The story of Buenos Aires is told in its neighborhood bars. Open from morning to night, they are the spaces that see the city wake and fall back to sleep. They feed us burnt coffee with clouds of cream and sweet medialunas brushed in butter in the morning. Midday, the smell of milanesa and mashed potatoes wafts through the air and pulls us in off the sidewalk. At night, cold vermouth swishes loudly with soda water that pours out of plastic siphon bottles and accompanies metal trays of olives, salty potato chips and fried peanuts — the waiter rarely comes unless you shake the empty siphon in the air. The neighborhood bar is a place where everyone belongs; where the collective consciousness shares the same images, smells and memories. It is a space where community, resistance, joy and discontent all rub elbows. It is a space where time stops, where wi-fi often doesn’t exist, where you are forced to sit and be still for a moment. Read a book. Have a conversation.
Over the last few decades, these community spaces have slowly disappeared. A product of economic crisis and the natural urban lifespan — it is hard for anything, no matter how much beauty or nostalgia is folded into it, to last forever in a city. A movement across social media began to grow last year to save them in the name of patrimony. It is easy to romanticize these spaces for their old decadence, stuck in a parallel world and drenched in an accidental Wes Anderson design. It’s also easy to brush these spaces off as being outdated, their closure the product of stubbornness to modernize. I don’t think either of these takes are useful because the impetus always falls on the aesthetics: a longing for something of an era that is no longer ours, or to the contrary, for a culture that was never really ours to begin with, one that aspires more and more to the global rather than the local. I don’t think that either are bad: I like old bars on lone corners and the new specialty cafés jammed one against another. The problem, and this can be extended across the entire restaurant world, is that the conversation roots itself in aesthetics and our consumption of those aesthetics. Rarely does the conversation around the value of these spaces steer towards the people who make that consumption possible.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the word preserve lately, especially as the city begins to reopen, and what exactly we want to leave behind with this pandemic and what we want to bring with us into the beyond. I would like to think that we are slowly moving further away from wanting to save aesthetics for the sake of it and closer towards wanting to save the people behind them.
This is exactly what Analia Gonzalez and her eleven co-workers are doing. For decades they worked for Piazza, an emblematic café in the neighborhood of Congreso with a front row seat to the nation’s Senate. For decades they worked under abusive conditions, underpaid or hardly paid at all, for a boss that hoarded all the winnings for himself. They no longer work for Piazza. They are Piazza. In the middle of the pandemic they kicked out the owner, took over the business and have formed a cooperative where the risk and the take is spread evenly across all twelve. We sat down to talk about the realities behind the facade of the restaurant industry, learning to depend on yourself and the power of medialunas.
Argentine pastries bookended on either side by the infamous medialuna
Right now there is a lot of conversation around the problems that the restaurant industry is dealing with head on, a lot of restaurant closures, and the discourse I see most is very focused on the pandemic. I think that the pandemic, obviously it has caused a lot of problems, but I think that what it has really done is pull back the curtains on the problems that already existed in the industry. Can you tell me about the history of this place, the people who work here and what was going on here before the pandemic hit?
This café has been around for roughly 40 years and there are a number of co-workers that have been around for a long time. There are 12 of us. Many come here to work from the southern suburbs. Nestor, he has been here the longest. If this place has been around for like 37 years, he has probably been here for 35. The original owners also had a café in Mar del Plata, which I think opened a little bit before this café. Unfortunately, that one closed in 2018. Piazza has always been known for its medialunas and people who came here with their parents or grandparents keep coming because they are really nostalgic about the classic medialunas. We are a part of a group of bars that have been here for a long time. Obviously you have El Molino which is in the middle of a restoration to bring it back to its original beauty. There is also La Lorea, La Victoria and La Moncloa which unfortunately was bought and turned into a farmacy a few years ago. Around the corner is 36 Billares which is really emblematic of the area. The old school restaurants are a little further down in Montserrat. This is a historic restaurant area. This bar changed ownership 15 years ago. A lot of us were hired by him. He came in, took over some debts and reorganized the business. One part of that restructuring was that everyone who was already here was stripped of their seniority.
