Word: boca
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...Boca ("The Mouth"), a bedraggled, crowded, riverside quarter of corrugated iron shacks, docks, fish markets, is regarded by Porteños (colloquial for citizens of Buenos Aires) as the Montmartre of Buenos Aires. There, for many years, Quinquela Martín has painted La Boca's muscular sailors and barnacled boats, exhibiting his work in a little combination school and museum near his home. When, a few years ago, La Boca jocularly declared itself a republic, it elected First Citizen Quinquela Martín its president...
Painter Martín is a true product of La Boca. A foundling, he was adopted as a child by a coal heaver, Manuel Quinquela. He grew to boyhood with an incorrigible habit of messing up the Quinquela home with coal and charcoal, drawing soot-colored pictures wherever he could find a clean space. The Quinquelas finally went to the parish priest about it. The priest bought the boy drawing materials, told him to make his drawings on paper instead. Quinquela Martín, completely self-taught, became renowned throughout La Boca for his drawings; his reputation spread...
Several years ago Quinquela Martín bought a piece of one of La Boca's slum-strewn blocks and gave it to the municipality on condition that it erect there a school of graphic arts exclusively for La Boca's moppets. The school was built, named the Escuela-Museo Don Pedro...
Mendoza, after the man who, according to Boca legend, landed at that very spot when he founded the city of Buenos Aires. In a studio on the third floor Quinquela Martín himself painted and directed the school's activities, agreeing to foot the bills for the museum as long as he lived...
...seemed better than their humdrum jobs (a broker's office, a radio-tube factory). Resolved to hunt orchids themselves, they somehow persuaded U. S. orchid growers to stake them to orders for 6,400 cattleyas from Colombia and Venezuela. When, one Christmas Eve, the venturesome young men reached Boca Grande, Orchid Hunter MacDonald was already at work on notes for his readable, Rover-Boyish orchid odyssey...