By Evan Lehmann, CASA Argentina Fall 2017 (Brown University '19)
While I was first visiting the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), I wandered into a classroom and was met with two students blanketing the walls in political campaign flyers. With my incredibly non-Argentinian Spanish, I asked if I could help, with hopes of learning a bit about the country’s upcoming elections. “Sí, claro,” one of them responded, and for the next hour, we talked about Argentina’s political climate. I learned about the resurgence of neoliberalism across the region, its impacts on people in Buenos Aires, and fissions among the Argentinian left in addressing this wave. This was one of my first engagements with politics in Argentina, and it remains one of my most cherished memories of my time in Buenos Aires.
The energy with which the UBA student, and later my friend, spoke of Argentinian politics was found in countless corners across the city. I felt it again most heavily when I attended a rally in Plaza de Mayo, the center of Buenos Aires political life, for Santiago Maldonado. Santiago Maldonado was an activist working with Mapuche indigenous people in Patagonia to advance indigenous land rights in the South of Argentina who had disappeared after a protest. All of the protesters at this rally, and in many ways the evidence itself, largely pointed to the Argentinian gendarmerie as the perpetrator. Drawing from histories of state violence endured during la dictadura, this movement colored my entire semester in the country.
I learned quickly that studying abroad requires very intentional engagement with the host country’s politics. We must not avoid them, but we must not engage with them negligently either. As Argentina grapples between leftism and a resurgence in conservatism, studying abroad in Buenos Aires allows for a particular experience, one where students are able to experience Latin American politics in relatively direct ways. I learned to pay attention to flyers and to political propaganda, ask questions, and ultimately, think critically about global politics. That is what was most impactful about my time in Buenos Aires—the ability to think about political issues in ways that a classroom just cannot teach you.
