The story
Imagine for a moment the sound of a heavy printing press clacking away in a small room filled with the sharp scent of ink and the weight of a quiet determination. You are walking down a street that carries the name of a woman who believed that the mind of a girl was just as capable of flight as any other. This is Juana Manso. If you look around you now, you will see a landscape of polished glass, sleek curves, and the distinct, open sky that only the docks of Puerto Madero can offer. But the woman behind the name lived in a world of rigid boundaries and restricted voices.
Juana Paula Manso was born in 1819, and she was a writer, a teacher, and a revolutionary who simply refused to be silent. Because she spoke her mind during the era of the governor Juan Manuel de Rosas, she spent many years in exile, living in Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro. It was in Brazil where she founded a newspaper specifically for women, arguing that education was the only true path to freedom. When she finally returned to Buenos Aires, she became a close ally of the great educator Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Together, they worked to build a public school system that included everyone. She was a woman of remarkable firsts, including being the first woman to join the National Education Council, a position that was unheard of in the mid-nineteenth century. She faced mockery for her belief that schools should be secular and that children should never be hit, yet she never stopped writing her textbooks and novels.
For a long time, these docks where you are standing were quiet, gray, and decaying. However, in the 1990s, when the city decided to breathe new life into this neighborhood, they did something unique. They decided that every single street in Puerto Madero would be named after a woman who had shaped Argentine history. Juana Manso was a natural choice for one of its most important thoroughfares. Today, this street serves as a central spine for the district. It is a corridor of modern Argentina, connecting the high-rise corporate towers of the north with the luxury residences and the lush, green entrance to the Ecological Reserve in the south.
As you move along Juana Manso today, you are navigating a space where the historic red-brick warehouses of the old port sit right across from some of the most avant-garde glass architecture in South America. It is a place of movement, luxury hotels, and wide sidewalks that feel a world away from the narrow, crowded alleys of the historic city center just across the water. Before you continue your walk, take a moment to look at the reflection in one of the large glass windows nearby. Notice how the modern towers mirror the river and the sky. Juana Manso spent her life trying to give her country a clearer vision of its own potential, and as you step forward, you are walking through the very future she once tried to imagine.