Luis

As far as intensive language classes go, my courses here in Buenos Aires were pretty standard. We met for three hours a day, five days a week, learned the minutiae of the subjunctive, and had the occasional excursion. It was exactly what I needed. I got placed into a level four (out of six), which was awesome, giving me the chance to advance quicker. The class was made up predominantly of Americans, with some Europeans and Chinese thrown into the mix. And although I broke some new ground with my Spanish, the most memorable part of the experience by far was a guy named Luis.

Luis, whose real name we never learned, was from Hong Kong. Like many Chinese students at the school, Luis assumed a western name to help others refer to things he’d say during conversations. The only problem was that Luis never spoke. When called upon by the teacher, he would just smile and shake his head—every time, no variation, the same exact way. As English speakers, we have a tremendous advantage over those from China when learning Spanish, I know this, but Luis didn’t even pretend to try. When we formed groups, it was a hazardous roll of the dice for those who cared: whoever got stuck with him was busy talking to a statue for ten minutes. Nobody wanted to work with him.

But this isn’t why Luis is blog-worthy.

As the course started to come to a close, we learned that an oral exam was required for the successful completion of level four. It was to last ten minutes and would take the form of a speech concerning a ‘social problem’ of our choosing. This meant that after a month of malingering, Luis—if he even came to the test—would have to speak in Spanish, uninterrupted, for ten minutes. It had all the mounting tension you’d come to expect from some 80’s movie, where a marginalized, misunderstood character rises above all odds in the end to flummox all the nay-sayers (read: Bill and Ted; Daniel-san; Willow; innumerable others.) I wanted this to happen. I wanted the class to burst into applause, tinker tape everywhere, metal ballads abound. I wanted to like Luis.

His chosen topic was how homosexuality is a social disease and that its sufferers should perish. We were flabbergasted. He had been writing this speech while others we giving theirs, frantically flipping through his dictionary for the right words. When it came time for him to go, there was a hush of curiosity. Some of us never heard him speak before. When he began, we weren’t entirely sure what he was saying because he mumbled. So we shut off the air-conditioner and readied ourselves, our heads down, concentrating. We heard the peppering of opinion here and there, but it was still unclear what he was really talking about. Like his namesake, Luis was still an encrypted discourse for us.

But then little by little we found the signposts, polysyllabic billboards like homosexualidad and enfermidad, and one by one our heads began to bob up in shock. Javier, our teacher, interrupted Luis for fear his speech was being grossly misunderstood, but Luis confirmed it wasn’t. Here was a guy who didn’t utter more than a few words the whole month, and now this. Luis wasn’t winning anyone over.

The Americans gave him the hardest time, leafing through their pocket-sized dictionaries, just as he did, but now with added purpose. Someone, without a dictionary, chimed in. Do you know anybody who is gay? What if I were gay? Would you think I’m sick? Luis responded with the same robotic arguments, reading them from his notes. Four weeks of learning the subjunctive prepared us for this moment. You could say that, grammatically, it was a subjunctive bloodbath: we were inundating Luis with our opinions, our derisive judgments—everything our level four Spanish had to offer. If his speech weren’t for real, it would have been the perfect test. (And if it had been a hoax, and Luis—a fluent speaker of Spanish—was in cahoots with the language school, then that’s quite a pedagogical approach.) It provoked us to use all the linguistic tools at our disposal, to make ourselves clear, to expose and challenge such intolerance. But Luis was unmoved, if not confused by our protest. And in the end there was no enlightenment—just a heavy, humid silence. So after some diplomatic remarks from Javier, it was over, and the class ended.

But now for the most awkward part: It being the last day and all, we parted ways with Javier the Argentine way: with a kiss on the cheek. For those of you who don’t know, in Argentina it’s universally accepted and customary for men to kiss other men when saying goodbye. So we were all lined up, kissing Javier, thanking him, wishing him the best, and then, at the end of the line, came Luis. Not knowing what to do, Javier forwent the beso with a nervous chuckle, and shook Luis’ hand instead. Pretending not to watch, I think we were all hoping for that kiss.

Simulacra and salvation

Besides my lifelong hobby of motion sickness, I have many reasons for not attending theme parks—long lines, expensive food, pushy people, etc. But this all changed last week. In Buenos Aires, Ladies and Gentleman, I found hope.

