This semester, I have one class at the University of Buenos Aires, a public institution. I am still taking classes just for exchange students but taught in Spanish as well as a class at the private university; this semester I have a more challenging course load as I am taking two “direct enroll” classes at Argentine Universities. My experience at UBA has, all things considered, been going really well, and I wish I had taken a class there last semester.
Outside of the UBA building where I take classes. There are two locations for the School of Social Sciences, located about a twenty-minute bus ride apart. (Photo Wikipedia).
UBA is a massive institution- I was told there are upwards of 300,000 students, and there’s no centralized campus. Argentines, per the Constitution, have a right to universal education and healthcare, so by extension, the UBA undergraduate experience is free. You have to complete and pass a year’s worth of introductory courses called Ciclo Básico Común (Basic Cycle) for the school you want to go to, and then you are allowed to declare your major and begin study. Most majors take six years; however, the majority of Argentines work while studying, so the degree process can take a very long time if you’re not a full-time student. There’s a joke here that almost everyone you meet is a student at UBA, since it takes so long for people to finish and get their degrees.
My class is called Communications Practices with Focus on Gender and is a seminar in the Communications school. A seminar is a small discussion-based class that has a final paper instead of a final exam, and usually every student has to take at least one to graduate. For me, this type of class is very similar to my classes at IU—the professor knows my name, I am expected to speak in class, and the students generally give presentations or apply the concepts learned in class to outside examples.
Employee at the UBA fotocopiadora smoking. Sincerely hoping that the place filled with paper (!!!!) does not catch on fire.
To understand the dynamics of the class, it helps to know that UBA has a reputation for being pretty leftist and in some schools, radical. Che Guevara studied at UBA’s Medical School and is a major inspiration for many of the students. My class is in the extension campus of Social Sciences, which is not as bad as the Philosophy and Letters building. However, there are still painted signs everywhere calling for support for various causes, the students occasionally “take” the school over and shut it down for the day, professors will strike because they don’t get paid enough, the list goes on. You can smoke in the building (despite the frequent signs saying it’s illegal per city law. It appears that Argentines have a right to free education but not to a free toilet paper in the bathrooms—you have to provide your own.
Our professor is a well-known Argentine journalist who focuses on gender equality for women and also those with “diverse genders.” All of the students in the class are very conscious about gender topics and many work in schools, therapy centers, or other locations where the topics we discuss are part of their jobs. The majority are female, and there are a couple male students who sheepishly admitted they were in the class because the other seminar they wanted had filled up. I am without a doubt the youngest and least experienced in these topics. This puts me at a disadvantage not only thematically but also linguistically, as a large part of our class focuses on sexism in language. Every noun in Spanish has a gender (dress is male, chair is female, window is female) and adjectives have to agree with gender and number with the nouns. If you have a group of people (or objects) that is comprised of at least one male, then you use all male adjectives. This frequently makes women invisible in texts.
Cristina Kirchner, the president, is well-known and ridiculed for her efforts to use non-sexist language. In Spanish, you use the word "todo" to describe everyone (Hello, everyone = Hola a todos). Cristina will often say, "Hola a todos y todas," which is widely ridiculed by many Argentines because it sounds very out of place in a formal speech.
There are different ways to remedy this, as we learned. Usually a word that is masculine ends in an “o” and feminine words end in an “a,” so some people use the @ to show both. However, in my class (radical? Unsure) that @ is too limiting because it does not respect individuals who many not identify with a male or female gender. Instead, we should use x, e, *, or / to include everyone in language. A big critique of this is first, that there’s no way to reproduce it speaking and second, that it makes the language very clunky and strange looking.
We have had homework assignments where we have rewritten news articles to remove the sexist language—any readers who know Spanish will know how difficult of a task this was. As a non-native speaker, I’m aware of the inherent sexism in Spanish but not to the degree of the other students. Many of the other topics too—Argentine laws to help women (which are all referred to by number, someone help me!), different media personalities, and prominent gender violence cases from the last ten years—are totally new to me. I understand what is being said in the class, but I don’t have the context to necessarily understand the nuisances. I spend a lot of on Wikipedia and asking around after class to figure out who all the people are.
The best part about UBA is how friendly everyone is! At UCA, the private university, I might as well be invisible. In my class in UBA, I have gotten multiple offers for help for words or ideas I don’t understand, and during class all of the students are willing to help me when I might not have heard of someone. We talk before class, they ask me about America, and they help me explain ideas in class when I don’t know the words. It’s such a better atmosphere and a much more organized class than what I had last semester.