Tango emerges in Buenos Aires

Tango took shape in the 1880s and 1890s in the working-class districts and port quarters of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the two cities on the Rio de la Plata. Its parents were the milonga, a fast local dance song, the habanera that sailors brought from Cuba, and candombe, the drumming tradition of Afro-Argentine and Afro-Uruguayan communities descended from enslaved Africans. Early bands used flute, guitar and violin, and the German-made bandoneon, a button accordion with a sighing tone, became the signature instrument by the early 1900s. One of the earliest well-known scores is El Entrerriano, composed by Rosendo Mendizabal in 1897.¹²⁴

The setting was a boom town. Buenos Aires grew from about 180,000 people in 1869 to well over a million by 1914, as millions of Italians, Spaniards and others arrived to work in the port, the meat trade and the railways. Many were young men far from home, and dance halls and brothels offered company. Respectable society first scorned tango, until Paris took it up around 1912 and the craze returned to Argentina as an elegant dance. Carlos Gardel made it a sung form before his death in 1935, and Astor Piazzolla blended it with jazz in the 1950s. Which city was its birthplace is still argued, and in 2009 Argentina and Uruguay shared a UNESCO listing for it.²³