Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas

6. Tango Tourism and the Political Economy of Space

   6 Tango Tourism and the Political Economy of Space How often do you travel to a foreign country and run into seven friends in the same bar? . . . But by now on this fifth visit, I have grown accustomed to bumping into people who I not only recognized, but who I know personally from all parts of the world. —Tammy McClure, “Buenos Aires: Birth of a Phenomenon” What happened to tango? What happened to the elegance of the dance? To the overcrowded milongas stuffed with locals? Tango Disneyland. Where the locals can no longer afford to ride. —Deby Novitz, “The Secret Society” The tango sentiment may be universal, but tango in its essence is a Porteño [from Buenos Aires] product. —Pablo Rodríguez, professional tango dancer and milonga organizer For years, tango has been Argentina’s most prized attraction, to the point that tourism representatives often equate its promotion with that of Buenos Aires and Argentina at large. From shows to souvenirs to classes to tango-themed dinners, tours, and festivals, tango is now at the core of Buenos Aires’s growth as a global city and is estimated as a 450 million per year industry (OIC 2007). These figures do not account for the purchase of classes, clothing, shoes, and other ancillary items or for a vibrant and diverse tango service industry that is developing apace and   Tango Tourism and the Political Economy of Space that includes, but is not limited to, tango taxi dancers who escort dancers to milongas (tango dance venues), street performers, and a new generation of teachers incorporating the latest fads, whether Eastern mysticism or kinetic physics. Today, it is not uncommon for tango tourists to outnumber locals in some of the most “traditional” milongas during the peak tourist season and for inquiries about the location of tango shoe stores to be the numberone query fielded by tourist kiosk attendants. Yet despite tango’s rapidly growing dominance of Buenos Aires’s tourism economy, there is a dearth of studies of tango tourism with an eye to its effects on issues of urban development and cultural equity in Buenos Aires’s creative economy.1 In 2006, the government of Buenos Aires recognized this void when it launched its first study of tango’s economic impact (OIC 2007). However, while the study recognizes the vibrancy of this sector and its dependence on international consumers, who pay more than three out of every four dollars that comes into the sector, it leaves untouched the larger social and political implications of tango tourism. As a result, the growing recognition of tango’s role in fueling Buenos Aires’s growth has yielded little insight into how this development is affecting the participation of local residents in the tango economic circuit, or about the ensuing inequalities and distinctions around who is more or less able to participate and profit from this booming industry. The global exchanges and networks that are sustained and created through tango and the consideration of which citizens are included in them and which are excluded have also remained unexamined. This chapter looks into these questions, adding to the literature of tango while contributing to wider debates about the role of culture in contemporary urban development. Indeed, despite tango’s notoriety in Argentina’s national imaginary, the literature on contemporary tango is surprisingly scant. Scholars have documented the transformation of tango from a despised cultural practice of working classes to a symbol of Argentinean national identity, showing the aestheticization that tango underwent in the 1920s and 1930s as part of state-sponsored modernization (Garramuño 2004). Writers have also tracked tango’s African roots, unearthing the role played by Afro-Argentinean composers and performers of the genre (R. Thompson 2005); others, performance scholars in particular, have focused on tango’s sensual aesthetics, by probing into the gendered, sexual, and racial identities that are regularly expressed and contested through the dance (J. Taylor 1998; Savigliano 1995). In fiction, Tango Tourism and the Political Economy of Space   a plethora of works continue to reify tango’s sensuality through “coming of age” stories of global citizens, mostly women, undergoing personal transformations through tango dancing. Typical of this genre are Kiss and Tango: Diary of a Dancehall Seductress, a Sex and the City–style story of a bored thirty-year-old advertising executive who turns to tango to find meaning and transcendence in her life (Palmer 2006...