This past weekend
on Saturday I went to the Casa Rosada- the pink house, the Argentinian version
of the White house. When I got off of the subway I found a parade going on. I
could see the Casa Rosada at my right and the parade at my left. What should I
do? I looked back and forth- the Casa Rosada did look kinda cool and there was
a nice Plaza (Plaza Mayor) in front of it. But the music and the noise of the
parade was calling me. I could come back to the Casa Rosada any time; the
parade would only be here once.
(a band performs in the plaza in front of the Casa Rosada)
The first thing I noticed about the parade was that there was a lot of brown people there- both in the parade and watching it. My experience in Buenos Aires so far has been very whitewashed. The people here don’t look like what we would in general (heavy emphasize on in general) expect Latinos to look like. (And yes, I know there’s a whole different conversation about race & ethnicity to be had here, I’m just keeping it uber simple). So after a week of almost only seeing white people- and being able to count the number of brownish people I’ve seen on two hands- I was amazed to suddenly be surrounded by lots and lots of brown people. In this parade it was the ‘white’ people who stood out by leaps and bounds.
