That creative freedom has fueled plenty of cultural cross-pollination. Dick Verdult, an avant-garde musician and artist from the Netherlands, began toying with cumbia around 2000, manipulating the childish rhythms of the South American folk music with electronic bass lines, time delays and sampled voices. “Cumbia is like a ball of clay,” said Mr. Verdult, 53, who is better known by his stage name, Dick El Demasiado. “If you stick to the simple laws” — a 4/4 rhythm that he likens to a galloping horse — “but disregard the tradition, you can do a lot with it. Argentina has a very elastic culture.”

His first cumbia album, “No Nos Dejamos Afeitar,” released in 2002, was so well received that Mr. Verdult decided to move to Buenos Aires. “The reaction blew me away,” said Mr. Verdult, who is regarded as the unofficial godfather of this new electrotango sound known as experimental cumbia.

Not surprisingly, many of his disciples are fellow expatriates. “There’s a group of maybe 10 producers and D.J.’s who are really pushing these new styles,” said Gavin Burnett, 26, a D.J. from San Francisco who blends cumbia with hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall under the pseudonym Oro11. “If you’re an artist looking to be inspired and have $10,000 saved up, you can basically come down here and work, and not worry for a year.”

Image Le Bar was started by French expatriates. Credit... Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

It’s not only artist types who are soaking up Buenos Aires’s budget bohemia. Stumble into many of the city’s trendy restaurants, bars and hotels, and there’s a good chance a foreigner is behind it.

One of the newest is Le Bar, a martini lounge and restaurant in Microcentro with sunken seats, cool lighting and a rooftop terrace. It was started by several French expatriates including Manuel Schmidt, 40, an architect from Paris who sailed to Argentina with his wife and young daughter three years ago, and basically didn’t sail back. Brasserie Petanque, a new restaurant in San Telmo, looks as though it was transplanted tile by tile from the Left Bank. “When I came in 2003, there were no French restaurants, so I stayed and opened this,” said Pascal Meyer, an owner who was tending bar on a recent Sunday night. Before becoming a restaurateur in Buenos Aires, he was a culinary tour guide for the United Nations in New York City.

AND then there are the novelists, journalists and screenwriters, quietly tapping away in their $600-a-month apartments, seeking to make a name for themselves on Argentine soil. Nate Martin, a 24-year-old from Wyoming, moved to the city in November and took a job as an editor at The Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language newspaper, because, he says, “I didn’t want to be a waiter while writing.” For his creative outlet, Mr. Martin maintains a blog, Grating Space. Like dozens of similar blogs written by foreigners, it rhapsodizes about the Argentine good life. He also D.J.’s on the side.