it’s more intriguing to get into it
though it’d be easy to breakfast on medialunas and cafe con leche every morning, blithely oblivious.
Love notes from Siel is a newsletter about love, writing, and the nomad life from me, Siel.
Dear friend —
A hundred years ago, Buenos Aires was a rich city! European immigrants poured in in search of economic opportunities, land incentives, and social freedoms — Argentina’s government being more stable at that time than many countries in Europe.
Forty-five years ago, Buenos Aires was under a military dictatorship! People were tortured and killed with impunity for minor offenses — like helping the poor, an act considered subversive and communist. Tens of thousands people were murdered by the government in the 70s and 80s.
Last week, Buenos Aires elected a new president! Far-right libertarian Javier Milei won the election, despite his lack of political experience, love of conspiracy theories, and proposal to ban abortion. Will the Argentinian peso soon be replaced by the U.S. dollar?
I've heard Buenos Aires has transformed a lot in recent years, but if you walk around, you see all this history intermingling together. The luxurious marble buildings from the 19th century, the remembrance plaques for desaparecidos embedded into city sidewalks, the AI-generated posters promoting Milei or Massa.
It’s rather hard to believe such a beautiful city has gone through so much. It’d be very easy, in fact, to breakfast on medialunas and cafe con leche in sunny Palermo cafes every morning, blithely oblivious.
But it’s more intriguing to get into it — to read and ask and learn about what’s happened and is happening — to delve into the essence of the place.
To that end, a few book recommendations:
Hades, Argentina by Daniel Loedel (Riverhead, 2022)
Boy meets girl, girl joins insurgency fighting against military dictatorship, boy ends up becoming a double agent of sorts, officially working in a government-run torture shop but unofficially serving as a spy for the insurgency. That’s the gripping story Daniel tells in this dark and dreamy novel, though the skeleton of this tale is based on the true history of Argentina. During the Dirty War waged in the 70s and 80s by Argentina’s military dictatorship, political dissidents were routinely tortured and killed. One of these victims was Daniel’s own half-sister.
This book is as beautiful as it is painful. It takes you on nostalgic tours through the prettiest parts of Buenos Aires and also puts you in the dirt and grit of torture centers disguised as auto shops. It shows the courage of people willing to fight for justice and the cruelty people are capable of inflicting on each other. By the way, Automotores Orletti, the real life detention center on which the novel is based, today serves as a memorial and human rights center and is open to the public.
Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains by Alexa Hagerty (Crown, 2023)
I picked up this book at random, almost put it down because the subject felt so dark and violent, but couldn’t stop reading because the stories are intensely compelling. The book details Alexa’s training as a forensic archaeologist, working in Guatemala and Argentina to locate, exhume, record, and return to families the bones of people who were tortured, murdered, and buried in unmarked graves — all in relatively recent history! — by authoritarian regimes in those countries.
This is a detailed and heartfelt book that shares not only Alexa’s personal story but that of the other forensic scientists driven to do this work despite political risks, the families of the dead who seek closure and justice, and the individual victims themselves who often died brutal, sudden deaths. I learned so much — about the complex histories of Guatemala and Argentina, about the stories bones can tell, about human violence, resilience, ritual, and memory.
Animalia by Sylvia Molloy (Eterna Cadencia, 2022)
If you’re an animal lover who happens to be trying to learn Spanish, I recommend this book. Why? Most chapters are just a page or few long, and the book as a whole is short. You can read one tiny chapter a night and have read a book in Spanish by the end of the month, which is basically what I managed to do.
This collection of life snapshots is written by Sylvia, who grew up with animals — puppies, ducks — in Argentina, then later in New York, kept a lot of pets — mostly cats. Pick it up and over the course of the book you’ll pick up a lot of Spanish vocabulary related to animals. Do you know what a pato is? A zorro? Read and learn.
Three links you might love:
People still get disappeared by the government. One example: China: “Some of the disappeared eventually go on trial in courts that have a ninety-nine-per-cent conviction rate; others are held indefinitely under murky rules known as ‘double restrictions.’ The disappeared hail from every corner of life.”
Expect bias in AI image generators. “‘A Mexican person’ is usually a man in a sombrero…. ‘An Indian person’ is almost always an old man with a beard.”
Will deepfakes change what we believe to be true? Some argue no. “The manipulations we’ve faced so far haven’t been deceptive so much as expressive. Fact-checking them does not help, because the problem with fakes isn’t the truth they hide. It’s the truth they reveal.”
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