Between The Gaucho and Tango

FIGURE 1: Mario Zavattaro created this playful caricature of Argentine singer-songwriter A
ngel
Villoldo for the cover of Carbonada criolla (ca. 1906), a collection of popular Villoldo tunes
arranged for piano. Though considered a pioneering early lyricist of the urban tango, Villoldo
is depicted here in gaucho costume, reminding viewers of his origins as a mock rural payador
whose song repertoire focused heavily on tales about the countryside. When combined with the
tangos scattered at his feet, including the contemporary hits El Choclo and El Portenito, this
rustic portrait of Villoldo serves to illustrate the hybrid nature of urban popular culture at the
turn of the century, bringing two very different icons of modern Argentine national identitythe
gaucho and the tangointo temporary unison. Courtesy of the University of Miami Libraries,
Coral Gables, Florida.
Between the Gaucho and the Tango:
Popular Songs and the Shifting Landscape of Modern
Argentine Identity, 18951915
BRIAN BOCKELMAN
IN ONE OF ARGENTINAS MOST COLORFUL historical episodes, populist president Juan
Domingo Peron began his term in 1946 by promoting literary lion Jorge Luis
Borges from his comfortable post at the Buenos Aires municipal library to the po-
sition of poultry and rabbit inspector in a nearby public market. Whether or not
Peron himself issued the order remains unclear, but the event sparked lifelong en-
mity between the two prominent Argentinesno doubt felt more acutely by Borges,
who had a sharp pen but no other means of retaliation.
1
In subsequent decades,
Peron and Borges came to represent very different visions of Argentine culture:
Peron the self-styled man of the people, macho, witty, garrulous, but anti-intellec-
tual; Borges the cultivated man of letters, detached, cosmopolitan, encyclopedic. The
conict between themmore of a stewing feud than a direct assaulthas long ap-
peared symptomatic of the polarized political and cultural views that gripped Ar-
gentina after World War II.
2
Yet looking back, it now seems obvious that these two otherwise antagonistic
gures actually shared a common cultural practice that went unnoticed by their con-
temporaries. Peron and Borges both drew on the same storehouse of national sym-
bols connected to the gauchoArgentinas fabled cowboyand the tangothe
popular dance and songto assert their mastery over Argentine culture. Although
they used this cultural inheritance in different ways, each reached the pinnacle of
I would like to thank Tom Skidmore, Ana Cara, Diego Armus, Cotten Seiler, and the anonymous re-
viewers for the AHR for their comments on previous drafts of this article. Emma Kuby of the University
of WisconsinWhitewater deserves special credit for helping me conceptualize and rene the project.
I also owe Doug Cope of Brown University a debt of gratitude for his insistence that I look more closely
at the popular dimensions of Argentine cultural history, a small but powerful suggestion that eventually
propelled me to Berlin. In Germany, Dr. Gregor Wolff and the staff at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut
kindly opened their archives to an unexpected stranger and made my study of the Lehmann-Nitsche
collection possible. Finally, I would like to send my thanks and appreciation to my former colleagues
at Dickinson College, where this work was rst presented in the unique atmosphere of the Department
of History evening colloquium.
1
If I used his name in a poem it would all fall to pieces, Borges once said of his foe. Quoted in
V. S. Naipaul, The Return of Eva Peron (New York, 1981), 121. The story of Borgess promotion has
been recounted numerous times. See Emir Rodr guez Monegal, Borges: Una biograf a literaria (Mexico
City, 1987), 348353; and Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life (New York, 2004), 291295.
2
For example, Naipaul, The Return of Eva Peron, 99138; John King, Civilisation and Barbarism:
The Impact of Europe on Argentina, History Today 34, no. 8 (1984): 1621; and Toma s Eloy Mart nez,
La Argentina de Borges y Peron, in Mart nez, El sueno argentino (Buenos Aires, 1999), 5778.
577
fame by wedding an avant-garde approach to his chosen craftpolitics for Peron and
literature for Borgeswith a keen deployment of popular Argentine motifs that had
been in gestation since the turn of the century. Borges wrote mysteriously of ur-
banites lost in gaucho fantasies and tough characters from the outskirts of Buenos
Aires who lived and died by the tango and the knife. Peron peppered his political
speeches with phrases culled from popular tangos and old gauchesque poems such
as Jose Herna ndezs Mart n Fierro (1872), giving him an ability to communicate to
working-class audiences [that] his rivals lacked.
3
Moreover, both men were equally
at home with the two sets of popular symbols, passing back and forth between the
imagery of the gaucho and that of the tango as the occasion demanded.
The fact that such bitter enemies and supposed cultural adversaries employed the
same symbolic materials indicates just how pervasive these popular traditions had
become as elements of Argentine national identity by the middle of the twentieth
century. Of course, neither Peron nor Borges made the symbols of the gaucho and
the tango fashionable; they simply knew how to rework their cultural heritage in new
and compelling ways. Both Peron (b. 1895) and Borges (b. 1899) came of age during
a dizzying period of social change and cultural innovation that catapulted elements
of Argentine popular culture to the center of a struggle to redene national char-
acteristics and identities. Despite a strong ofcial campaign after 1880 to modernize
Argentina by throwing the countrys borders open to foreign inuences and emu-
lating European high culture, by 1900 the gaucho and the tango had both begun to
emergealbeit at different ratesas alternative symbols of the nation.
4
Over the
following decades, each gave imaginative shape to a prolonged search by artists,
musicians, writers, lmmakers, and their audiences for a more authentic or primitive
Argentina than the one envisioned by the ruling liberal elite.
5
By the time Peron and
Borges reached national prominence, some thirty or forty years of intense cultural
3
Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 19461976
(Cambridge, 1988), 2324. On Borges, see Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge (London,
1993), 2034.
4
A vast literature exists on the (often conicted) Europeanizing cultural project of the Argentine
liberal elite, who controlled the political system between 1880 and 1916. Useful starting points include
Jose Luis Romero, El desarrollo de las ideas argentinas del siglo XX (Mexico City, 1965), 946; Jeffrey
D. Needell, Optimism and Melancholy: Elite Response to the n de sie `cle bonaerense, Journal of Latin
American Studies 31, no. 3 (1999): 551588; Michael Johns, The Antinomies of Ruling Class Culture:
The Buenos Aires Elite, 18801910, Journal of Historical Sociology 6, no. 1 (1993): 74101; and Hebe
Noem Campanella, La generacion del 80: Su inuencia en la vida cultural argentina (Buenos Aires, 1983),
159205.
5
The still-fragmented subject of the early-twentieth-century search for national, popular, bohemian,
and avant-garde alternatives to liberal culture can be surveyed, though not exhausted, through Eduardo
Jose Ca rdenas and Carlos Manuel Paya , El primer nacionalismo argentino en Manuel Galvez y Ricardo
Rojas (Buenos Aires, 1978); Richard W. Slatta, The Gaucho in Argentinas Quest for National Iden-
tity, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 12, no. 1 (1985): 99122; Jean[e] H. DeLaney, Imag-
ining El Ser Argentino: Cultural Nationalism and Romantic Concepts of Nationhood in Early Twentieth-
Century Argentina, Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no. 3 (2002): 625658; Eduardo P. Archetti,
Masculinity, Primitivism, and Power: Gaucho, Tango, and the Shaping of Argentine National Identity,
in William E. French and Katherine Elaine Bliss, eds., Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America
since Independence (Lanham, Md., 2007), 212229; Brian Scott Bockelman, Prophets of the Arrabal:
Remaking Argentine Culture in Buenos Aires, 18801930 (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2004); Jorge
B. Rivera, Los bohemios (Buenos Aires, 1971); Juan Suriano, Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and
Politics in Buenos Aires, 18901910 (Oakland, Calif., 2010); Leandro H. Gutie rrez and Luis Alberto
Romero, Sectores populares, cultura y pol tica: Buenos Aires en la entreguerra (Buenos Aires, 1995); and
Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad perife rica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930 (Buenos Aires, 1988).
578 Brian Bockelman
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2011
production and debate had changed the gaucho and the tango from marginal cu-
riosities into full-blown showpieces of Argentine identity.
This shift is doubly intriguing for the historian. To begin with, it was hardly unique
to Argentina. The transformation of the gaucho and the tango into Argentine icons
belongs to a broader transatlantic history of national identity reformation in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the United States, for example, the
cowboy and jazz followed a similarly overlapping trajectory from obscurity to ce-
lebrity in this period. With them, the answer to Cre`vecoeurs famous question What
is an American? would never again be the same.
6
Likewise, in Russia a late-nine-
teenth-century surge in popular literature saw the old Cossack and the humble
Great Russian begin to displace the tsar and the Orthodox Church as leading sym-
bols of national identity. The decentering of these older, ofcial emblems of Rus-
sianness continued after 1900 as the cruel song and neo-gypsy music of the cities
thrust hybrid, marginal customs into the limelight of modern Russian culture.
7
Thus,
while the gaucho and the tango would themselves come to be seen as consummately
Argentine, the historical processes that propelled them together to the center of
national self-denition around 1900 were not specic to Argentina. As Thomas C.
Holt observes, the social and economic transformations of the world capitalist sys-
tem at the dawn of the twentieth century formed a common template for reimagining
the nation on both sides of the Atlantic.
8
Although many historians now trace the origins of nationalism to ethnic or ver-
nacular traditions rather than modern socioeconomic developments, this later re-
shufing of national identity cannot be understood without considering the impact
of modernization and urbanization on the social and cultural life of the nation-state.
9
In particular, the expanded mobility, literacy, and leisure time of the lower and mid-
dle classes challenged the stability of older national cultures and the founding myths
that political elites had developed during earlier independence movements (the
6
J. Hector St. John [de Cre `vecoeur], Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1782), 45113. On
the cowboy, popular culture, and American identity, see William W. Savage, Jr., The Cowboy Hero: His
Image in American History and Culture (Norman, Okla., 1979); and Bill C. Malone and David Stricklin,
Southern Music/American Music, rev. ed. (Lexington, Ky., 2003), 2930. Comparisons of the cowboy and
gaucho as n-de-sie `cle cultural icons include Richard W. Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas (New Haven,
Conn., 1990), 191218; and Zeese Papanikolas, The Cowboy and the Gaucho, in Melody Graulich and
Stephen Tatum, eds., Reading The Virginian in the New West (Lincoln, Neb., 2003), 175197. On jazz
as an expression of American culture and identity, see Lawrence W. Levine, Jazz and American Cul-
ture, Journal of American Folklore 102, no. 403 (1989): 622; and Donna M. Cassidy, Painting the Musical
City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 19101940 (Washington, D.C., 1997).
