I have lived in two places prior to last Saturday, in the 10 years I've been in Argentina. Garin and Recoleta.
Garin (about 15 kilometers towards the city from Pilar, or about 40 kilometers north of the city on Panamericana highway, the Pilar branch) was a nice place, but unfortunately I didn't know very much when I moved out there in 2008, and ended up returning in 2010, to Recoleta. The reason I mention that is because I thought, back then, that I wanted to live more like I did in the States, in a "nice" neighborhood with a two-story house, a pool and kids playing in the streets. I chose a small closed neighborhood of 50 lots and thought I'd be happy. I did love the house and the pool, and my office had a sliding glass door that lead out to the pool, a yard with grass and all that - but Noesdeayer has it when he talks about pretension. I've never met a bunch of snootier, stuck-up, almost mercenary (that has to do with a little side business one of the housewives had there, which I won't go into here) and in many cases outright racist people in one place.
I would have stayed out in Garin, moved into a real neighborhood outside of one of those bubbles of surreal-ness of the closed neighborhoods, but my wife is too much of a city girl, doesn't drive (and never will, due to a childhood accident in a bus in Paraguay) and she really, really wanted to move into the city again. So we moved to Recoleta and stayed there for the next 6 or so years. I will mention here that I was never particularly happy in Recoleta, but it was close to where my wife worked and the people were not as snooty (simply because there were more people of varying varieties) than out in the closed neighborhood I lived in.
But I still wasn't all that happy with Recoleta itself.
Ever since I moved out to Garin, I've always known large parts of the city - and the environs outside, simply because I had a car and could travel easily. It's one of the reasons I was outspoken here (and wherever anyone would listen to me) against Cristina and the effects of her "inclusive" policies, which really were anything but.
I do know expats who know nothing of the city except Recoleta, Microcenter, Palermo and maybe a bit of Belgrano. They live in an expat and upper-class Argentine bubble, there's no doubt about it.
We just moved, this past Saturday, to Boedo. And really, literally on the border of Boedo and Parque Patricios and Nueva Pompeya (although to be fair, the border of Parque Patricios is actually three blocks away from my new apartment but across Caseros, the street on which I now live, is Nueva Pompeya
).
I admit to not knowing much about La Boca (which the article talked about). I've driven through it a few times and it looks a lot like the neighborhood I see in Nueva Pompeya, and which I drove through a lot in Barracas for the last two weeks as I was going back and forth between the new apartment and Easy to buy construction materials for the new apartment (we had to build out a few rooms before we moved in).
I like the neighborhood where I am now, although I was trying to get more into Parque Patricios itself. We know people who live in PP and it's a very nice neighborhood for families, but it is very, very difficult to find big apartments or houses to live in because they are all occupied. But what I really love about this area is that people are, for the most part, fairly nice. Before we even actually moved, I needed a cartridge for my printer. We had just signed the contract on the apartment and I realized that on Av Boedo (our other primary intersection street) there was a printer shop. I walked in, bought a cartridge (really fairly cheap! laser printer cartridge, b&w, for 280 pesos) and had a nice conversation with the older gentlemen who owned the shop. I've had similar experiences in the weeks before I moved and in the days since I moved.
But about 10 blocks or maybe a bit more from us (I haven't counted either on the map or driving) is the Riachuelo Matanza River. There is a really cool bridge at the other end of Av Saenz (continuation of Av. Boedo into Nueva Pompeya) where it crosses the river. It looks like a church of some sort (I'm not much on architectural styles - it looks kind of like a church to me, but maybe not. it's a facade on the bridge itself, facing the road - you drive into it). The bridge is in extremely poor condition and to me it is a good metaphor of leaving the city and going into the province, at least in many areas to the west and south. You have to practically crawl over the bridge it is such poor repair.
This image is a picture of the bridge as you see it leaving Nueva Pompeya. I don't know when this was taken, but the road doesn't look anywhere near this nice - I've crossed it probably 20 times in the last month!
You cross into Valentin Alsina, in the province and things are just suddenly different. Broken road, left over from construction projects that were started and either never finished or finished but the road never repaired afterward (maybe they were fixing a water main or something, who knows). Poor housing mixed with lower income housing. I've known about the area for a few years as it's where my brothers-in-law and their families moved to find affordable housing that wasn't in a "hotel" or pension, which is about the only way lower income families can live in the city.
However, there is a villa nearby, on the city side (I believe, I've never seen it personally and not sure exactly where it is - my brothers-in-law also talk of a villa on their side of the river). The inhabitants of this wonderful place often go over to the bridge, the only place anywhere nearby to cross the river, and cut access to cross. They protest apparently because they get electricity to their villa cut off, or for whatever other reason they feel that they need to horribly affect the working people of the area.
The bridge, cut off by protestors...
Imagine people exhausted after having worked a 10 or 12 hour (or longer in some cases) day, riding an hour, hour and a half or even two hours to get through the city (where they work, because there sure as hell isn't much work where they live, and they live there because it's all they can afford), often crossing through other demonstrations in the city by other idiots who want to cut off 9 de Julio, or Rivadavia, etc, to prove some point they have to all the hard-working people of the city - then they get near their home and find out they have to walk the last 2 or 3 three kilometers home because these idiots from the villa are blocking the bridge.
This, to me, is the other half of the city (even though it be in the province). Or the really, really poor places in Jose C Paz where people have bought land legally from people who have reclaimed abandoned land (I have a sister-in-law who lives out there).
Very few expats have been to these places, I think, or much less even know about them. Rivadavia is indeed a dividing line within the city itself and there are places to the north that don't include Microcenter, Recoleta, Palermo and Belgrano and are not poor - are actually quite nice to live in. I saw more of this recently when I was looking in places like Villa Devoto, Villa Luro, Saavedra, for a decent place to live at a reasonable price and with a little bit of space for 5 people.
But crossing Rivadavia is only one change, and fairly minor in my opinion. Cross Riachuelo or General Paz (the loop around part of the city) and there's a jump even bigger. They still consider themselves as living in Buenos Aires, even though it's not CABA. But they are very forgotten as well as far as the maintenance of roads and other infrastructure goes, and large amounts of serious poverty,
