San Telmo is the Buenos Aires neighborhood where the de Wandaleer family made its first home after arriving from Antwerp in 1891. Its crowded tenement life, shared with Italian and Spanish immigrant families, gives the neighborhood a decisive role in the account of Marijke de Wandaleer’s childhood: she grows up amid a social world her parents keep trying to hold at a distance.

The family’s first home

Marijke’s parents had hoped to find a place when they boarded the ship in Antwerp, but in Buenos Aires they could secure only a room in a small interior apartment already shared by two Italian families. The de Wandaleers were Protestant, austere, and serious; their neighbors were Catholic, noisy, and numerous. After moving as soon as they could, they found a home of their own in a San Telmo tenement on Defensa Street, but not a life apart: its courtyard was still shared with Italian immigrants and with Spanish families described in similarly disapproving terms.

Marijke’s childhood in the courtyard

Marijke, the eldest of three children, grew up pale and red-haired, and habitually alone. Her parents did not like her playing with the darker, barefoot children of southern European families in the courtyard, who ran, shouted, danced, and fought there. The separation was imposed at home, but it did not keep the sounds of the courtyard out of her childhood: she learned the songs O sole mio and Asturias, patria querida by heart, though she would never dare sing them aloud.

Leaving San Telmo

As Peter de Wandaleer prospered, he was able to rent a three-room apartment on Perú Street, between San Telmo and the more reassuring Centro district, not far from Plaza de Mayo. His grain-export business, established with two German partners and a Belgian from Leuven, had grown enough to support the move. San Telmo thus marks both the family’s first foothold in Buenos Aires and the crowded immigrant environment from which its rising prosperity allowed it to move. The neighborhood’s social mixture also sharpens the contrast between the sounds Marijke absorbed and the restraint her parents expected of her.