Cafe Culture in Buenos Aires

When you first walk around the many neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, one of the things that strikes you most is the shear amount of Cafes which line the streets. Although it is easy to dismiss the significance of these establishments and come to the conclusion that Porteños must just really like coffee, the reality of the situation is much more complex and significant than that. For Porteños, and Argentines in general, cafes seem to provide not only a place where one can go to grab some coffee and read the paper; but also a location and a venue for true public discourse and debate to take place. It is over coffee at the seemingly endless cafes which inhabit the city where people debate politics, sports, news or whatever other current events are relevant at the time. It enables people to remain engaged with society and the events currently being discussed in a way which would otherwise not be possible, or at least not as easy (or delicious).

            When searching for an equivalent venue in the United States, one does not come immediately to mind. Sure there is a coffee culture in the US, and it is growing more significant all the time in many metropolitan areas, but it seems to not serve the same purpose. The average coffee house in the US will most likely be primarily filled with people working alone. College students and young professionals typically go to coffee houses as an alternative to their respective office buildings or libraries. There will be some people who go together to discuss current events and politics or to just catch up, but they are generally more the exception than the norm. Although it is an important function that these coffee houses in the US are filling, it is fundamentally different than the cafés of Buenos Aires. Although there’s no way to say for sure, I believe that the strong café culture in Buenos Aires has contributed in some way to the seemingly high level of political awareness and involvement that Argentina appears to have in comparison to the US.

            I believe that one of the primary reasons that the café culture is so strong in Argentina, and Buenos Aires in particular is the fact that there is such a strong history of European influence. For several decades at the end of the 19^th century and beginning of the 20^th century, there was a massive wave of immigration from Europe to the southern cone of South America, and Argentina in particular. Within the span of a few decades, pockets of immigrants from many western European countries began to emerge around Buenos Aires. Many of these immigrant groups brought parts of their native cultures with them; café culture being one of those things. Cafés began popping up around the city and they provided a place where Europeans could be reminded of home, even though they were thousands of miles away.

            Another factor which I feel had a significant impact on the expansion of café culture in Buenos Aires and the fact that cafés turned into locations for political discourse to take place is the fact that Argentina has had such a varied (and often turbulent) political history. In more “stable” countries such as the United States, there seems to be less passionate public discourse over politics because people haven’t had to live through different governments and the suspensions of certain freedoms like much of the population, especially the older population, in Argentina has. This firsthand experience with governmental turbulence has given Argentines an appreciation for democracy and self-expression that is not seen in many other countries, and the cafés provide the ideal space for this free exchange of ideas to take place.