It's breathtaking. I think it's far too beautiful to have had such a monstrous Mayor as Mauricio Macri! He's certainly not good enough for a city like that, in my total view.

Unbelievable architecture, and the trendy places look fascinating. It certainly has its own vibe, its singular personality.

Truly loved the video you added, peppertree. Thank you!

On edit:

We met a journalist around 2000, on the CNN message board, around the time of Elian Gonzalez, who washed ashore in Miami from Cuba. This man, whose screen name was Charles Mirabal, I found out years later, had been a writer for the United Press International, (before it was purchased by the wealthy conservative Sun Myung Moon, friend of the late George H W Bush) and he had mentioned once around 2000 in a conversation with an Argentine Italian woman that Argentinian people seemed a lot more like Europeans than South Americans, and that they saw themselves as being more European. That really stuck with me all these years. They had been discussing Argentine soccer moments before.

The architecture, and city life most surely seem European. I think on your posted video the narrator seemed to cover it all in saying there was a ton of immigration early in the current culture.

Citizens of the city have every reason to be very proud to live there. It's beautiful!

Thanks, again.

Argentina has never asked about ethnicity in its censuses - except, since 2010, when it comes to Afro-Argentines and the Indigenous (together they made up 3% of the total).

But that excludes mestizos (people with at least 1/3 Indigenous blood) - so all estimates as to the % of white Argentines have always been just that: estimates. It's certainly never been "97%" - that's for sure.

I remember Encyclopedia Britannica estimating it at 85% in the '80s - and that was probably about right, at the time.

Most every Argentine you met was Italian, Spanish, and often both - plus a scattering of other European and Middle-Eastern backgrounds, and often, an Indigenous forbear or two.

But since then, there've been perhaps two million+ immigrants from Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru - plus, since 2015, Venezuela. And these tend to be mestizo.

Add to that a sizable East Asian immigration and others, and you could easily see in the crowds these days, if you were to visit, that Argentina's more diverse than it was 30-40 years ago - and certainly not 97% white.

And nowhere is this more evident than in Buenos Aires - whose suburbs already included millions of migrants from the poorer, mestizo-majority provinces in the north.

Indeed - and contrary to what right-wing Argentines might tell you - if you look at Buenos Aires footage from the "halcyon" dictatorship days, there was already a sizable mestizo minority. The crowds were whiter - but not that much.

1981:

2022:



Like the '50s in the U.S., there's been a concerted effort in Argentine right-wing media to mythologize the Videla years (doubly absurd since Ike was a statesman, and Videla was a fascist thug who derailed the economy - polite though he was).

Thanks again for your thoughts, Judi. Always rewarding and worth getting into. Have a great Sunday, and All the Best.