“The european character of Buenos Aires has reached the status of myth. A touchstone in the conviction about this city’s exceptionality in the latin american context or a consign to repudiate its interest manifested by the country and the continent it “leaves behindâ€?, the european character of Buenos Aires had been preserved, until not long ago, in the principal representations of the city, as if it were a fact of reality whose urban, historic or cultural evidence doesn’t deserve to be questionatedâ€?.

At “European Buenos Aires?�, a chapter of Miradas sobre Buenos Aires. Historia cultural y crítica urbana, Adrian Gorelik brings up the always present topic of Buenos Aires european ways. His intention is to show how this representation carries long years of decadence, particularly facing the “northamericaneization� and “latinamericaneization� of the city in the las three decades. While the categories stated here deserved a more detailed analysis, my intention is to draw your attention to how the “unquestionable character� of Buenos Aires “european ways� is already being questionated in areas that go beyond academics. As Cecilia Palacios work already showed (spanish only), in the european tour guides the description of Buenos Aires has left the european way issue behind long ago.

More likely, the description of Buenos Aires is the description of identity construction failure. That is, the “europeanâ€? aspect that the city pretends to have is never entirely achieved, in the same way argentineans don’t get to construct themselves as “europeansâ€?. The latinamericaneization of the city, something the guides points out only at its negative side, is part of the fact that the Buenos Aires project hasn’t succeeded. This correspondence between “architectureâ€? and “identityâ€? is interesting. The decadence, for example, of the “europeanâ€? center of the city, such as the Avenida de Mayo, is analysed as the country’s economic decadence. As if it could only take a look at a few blocks of Buenos Aires to talk about the state and a project of Argentina.

Obviously, all of this can’t stop being a particular politic lecture: Argentina’s economic crisis being read from the decadence of its “european waysâ€?. As many travel guides put it, the eurocentric look becomes patent in this correspondence between “latinamericaneityâ€?, with its negative attributes, and the recurrent economic crisis. As if other details -the unequal commercial trade, the support of the main countries to coup d’etats in this part of the world, the looting of Latin American resources since the times of the conquest, the huge inefficiency of the argentinean political system, the lack of a local strategy for the development of education and production, etc.- were not some issues to be taken into consideration.