Study the tango in all its dimensions is a good way to know how we are, we feel and where we come from Argentine.

I leave aside the philological review which the more studied less clarification, but not some elementary approach to the term that we alluded. Say that the tango is a dance is like holding the dog is a tail. Not satisfy us musicological definitions for being too incomplete. We believe that the tango is a genre. From Latin, engender, create, cause, fixtures. An "invention" that men ever began, thus giving, perhaps unknowingly, the most typical brand of its geography and the most mysterious phenomenon of identity.

Something that is at the same time love, sex and death must be vast enough to symbolize a culture. Something that has from the beginning the fleeting euphoria of the whorehouse and indulgence of mothers, It has what it takes to last in time, as enduring passions and miseries.

Borges in his mock Evaristo Carriego: "It was an orgiastic devilry Before, Today is a way to walk. ", insinuándonos and what the tango is fatal and inevitable. Why do we think tango history is to test a genealogy of our identity. The method is the observation of the characteristics most representative of the genus, What are they, not coincidentally, the most typical way of being of the culture that spawned.

Then we enunciate some. In this discursive level aesthetic judgments are not worth. The tango is something that no Argentine escapes. At first glance we might believe that the tango is men. We could say without violating the truth, effectively, It was done by men but women thinking. As they have highlighted the gender doctrinaire, women in three states against man: when there are, when they arrive and when they are gone.

Undoubtedly tango evidence that characterizes machismo. This usually hide a shameful feeling of inferiority that delves man with impotence against the abandonment of the "mines"; and the idealization of the mother and the first good girlfriend who was abandoned while. This attitude came often to violence:

He stopped punishing him, finally tired
repeating the brutal daily outrage
which will then count, congratulated
the insolent wheel cronyism.
(Evaristo Carriego, Heretics masses)

This same sentiment has its best evidence swagger. Swagger "hoodlum" which is commonly Argentine, It is the symptom of his insecurity, the fear of being less. Matter what man is, but more important is what they say. And in sustaining life goes appearance.

But especially the tango is sadness, and the habit of seeking as our, the habit of "inventing" nostalgia to the extreme conviction that everything is gone, that nothing will be as before. This taste for decadence review.

Far from evasion and further entertainment, man meditates on a coffee table on your luck, on her grief, thus choosing the most absurd way to forget that just does not want to. He "is" his grief, that penalty that oppresses.

Said Horacio Ferrer and Luis Adolfo Sierra that tango is not sad, is serious. We believe that, just, It has the sadness of the seriousness, the bitterness of everyday life and the "thing seriously". So it says Martinez Estrada referring to the dance: "Has the seriousness of the human being when procreate. The tango has set the seriousness of copulation, because it seems to beget without pleasure '.

I once heard say that the tango is not dramatic, It is rogue. It is true, but that playfulness is far from cheerful. it is not surprising that some letters are crossed by a humorous tone. When the mood appears it does in tango in the crudest form is the grotesque. Against hopeless misery, resigned and skeptical than expected nothing smile. "Laughing not to cry" may be the most childish way of dealing with adversity… or the wisest (the work of Enrique Santos Discépolo summarizes this trend).

The first letters allude to funny nights of drinking and brothel should not mislead. The alleged joy of tango can even be inferred from these data, because as Sabato says «that same fact must already make us suspect that it must be something like its reverse… for artistic creation is an almost invariably antagonistic act, an act of escape or rebellion. You create what you don't have…» (Ernesto Sabato, Tango. Discussion and key).

Finally, we can approach the most curious identification. Argentine tango and share a hybrid and obscure. We are the descendants of a traumatic encounter. natural children of nostalgia and overcrowding, immigrant cheated and displaced by war and criollo "corrido" by wire fences, the Bible and laws, that is to say, by immigrant. From this combination we come, of this struggle. Heirs of the unfortunate history of the old continent and misfortune of a plain 'no history', we discussed us from those years if we identify with both and meanwhile we do not recognize any.

Result of a cultural difference that deepened in language and dimmed in anger and confusion, tango was born, in some piece of conventillo which is where the Argentinean born rule. And that same anger born lunfardo, as marginal dialect first, to be later the peculiar Spanish Argentine. as Gardel, our idol, we anguish of uncertain origin sometimes suspected unseemly.

Tango is, In summary, that monstrosity that our, as paternity, It is so vain as to deny support, because it is a fatality of our culture, as "being criollo" which is the same. From this angle the study of gender leads to learn more how we are and where we come from Argentine.

Source: Nicolás Sosa Baccarelli – http://www.todotango.com/