The boy was called Mosquito for how thin he was, hauling sacks of coal across the docks of a slum that smelled of tar and river rot. He had grown up in an orphanage, left school after third grade, and learned to draw with charcoal from his father's coalyard. His name was Benito Quinquela Martín, and decades later, in the 1950s, he would lead a band of friends up a forgotten lane with buckets of leftover ship paint and turn the corrugated-iron shacks of La Boca into the most photographed street in Argentina. The colors people travel across the world to see were once just whatever the dockworkers had left over.
La Boca means "the mouth" - probably of the Matanza, the dark river that bends past the barrio on its way to the harbor. This is where Buenos Aires touched the sea, and where the sea brought everyone else. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of immigrants poured into Argentina, and a great many came ashore here, in the southeast corner of the city near the old port. Many traced their origins to Liguria, the Italian coast around Genoa. They built homes from the materials at hand: sheet metal off the ships, timber, whatever the river economy discarded. The result was a neighborhood unlike any other, leaning and patched and loud, where Genoese dialect mingled with the Spanish of the docks.
La Boca has never been easy to govern. In 1882, after a long general strike, the barrio theatrically seceded from Argentina and ran up the flag of Genoa - a gesture so brazen that President Julio Argentino Roca came down to tear it from the pole with his own hands. The rebellious streak never really left. La Boca elected Argentina's first socialist congressman, Alfredo Palacios, and its corners filled with demonstrators during the economic collapse of 2001. The people here cultivated something they called garra - a fighting spirit, hard-working and unsentimental, suspicious of the wealthy families to the north. It was the temperament of a place that had been handed nothing and built everything itself.
Before tango wore tuxedos and filled European ballrooms, it was born in places like this - in the bars and tenement courtyards of the immigrant port, music made by people far from home. La Boca was one of the cradles. Today the dance comes back to the Caminito, the short pedestrian lane at the heart of the painted blocks, where couples perform among the stalls and the memory of the music sold as souvenirs. It is honest to say the tourist quarter is only a few blocks long, polished and assembled for visitors, and that the wider barrio remains poor, its residents living for over a century with a river so laced with arsenic and lead that public health authorities have warned of the danger. The color and the hardship share the same address.
Among football supporters, La Boca means one thing above all: Boca Juniors, one of Argentina's two great clubs, who play their home matches a few streets from the Caminito in the stadium everyone calls La Bombonera, the bonbon box. River Plate, the rival, actually began in La Boca too, before decamping in 1938 to wealthy Núñez in the north - and that move hardened a class divide that the two clubs still carry onto the pitch. To be of Boca is to claim the dockworker's side of the city. The murals around the stadium know it; they paint the people of the barrio in blue and gold, jerseys over the shoulders of men who once unloaded ships for a living.
La Boca sits at the southeastern edge of Buenos Aires at 34.636 degrees south, 58.365 degrees west, where the Riachuelo (lower Matanza) bends toward the harbor. From the air, look for the dark elbow of the river, the rust-red lattice of the old Puente Transbordador (the transporter bridge) spanning it, and the bowl of La Bombonera stadium just inland. Recommended viewing altitude 1,500 to 2,500 feet for the painted streets and riverfront. The nearest field is Aeroparque Jorge Newbery (ICAO SABE), about 8 nm north along the Río de la Plata coast; the international gateway is Ministro Pistarini / Ezeiza (ICAO SAEZ) roughly 17 nm southwest. Clear, calm mornings give the best light on the colored façades and the cleanest view of the river bends.