Tango is a manifestation that emerged in the 19th century from the fusion of Afro-American, Creole, and European immigration contributions.
The Argentinean and Uruguayan tradition of tango, now known worldwide, originated in the Río de la Plata basin, among the working classes of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
In this region, where European immigrants, descendants of African slaves, and Creole peoples mix, there was a blend of customs, beliefs, and rituals that transformed into a specific cultural identity.
Among the most characteristic expressions of this identity are the music, dance, and poetry of tango, which are both an embodiment and a vehicle of diversity and cultural dialogue.
The tango proper begins with the Guardia Vieja. All scholars recognize this stage and refer to it in the same way, although there are differences regarding the moment that marks the beginning and end of this stage. The National Academy of Tango places the period between 1895 and 1925 and divides it into two sub-stages, a first moment of tango’s emergence and a second moment of formalization, when it becomes socially established.
Several pairs of men dance the tango in the Río de la Plata. The dance between men and the inversion of roles was a characteristic of tango from its beginnings, which has led to diverse opinions about the reasons. The film Tango by Carlos Saura features a beautiful dance scene between men, performed by Julio Bocca and Carlos Rivarola. The contemporary tango queer movement reclaims these original practices to propose a dance without fixed roles.
After several decades of musical, lyrical, and cultural combinations, already in the last two decades of the 19th century, the tango had left behind the initial forms of the old tango (a rural milonga evolved with touches of habanera, candombe, Andalusian tango, and zarzuela), and increasingly adopted a defined original form, with its own identity, entering the stage known as the Guardia Vieja. To reflect this originality, it began to be defined by the musicians themselves as “tango criollo.”
Coincidentally, in the last decade of the 19th century, tango scores began to appear. In 1898, the first tango with a registered author, “El Entrerriano,” by the Afro-Porteño Rosendo Mendizábal, was printed, considered by many scholars as the first proper tango. A year earlier, in 1897, the new genre was designated for the first time as “tango,” in the zarzuela “Justicia Criolla” by Ezequiel Soria. In 1899, the violinist Ernesto Ponzio composed “Don Juan,” and in 1903, Ángel Villoldo composed “El Choclo.”
By then, the port cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo were bustling with hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers from diverse nations and speakers of various languages, primarily men, who established relationships with the local populations of Spanish colonization descent, with multiple origins and mixtures of indigenous and African ancestry, in which women played a crucial role. Montevideo, which experienced its peak immigration before Buenos Aires, grew from 100,000 inhabitants in 1865 to 300,000 inhabitants in 1908. Buenos Aires, on the other hand, ceased to be the “big village” of 1870, with a population of less than 200,000 people, to become one of the largest cities in the world by 1914, with over 1,500,000 inhabitants.
In that unique moment of multiethnic and multicultural interaction, almost unparalleled in the world, the Rio de la Plata tango emerged, between the mid-1890s and the late 1910s. The tango broke away from the milonga and acquired a distinct personality. Tangos such as “El Entrerriano” and “Don Juan,” which established the three-part structure that characterized tangos of that time, composers like Ángel Villoldo, author of “El Choclo” and “La Morocha,” with a defined style in his songs that carried lyrics for the first time, typical orchestras like those of Vicente Greco and Juan Maglio (Pacho), and the introduction of the German bandoneon, at the end of the stage, clearly defined the birth of the tango proper.
Suárez and Necochea, a historic corner of the La Boca neighborhood associated with the origins of tango, where several tango cafés of the early 20th century were concentrated.
The tango was reaching broader audiences by entering theater shows, cafes, tents, circuses, dance halls, and cabarets. Following this evolution, the original tango canyengue was transformed to “clean it up,” softening or eliminating directly the cuts and breaks, and began to be danced in the streets and courtyards of tenements until, in the 1920s, without the stigma of a prohibited dance, it began to dominate the so-called ballroom tango, also known as social tango or smooth tango.
