of representation, assemblage, and exchange between actors and spectators, […]

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Graffiti art, Protest and Memory in the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires city

By Yovanna Pineda On a casual stroll through Buenos Aires City, the pedestrian’s eyes can follow the public spaces lined with colorful graffiti. Though the latter is illegal, it is socially accepted, and for some urban residents and tourists it is even valued. Indeed, they locate their graffiti, including name tags, screen printing, and murals, […]

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Buenos Aires Flaneur: The View from the Streets

By Kristen McCleary  Strolling through Buenos Aires in the twenty-first century, the city might be read as an alternative text to that of established Argentine national history. The streets, walls, and tunnels of the city itself form the backdrop from which passersby create and narrate their own histories of the city from the words and […]

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Race, Immigration, and Culture in Buenos Aires: A Bibliography of the Argentine Capital

When South Americans first laid eyes on British immigrants playing the game that they called football (and residents of the United States came to call soccer), they were, historian David Goldblatt writes, “genuinely bemused.” A Brazilian observer described a scrum of English men hoofing “something that looks like a bull’s bladder” about as “a bunch […]

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