I’ve officially made it to my second stop: London, UK! It’s been a busy week between two tours and time in the archives in Argentina and a full 24 hours of traveling to arrive here.
On the second to last day in Argentina, I went on a tour to learn more about the architecture and history of Buenos Aires. I learned about how a few core families controlled most of the money within the country. Argentina is known for its beef, so when they learned how to start freezing it, the industry grew increasing the wealth of these families enough to build large, beautiful mansions. After seeing several mansions, we ended our tour through the Recoleta Cemetery. When I first started searching for tourist attractions in BA, I was surprised that a cemetery topped the list. However, once I arrived, I understood why. This cemetery is unique because there are no gravestones, each one has a fancy mausoleum. It became a competition amongst families to create the most expensive and largest one. My tour guide, Fabian, pointed out some of the notable graves there with stories. He mentioned that a lot of the graves are now abandoned, but there is one that consistently receives flowers: Eva Perón’s. I was not too familiar with the history of Eva Perón, but the name continued coming up while I was there. He explained that Eva was the first lady of Argentina from 1946 to 1952 when she died in office. Eva, commonly referred to as Evita, was notable for her work to advocate for the working class and her monumental role in her husband’s presidency–she was a woman of the people. Fabian mentioned that the staff clean the cemetery daily, and Evita always has tons of flowers and notes of people expressing their gratitude and appreciation for her work. Although not directly related to my work, I am grateful for this experience, and I found it helpful to learn about arguably the most important woman in Argentinian history. Despite her lack of an official position in office beyond First Lady, Evita was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement in Argentina, and she is still known for expanding the role of women in politics in Latin America.
On my last day in Argentina, I met with Erica to go through a personalized tour. I let her know in advance that I wanted to learn more about the final military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. She took me to ESMA on the subway (which was super clean and easy to understand). ESMA stands for Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, and it was the original educational facility for the Argentina Navy. In 1976, after the coup and the start of the military dictatorship, it was the largest “clandestine center for detention, torture, and extermination” (Source). I cannot emphasize how difficult it was to walk through this large complex, and it feels impossible to fathom the tragedies that occurred. When I visited, the museum had a special exhibit about the experience of women during the dictatorship that felt extremely relevant to my work. Women that were educated or unique in some way (i.e. transgender women, pregnant women) were heavily targeted and kidnapped first. It set in that a woman like myself, young and educated, would have been a target. Moreover, these women faced horrible sexual abuse regularly from officers. The military degraded and dehumanized these women in every single way. They even enforced women waxing or wearing makeup to further psychological harm. One of the most shocking parts was hearing about pregnancy and childbirth in this center. My tour guide explained that they would blindfold the woman during labor, and many women died from the lack of proper medical care. If the woman survived, they would let her hold the child while blindfolded for one minute, but the military officers would then take the child. The children would be taken away or adopted by military/police families. Most women had no idea what had happened to their children. After democracy was restored, some families tried to reunite through the large databanks, but it was very challenging. Erica explained to me that there is a large generation of children who do not know much about their families and grew up without the love of a family due to the dictatorship.
During the dictatorship, mothers and grandmothers engaged in some forms of protests. I learned about the cloth diaper symbol that many women wore during this era. Cloth diapers were popular in Argentina for much longer than in America, so women would take a clean one, write their child’s name on it, and tie it around their head. This would represent that their child was kidnapped, and they want information about what happened. When someone was kidnapped, they would join “the missing.” This stood out to me because despite knowing that most of these people were killed in captivity, it is polite to refer to them as “missing” in Argentinian culture no matter how long it has been. Erica explained that it comes from their story is missing, their life is missing, and their entire being is just missing from us. This is hard history, and Erica mentioned that many Argentinians prefer not to discuss this era of the country’s history. They are ashamed, and considering how long ago it was, many of the impacts are still being felt today. Erica told me that many times if you bring this up to someone, they will tell you “no te metas” which means “don’t mention it, don’t mess with this.” Because of the difficulty for people to discuss this history, there were and are many campaigns spreading the message that it is important to talk about this and safe to do so now. I wondered how many survivor stories or information could be missing because people do not feel comfortable speaking about this still. It was a very heavy and difficult day, but I realized how important it was to view this history to learn from, but it is also so much deeper than just researching about a dictatorship in the library or online. These are real lives, real stories, and real tragedies.
I took lots of photos during the architecture/cemetery tour and ESMA tour, so I created folders: Architecture tour & ESMA tour