So from the get-go there was already some lack of respect towards labor rights.
Yeah. When a business changes its registered name, which in this case happened when the ownership changed hands, you can choose to maintain the seniority of the employees that continue working in that place. Seniority gives you certain rights and benefits related to retirement and other social security. They lost their seniority but they were able to keep their jobs. At first, the business did really well. We all worked very well. There were always conflicts but in the last four years we started having issues with our pay. I always asked for a salary receipt because I have children and needed proof for our health care provider. There are co-workers that haven’t received a salary receipt in fifteen years. Every 4 years he changed the registered name, he isn’t even the technical owner anymore, it was under another name. This last time that the name was changed he decided to not respect anyone’s seniority. We all started from zero. He began telling us how the financial situation of the business was really bad. He only began putting half of what we worked on our salary receipts. We understood that the country was dealing with an economic crisis and that it was hitting the restaurant industry hard. But our salaries never were handed out all at once or completely. My salary was $17,000 pesos a month, which isn’t even like he was paying me $30,000 or $40,000. It was $17,000 plus tips but this isn’t a restaurant with service where tips are different. The bakers were paid slightly more. Somewhere between $18,000 and $20,000 a month but a lot of times they worked well over 8 hours a day. And so we started getting paid [sic] $300 one day, $700 another, one day he might give you $500 and the next day you’d finish work and he’d tell you there was no money because he had to pay bills that day. And that’s how we lived for 4 years. Twice yearly bonuses that are required by law, that is not part of our vocabulary. At the end of the year, he’d give us $1000 for the holidays. If we went on vacation, they weren’t paid for and we’d have to come in the middle of the week during our vacations to see if he’d throw $500 or $1000 at us for the week. One thing just stacked on top of the other.
[Editor’s note: It is difficult to give an exact exchange rate from ARS to USD. TODAY, the official rate is 75 pesos to 1 dollar while the black market exchange for dollars can range anywhere from 110 to 145 pesos. For better context, official calculations estimate that a family of 4 needs a monthly income of 45,000 pesos to cover essentials and likely would live outside of the city to survive on such an income]
What happened when the pandemic and the quarantine hit?
When the pandemic hit in March, the café closed because of all the protocols. I live in the building next door so he had me come down to get $1000 which he owed me from the month before. He wasn’t helping me out with anything. The bakers were given $300 each and he had the nerve to tell them to save it because hard times were coming. Later on, he called 3 of the 12 employees to come back to work. He never called a single one of us during all of this to tell us anything, ask how we were, if we needed anything, to let us know he wouldn’t be paying us anything, nothing at all.
Were you able to get any help or subsidies from the state that happened during this quarantine?
There was a program that helped with half your salary. I tried to talk to him to see if we could apply but no way, obviously, he wasn’t on the books or up to date on anything with any local or federal organization. We were all declared but none of us are on the books, this strange grey area, so when we talked to Social Security they told us that they couldn’t help us because although we were technically declared as dependents there was no information about how much we actually worked or what we made each month, so how were they supposed to give us 50%? And that’s how it was for everyone here. I started selling food from home together with my son, who now is cooking with my husband. Another was selling medialunas, another was selling fried empanadas. I have rent to pay at the beginning of every month. The woman who I rent from can wait a month but not two or three. This is the roof over my head. Another co-worker has five children. The pastry chef became a father in the middle of the pandemic. This was a tidal wave of anguish, desperation and having no idea what to expect.
When did you all start thinking about starting a co-operative?
