In June 1943 a military coup again ousted the government, though the army command was politically divided over what should follow. One faction advocated a more liberal and conciliatory approach to trade with the north. Another, gathered in the United Officers Group or ‘GOU’, advocated economic nationalism and anti-communism. The attempt by the moderates to reach an agreement with the U.S. to lift the arms embargo in exchange for a break with the Axis Powers met an obdurate refusal in Washington.
Colonel Juan Domingo Perón,10 a military officer with close ties to Mussolini’s Italy, rose rapidly in the new government, first as War Minister and then in the enormously powerful Ministry of Labour. In the course of his road to power, he changed political direction and began to identify himself with the new immigrants from the countryside, the descamisados. His wife, Evita, was an enormous help in his campaign for the presidency. She was a singer of tangos and ballads, the protégée of the much-loved performer Magaldi, and a woman from a poor provincial family, not to mention an actress in the highly popular radionovelas, the radio soap operas – she was, in a word, like them. And Perón, in building his devoted base of support among the new workers, exploited her ability to appeal to them. They were not welcomed into the existing trade unions, and they were socially marginalized as recent rural migrants to the big city which earlier generations of immigrants had appropriated for themselves. Arrested by the military government in 1945, Perón was released into the arms of tumultuous waiting crowds. He and Evita addressed them from the presidential balcony in the language of the street, and to the delight of some of tango’s most prominent musicians – Discépolo and Homero Manzi among them. Indeed, Manzi wrote two songs for Perón and Evita.
Tango and its musicians, like Argentine society itself, was deeply divided by their attitude to Perón. And this was further complicated by the hostility of the Argentine Communist Party towards him. The reasons were complex: the party was conservative and cautious and deeply suspicious of Perón’s mix of populism and anti-communism. And the hostility was echoed by Perón himself. One of tango’s outstanding exponents, the pianist Osvaldo Pugliese, was a communist who was jailed under both Perón and the right-wing government that overthrew and succeeded him. Yet Pugliese was one of tango’s great survivors and re-emerged with it when it had its second renaissance at the hands of Astor Piazzola.
In 1943, Hugo Wast (nom de plume of Gustavo Martínez Zuviria), Minister of Education of the military regime, had set up a ‘purification commission’ with the enthusiastic support of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Its aim was to ‘purify’ the language of its ‘lunfardo elements’ and some of the linguistic echoes that linked it to the immigrant past, in particular the use of the anachronistic ‘vos’ pronoun instead of the intimate and polite forms approved by the Spanish Royal Academy, ‘tú’ and ‘usted’. It was a direct assault on the tango and, more indirectly, a challenge to the cosmopolitan and mestizo version of Argentine nationalism. Not for the first time, or the last, tango’s references and collective memory would present an image of the nation that conservatives found unacceptable. Just as the original leaders of a unified Argentina had worked to purge it of Indian resonances and black cultural residues in the mid-nineteenth century, each conservative regime thereafter fought to restore a vision of Argentine nationhood that was white, Catholic, and resolutely Hispanic in the mould of the grand families whose defiantly Mediterranean mansions can still be found in the Florida district of the city. The same battle had recommenced in the post-radical governments after 1930, from Uruburu onwards. And the confrontation would be deliberately renewed in the most murderous terms by the military government of the 1960s and 1970s, insistent as always on a Christian heritage that was racist, anti-semitic and unashamedly elitist.
Through the 1930s, tango had reflected and voiced the frustration and anger of ordinary people faced with a regime at once corrupt and brutal. At the same time, it provided a momentary refuge. The lyrics of Enrique Santos Discépolo and Celedonio Flores were its expression. The gains made for working people – especially in terms of political representation – were embodied in the Yrigoyen regime, at least in its early phases. And in some sense, it was the memory of that time – idealized perhaps – that Perón evoked, for an expanded urban population of new immigrants and old. If the década infame inaugurated by the military regime of Uruburu, which began in 1930, had been ‘a time of profound collective and individual frustration and humiliation’ for working-class people,11 Perón not only addressed directly the economic needs of the new rural immigrants, his beloved descamisados – he also promised a concept of nationhood and citizenship which specifically embraced all the working people of Argentina, el pueblo trabajador who occupied such a central place in his discourse.
As some commentators were quick to underline, there could be no Peronist tango as such. Though their arguments often derived from a bitter hostility to Perón from the conservative right or from the communists, who were as ferociously opposed to him as those on the opposite side of the spectrum, there was a point of substance in what they were saying. Tango’s origins, its history and its narrative were rooted in a community that was marginalized and excluded. In that sense, Gardel’s recreation of the tango hero, while it placed tango at the very heart of popular culture, also romanticized it and sweetened its bitter edge. It was the words and music of Celedonio Flores and Discépolo which provided the soundtrack of the era from the perspective of those who had given the tango birth. The infinite geography of the body, its movements and its hidden depths and possibilities, stood for the geography of the wider world in which the characters of this urban drama still had no place.
