Several people have requested that I put my thesis up on my blog. The jury is still out on that idea, but here is the one-page summary of Elizabeth's version of tango history. If you are interested in a copy of my thesis, it costs about $15 to make a copy with a front cover. I would be glad to do that and mail one to you. Due to past issues, I will copy it AFTER you have paid me for it :-)

I have taken out the references to make this less academic-feeling, but would be happy to email a bibliography to anyone interested in doing research themselves.

Tango developed out of the dances of the working class African-Argentines, poor European immigrants, and, to some extent, criollo (people of mixed indigenous and Spanish blood) culture, in the late 1800s in Buenos Aires. It developed out of a dance called the milonga, which combined the African-Argentine dance, the candombe, with European couple dances and with Afro-Caribbean dance forms.

The candombe, developed in the Buenos Aires area in the 1800s. After the international slave trade was banned in 1809, the separate African ethnic dance traditions maintained in Argentina gradually merged into a single dance. By the mid-1800s, the candombe was firmly established in the black community in Buenos Aires. Candombe contributed its rhythms and torso and hip movement to the development of tango.

European dances contributed the dance embrace and instrumentation to tango. European couple dances came to Argentina with the original Spanish colonizers as well as with the huge number of immigrants who arrived in the mid- to late- nineteenth century from southern and eastern Europe. Because laws privileged rich landowners, these new immigrants could not buy land easily. Many settled in Buenos Aires, thus creating a distinct subculture that differed from the creole and black mix in the provinces. The new immigrants were mostly men, having left their families back in the old country while they looked for work, which created a great imbalance in the number of men and women living in Buenos Aires. These men lived in collective houses called conventillos in the poor sections of town. The commonly accepted history is that tango was a male dance, developed by these lower-class men dancing together in the conventillos and on street corners.

However, tango did not evolve solely in the streets among male immigrants. It was danced by men and women, recent immigrants and established porteños. Various ethnic groups met in the academias de baile, or dance halls, of the working class neighborhoods in Buenos Aires where people gathered to drink, gamble, and dance. In the 1860s and 1870s, with the importation of new European dances such as the waltz, schottische, and mazurka, a new dance form, the milonga, melded together African and European traditions. The Afro-Cuban habañera, which was the most popular dance at African-Argentine parties in the 1880s, also exerted a strong influence over the rhythm of the new dance.

By 1883, the milonga was very popular dance among the working classes. It introduced the European dance embrace (man and woman touching) into the mixture that already existed, but the rhythms and instruments of the milonga were still African. Depending upon the source, milonga is considered to be either a dance that the poor whites did to imitate and/or mock the candombe of the blacks, or a dance that the black Argentines did to mimic the whites. Popular myth is that the compadritos (or suburban working-class white men) were the people who imitated the candombe and took it to their dance places as the milonga.

The tango began as a slower, smoother version of the milonga. By the mid- to late-1890s, Argentine tango was considered a distinct dance, separate from the milonga and other dance forms. It was mainly performed in poor areas of Buenos Aires, by working class people, and did not hold a widespread appeal elsewhere.

From 1890 to 1917, tango gained a larger audience in Buenos Aires gradually. Popular entertainment aimed at working and middle classes incorporated tango songs and the dance into plays, the circus, etc., and thus spread tango to more people and made it more acceptable. Tango continued to be danced in poor neighborhoods on the tenement patios, but during the 1910s, tango music and dance began to be played at upscale nightclubs in the richer areas of town. Here, a rich young man could develop a taste for tango music and learn to dance it by visiting the dance halls and the brothels of the working class areas. The popularity of tango among upper-class men spread the dance from lower-class brothels to upper-class brothels.

These same young men were sent to Europe on grand tours and brought tango with them, introducing it into the Parisian demimonde in the 1910s. During the ensuing fad for tango, Europeans viewed the dance as a symbol of exotic, Latin sensuality. They also linked it to Argentine national identity. Upper-class Argentines were scandalized that a lower-class, improper dance was connected to their nationality: they did not want to be associated with tango. In 1913, an Argentine observer of the Parisian fashion for tango noted, “ . . . the tango is nothing more than an exotic dance, vaguely sinful, that [Europeans] dance for its sensual, perverted and slightly barbaric context”. The Europeans simplified and codified tango’s steps, and adapted it to be more like European couple dances, so that it easier to dance, less provocative, but still exotic.

After tango won followers in Europe, it became more widely accepted among the middle and upper classes in Argentina. By the 1920s, tango was popular among most social classes in Argentina. The middle- and upper-classes adopted the more Europeanized styling as “appropriate.” The corresponding association of tango with Europe, rather than with the Argentine underclasses, made it acceptable for the more moneyed classes of people in Buenos Aires to indulge in tango. The support of upper-class male dancers in Argentina also allowed the middle class to adopt tango with less of a lower-class stigma attached to it.

The late 1930s and the 1940s were the Golden Era of tango. The upswing in the economy after the Depression drew more people to dance halls. World War II isolated Argentina from the rest of the world, which contributed to the growing popularity of the home-grown tango. An elderly interviewee told me that “tango was danced in all the clubs . . . and when Carnival came around, the clubs would argue over orchestras [who would get to play where]”. So many people danced tango that each neighborhood in Buenos Aires developed its own particular dance style.

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