Sometimes, when I think about what to write and Asia or Europe comes to mind, I realize I forget the place where I was born. Over twelve thousand kilometers away, Argentina—my country—still influences every decision I make, even when I can’t see or touch it. It’s like a moon that pulls me from afar: invisible to the five senses, but impossible to ignore. You feel it in the way I calculate expenses, in the distrust toward what seems too stable, in the creativity that suddenly emerges when something fails. This invisible mark has a name: Argentine resilience. The ability to appreciate chaos, the art of making guesses in the dark, of laughing even when everything goes wrong.
In this way, Argentine resilience isn’t a statistic or a slogan: it’s a way of moving through the world. We grow up seeing how the rules of the game change, how plans fall apart overnight and are rebuilt the next day; we learn to adapt and survive amid instability. Five presidents in eleven days, the corralito, the blue dollar, attending classes sitting on the floor. Waiting for the train knowing it will be late, calculating those minutes of delay as mandatory, hoping there’s no traffic on the highway to get to work.
Disorder, chaos, improvisation—Buenos Aires that can’t breathe and won’t let you be at ease. Traffic, pedestrians, protests, lousy politicians, currency exchange offices, people begging, people laughing and drinking mate on the bus. All of this is part of the Argentine society I was born into and that has seeped into my bones, following me like a ghost even in my life as an immigrant in Europe. The skills I learned in the whirlwind of Buenos Aires are what allowed me, when I left, to work and live abroad with a backpack full of invisible resources.
What I Mean by “Argentine Resilience”
When I say Argentine resilience, I’m not just talking about the ability to endure whatever life throws at us, something that supposedly characterizes Argentines. It’s not another national or cultural product we pridefully claim as ours. I mean inventiveness in the face of uncertainty: turning scarcity into a path, confusion into method, and entanglement into shortcuts. In a context where inflation is high and economic rules can change at any moment, daily life becomes flexible out of necessity. Over time, this flexibility becomes a second skin.
The patch is an image: a mended wheel, a door held together with a different screw, a plan that mutates. Learning to save money from a young age in a currency that isn’t yours. Hiding cash under the mattress “just in case.” Having a million solutions for possible problems that could arise. But it’s also practical: learning to negotiate, ask for help, and test provisional solutions that often work better than the “official” ones.
This culture of immediate fixing instills an adaptable and creative mindset. Not everything is heroism: there’s fatigue, anger, and injustice. But there’s also a collective engine of ingenuity that activates without asking permission. A code that isn’t written anywhere but that everyone knows. Something that flows through the streets and neighborhoods of Argentina without us being able to put it into words.
How Argentine Resilience Abroad Taught Me to Live
Going abroad for someone from this context wasn’t, paradoxically, a shock—it was a continuation. Leaving the Buenos Aires metropolitan area for Croatia was a continuation of this daily struggle. One might think that leaving your own country across the ocean would mean leaving behind the identity you built.
Yet what we call “Argentineness” appeared even stronger. In the Argentine accent that comes through every time I speak English, in the words and expressions I try—and fail—to translate. The gestures, the jokes, the clichés. Unknowingly, my Argentine identity grew stronger abroad and was reinforced amidst the confusion. It was also what allowed me to survive in a new country and in a culture so different.
I had already learned to improvise, deal with changing plans, to rebuild and re-rebuild myself. To accept that I had no control over the situation and couldn’t predict what would happen. I could leave behind the life I had built over twenty-five years to embrace a new one. Leaving my career, my job, and my home in search of something new. Finding new friends, a new neighborhood, new ways of living even when everything around me seemed to fall apart. Moving countless times, learning a new language, a new social code, saving in another currency.
Living with Croatians, Poles, Latinos. Saving in kunas, euros, dollars. Working as a cleaner, receptionist, supervisor. Learning Croatian, English, and German. Knowing what you can and can’t do. Changing countries, changing neighborhoods. Moving to Barcelona and renting a room off the books from an Egyptian. The chaos that one unconsciously seeks and can’t avoid after having lived in Argentina. “This place seems too quiet,” I used to say after a stint in a small Croatian village.
From Disorder to Identity
If you come from cultures with more predictability, it can be disorienting to imagine managing life amid daily price hikes and twisting regulations. Argentine resilience doesn’t romanticize chaos: it recognizes fatigue and injustice. But it focuses on a collective response that teaches us to cope with problems and adapt constantly.
Resilience becomes identity when it’s no longer just a strategy and becomes part of personal and collective narrative. Argentine society is chaotic, erratic, yet incredibly beautiful. Imperfect, eclectic, diverse, multicultural, problematic, like a bomb about to explode. But also, in some way, harmonious. We live among the ashes of a fire that always seems ready to flare again. Yet, somehow, everything works.
Being “of the patch” means recognizing this complexity as your own. The social fragmentariness that internalizes and is proudly expressed. It’s resisting, continuing, inventing ways of being, rebirthing, and erupting again. And that was the backpack I carried from Buenos Aires to Croatia. The scar I celebrate every day and that grows stronger with each day I spend far from home.
If there’s one thing I want my European friends to understand, it’s that this isn’t about celebrating chaos, but about recognizing wisdom born from fracture: knowing how to sew paths with uneven threads. Like in the Japanese art of kintsugi, where cracks are filled with gold to make the piece unique again, in Argentina we learn to embrace our breaks and turn them into identity. Celebrating fragmentariness, imperfection, and partiality. Finding that scar without needing to cover it. Simply appreciating its beauty.
If you are interested in nomadic life, emigration and identity, you can check out this category 🙂