Ann Noguer ’05 Moved to Argentina and Opened a Travel Company

The first time Ann Noguer ’05 made an ironic comment in Spanish, the feat hushed an entire room of Argentine lawyers.

“You have arrived!” one colleague exclaimed. Over a decade later, Noguer recalls the incident with a laugh. “It’s so hard to be fully yourself in another language,” she says while sitting at a bar overlooking the grounds of an upscale hotel in Buenos Aires’ Recoleta neighborhood. “And I so value my friends from that nonprofit because they were very patient in figuring out who I really was in Spanish.”

Now fluent in the language and settled in Argentina, Noguer manages the Argentina-based educational travel company Puentes Abroad, which she founded in 2014. A Tennessee-born and Arkansas-raised sociology major who spent three years working in New York City after Princeton, Noguer had never planned on moving to Buenos Aires.

Then, in 2008, an opportunity arose to take a four-month trip to Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina with her friend Tessa Marmion Muir ’05, who had just finished law school. Would Ann join Tessa on the adventure of their lives?

After some hesitation, Noguer took the leap. Thus began a journey of Spanish classes, homestay families, hiking, eating, and exploring across South America, which prompted Noguer to consider either moving to Buenos Aires or Santiago. She no longer wanted to stay in New York. In the end, Buenos Aires presented itself as a combination of the two homes she’d already known. Porteños (as people from Buenos Aires are known) were as relaxed and friendly as the Southerners she grew up with in Memphis and Little Rock; like New York, the city was “eclectic, dynamic, with a little hustle and bustle.”

The deal was sealed, and Noguer packed her bags in early 2009 to begin a life abroad.

It was in Buenos Aires that Noguer met her husband, Tomás Noguer, with whom she now has two children. Though the family moved to the Patagonian city of Bariloche during the pandemic, Noguer remains devoted to the task of connecting Buenos Aires, her adopted home, with the United States, her inherited one, through Puentes Abroad. “Puentes” means “bridges” in Spanish. Fittingly, the organization builds bridges between Argentina, Uruguay, and American universities via the coordination of study abroad programs and internships in South America. Princeton’s International Internship Program (IIP) has partnered with Puentes for years, sending students to work with groups including civil rights organizations, regional newsrooms, and conservation agencies across the two countries.

Noguer’s team works closely with universities so that specific organizations and students — who receive one-to-one advising — find good fits in one another. Successful interns get mentors, often live with homestay families, and take part in day trips to places such as an Argentine ranch or the cobblestoned Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay. In recent years, Puentes began offering one-to-three-week immersive trips that expose students to diverse parts of Argentina, be it the wine and tourism sector in Mendoza, abundant natural resources in Puerto Iguazú, or the rich biodiversity and terrain in Patagonia.

Floralis Generica is in the Plaza de las Naciones Unidas in Buenos Aires. As part of Puentes Abroad, Ann Noguer ’05 plans immersive trips for students to experience all of Argentina.

Adobe

Given the nature of her business, it might come as a surprise to learn that Noguer arrived at Princeton wanting to be, of all things, a math major. Life in Spanish was certainly not on her Princeton bingo card: Her extracurricular life was an eclectic mix of rock climbing, accounting for her sorority, and coordinating English tutoring for Spanish-speaking staff at the Ivy Club. She also co-founded Princeton’s first Redhead Society with Doug Rosenthal ’04. The group would have “moon-tanning” parties in the red-hued basement of Dod Hall with red Twizzlers and cherry ginger ale. (“Redhead attendance required, other hair colors encouraged,” read an invitation to one Valentine’s Day party covered by The Daily Princetonian in 2004.)

By the time Noguer finished Princeton, she had landed a job at a New York-based nonprofit leadership training organization through the Project 55 fellowship program. It was via coordinating students’ study abroad experiences through the Watson Foundation that Noguer wondered about moving abroad herself. Upon arriving in Argentina, she started writing grants for a civil rights organization during the day and coordinating Boston College’s Buenos Aires study abroad program by night; in 2010, seeking insights into the Argentine nonprofit sector, she enlisted in a Spanish-language master’s program on nonprofit management at the University of San Andrés, and went on to serve as a regional director for the global recycling company TerraCycle before founding Puentes.   

“It’s nearly impossible to plan out all the steps of your life looking forward, but when you look backward, you can connect the dots to see how they all come together,” Noguer says of her trajectory. The throughline? “A lot of that was navigating two different cultures and helping make bridges between cultures and ideas and people.”

In moving from the United States to Argentina, from civil rights work to educational travel, “it didn’t mean that I had to start from zero, but I could start from a different place.”