When I returned to Buenos Aires last month for the first time in 11 years to profile Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, I found a city plagued by very different economic pains: deflation and a looming, full-blown depression. Men without jobs roam the city peddling cheap items and finding few buyers. With the country mired in a nearly three-year-old slump, many Argentines talk openly about abandoning the land of their birth: a taxi driver of Greek parentage says he plans to emigrate to his ancestors’ native island in the Aegean later this year.

And everybody complains. That in itself is hardly news: after soccer, kvetching always struck me as Argentina’s leading pastime. Far be it for an Argentine to suffer a precipitous decline of living standards in silence, as Mexicans or Peruvians typically do. To my American eyes, not everything had taken a turn for the worse since I left Buenos Aires in May 1990. Basic services like phones and electricity actually work quite well, and shortages of food products, consumer durables and other goods are practically unheard of. But the bellyaching is not just the self-indulgent quirk of a society whose heyday ended in the 1930s and has been cursed ever since by a procession of ruthless military dictators and corrupt politicians. Two of five Argentines live below the poverty line of $110 a month. Equally important, Argentines have understandably lost faith in political messiahs after the untrammeled graft and economic tailspin that stamped Carlos Menem’s second term as president in 1994-99.

But not all is lost. The most positive attributes of the Argentines live on. Their flair for elegance and fashion has no parallel anywhere in the Americas. That trait draws sneers from their fellow Latin Americans, but it holds a special appeal for a foreign journalist just in from a nation of slobs, of people who think dressing up means donning that new Corona beer T shirt they picked up at the Cancun duty-free.

And the Argentines’ passions are not just skin-deep either. Miguel Angel Lobos is the dark-haired, dark-skinned son of a dirt-poor farmworker. His family moved from the western province of Mendoza to the Argentine capital when Miguel was 1 year old. The 37-year-old Lobos works as an usher at Cervantes National Theater in the heart of Buenos Aires and must support his wife, Griselda, and three young sons on a monthly salary of $420. They live in a lower-class barrio in the shadows of the city’s once majestic Retiro railroad terminal, and as I discovered during a late-night dinner in the Loboses’ modest household, Miguel loves literature almost as much as he does his family. As I took my leave on that chilly Monday evening, my host gave me 31 poems he had penned over the years and added the following inscription in Spanish: “For Joe, who lives by the written word, from someone who lives for the written word. Miguel Lobos.” It would be very difficult to imagine his counterpart in Pittsburgh or Detroit thinking such thoughts or expressing such sentiments to a virtual stranger. For that reason and many, many others, I am proud that Buenos Aires is the city of my son Dominic’s birth. ¡Viva la Argentina!