Tango and resistance

My friend Javier Lewkowicz posted "un tanguito" or a "little tango" on social media calling his followers to go out on 23rd April to demonstrate against Millei's plans on public education in #Argentina.

Music and resistance projects have always been my favourites to work on and I wish I had done more of it in the past. I am also a a ferocious dancer of Argentine tango. And I was not half surprised to discover years ago, that tango was indeed political. Here is how...

Tango and politics

From Carlos Gardel to Astor Piazzolla, from its "classic" version to its reinvention, everyone knows tango, more or less closely. It is commonly identified as sexy and dramatic, coded and stylised. Less well known is the fact that this music that dances, popular in every sense of the word, has a history that is intertwined with the political history of Argentina.

by Jean-Louis Mingalon

Tango and politics

Tango is a dance, of course. It is also music, song and poetry. It is commonly attributed, more or less vaguely, to an Argentinian origin, but, as we watch couples drawing in space a kind of choreography of sublimated desire, we rarely ask ourselves how it came about, and even less if its history is in any way linked to politics. Yet it is both the product of a certain kind of politics and, since its birth, the partner in an often stormy relationship with the representatives of the powers that be.

It all began around 1870. The two countries on the banks of the Río de la Plata, Argentina and Uruguay, were still largely rural regions, and their governments decided to pursue a policy of modernisation and settlement - which involved a massive call for foreign labour. Immigrants, mainly men from Italy and Spain, tried their luck in large numbers. In 1870, Buenos Aires had a population of 250,000. Over three decades, 1.5 million immigrants arrived, disembarking from ships that docked in the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. They crammed together on the outskirts of the city in squalid collective dwellings known as conventillos: around a main courtyard with a water supply, small rooms of around ten square metres, reminiscent of nuns' cells. This insalubrious housing, where promiscuity and prostitution reigned, existed until the early 1920s.

Although they formed communities, they also came into contact with other languages, other music and other instruments, in the conventillos or at work, for example. They came across a black population that danced to its own music, even though it was dwindling due to high infant mortality, epidemics (cholera, yellow fever) and wars, in which blacks, mulattos and Amerindians were often used as cannon fodder. Blacks, the descendants of slaves who had long been arriving on the Río de la Plata at the rate of 100,000 a year, still represented a third of the Argentine population in the mid-19th century (0.4% today), and the same was true of Uruguay (around 8% today). The newcomers also came into contact with the poorest section of the criollos, the name given to the descendants of the Spanish colonists, and the immigrants from the interior, the gauchos and payadores, the itinerant singers who were champions of public improvised poetic jousting (the payada), first in the countryside and then in the city, and who are still present today in Latin America as interpreters of folklore.

Cuban habanera, African candombe (whose contribution will long be overlooked ( 1 )), Italian song and echoes of the songs of the payadores will all merge into a single musical and choreographic melting pot that will transform them. Gradually, as dance music, the tango, like the milonga, an older genre with a livelier rhythm, and then the waltz, became established in academias (dance schools), gambling dens and brothels. In the courtyards of the conventillos, or even in the street with the barrel organs, you could sometimes hear a piano or a trio of guitar, violin and flute (soon to be replaced by the bandoneon, which had arrived from Germany and was to become the emblematic instrument of the tango). It was here that the male proletariat of the Río de la Plata, of all origins, came to relax in the evenings, usually dancing with the only women they met: prostitutes were thus the first tango dancers.

At first, women musicians and singers were obliged to dress up as men in order to perform in public, but gradually they began to play a very important role in tango singing and playing, and today they occupy a fundamental position that nobody disputes any more. For some time now, they have even been the driving force behind an evolution in the guide-guided relationship in the dance... But at the time, it was not uncommon to see two men dancing together, learning new steps and practising for the evening dance floor, a practice that continued for a long time, even when it was forbidden.

