Photography by Samantha Demangate
Disembarking from the modern Belgrano C train station, you enter another world. Sights and sensations rarely associated with Buenos Aires surround you. As you step out of the station, a towering gate emblazoned with Chinese characters stretches above. The smell of grilled meat with sizzling soy-sauce and five-spice marinades caramelizing over open flames hits you like a ton of bricks. Loud street vendors shout various dialects of Chinese mixed with Porteño Spanish. Welcome to Buenos Aires’s unofficial Chinatown.
The Neighborhood on Foot
Every week, tens of thousands of people from the city and beyond crowd the streets in a small section of the city’s Belgrano neighborhood. Locals consider this small area the center of Argentina’s Chinese culture. Barrio Chino, as it’s known among locals, attracts thousands of foodies and fans of Asian culture and cuisine every week. On a hot Saturday afternoon, my girlfriend and I join them.
We walk past Plaza Barrancas Park and enter an entirely different city. I’m looking for Chinese grocers and places to satisfy my craving for beef noodle soup and savory dumplings. On the way, we grabbed a boba milk tea at Oh! Tea, one of the city’s best boba tea shops.
At the entrance of Arribeños Street, we come to the Main gate. It was built in 2009 with funding from the mainland Chinese government. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of the neighborhood’s Taiwanese business owners did not receive the gate with open arms.
We walk shoulder to shoulder along the narrow sidewalks. Businesses selling all types of Chinese decorative art, lingerie stores, and restaurants line the avenue. Tourists taking selfies by the gate slow the honking motorbikes.
A Foodies Paradise
Along the pedestrian-friendly Arribeños Street, we stop at La Parilla de la Barrera. Here, meaty skewers are grilled to perfection. In their window, an assortment of traditional sauteed Chinese specialties and braised ducks tempt passersby.
We eat our food and continue walking past more restaurants, food stands, and grills. People everywhere are carrying and eating food or slurping giant boba teas with bags of gifts and knick knacks. Belgrano’s Chinatown is a place where locals can feel like they’ve traveled overseas and many businesses cater to this feeling.
Like everywhere in Buenos Aires, you can find smoky BBQs known as parillas in almost every block. These parillas serve heaps of various marinated cuts with steamed dumplings, bao buns, and vegetable based spicy comfort foods.
Japanese restaurants have also become popular in the neighborhood. We pass several sushi restaurants and izakayas that are pleasant sanctuaries for fish lovers in a meat loving world. These restaurants have gained plenty of fan bases over the years.
We enter several Asian grocery stores selling everything from Japanese curry paste to dried squid. At ChungHwa supermarket we load up on hard-to-find goods for home: five-spice powder, tongue-numbing Sichuan peppercorns, and star anise. In the back, they have one of the best selections of fresh seafood in the city. Giant clams, sea bass, squid, everything is as fresh as can be and affordable.
A Brief History
Barrio Chino is technically a sub-neighborhood of the Belgrano neighborhood, on the northern side of the city. Belgrano owes its name to General Manuel Belgrano, who designed Argentina’s flag in 1812. The neighborhood was once a separate city from Buenos Aires until the city outgrew itself in the late 19th century. During this time, English railway workers built large homes and wide, tree-lined avenues.
In the 1980s, Taiwanese immigrants began establishing their businesses here, taking advantage of the steady clientele of train passengers disembarking from Belgrano train station. Within a decade, immigrants from mainland China also began opening their businesses within the neighborhood, followed by immigrants from Korea, Laos, and Japan. Today there are over 100 Asian owned businesses, including grocery stores, home goods stores, restaurants, and teahouses condensed within six blocks.
The community developed around several social institutions. On Montañeses Avenue, the Taiwanese monk Master Pu Hsien established one of Argentina’s first Buddhist temples, Tzong Kuan Temple, in 1988. The temple would become one of the largest meditation and cultural centers in the city.
Celebrations
On February 1, 2022, the neighborhood rang in the Chinese New Year, much as it does every year. The neighborhood’s cultural organizations like the Chinatown Association of Buenos Aires, along with the city’s Tourism Entity, are promoting the festival as a major cultural event. Tango shows, traditional dancing, fireworks, and the famous Dragon Dance down Arrebeños Street all become a festive and intricate display of the merging of cultures. On January 22, 2023, tens of thousands of people will crowd the streets again for the Chinese New Year celebrations.
Buenos Aires is a city that’s built on immigration and perhaps Chinatown is the newest neighborhood to reap the benefits of that identity. At one point, the neighborhood gathered hundreds of local business owners to support making it the newest official neighborhood of the city. However, the local government shot the push towards official recognition down. Their argument was that, unlike New York’s Chinatown, it functions as a commercial center and not a residential area. Most of the city’s Asian population lives in other neighborhoods and only come here for work.
It’s hard to say what the government will decide to do with the neighborhood’s status. What is clear is that it’s a special spot for locals and visitors to visit. It’s also an important community center that serves not only the Chinese and Taiwanese community of Buenos Aires but much of the city’s Asian community as a whole. As tensions continue to flare between China and Taiwan and nationalism rears its ugly head world-wide, places like Belgrano’s Chinatown will help to symbolize unity. And fortunately for us, this unity is best symbolized through food.
