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105 chapter four Elderly Newcomers and the Tango’s Vulnerable Image At the beginning, it was hard to sell my discos [compact disks, CDs] here and there. But with Manolo’s help [an Argentine musician] and the extra money I now make selling them, I finally got into it. Just the other day, I sold thirty-five CDs at a tango party! A guy there [the organizer] was touched by the way I sang, and he came up to my table after the show and said: “Just leave the CDs there, next to the speakers and you’ll see, they will sell out in no time.” And so I did. Now, I always take them along, just in case. . . . You have to try everything to make a living here. bartolo, tango singer Bartolo’s remarks poignantly illustrate the efforts of many Argentine artists, young and old, who creatively utilize their resourceful tango portfolios to make ends meet. Hitherto, when thinking about tango artists, the picture that frequently comes to mind is that of a sensual young tango dancer who enjoys a seemingly flamboyant, if not bountiful, life. This portrait is typical of tango postcards colored by clichés of seductive femme fatales and irresistible “Valentinos.” This study revealed a more complex universe of tango actors embedded in multiple social webs. Among the tango newcomers I initially met during fieldwork, I purposely chose to explore the lives of those who in spite of their advanced age (sixty-five years old, on average) had also arrived in the United States in recent decades. Bartolo, a seasoned tango singer in his midsixties, had left his family in Buenos Aires in early 2000, with promises of bringing them to the United States within a few months. I met Bartolo for a first interview on a warm spring day in May 2001, when we got together for coffee close to the restaurant where he was performing at the time. I had heard him singing 106 • More Than Two to Tango there a few nights earlier and decided to invite him to be part of my research project. He gladly accepted, although he would not allow me to buy his compact disk and, instead, gave it to me for free. As a proper caballero (gentleman), he would not take money easily from a fellow Argentine —a struggling graduate student at the time—willing to lend a sympathetic ear to his plights. My informal follow-up encounters with Bartolo later on helped me gain a fresh perspective on the purpose of my research study. As a social scientist eager to decipher the efforts of Argentine performers to succeed overseas, Bartolo’s tango trajectory reinforced my commitment to providing an in-depth analysis of the social determinants of immigrants’ accomplishments , and disenchantments, as they pursued their careers in the United States. At a time when many of his contemporaries in Argentina were already harvesting the fruits of their long-standing artistic careers, Bartolo had boldly embarked on a hope-filled journey abroad, lured by the growing popularity of the tango in one of the global cities in the North. For the most part, elderly newcomers in this study did not enjoy the advantage of having a US permanent resident visa at the time of the interview and—in contrast with their younger colleagues—they were not dancers but rather musicians and singers. Unlike the senior citizens representing the old tango guard, who came to the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s, the prevalence of these two long-standing groups of tango immigrants (younger and older) in New York City has been characterized, until recently, by the relative absence of middle-aged milongueros, a phenomenon known as “the generation gap” (Windhausen 1999). Notwithstanding the salience of elderly tango performers in this study, they have remained almost invisible in the United States, as it is often assumed that the young and the healthy are more prone to migrate. In the following pages, I present the life trajectories of a few of these older tango interpreters, who conspicuously epitomize the hazardous experiences many artists endure overseas. The process of migration is itself a network-building enterprise in which different roles are played before, during, and after the settlement process. Distinctions between different types of networks are as important as understanding the changing roles they play in immigrants’ lives over time (Portes and Bach 1985). This chapter reveals how the social webs that helped some of my elderly respondents arrive...

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