Milonga and the Birth of Tango

The milonga and the tango arose together along the Río de la Plata, the wide estuary on whose southwestern bank Buenos Aires grew into Argentina's capital and largest city.^[1] Throughout the nineteenth century that port drew millions of immigrants from Europe and elsewhere, forming a dense melting pot whose speech and street culture mingled many peoples.^[2] Commentators have long held that tango means for Buenos Aires what jazz means for New Orleans, a foundational emblem of civic identity rather than mere diversion.^[3] Within that mythology the milonga functions as the elder form, the rhythmic and lyrical ancestor from which the danced tango eventually separated.^[4]

Long before the partnered dance existed, the milonga belonged to the countryside as the music of the gaucho, the mounted herdsman of the Argentine pampa.^[5] Oral histories picture these hardy, mate-drinking riders strumming the guitar with daggers thrust into coin-studded belts, wholly at ease in the wide and idyllic grassland.^[6] Their songs conjured a vanishing rural world, the dream of an independent Creole life rooted in open space rather than in the swelling city.^[7] That pastoral inheritance furnished tango with only one strand of a tangled genealogy, which scholars trace to African-Argentine dance, the Cuban habanera, gaucho country song, and the criminal underworld of the turn-of-the-century capital.^[8]

The gaucho and his music were gradually domesticated as the modern Argentine state consolidated around 1880.^[9] Through the Conquista del Desierto the government threw the pampa open to fencing and divided it into vast estates for aristocrats and modest plots for the European newcomers then arriving in force.^[10] In the same years Buenos Aires was federalized and separated from its surrounding province, its boundaries widened to take in outlying towns such as Belgrano and Flores.^[11] Stripped of the open range, the near-nomadic gauchos drifted toward the poorest fringes of the capital, where their adjustment to city life proved hard and many slid into petty crime.^[12] There they earned a new label, compadrito, a word that marked the swaggering and aggressive bearing of the countryman remade as urban tough.^[13]

In those marginal districts the tango took form as a dance, arising mostly on street corners and inside the city's brothels.^[14] The meeting of the compadritos with the African-Argentine population of the outskirts is generally credited as the spark that converted rhythm and song into a partnered embrace.^[15] Musically the early tango advanced in a quick two-four time, its syncopated bass bounding beneath the tune, as heard in the famous El choclo of that era.^[16] The protagonist of the lyrics changed in step, since the 1905 Creole tango La morocha already celebrated a porteño, a dweller of the port city, where the open-range gaucho had stood before.^[17]

From the outset the tango bore a strong emotional charge, a yearning that observers have likened to the Portuguese saudade, a longing for days long gone or for better days yet to come.^[18] This nostalgic temper, perceptible even within the brisk early tangos, would harden into the genre's enduring reputation as a music of memory and loss.^[19] Tango accordingly became many things at once, a dance and a song, a poetry and a brand, an emblem of the Argentine nation and a vivid vessel of nostalgia.^[20]

As it matured the form split, much as jazz had, into successive schools that historians group as the Old Guard, the New Guard, and a later avant-garde.^[21] The Old Guard upheld the creole tango, the New Guard gathered the tango-milonga and the tango-cancion, and the New Tango of Astor Piazzolla recast the genre across the latter half of the twentieth century.^[22] Jorge Luis Borges, blinded in midlife and rebuilding the city from memory, exalted the milonga together with the classic creole tango while disdaining the sentimental tango-cancion that followed.^[23] His allegiance encoded a deeper dispute over rival images of the Argentine past, the rural and heroic set against the urban and nostalgic.^[24] Even so, Borges esteemed the danced tango's verse, reportedly forecasting that its lyrics would outlive much of the poetry blessed by the literary establishment.^[25]

The tongue of the early tango was lunfardo, the argot of immigrants and the urban margins, long scorned as a criminal vocabulary yet now interpreted as an authentic stamp of identity.^[26] That linguistic root underlines how completely the genre was entangled from the beginning with politics, exile, immigration, and the wider arts of the city.^[27] Few popular cultural forms have proved so deeply interdisciplinary, operating simultaneously as dance, as song, as poetry, and as a window onto history.^[28] The milonga's persistence within this current is itself telling, for the tango it sired owes its nature to improvisation and to a long discipline of adaptation and renewal.^[29]

Tango's standing at home declined across roughly four decades of disenchantment between 1950 and 1990, until a touring stage spectacle reversed the slide.^[30] The revue Tango Argentino, which appeared in Paris in 1983 and in Brooklyn in 1985, revived Western fascination and moved Argentina and Uruguay to reclaim a heritage they had allowed to lapse.^[31] That reappropriation reached its formal summit in 2009, when tango was entered on UNESCO's register of intangible world heritage.^[32] The worldwide diffusion that ensued planted social-dance communities far from the Río de la Plata, among them the Philadelphia tango scene, which expanded steadily from 1991 to 2006 around an unusual cohort of older, well-educated, and often foreign-born dancers.^[33] In such places the danced milonga and the tango descended from it endure not as relics but as living practice, renewed by the same hybridization that first produced them.^[34]