The Strangest Book Launch I've Ever Attended
An interesting debate in Argentina about informal work
NOTEBOOK ENTRY NO. 12: BAR ROMA, BALVANERA, CIUDAD AUTÓNOMA DE BUENOS AIRES, FEBRUARY 27
I was going to be late for the bus to this book launch. The elderly man at the reception desk was lugubriously punching what seemed to be more or less random numbers into the calculator app on his phone to determine the rate I would be charged for two nights’ stay.
The previous day, I’d been invited to this book launch by some guys I’d met with at the Bar El Federal, an old and, as they’re called here, “notable” café in this same neighborhood of Buenos Aires, San Telmo. The book in question was entitled The Worst Ones and it was by Juan Grabois, the ringleader of a political group called the Frente Patria Grande that lay at the leftward edge of the governing coalition, the Frente de Todos, and as of recently a presidential candidate.
The guys from the Bar El Federal were militantes (not militants, the word simply means “activists”) in Grabois’s group and had put me in touch with someone who was supposedly organizing a bus to the book launch, which was an hour away in the nearby city of La Plata.
A bus to a book launch—not something I’d heard of before. Maybe that was how they did things down here. I didn’t know much about Grabois, but he was going to be discussing the book with Axel Kicillof, the Peronist governor of Buenos Aires province and a fairly important figure. Why not see what Argentine political letters had to offer? I got the details for this bus that was set to leave from near the city center.
Except I still needed to get something to eat. The receptionist having finally settled on a number, I paid, deposited my things, and climbed into a cab equipped with a brown paper bag of empanadas. Having given the address indicated for the bus, I was dropped off in a neglected, deserted alley near the center. I stood in the shade, away from the merciless summer sun, and pulled out the brown bag of empanadas. One of them fell out of what turned out not to be a bag but rather a paper sleeve, onto the sidewalk, which was not very clean. I picked it up, dusted it off and ate it anyway, washing it down with a gulp of the grapefruit soda I’d bought.
Eventually the woman who was organizing the bus appeared, flanked by a skinny guy with an earring, and unlocked a sliding metal door to lead us into a garage-like concrete room with several threadbare couches and a life-sized cardboard cutout of the vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Both the woman and the man looked to be in their early twenties. She started hauling large instruments, enormous drums and what looked like some kind of horn out of a back room.
“There’s going to be music at this book launch?” I said, a little incredulously.
“Champions of the world can celebrate a book launch however they want,” replied the guy with the earring without missing a beat, referring to the Argentine World Cup title. This seemed like a clever rejoinder to me at the time, but I later learned that it is a stock phrase across the country since the victory in Qatar, used to justify any odd behavior.
An hour later we finally boarded the bus and trundled towards La Plata. By this point I had realized that the event was probably going to be less of a typical staid literary book launch and something closer to a political rally. The bus was full of kids from the prestigious University of Buenos Aires, part of Grabois’s Frente Patria Grande.
“If you go swimming in there, you’ll come out with a third eye,” said the guy with the earring, now my seatmate, as we passed over the Riachuelo, the stinking estuary that divides the south of rich Buenos Aires city from its poorer suburbs.
The college kids were amused when I told them I’d been to Perón Perón the previous day, a restaurant that doubles as kitschy shrine to the glorious Peronist past. They informed me, however, that there had been an interna among the employees and that some had gone off to form a rival restaurant named Santa Evita. (An interna is what it sounds like, some sort of internal schism or controversy within some group, political or otherwise.)
“There’s really an interna in everything here in Argentina, isn’t there?” I said to them.
“In the world,” they corrected me.
My seatmate—who turned out to be from Boedo, a working-class area of the city with a proud intellectual history and a famous café, the Margot—told me a bit about his recent trip to Cuba and asked me about American politics.
“I’ve heard of Texas,” he told me. “Where is it again?”
I told him it was more or less in the middle of the country, but at the bottom. He asked if it was conservative or left-wing. I told him it tended to be more conservative, like many parts of the South.
“The South is conservative?” he asked me. At this point I figured he had to be messing with me, but he seemed pretty serious. I hesitated and then decided to dispense momentarily with the particularities of regional political history in the name of conversational convenience.
"Yeah, you know, the history of Jim Crow and all that.”
“Jim Crown?”
So then I had to explain what Jim Crow was, still completely unsure if and to what extent I was being messed with. It all seemed to be news to him. He had me spell it out on his phone.
We eventually arrived in hot, desolate La Plata, with its odd, careful grids, its geometric parks, the weekday silence lending it an agreeable, Ozymandian quality of gracious abandonment. The city was built after Buenos Aires was detached from its surrounding province and made the federal capital in 1880. A planned city, like Washington, D.C., its less central role in national political life and its construction a century later give it quite different qualities.
The streets of La Plata, perfectly geometrical, perfectly straight, receding placidly to the horizon, reminded me in a way of Chicago. But La Plata is completely without the terrifying, imperial aspect of those Chicago streets that seek somehow to dominate, to ape eternity and defy the gods. Its is a minor sort of eternity: akin to the perfect line that the protagonist of the Borges story, “Death and the Compass,” vainly suggests to Red Scharlach when it is already clear he is going to die.
