Argentina - Buenos Aires, National Museum
Notes:
This country tour I deferred to L's preferences re visiting a foreign country:
socializing, eating/drinking well, seek out entertainment that promises to make
you laugh...etc. No museums, no road trips through the countryside, no grand
cathedrals, no opera.
In Argentina it was fairly easy to comply with her desires since
she had friends/relations in all the major cities, restaurants to beat all,
very few museums or cathedrals, and next to no remnants of ancient
civilizations (ala Peru, Mexico, Guatemala). But I did manage to escape for a
few hours to the grandly named National Museum of Argentina. What a
disappointment.
The collection of artifacts...such as San Martin's quarters in
France after abandoning the Americas as hopeless... and largish paintings on
display do their best to recount Argentine history from its founding by the
Spanish conquistador, Pedro de Medoza, through its wars of independence and,
later, the European expansion into, and extermination of, indigenous peoples.
But the displays are few and the explanatory postings to be found here and
there rather sketchy.
(The Museum of the CITY of Barcelona I had visited some weeks
earlier is far more impressive on all counts...but then, again, the Catalans
are passionate about celebrating who they are any way they can).
This is a country of 45 million people who have come here from
all over Europe (the majority from Spain and Italy in the last hundred years or
so) and all we have on display are the petty squabbles of privileged land-
owners with their cousins back in the Peninsula... who were, at that time,
themselves bedeviled by Napoleon and his invading hordes. This landed gentry,
amounted to only few thousand and could claim dominion over less than a quarter
of what Argentina is today.
Among tem was a young Spanish immigrant who sided with the
Criollos against the Peninsulares: my great- grand- something-father (five
generations back) General Juan Pardo de Zela. He followed San Martin into Peru
and eventually settled there...and, to be clear, from whom I have inherited
absolutely nothing.
After the independence war dust had settled, some decades later, the privileged
few ended up with even more land than before...now extending all the way down
to the end point of South America, having extinguished any native populations
along the way. Roughly, Argentina went South like the Americans went West,
contemporaneously following the same time-lines and mistreatment of the native
folk.
Note: to understand modern Argentina you could begin by studying
its land-use management of newly conquered territory then comparing it with
policies in the US... or even Australia and New Zealand... at about the same
time.
There is so much more to Argentina, and certainly since the
massive European migrations beginning in the late nineteenth century, which is
very well documented in books authored by Argentinian and foreign scholars...
but you wouldn't know that visiting this museum.
BTW, half of the
National Museum space is dedicated to the history/development of
"futbol" from the time it was a pastime indulged in by English
sailors in the early 1900's...that the locals then decided to emulate... to
Argentina eventually winning three..count them..THREE world championships. All
hail the god, Maradona; all hail the god, Messi.
April 26, 2023
