Tango (3 page)

Young men came from Spain, particularly from regions like Galicia, where rural poverty and the threat of obligatory military service accelerated their decision. Others came also from central Europe, from Poland and Russia, driven by hunger and persecution; the majority of these groups of migrants were Jews.

The young immigrants often left their families behind in the home country, where the women and the elderly scratched a living on tiny plots. It was a pattern across Europe. The men would surely have left amid tears and regrets, reassuring those left behind that they would make their fortunes soon and call for their wives and families once as they were settled. And they would have meant every word.

Freshly arrived immigrants at the docks, Buenos Aires.

Not all the migrants were men, however. Abandoned and impoverished women have always found the route of prostitution open to them. And the promise of Argentina appealed to them too.

Paradoxically, Orthodox Jewish women left by their husbands or widowed had very few alternative options; they were forbidden from finding new partners and restricted in the work they could do. The networks of Eastern European Jewish procurers exploited the situation to their advantage. Over 60 per cent of registered prostitutes in Argentina at the end of the decade were foreign
born, with Polish, Russian or Austro-Hungarian citizens among them.
⁸
Perhaps they imagined that the booming Argentine economy would offer them other opportunities, but women's employment there remained very limited – mainly domestic service or shop work – at very low wages.

In Britain, in particular, the myth of the white slave traffic filled the scandal sheets and the penny dreadfuls. The reformers and morality campaigners rose in high dudgeon in their turn and retailed stories of respectable young English women kidnapped at night and deposited by force in the bordellos of Buenos Aires. In reality, the British consul could find almost no cases to confirm the legend – but the rumours persisted nonetheless. In fact, it was Eastern European women who would have been most likely to have been entrapped by organizations of pimps. Those who travelled to the riverside red-light districts from Western Europe were impelled by poverty rather than sinister criminal bands roaming the night streets of Paris or London.

It was the expanding market for their sexual services, among this population of men far from home, that explained the dramatic expansion of the sex industry in this same period. There were, of course, equally large numbers of local women working the streets or in dubious music halls and cafés as waitresses; they too had come from the interior of the country in search of the riches that the myth of Buenos Aires promised them.

For all of them, Paradise proved less easily accessible than they had imagined. Some immigrants accepted their free rail tickets to the interior; the majority, however, did not, and those who did go in search of a plot of land for a small farm were for the most part disappointed. The big landowners resisted any attempts to diversify land ownership. When they did offer small, largely infertile plots for rent or sharecropping, they would arbitrarily take them back to prevent any claims to permanence. In the event, many immigrants soon returned to the cities, while
most remained in Buenos Aires, or in cities like Santa Fe. Buenos Aires was the federal capital, the heartland of the economy, and a thriving port where work could always be found.

From 1870 onwards, the city lived through a dramatic period of growth, as the wealthy classes whose income derived from the land built a city that expressed both their growing prosperity and their cultural and social aspirations to be a second Paris at the other end of the world. As it grew, its wide avenues, like Avenida 5 de Mayo, its European stores and shopfronts, its elegant restaurants, theatres, and café-concerts mimicked the city where all bourgeois Argentines imagined themselves living someday. As is so often the case, it was immigrant labourers who built the new city, though at night they returned to a very different world around its edges.

In the city, the new arrivals came face to face with others who had also recently arrived in the slums around the port. There were the rural populations who had lost their living space and who had drifted towards the burgeoning city. There were others who came from Brazil and Uruguay, some left behind as the flotsam of the recently completed war, others freed from slavery in Brazil a few years earlier and moving south in search of work.

The immigrants met, or clashed, in the unlit streets close to the river. They shared neither a language nor a history at first, yet eventually in these crowded alleys they, their cultures, their languages, and their rhythms would merge as they learned to dance – and survive – together.

LIVES AT THE MARGINS

The living spaces of the poor, native and foreign born, were very different from the grand houses and mansions of the city centre and the middle-class suburbs. In 1871, an epidemic of yellow fever in the south of the city, where most of the richer families then lived, drove them to look for new homes in healthier environments. They
moved north, to the areas that still remain the habitat of the prosperous – Florida, Belgrano and the Barrio Norte. The grand houses they left behind, their patios and backyards, and the alleys in between, became home to hundreds of families moving towards the capital, where they lived in makeshift rooms, each housing at least one family, surrounding open courtyards with shared sinks. These were the
conventillos
, where the immigrants mingled with the refugees from the countryside in an overcrowded and promiscuous environment.

The sediment of the population flowed across the wet floor; the rooms were small and narrow, and through their open doors you could glimpse the grubby rooms, full of boxes and trunks, broken chairs and tables with three legs, mouldy mirrors, comic strips pinned to the walls, and that strange disorder wherever four or six sleep together, and where everything has to be given a place somewhere.

