Image credit: Andrés Toledo Margalef
It was hard to say goodbye to El Pacha. Tomorrow is the day, they would say, and then they’d say the same thing the next day, until half a month had passed. Finally, one day, they went into the patio and looked up at the unusual tree, its old roots amassed in concrete, and tore it to the ground. Anyone who wanted to could take a limb. Later, they returned to take chunks out from the wall in the library. On the final day—at least, what is remembered as the final day—they started throwing all of El Pacha’s innards out onto the street: decrepit couches, decorative broken TVs, pieces of wood, empty cases of beer, everything, out into the tiny alley that lies on the border between the neighborhoods of Villa Crespo and Almagro. They sat on the couches and, as in a cremation or medieval execution, lit the pile of debris on fire. They took out sausages and large cuts of meat from their bags and began to roast them over the licking flames. With the exception of that unusual feast, they spent the rest of the funereal night doing what they always had done: they drank, played guitar, and took turns reading their poetry aloud.
El Pacha was an important space in the Argentinian underground poetry scene until it closed roughly one year ago, in March 2018. It had operated illegally out of the second floor of a spindly residential apartment building; participants would be informed of weekend events through an email listserv, Facebook pages, or word of mouth. Though the space passed away, El Pacha still serves as an example of how writing is a community process and provides a window into how politics and economics mold the unique structure of Buenos Aires’ literary scene.
I first heard of El Pacha in early 2016 from Enzo Maqueira, an Argentinian novelist with whom I was working whilst interning at a publishing house in Buenos Aires. He circulated through the city’s underground circuit—more as traveler than participant he would later tell me—and forwarded me the unconventional event postings. My first call to visit the world of El Pacha landed in my inbox with distinct, multi-colored irreverence:
:::: TODAY ::::
there were Concoctions
—————————
Thursday 28 ::: 10 PM
Poet Canteen
NIGHT OF CONCOCTIONS
VOL VII
The message continued with a list of performers that promised “a space where music and poetry meet, where clowns and performers, poets and monologuers, musicians and circus performers, the famed and the apprentices all come together.” An “open mic night at low volume” would follow the acts, which were all acknowledged with quiet finger-snapping rather than applause, since anything louder would wake the neighbors.
And the email ended with the following message, which clearly established El Pacha’s agenda:
*******************************************************************
+IF YOU THINK THAT THE UNDERGROUND TURNED BOURGEOISIE
THAT THE TIME FOR GETTING BLASTED IS OVER
THAT THE ART OF PROVOCATION HAS FALLEN TO PIECES
THAT BEING A FREAK MEANS MORE THAN JUST PIERCINGS
THAT NO ONE WANTS TO TAKE ON
THE RISK OF FAILURE
and THAT THE MUTANTS SHOULD COME BACK
TO VOMIT UP THEIR DELIRIOUS INSANITY
NIGHT OF CONCOCTIONS
That night, I visited the unassuming old apartment. The landing opened out onto a patio with mural-coated walls and that huge tree, which somehow grew tall in the center of the concrete space. I walked inside and bought a glass of Malbec from a makeshift bar offering cheap beer, red wine, and Fernet, and took the last seat on a couch in the back corner of the room. Rows of mismatched furniture faced a stage, and the audience was already filled with lines of drunk and drugged out poets, artists, and musicians discussing absurdities and, occasionally, politics. The aesthetic ranged from hippie to rocker grunge; there were transvestites, feminists, communists, and often a combination of all three. Eventually, hours after the official starting time, all heads turned to enjoy (and quietly heckle) the intriguing mixture of performative poetry, music, comedy, and narrative that graced the makeshift stage. It was a space where anyone could perform anything, where anyone could consume anything, where the bathroom was not for the faint of heart, and where first-time visitors took care not to fall too deeply into the vortex of verse and smoke-soaked couch cushions, pushed to the margins out of fear that they might never return to their calm, sunlit apartments the next day.
Years later, when I heard that El Pacha had closed, I contacted Enzo Maqueira. The death of El Pacha gave me the urge to unwind the mystery of that strange building on the border of Villa Crespo and Almagro: I wanted to know who frequented that space, if other similar centers existed, and, more broadly, what the relationship was between the Buenos Aires underground and the more official publishing and cultural spheres with which I was already acquainted.
Enzo himself straddles these two worlds. He got his start as a writer frequenting the city’s cultural centers, visiting underground bars, and participating in writers’ workshops. His first novel to receive wide recognition, Electrónica, takes place in Argentina’s EDM scene; he even wrote a nonfiction article about Buenos Aires underground sex parties for VICE. Now that he has gained significant notoriety in Argentina, he is no longer embedded in underground circles, but still knows the contours of the porteño literary scene. And, lounging on the red leather couch in his living room, he was willing to share with me his interpretation of how it all works without shying away from the gritty details.