If, as Perón increasingly claimed when he was in power, he had invited the working class in from the cold, and if the depression era was now to give way to prosperity and full employment, how could tango – as the poetry of urban alienation – survive the transition? For some of the key figures of tango, like Discépolo himself and Homero Manzi, Perón was the salvation of Argentina and Evita the iconic symbol of the tango generations that had gone before. Indeed, Evita was the link between past and future. Her story, at least as it was retold, was an archetypal tango story, beginning with her background in poverty (albeit in the provinces), then her affair with the tango singer Magaldi, and then her rapid ascent to the world of diamonds and furs which she so elegantly carried (much to the disgust not only of Argentina’s traditional oligarchic families but also of the royal families of Spain and Britain whose noses were permanently put out of joint by her vulgar insistence on being treated like one of them). This was a story endlessly retold in the idiom of tango. Yet Hugo del Carril’s eulogies to both Perón and Evita (with music by Homero Manzi) did little justice to the poetry of tango. In form he returned to the tradition of the payador, whose improvised verses had always marked civic occasions, public scandals, or retold the endless fables of rural life. Carril’s fervid praise of the new golden couple, Juan Perón and Evita, were public anthems which won him what proved to be only temporary access to the higher echelons and threw a veil across his musical career. And Enrique Maroni’s La descamisada, famously sung by Nelly Omar, was one of a number of enthusiastic oaths of loyalty to Evita – in effect a campaign song for the ‘mother of the nation’.
In fact, the period of Perón divided the tango community. His most fervent adherents, like Manzi and particularly Hugo del Carril, were mistreated and rejected. The comments on Hugo del Carril’s ‘Los muchachos peronistas’ were at best scathing, so it is particularly poignant that del Carril so offended Evita, in ways still unspecified, that it would be many years before the official composer of Peronismo would receive the plaudits of his home city. While at the time, some musicians baulked at the limitations imposed by Perón’s labour laws, and generally stood aside from politics, they participated cheerfully in the tango boom that Perón oversaw. Perón himself was happy to be seen with the tango greats, and in March 1949, finally lifted the ban on lunfardo and the cen
sorship of tango lyrics imposed by the military government some six years before. And tango basked in what remained of its second Golden Age.
7 ASTOR PIAZZOLA AND TANGO NUEVO
THE DANCING COMES TO AN END
Peronism led the working class of Argentina half way to the top of a hill between 1946 and 1951. Evita’s promise of a radical new vision seemed briefly on the horizon. There was full employment, wages rose, the trade unions came to occupy a central place in Argentine society under Peronist tutelage. And the frustration and discontent of Argentine’s wealthy classes confirmed in a negative way that real change was under way.1 In 1947 and 1948 several major industries and companies were brought under public control; the railways were nationalized, so too were the national oil company and the utility and telephone companies. Perón’s rise to power derived from the alliances he forged from the Ministry of Labour with the trade union leaders; it was they who mobilized the massive demonstration of 17 October 1945 which brought Perón and Evita back to centre stage and prepared the way for his presidential victory the following year in 1946.2
Given the position Argentina had taken during the war period, and Perón’s openly nationalistic stance together with his earlier sympathy for Mussolini, it is perhaps not surprising that the United States should take the openly hostile attitude towards him that they did. The famous Blue Book, prepared by U.S. ambassador Braden, ostensibly demonstrated Perón’s contacts with European fascism and underpinned Washington’s continuing attacks on him. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Argentine Communist Party supported that position and also denounced Perón as a fascist. Yet from the point of view of the workers, Perón was championing their cause, and as president was pushing through legislation in favour of the masses. And his political language, his discourse, returned endlessly to his sympathy with the workers and his desire to speak for and represent ‘the people’, which Evita articulated and reinforced.
There are many ways to describe Perón’s political position3 – but what is clear is that he succeeded in forging a kind of consensus around the symbolism of nationhood and the improvement of the living standards of the majority. During his first presidency, wages rose for both skilled and unskilled workers. The aguinaldo or ‘thirteenth month’ (an extra month’s payment at the end of the year) was introduced, together with pensions, sick and holiday pay, and new rules over health and safety at work. The trade unions opened holiday camps, sports centres and built houses for workers. It was these years that created the myth of Peronism that has sustained the Peronist tradition ever since. All this was financed by new industrialization measures and a public sector whose coffers were swollen by rising agricultural production.
