December 10, 2018
Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación [National Department of Culture of Argentina]
This is an unauthorized translation of an anonymous article, “El origin Negro del tango,” based on Pablo Cirio’s work, that can be found on the official website here.
On the ships arrived both the European immigrants and the enslaved Africans who would create the cultural mix (mestizaje) that makes Argentines who we are today
The African presence in the Argentine Republic, as we know, was silenced and made invisible for centuries. White history, centered in Europe, was what filled the school books and official narratives. However, in the last two decades the silenced history of the Afro-Argentines of colonial roots (Argentines who descended from enslaved people in this territory) has begun to emerge, bringing to light an undeniable presence which forms part of our roots as a nation. This is true even for one of the symbols of Argentinian identity, the tango, which has Black culture in its DNA. This is the Black history of tango . . .
Gregorio Urbano “Soti” Rivero (1899-1949), Afro-Porteño tango composer and guitarist. Photograph from an unidentified Buenos Aires magazine.
Although tango is stereotypically associated with the figure of Carlos Gardel, the immigrants’ conventillos (tenements), the incorporation of the bandoneon, and a dominant history focused on whites; the word tango since the 18th century always appears in association with musical and dance practices of Afro-Argentines.
The oldest Porteño document in which the word tango appears dates, as it turns out, from November 11th, 1802, and is a bill of sale of a “Black site” in the neighborhood of La Concepción (today Constitución).
Pablo Cirio, anthropologist at the Instituto Nacional de Musicología Carlos Vega, discovered this document in his search to understand the origin and development of the tango from a multiethnic and multicultural perspective.
Norberto Ismael Posadas, grand nephew of Carlos Posadas, playing bandoneon “Piazzolla style” as he explained to Cirio. Buenos Aires, July 1972.
“The European immigrants enriched, complicated, and contributed to the evolution of the tango that we know today. But the genre was originally Black, connected with the urban milonga, which is in turn connected with the candombe and other Afro-Porteño genres that are less well-known. All of them have the same African heritage. When you hear the Porteño candombe, which always has lyrics, which is danced and which has lyrics, and you analyze the cadence of the melody, and the harmonic structure which supports it, you begin to hear structures similar to those of an old tango. But it turns out that listening is cultural, and that we have been educated to neither see nor to listen to Black people. When you hear the tango and the milonga with an ear that is open to diversity, you begin to hear it as Black.”
Has anyone listened to Afro-Argentinian men and women telling the story of tango?
Pablo Cirio argues that the official history was written by consulting sources that were researched by whites, from the point of view of “scientific” racism which was naturalized to seem neutral. For three decades the anthropologist has been interviewing different generations of Afro-Argentines from many parts of the country, and affirms that it is possible to construct a history of tango on the basis of this oral history, using their documents and testimonies.
The Afro-Argentines of colonial roots never stopped playing, composing, dancing, and establishing places to share their traditions. Even if during long periods of time they did so outside of public spaces, it is possible to detect their presence at every milestone in the history of tango.
Sergio Pantaleón Montero playing the guitar. Buenos Aires, 1920. (Collection of Pablo Cirio).
The official sources identify “El entrerriano” (“The guy from Entre Ríos”) (1897), by the Afro-Porteño composer and pianist Anselmo Rosendo, as the first formally composed tango, marking the start of the period known as the Guardia Vieja (Old Guard) (1897-1920).
Cirio has identified 40 Afro-Argentinian composers who together have almost one thousand compositions, published and unpublished. Even though the majority are not well-known, some became undeniable landmarks in the evolution of the genre.
In the center, José Delgado, Afro-Porteno guitarist and jazz tap dancer. Buenos Aires, circa 1930. (Collection of María del Carmen Obella).
Gabino Ezeiza (1858-1916) was born in San Telmo and was the one who introduced milonga into the payada (an improvisational musical tradition) in 1884 in a café in Barracas which still exists. He also promoted the participation of women in the payada, such as his natural daughter Matilde Ezeiza.
At the apogee of tango in Europe, for which we can thank Carlos Gardel and his musicians (between 1920 and 1930), two figures appear: his guitarists and composers, the musicians of African descent Guillermo Barbieri (1884-1935) and José “el Negro” Ricardo (1888-1937).
“La pulpera de Santa Lucia” (Santa Lucia Café) (1929), one of the best-known Argentinian waltzes, was composed by Enrique Maciel. Similarly, the well-known romantic tango “Margarita Gautier” (1935) was composed by Joaquín Mora, also of African descent.
