Rosario, Argentina: Not in Kansas anymore

Action
There’s some bad hair here in Argentina. A surprising number of young men have rat-tails and timid mohawks. The women’s hair looks a bit better if monotonous. All the women have long hair, and many of them have interesting layers and dramatic bangs that reach to their eyebrows.

Besides hairstyles, there are other differences between the US and Argentina that we notice in our daily life. As we’ve noticed elsewhere in Latin America, people often drive at night with their lights off. The streets are well lit, but as a pedestrian, discerning an oncoming car can be difficult at times. Cars with their lights off do tend to flash their lights as they approach intersections to improve their visibility. One explanation offered to us is that cars drive with their lights off, so that they are even more visible when they flash their lights at intersections.

There are also times when I’ve been taken aback by differences more profound than hair and driving styles. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a class on Latin American literature at the National University of Rosario. Halfway through the class, I noticed the smell of mate wafting through the air and turned around to see the row of students behind me sharing a gourd. I shook my head indulgently. A few minutes later, a student sitting next to the door lit a cigarette. The professor began smoking as well. Before long, I was in a classroom full of smokers. I’m accustomed to being surrounded by cigarette smoke here, and seeing mate everywhere, so I wasn’t too shocked by the scene in the classroom at that point.

About an hour into the hour-and-half-long afternoon class, a man came in through the door in the back of the classroom. He had a large bag slung over his shoulder, in which were 4 thermoses, 2 plastic squeeze-bottles, and one shaker filled with a powdery substance. When he entered the room, several people in the back began ordering coffee, cappuccino and hot chocolate. He prepared all the drinks with his thermoses of hot water and coffee and ketchup bottles of cream, pouring them into the plastic cups he was carrying. I was stunned and a little offended. This was a classroom, not a stadium! I looked to the professor to see if he was as indignant as I was. He didn’t seem the slightest bit perturbed. Then the salesman proceeded to the front of the room preparing more beverages and collecting coins as payment. At this point, the classroom felt like the stage of an absurdist piece of theatre and I tried to suppress a laugh. I wanted to make eye-contact with someone so we could share a chuckle or at least a smile about the silliness of it all but everyone was rapped up in the discussion of literary responses to the vanguard movement and sipping their piping-hot drinks.

Reflection
Living in Argentina at times isn’t all that different from living in the US. People speak a different language, but because most people we see in Rosario have European ancestry, they look like white Americans. Their haircuts and fashions are a bit different, but probably just as different as mid-west styles look to a New Yorker. The logic of the drivers is quirky, but not outrageously different. Every once in a while, though, something happens to remind me that I really am thousands of miles away from the country I grew up and in an entirely different hemisphere. Or as Dorothy said when she entered the land of Oz, “Gee, Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” Watching a coffee vendor enter the university classroom was such a moment. It wasn’t just that the situation struck me as absurd; silly things happen in the US too. What struck me was also that no one else thought it was absurd. Being in a foreign environment is most alienating when it’s clearly not foreign to anyone else who’s around you.

Question
When have you realized that you’re “not in Kansas anymore”?

Rosario, Argentina: Popular education? Oh no, that wouldn’t work here

Action
Soon after arriving in Rosario, we were invited to a series of participatory workshops organized by a city program called Rosario Habitat. The extensive program is responsible for developing formal urban infrastructure (e.g. roads, sewer systems, stable houses, public spaces) in the city’s many informally developed shantytowns (villas miseries). To accomplish this, teams of staff members are going to the shantytowns and asking residents how they want to improve their neighborhoods.

One weekend-long workshop that we attended brought together 150 residents of Villa Itati to identify the shantytown’s problems and start to develop solutions for these problems. The workshop started with groups of 6-9 residents and a facilitator working together to write down their neighborhood problems on index cards. Using prodding questions and cartoon illustrations of typical neighborhood scenes, the facilitator encouraged the participants to discuss a wide range of issues. Workshop coordinators then joined these small groups together in larger groups of 20-25 people, to share the ideas generated. As the groups presented, the coordinator posted the index cards in columns on the wall, grouping them into themes (e.g. urban infrastructure, security, environmental issues).