Tierra Santa, or Holy Land, is a Judeo-Christian theme park set in the image of ancient Jerusalem. The park has no rides and hardly any lines. It hasn’t height requirements or ominous warnings for epileptics. Instead, its main attraction is a forty-foot animatronic Jesus that resurrects, every hour, to a crowd of emotional Argentines.

And this was all I needed to know.

Visually, the park is one part Disney’s Aladdin, one part Gladiator—with a cartoonish display of fake palm trees, diminutive minarets, and faux-limestone colonnades. But don’t let that fool you: Tierra Santa is taken quite seriously by its guests, many of whom are nuns and priests and other god-fearing gentry. Visitors of the park can witness some of the Bible’s greatest moments in little over an hour; milestones such as The Last Supper—housed in an intimate, chapel-like setting—and The Birth of Christ, which takes place in the iconic manger, alongside sedate cows and fly-by cherubs. The main event, however, is the Godzilla-sized Christ rising from the calvary mound. With Halleluiah blasting from the PA system, the rotating Savior greets Jerusalem and its guests like any proper emcee. Many are visibly stirred by this. They cry; they sing; they shower Him in bursts of digital flash like some ecumenical paparazzi. Others, such as myself, are quietly incredulous, wondering if this is for real.

And it is. Everywhere you turn there are life-sized effigies of Jesus, The Virgin Mary, Pontius Pilot, and dozens of nameless Roman soldiers—all staging important and surprisingly photogenic chapters from the Good Book. There is also a Wailing Wall, with its cracks and crevices packed tight with written prayers, and a laser show detailing the Pink-Floydish workings of creation. Although Islam is understandably absent, as its laws strictly forbid these forms of representationalism, the park does allow for other players in the piety market such as Gandhi and Martin Luther, who have their own corners in J-town. It seems that the park has something for everyone—even those who just want to chow down on some baklava and catch a quick belly dancing show (we did both). In a way, Tierra Santa is the praying-man’s equivalent to one-stop shopping, an all-you-can-believe buffet of religious iconography—and it will only cost you about five US dollars.

But the park is more than just the sum of its parts. Tierra Santa is officially holy. Having received endorsement from the Roman Catholic Church, the theme park is not only promoting fun, but also promulgating faith. In its quest for verisimilitude, Tierra Santa has its employees dress in Middle Eastern-like attire: Palestinian headscarves, genie pants, rustic sandals, and the occasional sword. This makes for a strangely immersive experience—you feel as if you are navigating the collective imaginary of Christianity, with a little Indiana Jones mixed in for adventure.

But clearly, historical accuracy isn’t one of the park’s virtues—and I’d venture to say that Tierra Santa isn’t all that popular amongst biblical archeologists. The park’s secular neighbors are an airport, a water park, and a driving range. Planes come tearing through the sky at apocalyptic decibels, seconds away from landing;[1] splashing and screaming can be heard from the pools just beyond the creation cave; and large, golf ball-catching nets line Jerusalem’s eastern border. After a short hike up Golgotha, the centerpiece of the park, you’re treated to a panorama of ancient Jerusalem and these anachronistic hinterlands. It makes you think this gravel-strewn city[2] is under siege by the encroachment of time, and that you stand on one of its last dogmatic strongholds. And although Noah’s ark is sadly missing from the park’s exhibitions, at that height, overlooking the churning madness of Buenos Aires, you begin to feel that Tierra Santa is the ark itself, adrift in some other world, bent on its own preservation.

While it didn’t make me more or less a believer, Tierra Santa did give me a lot to think about—and just in time for the holiday season! I’ve never seen any quite like it and don’t think I will ever again. That said, whether its miniature golf or God, we all have our fixes, right? Some just prefer it with a little extra kitsch on top.

[1] While writing this I realized that theoretically, with the right seat and timing, it’s possible to be greeted by a towering Jesus when landing in Buenos Aires. Now that’s just amazing.
[2] This may or may not be the park’s most high-concept exhibit, challenging at every step the would-be, blog-writing heckler—the heckler who is without sin, who is without his own quixotic flaws—to cast the first stone at Tierra Santa.

