The Emergence of Tango in Valparaíso (1900 -1920)

Abstract

Tango is a popular musical expression from the River Plate region that emerged in Buenos Aires and Montevideo around the last third of the 19th century, whose formative period spanned several decades until the appearance of the so-called tango-song around 1917. It is well known its dissemination in Europe from the second five-year period of the 20th century; however, its spread to the South American countries of the Pacific coast, which occurred during the same period, is less so. This paper investigates the emergence of tango in Valparaíso during the first two decades of the 20th century and argues that this emergence can be associated with the city's character as a port city, a characteristic it shares with Buenos Aires and Montevideo. In these three cities would have been coexisted social, cultural, economic, and even political similarities, which constituted the conditions of possibility for the early acceptance and practice of the tango genre in Valparaíso and in Chile.