Joaquín Mora
The great Horacio Salgán (1916-2006), an Afro-Argentine of colonial roots, created a new style with his composition “A fuego lento” (On a slow fire) (1955); this new style was a great influence on Astor Piazzolla.
Unknown to many, the Black bassist Ruperto “el Africano” Thompson (1890-1925) introduced what was called “canyengue style,” a hallmark of modern tango, which is based on lightly striking the instrument as if it were a drum.
“The Blacks reinvented their musical styles together with the immigrants who were beginning to arrive and from the Hispanic world, with whom they had lived for centuries. And in this way the tango began to emerge very slowly. The fact that the musicians were of African descent does not mean that all of their music was necessarily African, but if we are not familiar with Afro-Argentinian music, we cannot judge which parts of these musical styles have Black features. If I do not have the auditory and bodily sensibility of creating Afro-Porteño music and dance, I cannot thoroughly understand beautiful melodies such as “El ciruja” (“The hustler” or “the trash-picker”), a tango by the composer Ernesto Natividad de la Cruz (1898-1985) from Entre Ríos, which, ever since it was recorded by his friend Gardel, has been emblematic of Lunfardo,” argues Cirio.
The social ties of memory
“When we gradually stop talking about a certain subject with the passing of the generations, the ties that keep this memory alive are cut, and then the subject passes into oblivion; that is to say, it is replaced by another memory, in this case one belonging to the hegemonic groups. This is what happened with the Afro-Argentines,” explains Pablo Cirio.
Even though in 1778 46% of the Argentinian population was of African descent, descended from the 72 thousand slaves that entered the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo between 1777 and 1812, and even though currently there are about 2 million Argentines of African descent, according to organizations of Africans and African descendants; the dominant narrative stopped discussing the subject of African descendants, or reduced it to very short mentions in books, one or two quaint photos, or appearances in the celebrations of May 25th, where they are always represented in minor roles.
A show by Alberto Castillo with Afro-Porteño candombe dancers. Rosario (Santa Fe), circa 1970. Photo by Carlos Gomez. The Afro-Argentinian dancers—almost all of whom as still alive—are from the Garay, Córdoba, and Lamadrid families. The house of the Lamadrid family, in Flores, functioned as the Centro Recreativo La Armonía from 1917 to 1952, where the tango of the Guardia Vieja was danced.
“The generation of the ‘80s constructed a narrative that took for granted the disappearance from history of the Afro-Argentines of colonial roots. During this same time, the disciplines of the social sciences are taking shape: sociology, anthropology, and musicology. And these disciplines obeyed the dominant narrative; they did not question it. Carlos Vega, the father of Argentinian musicology, shut down the discussion of the subject of ownership and relevance of a possible Afro-Argentinian musical style: ‘Everything was lost forever when the last authentic Black closed his eyes and the remote and faded image of the African plains disappeared. On this day, Africa ceased to exist in la Plata.’ ”
Cirio reflects that the generation of the ‘80s denied the subject of Black influence because their parents had been slavers. “If Mitre, Sarmiento, Roca, Alberdi, and Avellaneda had recognized that Argentina was an accomplice and a beneficiary of 350 years of slave trafficking, they would have had to recognize that their patrician families were slavers; and to this day, many Afro-Argentines have the last names of their families’ former owners.”
Afro-Argentinian compradrito. Buenos Aires, circa 1910. (Collection of Silvio Killian).
In this way, the Afro-Porteños were submerged in a total silence for more than 100 years, and they shared their rhythms and dances behind closed doors. They were wounded by the institution of slavery, humiliated when they were freed (1861) by the whites who mocked them by imitating their dances and blackening their faces for carnival, and subject to laws which, until the end of the 18th century, prohibited them from playing the drum under pain of 200 lashes and a month in jail. The situation caused such an injury to the Black people that they found it necessary to withdraw from the public scene and hold their candombe practicas inside their homes. And only because they were so wisely disobedient was the tradition kept alive in an uninterrupted chain.
National Tango Day is celebrated on the 11th of December. This date was proposed by Ben Molar in homage to the birth of two greats of the genre, Carlos Gardel (Toulouse, 1890 or 1897) and Julio de Caro (Buenos Aires, 1899). And “coincidentally,” it is also an 11th of December, but in 1802, that is the date of the first recorded mention of the word tango in Buenos Aires.
Returning to the roots, the meaning of the word tango in Kikongo (one of the African languages spoken here until around the middle of the 20th century), appears to clarify the issue [literally “appears to put white over black, or in this case black over white”]: “It is time to talk about our own” (tango fueni kia songa kinkulu kieto).