7
Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 18611917 (1985;
repr., Evanston, Ill., 2003), 174176, 214217, 245; Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertain-
ment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, 1992), 1215. See also Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, The Cossack
Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology (Madison, Wis., 1992).
8
Thomas C. Holt, The First New Nations, in Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and
Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, eds., Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003),
xi.
9
On the debate between modernists, perennialists, primordialists, and ethno-symbolists
over the roots of modern nationalism, see Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford,
1999), 327. Most students of Latin American history adhere to the modernist camp. See Nicola Miller,
The Historiography of Nationalism and National Identity in Latin America, Nations and Nationalism
12, no. 2 (2006): 201221. As an approximate denition, I take modernization to be a complex, locally
inected mix of rapid economic development, technological innovation and standardization, mass de-
mographic realignment, and pressures to rationalize, secularize, and expand both political represen-
tation and cultural consumption.
Between the Gaucho and the Tango 579
United States, Latin America), republican revolutions (France, Spain, parts of East-
ern Europe), or wars of unication (Germany, Italy).
10
Meanwhile, capital cities and
large metropolitan centers on either side of the Atlantic became sites of unprece-
dented cultural innovation and amalgamation, where new plebeian arts were
forged out of the intersection of urban and rural (and sometimes foreign) customs
and the spread of technology and commerce into cultural production.
11
These rapid
social and cultural changes prompted renewed quests to dene the nation alongside
new political projects, both of which had to account for an increasingly urbanized
and proletarianized population that was beginning to assert its own national visions
through popular music, theater, and the penny press. In this context, popular ex-
pressions of a nations cultural vitality or authenticity offered dynamic alternatives
to the patriotic symbols and bourgeois ideals of citizenship long promoted by schools
and other ofcial cultural institutions.
12
The Cup Tie at the Crystal Palace last year
was more interesting than the Jubilee pageant on its way to St. Pauls, mused one
British journalist in 1898. Across the pond, George M. Cohan venerated the Stars
and Stripes with a 1906 song originally titled Youre a Grand Old Raga playful
wink, in part, to the ragtime craze of the day.
13
What makes this transition all the more intriguingand challengingfor the
historian is the fact that the new popular culture put forward multiple, seemingly
incongruent symbols of the nation at the same time. How could both the rural gaucho
of old and the novel urban idiom of the tango become more representative of Ar-
gentine identity in the early twentieth century? Asking this unconventional question
not only goes against the grain of Argentine historiography, which has largely kept
the two histories apart; it also raises the broader interpretive problem of how to
explain the effects of modernization on the heterogeneous symbolism of national
identities, not just in Argentina but in all nation-states. Too often rural and urban
national icons are studied in isolationjust as the cultural histories of the gaucho
10
The best comparative survey of the early history of nationalism and the subsequent dislocations
caused by modernization is E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth,
Reality (Cambridge, 1990), 14100, 109110. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Re-
ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1991), 47111; and, for a case study, Kirsten
Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gar-
tenlaube, 18531900 (Lincoln, Neb., 1998).
11
Hobsbawm dubs the rise of this new urban popular culture the most signicant cultural devel-
opment of the twentieth century; see E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 18701914 (New York, 1987),
236, 242. More detailed studies of the intersection of consumption, spectacle, and popular culture in
turn-of-the-century cities include Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-
de-Sie `cle Paris (Berkeley, Calif., 1998); Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996);
and William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Commerce and Culture in New York (New York, 1992),
esp. 6991. For Latin America, see James Alex Garza, The Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime, and Vice
in Porrian Mexico City (Lincoln, Neb., 2007); and Adriana J. Bergero, Intersecting Tango: Cultural Ge-
ographies of Buenos Aires, 19001930 (Pittsburgh, 2008).
12
Tim Edensor theorizes but does not adequately historicize this shift in National Identity, Popular
Culture, and Everyday Life (New York, 2002), vi35.
13
Ernest Ensor, The Football Madness, Contemporary Review 74, no. 5 (1898): 751. On Cohan,
see Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley (New York, 1990), 31. Reecting on this transition in Amer-
ican cultural history, Richard Slatta observes that the cowboy has supplanted the yeoman farmer as
the foremost symbol of the nations mythical past; Cowboys of the Americas, 191192. See also Wilbur
Zelinsky, Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1988), 2068. For a brief French counterpoint, see Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over
Cultural Identity, 19001945 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 711.
580 Brian Bockelman
and the tango have been told separately, so too those of the cowboy and jazz.
14
The
result is a bifurcated view of how national identities changed in the new century, with
one narrative suggesting the primacy of a backward-looking invention of tradition
and the other stressing the creation of new urban cultural forms to replace outdated
rural traditions.
15
But neither interpretation alone tells the whole story. In Argen-
tina, the turn of the century was a time of reinventing old traditions like the heroic
gaucho and creating new ones such as the steamy tangoperplexingly parallel yet
divergent responses to the local experience of modernity. As elsewhere, the process
of cultural modernization followed many paths at oncethink spokes of a wheel or
voices in a fuguerather than traveling along a single, linear path from old to new
or from new to an imagined old.
16
Thus what historians need is a basis for analyzing the relative signicance of
multiple and disparate national icons, so that we do not isolateand therefore ex-
aggeratethe story that any one of them has to tell about how nations respond
culturally to modernization and urbanization. The cultural turn in historical stud-
ies has produced outstanding work on the divergent meanings that people of dif-
ferent social backgrounds attribute to the same hegemonic national symbol over
time.
17
But what do we do when the symbols are themselves numerous and radically
different from one another in imagery, meanings, and uses? Two complementary
strategiesone empirical and one conceptualcan help solve this problem. The rst
is to recognize the utility of popular song as a source for examining the many shifts
and tensions in the expression of national identity, both across time and at a specic
historical moment. The second is to bring fundamentally dissimilar national icons
into a unied historical analysis by translating them into a common conceptual reg-
ister or interpretive framework. An effective technique for doing this is to spatialize
each symbol by situating it in the larger cultural landscape it comes from and rep-
resents. Thanks to the territorial emphasis of the modern nation-state and the close
historical connection between national identity and landscape imagery, national
icons often evoke particular regions or localities that possess special signicance for
14
The few exceptions typically focus on the performance of jazz music in Western settings, sometimes
by entertainers attired as cowboys. See, for instance, William W. Savage, Jr., Singing Cowboys and All
That Jazz: A Short History of Popular Music in Oklahoma (Norman, Okla., 1983); and David W. Stowe,
Jazz in the West: Cultural Frontier and Region during the Swing Era, Western Historical Quarterly 23,
no. 1 (1992): 5373.
15
Compare the different treatments of the cultural impact of modernization in Eric Hobsbawm and
Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York, 1983); and Eugen Weber, Peasants into
Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 18701914 (Stanford, Calif., 1976).
16
Frank E. Manuel traces the longstanding dialectic of the wheel (cycle) and the line (progress) as
rival views of historical time in Shapes of Philosophical History (Stanford, Calif., 1965). In an equally
stimulating excursus, E. H. Gombrich fashions a post-Hegelian image of cultural history as a wheel from
the hub of which radiate eight spokes; see his In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1969), 910. Carl
E. Schorske, whose works abound in musical metaphors, makes an analogy between cultural modernism
and a discordant symphony in Fin-de-Sie `cle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980), 34. Such
books might be protably reread in light of our current ambivalence toward the idea of modernization
as a linear process.
17
Examples include D. A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of GuadalupeImage and Tradition
across Five Centuries (Cambridge, 2001); Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American
Icon (New York, 2004); and Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism
in France, 17891880 (Cambridge, 1981). For more on the analysis of hegemonic but contested national
symbols, see Michael E. Geisler, ed., National Symbols, Fractured Identities: Contesting the National Nar-
rative (Middlebury, Vt., 2005), xiiixlii.
the country as a whole.
18
Rather than an exact social portrait, each of these cultural
landscapes is a selective reading of the visual environment that a group of peoplein
this case a nationstruggles over as a means of self-identication.
19
By converting
otherwise idiosyncratic popular symbols such as the gaucho and the tango into the
standard conceptual currency of the cultural landscape, it becomes possible to map
their interactions and conicts as they competed to redene national identity from
below during an era of rapid change.
HISTORIANS HAVE LONG RECOGNIZED THE VALUE of song lyrics for the study of national
identity and culture. When Merle Curti appealed to his colleagues in 1937 to con-
sider the dime novel a valuable historical source, he took it for granted that popular
songs had already received that recognition. As later scholars have discovered, this
empirical focus is especially useful for analyzing cultural change from the late nine-
teenth century on, when music became a key site of creative struggle between local-
regional folk traditions, classical and modernist appropriations, commercial pres-
sures, and ofcial nation-building projects.
20
Thanks to their succinctness and easy
transmission in oral, written, and recorded forms (a distinct advantage over plays and
18
Technically speaking, these icons are synecdoches for the cultural landscapes they inhabit and
symbolize. Some national icons easily evoke their home. The American hillbilly calls to mind the im-
poverished backwoods of Appalachia and the Ozarks, while the bandeirante summons the underdevel-
oped sertao of the Brazilian interior. Other cultural landscapes are harder to detect behind their cor-
responding symbols. Apple pie, a cherished U.S. national icon born in New England, today evokes the
Midwest heartland, while Marianne, the female embodiment of republican France, alternately sug-
gests the barricades of Paris or, more imaginatively still, a classical republic, the allegorical home of the
modern French nation-state. See Harkins, Hillbilly, 5, 1314, 47; Richard M. Morse, ed., The Bandei-
rantes: The Historical Role of the Brazilian Pathnders (New York, 1965), 36, 1018, 2831; Mary P.