“I don’t feel like I’m part of the world of El Pacha. I feel more like a friend or a visitor,” Enzo said. He attended El Pacha’s events regularly but was not one of its key members. He describes it as one of the three key poles of the underground poetry scene in Buenos Aires. The other two are “ciclos de lectura”—groups that organize public readings of their work—and continue to function today. Rockelin, a cycle focused on rock music with a poetic twist, has less of a hippie approach than El Pacha and operates out of the bar El Emergente. The Maldita Ginebra (Cursed Gin) reading circle is a group formed by old, strung out poets. Members read in a cultural center known for whiskey, gin, and cocaine in the Once neighborhood of Buenos Aires.
“There isn’t anything other than underground poetry,” Enzo says. “That is, poetry is born and dies underground. There isn’t a strong center for verse in Buenos Aires.” Though poetry is also strong within the city’s LGBTQ community, the scene rarely reaches the more polished venues of bookstore readings. Prose, meanwhile, is more above-board than below. Aside from El Pacha, which included writers as well as poets, there are various more official and structured prose-focused circles in the city. The Grupo Alejandría has passed through different neighborhoods, moving from a bookstore in San Telmo to the Matienzo Cultural Club, one of the strongest arts spaces in the city. Then there is the Ciclo Carne Argentina, which at one point even acted as a publishing house. Facilitated by authors including Selva Almada, the cycle passed through the famous bar La Tribu, which is also a radio station and cultural center. Lastly, the group called Los Fantásticos, which operates in the tradition of author Washington Cucurto, passed through the La Libre bookstore in San Telmo and the Mendel bookstore in Palermo.
“Prose writers are domesticated poets, right?” Enzo laughs as he notes the differences with the poetry scene. “Narrative is more in bookstores, while poetry moves through bars.” But it is not the space that forms or determines the literary circle. Instead, a group of writers join together and someone suggests a space. “There are so many spaces because, generally speaking, the bookstore owner is also a writer, or an editor, or a writer and an editor, or a writer and an editor and a professor. Here, all of us in the literary world do everything,” he says. And it is out of these mutually inclusive communities of writers, publishers, bookstores and bars that the rich scene in Buenos Aires forms.
“We’re used to doing things that the government will not do, things that you can’t hire anyone to do because you don’t have money. You have to come up with it on your own. In that sense, everything that could be a problem in another country helps us organize everything ourselves.” Enzo himself used to read in a cycle called Outsider, which was at one point held in the Casa Brandon in Almagro. The owner of the space had a good relationship with the writers, and so the group ended up reading there. Bookstores need to find a way to bring in people to get business, so adopting a circle of writers is a good bet. And it generally pays off, since the city’s literary events are frequently full. Enzo insists that this is not so surprising in a neighborhood like Almagro, which he insists has the “most writers per square meter.” When he says this, it was unclear if he meant in Buenos Aires, Argentina, or the world.
The first time Enzo visited El Pacha was on a drunken night in 2008, accompanied by a slightly unhinged poet friend. He doesn’t remember anything. The first night he actually remembered El Pacha was three years later, in 2011, when his friend Gonzalo Unamuno, also a writer, said to him: “che, let’s go to El Pacha.” The cycle was getting really good—they had started doing poetry slam competitions—and lots of people in the literary world had started going. It was the kind of slam poetry which had already become popular in New York but that was still new in Buenos Aires.
“It wasn’t what I thought of as poetry,” Enzo explains. “Before, people read more classical verse. Everything used to start with ‘OH, dioses del oído.’ This was poetry of the 21st century, poetry that didn’t sound like poetry. It was also theater. For me, that was love at first sight. Right away I thought, this is incredible, and I understood the space.”
New voices as well as established figures would read their work. Enzo remembers how an editor from the publisher Milena Caserola sat on stage, picked up a newspaper, and read the headlines aloud. That was the entirety of his literary act. During that first slam, Enzo stood up to read his own work. He read an excerpt from his second novel (it was a poetry slam, but in true El Pacha spirit, people could read any genre), and partway through his reading two trans poets interrupted him, asserting that his writing was sexist, and that women would never act as they did in his book. Enzo remembers that night as a cathartic moment in the sexist period in his life. From then on, he never read his own work at El Pacha, but instead went to learn through observation. Enzo would gain as much from people-watching as from the literature read on stage. He recalls one night when two women on acid sat in the front row of couches, and he watched their reaction to the program rather than the show itself.
