Berkley Center

After glowing recommendations from friends, tourists, and locals alike, I finally decided to embark on a graffiti tour around Buenos Aires. Throughout my four-month journey, I had noticed the intricate, graphic, and bold designs on many walls around the city but had never properly taken the time to investigate them. It was not until after the tour that I really appreciate how much these walls are a living modern history book of Argentina.

Writing on walls is not a modern phenomenon. Rather, it has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to the first cavemen and expressions of social and political unrest dating back to the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. Moreover, Argentine artists are no strangers of using their work to highlight the pressing social and political issues of their time. One of the most famous artists of this genre is Antonio Berni, an artist closely associated with social realism. His most notable works have been exhibited around the world, bringing global attention to the devastating poverty and effects of industrialization in Buenos Aires. Therefore, maybe it is only natural that, today, these expressions of social and political angst are painted on the walls, invading the public eye and inviting the onlookers to question the state of affairs.

In Latin America, the Mexican mural movement in the 1930s kicked off the trend of street art. This movement brought an unprecedented prominence to murals as a social and political tool in this region of the world. In Buenos Aires, a similar movement took off afterwards and further intensified in the backlash against the difficult economic times in the early 2000s. The years of 1998 to 2002 are dubbed the Argentina great depression. The Argentine economy shrank by nearly 30 percent in this period; this led to widespread unemployment, riots, the fall of the government, the worsening of the already severe problem of poverty… as well as a whole host of other problems. But it also led to a burgeoning sense of creating a social experiment on the streets.

The artwork on the streets carries a powerful political charge, tracing the nation’s modern political history from the dark days of the military dictatorship to the depression of the economic crisis to the current controversial Kirchner presidency. For me, some of the most powerful images are those detailing the military dictatorship and los desaparecidos, or those who “disappeared” during the regime due to their perceived ties to socialism. During the dictatorship, the military training school was the city’s largest center of detention, torture, and extermination. Today, it has been transformed into a memorial and museum for those who perished in during the military dictatorship. On one of the walls of this complex, there is a black and white image of a child holding a photo of one of the desaparecidos, and with the words “Juicio y Castigo” (judgment and punishment) stamped on his chest in red. These words are the slogan for a human rights group that continues to fight for justice. To me, such images really keep the atrocities of the military dictatorship in the country’s collective memory.

Due to the aforementioned economic crisis, thousands lost their jobs. Many of the suddenly unemployed took to the street to comb through the trash to salvage anything they could exchange for money; they became known as cartoneros (carton collectors). The graffiti that depicts these cartoneros with their metal trolleys and cigarettes in their mouth somehow brings back that same sense of desperation. Néstor Kirchner, president of Argentina from 2003 to 2007, is widely credited with improving the country’s financial situation. As such, there is much graffiti paying homage to him. Currently, his wife, Cristina Kirchner, is serving as president. Although she is popular with the working class in many of Argentina’s provinces, Porteños (people from Buenos Aires) are less convinced and blame her administration for the country’s current economic woes. These contrasts are also clearly expressed on the walls of the country’s capital. All in all, these walls really do tell the city’s story, and I am so glad I took to time to stop and look before I left this gem of a city.