Ryan, Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women and Men through American History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006),
6164, 8894; Raymond Sokolov, Fading Feast: A Compendium of Disappearing American Regional Foods
(Boston, 1998), 1315; Ann V. Millard and Jorge Chapa, eds., Apple Pie and Enchiladas: Latino New-
comers to the Rural Midwest (Austin, Tex., 2004), 24; and Agulhon, Marianne into Battle, esp. 1122,
3842. On the broader signicance of landscape to national identity, see Anthony D. Smith, National
Identity (London, 1991), 1516, 2223; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995), 15;
Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United
States (Cambridge, 1993), 38, 243; and Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life,
3768.
19
As Raymond Williams put it, On the actual settlements, which in the real history have been
astonishingly varied, powerful feelings have gathered and have been generalised; Williams, The Country
and the City (New York, 1973), 1. This approach differs from that employed by landscape theorists to
analyze how human culture shapes ordinary environments. Here I am more interested in what Joe l
Bonnemaison calls the space of belief in common values structured by iconography . . . and geosym-
bols, through which the members of a community perceive themselves as connected, even though they
may read different meanings into the same suggestive landscape. Compare Paul Groth and Todd W.
Bressi, eds., Understanding Ordinary Landscapes (New Haven, Conn., 1997), 121; and Joe l Bonne-
maison, Culture and Space: Conceiving a New Cultural Geography (London, 2005), 4047.
20
Merle Curti, Dime Novels and the American Tradition, Yale Review 26, no. 4 (1937): 761. The
multiple intersections between music (classical, folk, commercial, patriotic, etc.) and national identity
after 1870 are examined in Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 429451; Ernest Gellner, Nations and
Nationalism (Oxford, 1983), 5860; Barbara L. Kelly, ed., French Music, Culture, and National Identity,
18701939 (Rochester, N.Y., 2008); David E. Schneider, Bartok, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition:
Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality (Berkeley, Calif., 2006); Malone and Strick-
lin, Southern Music/American Music; Philip V. Bohlman, LandscapeRegionNationReich: Ger-
man Folk Song in the Nexus of National Identity, in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music
and German National Identity (Chicago, 2002), 105127; and Hermano Vianna, The Mystery of Samba:
Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999).
582 Brian Bockelman
other popular arts of the pre-television era), song lyrics allow us to chart the everyday
juxtaposition of diverse national symbols in a single but widespread cultural medium.
They also permit close analysis of changing representations within a genre known
for its reliance on formulas.
21
Nowhere else in the turn-of-the-century cultural realm
is the dynamic between continuity and change so constant and traceable. Rooted in
convention but open to innovation, popular songs let us listen in on the divergent
strains of identity reformation as they competed for attention in the unprecedented
cultural crucible of the modern city.
Songs were indeed crucial to the remaking of Argentine identity in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. At the vanguard of the creative elaboration of
both the gaucho and the tango as national symbols stood a little-studied group of
singer-songwriters called urban payadores. Despite their rustic trappings and folk
heritage, these modern troubadours were a mainstay of Argentine urban popular
culture until the late 1910s. From small theaters, clubs, music halls, and cafe s to
circus tents and street festivals, the payadores performed at popular venues all over
Buenos Aires, the nations rapidly expanding capital and major Atlantic port city.
Equally as important, both for their contemporaries and for us, they frequently pub-
lished compilations of their latest songs in cheap, sparsely illustrated editions that
could be purchased at newsstands and kiosks around Buenos Aires, La Plata, and
other nearby cities as early as 1885.
22
The typical payador songbook was thirty-two
pages long and consisted of multiple lyrics organized around a common urban theme
or the life of a popular gaucho hero. Unlike sheet music, which was also published
in Argentina at the time, these booklets rarely contained musical scores or notations.
In their focus on legendary rural stories and contemporary urban curiosities, they
more closely resembled nineteenth-century American dime novelsonly in this case
the narratives were rendered in song verse, not prose. Hundreds of different titles
appeared by 1920, and the most sought-after went through multiple editions in rapid
succession.
To the historians delight, many of these pages survive today in the extensive but
still underexplored Lehmann-Nitsche archive at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut
in Berlin, which houses more than a thousand turn-of-the-century Argentine song-
books.
23
The collection is the creation of German anthropologist Robert Lehmann-
21
Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960; repr., Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 45, 3067.
22
Demand for these materials came from an increasingly literate urban populace. See Adolfo Prieto,
El discurso criollista en la formacion de la Argentina moderna (Buenos Aires, 1988), 2734; and Leandro
H. Gutie rrez and Luis Alberto Romero, Barrio Societies, Libraries, and Culture in the Popular Sectors
of Buenos Aires in the Interwar Period, in Jeremy Adelman, ed., Essays in Argentine Labour History
(Basingstoke, 1992), 217234.
23
The Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut is Europes largest library focused on Latin America. For more
on the institutes extensive Argentine holdings, see Reinhard Liehr, El fondo Quesada en el Instituto
Ibero-Americano de Berlin, Latin American Research Review 18, no. 2 (1983): 125133; and the Papers
and Manuscripts link at http://www.iai.spk-berlin.de/en/library.html. On the Lehmann-Nitsche collec-
tion itself, see Cristina Lisi and Jose Morales-Saravia, La Biblioteca Criolla del Fondo Lehmann-
Nitsche en el Instituto Ibero-Americano de Berlin, Caravelle, no. 47 (1986): 4149. Previous studies
using the archive include Prieto, El discurso criollista en la formacion de la Argentina moderna; Olga
Ferna ndez Latour de Botas, Poes a popular impresa de la Coleccion Lehmann-Nitsche, Cuadernos del
Instituto Nacional de Antropolog a 5 (19641965): 207226; 6 (19661967): 179240; and 7 (19681971):
281325; Carla Rey de Guido and Walter Guido, Cancionero rioplatense, 18801925 (Caracas, 1989);
Gloria Beatriz Chicote, La biblioteca criolla de Robert Lehmann-Nitsche: Topograf a de lectura de la
Argentina de entresiglos, in Beatriz Mariscal and Mar a Teresa Miaja de la Pena, eds., Actas del XV
Nitsche (18721938), who lived in Argentina from 1897 to 1930 and taught at the
University of La Plata. A specialist in indigenous and rural folklore of the R o de
la Plata region, Lehmann-Nitsche also spent decades acquiring popular songbooks,
poetry anthologies, almanacs, and other miscellany sold on the streets of turn-of-
the-century Argentine cities. Though he used these documents only intermittently
in his own work, he amassed an extraordinary number of booklets, some 1,106 of
which survive today.
24
This large corpus of song lyrics and verse is unparalleled as
a source for the examination of urban popular culture in turn-of-the-century Ar-
gentina, giving us a ground-oor view of the payadores as they blended rural and
urban material for the rst time. The sheer quantity of booklets still available for
consultation and the chronological scope of the archiveranging from the late 1880s
to the early 1920s, but concentrated between 1895 and 1915make it the ideal basis
for analyzing the shifting relationship between the gaucho and the tango during the
height of Argentinas modernization era.
While a complete statistical survey of the Lehmann-Nitsche collection remains
to be done, even the most basic quantitative analysis reveals that songs about gauchos
and the countryside still outnumbered those on the city at the turn of the century.
This fact informs the most signicant monograph on the Berlin songbooks to date,
Adolfo Prietos brilliant account of the centrality of rural criollo (creole) discourses
in the formation of modern Argentine identity.
25
In an analysis reminiscent of both
the invention of tradition approach to nationalism and the efforts of cultural his-
torians to explain the diverse social appeal of hegemonic but contested symbols,
Prieto shows how an increasingly urban and multiethnic Argentine populace re-
sponded to the uncertainties of modernization by embracing tales of such gaucho
heroes as Mart n Fierro, Juan Moreira, and Santos Vega. He also expertly explains
why these rural traditions appealed as much to newly arrived immigrants and the
working poor as to the traditional elite. Yet in the process Prieto says little about
the many novel urban elements of turn-of-the-century Argentine popular song. De-
ning criollo customs narrowly as rural, gauchesque traditions, he treats the growing
presence of city subjects and tango songs in the collection as a matter of semantic
contamination rather than a sign of the hybrid nature of creole cultural activity
in the period.
26
This raises a challenge that historians face when using popular songs as a source
for the study of national identity: the need to look beyond aggregate numbers in
Congreso de la Asociacion Internacional de Hispanistas (Mexico City, 2007), 491500; and Mar a Cristina
Parodi-Lisi, Estraticacion de la cultura popular en el R o de la Plata, Hispame rica 17, no. 50 (1988):
3545.
24
This is my own best estimate. The collection has been reorganized several times since it moved
to Berlinfrom boxes to bound volumes to microlm. The changes in location and format have pre-
vented the most capable of researchers from compiling an exhaustive bibliography; the best two are
Prieto, El discurso criollista en la formacion de la Argentina moderna, 195241; and Ferna ndez Latour
de Botas, Poes a popular impresa de la Coleccion Lehmann-Nitsche, 7: 292325. Lehmann-Nitsche
drew sparingly on these materials for his Folklore argentino: Santos Vega (1916; repr., Buenos Aires,
1962), 154209; and Texte aus den La Plata-Gebieten in volkstumlichen Spanisch und Rotwelsch (Leipzig,
1923), originally published under the pseudonym Victor Borde. The latter has been reprinted as Robert
Lehmann-Nitsche, Textos eroticos del R o de la Plata: Ensayo linguistico sobre textos sical pticos de las
regiones del Plata en espanol y lunfardo (Buenos Aires, 1981).
25
Prieto, El discurso criollista en la formacion de la Argentina moderna.
26
Ibid., 6466.
584 Brian Bockelman
search of subtle shifts and overlaps between established and new lyrical subjects. In
particular, we should be wary of judging the character of songs by a majority rule
mentality that leaves out minority strains and uctuations over time. When the ear-
liest tango songs were beginning to appear in the Lehmann-Nitsche collection at the
end of the nineteenth century, urban-themed songbooks amounted to only about 10
percent of the datable total, compared to more than 30 percent on rural gauchesque
subjects. Yet a decade later, city songs had nearly caught up, reaching 22.5 percent
by 1910. Booklets containing tangos likewise increased, eventually making up about
15 percent of all datable songbooks between 1911 and 1915.
27
From these gures,
it seems that even if a revamped rural culture remained dominant, the real growth
area after 1900 was urban song. More broadly, since new lyrical themes often appear
rst within older song traditions, only later emerging into independent existence, too
much focus on quantitative tallying can obscure this kind of signicant cultural in-
novation. Close textual analysis of the Lehmann-Nitsche songbooks is necessary to
see howthe payadores gradually incorporated urban folklore into their standard rural
repertoire, thereby leading the way for the early development of tango lyrics even
as they continued to offer their audiences a steady diet of traditional gauchesque
tunes.
