"The tango started life as a symptom of a city with growing pains. A hybrid of sailor's song and Italian dance tune played on a German accordion, the genre was born in the ports of Buenos Aires around 1880 when the city was still a frontier town and more than half of its inhabitants were new arrivals from the poorest parts of Europe. Over the next forty years, the populationof Buenos Aires grew rapidly, from 500,000 to three million, as men and women flocked to "make America". A whole Spanish village had made the journey. But the dream of easy money proved elusive for many of them. Tango became the anthem of a generation of homesick and sometimes desperate immigrants. Usually set in Buenos Aires, the songs always yearned for a happier past.'"
The above extract is taken from Bad Times In Buenos Aires by Miranda France (Orion).
Folklore
"The south," Buenos Aires street wisdom observes, "begins the other side of Avenida Rivadavia." Translated to London, this is something like saying "Scotland begins at Highbury and Islington".
On one level this is simple city snobbery; BA's northern suburbs are the posh, sophisticated areas that look like Paris, while the southern suburbs are more distinctively Argentine, whether old-fashioned San Telmo with its street-corner bars and courtyard houses or colourful La Boca, home of Boca Juniors, Maradona's old football club.
On another level, and especially in the Argentine writer Jorge Luuís Borges's short story El Sur, the divide reflects two quite different strands in Argentina's cultural inheritance. The story, a masterpiece of concision, concerns a Buenos Aires librarian. His paternal grandfather was a German immigrant, one of many from Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the man affects to identify with his 'criollo' side, his maternal ancestors of Spanish descent, living in Argentina since before independence. One day he tires of BA life and takes off for his ancestral cattle ranch in the plains to the south, and perhaps - the story ends inconclusively - dies in a romantic knife fight with a yokel.
At its most polarised, the divide Borges is drawing is between gauchos, the wild cowboys of the pampas, manly and brave, but given to lawlessness, and porteños, the cultivated but effete citizens of Buenos Aires, many of whom are of recent immigrant stock. One president of Argentina based a political tract on the contrast; called Civilisation and Barbarism, it described his political opponents (not without some cause) - as provincial gangsters, opposed to the 'urban' benefits of progress and industry that he claimed to represent. It was perhaps not a brilliant ploy, as many Argentines would identify to some extent with both parts of the cultural legacy.
Indeed there has always been a lively interplay between the two; Argentina's national epic, a paean to gaucho bravery entitled Martín Fierro, has long been required reading for the country's numerous litterati. Perhaps more surprisingly, tango, the national dance strongly associated with the brothels and later the ballrooms of the capital city, supposedly has its origins in the pampas, as a stylised knife-fight performed by two men.
Tango, which started off as coarsely, authentically Argentinean, got exported to Paris, and was then reimported as a fashionable European dance, demonstrates Argentina's ambiguous relationship with outside influences - on the one hand proud of its own culture, but on the other not wanting to seem unsophisticated. The patron saint and high priest of tango, Carlos Gardel, was known as the "zorzal criollo" - "our home-grown songbird". He was, of course, born in France.
In neighbouring countries the two sides of this dialogue - pride in national culture and desire to keep up with the Europeans - contribute to a reputation for arrogance, spawning a rash of anti-Argentine jokes, one of them suggesting that suicidal Argentines jump off their own egos.
Of course, things move on, and gauchos are no more a daily part of the Argentine identity than cowboys are in New York, but the conflict between the native and rural and the foreign and urban can still be seen in Argentine pop. In the late 90s two of the most popular acts were Fito Páez, a sophisticated singer-songwriter sounding like the Pet Shop Boys produced by Phil Spector, and Los Pericos, an unpolished reggae-influenced rock band singing distinctively Argentinean lyrics.
There is still one area where the gaucho-porteño divide can be clearly seen; the national drinks. Out on the street in the grand boulevards of Buenos Aires, people sip European espressos, but at home they drink mate, a native tea-like herb, sipped through a metal straw from a hollowed-out squash [or: pumpkin]. And if they're honest, they prefer the mate.
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