Intersecting Tango: cultural geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900-1930 (review)

Intersecting Tango is an ambitious attempt to convey the toil and turmoil of fin-de-siécle Buenos Aires through a textual analysis of newspapers, popular literature, theatre productions, and tango lyrics. Bergero, a Spanish and Portuguese linguist, resolves to "map Buenos Aires, attempting to decipher the city's dramatic changes at the dawn of the 20th century." She tells us that, "this study is about maps – both urban maps and the cognitive and affective maps that diasporas, exiles and cities confuse and reassemble" (2). Bergero's geographic analysis falls flat, as she never engages geographic theory dealing with gender, class, territoriality, the production of space, or patterns of Latin American urbanism. While one cannot reasonably expect Bergero to be conversant in all of these sub-disciplines, the sub-title of the book and her stated goal imply a general familiarity. Geographers will need to bring their own theoretical frameworks to make sense of her tome. Those not familiar with the relative locations (which Bergero calls "proxemic distances") of the neighborhoods, streets, and physical geography of Buenos Aires in the early 20^th century would do well to read with a historical map in hand, as there are no maps in the book! This begs the question as to whether or not there can be aspatial cultural and urban geographies.

If Bergero fails to provide a geographic framework for exploring the changing cultural landscape of Buenos Aires, she is more successful in her examination of how the "modernization of Buenos Aires produced profound identiary dislocations of all kinds"(5). Her approach is centered on the workings of "imaginaries": a term that incorporates "urban geography, sensorial geography, cultural studies, gender studies, and social history"(6). In addition to the aforementioned, Bergero's imaginaries are discursive nodes that attempt to control social meaning. Throughout the book we are introduced to imaginaries that are alternatively: stabilizing and destabilizing, paternalistic and misogynistic, dominant and subversive, urban, deterministic, sanctioning, coherent, social, predetermined, sexist, market-oriented, conservative, progressive, working-class, proletarian, elite, self-affirming of modernity, diastolic, twentieth-century, etc. There are so many "imaginaries" that the term was quickly emptied of meaning and distracted from the often poignant exegesis of primary documents.

Despite the absence of a cohesive theoretical framework, Bergero is clearly in command of the literature of the era and uses it adroitly to string together her narrative. The use of scripts from plays and popular theatre, tango lyrics, magazine articles, poems, novels, short stories, and newspapers provides us with a window into the vibrant cultural life of fin-de-siécle Buenos Aires. Bergero's reading of the city through these various texts leaves no doubt as to the pace and extent of social and urban changes, dislocations, and conflicts. It is through extensive exposure to primary texts that we gain access to the running battles between capital and labor, the problems of accepting immigrants into society, the systematic oppression of women, and differences in the urban experience created by patterns of uneven development.

As someone who is familiar with Buenos Aires in its historical and contemporary contexts, I found Bergero's exploration of this tumultuous time in the city's history to be useful but too unstructured. One of the elements of her narrative that I would like to have had more information about was who the authors of these various texts were. The book is predicated upon the idea that textual analysis is the most direct way to access the lived experience of porteños. This may be true, but we are never given any insight into the people who were creating these texts or who their audiences were. Bergero's prodigious command of the literature would have benefited from a stronger editorial hand and a cohesive theoretical framework rather than catchwords.

Intersecting Tangos will alternatively frustrate and serve as a resource for urban scholars who...