Tropical Counterpublic : Popular Music and Politics in Neoliberal Argentina

During the 1990s, the Conurbano, the vast urban area surrounding Buenos Aires, became the site of an innovative popular politics, as poor people responded to a deepening crisis provoked by neoliberalism with a new repertoire of collective action. At the same time, the Conurbano was also the site of a hugely popular music and dance scene, the so-called Movida Tropical. Breaking with interpretations that depict tropical music as explicitly apolitical, consumerist, even frivolous, this article argues that the Movida Tropical helped create the conditions that made possible a political culture of resistance to neoliberalism. The Movida constituted its participants as a counterpublic, a visible, audible collective whose joyful social interactions expressed opposition to dominant aesthetic hierarchies. Operating within the spaces afforded by neoliberalism’s contradictions, it embodied a working-class aesthetic that resisted appropriation, marginalization, and dismissal while revalorizing provincial roots and sparking new Latin American affiliations.