The Slaughterhouse Fair, an indirect translation

The Feria de Mataderos happens weekly every Sunday in the Mataderos barrio in BA. The district was once called Nueva Chicago and used to be the place where cattle met their deaths, and were subsequently salted or made into wallets and shipped all around the world.

Things have changed.
Mataderos is no longer the center of mass bovine death and is now, more or less, a quiet suburb of BA and home to the Feria where people sell choripan (sausage sandwiches) out of their windows and folklorico dancers
and musicians take the stage.
A little hokey, but it was fun. Above, in the Hat, next to a stall of foam puppets, absorbing the native culture by process of passive diffusion.

Here I am messing with an alpaca, in the infamous and illustrious Hat. I told it a dirty joke about llamas, but alpacas apparently can't take a joke as well as their other camelid brethren. (The "La llama que llama" commercials are hilarious.)

I bought my first maté cup here, but I took forever choosing one at the stand. The man engraving the cups just laughed at my indecisiveness as I picked up, put down, and picked up, again, every single maté on the table. Porteños are really big on Ferias (fairs), and there are quite a few every weekend. It's a place for the artisan market to show its wares and take money from tourists, and a destination for live music while sipping maté with friends on the grass in the park.

What made Mataderos different was the presence of horses and a more folksy vibe. There were a couple good fusion folklorico/rock bands as well as traditional music and dances with panuelos (scarves) celebrating what is becoming a more and more tenuous link with the rural guacho past.

I had thought it was going to be like a county-fair, with things like barrel racing and breed shows. I was very wrong. For the horse riding competitions, the horses definitely raced on an asphalt street. It was a Carrera of skill, and a rider would gallop toward a very tiny ring hung from a bar several hundred yards away and attempt to snatch the ring at full speed. Hopefully the video I shot of it below works!



---Nicole
P.S. A thank you to my friends who took pictures of me in the Hat!