Intersecting Tangos: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900–1930 (review)

Adriana Bergero tackles the question of how cultural expression, in both popular and erudite forms, is integral with the social, political and economic dynamics of a particular place and time. More specifically, Bergero literally "maps" the cultural terrain of Buenos Aires between 1900 and 1930—a period that many devotees of the city continue to regard as fundamental and formative of both its geography and its character.

In both respects, this is an ambitious study. It succeeds largely because Bergero is measured and consistent in gauging cultural works—fiction, poetry, essays, tango lyrics and especially sainetes, a heterogeneous form of popular theatre—against the physical transformation of the city. Bergero's success also owes to her creativity and flourish, which results in both an innovative perspective on cultural expression and a vivid, energetic style.

A third, essential ingredient to this outcome is Richard Young's highly sensitive translation. Bergero's mastery of myriad sources, combined with her original phrasing, necessary use of neologisms, and occasional syntactic imprecision, results in meaning that is sometimes not intuitively clear. Young does two things to bring Bergero's insights to full fruition. First, he manages always to find just the right word or phrase to convey the sense of Bergero's concepts and perspectives. Second, he delivers Bergero's neologisms with as much clarity as possible. At the handful of junctures when he surmises that many readers will need extra help, he adds a concise endnote.

The dimension of Intersecting Tangos that most illuminates and delights is the concrete, tangible illustration of a cultural explosion in a city undergoing frenetic physical and demographic change. Bergero adeptly demonstrates a mastery of Foucault-inspired cultural theory, but she does it to verse, music, images and movement. In her chapter on "Theatres and Cafés," for example, Bergero describes the immediacy of a groundbreaking sainete, Los inquilinos by Nemesio Trejo. In addition to incorporating references to the recently-occurred conventillo (tenement) strike, Bergero notes, the performance featured a familiar tango, accompanied by the audience, the rewritten lyrics of which later "circulated along the porous channels of popular culture" (80). She then effectively contrasts the messy immediacy of popular genres to Borges's "sociophobia" (85), which methodically places the vulgarity of immigrant Argentina at a remove, and to Arlt's "urban imaginaries of social fragmentation" (86), which illustrate the alienation inherent in Buenos Aires's public spaces.

The book gives such treatment to an impressive array of intersections between cultural expression and urban milieus. Bergero's study embraces, among other things: the linguistic cacophony of the conventillo; the uncertain, exploited identities of workers in factories designed without regard to the human body's limits; the ambivalence of consumer desire personified by shop girls and culminating in the "gendered spaces" of grand department stores (187); the "vampiritic/parasitic" dynamics of the garçonière (dance hall for bachelors), whose interiors were ". . . ergonomically disposed to reaffirm social spaces in the sexuality of the city and to accommodate sexual fantasies in a private darkness . . ." (325); and the "social laterality," or dynamics of collective identity, born of Buenos Aires's working class barrios.

Much of the book's raw material is not strictly new, nor necessarily specific to Buenos Aires. Bergero's analysis of the personal and cultural impact of the Argentine garment industry on a generation of immigrant daughters, for example, is consistent with the experience of urban American Jews. (My Newark, New Jersey grandmother never learned to operate a sewing machine because her four older sisters, all sweatshop veterans, were adamant that she be spared.) Readers intrigued by the book's examination of department store consumerism and its creation of a distinctive "shop girl" class of porteñas can turn to O. Henry's "The Trimmed Lamp" for a contemporaneous New York treatment of a similar phenomenon, or to Steve Martin's Shop Girl for a contemporary Los Angeles version.

Bergero's approach to these phenomena, however, is as...