We were escorted to a gymnasium. Outside a band whistled and beat enormous drums. In attendance in their hundreds were the popular sectors—workers’ groups, LGBT groups, bottle and can collectors, all wearing shirts with political slogans and, often, the silhouettes of the Malvinas (the Falkland Islands). One of the Frente Patria Grande’s big initiatives was organizing cartoneros, informal bottle and can collectors, in the Buenos Aires area. They were proud of having managed to help elect a cartonera to Congress.
Inside it was about a million degrees and we languished, sweating bullets, on the crowded bleachers in the back for a full hour before Grabois and Kicillof took the stage and—after a polite, longwinded and mostly content-free prologue, as they passed around a gourd of mate and Kicillof took off his jacket—they began arguing in an odd, guarded way.
In question was a topic of political economy: whether informal work was an increasing, inevitable consequence of capitalist accumulation (Grabois’s position), or something cyclical (Kicillof’s). A recent estimate put the rate of informal work among the working-age population at 28 percent, which is lower than many other countries in Latin America.
The subtext here, too, was whether the “popular economy,” as Grabois preferred to call the informal sector, was something to be praised, embraced, organized; or whether it was an unfortunate consequence of the sabotage of Peronism’s attempt to guarantee everyone a good job with all the attendant benefits and labor protections.
Kicillof was soon sweating through his shirt in the oppressive heat inside the gymnasium. A few fans mounted on the walls in the four corners of the enormous building whirred ineffectively. Women walked up and down the aisles carrying exhausted-looking babies on their shoulders, thin dark hair plastered to their tiny foreheads.
On stage, the two men vacillated between debating each other and playing to the crowd. It wasn’t exactly the perfect setting for an exchange of views on political economy. Besides it being about a million degrees, the audience—blue-collar and academic types alike—seemed to have been expecting a political rally, not an in-depth discussion on an abstract subject.
Each speaker would waver a bit, offering a concession here or there to his rival, or a backhanded compliment (Grabois called Kicillof a “small hope” for the left), then made his sally, arguing against the other’s position. Once the point was made, the speaker would quickly change tack, falling into a more familiar soapbox style, the dignity of the people and so on, offering familiar applause lines for the restless, hot and somewhat perplexed audience.
Grabois argued the state was impotent without the inclusion of the popular economy. Kicillof contended this attitude was to “romanticize the result of a political defeat”—that is, the defeat of the left by Mauricio Macri, president from 2015 to 2019.
To the gringo observer, there seemed to be a bit of utopia about both positions. Grabois saw that parts of Peronism had ossified into an attempt to protect the privileges of a diminishing part of society and the movement’s popular rhetoric at times seemed more and more out of joint with this reality. But Kicillof had a point that there was something a little romantic about Grabois’s stance—a sort of workerism for informal workers. And while strides had been made in organizing the cartoneros, the horizons for organizing the informal sector seemed potentially limited. How to organize something so spontaneous and mobile as the roadside stalls and handshake agreements that make up much of the informal economy?
To organize informal labor, to lend it force to exercise upon the state is, in turn, to make it legible to the state—something that seemed to entail, in some sense, formalizing it. Kicillof and Grabois seemed to want the same thing, dignity and stability for all workers, but neither’s means seemed entirely capable of guaranteeing it.
The discussion went on for far too long. The moderator vainly tried to bring matters to a close; the two men dueled to see who would get the last word, speaking for fifteen minutes at a time. My friend from the bus slipped out down the bleachers and through the packed crowd, returning with a large bottle of ice-cold water, offering me some. I gave him in turn some of the grapefruit soda I had been carefully husbanding. It wasn’t too cold at this point.
“Maybe good for mate,” he pronounced with a grimace, handing it back.
Finally Grabois and Kicillof became too physically exhausted to go on, regular draughts of mate failing to revive them. Eventually we were able to proceed out into the comparatively mild evening, where ragtag bands were playing again, banners promoting Grabois’s candidacy held aloft. I cut through the crowd to the nearest kiosco and bought an enormous bottle of cold water and some ketchup-flavored potato chips.
Back amid the crowd, I ran into my friend from the Bar El Federal, the one who had put me in touch with the bus organizers in the first place. He and his friend had a spot in their car headed back to the city: I rode in the back seat next to their girlfriends. The full moon shone above the reeds and brick shacks visible from the highway.
They dropped me off near where I was staying. Walking back to my hotel, I saw people walking their dogs, women with babies, men dumpster diving—literally diving, you could only see their feet protruding from the bins. I wondered if they were in the cartonero union.
At the hotel, the receptionist said it was all right to use the pool, even though it was technically after hours. How exciting to have the exchange rate in my favor and be able to stay at a hotel with a pool, I thought—what a perfect relief after this political-economic sauna experience. The small, shallow pool was on the roof, deserted and dark. You could barely see the pool. The sounds of the nighttime life of San Telmo filtered up, out of sight, from the streets below. I lowered myself into the water and dunked my head under the cool water: bliss.
The next afternoon I went back up to the roof to use the pool again. The water was murky, shot through with green particles of algae. It looked just like the pool in Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénega, like it hadn’t been properly cleaned in months.