28
POETIC RENDITIONS OF THE ARGENTINE COWBOYS rough existence began to circulate
in the late eighteenth century, eventually giving rise to a distinctive gauchesque
genre in regional literature after independence was secured from Spain in 1816. But
it was only as the nineteenth century came to a close that the gaucho became a truly
national Argentine folk hero, celebrated for his rugged character and simple virtue
in popular culture, high culture, and public ceremony alike. From 1880 on, gaucho
stories proliferated in songs, cheap novels, paintings, plays, andeventuallythe
rst Argentine lms.
29
By the early 1910s, intellectuals in Buenos Aires had redis-
covered Herna ndezs Mart n Fierro, dubbing it the nations greatest epic poem. Soon
27
To arrive at these gures, I limited myself to categorizing the overt contents of 683 datable song-
books, dividing the period from 1891 to 1920 into ve-year intervals. A booklet whose lead story or verse
told a classic gaucho tale (such as Santos Vega or Juan Moreira) or another gaucho narrative or otherwise
identied itself as treating gaucho customs or the pampa landscape was counted as a gaucho/pampa
songbook. The urban songbooks were those that focused on marginal city characters such as the
cannero, compadrito, or atorrante (see below), urban crimes, cons, and spectacles, or some other aspect
of city life such as fashion or contemporary gender relations. Finally, I made a separate tally of booklets
announcing the inclusion of a tango song.
28
Rural payadores existed long before the rise of the urban tango, and some histories claim that the
tango effectively ended the payador tradition. See Marcelino M. Roma n, Itinerario del payador (Buenos
Aires, 1957), 182220. However, most tango historians recognize the urban payadores of the turn of the
century as the lyrical pioneers of what we might call proto-tango songs, distinct from the commercial
tango-cancion that was popular in the interwar years. See, for instance, Blas Matamoro, La ciudad del
tango: Tango historico y sociedad (1969; repr., Buenos Aires, 1983), 1618, 4372; Eduardo Stilman,
Historia del tango (Buenos Aires, 1965), 39; and Jorge B. Rivera, Historias paralelas, in Manuel
Pamp n, ed., La historia del tango, vol. 1: Sus or genes (Buenos Aires, 1976), 14. For a ne sociological
analysis of the tango-cancion, see Dar o Canton, Gardel, a quie n le cantas? (Buenos Aires, 1972).
29
Eduardo Gutie rrezs serialized novel Juan Moreira (1880), which he and Jose Pepino 88 Podesta
adapted into a popular circus pantomime act in 1884, helped spark this trend in Argentine culture. See
Raul H. Castagnino, Sociolog a del teatro argentino (Buenos Aires, 1963), 1740; and John Charles Chas-
teen, National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular Dance (Albuquerque,
2004), 55. On the prehistory, consult Josena Ludmer, El ge nero gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria
after, in 1915, Nobleza gaucha (Gaucho Gallantry) became the rst smash hit of
Argentine cinema, with box ofce receipts surpassing production costs twenty times
over in the rst six months. The image of the gaucho continued to adorn popular
illustrated magazines such as Caras y Caretas well into the 1920s, and even the highly
urbane and Eurocentric avant-garde literati of Buenos Aires (from which Borges
emerged) came to embrace the gaucho as a national symbol. Tellingly, Ricardo Gui-
raldes dedicated his classic 1926 novel Don Segundo Sombra to the gaucho whom
I bear within myself, sacredly, as the monstrance bears the host.
30
Meanwhile, during roughly the same period, the tango emerged from its roots
in the waterfront brothels, bars, and clubs of Buenos Aires and Montevideo to be-
come a characteristic Argentine dance and popular song.
31
While its deeper ethnic
and social origins remain contested, by the early 1910s the tangos popularity had
spread beyond the R o de la Plata to the Argentine interior andin the other di-
rectionto the dance halls of Europe and the United States. For a time it competed
with American jazz for pride of place in a West wracked by world war and searching
for primitive impulses beneath the rubble of civilization. Back in Argentina, the
tango evolved into a mass cultural phenomenon as middle-class acionados san-
itized the dance by eliminating the sexually suggestive elements of its earlier cho-
reography, and as singers developed sentimental lyrical forms of the tango for radio
and records.
32
Mi Noche Triste (My Sad Night), the rst commercial success of
these sung tangos, caused a stir upon its release in 1917, launching former payador
Carlos Gardel and the genre to fame. That same year, director Jose El Negro
Ferreyra screened El tango de la muerte (The Tango of Death), the rst of his many
lms that blended tango themes with tragicomic portraits of everyday life in modern
Buenos Aires.
The importance of the gaucho in Argentine cultural history has long been rec-
ognized; so too that of the tango. Yet historians of Argentina have rarely discussed
the two stories together, despite their interest in the impact of rapid social change
on national customs and symbols at the turn of the century.
33
One reason is the
(Buenos Aires, 1988), 1146; and Augusto Raul Corta zar, Poes a gauchesca argentina: Interpretada con
el aporte de la teor a folklorica (Buenos Aires, 1969), 2137.
30
Ricardo Guiraldes, Don Segundo Sombra, trans. Patricia Owen Steiner (Pittsburgh, 1995), 3. Like-
wise, the major experimental vanguard literary journal of the 1920s was called Mart n Fierro, in honor
of Herna ndezs hero. For the broader cultural details mentioned here, see Tim Barnard, ed., Argentine
Cinema (Toronto, 1986), 146; and Slatta, The Gaucho in Argentinas Quest for National Identity, 106.
31
The origins of the tango are no more Argentine than Uruguayan, but as the dance began to cir-
culate beyond South America, it became intimately associated with Argentine national cultureexcept
in the eyes of the Uruguayans themselves, who continued to lay rightful claim to its inheritance. See
Sheila Werosch and Walter Veneziani, Abran cancha, aca baila un oriental: El tango de los uruguayos
(Montevideo, 2006), 155170.
32
For a recent survey of this sociocultural trajectory, see Jo Baim, Tango: Creation of a Cultural Icon
(Bloomington, Ind., 2007). Most scholars agree that the tango was a dance of hybrid cultural origins,
marrying Cuban, Spanish, African, and local inuences, but debate has always raged about the degree
and specic effects of each input. Once a matter of great controversy, the impact of Afro-Argentine
candombe on the rhythmic structure and the cut and break body movements of the tango is now widely
accepted. See Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots, 1213, 1819, 5170; and George Reid An-
drews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 18001900 (Madison, Wis., 1980), 156167. Donna J. Guy
discusses the later cultural sanitization of the tango in Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution,
Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln, Neb., 1990), 145148.
33
An important exception, written by a historically minded anthropologist, is Archetti, Masculinity,
586 Brian Bockelman
imperfect overlap of chronologies. The gauchos rise from marginal curiosity to ce-
lebrity was more gradual than that of the tango, stretching back in some genres
such as poetryto the mid-nineteenth century. The tango tradition emerged later,
beginning around 1870 with the rise of the milonga (much as ragtime helped fuel
jazz), and then experiencing a more abrupt transformation into a popular symbol in
the rst decade of the twentieth century.
34
Likewise, the consecration of the tango
in Argentine high culture occurred a dozen or so years after the intellectual redis-
covery of the gaucho. Nevertheless, from 1900 on, we nd an increasing juxtaposition
of these two phenomena, beginning in urban popular culture and gradually working
their way up into higher cultural strata. Not only did the gaucho and the tango appear
side by side in the popular songs of the rst decade of the twentieth century, but
theater directors and lmmakers worked interchangeably with the two sets of stories
in the 1910s. Another ten years on, the experimental and socially committed wings
of the Argentine vanguard each made ample if sometimes critical use of this double-
sided symbolic heritage.
35
Seen in retrospect, both the gaucho and the tango took off as popular icons during
the broad turn-of-the-century period, when a long modernization process begun in
the 1870s was reaching its crest and an ideologically liberal but oligarchic political
consensus forged in 1880 was beginning to break down. This was an important tran-
sitional era in Argentine cultural history, as older elite formulations of national iden-
tity as a struggle between two Argentinasone urban, modern, and European, the
other rural, traditional, and autochthonouscame up against new socioeconomic
realities, especially the capitalist development of the pampas and the rapid expansion
of Buenos Aires through immigration.
36
Facing a massive inux of migrants from
Primitivism, and Power, which examines the continued deployment of gaucho imagery and dress in the
tango.
34
Like other scholars, I am leaving aside the various South American songs from the earlier nine-
teenth century that contemporaries referred to as tangosthe tango africano, tango cubano,
tango espanol, tango americano, etc.but which shared little in terms of rhythm or melody with
the later tangos of the R o de la Plata region. See Carlos Vega, Estudios para los or genes del tango
argentino, ed. Coriun Aharonia n (Buenos Aires, 2007), 3850. One way to measure the growing symbolic
importance of the tango at the turn of the century is by observing the rebranding of milongas as tangos,
as happened with the hit Bartolo ten a una auta between 1900 and 1903. See Chasteen, National
Rhythms, African Roots, 224 n. 38. The standard account of the tangos rise as a national icon, which
emphasizes the local social impact of its triumph in Europe during the early 1910s, is due for revision
in light of the considerable evidence in Caras y Caretas and other cross-class publications that the tango
enjoyed growing mainstream popularity during the rst decade of the twentieth century.
35
As far as I am aware, this topic has yet to nd its historian. Beginning points include Marta
Scrimaglio, Literatura argentina de vanguardia (19201930) (Rosario, Arg., 1974), 7490; Carlos Alta-
mirano and Beatriz Sarlo, Ensayos argentinos: De Sarmiento a la vanguardia (1983; repr., Buenos Aires,
1997), 211254; and Florencia Garramuno, Modernidades primitivas: Tango, samba y nacion (Buenos
Aires, 2007), 99146.
