AustLit

'Late on a Monday afternoon in April, I cross Buenos Aires to hear J.M Coetzee give a speech. The journey takes two and a half hours. I leave the cobbled streets, antique stores, and tourist crowds of colonial San Telmo, ride the subway to Retiro Station, and catch a commuter train on the Mitre Line that takes me about 25 kilometres north-west of the centre. As we leave the downtown area, broad boulevards and grand public buildings make way for factories, freeways, and drab apartment blocks. I disembark at Miguelete, the second last station, outside the city limits on the edge of the conurbano, the ring of industrial and working-class neighbourhoods surrounding the federal capital. Imagine a version of Western Sydney with upward of ten million residents. Densely populated, growing fast, and vital to winning government nationally, Greater Buenos Aires is hugely important to the country economically and culturally. But because nearly 40 per cent of the population lives in poverty (on the latest figures from the national statistics institute), and because it has been the heartland of Peronism, the populist workers’ movement that has dominated Argentine politics since the 1940s, the conurbano is often represented as a menace in the mainstream Argentine media. When I ask a group of students for directions to the university campus, they lead me through a suburb of low-set cement buildings, pot-holed streets, and rubble. We cut through an old railway yard where carriages lie rusting in long grass, and squeeze through a gap in the chain-link fence.' (Introduction)