El Tango Entre Dos Américas

The extensive literature on tango generally takes as its point of departure that the music and the dance were born in Buenos Aires, exported to the salons of Paris and other European cities, where they were embraced and legitimized, and reclaimed by Argentina as a national cultural symbol. El tango entre dos Américas is a refreshing and overdue addition to this literature, a fascinating and well-documented exploration of the experience of tango in the United States during several decades of critical importance to its discovery and dissemination. Relying heavily on press coverage from major cities in the United States, sources such as Caras y Caretas in Argentina, and to some extent on secondary literature, Matallana does more than compare the United States' relationship to tango with that of Europe; she investigates the roots of the differences, and the reader comes away with a much more vivid picture of the evolution of tango on both sides of the Atlantic.In the early decades of the twentieth century, society in the United States emulated what was in vogue in Europe, and in both places the wide dissemination of tango was facilitated by new recording technologies, vinyl records, the phonograph, and the gramophone. The role of these technologies is central to the author's argument: that the ability to listen and dance to music in private settings rather than having to go to a club to experience tango dramatically expanded the exposure to and popularity of the music. Private tango teachers were in great demand, tango singers capitalized on the possibilities of audio distribution, radio stations regularly included tangos in their programming, and tango “teas” organized by society matrons, often benefiting charities, further extended the range of tango. The last phenomenon is particularly notable given initial resistance to what was perceived as a scandalous, transgressive dance. But if it was hot in Europe, the United States would follow suit, not only copying the customs but also going further and integrating them into the fabric of its culture.The book presents many compelling angles on tango and its various trajectories and influences, among them the process of the stylization and sanitization of the dance itself. Throughout the book Matallana describes how its adaptation to European and especially US contexts took the dance far from its roots, resulting in its domestication and appropriation by a very different public. The dance became more formalized, and tango manuals of the time seemed to want to “wash the face of tango” (p. 54), purifying it, turning it into something it had never been. Add to this the tango danced by Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) in full gaucho garb — a costume that was later often replicated not only by tango dancers but also by members of tango orchestras — and the result was a far cry from tango in its original form, a perpetuation of its exoticism.As she traces the path of tango into the 1930s in the United States, the author describes the role of Pan-Americanism and the Good Neighbor Policy, citing the many initiatives of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Pan-American Union, the diffusion of tango and other Latin American music on the radio and via festivals, the importation of Argentine films as well as the production of new Hollywood films with Latin American themes, and the apparent ubiquity of Carmen Miranda, the Portuguese-born Brazilian who came to symbolize all of Latin America. Tango found its way into the repertoires of bandleaders such as Xavier Cugat and Guy Lombardo, alongside the rumba, the conga, and the merengue.El tango entre dos Américas is rich in facts, insights, and commentary. The author has done a laudable job of tracing tango from its first forays into US society to its relative decline as World War II approached and the more upbeat jazz came onto the scene to steal the show from the melancholic tango. Readers will take away from this fascinating study a deep understanding of tango's trajectory and its full context in the United States and beyond. An index would have added greatly to the book's usefulness

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