36
On the two opposing nineteenth-century formulations of Argentine national identity, see Nicolas
Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley, Calif., 1991). Between 1880 and 1930, Argentina re-
ceived approximately six million immigrants, three-quarters of whom came from Italy and Spain. More
than half of all new arrivals settled in the country, helping the greater Buenos Aires area surpass two
million residents by 1914. Jose C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires,
18501930 (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 56; and Charles S. Sargent, The Spatial Evolution of Greater Buenos
Aires, Argentina, 18701930 (Tempe, Ariz., 1974), 146. A succinct discussion of the social and political
history of Argentina in this period can be found in Ezequiel Gallo, Argentina: Society and Politics,
18801916, in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 5: C. 1870 to 1930
(Cambridge, 1986), 359391.
southern and eastern Europe, the native-born population rushed to dene a set of
criollo customs as distinct from those considered too modern or too exotic to be
Argentine. But confusion reigned over what counted as creole, since immigrants
quickly adopted and transformed local traditions and the elite continued to promote
a Europeanized vision of Argentina by rebuilding downtown Buenos Aires as a
grand, Continental-style capital.
37
In this uid cultural context, both the gaucho and
the tango were tagged with the criollo label. While this fact riled elite intellectuals
who saw hybrid forms of urban popular culture as antithetical to their image of
Argentina, it suggests that ordinary people celebrated a wide variety of traditions
new and old, urban and ruralas distinctively local.
38
For the average city dweller
in the early twentieth century, the gaucho and the tango simply coexisted in the world
of urban entertainment.
Another reason that these two popular phenomena have been kept apart in our
minds is that until recently, historians studied the transformation of the gaucho into
a national hero under the rubric of intellectual history, while they examined the rise
of the tango through the lens of urban social history. The rst line of inquiry focused
primarily on the shift in elite perceptions of the gaucho between the mid-nineteenth
century, when men on horseback still roamed the countryside and liberal thinkers
deemed them obstacles to progress, and the early twentieth century, when immi-
grants had displaced these native Argentines as the countrys principal source of
labor but also as the focus of elite anxieties about the pitfalls of modernization.
39
Interpretations differed slightly over the years, but most historians explained the
resurgence of gaucho stories and images in the rst two decades of the twentieth
37
On the elite attempt to transform Buenos Aires into the Paris of South America, see James R.
Scobie, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 18701910 (New York, 1974), 1336, 104113; Jeffrey D. Needell,
Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires: Public Space and Public Consciousness in Fin-de-Sie `cle Latin Amer-
ica, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3 (1995): 519540; and Ramon Gutie rrez, Bue-
nos Aires, a Great European City, in Arturo Almandoz, ed., Planning Latin Americas Capital Cities,
18501950 (New York, 2002), 4574, esp. 5157. For the broader ideological context, see Lilia Ana
Bertoni, Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas: La construccion de la nacionalidad argentina a nes del
siglo XIX (Buenos Aires, 2001).
38
Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots, 6869. The meaning of criollo in the Argentine context
should not be confused with the Afro-American association of creole elsewhere in the Western Hemi-
sphere. According to Simon Collier, by the twentieth century it really meant little more than tradi-
tional, and historians have tended to assume that its use referred primarily to rural or rustic traditions
that pre-dated the modernization of Argentina. My own provisional view, based on the research pre-
sented here, is that this particular rural-traditional meaning of criollo was being invented at the turn of
the century by Argentine elites as a rejection of other hybridized, popular uses of the label in the city.
See Simon Collier, The Life, Music, and Times of Carlos Gardel (Pittsburgh, 1986), 18; Prieto, El discurso
criollista en la formacion de la Argentina moderna, 1822, 141193; Ana Cara-Walker, Cocoliche: The
Art of Assimilation and Dissimulation among Italians and Argentines, Latin American Research Review
22, no. 3 (1987): 3767; Ana C. Cara, The Poetics of Creole Talk: Toward an Aesthetic of Argentine
Verbal Art, Journal of American Folklore 116, no. 459 (2003): 3656; Jens Andermann, Reshaping the
Creole Past: History Exhibitions in Late Nineteenth-Century Argentina, Journal of the History of Col-
lections 13, no. 2 (2001): 145162; and Eduardo P. Archetti, Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Tango
in Argentina (New York, 1999), 2339, 5672.
39
In English, the three major accounts are Richard W. Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier
(Lincoln, Neb., 1983), 180192; Carl Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism: Argentina and Chile, 1890
1914 (Austin, Tex., 1970), 154156; and Jeane DeLaney, Making Sense of Modernity: Changing At-
titudes toward the Immigrant and the Gaucho in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina, Comparative Studies
in Society and History 38, no. 3 (1996): 434459. More recently, Kathryn Lehman has stressed the mul-
tiple cultural meanings of the gaucho. See her The Gaucho as Contested National Icon in Argentina,
in Geisler, National Symbols, Fractured Identities, 149171.
588 Brian Bockelman
century as a nationalist, elitist, and anti-modern reaction to the inux of foreign
customs, both real and imagined, that accompanied Argentinas rapid transforma-
tion from a backwater of the Hispanic world into Latin Americas most dynamic and
cosmopolitan country by 1900.
40
The second topic unfolded at a far remove fromthe rst, since the tango appeared
intimately connected with the internal social history of Buenos Aires, reecting the
difcult adjustments of the lower classes to new kinds of work and sociability in the
modern city. Frequent expressions of elite prejudice toward the tango also conrmed
for many historians and sociologists its inherently popular character, further dis-
tancing the subject from traditional intellectual history. In some cases, studying the
tango became a cultural adjunct of inquiries into the formation of Argentinas vig-
orous urban labor movement between 1900 and 1930.
41
It thus inspired a separate
historical narrative, one that stressed the emergence of a new urban popular culture
capable of fusing the traditions of locals and immigrants, of the poor and the middle
class, into an anti-elite discourse that straddled nostalgia and resistance.
42
Again,
individual interpretations varied, but few made more mention of the gauchos con-
current rise as a symbol of national identity than to relate how Europeans and North
Americans often asked their Argentine visitorsincluding Gardelto dance or sing
the tango in gaucho costume (irritating for the guests, interesting to us), or to point
out occasional references made to the gaucho in tango lyrics.
43
The emergence of the new cultural history in the past two decades has eroded
this old split between intellectual and social history, encouraging the examination
of subjects that cut across high and low culture.
44
But one further obstaclewhat
40
This included, but was not limited to, the xenophobic, proto-fascist new nationalism of writers such
as Manuel Ga lvez and Leopoldo Lugones. David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Move-
ment, Its History and Its Impact (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 3754. Slatta looks at the gauchos place in the
broader national turn in The Gaucho in Argentinas Quest for National Identity.
41
An example is Ronaldo Munck, with Ricardo Falcon and Bernardo Galitelli, Argentina: From
Anarchism to Peronism (London, 1987), 230246. The broader popular interpretation of the tango
informs many works, including Fernando O. Assunc ao, El tango y sus circunstancias (18801920) (Buenos
Aires, 1986); Simon Collier, The Popular Roots of the Argentine Tango, History Workshop Journal
34, no. 1 (1992): 92; and Donald S. Castro, The Argentine Tango as Social History, 18801955: The Soul
of the People (Lewiston, N.Y., 1991). An outstanding but lesser-known social history of the tango is Hugo
Lamas and Enrique Binda, El tango en la sociedad portena, 18801920 (Buenos Aires, 1998), which
deserves an English translation.
42
Noem Ulla, Tango, rebelion y nostalgia (Buenos Aires, 1967). Some renditions of this argument
take the form of a triumphant history in which an authentically national popular culture vanquished the
European pretensions of the Argentine elite; for instance, Edmundo Rivero, Lunfardo: Up from the
Buenos Aires Underworld, Ame ricas 35, no. 5 (1983): 34. More soberly, social historians have inter-
preted the success of the tango as a sign of class and national identity formation among the heavily
immigrant Argentine poor. See Sergio A. Pujol, Las canciones del inmigrante: Buenos Aires, espectaculo
musical y proceso inmigratorio (Buenos Aires, 1989); and Collier, The Popular Roots of the Argentine
Tango.
43
Brief references to crossovers, especially in the reproduction of the tango abroad, can be found
in Castro, The Argentine Tango as Social History, 1; Baim, Tango, 20, 93; Marta E. Savigliano, Tango and
the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, Colo., 1995), 119120, 131134; and Carlos G. Groppa, The
Tango in the United States: A History (Jefferson, N.C., 2004), 158. Deborah Jakubs of Duke University
maintains an invaluable tango bibliography at http://library.duke.edu/research/subject/guides/lastudies/
bibliographies/tango/index.html.
44
Lynn Hunt ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), 1417; Peter Burke, Varieties
of Cultural History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), 184191. For an outstanding empirical example of this kind of
analysis, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, Mass., 1988).
we might call an apples and oranges problem of conceptualizationhas continued
to impede our recognition of the overlapping histories of the gaucho and the tango
as rising symbols of national identity in turn-of-the-century Argentina. Put suc-
cinctly, these two phenomena were so different from one another in nature and
symbolism that it has been difcult to perceive any signicant historical relationship
between them. In their most concrete social manifestations, the gaucho was a par-
ticular kind of lower-class inhabitant of the Argentine plains in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, while the tango was an urban dance that evolved into a song
form on the eve of the twentieth century. If we consider only this material realm,
it is much easier to analyze, say, the everyday interaction of the gaucho with the
immigrant workertwo individuals who did confront one another in lived reality
than the sparse connections between the gaucho as a social type and the tango as
a dance. Likewise, one might more easily compare and contrast the rhythmic struc-
tures of the tango and jazz than nd a common basis for evaluating the tango and
the gaucho as physical entities.
Of course, neither of our subjects existed only as a concrete social phenomenon
at the turn of the century. Once the gaucho and the tango became central to rep-
resentations of Argentine culture, they each began to lead a double life, one material
and one symbolic. This second cultural existence gave them something in common,
since both increasingly served as epicenters of images and stories about what made
Argentina distinctive. And yet differences persisted even in this symbolic realm.
Thanks to the modernization of the countryside, by 1900 the gaucho was little more
than an image inherited from the past, more alive in popular culture than society,
while the tango had yet to acquire a fully formed imagined universe of its own. Unlike
the symbolism of the gaucho, whose stock rural characters, settings, and legends
could be given new meanings but never be essentially changed, the tangos symbolic
content was still being created in relationship to the new experiences of the growing
metropolis. To put the situation in terms used by Eric Hobsbawm to distinguish the
appeal of folk music from that of jazz, the gaucho had become a cultural fossil,
while the tango was so novel that it appeared to be something symbolic and sig-
nicant in itself, even as it was generating its own mythology.