We found out that the rent here hadn’t been paid in a year. We knew there was a debt but we didn’t know how much. The bills too. The day we took over this place we opened the electricity and gas bills and we owe 1 million pesos. He was always saying to us that we needed to be patient because we needed to put together money for rent, for the gas, the electricity and the purveyors. And you say to yourself, where did all that money go? He wasn’t going into debt to pay us. We all started talking to each other and started reaching out to friends that work in social organizations. The Ministry of Labor has known for a long time what we were dealing with and never did anything. We have complained for the last four years whenever the state came in here. We filed complaints, they came and took them down, and never did anything. When the government changed, this year they institutionalized a measure that allows businesses to form cooperatives. We got in touch with the lawyer in charge, she brought us in for a meeting and told us we met all the requirements and started helping us to rethink and reconstruct this space. The only thing that we care about is being able to continue to preserve our workplace. This is what we know how to do. We’ve all been working in restaurants for a long time. I have worked in restaurants since I was 19 years old. I’m 41 now. It’s what we know. And the thing is, if you are a worker in the restaurant industry, they want experience but they also want you to be between 18 and 25 especially if you work in service. Maybe the baker would have more luck but the ones that work in service: forget about it. We know that. We are 12 families. This isn’t just 12 people. There are a lot more people behind this. These are decisions and conversations that involve our families.
What is the legal process like and how do the administrative roles change?
We took this space over last Monday and we are here 24/7 just in case. We changed the locks. The owner agreed to not come back. That’s all in the books but we are taking precautions. We went to the real estate agent to talk. They were already in the process of kicking us out of the building because of the back rent which luckily because of the pandemic had been put on hold. Otherwise we would have all been out of work already. They have decided to pursue the co-signers on the rental contract and let us stay and start fresh. We are in charge of paying everything from here on out. Obviously we could have never covered that debt no matter how hard we tried. There was a year left on the contract, which was rescinded, and soon we will be able to sign a new rental contract as a cooperative. The organization is made up of a President, Secretary and Treasurer that are voted in a meeting amongst all the workers. Then there are four others who are in the meetings and the rest are associates. Everyone makes the same. We take the net profit and split it evenly. Maybe one month we’ll make more, one month we’ll make less, or we run the risk of not making anything at all which is basically what we are dealing with now as we put money together. Each day we close the register, everyone who worked gets $500 and the rest is used for purchases and to pay bills.
There are a lot of you and everyone stayed, which isn’t the norm. Was it difficult to break down that construction of being employees to being partners and owners?
None of us ever imagined anything like this. We had to deconstruct our relationship to employment and understand that we could do this ourselves. We got a big push forward from the other cooperatives in terms of seeing that this was possible. There are so many cooperatives that have reached out to us and many that we don’t know yet that have our backs. If we need anything, we know we can count on them. There are people I can call whenever with a question, a problem, whatever. We want to be that push forward for others too. This has always been our place of work, our source of income, and if this person would have let us know what was going on, what the situation really was, we would’ve figured out a way to deal with it because this place is ours too. He never did that. He never cared about us.
How have the neighbors reacted?
This cafe is built underneath a building with 120 families that have come here for years and know all of us. Through this whole process and even before, they have given us so much support. People who are not in favor of these kinds of politics either of taking over [sic] they’ve changed their way of thinking because they know that this place is here and continues to be here because of us. They come for us and have told us that for a long time.
I am talking a lot with restaurant workers from all parts of the industry, from high end to more day-to-day spots, and what I am seeing is the empowerment of ideas that existed long before the pandemic. The pandemic has been a moment of reflection, of what it means to be a worker, what food origins mean, and this desire to fight for what's yours and start to have conversations about everything that comes behind this final plate, your medialunas, whatever it is.
Absolutely. The thing that has always kept Piazza afloat is our medialuna. People come and always ask if it's the same recipe from all those years ago. It wasn’t and that was always something that made us feel ashamed. They used to have butter that was switched for oil. They used to have milk that was switched to water. We have really made the decision to bring that medialuna back. People come for that. We started buying milk and butter and what we are making now is totally different. We want people to keep coming for that and keep that mysticism alive. People come all the time to ask if it was true that we brought water from Mar del Plata. There was this magic, this myth and we really want to bring that essence back. Coffee is a part of our DNA here in the city. That morning coffee, the get together with friends, we want to bring back that moment of a good coffee and a good medialuna. And stop going to Starbucks where everything is chemical and there is no personality. The neighborhood cafe is about having a bar to sit at and everyone knows that whenever they come there will be some neighbor to talk to for a little while and then continue on with your day. That is what we want to achieve. We know our clients. They know us. That’s beautiful. That’s the idea. To improve the product and bring back its identity. We want to place value back on the origins and have it come from us.