Buenos Aires, 1910

In 1580, Juan de Garay, leading an expeditionary force down the Paraná River from Asunción (in today’s Paraguay), reestablished an abandoned trading post. Within a few years, the Río de la Plata region was being called “Argentina,” which means “silvery” in Spanish, reflecting the hope that riches would flow. This was not to be. The renewed town of Buenos Aires languished for decades as a poorly patrolled contraband port.

Local settlers turned to cattle, hides, meat and the slave trade to survive. By the mid–eighteenth century, Buenos Aires had grown into the largest slave port in South America. The city’s population grew beyond 30,000 by the century’s end, with about a third of the local residents being Afro-Argentine slaves.

The end of Spanish rule during the 1810s unleashed a half century of internecine conflict, pitting — in various guises — emerging oligarchic rancher, urban commercial, and merchant elites oriented toward the port of Buenos Aires against everyone else. Unitarians (unitarios), who were promoting centralization in Buenos Aires, fought with Federalists (federales), who were supporting greater power sharing with the interior.

The continuing struggle between the Unitarians and Federalists took a particularly violent turn in late 1828 when General Juan Manuel de Rosas, a Federalist caudillo from Buenos Aires Province, emerged as the most powerful figure in Argentina. Afro-Argentines constituted between a fifth and a quarter of the city’s population when Rosas arrived.

Few Afro-Argentines were able to break through the discriminatory barriers imposed by slavery and racism. Collectively, they nonetheless benefited from a more lenient system than that found in the large plantation economies elsewhere in the Americas. Many black men became street vendors, while women earned extra money washing clothes for a variety of clients. Slaves worked the docks and slaughterhouses, and many AfroArgentines headed into the countryside to labor on estancias (ranches).

A gradual process of emancipation produced a highly variegated racial landscape. As Afro-Argentines became ever freer, they “disappeared.” The community’s share of the city’s overall population declined from nearly a third to being negligible. This “disappearance” has been overstated. African Argentine mutual aid societies, newspapers, magazines and informal associations, ranging from Church-sponsored cofradas to self-organized ethnic associations known as “nations,” existed into the twentieth century, long after AfroArgentines themselves were said to have “disappeared.”

Sarmiento — drove Rosas into exile in early 1852. They proved to be not nearly as sympathetic toward African-infused street dancing as Rosas had been. One of Sarmiento’s first actions upon becoming president in 1868 was to ban AfroArgentines from dancing in public. The new regime similarly used barbed wire, railroads, refrigeration and the extermination of Native Americans to destroy the free-wheeling life of gaucho ranch hands. Many displaced gauchos moved to the rough-and-tumble outer barrios of Buenos Aires known as the arrabal. The tango appeared in such poor neighborhoods as an amalgam of customs brought to town by the poorest of the poor. The tango combines native Argentine, African and European musical forms and dance traditions. To begin with the tango’s most indigenous roots, the nomadic gaucho life of herding cattle and working The rise and fall of Afro-Argentines is inexorably tied to the fate of the Rosas regime. Rosas increased patronage for Afro-Argentines, reined in the slave trade, promoted black military men and offered financial assistance to African mutual aid societies. Interest in and support for AfroArgentine music became one of the most visible ways in which Rosas reached out to blacks. African musical traditions were on display during these years in weekly, monthly and annual holiday celebrations. Such revelries reflected the diverse ethnic and national origins of the city’s blacks. Different communities competed with one another and, at other times, joined together in communal revelry. Funeral dances similarly became a mainstay of Afro-Argentine religious and community life. European-oriented intellectuals together with agricultural and merchant oligarchs — including future president Domingo

No one knows for sure precisely who took the tango to Paris. Perhaps he, she, or they were upper-class fops who had enjoyed slumming around local bars and brothels before leaving for Paris; perhaps they were returning French tourists; perhaps they were exhausted European immigrants seeking a distant home of memory, or local Argentine musicians who got a gig on a transatlantic voyage; perhaps they were a ship’s crew or a touring theater group. What is known is that the music exploded across Europe on the eve of World War I. Within weeks of its arrival, tango musicians, singers and dancers were performing for wildly enthusiastic audiences, including political leaders, British royals, the Russian tsar and his family, the German Kaiser and the Pope in Rome. The tango entered a “golden age” in the years after the war. Urbanites around the world flocked to bars, cafes, cinemas and theaters to listen to their favorite groups. New mass media — such as radio and cinema — transformed the tango from the dance of a male underworld into the popular entertainment of bourgeois housewives. The tango is a product of the potent diversity and energy of the city; but not just any city. The tango is what happened when diversity was placed within the pressure cooker of a Buenos Aires on the make. the sheep ranches in the country’s interior produced a cornucopia of folk musical forms and songs. The gaucho payada tradition based on the poetic sparing of competing singer-guitar players served as glue binding many elements together. The payada — which easily lent itself to long evenings around campfires, afternoon breaks under giant ombŭ and gomero trees — aligned with the call-and-response traditions of Africans transplanted to the Americas. Perhaps the greatest payadores (performers in payada competitions) of the era — or of any era — Gabino Ezeiza and Higino Cazon — were Afro-Argentine, as were many other leading practitioners of the art. By the time Ezeiza died, after being helped off stage a final time in 1916, a new singing duo specializing in Pampas-tinged provincial folk music was sweeping the country: Carlos Gardel and José (Pepe) Francesco Razzano. Gardel, an illegitimate immigrant child from France, and Razzano, who grew up in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo, had been making names for themselves singing in small bars around their local barrios in Buenos Aires. They began to hear about one another, because they were often performing in the same clubs, before finally running into one another in 1911. Within months, Razzanno needed a partner for a tour of small provincial theaters scattered around Buenos Aires Province, and he tracked down Gardel. Thus was born one of the great entertainment collaborations of the twentieth century.