45
Following this logic,
we might say that the differences in degree of maturation between the two Argentine
symbols in the early twentieth century has made it difcult for us to see any cultural
connection between them.
Solving the apples and oranges problem thus requires overcoming the many
disparitiesboth concrete and symbolicthat make each national icon seem to pos-
sess a unique and irreducible history. Applied to the Argentine context, Hobsbawms
formulation has two aws. First, it implies that one symbol was dead and the other
alive, when in fact both the gaucho and the tango would continue to gain in popular
appeal over time. This is a general weakness of the invention of tradition inter-
pretation of cultural modernization, because it treats old symbols and rituals as ar-
ticial survivals rather than accepting that they possess vitality long after their orig-
inal social roots have disappeared.
46
Second, Hobsbawms approach mistakenly
45
Eric Hobsbawm, Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz (London, 1998), 266267.
46
Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life, 6; and Richard A. Peterson, Creating
Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago, 1997), 216217.
590 Brian Bockelman
views a modern cultural practice such as tango or jazz as a symbol of itself (or simply
of the new), when it would be more accurate to say that its broader cultural sig-
nicance was still in development in the rst decades of the twentieth century. Like
the gaucho, the tango could not have become an Argentine icon without being rooted
in some distinctive national landscape. While the rst called to mind the nations vast
open plains (pampas), the second evoked the new urban underworld taking shape
beneath (hampa)and later beyond (arrabal )the mainstream city.
47
Despite their
many differences, these territories had one thing in common: they were celebrated
as imagined refuges of the most colorful, vital, and authentic elements of Argentine
popular culture still thriving below the surface of the ofcial elite drive to modernize
and Europeanize Argentina. Only once we recognize that the gaucho and the tango
stood not for themselves but for larger cultural landscapes made meaningful by mod-
ernization do we have a conceptual foundation for examining the relative signi-
cance of two radically different national emblems.
IN THE OPENING LINES TO TRANQUERA, Alma Nativa (Silverio Manco) sketched the
ideal image of the payador that still infused Argentine popular songs after 1900:
Twas in a pueblo
far from our great capital
where this brave paisano
did hurl his lasso;
with his sovereign air
and his sublime care
he sang with love
to the girls of that land
and all his sweet talk
owed out even better.
48
This vision of the payador recalled the legendary gure of the errant gaucho, whose
peripatetic lifestyle and sufferings at the hands of rural authorities foundin the
public imagination, at leastconsolation in a supreme talent for song, dance, and
wit. Herna ndezs Mart n Fierro had helped popularize the image of the gaucho as a
musician and poet in the 1870s, and this identication only increased in the new
century, ultimately receiving the sanction of the Argentine intelligentsia after a series
of widely attended lectures on gaucho culture given by the nationalist writer
Leopoldo Lugones in 1913, later expanded and published as El Payador (1916).
49
Despite this association, most turn-of-the-century popular singer-songwriters
47
The marginal but exotic side of modern Buenos Aires was rst associated with a diffuse criminal
underground known as the hampa. Over time, however, its symbolic location shifted to the arrabal or
arrabales (outskirts), a downtrodden popular district located in the transitional space between the coun-
try and the city. The rise of the arrabales to cultural signicance is traced in Bockelman, Prophets of
the Arrabal.
48
Alma Nativa (Silverio Manco), Tranquera y venganza (n.d.), RLN 1317: 16: 8: 3. Other works by
Manco in the archive are dated between 1907 and 1918. I have used the following format for references
to materials in the Lehmann-Nitsche collection: RLN [catalog number]: [roll or volume number]: [item
number]: [page number(s)]. All English translations from the original Spanish-language songbooks are
my own.
49
Leopoldo Lugones, El payador (Buenos Aires, 1916). See also the opening chapters of Ricardo
were urban people, having grown up in or moved early in life to littoral cities such
as Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Montevideo. While the earliest payadores of South
America had been country dwellers and had sung for rural audiences, the new paya-
dor of the late nineteenth century made his home in the city and plied his trade in
a range of metropolitan venues.
50
Gabino Ezeiza (18581916), the most famous
singer of the era, performed in an impeccable black suit, not in the poncho and baggy
trousers worn by the gaucho or the crude garments of the rural poor. Also unlike
the pampean troubadours of old, almost all of whom were illiterate, Ezeiza and his
contemporariesNemesio Trejo, Fe lix Hidalgo, Pablo Va zquez, and otherswere
deliberate craftsmen of new lyrics, which they published for urban readers with ever-
increasing frequency in the 1890s and early 1900s. These singer-songwriters also
shared broader literary or cultural ambitions and a air for new rhythms that dis-
tinguished them from their rural predecessors.
51
In terms of subject matter, however, the innovations of these rst urban payadores
were modest. Apart from the occasional foray into the new urban milonga, Ezeiza
and his contemporaries stuck to the traditional rural repertoiresongs about life,
luck, and hardship on the open pampas.
52
Cultivating a deep familiarity with this
storied gaucho past, they paid little notice to the growing city around them. Most
sought to perfect the classic technique of the old rural payador, which was to im-
provise verses on a given gauchesque theme, often in direct competition with another
singer. Such contests, known as contrapuntos (counterpoints), had been popular in
the countryside earlier in the century. Ezeiza, Hidalgo, and other early urban paya-
dores re-created these singing duels in modern Buenos Aires and nearby towns in
the 1890s. Great multi-night battles between Ezeiza and his closest competitors en-
sued, and smaller-scale contrapuntos became a regular feature of cultural life in the
metropolis for the next two decades.
53
Their posture as ambassadors of gaucho cul-
ture appeared so authentic that when Alberto Williams and other elite composers
Rojas, La literatura argentina: Ensayo losoco sobre la evolucion de la cultura en el Plata, vol. 1: Los
gauchescos (Buenos Aires, 1917).
50
Roma n, Itinerario del payador, 183.
51
Some urban payadores did perform in gaucho costume during theater or circus performances,
though this was little more than an entertaining artice. Another modern attribute of these newer singer-
songwriters was their occasional involvement in popular politics. In the 1890s, many of the singers iden-
tied with Radicalism, then the major opposition movement. Others became socialists. On the politics
of the late-nineteenth-century payadores, see Victor di Santo, Payadores y pol tica, Todo es historia
24, no. 278 (1990): 2445.
52
According to Trejo, Ezeiza was the rst payador to compose a milonga-inected folk song in 1884.
See Rivera, Historias paralelas, 1516.
53
Contrapuntos were widely publicized events. Payadores boldly challenged one another via open
letters in the mainstream press, as occurred in the pages of La Prensa during the winter of 1894, when
Uruguayan singer Jose M. Madriaga called out a seemingly reluctant Va zquez for a duel. See Entre
Payadores: Un desaf o a Va zquez, La Prensa, June 18, 1894, 4; Entre Payadores: La Respuesta de
Va zquez, ibid., June 19, 1894, 6; and Entre Payadores: Va zquez y Madriaga, ibid., June 29, 1894, 5.
Perhaps the most extravagant contrapunto also happened in 1894. For two nights, Va zquez squared off
against Ezeiza in a singers duel at the Florida Theater in the outlying town of Pergamino, a short
distance from the capital city. Though Ezeiza won the competition, the much-celebrated standoff
signaled the triumph of the contrapunto as a form of urban entertainment. Thereafter the urban paya-
dores found a wide audience not only for their performances but also for printed collections of their
songs. A contemporary version of the Ezeiza-Va zquez duel can be found in RLN 1317: 6.
592 Brian Bockelman
sought to give Argentine classical music a national edge, they unwittingly turned to
the reworked rural songs of the urban payadores as genuine folk music.
54
Meanwhile, a new generation of singer-songwriters came to the fore around 1900.
Manuel Cientofante, A
ngel Villoldo, Jose Betinoti, Silverio Manco, J. Lopez Franco,

and Luis Garc a followed closely in the footsteps of their elders, but where the earlier
group had sought to perfect the style of the old rural troubadours, the new artists
began to expand out from this inheritance. They altered the standard narrative rep-
ertoire to include short, image-rich songs among longer contrapuntos and gaucho
tales. They also experimented with a wider variety of song forms, both local and
international. To the de cimas, gatos, cuecas, cielitos, and vidalitas of Argentine folk
music, they added urban-tinged milongas, habaneras, and even tangos. Perhaps most
signicantly, the younger payadores began to open up the thematic focus of popular
Argentine song to include the novel experiences of city life alongside the more con-
ventional rural scenes and stories of their predecessors. By doing so, they helped
establish and shape the images of the new Buenos Aires and its popular characters
that would come to fascinate so many poets, artists, and intellectuals in the coming
century.
Betinoti (18781915) inherited the mantle of popularity from Ezeiza and became
the most celebrated public gure among the younger singer-songwriters. His corpus
was wide-ranging and much-anthologized, moving as it did between classic gaucho
themes and newer urban subjects.
55
Villoldo (18691919), for his part, became the
most prominent early tango lyricist but continued to show off his payador roots.
56
Less well known but more lyrically diverse was Cientofante (18721935). Like Manco
and Lopez Franco, Cientofante combined a deep knowledge of the rural songs of
the past with an awakening interest in both popular politics and the cultural novelties
of the growing capital city. More than any other turn-of-the-century payador, he cast
his eye across the vast spectrum of Argentine popular culture, becoming a prolic
singer of gaucho tales even as he began to explore the underbelly of urban life as
a source of exciting new material. Whereas Ezeiza perfected the style of the old rural
troubadours and Betinoti impressed with his showmanship, Cientofante worked to
update and expand the repertoire of Argentine popular song. He was quite conscious
of this changing of the cultural guard. I am not Trejo nor Va zquez / nor am I Gabino
either, began one of his songs, and another explained:
I am a new payador
of the Argentine land
and Im off searching for
the path of [a] new happiness.
57
Not all of the new singers shared Cientofantes versatility and self-awareness, but for
those artists whose careers took off around 1900, to be a payador was no longer
54
Deborah Schwartz-Kates, The Popularized Gaucho Image as a Source of Argentine Classical
Music, 18801920, in Walter Aaron Clark, ed., From Tejano to Tango: Latin American Popular Music
(New York, 2002), 324.
