Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Lucamba: Herencia africana en el tango, 1870 – 1890

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-025

1527-1900

George Reid Andrews,

Cuban History and Society

The Uruguayan musicologist, composer, and historian Gustavo Goldman concludes his book by informing us that it “does not deal at all with the origins of the tango” (p. 197). Rather, he says, it focuses on the role of Afro-Uruguayans in the creation of this world-famous music and dance. Nevertheless, by providing abundant information on how Afro-Uruguayans took part in that process, and on the social context in which that participation took place, this meticulously researched and clearly argued book has a great deal to tell us about the tango and how it came to be.Readers of HAHR who are not familiar with the tango and its history may ask, “What would Afro-Uruguayans have to do with the creation of Argentina’s defining cultural artifact?” But if tango defines Argentina, it defines Uruguay as well. Throughout their histories, the two countries, and especially their capital cities, have been linked by dense ties of commerce, politics, and migration. Any innovation, musical or otherwise, that occurred in either city soon appeared in the other. During the second half of the 1800s, the two cities also underwent similar processes of demographic and economic growth, fueled by mass immigration from Europe and, to a lesser degree, from their respective hinterlands. But here we come to a crucial difference: while Buenos Aires’s black and mulatto population was numerically overwhelmed by white immigration, in Montevideo Afro-Uruguayans remained a visible component of the urban scene. And not just visible: they were legible as well, producing a more active black press than in any other Latin American country at that time.Goldman uses those newspapers, the mainstream “establishment” press, and other sources to carefully trace Afro-Uruguayans’ role in creating what has come to be known as tango. As he makes clear, the word tango appears in almost every American country, including the United States, and has had different meanings over time. By the mid-1800s, it referred to a number of different musical and dance forms that combined European chordal and melodic elements with syncopated polyrhythms deriving from Africa. One such form was the habanera, also known as the tango cubano or tango americano. Originating in Cuba, the habanera arrived in the Río de la Plata in the 1860s, introduced by touring Spanish theater troupes and by U.S. composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who lived in Montevideo from 1867 to 1869.Wildly popular throughout the Americas, the habanera took Montevideo by storm. It made a particular impact on second- and third-generation Afro-Uruguayans (and, in Buenos Aires, Afro-Argentines) who themselves were in the midst of creating a new African-American music in the Río de la Plata. The venue for much of that creative work was the Carnival comparsas that performed each year in the weeks preceding Lent. Among their repertoires were waltzes, polkas, and schottisches, plus habaneras, plus a completely new musical form that their members called “tango,” and that Goldman calls “tango de comparsa” to differentiate it both from the tango cubano and from the later, twentieth-century tango.This new genre incorporated elements of the habanera and of rhythms played by enslaved and free Africans at their dances (also known as tangos or candombes) in Montevideo. In a meticulous analysis of these tangos’ lyrics and musical structure, Goldman highlights their African-derived components and shows how those components continued to influence the subsequent evolution, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, of the music that we know today as tango.The book concludes with transcriptions of song lyrics performed by the comparsas (pp. 202 – 34). This is a gold mine of primary material that more than one U.S. graduate student, I predict, will use for a seminar research paper. Here, however, I must register my respectful disagreement, or at least uncertainty, concerning a key element of Goldman’s story: the role of white blackface comparsas in creating the tango de comparsa. Goldman asserts that those white groups never used the word “tango” (p. 175); this is not true, as his own evidence indicates (pp. 189 – 90, 215, 230, 231). And he identifies as Afro-Uruguayan several groups that I am fairly certain were white in composition (pp. 123 – 24, 138 – 40). This seemingly arcane and even reactionary point (why do we need to keep assigning people to nineteenth-century racial categories?) actually becomes terribly important when one turns to the analysis of lyrics. Knowing the racial and social position of their authors and performers is crucial to understanding how they were meant to be heard and read at the time.That reservation aside, this book does a masterful job of recovering a crucial chapter in Afro-Latin American history and in Latin American cultural history. By focusing on Uruguay, it perfectly complements John Chasteen’s brilliant comparative study of Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba, National Rhythms, African Roots (2004). Readers who enjoyed that book will find this one just as engaging, and that is high praise indeed.