Intersecting Tango: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900-1930 »

Adriana J. Bergero is professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of El debate politico: Modernidad, poder y disidencia en Yo el Supremo de Augusto Roa Bastos; Haciendo camino: Pactos de la escritura en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges; and co-editor, with Fernando Reati, of Memoria colectiva y políticas de olvido: Argentina y Uruguay, 1970-1990.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Buenos Aires erupted from its colonial past as a city in its own right, expressing a unique and vibrant cultural identity.

Intersecting Tango engages the city at this key moment, exploring the sweeping changes of 1900-1930 to capture this culture in motion through which Buenos Aires transformed itself into a modern, cosmopolitan city.  

Taking the reader through a dazzling array of sites, sources, and events, Bergero conveys the city in all its complexity.  Drawing on architecture and gendered spaces, photography, newspaper columns, schoolbooks, “high” and “low” literature, private letters, advertising, fashion, and popular music, she illuminates a range of urban social geographies inhabited by the city's defining classes and groups. In mining this vast material, Bergero traces the profound change in social fabric by which these diverse identities evolved, through the processes of modernization and its many dislocations, into a new national identity capable of embodying modernity. 

In her interdisciplinary study of urban development and cultural encounters with modernity, Bergero leads the reader through the city's emergence, collecting her investigations around the many economic, social, and gender issues remarkably conveyed by the tango, the defining icon of Buenos Aires. Multifaceted and original, Intersecting Tango is as rich and captivating as the dance itself.

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
Urban Ceremonies and Social Distances
The Jockey Club     13
Palaces and Residences     26
Parks, Plazas, and Calle Florida     41
Passages, Public Spaces, and Cultural Crossings     51
Theaters and Cafes     77
Conventillos     90
Munecas Bravas of Buenos Aires
Paradigms and Deviations     115
Work, the Body, and Dislocations of Identity     144
Chains of Desire     153
Palaces of Temptation     183
Beauties, Femmes Fatales, Tramps, Vamps, and Vampires     195
Rags and Rejects     207
Reaffirming Old Paradigms     217
Gender and Politics
New Alliances-Old Causes     261
Putting Out Fires     281
Fractured Identities and Economic Dislocation     302
The Garconieres and the Sex of Power     318
In-between Identities, Peripheral Sexualities     327
The Weak, the Violent, and the Tearful     352
Barrios and Melodramas: Of Love and Consternation     369
Conclusion     415
Notes     435
References     441
Index     457