"I'm from the interior"

The following is an unfinished ramble inspired by Trump, being on the periphery and the unitarian vs federalists fallout. 

A great motor of Argentine history is the conflict between a (more or less) coastal, financial, cultural and political capital and the rest of the country, throughout which its main industry, agriculture, is dispersed.

It is through the dominance of Buenos Aires that the rest of the country received its moniker as "the interior". Of course, as a European trader making landfall at the port, all inquiry leads further upriver, further "inside" the country. Where did this fruit come from? Where did these unfamiliar people come from?

As a result of its geographic position of interlocutor in all commerce between the fields of production and the sea-bound, European purchasers, Buenos Aires achieved great prominence. It becomes a financial center, a point of high population density and subsequently a hotbed of art and culture. It is, for better or for worse, the face that Argentina must show to the world, like New York and LA are for my own country. 

The arrangement is not a pleasant one for the people who live "upriver". The diverse peoples populating the immense stretch of land in the 8th largest country in the world hate to the fact that the "Argentine" accent occasionally shown in Mexican soap operas is inevitably that of the port-city. They resent that many internationally known Argentine stereotypes of arrogance and crookedness are really stereotypes they themselves associate with Buenos Aires. They feel misrepresented, or at best, ignored by the group of people who take the products of their labor and sell it at port. It's incredible to see how often denizens of this city (myself included) will use "Argentina" and "Buenos Aires" interchangeably until reminded that the issue in question is actually only locally relevant. Truly, the egotism of the city's stereotype is not without merit.

I leave Buenos Aires only occasionally, but I know these things because a great part of the these port-dwellers are transplants. The joke is that everyone living in LA is actually from some nameless town in Idaho or Kansas, trying to "make it". It's much the same in Buenos Aires. In fact, it's usually with a certain begrudging acceptance that Argentines all over the country heed the city's siren call as they advance in their field, or enter in a more specialized one. As one man told me over mates in a recording studio "I wanted to be an audio engineer, but I lived in Chubut. What are you going to record in Chubut? The Patagonian sheep?” He had seen himself obliged to move to Buenos Aires and to become, to his horror, a porteño.

Looking back, I realize that I too was reluctant--more than reluctant, resentful--of the various Buenos Aireses of my country. As a person destined for work in art and culture,  (or at least, a recent college grad with no clear direction in life) it was often suggested to me that I go to New York and "figure it out." But I couldn't go to New York, you see, I was from Kansas. Their baseball team was a cancer that was ruining the sport. It's expensive far past the point of reason. Moving to New York was selling out in some way, admitting that where I was from was in fact tiny and irrelevant and insufficient. 

Though I moved to Buenos Aires, through christmas-time trips, I eventually came to know Chicago and fell in love with it. Chicago is no different than New York or Los Ángeles. It is "the city" for the thousands of miles of farmland that surround it. It is the hub for air transportation such to the point that ocean fish in Chicago (a geographical/culinary blasphemy for some) are probably a whole day fresher than they are in Kansas and other landlocked states. It is the place that all of your friends gravitate to if they were born within 500 miles of it, particularly if they are artists. It is also the city that wields too much influence in state politics, who houses financial mavens whose whims are life and death for working families around the country. But I love it all the same. I am an artist, there beat hearts that sustain my profession. Musical theatre, bars, symphony halls, parades, recording studios, all those magical things that happen when money and population get together. And furthermore, among the giant cities of the US, Chicago faces the same problems that people from Kansas do. It lives in the shadow of Los Ángeles and New York. They call it the Second City. For all its greatness, it is nestled inside the United States. You need a coastline (and a movie industry) to be truly

great, to let everyone know just how great you are, to grow your legend.

When I came to Buenos Aires, I didn't understand that I was setting up shop in their New York, but I learned. In the roulette of shoddy temporary lodgings that served as my homes, I shared my dinner table with Argentines that commiserated with all my difficulties of being new in the city. We could complain together about the unhappy look of commuter's faces, how the people who worked the newspaper stands would sometimes be rude to us when we asked for directions. The total inhumanity of transportation at rush hour, the press of bodies, the din of car horns. I looked at them with surprise. Why would you say all this about your city? This is not my city they would tell me. Then they would smile ruefully and tell me "soy del interior". Entrerrianos, cordobeses, jujeños, correntinos. Sworn enemies of Buenos Aires, but nestled in its bosom.

At first I thought that the interior-Buenos Aires contest was more personal. More like my childhood hatred for the Yankees. Traditional, light-hearted, silly. Then I learned a little of history and I saw that it was not. Buenos Aires is an autonomous zone inside Argentina. Seceding from the country (or vice versa) has been seriously proposed a number of times. The resentment runs deeper than that. As any good historian in Argentina will remind you, time, time and time again: the infrastructure of this country was developed to be extractive. Highways and railway lines do not form an egalitarian grid across the country. There is only a funnel, a carefully aimed fractal, all pointing to Buenos Aires. People from the interior point at the port when they spit and gnash their teeth, lamenting the destruction of indigenous wealth and culture at the hands of the exploitative Europeans, even though many of them sport Italian last names and white faces.

I learned a lot about how Argentines see themselves. In general, I find myself returning to the same conclusion over and over. Argentines seem to understand themselves better than we do. They aren't squeamish about staring themselves in the mirror and reflecting on the gritty bits. They are sort of refreshingly indelicate on a host of matters that in the United States we prefer to hide behind acronyms.  While at times they seem brutally sexist or racist to my American sensibilities, I think it is far healthier to be racist and aware of it than to hide it behind a learned facade of political correctness. Certainly, the parties are livelier.

I have most recently come to the conclusion that Argentines are ahead of us another aspect of understanding themselves. In Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Wisconsin and Minnesota, we tell ourselves a certain lie. Well, like a lot of things Americans tell ourselves, maybe it's not a lie so much as it something that is not yet true, but god dammit, my squinting my eyes and believing it, it will become true soon enough! We say that there is a life for you in Kansas City, in Lincoln or Milwaukee. Or maybe even in Hays, Kenosha, or Battle Creek. A life that is just as good as it is anywhere else in the country. The joke is on the New Yorkers, they make fun of us but really they have the tough lives, living on top of each other and fighting for fresh air at Central Park, really the good life is right in in Oconomewoc. Maybe in the olden days it would have been a drag, but now with the Internet and Amazon Prime and Netflix, truly there is no reason to go live in those overpacked sardine cans.

Argentines don't believe in that sort of nonsense. They know that if they don't pack their bags and move to Buenos Aires, they will be forever ten steps behind the people that do. They know that they are relegated to a second class in their own country. They will wait longer for goods and services that are already commonplace in the city, they will hardly ever see themselves reflected in their media, they won't make the connections that can crack open a new field for them. Many of them choose that life anyway, like many Americans have, but I think Argentines have been much more honest in their calculations. And so I think they are never disappointed.

Not so, in America. The truth is you do not have a life in Sheboygan. Some towns are feeling the squeeze more than others, but like Argentina, all the money, power and art is gravitating towards a big city on the coast. Which one depends on where you are exactly, (that's the one thing that sets us apart from the Argentines, they have but one Buenos Aires, we have several) but don't doubt that it's going. The striking images from video essays on YouTube may talk about the smallest and the poorest like MacDowell county West Virginia, but I think the time is coming for even the mid-level cities. It's clear they're already culturally irrelevant. I can't remember the last time I saw Kansas City on TV. Soon we'll wake up to the fact that everyone there would prefer to live somewhere else, if only they could. If only they didn't have children, if they could afford it. 

But, we lie to ourselves, we tell ourselves that 

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