Soundscapes of Tango: Criollismo, the Dissonances of Modernity, and Peronism

As an alternative to primarily textual and visual approaches, sound studies offer a mode of understanding cultural organization and change. Furthermore, the emotional dimension of sound allows for a consideration of the links between affect and cognition. This article examines sound references in tango that register the displacements of modernity. What emerges is a contested aural landscape in which the sounds associated with tradition— birdsong, the payador's guitar and linguistic traits, the disappearing barrel organs on Buenos Aires street corners—encounter the invasive noise of the locomotive, the threshing machine, immigrant accents, and jazz. The presence of such sounds in tangos, poems, and newspaper commentaries from the 1920s through the 1940s feeds into expressions of criollismo, a particular manifestation of Argentine national identity. Given Perón's identification with both tango and criollismo, the article examines how such sounds are deployed in both the progressive and the divisively populist strains of Peronism. That two of the greatest tango lyricists, Enrique Santos Discépolo and Homero Manzi, were fervent peronistas makes the endeavor all the more rewarding.