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TANGO LESSONS  
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Cesar Chelala
December 24, 2025
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_ Tango has long chronicled those times. In doing so, it continues to
offer a vocabulary for confronting a world where decency is in short
supply and moral responsibility and kindness even more so. _

Enrique Santos Discépolo., Photo by Annemarie Heinrich

 

Tango—one of Argentina’s most enduring cultural exports—has
always been more than the sum of its music, lyrics, and dance. For
many, it functions as a lens through which to interpret the world: its
contradictions, its longing, and its wounds. Every year, thousands of
tango fans come to Buenos Aires seeking not only to master its steps
but to enter a universe where melancholy, social critique, and
emotional longing coexist.

Few have described that universe with greater insight than Horacio
Ferrer, who called tango “music, dance, a way to see the world… a
sensitivity, an emotion… the mythical dimension of reality,
nostalgia, abandonment.” Ferrer captured a fundamental truth: tango
resonates because it gives form to the uncertainties and moral
ambiguities that define modern life.

THE BIRTH OF A SOCIAL LANGUAGE

Tango emerged in the late 19th century from a convergence of cultures
in a rapidly changing Argentina. African candombe rhythms, the Cuban
habanera brought by sailors, the criollo milonga, and the Spanish
cuplé all blended in the crowded _conventillos_—tenements where
millions of immigrants grappled with loss, memories, displacement, and
reinvention. Out of that tumult was born not only a new musical genre
but a distinct vocabulary for urban angst: a cultural x-ray of a
society reinventing itself.

Among the artists who mastered that x-ray, Enrique Santos Discépolo
stands apart. Using _lunfardo_—the streetwise dialect shaped by
Spanish, Italian, and immigrant slang—he turned tango into an
instrument of social dissection. His iconic song _Cambalache_,
written in 1934 during Argentina’s “Infamous Decade” of
political corruption and economic collapse, distilled a mood of
profound disillusionment.

A NATION’S MIRROR—AND A WARNING BEYOND IT

For Argentines, _Cambalache_ has come to symbolize the recurrent
cycles of dysfunction that have marked the country’s modern history.
A nation that entered the 20th century among the world’s most
prosperous has endured repeated recessions, runaway inflation, and
political upheavals. Discépolo identified a pattern that remains
painfully familiar: the erosion of distinctions between effort and
opportunism, merit and deceit.

His verses feel disturbingly current:

“Today to be either loyal or disloyal are both the same…

An ass is the same as a scholar of renown…Those without morals have
caught up with us.”

And later:

“It’s the same if you workday and night like an oxas the one who
lives off othersor those who kill, or those who healor those who live
outside the law.”

Discépolo described a world in which values dissolve and impostors
thrive. Although he wrote for an Argentina in crisis, his diagnosis
extends well beyond national borders. As the University of
Oklahoma’s Michael A. Mares has noted, _Cambalache_ reads today as
a prescient commentary on the global challenges we now confront at the
world level: the rise of authoritarian leaders, the weakening of
democratic norms, institutional decay, and widening inequality.

WHEN INDIFFERENCE BECOMES POLICY

Yet the injustices of our era unfold on a larger and more brutal scale
than Discépolo could have imagined. Across continents, families are
torn apart by forced deportations; children in refugee camps grow up
without schools, safety, or even clean water; and vital health
programs deteriorate as funding is withdrawn. In South Sudan, Congo,
and Gaza, women and children account for a disproportionate share of
war casualties. In parts of Africa, cuts to aid programs for
malnutrition, HIV, and other diseases have caused thousands of deaths
and left millions exposed to preventable suffering.

These crises reveal something deeper than political failure: a world
in which indifference is no longer an accident but, in many places, a
deliberate policy. Yet not even tango, that was prescient in
identifying social ills, was unable to predict the extent of today’s
callousness and cruelty among politicians, who enact policies aimed at
favoring the few at the expense of the most.

THE LESSON TANGO OFFERS

Yet Argentina’s cultural history offers a counterpoint. Tango was
born from hardship, but it transformed hardship into beauty and
elegance. Even at its bleakest, tango refuses complete surrender. It
insists on dignity amid injustice, on memory amid erasure.

This stance echoes Bertolt Brecht’s famous question: “In the dark
times, will there also be singing?”  His own answer is the one
tango has embodied for over a century: “Yes, there will be
singing—about the dark times.”

Tango has long chronicled those times. In doing so, it continues to
offer a vocabulary for confronting a world where decency is in short
supply and moral responsibility and kindness even more so.

 

_DR. CESAR CHELALA is a co-winner of the 1979 Overseas Press Club of
America award for the article “Missing or Disappeared in Argentina:
The Desperate Search for Thousands of Abducted Victims.”_

 

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* Tango
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* Argentina
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* Cultural Resitance
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* dance
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* Music
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