Thursday, April 17, 2008

murga porteña

We met Gabriel yesterday at the Plaza de Mayo protests against the closing of cultural centers in the city by the right-wing city government. He is the coordinator for the the Murga Los Descarrilados de Parque Avellaneda. A murga is a musical street theater group centered around the Rio Plata primarily in Buenos Aires and Montevideo but in surrounding regions as well. Different neighborhoods have different murgas and they perform not only at carnival time but throughout the year. This murga is more of a socialist murga. They perform, for example, for a shoe company party and receive shoes instead of money. They hold fundraisers but never charge anything and are connected to the politics of their increasingly Bolivian populated neighborhood. So they also organize around labor issues like the issue of clandestine factories that produce cheap clothing on Bolivian slave labor.

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