Travel notes S2 E2: A Tale of two cities
Originally published on Medium on October 7, 2018.
Stories; the currency of travel
Travel is a great leveller; in a hostel bar we are all equal in our material worth, that of the value on our backs.
Thus in the absence of dealing with ‘stuff’, stories are the travellers currency, our perceived worth in hostel life, our place in the ephemeral hierarchy that forms, shifts and drifts apart as people come and go from bunk to bunk.
So in this week that was; two stories and two ideas come to mind.
Scaling Argentina
“We just need more people”
Was the statement of Florentine, an Italian-Argentine from the north of the country, passionate about rugby in general and his local team in particular. We’d met in a bar owned by a trio of city guides in Montevideo; representing their dream of independence, created as a little slice of Shoreditch in perhaps a slightly less than savoury corner of town.
Escaping the confines of the gringo trail always open doors to interesing opportunities, even if it highlights the woeful inadequacy of my Spanish. The bar was quiet midweek and so early in the evening, just us and the bar owners chatting over craft beer, grapa and bar snacks.
That Argentina and Uruguay are beautiful countries, rich in wonder and passionate about their flags. Yet these are both new countries, formed from ground up by waves of immigrants crossing from Europe, bringing ideas, eagerness to succeed and a liberal attitude which seems at odds with their ex-colonial cousins in the northern continent.
They’ve both suffered (or maybe still suffering in Argentina) from growing pains, finding the right balance between liberty and security, social goods and economic necessity, financial incentives for ‘success’ vs. Egalitarian ideals. Yet at the core they’re mature, ‘western’ nations, that wouldn’t be out of place on the border of Spain or Germany.
The lever they are missing is the population, the pure numbers to put to work to make their mark on the world. They have the infrastructure, they have the governance, they have the passion. They just need more Argentinians and Uruguayans to execute.
Whether this is the view of the broader population and government I don’t know, whether they are already pro-immigration at policy level, I don’t know. Yet fundamentally it makes sense that Argentina with a population of 43M and borders the size of Europe needs a base density to allow for the creation of the infrastructure, businesses and value it’s social stature deserves.
One people, many hats
“I’m a Galician living in Argentina”
A comment made on a rather tipsy evening in a British ‘pub’ located in central Buenos Aires (which I found rather odd in itself, given the Malvinas/Falklands marches are still a regular occurrence). The orator in question was… actually his name escapes me, it was rather late at this point, an Argentine bagpipe player I’d been introduced to that day.
It turns out there is a rather large Galician community in Argentina, originating from North West Spain, with its own dialect that’s more Portuguese and Spanish and a pendant for the bagpipe and drums.
Amongst the rumination on Galician traditions, came the headline quote; that a person born and raised in Argentina would choose to identify themselves by the culture of his parents (or grandparents) birth over that of his or her own. The same point was reinforced by a another member of our most merry crew, a Swiss teacher with Spanish roots who identified more with the warmth and passion of the Latin people than the calculated efficiency of the Swiss.
Perhaps this outlook is more prevalent in countries founded or scaled by Immigrants; nature abhors a vacuum and in the absence of a strong homogenous culture we look outside our borders to find one. This is seen in the US with the prevalence of ‘Irish-Americans’, Chinese and Indian Diasporas the world over and seemingly every Uruguayan broadcasting their roots back to Spain and Italy.
So perhaps there is a ‘cultural stack’ wherein we all hold multiple identities with differing importance given to each. That Argentina and Uruguay can strike out to create large scale human systems from scratch driven by formative cultures yet still support underlying identities or at least align enough to them to not cause overt friction is impressive.
Perhaps this is why I was told that “Mercosur has purely economic goals”, that Argentina and Uruguays (I can’t say for the other members) cultural identities are not mature or homogenous enough as yet to support a broader ‘South American’ Identity, that a country needs to get to a point where the national identity holds higher priority than its component parts.
Without diving deeper; perhaps this is why we’ve seen pushback against the EU from across Europe in recent years. It’s become clear that many national governments haven’t succeeded in forging homogenous identities, thus the EU’s forbearance as the overarching ‘European Identity’ doesn’t have a chance until the component parts are brought together themselves.
That’s not to judge whether pan-national identities are a positive or negative thing of course, yet if the base responsibility of government is to prevent conflict which would inflict damage on its people there are distinct advantages.
Currently Reading
‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance’ at long last after having my dad pester me for years to read it. It’s a little hard going (at least with a minor hangover) yet the core ideas so far have resonated; the Romantic and the intellectual, System thinking and first principles, the what and the why.
Currently Listening
Much much much Reggaeton…… much of dubious quality 😂