The next day, participants worked on developing solutions to the identified problems. First, they were asked to draw the neighborhood that they wanted to build on group flipcharts. The groups then shared their drawings and discussed the issues they raised. Finally, the participants divided into theme groups, each of which focused on one of the themes of problems generated the previous day. These groups reviewed the index cards of problems related to their issue and converted each problem into an objective. For example, the problem “unsafe streets” was transformed into “install street lighting”. After the participants wrote their objectives on new index cards, the workshop coordinators pinned the cards on the wall next to the columns of problems.


A few weeks later, I was asked to facilitate a workshop about public participation at the international Fair of Governance, this year held in Rosario. I proposed using a similar technique as the Rosario Habitat workshop – having participants write reflections about their experiences with public participation on index cards, and then sharing these ideas in small groups. To my surprise, my colleagues at the city said “No, that won’t work here.” They explained that the participants would be important representatives from different municipalities, and that asking them to do some sort of exercise using index cards would be an insult.

When we eventually had the workshop, most of my ideas had been dismissed. Instead, the other workshop coordinator decided to seat the 50 participants in a big circle and ask each person to introduce themselves and share a thought about public participation. As we went around the circle, some people spoke for 5 minutes and others declined to talk, some spoke about public participation and others about different things that they found interesting. When our allotted hour was up, only half the people had spoken, so the other coordinator extended the workshop into the snack break that followed. After another 45 minutes our bus drivers announced that they were leaving and we hurriedly ended the session, before some participants had their chance to speak.

Reflection
The participatory procedures used in the Rosario Habitat workshop are often referred to as techniques of popular education or facilitation. One of my goals during the past year has been to learn more of these techniques, since much of the theory and practice of popular education developed in Latin America (especially through Brazilians such as Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal). I was therefore somewhat surprised to hear that, after traveling to the middle of South America, I was in the wrong place to use participatory techniques. Or was it just that these techniques were only appropriate for poor people, not for government officials?

I wasn’t convinced. After all, I’d already seen the technique of writing ideas on index cards used by the Catalyst Centre (see chris’s blog) and the City of Toronto with a wide range of people. Sure, workshop techniques should be adapted to the local context and the participants, but I’d like to think that some rules of thumb are relatively universal. For example, everyone should have an equal opportunity to express their thoughts (in whatever way they feel comfortable, be it talking, writing, drawing...), you should respect the amount of time participants have allotted for the workshop, and the smaller the group the more time each participant has to express themselves. If these conditions are true, it seems to me like a participatory exercise with index cards and small groups might have been more productive than the 50-person roundtable, even with government officials. Perhaps the main reason why my colleagues thought a participatory exercise wouldn’t work is simply that they hadn’t tried it before?

Question
What do people say wouldn’t work or couldn’t happen in your city or community? Are they right? What do you think wouldn’t work or couldn’t happen?

Montevideo, Uruguay & Rosario, Argentina: Writing Our Own History

Action
While touring the colonial downtown of Montevideo in February, we came upon the following plaques providing historical information about buildings and locations throughout the downtown:

The bottom of the plaques contain the logos of their sponsors, such as IBM.

Now, as we walk around Rosario we regularly come face to face with graffiti declaring “Pocho Vive” (Pocho lives):

The graffiti is often accompanied by stylized spray painted stencils of ants. During one of our first interviews in Rosario, we couldn’t help but ask who or what Pocho was. We learned that Pocho LePratti was a community activist who grew up in a middle class family in Uruguay but chose to work with children in a shantytown in Rosario called Ludueña. During the Argentinean economic crisis and mass protests of December 2001, he was fatally shot and killed by police officers as he climbed the stairs to the roof of the school where he was preparing food for the children. A website dedicated to the memory of Pocho explains: “Pocho developed an ant’s work, sharing hope, brotherly love and a spirit of struggle among the least favored of this society. It was this that his assassins sought to kill.”