55
For example, Jose Betinoti, Lo de ayer y lo de hoy (1909), RLN 1536: 1: 23.
56
Villoldos oft-forgotten payador past is detailed in Enrique Horacio Puccia, El Buenos Aires de
Angel G. Villoldo (1860 . . . 1919) (Buenos Aires, 1976), 1942.
57
Manuel Cientofante, Improvisaciones del payador Argentino (1896), RLN 1317: 3: 1: 9, 3.
FIGURE 2: Cover image of a typical turn-of-the-century Argentine songbook, this one by
the wide-ranging singer-songwriter Manuel Cientofante. The artist is unknown. Ciento-
fantes choice of subjectthe dandied pimpreects the growing interest of the paya-
dores in the modern city after 1900. In part through their efforts, the corner store (al-
mace n) in the distance would later become an important part of the iconography of the
urban outskirts (arrabales), the mythical birthplace of the tango and a central landscape
of twentieth-century Argentine culture. Property of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut,
Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.
594 Brian Bockelman
simply to re-create rural stories for an urban audience. Buenos Aires itself beckoned,
and Argentine songwriters increasingly experimented with spectacles of big city life
alongside the tried and true tales of authenticity on the plains.
THE FIRST EXPLORATIONS OF THE marginal underside of Buenos Aires in song were
tentative, as if that world were still shapeless, exotic, and of unclear cultural sig-
nicance. The payadores could no longer shut out the city, but that did not mean that
they could immediately perceive any coherence in the new sights and sounds of the
metropolis. Their rst instinct was to make sense of the unknown and bizarre, es-
pecially the seemingly strange new characters who inhabited the growing capital, by
inserting them into their gauchesque repertoire or simply by juxtaposing them with
gaucho stories. Only gradually did they come to grant the city separate status as a
locus of Argentine culture, not only detached from the legendary pampas but also
possessing its own depthan internal physiognomy of neighborhoods and urban
circuits. This development paralleled the increasing inclusion of tangos in popular
songbooks after 1905. Yet there would be no wholesale shift from an older rural
imaginary to a newer urban one; rather, the two visions continued to overlap with
one another into the 1910s, as singer-songwriters shifted back and forth between
their traditional material and the dynamic stimuli of the city.
One task of the rst urban songs was to render the peculiar new customs of
modern urban life intelligible. The payadores were especially fascinated by colorful
and marginal city characters who did not t into neat occupational or social groups.
Their songs rarely focused on mundane urban people: listeners or readers would
catch only occasional glimpses of workers, teachers, students, store owners, and po-
licemenand then only when these ordinary inhabitants experienced tragedy or il-
lustrated unexpected heroism. Singers were drawn to the exotic underworld of the
hampa, not the everyday existence of the average city dweller. In addition to the
compadrito (literally little compadre, an urbanized mimic of the gaucho) and the
cannero (a cross between a pimp, a rufan, and a dandy), the characters who
grabbed their attention in the rst decade of the century included con men, aladoras
(irtatious women), aladores (playboys), atorrantes (tramps), and other tough guys,
petty thieves, and patotaspacks of young men spreading havoc through the city.
These same gures were simultaneously making their rst appearance in Argentine
theaters, and soon they would populate the tango song of the interwar era.
58
Although the compadrito later became the central character of the tango and
avant-garde literature, it was the cannero who most intrigued the payadores and
came closest to being an urban rival of the gaucho around 1900. A rush to capture
the essence of this gure ensued, with three major singer-songwritersLopez
Franco, Cientofante, and Horacio del Bosqueeach publishing a tract on him be-
tween 1899 and 1901.
59
The topic was so novel that they all spelled the name dif-
58
Domingo F. Casadevall, Buenos Aires: Arrabal, sainete, tango (Buenos Aires, 1968), 7489; Simon
Collier, The Tango and the Buenos Aires Urban Identity, in Richard F. Phillips, ed., Documenting
Movements, Identity, and Popular Culture in Latin America (Austin, Tex., 2000), 65; Matamoro, La ciudad
del tango, 4555.
59
J. Lopez Franco, Los canneros o los amantes del d a (1899), RLN 1317: 12: 13; Horacio del
ferentlycannero, camnero, and caero, respectively. None demonstrated in-
sider knowledge; del Bosque claimed that he knew the life of the cannero well,
but only because he had once followed one.
60
The songwriters placed great emphasis
on describing his clothinga soft, broad-brimmed hat, a silk scarf, an elegant jacket,
and ne shoes. According to Cientofante, the cannero always wore the latest
fashions.
61
The payadores also sang at length about his varied romantic intrigues.
One moment the cannero prowled the city for easily duped women, the next mo-
ment (even in the same songbook) he was writing a tender note to his beloved. Del
Bosque warned his audience that they might nd these attributes picante.
Clearly, however, the payadores did not at rst sense any lasting cultural signif-
icance in such odd city characters as the cannero, atorrante, or compadrito. A com-
mon knee-jerk reaction was to represent them as false or degraded gauchos. The
hero of Sebastia n Berons El gaucho Picard a (ca. 1900) complained that his fellow
Argentines dont see that theres a great distance / Between the compadre and the
honorable gaucho. But for him, the difference was obvious:
Me, when Ive gone to the city,
Ive seen packs of compadres,
Many of em, good God!
All done up and fashionable,
Bathed in colognes
And dying of cold indifference.
Ive seen them talking
And I can frankly say
Never have I seen a decent man
Repelled by a paisano,
But yes, Ive seen a Christian
Repelled by those people.
62
According to this logic, the real gauchos came from the countryside, while the com-
padres and their ilk were either upstarts or dandies. Such a view was certain to be
appealing among audiences who still expected the gaucho to be the gallant protag-
onist of popular song, especially since no positive vision of the new urban culture
had yet emerged.
63
But it also reected the fact that the payadores had nothing to
judge the modern city characters against except the culturally established world of
the pampas.
Bosque, La vida del caero (1899), RLN 1317: 2: 20; Manuel Cientofante, El moderno camnero
(1901), RLN 1317: 5: 16.
60
Del Bosque, La vida del caero, RLN 1317: 2: 20: 7.
61
Cientofante, El moderno camnero, RLN 1317: 5: 16: 3.
62
Sebast an C. Beron, El gaucho Picard a (n.d.), RLN 1317: 1: 13: 5. Other works by Beron in the
archive appeared between 1895 and 1905.
63
In addition to supporting an emerging elite nationalism, rural motifs continued to have both a
political and a cultural persuasiveness among the urban populace into the 1910s. See Ernesto Quesada,
El criollismo en la literatura argentina (Buenos Aires, 1902); Alfredo V. E. Rubione, ed., En torno al
criollismo: Ernesto Quesada, El criollismo en la literatura argentina y otros textos (Buenos Aires, 1983);
and Matthew B. Karush, Workers, Citizens and the Argentine Nation: Party Politics and the Working
Class in Rosario, 19123, Journal of Latin American Studies 31, no. 3 (1999): 589616, esp. 599610.
Even today, the phrase ser muy gaucho (to be very gaucho-like) is a compliment among urbane
Argentines.
596 Brian Bockelman
So even as they turned their eyes to the city, popular songwriters tended to lter
the newexperiences of Buenos Aires through song styles and cultural labels inherited
from the past. A favorite technique was to invent an encounter between a gaucho
and a compadrito or cannero. These interchanges especially characterized the rst
wave of songs dealing with city characters between 1897 and 1902. In classic payador
fashion, Lopez Franco introduced the cannero in 1899 by creating a contrapunto
between this new gure and the more easily recognizable gaucho. Tell me, canne
friend, begins the gaucho with a certain amount of provocation, How are you?
Hows it going? / What are you doing over there / like a lost calf? The cannero
boasts back that he is the real ladies man. When asked what he will do if an im-
pending war breaks out with Chile, he proclaims, Ill take away the pain / Of each
and every Chilena / With my sincere affection. Caramba! How tedious, replies
the gaucho. Why dont you tell me, / my friend, the story of San Mart n / Since you
come along so wise / From over there in the capital, implying that his adversary is
disconnected from national traditions.
64
Labels given to both songbooks and individual verses also show how the payadores
pressed old conventions onto new urban material, even well after 1900. Two of the
main series of popular folios in the early twentieth century were the Biblioteca
Criolla (Creole Library) and the Biblioteca Gauchesca (Gauchesque Li-
brary), both published in Buenos Aires. Their successful role in the production of
this popular medium ensured that they would continue to publish new works that
drew on city subjects in the new century. This circumstance led to the curious ap-
pearance of booklets titled Las aladoras callejeras (Street Seductresses, 1906) and
Tangos populares (1909) in the Gauchesque Library series. More interestingly, the
generic label versos gauchescosgauchesque songs or versescontinued to ap-
pear on title pages even where the content had nothing to do with either the gaucho
or the rural landscape of the pampas. Cientofante billed his Los amores de un tarugo
(The Love Life of a Knucklehead, 1908), an account of amorous tomfoolery in the
city, as a creole narrative in gauchesque verses. Hybrid labels began to crop up as
well, with some songs being described as semi-creole.
65
Such mixtures became commonplace, and payadores usually made little attempt
to keep their urban discoveries separate from their well-worn rural material. If any-
thing, those who became experienced in treating city subjects sought to demonstrate
their facility at crossing the urban-rural divide. Despite the fact that many songbooks
had a lead narrative or cover page suggesting a focus on either the pampas or the
urban underground, inside one would frequently encounter a more complex mixture
of verses. Cientofantes El tango de los 50 (1907) contained songs titled Prole and
The Rich and the Poor as well as Old Things (Gauchesco), To a Country Girl,
and To a Willow Tree. In U
ltimas composiciones (Latest Compositions, 1912), Beti-

noti included both Gaucho Advice and From the Arrabal.
66
As late as 1914,
64
Lopez Franco, Los canneros o los amantes del d a, 1517. Jose de San Mart n (17781850) led
the struggle to liberate the R o de la Plata region and southern South America from Spanish rule during
the wars of independence, including a heroic campaign over the Andes into Chile in 1817.
65
Manuel Cientofante, Los amores de un tarugo (1908), RLN 1317: 5: 7; Silverio Manco, Las far-
rucas, in Almas que luchan (n.d.), RLN 1317: 15: 2: 2728.
