El rincón cultural – Dude, where’s my car?

You know when you’re driving to a place on a busy Saturday night and come to it and the dread you feel, after letting your wife, girlfriend, buddies, whoever off: you still need to find a place to park.  Then, the inevitable agony and ecstasy.  The agony: you drive around for 20-30 minutes and can’t find a good spot anywhere and end up either having to pay to park, or parking 5-10 blocks away from the place you were going to followed by hearing your wife/girlfriend yell at you because you were too cheap to just pay for parking.  The ecstasy: you let everyone off and within 30 seconds, you pull up exactly behind someone who’s pulling out on the same block of the place you’re going to. SCORE! You then go back, and you’re so stoked because of the spot, you tell everyone in the restaurant and then either your wife really couldn’t care less or your buddies love it and follow with a round of “high fives”. OK, hopefully I’m not alone in this?

                          I can park with the best of ’em!

Well, here in Argentina, I am going for a year without a car for the first time since 1993 when I lived in Madrid. Although it’s occasionally a hassle to not have one, it’s actually quite pleasant to not have to worry about where the car is, pay the sky-high insurance rates and, of course, find a place to park.  I also enjoy being able to walk all around and find the colectivos and subte not too bad (unless it’s during las horas pico – rush hour) to use. Though I don’t have the driver’s perspective here, I do have the unique perspective of the foreign passenger observer as I go in taxis a lot and get rides from many people to places.  Since I’m talking about parking, I figured I’d detail to you all one of the most unique “jobs” I’ve seen here, which I know exists in other countries but not so much in the US. It’s a job that 15-20 years ago didn’t even exist in Argentina. This is the ubiquitous cuidacoche.

To call the cuidacoche actually an official “job” might be a stretch. A cuidacoche is someone who “helps” you park your car on the street and then “watches over” your car until you get back to it. The word is a compound of the Spanish words cuidar (to take care of) and coche (car). They are also sometimes known as trapitos. The idea is that for this “service”, the man or woman will, with his/her rag or flag, alert you to the availability of a spot, “help” you into it, look over the car and then, when you return, you’ll pay for it. (Trust me, he’ll still be there)  The average going rate for this service is anywhere from 2-10 pesos (a couple dollars or so), depending on where you are, when you park and, probably, the kind of car you have (or I’ve heard how well dressed you are).  I’ve heard, no joke, that at sporting events and places of high demand that people can be forced to pay up to 60 pesos (about $15 US) for this. Though most make a couple hundred pesos a day, some cuidacoches have been known to make up to $1000 pesos a night doing the job! The job, at least in Buenos Aires, is usually taken by either young, poor people here or many retired persons. It’s a semi-official job that sprung up in the 1990s, was outlawed in 2004 but that now the government, after having given up trying to enforce the ban, has tried to regulate somewhat since they can’t really enforce it much. They’ve had moderate success but it certainly doesn’t seem like something that isn’t going away.

There are other illegal “jobs” like this such as the limpiavidrios (winshield washer) among others but I find the cuidacoche the most interesting. Does this occur on public streets that no one actually owns? Yup. Do the cuidacoches really watch your car?  Unlikely.  Are they actually responsible for the safety of the car?  Of course not.  Is it blackmail? Sort of, I guess. Do people complain about it?  Of course.  Is it fair?  Probably not. Is there much they can do about it? Well, I’m sure you don’t want to be the one to refuse to pay and later come back to your missing or damaged car. People, thus, grumble about it but, in the end, are basically just forced to accept it as a reality of the country and economic climate. So in the end, though drivers might still get psyched about the scoring of a sweet parking spot, now, though, the reality is that one way or another the BA parker is probably going to have to pay for it.