Argentine Tango: Bibliography and Sources

The documentary record of Argentine tango is dispersed across reference compendia, theatrical retrospectives, and the printed lyric literature of its poets, and any working bibliography of the form must reconcile these unlike registers. As a musical genre and accompanying social dance, the tango emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in the working-class outskirts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, a binational origin that already complicates the search for a single authoritative source.^[1] Catalogued reference entries fix the genre's definition and approximate birth, yet they reveal little about the texture of daily practice, which survives instead in literary and performance documents drawn from later decades.

Encyclopedic reference entries form the first tier of such a bibliography, and their function is descriptive rather than interpretive. They classify the tango simultaneously as music and as dance and locate its formation in the suburban districts of the Río de la Plata.^[1] Entries of this kind are valued for their stability and neutrality, but by design they compress a contested social history into a brief label, leaving questions of choreography, instrumentation, and social milieu to be answered by other materials.

A second tier comprises retrospective stage works that themselves operate as historical synthesis. The revue "Tango Argentino", a stage production of 1983, was organized around the history of the dance and its many varieties, and it carried that history to international audiences as performance rather than as written scholarship.^[2] Works of this kind occupy an ambiguous bibliographic position, functioning at once as primary artifacts of late-twentieth-century reception and as secondary narrations of a much earlier era.

The printed work of tango's lyricists constitutes the richest primary stratum, and here the figure of Celedonio Flores is representative. An Argentine poet closely associated with the bohemian life of Buenos Aires, Flores supplied lyrics for numerous tangos, among them Margot, Mano a mano, Corrientes y Esmeralda, and Sentencia, and his verse moved between lunfardo slang and a sententious, moralizing register.^[3] His poems were gathered in collections such as Chapaleando barro, first issued in 1929, volumes that preserve the vocabulary and social world of the form in a way that catalogue labels cannot.^[3]

Paratextual material amplifies the research value of these volumes. The poet Cátulo Castillo furnished a prologue for the second edition of Chapaleando barro, situating Flores within the literary currents of Buenos Aires around 1910 and alongside figures such as Evaristo Carriego and the emerging singer Carlos Gardel.^[4] Prologues of this sort are themselves sources, recording how one generation of practitioners construed the lineage of the form for the readers who followed.

Taken together, these materials expose both the strengths and the limits of the surviving record. Reference labels secure chronology and definition; the 1983 stage retrospective documents reception and transmission;^[2] and the lyric volumes preserve language and milieu.^[3] Scholars must therefore read across these registers rather than rely on any single one, since no individual source recovers the full social texture of the early tango, much of which survives only obliquely, in the printed traces left behind by its poets.