Cristian Alarcón. Dance for Me When I Die

Dance for Me When I Die is a book that asks few questions and provides no answers, but makes you think all the same. In 1999, following the police murder of a charismatic teenage hoodlum, Víctor Manuel “El Frente” Vital, Página/12 journalist Cristian Alarcón began a precarious eighteen-month journey into San Fernando, home to several of the many poor and violent villas miserias (slums) that encircle modern Buenos Aires. His object was not to investigate the killing, but to understand the social world from which Frente sprang and in which he became a kind of cult hero. Perhaps even that is an overstatement—Alarcón sought above all to familiarize himself with this world on its own terms, rather than those of the sociologist or anthropologist, by doing what journalists do best: haranguing people to talk and then, once they are willing to do so, just listening. As he poetically describes the process, “The bewilderment of an outsider getting to know the characters and the place, the language, the codes, incomprehensible to begin with; the difficulty of the first conversations—all this gradually gave way to a kind of familiarity, the sense of belonging you feel when you walk down a block and exchange greetings with people, chatting with some about the weather or asking others what the kids are up to—kids who are always so hard to pin down, who have no schedule but instead simply breathe in the present moment as deeply as they can, the actual moment they are in, never allowing any new activity or commitment to bring it to a close by imposing the future on it” (21)

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