Concept in Definition ABC

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a large number of immigrants arrived in Argentina, mainly Italians and Spanish, but also Poles, Syrians or Lebanese. Many of them settled in Buenos Aires and to a lesser extent in Montevideo and other cities. When the emigrants arrived in Buenos Aires on government The Argentinean provided them with temporary accommodation for a week and, after this initial stage, each immigrant had to look for some type of home. For this, very humble houses were built and in which the dining rooms and bathrooms were communal.

At first they were called tenant houses, since their inhabitants had to pay rent. With the passage of time the popular ingenuity coined a new denomination to refer to these houses and they were called conventillos.

The term conventillo made a lot of sense, since the houses resembled the structure of a convent, that is, a set of cells structured in galleries and a central patio.

Daily life in a tenement

In these houses lived single men and families of workers who came from different countries. They did not have running water or electricity and with some frequency there were episodes of cholera and other infectious diseases. Sometimes, some emigrants could not pay their rent and the police had to evict them and when this happened the inhabitants of the tenement resisted with a certain amount of resistance. violence.

The conventillos were a kind of tower of Babel for the lower classes. Different languages ​​were heard in them and there was a tense coexistence between the different traditions and cultural traditions.

Despite the terrible living conditions, there was an atmosphere of solidarity among its settlers. It must be taken into account that the socialist and anarchist ideals of Europe reached the conventillos and there the first workers' associations in Argentina were born.

The tango, the lunfardo and the sainete were born in the conventillos of Buenos Aires

In the conventillos a very fruitful popular culture was created. In fact, there arose the tango, the lunfardo or the sainete. In principle, the representatives of the official Argentine culture expressed their rejection of all of them, but over time the people of Buenos Aires were incorporating them as a symbol of their identity cultural.

In this sense, it is worth remembering that in the history of theater In Argentina, the most represented work is precisely "El Conventillo de la Paloma", written by Alberto Vaccareza, a playwright born in the Almagro neighborhood of the city of Buenos Aires and who was intimate friend and collaborator of Carlos Gardel, the father of Argentine tango.

Photo: Fotolia - carlosgardel