Intersecting Tango: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900-1930
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 examines 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...
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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 ixIntroduction 1Urban Ceremonies and Social DistancesThe Jockey Club 13Palaces and Residences 26Parks, Plazas, and Calle Florida 41Passages, Public Spaces, and Cultural Crossings 51Theaters and Cafes 77Conventillos 90Munecas Bravas of Buenos AiresParadigms and Deviations 115Work, the Body, and Dislocations of Identity 144Chains of Desire 153Palaces of Temptation 183Beauties, Femmes Fatales, Tramps, Vamps, and Vampires 195Rags and Rejects 207Reaffirming Old Paradigms 217Gender and PoliticsNew Alliances-Old Causes 261Putting Out Fires 281Fractured Identities and Economic Dislocation 302The Garconieres and the Sex of Power 318In-between Identities, Peripheral Sexualities 327The Weak, the Violent, and the Tearful 352Barrios and Melodramas: Of Love and Consternation 369Conclusion 415Notes 435References 441Index 457
