The Tango: The Discourse of Nation II - ‘Women in the Lyrics of the Argentine Tango’
Daniel Capilla, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The myth of the Buenos Aires femme fatale was so prominent in the first half of the twentieth century, that Charles Vidor’s 1946 classic Hollywood film noir Gilda positioned Rita Hayworth centre stage as the sexually empowered female protagonist in a cryptic, and often enigmatic filmic text. Gilda’s legendary performance of ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ in the Buenos Aires casino encapsulates the social and gendered subtext of the Argentine capital in the so-called ‘Golden Age’. The plot revolves around material gain, and the male gaze is constantly directed at this blatant seductress with the intention of provoking jealousy. The dialogue is infused with sexual innuendo from: ‘Gilda – are you decent?’ to Gilda being called ‘a harpy’. Gilda’s survival technique in life of being a kept woman is celebrated in the film, foregrounded in the publicity posters, clad as she is in satin and seductively smoking, with the tag line, ‘There never was a woman like Gilda’. Gilda is, in fact, linked to the cultural narrative of the tango which positions women as heartless social climbers.
So much so, to decipher this feminine construction, an understanding of the socio-economic reality of Argentina is needed. V. S. Naipul remarks, ‘the failure of Argentina, so rich, so under-populated, twenty-three million people in a million square miles, is one of the mysteries of our time’.[1] The so-called ‘Argentine Paradox’, namely the boom-bust cycle, defaulting on international debt and with runaway inflation still a central dilemma after almost ninety years [2],vis-à-vis the recent victory of Javier Milei and his radical libertarian policies in October 2023.
Certainly, the trajectory from rich country to poor country is one of the most studied economic failures of the twentieth century, with economic growth from 1860-1930 so impressive that Argentina was envisioned as the US of Latin America. Argentina as an economic powerhouse during this period was seen culturally in the emergence of Buenos Aires as the ‘Paris of Latin America’; UK capital investments rose from £20 million in 1880 to £157 million in 1890, Harrods established its one and only foreign branch in Buenos Aires in 1914, and the phrase ‘riche comme un argentin’ become part of the French linguistic and cultural consciousness.
Such exponential economic growth brought negative social consequences: an excess of male immigrants, prostitution, disposable income which initially linked the female tango dancers of the early ‘ruffianesque’ period, also called ‘milonguitas’, with prostitution. Marta Savagliano observes, ‘Argentina's incorporation into global capitalism, with its promise of class mobility and erasure of racial conflicts, helped render tango a potent, quasi-universal expression of gender and sexual struggle’.[3] Whilst the aspect of sexual confrontation and resolution transcends language in the dance moves - where no written language is required to interpret the physical dance moves with their sexualized confrontation and eventual resolution in a stylized choreography - a closer examination of the lyrics of traditional tangos further reveals a gender imbalance and frequent misogyny. There is a clear dissonance between received notions of feminine behaviour and female emancipation, as women in the tango are traditionally depicted as being corrupted by the bright lights of the city, normally with an impoverished background in the conventillos or tenements. Thus reduced to the binary opposition of good / bad; virgin / prostitute.
However, female emancipation through eroticised social climbing was illusory and with a clear shelf-life and told through the male voice who tells her story through tango. ‘Mano a Mano’ [4] catalogues the demise of the female in six stanzas, told through a sympathetic (or vindictive) male voice who narrates the female experience from past, to present to (broken) future:
Se dio el juego de remanye cuando vos, pobre percanta,
gambeteabas la pobreza en la casa de pensión,
hoy sos toda una bacana, la vida te ríe y canta,
los morlacos del otario los jugás a la marchanta
como juega el gato maula con el mísero ratón.
[The guessing game was up when you were just a poor young doll,
Giving poverty the slip back in the shabby boarding house…
Now life’s a laugh and song to you, the made girl standing tall,
And you throw your daddy’s ducats round, content to play the moll
Like a crafty kitten toying with a miserable mouse] [5]
The transformation of the constructed female, from the impoverished young woman in the boarding house to the ‘bacana’ or kept woman of the nightclubs and casinos, is both lamented and criticised by the male voice. He is at pains to remind her of her humble origins, with the use of the verb ‘gambetear’ – to trick or win, but also used to describe the provocative use of her legs and hips by a woman.
The excessive materialism of the Jazz Age, involving both the female focus on material gain and Argentinian society’s focus, is detailed in the lyrics as ‘la milonga, entre magnates, con sus locas tentaciones’ (the nightclubs with their millionaires and all their mad temptations), is predicted to come to nothing, as the male voice initially – and ironically – wishes her all the best:
Mientras tanto, que tus triunfos, pobres triunfos pasajeros,
sean una larga fila de riquezas y placer;
que el bacán que te acamala tenga pesos duraderos…
[Meanwhile, may your triumphs, your poor fleeting triumphs,
be a steady stream of riches and pleasure;
may the bigshot who supports you never see his bankroll thinning…]
He finally predicts her downfall, aged and morally bankrupt – ‘cuando seas descolado mueble viejo’ [like a battered piece of furniture] yet still dependent on a man (him, of course) – ‘si precisás una ayuda […] acordáte de este amigo’ [if you need a helping hand, you’ll recall your pal].
The early 1920s saw the emergence of one of the most famous tango lyricists, Santos Discépolo, whose caustic yet realistic lyrics established the tango as a vehicle of social commentary and protest. His 1926 ‘¡Qué vachaché!’ (‘Go on with you!’), was unusual in that the lyrics are in the mouth of a woman who rejects her male partner due to his inability to provide for her, exploring the female perspective and granting her a voice which turned the tables on the ‘whiny ruffian’:
Piantá de aquí, no vuelvas en tu vida […]
Lo que hace falta es empacar mucha moneda […]
Plata, plata, plata y plata otra vez
El verdadero amor se ahogó en la sopa
La panza es Reina y el dinero Dios […]
Vale Jesus lo mismo que un ladrón.
[Get outta here, don’t you ever come back […]
What you need is to save lots of money […]
Money, money, money and money again,
True love has drowned in the soup
The belly is queen and money is God […]
Jesus is worth the same as a thief]
The moral decline of Argentine society is clear in this classic tango, sung by Tita Merello, and featuring – like ‘Cambalache’ – a blasphemous discourse reflecting social degeneration due to materialism and social climbing. The politics of gender are constructed through the female voice, previously unheard and articulated through the language of betting and the slang of lunfardo. This ‘broad’ is tough and possesses survival instinct, neither of which have been seen in the self-indulgent and maudlin voice of her male counterpart.
[1] Miranda France, Bad Times in Buenos Aires (London: Phoenix, 1998), vii.
[2] The Wall Street Crash of 1929 heralded the decline of the Argentine economy, from which it never fully recovered: https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/opinion-and-analysis/the-argentine-paradox-becomes-ever-more-explicit.phtml
[3] Marta Savagliano, ‘Whiny Ruffians and Rebellious Broads: Tango as a Spectacle of Eroticized Social Tension’, Theatre Journal(Johns Hopkins University Press), Mar., 1995, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 83-104, p. 84.
[4] Written in 1920 by Celedonio Flores and set to music by Carlos Gardel and José Razzano
[5] Translation Jake Spatz: https://tangodc.com/lyrics/2020/10/14/mano-a-mano