Río de la Plata Roots and the Arrabal

The arrabal of the port cities

Tango is at once a coupled social dance and the musical style written to accompany it, and the two took shape together in the working-class districts that ringed the harbors of Buenos Aires and Montevideo — the cities that face one another across the broad estuary of the Río de la Plata.^[1] The setting most often bound up with this emergence is the arrabal, the plebeian margin of the port city, a milieu of immigrants, laborers, and the urban poor among whom the dance first circulated. Scholarly accounts place the genre's formation in these marginal neighborhoods around the turn of the twentieth century, even as the precise chronology of its earliest years remains difficult to reconstruct from a thin documentary record.

Rural and urban worlds in synthesis

Although tango is conventionally remembered as a wholly urban invention, research on the period resists any clean division between rural and urban musical life in Argentina at the dawn of the twentieth century.^[2] Countryside and city shared overlapping repertoires, performers, and audiences rather than sealed and separate traditions. That same tension between rural and urban worlds would become a durable theme of Argentine popular narrative, resurfacing in the opposition between countryside and city that the nation's early sound cinema later inherited and dramatized.^[4]

Gaucho and tango as national symbols

Two cultural emblems came to anchor competing yet complementary visions of national identity: the gaucho, the mythologized horseman of the pampas, and the tango, understood as the popular dance and song of the port cities.^[3] Where the gaucho evoked a rural and supposedly authentic past, the tango spoke for the immigrant and urban present; yet both were folded into a single storehouse of national symbols on which rival public figures could draw to assert cultural authority. The pattern is sharpest in the mid-century antagonism between Juan Perón — the self-styled man of the people, garrulous and pointedly anti-intellectual — and Jorge Luis Borges, the cosmopolitan man of letters whom Perón's government shunted in 1946 from the Buenos Aires municipal library to a poultry-and-rabbit inspector's post in a public market. For all that divided them, the two drew on the same inherited vocabulary of gaucho and tango to stake their opposing claims over Argentine culture.^[6]

From the arrabal to the screen

The prestige tango had accumulated by the 1930s is legible in the rise of Argentina's industrial sound cinema, an industry whose early audiences were drawn from the urban working classes and whose content was steeped in tango music and dance alongside popular stage forms such as the sainete and the revue.^[4] Industrial film production began in 1933 with the founding of the studios Argentina Sono Film and Lumiton, whose inaugural features — ¡Tango! and Los tres berretines respectively — ushered in the sound-on-film era.^[5] The tango star Carlos Gardel had already carried the form to the screen in the Spanish-language films Paramount produced between 1931 and 1935, though those were not national productions. Output then expanded with striking speed: the annual tally of films made in the country multiplied roughly twenty-five-fold between 1932 and 1939, and by the end of the decade Argentina stood as the foremost producer of Spanish-language films. Built on a studio system of mass production, stars, and standardized genres, this industry became one of the most popular across Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world, a standing it held into the early 1940s.^[5]

A form claimed on both shores

What began at the margins of the port cities thus moved, across a few decades, toward the center of Argentine cultural life, as the tango passed from the arrabal into the studios, the screen, and the symbolic repertoire of the nation.^[3] Its Río de la Plata origins remained the fixed reference for a form that both Argentina and Uruguay would continue to claim as their own.^[1]