And tango too was a beneficiary. In part, the tango musicians were aided by Perón’s commitment to national culture – but it was not the only one. The cabecitas negras brought their own music, the ‘folklore’ or folk music represented by Atahualpa Yupanqui and Jorge Cafrune, for example, which was still extremely popular in the interior of the country. Yet there was no clear division between the two audiences; both the new immigrants and the children of earlier generations crowded into the sports clubs and dance halls to hear tango and dance. And even as they were doing so, in the prosperous and optimistic times of the late Forties, tango itself was dividing between the musicians who played for dancing and those who saw tango as a broader musical genre evolving and merging with other forms (they called themselves the ‘evolutionists’).
In 1951 Perón was re-elected; in February 1952 Evita died of leukaemia. All cinema showings were stopped and the announcement made: ‘at 8.25 this evening the lady passed into eternal life’. By now, an economic crisis loomed, and Perón turned against his allies in the working-class movement. Strikes were broken and demonstrations attacked. Living standards and wage levels began to decline. And conservative Argentina – the Church, the upper echelons of the military and the business organizations which had benefited considerably during the early part of Perón’s regime now turned against him – together with the Communist Party.
Perón had his allies among the tango community, above all Discépolo and Homero Manzi and, until he was disgraced, Hugo del Carril. Only Osvaldo Pugliese was an active opponent, as a communist, and he was to suffer for it. As the atmosphere changed in the latter years of Perón’s regime, the memory of Evita came to stand for a collective nostalgia for a Peronism remembered and idealized. The reality, however, was a reversal of what had gone before – major companies were sold back to their original owners, trade unions now actively controlled and repressed their own more militant members, while rising inflation generated an increasing dissatisfaction.
The great orchestras were beginning to disband as the venues of tango’s second Golden Age began to close. And, in 1955, Perón was overthrown in a military coup that began in the city of Córdoba and spread rapidly through the country. It was the second attempt to bring him down; the first, in August, had left hundreds dead in the Plaza de Mayo of Buenos Aires. Despite rumours to the contrary, there was only minimal mass resistance to the September coup at the time, and Perón himself basically walked away. The leader of what was called the ‘Liberating Revolution’, la Revolución Libertadora, was General Lonardi, a nationalist who was willing to leave in place some of the advances made under Perón, under the slogan ‘Neither victor nor defeated’. It may be that this is what persuaded the Peronist organizations that they were safe.4 Nonetheless, within weeks there were strikes and demonstrations and armed resistance from the more militant sections, as the nature of the new regime rapidly became clear. The response was repressive and brutal, as Lonardi was replaced by the hardline Aramburu.
The immigrants of 60 and 70 years earlier were part of the ‘Peronist Resistance’ (as these years of social conflict and struggle came to be called). The vision they were fighting to defend, of a cosmopolitan nation enshrined in the tango, now faced more than a decade of political instability, state violence and repression by a succession of military governments interspersed with civilian regimes all heavily dependent on the armed forces.5
In the era that followed tango’s Golden Age of dance and the Perón period, Argentina sank into over two decades of repression and fear. The latter part of the Fifties was shaped by the long resistance against the military and civilian coalitions that ruled implacably after the departure of Lonardi in 1956. The country prospered, its industries expanded; but the political conditions of existence were forged by the ceaseless struggle between government and a trade union movement largely operating underground and dominated, at least initially, by the Peronist leaders who had come to control them during the 1945–55 decade.
The underground resistance surfaced time and again, and always with a political demand for the return of Perón, who was living in Spain. In a sense, the Peronism that prevailed in Argentina among those who opposed the governments that succeeded him was not one idea but many – though each claimed legitimacy by reference to the symbolism of Evita. The battle for possession of her body was a political argument conducted as ritual. At one level, Peronism was defined in practice as an ideology of militant trade unionism which was itself divided between the old trade union bureaucracy using their influence to win political recognition for Peronism, and a new emerging militant trade unionism rooted in factory-based rank and file movements which was readier to confront repressive government through street struggles and factory occupations. In 1962, the government of Arturo Illía moved towards recognition of Peronism and the possibility that the movement could participate in official political life. But Perón himself was still not allowed to return. A general strike called by the leaders of the official trade union majority in December 1965 demanding the right of return for Perón had only a patchy response, and accelerated the internal divisions within the movement. But it seemed increasingly likely that the presidential elections of 1967 would produce a Peronist majority. The army moved to overthrow the government in a preemptive strike. The new president, General On
ganía, belonged to a group implacably opposed to Peronism and committed to long-term government by the military.
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