More Than Two to Tango: Argentine Tango Immigrants in New York City

Notes

225 Notes Introduction 1. Argentine, Argentinian, and Argentinean are three of the most common terms, usually used interchangeably, to refer to both individuals and products that come from Argentina. In order to be consistent, I use the terms “Argentine” (singular) and “Argentines ” (plural) throughout this text. 2. Exceptions to this trend are seen in the English-language pieces by Freidenberg and Masuelli (1998) and Marshall (1988). Furthermore, beginning in 2001, an incipient attention began to be paid to a new wave of disadvantaged economic emigrants as a result of Argentina’s third major emigration phase (Marrow 2007). 3. The journeys and migratory paths of educated middle-class Argentine émigrés are seen in works by Aruj (2004), Barón and colleagues (1995), Boccanera (1999), Melamed (2002), Viñas (1998), Wilman-Navarro and Davidziuk (2006), and Zuccotti (1987). For example, Viñas offers a fascinating historical and literary account of some remarkable middle- and upper-class Argentine visitors to the United States, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that included politicians, artists, writers, and so forth. 4. The Spanish words criollo (singular) and criollos (plural) were originally utilized to name those who were born in the colonies but were of Spanish origin. Through time, this term became popularized to identify individuals of mixed heritage, including Amerindians. Today, the word criollo is commonly translated into creole in English , although the latter is utilized to categorize many different ethnic groups in the United States and is not related to any colonial system in particular. 5. Carlos C. Groppa is an Argentine illustrator and writer living in the United States who, for more than fifteen years now, has edited the magazine Tango Reporter in Los Angeles. His book The Tango in the United States: A History (2004) helps demystify the notion of the Argentine tango as a fairly recent phenomenon in the United States. Beginning with a chronicle of the first tangomania in the 1910s, Groppa’s book exam- 226 • Notes ines the tango’s dancing boost in this country, first launched by Vernon and Irene Castle and followed by the figures of Rudolph Valentino, Arthur Murray, and Xavier Cugat, who popularized the genre in the 1920s and 1930s. 6. The romanticized ethos of this new tangomania was represented in the film The Tango Lesson (1997), directed by Sally Potter, in which the ultimate postcolonial agenda is expressed via subtle forms of sexual tourism, spiced with psychological drama and constructed cultural sensitivity (Savigliano 2005). 7. A revival of the show Tango Argentino played at an open-air venue to an audience of more than twenty thousand in Buenos Aires’ downtown area in February 2011 (Reportango 2011). 8. Bourdieu (1986) initially coined the term “social capital” in the 1970s for the purpose of qualifying the power of social webs in granting access to valuable assets. According to Bourdieu, social capital is conceived as a fungible reserve that, in tandem with other forms of capital, can allow social mobility while reproducing social inequalities . 9. Coleman’s rational model sees social capital as a means to sustain group cohesion and social order versus Bourdieu’s theory of practice, which conceives the distribution of social capital as a means for maintaining the inequalities of the capitalist system (Edwards, Franklin, and Holland 2006). Chapter 1. The Tango’s Social History in a White-Imagined Argentina The poem excerpt at the beginning of this chapter is from “Para dormir a un negrito ” (Lullaby for a Little Black Child) by the Argentine poet Germán Berdiales (1896–1975). The translation is mine from Berdiales 2006. 1. “Los esclavos negros: ¿Por qué se extinguieron?” Todo es Historia (cover page), Buenos Aires (2000), 393. 2. The candombe was born out of Batu African drumming, which was brought by African slaves to Uruguay and Argentina. 3. As Farris Thompson (2005: 10) observes, “That most tangueros today are white no more hides the original—and continuing—black presence than Elvis Presley conceals the heritage of Robert Johnson, or Benny Goodman masks the contributions of Fletcher ‘Smack’ Henderson and Count Basie.” 4. CONADEP’s Nunca Más (Never Again, 1984) reported that the detenidosdesaparecidos (Argentines who were detained or disappeared) were reflected in all occupational groups. Factory employees and manual workers were among 30 percent of the disappeared, a number that was much lower among the exiled. Intellectuals, professionals , and artists mostly composed the latter group. Mexico, Paris, and New York were all stops on these émigrés’ journeys during this period (1976–83). 5. A...