The Dog Shelter
About the Book
Halfway between chronicle and fiction, the eleven stories in The Dog Shelter (La perrera) portray life in the former Villa Piolín—today renamed Charrúa neighborhood— located in Villa Soldati, Buenos Aires, in the 1970s and 1980s, through the voice of Gusty, the son of Bolivian immigrants, who is the narrator of these tales, spanning from his early years to his young adulthood.
The Dog Shelter is a visceral book in which everyday gestures and family traditions link the present with an ancestral legacy. In these stories, the Metropolitan reality and the Andean background coexist in a daily life woven from dances and fights, games and violence, hunger and shared meals, faith, memories, a rough environment, and solidarity.
The final story—the account of the narrator’s father’s childhood and his journey from Oruro, Bolivia, to Soldati—powerfully captures the migrant experience, offering an intimate and profound perspective on the legacy and the scars that define families and generations..
Through its poetic imagery, a tenderness that never yields to sentimentality, and an unsettling emotional power, this book celebrates the richness of multiculturalism, people’s dignity in labor, and their dreams in the face of adversity.
Excerpt
The Christmas Fire
We ran through the corridors with a steel wool sponge set ablaze, as if we were trying to fly a kite made of sparks, only intercepted by the threats and lectures from the adults about fires in the past. We would answer in unison, yes, yes, we understood. We had even learned it in Quechua: “arí, arí, intindi quichu.” But we would keep running right away.
They used to tell us about the times when there had been two huge fires, back when the houses were made of wood, cardboard, and nylon, and everything burned down in minutes. In those moments, it didn’t matter whether you were Argentinian or Bolivian or Paraguayan or Peruvian or anything at all, because everyone helped each other escape those tongues of fire that spat out more fire. Many of those who were young back then still remembered it. Just like Mr. Juan, the neighborhood mechanic, who was a frustrated singer. When he talked about that, he’d stare off into a chimeric horizon, and only his lips would move: someone falls asleep with a lit cigarette, a rag catches fire, and after that it becomes unstoppable. The furious, shifting yellow colors are reflected in the retinas of all the neighbors who fight the flames to save their children or to secure the money buried or hidden in some corner, or the little bag of coca leaves they chew to hold on longer and cope with hunger. In front of those orange-tinged faces, the fire creeps forward, swallowing up the shacks, the corrugated metal sheets, the waterproof plastics tied with string. It makes soup and bathwater boil in black pots, sets fire to the firewood, overheats the steel of the machetes and the masonry tools. Amid the silence and tears of the neighborhood, it carries away the Sunday shirts, the sandals and lama wool wraps called aguayos worn by newcomers. And when the gas cylinders explode, a giant mushroom cloud, in which many imagine the Devil’s grimace, hovers over the flames that reduce to ashes what will later be known as Villa Piolín, Villa 12, or Barrio Charrúa, named for the street that runs through it and ends at the San Lorenzo sports complex in Soldati.
Since then, the fire has become a part of our collective fears. In the neighborhood, the topic would come up from time to time, and there was always someone who started recounting what the fires had been like, and soon everyone was talking about those unforgettable flames.
That’s why, around Christmas time or New Year’s, the adults would look with some suspicion at those of us playing with sparklers or firecrackers. And even more so at those of us who didn’t have money for fireworks and would light a steel wool sponge tied to a piece of twine and start running down the corridors. As always, the one who came up with the idea was Pico, the fourth of eleven siblings who lived in the corner house on corridor 4. The boys were always together. Pico was eleven years old, Calo ten, Churco nine, and Pilder seven. I was around nine when mother started to let me off her leash. Not too much, though. I was only allowed to play in any section of the corridor and up to its corners. Anywhere beyond that was banned. Not corridor 5 or 3. And God forbid they found out I was heading toward the railway tracks or crossing the street to go to the dirt football field. Unlike me, Pico and his brothers had the freedom to wander everywhere, even outside the neighborhood, like when they went to catch butterflies or grasshoppers near the second bridge on Erezcano Street.
“Did you bring the steel wool?” Pico would ask.
Pilder would pull out the packet he’d been hiding on his back, between his butt and his shirt. Calo had the matches. The rest of us would look around, keeping watch. They tied the steel wool with wire, and then hooked it to the mason’s string they’d swiped from Mr. Suazo. Once lit, we would take off running through corridors 4, 5, and 3. We left a trail of sparks behind us and took turns holding the string. In corridor 5, Mr. Paniagua would shout: “Put that out, kids! If you come by again, I’ll take it away from you, got it?”
In corridor 3 it was Mr. Juan or Mrs. Margarita:
“Kids! Go somewhere else! Don’t play with that!”
“Do you want to burn the whole place down?” Mr. Juan would scold, surrounded by the welding gas cylinders he kept there in the corridor.
“¡Supay ‘pa wachaska!” Mrs. Margarita would shout. Her son, who had hydrocephalus and was at the doorway in a wheelchair getting some fresh air would watch the specks of light zigzagging through the air and laugh and laugh, with guttural sounds, as if asking us for more.
“Enough!” one of the workers would yell at us at around seven in the evening.
It was Christmas week, and the workers were returning to the neighborhood with the holiday boxes their bosses had given them. On the corners, people talked about the year-end bonus as if it had superpowers, and my mother would tell us once again the story of our neighbor, poor old Mrs. Eulalia, who, while carrying her children out of the flames, was splattered in her left eye by a drop of boiling plastic, which had caused her to sport an eternal wink ever since.
It was during one of those fires in the slums that my old man first set eyes on my mom. They tell a different story now that they are separated. There are less romantic versions, and even more erotic ones, if you will. The screams of people begging for water, the explosions of gas cylinders, my teenage mother running for shelter and coming out in a nightgown barely covering her body, and him watching her through the fire and sparks.
“Damn, what a woman!” thought Mr. Americo.
“What the hell is that guy looking at?” Mrs. Martha muttered under her breath.
At dawn, the neighbors cleared away the ashes and debris. They walked among the ruins of their homes, thinking of the Pachamama, the Andean earth‑mother goddess, they had left behind in Bolivia. Others recalled the rivers of Paraguay and the afternoons spent in the red earth and deep green forest, where they drank tereré, a cold infusion made of yerba mate leaves, unconcerned about progress, during a childhood that was poor but happy.
Meetings were held, and the decision was made to build proper houses, yes, with bricks and proper mortar—what are we going to leave our children otherwise, no one is going to help us here, we have to do it ourselves, let them give us the materials and we’ll do it on our own, neighbors, what do you say, let’s vote, fellow neighbors, we’re all in the same boat.
After work, coming back from the factories or construction sites, on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, they all pitched in together to build the village, the neighborhood, our home, and the shared corridors where we played hide-and-seek, and at Christmas someone would bring out the record player and play Los Mirlos, Creedence, Deep Purple, Sandro, Chacalón y la Nueva Crema, Imagen, Los Flamencos, Koli Arce, Los Bere Bere, Los Kjarkas, Savia Andina, Los Pasteles Verdes, Adrián y los Dados Negros, Javier Solís.
If they could raise the tallest buildings in Buenos Aires from scratch, wouldn't they be able to build houses for their own children?
Translated by Sandra Botta - Edited by Cecilia Della Croce