“Those were the things that made me want to go to El Pacha,” Enzo says. “That, and listening to the conversations. I don’t know if this happened to you, but sometimes you would pass by two drunk people saying things like, a vase has a soul that is different from that of the bottle. Or, I don’t know, cats are rock n’ roll while dogs are sunnier. What were these people saying? And on top of everything, you’d always be very drunk, very high, and you yourself couldn’t remember. But I would hear these things and think, I can’t believe I just heard that. The level of delirium that everyone handled. And I went just for that. Because whenever I was there, I always found something, some stimulus, a new band, a poet. It was a universe that I went to in order to absorb all of that beautiful, creative chaos.”
However, when El Pacha closed down, a series of unsettling realities about the space came to light. It was not the idyllic place that Enzo had imagined. He discovered that many members were Trotskyists with rigid political views that did not mesh well with anarchism and other leftist ideologies in El Pacha. Far worse, accusations of sexual harassment and abuse were common, and these instances of abuse seemed normalized.
“You’d think that there wasn’t sexism in El Pacha, that it was a free and conscious world,” Enzo says. In fact, the man who organized the poetry slams—a poet, actor, theater director, and playwright who weighed over 100 kilos—was one of those accused. According to editorial sources privy to the case but prone to exaggeration, he moved to California to grow marijuana after testimonies came to light. El Pacha closed down because of building code regulations, not because of a sexual harassment scandal. However, the silenced accusations finally came to light this past year, as Argentinian feminism strengthens and the country experiences its own #metoo movement. Literary communities function in tandem with, or react to, broader social and political realities. El Pacha was no exception.
The broader structure of the current literary scene in Buenos Aires can indeed be understood as the product of economic and political realities. In addition to reading cycles, writing workshops are crucial to prose writing in Argentina, and they too are a clear example of a cultural movement that began out of economic necessity. “Generally speaking, there are three or four old writers, very renowned, who can’t live from their literature,” Enzo says. “They don’t receive any support from the state and would probably drop dead from hunger in some cases, and so they find themselves obligated to teach classes in order to survive.” The four writers who made up the last group to run influential workshops were, according to Enzo, Alberto Laiseca, Abelardo Castillo, Liliana Heker, and Hebe Uhart (of the great four, only Liliana Heker is still alive). Each with their own perspective on literature, they trained groups of everyday people to write, forming new generations of authors.
Buenos Aires now has hundreds of their disciples, many of whom run their own workshops, also out of economic necessity. Their disciples’ disciples will soon start doing the same. Laiseca, Castillo, Heker, and Uhart’s praxis of writing multiplies through generations of writers like a giant literary family tree.
“We’re following in their footsteps,” Enzo says. “Until, at some point, something new will come along.”
Though the literary ecosystem of hidden cultural centers, bar and bookstore reading circles, and literary workshops comes from the unique combination of a strong literary culture and few options for formal employment in writing, it can only thrive when independent publishers exist and have the ability to work with young writers—and when the municipal and national governments are friendly to unofficial spaces. Now, with Argentina’s economic crisis and a government that pulls funding from culture and the arts, independent publishers are forced to publish fewer print books, which makes becoming a writer an even less stable line of work. And though the underground will never stop creating poetry, the city of Buenos Aires has closed countless cultural centers in recent years because of violations in building regulations. The current moment presents real challenges for writers, challenges that remind Enzo of the 1990s when independent publishers barely existed in Buenos Aires and the market focused mostly on imported books:
“Literature in the ‘90s was very closed off. There were so few spaces. You knocked on the door and they wouldn’t open, not for the writer and not for the editor. And then we realized that all of us were out here. We started to look at each other and play amongst ourselves,” Enzo explains. “Now, with Macri, things are reverting. The doors are closing.”
But it is no longer the 1990s. Even with a combative relationship to the state and fewer economic resources, Argentina now has possibilities for digital independent publishing and online literary communities. These are new territories for the literary world to occupy and new possibilities for exchange in underground literary scenes. As Enzo finished describing the physical Buenos Aires underground, he pointed me to El Pacha’s digital simulacrum, the Facebook group Vida y Viveza del Pacha. It is not the same as entering the strange, delirious old apartment in Almagro, but when a new visitor asks to join that page, they are welcomed by a message with a familiar tone:
who who who are you. Just kidding. I’m singing. This shit says I have to approve you to be in this group. And who am I to approve anyone: say Hi and come in. H<3gs, my pachense brother.
Clearly, the doors are still open.
Lara Norgaard is a recent graduate of Princeton University in Comparative Literature with a focus on Latin America. She teaches English and researches public memory in Brazilian literature as a 2017-2018 Fulbright Scholar in Brazil.
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