Tango by Mike Gonzalez Page B

world of the dance, where the man controls, manipulates and drives his woman, expresses his domination of her, and she twists and turns to the touch of his hand – sensual, seductive yes, but never leading. Yet here, in the tango-canción , the tango-song, the woman is cynical and manipulative, and the man, the compadrito , who lived from her earnings in the past, now presents himself as the victim. The transgressive, amoral universe of the underworld provides the new tango-song with its dramatis personae, but its moral universe seems to have turned upside down. Now the tangos are ‘male confessions that talk overwhelmingly about women’. 7
    As he protects himself with a facade of steps that demonstrates perfect control [the male tanguero] contemplates his absolute lack of control in the face of history and destiny. 8
    This is one interpretation – that tango is an expression of a general sense of alienation and powerlessness, an echo of the marginalityof the immigrant. But there is another text at work in these sometimes melodramatic pieces. The man laments his impotence before the wiles of women, women who, as Contursi notes, are unwilling to accept the life of decent poverty, sacrifice and self-abnegation that awaits them in the slums and clapboard houses of the conventillos and the arrabales .
    Their unwillingness to accept a wretched fate perhaps reflected the atmosphere of emancipation spreading among the middle-class women of Buenos Aires. Their attendance at the afternoon thés dansants was more combative and challenging than their thoroughly respectable equivalents in New York. It was said that the women of Buenos Aires snorted cocaine and drank enthusiastically with their part-time afternoon gigolos, just as their husbands did in the evenings with the milongueras . The symbolic universe of the new Argentina, with its emphasis on family and decency, was in some sense enshrined in the Radical Party, which increasingly came to represent these values. Yet women seemed increasingly unwilling to passively accept their role in this new arrangement, be they middle-class women or the working-class girls whose route out of the barrio passed through the dance halls and cabarets. It is a curious contradiction that the growing number of women employed in factories, shops and increasingly in offices expressed fewer concerns with independence and liberation, despite the level of organization and militancy in the working class in general. 9 For even the anarchists saw the role of women in similar ways to social organizations – as mothers and supporters of male activity.
    Rosita Quiroga, one of the early group of women tango singers, described the trajectory of a typical milonguera , responding to the criticism implicit in so many of these early tangos.
    Yo de mi barrio era la piba más bonita
    En un colegio de monjas me eduqué
    Y aunque mis viejos no tenían mucha guita
    Con familias bacanas me traté .
    Y por culpa de este trato abacanado ,
    Ser niña bien fue mi única ilusión
    Y olvidando por completo mi pasado ,
    A un magnate le entregué mi corazón .
    Por su porte y su trato distinguido ,
    Por las cosas que me mintió al oído ,
    No creí que pudiera ser malvado
    Un muchacho tan correcto y educado .
    Sin embargo me indujo el mal hombre ,
    Con promesas de darme su nombre ,
    A dejar mi hogar abandonado
    Para ir a vivir a su lado .
    Y por eso que me vida se desliza
    Entre el tango y el champán del cabaret;
    Mi dolor se confunde en mi risa
    Porque a reír mi dolor me acostumbré .
    Y si encuentro algún otario que pretenda
    Por el oro mis amores conseguir ,
    Yo lo dejo sin un cobre pa que aprenda
    Y me pague lo que aquel me hizo sufrir .
    Hoy bailo el tango, soy molinera
    Me llaman loca y no sé qué;
    Soy flor de fango, una cualquiera ,
    Culpa del hombre que me engañó .
    Y entre las luces de mil colores
    Y la alegría del cabaret ,
    Vendo caricias y vendo