Intersecting Tango: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900–1930

Abstract

Literary critic Adriana Bergero has set herself an extremely ambitious goal in the book Intersecting Tango: to reveal the overlapping “maps” of modernity that defined the culture of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. Her approach recalls David William Foster’s study of a more contemporary period of porteño culture in Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production. Like Foster, Bergero is interested in the city not just as a location or backdrop but as a space that constitutes subjectivities. She proposes to explore this rapidly changing city through its “imaginaries, through the theoretical convergence of urban geography, sensorial geography, cultural studies, gender studies, and social history” (p. 6). The result is a wide-ranging and somewhat unwieldy work that nonetheless reveals to the reader a fascinating variety of social texts.Intersecting Tango contains 20 chapters divided into three parts: Urban Ceremonies and Social Distances, Muñecas Bravas of Buenos Aires, and Gender and Politics. The logic of the overall structure is not entirely clear, in particular the distinction between the second and third sections. Indeed, since gender analysis is central to most of the book one might have expected it to be highlighted in the title and more fully substantiated in the introduction. There is a certain lack of signposting throughout the text, leaving the reader with a somewhat impressionistic picture of Bergero’s overall argument.Still, there is a wealth of rich material here. Individual chapters treat such important cultural themes as the class exclusions built into elite housing design, the gendered messages presented in school textbooks, and fears about failed masculinity as expressed in tango lyrics. Bergero displays an encyclopedic knowledge of the period’s cultural sources: novels, plays, architecture, tango lyrics, newspaper columns, advertisements, private letters, popular magazines, fashion styles, and so on. Her command of “low” cultural genres such as tango and sainete (theatrical farce) is particularly impressive, and her lengthy quotations will introduce readers to little-known sources from the period.Bergero is at her best when presenting and interpreting these texts. Individual chapters juxtapose different kinds of sources, connecting discourses in advertising or public health to themes played out in popular music and theater. Bergero’s literary and popular sources shed light on changing labor relations, housing struggles, sexual politics, and patterns of consumption. For example, the middle chapters of the book explore social and sexual anxieties provoked by women’s increased mobility and autonomy in the big city. Chapter 11 contains rich material about men’s fears surrounding women’s new roles in the workplace. In chapter 12, Bergero reads classified ads for domestic servants for a glimpse of the “enormous number of illegitimate and orphaned children excluded from the metaphor of the nation’s well-formed family” (p. 211).Overall, this is a book written for scholars and specialists. References to historical events and characters are quite abrupt and would likely confuse a reader not already well versed in Argentine history. The prose is often dense and jargon-laden, as in the following interpretation of a text by physician and writer Eduardo Wilde. According to Bergero, Wilde expressed “the semiotics of a claustrophiliac aesthetics, underlying a utopia based on isolation and exclusion” (p. 32). Some awkwardness may stem from problems of translation, as in the assertion that French cuisine was “like a hand in a glove, reinforcing gastronomically the power of the elite’s ranching economy and its vast estates” (p. 21).This book would have limited usefulness in an undergraduate classroom, but it could certainly be used in graduate courses in cultural studies, gender studies, or literary criticism. It will also find a place on the shelves of scholars specializing in Argentine history and culture, who will likely be inspired into new fields of inquiry by its rich source material and suggestive cultural insights.