In search of the authentic

However broadly you define it, traveling is a consumerist activity. It takes things like time and money to make happen, and sadly, the more you travel this world—especially where your currency is disproportionately strong—the more aware you are of people who cannot. These are people who for one reason or another are too busy making ends meet than to labor over the existential reimbursements of travel. And yet for those willing and able, the question of travel isn’t why, but how: How are we to spend our time and money in way that is meaningful? What makes for a meaningful travel experience and what does not?

While combing the internet for ideas on where to stay in Buenos Aires, I came across this in a travel forum. I paraphrase: I’m moving to Buenos Aires next month and looking for a place to live. Which neighborhood will offer me the more authentic porteño experience: Palermo (Borges’ old haunt) or San Telmo (the edgier, more bohemian cousin)? As it were, both are extremely popular neighborhoods for travelers and expats in Buenos Aires, offering much in the way of local attractions and culture—and both happened to be the neighborhoods Dacia and I were most interested in. Suffice it to say, one of those internet debates followed, with forum-goers championing their neighborhood as the finer, more 'accurate' reflection of porteño life. (Mind you all these commentators were, at least as far as could tell, not originally from Buenos Aires.) Despite the questionable assumptions made—which we’ll return to—what interested me was the sheer regularity of these questions on the internet and their demands for authenticity. What does it mean to have an authentic experience abroad? Is this, strictly speaking, even possible?

On the one hand it’s completely understandable. We all want something unique from our travels, and most of us would prefer, when we can, to avoid the peristaltic squeeze of tourist traps. Perhaps for this reason we begin to associate the genuine with the untailored, the meaningful with the unmediated. But on the other hand, it’s rather spurious to say that a place is more or less authentic when it is irreducibly itself. Both Palermo and San Telmo, despite their demographic differences, are equally parts of Buenos Aires and its bewildering, smothering plurality. For Palermo’s detractors, it was the barrio’s vanity—its upscale high-rises, its poodle dogs and Pilates studios—that became the mark of its cultural artifice, its waning porteño-tude.[1] San Telmo, however, was preferred by many—the majority in fact—because of its honesty. Its buildings were preserved in beautiful states of ruin, the parlor of history raw and crumbling. Its cobblestoned streets, not yet gentrified, not yet poodle-worthy, were full of artists and local merchants. Like its deteriorating facades, San Telmo seemed to expose a deeper truth that Palermo only covered up and made shiny, more expensive. Whether or not these are accurate characterizations is really a matter of perspective and preference, but what remained uncontested by forum-goers was if our presence as foreigners precluded the very possibility of a place being ‘authentic.’

Consider the ever popular Sunday fair in San Telmo, which is a great place to take inventory of all the tourists in Buenos Aires. Supposedly, in addition to its local artisan handicrafts (which are sometimes mass-produced and available everywhere down here), it’s a great place to catch authentic, porteño tango. It would seem that all of Buenos Aires is a musical just waiting to happen when you’re there, as local musicians and dancers are seemingly everywhere, ready to ambush you with their authenticity. But it’s like that tree falling in the forest phenomenon: would these musicians and dancers still be there if we weren’t?—meaning if San Telmo wasn’t such a heavy draw for travelers? It has all the trappings of a riddle, or a joke: How much Gore-Tex and hand sanitizer does it take until the chemistry of a place is forever changed?

If we speak of an authentic travel experience, we must already have some idea of what it is—and it’s this kind of essentialism, like that of art, that challenges us to give it form. It could be traversing Patagonia on foot or simply connecting with people from different cultural backgrounds. Regardless, the shape our experience takes depends largely on the way we choose to understand that experience: i.e., as immersive, as humanitarian, as adventurous, as personal, etc. And yet there is something about traveling that’s always approximating the idea of itself—an arresting image, an impression that at the time we don’t entirely understand, but it sends us gallivanting across the globe in search of it. In this regard, maybe all those gap-year backpackers have it only half right: it’s not that if you travel long enough you’ll find yourself, but rather, travel long enough and you’ll find out why you’re traveling.

[1] Speciously enough, a similar attack could have been launched against the people of Buenos Aires themselves for not being completely authentic, as a good amount—men and women alike—receive some form of plastic surgery during their lifetimes. But nobody risked such a polemic.