Journalist Gustavo Barco Just posted Dog house (Cía. Naviera Ilimitada), a storybook in which neighborhood, family beliefs and childhood memories are intertwined in stories containing doses of historical and magical realism, to achieve stories with an emotionally challenging nature.
“It was a decision to give voice to Gusty,” he says of the narrator who runs through the stories. “I’m there, but I’m like a child making up stories. I wanted to stay away from the limelight, because a lot of the things that are there I saw, witnessed or reconstructed in conversations with friends, between beers, barbecues or football matches.”
Barco was born in City 12, in Villa Soldate – today the neighborhood of San Martín or Charroa – where he grew up, formed his family and raised his two children. “It was out of necessity, but also out of belonging. When I returned from the United States, where I went to study and work, I lived in my mother’s house for three years until I moved in with my wife Rosita, who was pregnant. We built on top of her mother’s house, and only six years ago we rented something abroad.”
The book inhabits everyday scenes of a community made up mostly of migrant workers, characterized by instability, but also solidarity and hope. “My political decision, if I made it unconsciously, was to put a face to these individual stories,” he says. “To show that the literature that comes out of the neighborhoods is not just about violence or drug trafficking. Yes, that exists, but 90 or 95 percent of the people who live there are workers.”
That look, which mixes tenderness and roughness, comes from his dual training: the training of a journalist who learned to observe, and the training of a neighbor who knows the pulse of the city’s corridors.
Barco began her career in journalism thanks to her profession and courage. He received an honorable mention at the LA NACION Awards for the story of HIV patients admitted to Borda Hospital. “That male changed everything,” he recalls. “I was a student at the Círculo deperiodistas and I was working with the aim of getting an internship. They told me that the competition was for professionals, but I entered anyway. When they called to tell me, my mother answered the phone. They asked me to go and collect the award in a suit… and I didn’t have a suit,” he says and laughs when he remembers.
This was my first recognition as a journalist. “I was able to write these facts thanks to the neighborhood in which I live,” he explains. “A friend put me in touch with the people at the hospital. I think they rewarded the boldness of the topic.” To this day, he remembers the structure of that text, the sounds it contained, and also that when they discovered that he was not a nurse, they kicked him out of the place.
Observation, recording, and empathy—those journalistic tools—also work through his literary writings. “The hardest thing is getting past the screen,” he said, referring to his work as a columnist for Canal13. “This is achieved with emotion and empathy. Sometimes I’m surprised when people ask me to take pictures of me on the street, but I think it’s because the stories are so realistic.”
In stories Dog house This closeness translates into straightforward visual prose, with scenes that appear to have been captured on camera. “It might be my audio-visual work,” he admits. “Subconsciously, when I read what I write, I have an idea of where the camera will be.” The stories combine real and poetic elements: there are weaving workshops with Korean leaders, narrow lanes, folk festivals, hot soccer games, bars, drug dealers, mothers and grandmothers, healers, and a symbolic port where the characters search for another shore.
Barco tells his first story, Christmas bonfireBorn in 2001, in the middle of the crisis. “I wrote it at IBM, where I was working as a bilingual operator,” he says. “I drove two hours on the 21st to Martinez. I felt the atmosphere of looting, the streets closed, the smoke. I had computers at my disposal and a lot of free time. And I wrote the first story.” This text was published years later in the magazine Villa worldAnd it became its foundation stone. He knew he could write literature.
“I’ve seen what a journalistic job is, which has a corset: the five Ws (the five basic questions: who, what, when, where and why) and that’s it,” he says, while admitting to some discomfort when he is interviewed. “I liked to write chronicles with specific statements and some literary twists. Now it was the opposite: I discovered that literature gives you incredible freedom.”
That freedom he found in literature allowed him to write from the place of witness, but also from the son, the neighbor, and the father. “I propose to walk down the aisle, with the good and the bad, with the beliefs and cultural traumas of those who come from other countries and are raising children in another culture,” he says. “It’s not easy.” In his stories, these tensions become literary material. “To say ‘little ball’ or ‘boliviano’ as an insult is something that still exists. In my stories I try to show another world, the world that the big media does not show: the world of the workers, the workers. I show that all of it – a trench, a ball of cables, a belief – can also be literature.”
The stories come from conversations with his mother, friends and neighbors. “It was all walking around the neighborhood. If someone didn’t know something, they would send me to someone else. Sometimes they would say, ‘Saturday will come, wait for it,’ because a lot of them have left. And so I started rebuilding. I had a little notebook in which I wrote everything down.”
In the story that gives the book its title, Dog houseHe recounts a real episode: a municipal truck enters the slums and a dog is killed in its driveway. He says: “The dog is a loyal friend who pays the price for disloyalty with his life. He was very strong. He faced loss and was sad when he was a child.”
There are also stories that cross over into magical realism, such as the story of Severino, the boy with powers, who appears among others in Green hellInspired by the character of his grandfather, the healer, and the Paraguayan War. “The kids at school love Severino,” he says. “I didn’t think of magical realism as a resource, I just followed my intuition. I wanted to convey what I felt.”
Family beliefs, even reflected in Quechua words, are present in all stories. “My mother and grandmother were very superstitious. They celebrated the Day of the Dead, cooked food, and set up a table with pictures of family members and the Tanggua people, but they told us: ‘Don’t tell this to anyone.’ They wanted to keep the traditions secret, so they wouldn’t discriminate against us.” In these practices, he says, there is a truth that connects him to his roots: “It’s not that I believe. I believe in the truth they have when they believe. That was sacred to my mother.”
Closing the book was also an intimate process. It’s the only moment in the interview where Gustavo becomes emotional, gaping, squeezing his eyes, containing himself. The story Without America It arose from his editor’s suggestion: write about his father. “I didn’t want to. It was something very intimate. In the end I interviewed him, recorded it, and my daughter recorded it for me. It was very difficult to put myself in the journalist’s shoes in front of him, and ask him about difficult things that I did not know. There I was able to understand some things, through his story, that were tremendous. I changed his name for protection.”
He answers: “Why America? Because in Bolivia they said that coming to Argentina is in America’s interest.” “It also represents all these people who come in wanting to advance.”
the address Dog house It was a sign. “It was the most popular story, and it had actually been published in the United States. It was a message: There’s something here,” he explains. He says the book is also a way to save neighborhood stories and neighbors who read it feel very proud. At the presentations they go to, they thank him for saving their stories. “They like to find themselves in stories,” he says. “In the cemetery scene, I put the names of those I remember who were there, those who carried our friend’s box.”
Barco, who holds a master’s degree in journalism from the Universidad Los Angeles Nacion and the Universidad Torcuato di Tella, and who knows that his reporting on television is the most watched, realizes that his starting point is the neighborhood. “I wanted to tell from the inside what many people see on the streets,” he says. “I feel a responsibility: to represent not just one community, but all of them.”
He ends with a wish: “I would like someone to read.” Dog house Start with a concept – or bias – and eventually you transform it. Because I also changed myself by writing it. I have been able to forgive and reconnect. I was able to find this literary path and recognize it as such.