Outside the door a metal pan is boiling . . . and the floor is covered with potato peelings, onion skins, cabbage leaves. They mark the room's frontier, just as the fences mark the limits of the great pampa ranches . . .
⁹

The majority of European immigrants crowded into these
conventillos
, or into the ramshackle wooden houses on the riverbank in the areas close to the docks. La Boca, with its brightly painted facades, housed them in suffocating intimacy. Most of the new arrivals were men between fifteen and thirty years old, far from home and marginalized from the host culture (despite the formal welcome that had been extended to them), without their families, and yearning for affection and the comfort of women. This concentration of young males created a world of repressed sexual desire, well served by the burgeoning sex
industry, in an atmosphere of male competition and ritual violence.

In these early days the immigrants would huddle together in the face of a cold and unwelcoming city. The Italians gathered in La Boca district whose painted houses reminded them of Genoa or Naples. The Spaniards, who were the second largest group, gathered on the Avenida de Mayo, while the Jews of Eastern Europe hovered around the Plaza 11 de Septiembre. The English migrants were for the most part entrepreneurs and chose to live beside their Argentine associates in and around Belgrano. And in the suburbs, the
arrabales
, the recent arrivals from the
pampa
played their guitars and remembered the homes they had left behind.

In every area the language and habits of home were repeated and reproduced. And while the different groups met regularly in the crowded streets down by the river, their relationship was tense and suspicious in this first decade of the new Argentina. The young men roamed the streets, watching and listening, waiting for the moment when they could visit the brothels whose tantalizing music filled the night streets. The working week was long and tough. Going home in the evening through dark streets must at times have been frightening. Home was a
conventillo
– noisy, crowded and dirty. You might share one room, where you lodged with a family. And each week the tension would rise as the time for the landlord's weekly visit approached. He might throw some families out, raise the rents arbitrarily, or drive more families into the overcrowded space. Small wonder that the street seemed so seductive.

In the 1870s, the beautification of Buenos Aires had hardly begun; the streets in the poor districts were not lit, and the conditions that had given rise to the yellow fever epidemic remained. But there was one day of rest. And there would always be a good set of clothes for Saturday night – a clean white shirt, freshly laundered by some young mother, shoes cracked but shiny, trousers narrow at the ankle. Brothels were legalized in the poorer areas of Buenos Aires by 1875, but the rules were strict – they could not be within two blocks of a church or a school and the women could not be seen on the street or at the windows. But you could still hear the music from the street.

The existence of these brothels was a paradox. Four years before their legalization a Civil Code was published which defined the proper role of women as that of marriage and procreation. The decision to seek work, any kind of work, placed them in the category of fallen women, whose existence outside the home consigned them to the demi-monde of the street, just one step away from prostitution. Against that background the existence of legal bordellos seems less liberal than might at first appear to be the case. It could be seen rather as a policy of containment in an era obsessed with the risks of venereal disease as well as yellow fever.
¹⁰
While the new immigrant labourers were indispensable for economic growth, it was imperative that they were kept away from the glistening new middle-class areas.

Other women plied their trade outside the law; they were the waitresses in the cafés or the local music halls. They would take you to their room in a cheap lodging house, or stand against you
in a dark alley. But in the brothels there were exotic women – French prostitutes with beautiful names, like the Madame Ivonne of Cadícamo's tango – to drink and dance with for a minute or two before the brief sexual encounter in an upstairs room.

On a busy night there would be a long wait in the edgy queues that surrounded the buildings in the darkness. There would be occasional fights over people who tried to jump the queue; sometimes the pimps, the
cafishios
, would emerge from the shadows to offer some quicker satisfactions in the local cafés or recommend their charges who were working inside; they might even offer a demonstration of their charges' prowess in a dance of sometimes obscene suggestiveness to the music issuing from within.

Only prostitutes danced in the Buenos Aires of the late nineteenth century, and they were not allowed into the street. So the men practised as they waited by dancing on the cobbles.

This was the birthplace of tango, and these were the actors in the tango drama. It is a story of encounters in a public space that is lawless, in construction, unsafe and full of marauding men and women hovering in expectation of an opportunity to cheat, to steal, or most importantly, to seduce. For in the end, the prelude to everything else is the seduction. In this male-dominated world, the tango dramatized the struggles between men for possession of women, and (from the predominantly male point of view) the cynical way in which the women exploited the loneliness and frustration of men.

TANGO: A DANCE IS BORN

There is endless debate and dispute over the origins of tango; inevitably so for a dance born in the shadows. Its provocative movements and bizarre combination of sexuality and distance would seem to confirm the contention of those like the writer Jorge Luis Borges, who insisted that it was a dance exclusive to
the brothel. It was surely born in the street, in the cafés and brothels of the port city. But it is more, much more, than a sexual entertainment.