La Boca brings to life the scene that springs to mind when you think of Buenos Aires. Brightly painted in reds, yellows, blues and greens, strung with coloured bunting and decorated with street-art caricatures of all things Argentine, artistic central La Boca bursts with energy. Add to that the mouth-watering scent of grilling meat wafting down every street, and the shouts of the local artists seeking buyers for the artworks they have pegged up on frames on the Caminito, and you have a sense of what it is like to wander around La Boca.
Although it is something of a tourist hotspot, there is a deeper story to La Boca’s colourful buildings and wall art. Once you hear it, everything begins to make sense. La Boca is one of Buenos Aires’ poorest neighbourhoods. It originated as a docking area and, as nineteenth-century industrial technology improved, pollution increased accordingly and the river soon became a smelly, sticky, rubbish-strewn mess. As the least desirable and cheapest area in Buenos Aires, it became an area where immigrants felt most easily able to move – mainly from Spain and north-western Italy – starting out on their journey towards a new life in Argentina.
However, Argentina did not live up to their dreams. La Boca was uncomfortably crowded and had a seedy undertone to its nightlife. From this, though, emerged one of the most iconic Argentine traditions: tango. Tango was frowned upon by civilised society when it first originated as it is a sensuous, tactile and dramatic dance – attributes that were not accepted in civilised society in the early twentieth century – and was therefore a form of art reserved for the lower classes living in La Boca. But past prejudices have been cast aside over the years and tango has since become one of Argentina’s most well-known cultural features.
Visual art is another highlight of La Boca. The inception of the art scene can be credited to Benito Quinquela Martín, born in 1890, abandoned and brought up in an orphanage before being adopted by an Italian couple. Quinquela Martín was uniquely creative and his main artistic output was oil paintings depicting a prosperous La Boca, which were so well-received that they not only brought him international fame but also put a spotlight on La Boca. He decided his resulting new-found wealth was best-placed given back to the community. He gifted new schools, museums and children’s hospitals to the city of Buenos Aries and the people of La Boca. Against a dark past, Quinquela Martín vowed to paint the city in colour. He would show colourful versions of the streets in his paintings to convince the community to let him paint the town in multi-colour using excess paint taken from the shipping industry. This is how the multi-coloured theme came to be.
Other legends of La Boca include the Boca Juniors, one of Argentina’s most famous and successful football teams. In the streets around the Boca Juniors stadium (La Bombonera), everything is painted in the bright blue and yellow of the club’s colours, allegedly inspired by the flag on a Swedish boat which arrived into the harbour on the day the colours were to be chosen. La Bombonera is a distinctive D shape, keeping alive the hope that one day city funding can be applied towards extending the D into a full O.
Despite La Boca being a popular area of Buenos Aires for tourists to visit, and the home of a famous football club, it remains one of the city’s poorest districts. Consequently, La Boca’s residents are vehemently against gentrification as this would inevitably cause prices to rise as the area becomes more desirable to live in, resulting in the residents being priced out. One way gentrification is being prevented in La Boca is that there are no hotels. When we were there, there was an ongoing protest against a measure recently taken by the government to move the artists’ stalls to a different area of the neighbourhood to make room for increased numbers of tourists.
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