Bailar para re-existir. Fuego en el 23 como agenciamiento de la condición migrante en Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract

Between 2015 and 2016, Hay Fuego en el 23 was born in Buenos Aires Argentina, a salsa brava party made and frequented by Colombian migrants, and from other countries of the region, based in Buenos Aires Argentina. This work analyzes this party, understanding it as a cultural practice whose performance contributed to the re-distribution of the sensible (Yepes 2012; Ráncière 2009), that is, to the reordering and resignification of the senses of identity, the body, migration, and life itself, as well as the place that "latino" migrants occupy in the cultural and politic dynamics of the Argentine Nation. Adopting the affective approach from the heuristic model of Sarah Ahmed (2004), this work describes and analyzes the migratory experience of the frequent participants of Fuego, taking up the ethnographic work that the author developed in the year of the party’s existence and complementing it with ethnographic interviews, in search of narrative reconstruction, its meanings and emotionality. Finally, it shows that the legendary salsa party Hay Fuego en el 23, far from being a simple space for leisure and catharsis, became a cultural space that evidenced and transformed the racist, xenophobic and multiculturalist power relations that oppress the Latin American migrant in Buenos Aires, constituting itself as a tactic of agency and re-existence (De Certau, 2000; Achinte 2013).