Poesía de gotán: The Poetry of the Tango

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Veinte años no es nada

On March 1, 2006 I landed at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires. I was 19 years old.

The only travel I had ever done outside the U.S. was a couple brief stints to Nogales, Sonora, Mexico to build houses with Habitat for Humanity, and to Puerto Peñasco for a cultural spring break trip. 

Both a good friend in undergrad (Esther Huckabay) and my faculty mentor (Profa Melissa Fitch) had both lived there, and are aficionados/scholars of Argentine culture. Profa Fitch and John Dahlstrand also danced a tango for us at the end of a course on Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, which I took in my very first semester at the University of Arizona. I had the immense privilege of having a scholarship and resources available to me to study abroad, so I picked the Universidad de Belgrano in Buenos Aires. 

I grew up in Chicago and rode the L to my diverse urban high school in the West Loop. My friends and I spent our adolescence riding the L around the city, bumming around sandwich shops and museums downtown and goth clothing stores in Wrigleyville and rollerblading by the Lake, so I always considered myself a “city kid,” and I was excited to live by myself for the first time in the heart of a metropolis like Buenos Aires. My grandma, who was a Spanish teacher in the Philippines, had started teaching me that language from a young age, and I took courses all through high school and declared Spanish as a second major in college. 

I landed in Buenos Aires feeling excited and prepared to have an adventure. 

I didn’t live with a host family. I didn’t live with any of the other U of A students who had come to study at Belgrano. I rented an apartment of my own, right where Avenida Coronel Diaz meets Soler and turns into Mario Bravo. Technically, just inside the very southwestern border of the barrio of Recoleta. But Palermo was the barrio where I hung out outside of class hours, went for coffees, met friends for drinks.

Nothing really could have prepared for life on my own in Buenos Aires. I thought I knew what it would be like to live alone, because when I moved to Tucson, Arizona from Chicago I had a single dorm room on campus. But I made friends fast at U of A, and during my freshman year I rarely spent any time alone, and rarely slept in my own dorm room, opting instead to sit up and laugh and hang out with my friends until the wee hours, when I’d chastely climb into one of their beds and fall asleep. 

In Buenos Aires, I felt what it was like to be a foreigner in a new country. I won’t be overly humble; my Spanish was already quite good, and I’d watched some films and chatted with Esther and Profa Fitch to familiarize myself with the porteño accent. But being there, getting a taxi into the city from Ezeiza, talking to my landlady, enrolling in classes, buying groceries, figuring out how to use the paper Guia T to ride the colectivos, interacting with people 100% of the time in a language that, despite my eagerness and perceived proficiency, was not native to me, was more difficult than I had imagined.

I made friends in my classes, Argentine students and international students and the other students from U of A who had decided to live with host families. My friend Stephanie and I even went on an epic summer trip to Patagonia together, and went to Rio de Janeiro for my 20th birthday (where I practiced my Portuguese, which was actually better than I had thought, and also jumped off the top of Pedra Bonita strapped in a hang glider with a stranger). 

And of course, I wanted to learn to dance tango.

I found a teacher named Lidia Ferrari, who lived just a short walk away from my apartment, and took weekly private tango lessons with her at her house in Palermo, and went to her weekly práctica at the Argentine-Japanese Cultural Center in San Telmo. 

Occasionally I’d Skype with family and friends back in the U.S., but in those days the video and audio quality of transcontinental internet calling were poor. Sometimes I’d go to a locutorio and call home, but the voices on the other end of the line always sounded so distant. My godmother came down to visit from Chicago, and we went on a tourist trip to Iguazú Falls, but that was a blink in time. 

In Buenos Aires, I learned what it was truly like to spend time alone. I would go to milongas (mainly Canning and La Viruta) to watch the dancers—I wasn’t proficient enough to get tandas until the very end of my stay. But I loved to listen to the music, and afterwards, I’d walk through the cobblestone streets of Palermo, past the house where Borges grew up, back to my apartment, where I’d eat an empanada or a medialuna from earlier that day and wash it down with some Malbec or a Quilmes. I’d sit on the balcony and look out at the street and listen to the night sounds of the city. I felt lonely sometimes, other times exhilarated and proud of myself and simply in awe that I’d been lucky enough to fly thousands of miles to come and live in a city on another continent.

I was also in awe of the general warmth and friendliness of the porteños. The kid at the empanada shop on around the corner, the lady at the laundry who washed and folded my clothes, the guy at the quiosco on the corner who learned quickly that I always wanted two peanut alfajores and a Coke. Lidia and her students at the practica. The girl at the bakery who boxed up my medialunas and cañoncitos. My classmates, who got me home when my drink got spiked at the gay dance club Amerika one night. 

And through it all, I had tango music to remind me that I was not alone. Lots of tangos are about being lovesick, sure, but so many others are about being homesick and missing the neighborhood where you grew up, and your old gang of friends. When I heard those songs then, I thought about my neighborhood back in Chicago and my friends back in Chicago and Arizona. When I heard someone singing about the gas lamps on the street where they grew up, I thought about the bungalow in East Rogers Park where I grew up, the only one on the block with an old gas streetlamp out front. My friend Lorena, who was both a U of A student and a native porteña, took me to a tango show at Esquina Homero Manzi. I put his iconic song “Sur,” the version sung by Edmundo Rivero with the orchestra of Aníbal Troilo, on the “walking around Buenos Aires” playlist I had on my iPod nano. Every time I listen to that song, I think about making a long journey by train or bus to the South Side of Chicago and the complicated and ill-fated first love I had there (with the person who’d gifted me that very iPod). 

In an iconic tango, “Volver,” Carlos Gardel sings “Veinte años no es nada.” Twenty years is nothing. In the last 20 years so much has happened in my life: I met a boy, fell for him, got married, moved with him all around the Western US, got a Master’s degree, had so many different jobs, lost my dad and my cousin and other family and friends, adopted many dogs and put a few down, had health scare in the middle of a global pandemic, went through more than one existential crisis, and am now enrolled in a second Master’s program. 

But through it all, I’ve also danced tango. I’ve taken classes, collected music, DJed, traveled from coast to coast, and made more friends from around the world than I’d ever dreamed of.

I have not, much to my sorrow, been back to Buenos Aires.

Yet. Traveling porteño tango teachers come to Portland all the time, and my tango friends go and come back, making their first pilgrimages after already knowing how to dance. And when I dance with those people, I feel in their embraces the echoes of the bygone days of my youth. 

There’s a line in a vals I love, written by José María Contursi: “En esta noche vuelvo a ser aquel muchacho soñador, que supo amarte y con sus versos te brindó sus penas.” “Tonight I become once again/that dreamy-eyed boy who knew how to love you and in his verses showed you his sorrows…”

This world and this country—the U.S., my homeland, for better or, these days, mostly for worse—are dark places right now, and technology inundates us with the senseless horror and needless cruelty that we humans visit on one another, on a constant and overwhelming scale.

But every time I go to a milonga and hear a beloved piece of music from tango’s Golden Age, and I embrace a friend and take a step onto the pista, I become once again that dreamy-eyed boy walking the streets of Palermo Viejo, a little dazed and nostalgic (now, for distant Buenos Aires), but also just existing in the moment and struck by the wonder of life. That’s why I’ve been dancing tango for 20 years, and, God willing, will for the rest of my life.