So it's hardly surprising that in the early twentieth century, tango - an urban creation of the poor, with a particularly macho streak and far removed from the defence of bourgeois virtues - was viewed by the ruling elites with curiosity, suspicion and even concern. In the end, it gave the impression that it was good for everyone, because it could be assumed that the most deprived members of the population were not thinking about anything else while they danced. As a result, it became fashionable, and spread fairly quickly beyond its original haunts to appeal to some of the middle and upper classes. This was exactly the opposite in France, which became tango's second home at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The craze began one evening in 1911 in a salon of Parisian high society. A young Argentinian writer, Ricardo Güiraldes, was invited to show what the dance was all about. He embraces a woman in the audience and sketches a few steps. This provoked a sort of collective hysteria, with everyone clamouring to learn. As word of the evening spread around Paris, what came to be known as "tangomania" spread first to high society and then gradually to all strata of the population, making the dancers from Río de la Plata ( 2 ) the kings of Parisian life, albeit a little heckled by a few jealous xenophobes. The most virulent attacks against this "accursed dance" came from conservative circles, particularly Catholics, from the Archbishop of Paris, Mgr Amette, to priests shouting from the pulpit. Le Figaro (10 January 1914) reported the Bishop of Dijon's condemnation of this "fashion borrowed from the cowherds of Buenos Aires", "in the name of human dignity, morality and religion". On the other side of the argument, the strongest defence came from the poet and novelist Jean Richepin (1849-1926), a member of the Académie Fran?aise. He gave a speech under the dome of the Institute in which he brilliantly swept aside the main criticisms levelled at this dance in France: its foreign and popular origins, its inappropriate and even erotic nature... President Raymond Poincaré certainly didn't pout when he found himself with his wife among the tango dancers at the Institut Agronomique ball. And twenty years later, Charles de Gaulle, still a lieutenant-colonel, would learn to tango at Georges and Rosy's famous class in Paris. In the end, the Church lost the battle, but the "accursed dance" only became acceptable in a much watered-down form, simplified as a salon tango or musette. The neutralisation process lasted until the 1980s when, thanks to shows like Tango Argentino, French audiences (re)discovered how to dance in the Río de la Plata.

While France continued to adopt tango after the Great War, and it conquered much of the world from the 1920s onwards - Mustapha Kemal Atatürk danced it at his inauguration ceremony as President of the Turkish Republic in 1923. In Argentina, particularly during the dictatorships, including the civil and military dictatorship of the "infamous decade" (1930-1943), it was censored. Above all because of the very language it often sang, lunfardo. This slang of thugs and the poor, which was becoming increasingly prevalent in tango poetry, made a mockery of official Spanish, the language of national unity, even though it mixed words from just about everywhere, and demonstrated a "hybridisation" contrary to the image that the rulers wanted to project of the national identity.

Tango was also censored for its sometimes "seditious" lyrics. Cambalache (which can be translated as "bric-a-brac" or more directly as "mess"), by the great Enrique Santos Discépolo, is a fine example of an ironic description of the political climate of the time ( 3 ). At the same time, tango canción was triumphing, with Carlos Gardel, who died in 1935, as its emblematic figure. It shifted the emphasis from sexuality to sentimentality, while the rhythm of conductor Juan D'Arienzo's orchestra filled the then neglected dancefloors. And so began what was to be called the Golden Age.

Tango was soon promoted to the status of national music by a military officer, President Juan Perón, who was elected in 1946 by the working classes and pursued a social policy on their behalf. Perón, who occasionally quoted tangos in his speeches and encouraged the opening of dance halls in every district, understood the importance of this music and dance for the entire population, for whom it was not only entertainment, but also a means of expression, even a way of life. And it was no coincidence that poets of the time, such as Homero Manzi and Discépolo, who were concerned with social progress, were strong supporters of his policies before the regime hardened. The coup d'état in 1955, which overthrew Perón, signalled the eclipse of the tango for a time: the militarists of the time were no longer in favour of the tango.

The arrival of nuevo tango with Astor Piazzolla was taking shape - more to be listened to than danced to. Some orchestras continued to play, such as that of pianist and composer Osvaldo Pugliese (1905-1995), a communist militant who was the first to organise his profession into a trade union, and who spent time in prison before, during and after Perón... " Every time there was a change of government, we wondered whether Pugliese would manage to work for twenty days. If he did, it was undoubtedly a democratic government ( 4 )". From 1955 to 1983, the country went through a terrible period of instability and violence, particularly under the military dictatorship that took over in 1976 and lasted until 1983: thirty thousand people "disappeared" and fifteen thousand were shot. Musicians went into exile: guitarist and singer Juan Cedrón, who like many others (Juan José Mosalini, Gustavo Beytelmann, etc.) had gone to France, invented with his Cuarteto a music full of melancholy and resistance, sung to committed lyrics by authors such as Julio Huasi, Raúl González Tu?ón, Juan Gelman and Luis Alposta. For a long time, this group was an artistic ally of the French left, and the tango of exiles enjoyed a strong media and public following.

In the early 2000s, the "Buenos Aires brand" was created, with tango as its logo. In 2009, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) included tango in its list of Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Once impure, vulgar and over-fed with foreign contributions, it has come to symbolise the national identity, and is now a major tourist attraction.

Jean-Louis Mingalon

Journalist and film-maker, co-author of Dictionnaire passionné du tango, Seuil, Paris, 2015.

( 1 ) See Juan Carlos Cáceres, Tango negro, éditions du Jasmin, Clichy, 2013.

( 2 ) Hence the expression "rioplatense tango", which is more accurate than the commonly used "Argentine tango", since it takes account of Uruguay's importance in the field.

( 3 ) Cf. "Cambalache", Chants de lutte et révolution.

( 4 ) See Fabrice Hatem's personal website and La Salida, le magazine du tango argentin, No. 43, Paris, April-May 2005.