Tango by Mike Gonzalez Page A

was not to say that the social divisions had in any sense disappeared; the ruling class remained resolutely criollo , of Spanish origin, and held itself physically apart in its well-defined upper-class districts. The children and grandchildren of the immigrants were still to be found in the working-class areas. But their music could be heard, and danced to, everywhere. And more importantly, tango was now also song, expressing nostalgia for a recreated (and romanticized) arrabal and more general existential positions which found their definition in the lunfardo terms that survived into the language – like the omnipresent mufarse – a kind of moping or melancholy reflection which some writers insist is particularly characteristic of Argentines.
    Tango had certainly broken out of the barrio – but it remained at its heart the expression of an urban experience of solitude, of nostalgia and loss.
    Del ciego musicante la música manida ,
    la tonada gangosa de un lejano acordeón
    revive en una estampa borrosa y desvaída
    el alma arrabalera del turbio callejón .
    La muchacha modista que cegó una quimera
    dorada, que no pudo jamás satisfacer ,
    flor que duró tan sólo lo que una primavera
    y pasó como todo lo que no ha de volver .
    Qué profunda tristeza
    tiene la calle sola .
    La música lejana
    solloza una milonga .
    Todo está como entonces ,
    cuando tú eras la novia
    que gustaba los versos ,
    los besos y las rosas . . .
    Yo también como tú me perdí en el camino
    y entre sombras extrañas paseo mi tristeza
    y no le pido cuentas de mi vida al destino ,
    aunque es larga la ruta y ruda la maleza .
    El mismo torbellino nos lleva al mismo puerto ,
    la misma sed de olvido nos une en hermandad .
    Qué lejos nuestras almas del callejón desierto
    donde la vida un día nos vino a despertar .
    The music coming from the blind musician / the seductive tune Of a distant accordion / brings back a blurred and shifting image / the soul of the barrio and the murky alleyway. / The young seamstress blinded by a golden / chimera, that she could never satisfy / a flower that lasted only a single spring / and passed like all things that never will return .
    How deep the sadness / of the empty street / the distant music / Sobs a milonga. / It’s all like it was / when you were the lover / Who enjoyed poetry / kisses and flowers . . . / Like you I got lost on the way / and now I carry my sadness through strange shadows/and I don’t ask fate for explanations of my life / though the road is long and the going tough. / The same storm will carry us to the same harbor /And we are joined by the same yearning to forget .
    (‘Yo también como tú’, Me too, just like you
    â€“ Diego Larriera Varela, 1926)

4 TANGO FINDS ITS VOICE
    TRANSITIONS
    While its wealthier young people were sowing their wild oats in Paris and elsewhere, a restless Buenos Aires was relentlessly moving on. The changes were physical, social and cultural; and it was finding new political forms too. In 1912, the Sáenz Peña Law marked a key moment of transition. The rent strikes in the conventillos in 1907 involved 120,000 people and announced a change in the attitudes of their immigrant inhabitants. The cowering new arrival, fearful of the landlord and his agents and powerless in the face of them, grew taller as the twentieth century began. By now, their insecure status as immigrants was changing; their sons and daughters were citizens of the new Argentina and they and their families now made up a significant majority of the urban population, reaching 50 per cent by 1914.
    By 1914, the total population of Argentina was close to 8 million, 3 million of them immigrants, living mostly in the cities and principally in Buenos Aires. In two decades the number of industrial workers had doubled, and the overwhelming majority of them were foreign immigrants who had arrived in the last two decades of the previous