66
Manuel Cientofante, El tango de los 50 (1907), RLN 1317: 5: 9; Jose Betinoti, U
ltimas composi-
ciones (1912), RLN 1536: 1: 21.
Policarpo Albarrac n released a collection called Ensalada criolla (Creole Mix),
promising readers both gauchesque verses and a popular tango by Villoldo. While
some artistsespecially Cientofantemade a clear effort to channel their output
into two distinct thematic streams, the typical practice was to juxtapose urban and
rural songs in the same volume, without privileging either.
Yet the Lehmann-Nitsche songbooks do show the gradual development over time
of a more nuanced and self-enclosed reading of the urban landscape. Without giving
up their gauchesque heritage, the payadores began to represent the underbelly of the
modern city as a cultural world all its own. Rather than treat the new popular char-
acters of Buenos Aires as rootless or exotic, they began to locate them within specic
urban locales or follow them in their circuits through the city, where they would
naturally come in contact with other urban people, not gauchos. Initially songwriters
had placed gures such as the cannero and atorrante just off the downtown Plaza
de Mayo or along nearby Florida Street, often depicted as the scene of petty crimes
against unsuspecting visitors.
67
In 1897, Mart n Gutie rrez told of a curiously well-
dressed atorrante who could be found lurking about Florida at twilight:
Where the gas light burns brighter,
Youll see him very still,
With his smug little smile
As he is every early evening
On Florida Street.
68
Most early verses about Buenos Aires did not go farther aeld, as if the downtown
area were a sufcientand suitably shockingcontrast to the authentic rural terrain
of the gaucho.
But as city songs multiplied, singers began to draw internal distinctions between
urban neighborhoods, both central and outlying, where one might encounter such
curious modern characters. Cientofantes colorful dictum from 1901I say that
among the camneros, / there is a great difference / between those of Juni[n], and
[those of] Boca / and those of Constitucionreferred to discrete urban landmarks
and showed a developing awareness of the hampa as a complex cultural landscape.
69
Similarly, Mancos urban vignette Disappearing round the Corner (1907) leads
the audience on a rainy nights journey through Buenos Aires, beginning at the cor-
ner of Cordoba and Parana streets downtown. There the male protagonist falls for
a girl who seems at rst to return his affections. But when she disappears unex-
pectedly, he must search for her high and low on the south side of town, rst in
Corrales, then Boca, then Barracas. Finally he nds her in the Neighborhood of the
Frogs, a place of extreme marginality near the municipal trash dump. But to no
avail. Some neighborhood toughs repel the unfortunate lover, who scurries home to
sketch out / this short story / that I have just related.
70
67
One common kind of early popular folio was called Cuentos del t o (Uncles Stories), which in-
variably recounted tales of people being conned or held up downtown. See, for instance, Horacio del
Bosque, Cuentos del t o o sean las grandes estafas del d a (1900), RLN 1317: 2: 18.
68
Mart n Gutie rrez, Los atorrantes de levita (1897), RLN 1317: 6: G9.
69
Cientofante, El moderno camnero, RLN 1317: 5: 16: 20. Cientofante was also the earliest to
produce a song that took the listener or reader on a tour of Buenos Aires. See Cientofante, A Buenos
Aires en viaje, Los verdaderos cuentos del t o (1901), RLN 1317: 5: 19: 2228.
70
Silverio Manco, Pianta piojito que viene el peine (1907), RLN 1317: 15: 20: 810.
598 Brian Bockelman
Notably, where earlier dialogues had paired a gaucho with a compadre or can-
nero, in later songbooks urban characters most often spoke to one another.
Cientofante was, as usual, a pioneer. In Take My Arm . . . Baby! from Tangos
populares (1909), he invented a discussion about urban life between a caso (pimp),
a china (mestiza), and a boton (cop). Similarly, his En la vereda (On the Sidewalk,
1909) was a series of street conversations showing off his familiarity with lunfardo
(urban slang).
71
In one song, Between Compadres, Cientofante sang of three
knife-toting toughs who claimed to be well-known dancers / in the Neighborhood
of the Frogs / where the stars come out in abundance. Not only was no gaucho
outsider needed to encounter and explain these new gures, but Cientofante had his
compadres talk openly about discarding the remnants of rural life. As one put it, I
say once and for all / we get rid of all the stuff / that Ive kept without offense / since
eighteen hundred ten. Lassos, belts, and sombreros may be things of worth / for
the true countryman, another says, but they belong in the past.
72
SUCH A VIEW, WHILE RESPECTING the value of the gauchesque, suggested that the fu-
ture of Argentine popular culture lay in the modern city. By 1910, the payadores had
prepared the ground for the tango song to catapult this view into mass popularity
in the coming decades. Nevertheless, the rise of the city did not undermine the place
of the gaucho in Argentine national identity. Gaucho traditions remained vigorous
and continued to shape the emergence of new cultural forms, including early Ar-
gentine cinema. The same payadores who had discovered and elaborated the land-
scape of the urban underworld still sang about the pampa heartland well into the
1920s. If it seems that turn-of-the-century singers were gradually distancing them-
selves from their old repertoire, consider this: in 1909 alone, the year that he was
inventing so many internal dialogues among city dwellers, Cientofante released or
rereleased ten separate folios about gaucho legendsThe Frontier Gaucho, The
Gaucho of Santa Fe, The Damn Gaucho, The Pampa Gaucho, The Gaucho Picard a,
The Son of Mart n Fierro, The Son of Pancho Bravo, The Tiger of the Desert, Pancho
Bravo, and Revenge! Similarly, Manco continued to sing about rural heroes through-
out the 1910s and still used the pseudonyms Alma Nativa and Gaucho Viejo in
his later works.
Naturally, the job of the cultural historian would be much easier if each new set
of symbols or styles extinguished an old one at a xed point in time, but the reality
of cultural production does not yield such clean breaks.
73
By opening their com-
positions to urban characters and locales, the payadores had only begun the process
of nding them a place in the representation of modern Argentina. Over time, tango
singers gave more denitive shape to the nations new cultural landscape, locating
it in the nebulous half-urban, half-rural outskirts known as the arrabales, which left
the symbolic door between city and country permanently open. In the 1920s, tangos
71
Manuel Cientofante, Tangos populares (1909), RLN 1317: 5: 10: 1718; Manuel Cientofante, En
la vereda (1909), RLN 1317: 5: 18: 926.
72
Cientofante, En la vereda, RLN 1317: 5: 18: 2730.
73
Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, N.J.,
1998), 3738.
sometimes cannibalized older gaucho and rural subjects, reversing the path taken by
the payadores. But the story of cultural competition and overlap does not end there.
By the time Peron and Borges reached their apogee in the 1950s, folk music was
enjoying a popular revival, while the tango was receding into the background. It has
only recently resurgeda testament to the apparent fact that national traditions and
symbols, once created, do not die.
74
This longevity makes it crucial that we understand both how popular culture
became so central to national identities in the early twentieth century and how new
symbols were forged next to the old. As this analysis of the Lehmann-Nitsche col-
lection demonstrates, popular song is a crucial source for examining this double
development. The point of such an inquiry is not to collapse all distinctions between
national icons such as the gaucho and tango (or the cowboy and jazz), nor to fuse
them into a single history. As a social phenomenon, each had its own independent
evolution. But since both the gaucho and the tango were also popular symbols of
Argentine identity at the turn of the century, any history of the period that gener-
alizes about cultural change from only one of their stories will inevitably create a
distorted picture of the process. In an age when many newcomers to Buenos Aires
were struggling to adapt to city life without forgetting their rural past, the payadores
did not choose between the backward-looking and forward-looking impulses of cul-
tural invention. Even as they retted one venerable tradition in the Argentine
cultural imagination to suit this changing public, they also gave life to a new one.
Their hybrid story suggests that if we are to account fully for the effects of mod-
ernization and urbanization on national identities, we have to recognize that the new
popular culture promoted both traditional rural folklore and urban folk innovations
as essential to the modern self-denition of the nation.
Yet the analytical task we face is complex, because not only is the storehouse
of each nations symbols always expanding, but it can be difcult for historians to
nd a common language to talk about icons as different as the gaucho and the tango
togetherto say nothing of the challenges posed by the coexistence of the yeoman
farmer, bald eagle, apple pie, skyscraper, and jazz as markers of American identity.
Even as symbols, these elements of popular culture seem so different from one an-
other in origins, makeup, and meanings that it becomes difcult to imagine any
historical connection between them. As the Argentine case indicates, however, it can
be misleading to interpret broad changes in culture through one icon alone. So how
do we move forward? Historians interested in charting the changing relationship
between multiple, often quite different symbols of national identity will benet from
the process of translating them into the larger cultural landscapes they represent.
Recognizing the residue of space behind each icon gives us a basis for analyzing its
relationship to others and assessing its relative signicance in a particular historical
context. This is surely not the only way that national symbols might be reworked into
a commensurate form for analysis, but it is an important one. Resituating popular
icons in the cultural territories that they inhabit and evoke makes it possible to see
74
Pablo Vila, Tango to Folk: Hegemony Construction and Popular Identities in Argentina, Studies
in Latin American Popular Culture 10 (1991): 107139; Chris Moss, Tango Revival: From Bordello to
Ballroom and the Ballet and Back (Almost), Dance Magazine 75, no. 9 (2001): 6468.
600 Brian Bockelman
them not simply as diverse national motifs, each with its own bailiwick of meanings,
but as competing representations of the nation at a given moment in time.
Brian Bockelman is Assistant Professor of History at Ripon College, where he
teaches Latin American history and comparative history courses. His current
research focuses on the representation of the outer margins of Buenos Airesa
half-real, half-mythical territory known as the arrabalesin turn-of-the-century
Argentine art, literature, and popular culture. Portions of this larger project,
titled Prophets of the Arrabal: Remaking Argentine Culture in Buenos Aires,
18801930, have been published in Clio, in Brujula, and elsewhere.

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FIGURE 1: Mario Zavattaro created this playful caricature of Argentine singer-songwriter A

ngel Villoldo, Jose Betinoti, Silverio Manco, J. Lopez Franco,

ltimas composiciones (Latest Compositions, 1912), Beti-

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