Tango Lessons
Illustration by Paola Bilancieri.
Tango—one of Argentina’s most enduring cultural exports—has always been more than the sum of its music, lyrics, and dance. For many, it functions as a lens through which to interpret the world: its contradictions, its longing, and its wounds. Every year, thousands of tango fans come to Buenos Aires seeking not only to master its steps but to enter a universe where melancholy, social critique, and emotional longing coexist.
Few have described that universe with greater insight than Horacio Ferrer, who called tango “music, dance, a way to see the world… a sensitivity, an emotion… the mythical dimension of reality, nostalgia, abandonment.” Ferrer captured a fundamental truth: tango resonates because it gives form to the uncertainties and moral ambiguities that define modern life.
The Birth of a Social Language
Tango emerged in the late 19th century from a convergence of cultures in a rapidly changing Argentina. African candombe rhythms, the Cuban habanera brought by sailors, the criollo milonga, and the Spanish cuplé all blended in the crowded conventillos—tenements where millions of immigrants grappled with loss, memories, displacement, and reinvention. Out of that tumult was born not only a new musical genre but a distinct vocabulary for urban angst: a cultural x-ray of a society reinventing itself.
Among the artists who mastered that x-ray, Enrique Santos Discépolo stands apart. Using lunfardo—the streetwise dialect shaped by Spanish, Italian, and immigrant slang—he turned tango into an instrument of social dissection. His iconic song Cambalache, written in 1934 during Argentina’s “Infamous Decade” of political corruption and economic collapse, distilled a mood of profound disillusionment.
A Nation’s Mirror—and a Warning Beyond It
For Argentines, Cambalache has come to symbolize the recurrent cycles of dysfunction that have marked the country’s modern history. A nation that entered the 20th century among the world’s most prosperous has endured repeated recessions, runaway inflation, and political upheavals. Discépolo identified a pattern that remains painfully familiar: the erosion of distinctions between effort and opportunism, merit and deceit.
His verses feel disturbingly current:
“Today to be either loyal or disloyal are both the same…
An ass is the same as a scholar of renown…
Those without morals have caught up with us.”
And later:
“It’s the same if you work
day and night like an ox
as the one who lives off others
or those who kill, or those who heal
or those who live outside the law.”
Discépolo described a world in which values dissolve and impostors thrive. Although he wrote for an Argentina in crisis, his diagnosis extends well beyond national borders. As the University of Oklahoma’s Michael A. Mares has noted, Cambalache reads today as a prescient commentary on the global challenges we now confront at the world level: the rise of authoritarian leaders, the weakening of democratic norms, institutional decay, and widening inequality.
When Indifference Becomes Policy
Yet the injustices of our era unfold on a larger and more brutal scale than Discépolo could have imagined. Across continents, families are torn apart by forced deportations; children in refugee camps grow up without schools, safety, or even clean water; and vital health programs deteriorate as funding is withdrawn. In South Sudan, Congo, and Gaza, women and children account for a disproportionate share of war casualties. In parts of Africa, cuts to aid programs for malnutrition, HIV, and other diseases have caused thousands of deaths and left millions exposed to preventable suffering.
These crises reveal something deeper than political failure: a world in which indifference is no longer an accident but, in many places, a deliberate policy. Yet not even tango, that was prescient in identifying social ills, was unable to predict the extent of today’s callousness and cruelty among politicians, who enact policies aimed at favoring the few at the expense of the most.
The Lesson Tango Offers
Yet Argentina’s cultural history offers a counterpoint. Tango was born from hardship, but it transformed hardship into beauty and elegance. Even at its bleakest, tango refuses complete surrender. It insists on dignity amid injustice, on memory amid erasure.
This stance echoes Bertolt Brecht’s famous question: “In the dark times, will there also be singing?”
His own answer is the one tango has embodied for over a century: “Yes, there will be singing—about the dark times.”
Tango has long chronicled those times. In doing so, it continues to offer a vocabulary for confronting a world where decency is in short supply and moral responsibility and kindness even more so.
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