Pocho’s house in Ludeña has been turned into a homeless shelter, a documentary about him has been shown twice (that we know of) in Rosario in the past two months, and numerous people’s libraries throughout Argentina bear his name. Pocho’s ants crawl around the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires as well.


In Rosario, there’s a campaign to name a street after Pocho Lepratti. The street signs have been painted over on President Roca Street, which was named after an Argentine president who began a campaign of massacring indigenous tribes in the south of the country:



Pocho’s story isn’t the only one being told via graffiti in the streets of Argentina. In Rosario there are 380 stencils of bikes painted throughout the city such as the one in a picture above. Each bicycle represents someone who was disappeared during the last dictatorship. When the military kidnapped youths, they often nabbed them in the street leaving their bikes behind. There are also stencils of sneakers painted around the country in homage to the youths who died in a nightclub fire in Buenos Aires in December 2004.

Reflection
As Peter Gabriel sings of anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko, “You can blow out a candle, but you can’t blow out the fire.” What people have done with Pocho’s story impresses me more than the story of Pocho the individual. The people of Ludueña have developed a means of maintaining a collective memory of someone intimately involved in their struggles to lead a dignified life. Pocho’s story is more relevant to them than that of Sarmiento or Mitre (two Argentine historical figures who have streets in Rosario named after them). The people of Ludueña have assumed the responsibility of sharing his story and their struggles with much of Argentina outside of their barrio. I don’t remember what the plaques in Montevideo said, and I still have no idea who Mitre and Sarmiento are, but thanks to the army of ants stenciling, spray painting graffiti, filming movies, and singing songs about Pocho, I know who he is.

Question
How might the fact that the plaques in Montevideo have corporate sponsors affect their content, if at all? Who are the streets named after in your community? Who are local heroes in your community and how did you learn about them?

Buenos Aires & Rosario: Murgas, more than just the same old song and dance

Action
On the first day of our first visit to Buenos Aires, we were walking through the residential neighborhood surrounding Parque Centenario when the drums started to echo in the distance. As we strolled along, the distant sounds became distinct and vibrant rhythms, resonating along the streets. Turning a corner, we discovered the source: a group of around 20 people, marching and dancing through the streets with drums in hand. Our hosts explained that the group was a local murga troupe, a type of musical theater that is native to Argentina and Uruguay.


During Carnaval in Rosario, we discovered the more theatrical side of murgas, when they stop marching and start performing. At a special murga stage set up alongside the Carnaval parade, murga groups from across the region took the stage to perform different types of theater involving singing, dancing, drums, and/or political satire and commentary. One group of young children did a simple song and dance about growing up. Later, a murga troupe of teenagers sang a tale about some of the basic problems in their neighborhood (e.g. no work, not enough food to eat) and the luxury in another neighborhood (e.g. swimming pools, fancy cars), rhetorically asking the audience if this was fair and just.


Reflection
A few weeks after seeing these murga groups, I had the chance to read an article about murga’s role in creating an educating city. The article explained that murga groups are usually formed independently by community members in a given neighborhood (usually in working class areas), and that the group members generally produce their own songs, dances, costumes, and even instruments. Or in other words, that the murga groups enable ordinary kids to become the independent producers of their own culture.

Many murgas are inherently political, posing questions about life in the local community and city to both the murga members and their audiences. Regardless of the political messages, murgas are by definition based on voluntary and collective groupwork in pursuit of a common objective. There are no “stars” in murga theater – rather, the group members are involved in all aspects of the production, in a non-hierarchical way. Murga advocates therefore suggest that, in a world increasingly dominated by globalized commercial culture, murgas enable kids to practice and develop their own identity, creativity, and self-esteem through a process that instills values of active participation, solidarity, and community.

Question
What kind of culture have you produced, as a kid or adult? When have cultural productions affected your way of thinking? When has music, art, dance, or performance been political for you?