From 1900 to 1930 Argentina was changed under the impact of massive European immigration provoking a remaking of the national identity. However, the project of a nation masks its heterogenity and denies a space both to the communities that become submerged through it and to the alternative imaginaries that it displays. The article is an illustration of these particular processes through the lens of the impact of gaucho imagery and dress in tango. In this context we will see that the gaucho dress and folk traditions were key components of a nationalist revival. The article tries to show that the connection between gaucho imagery and dress, in theory belonging to the past, embraces also tango, the modern dance and music created in Argentina in the 1880s and 1890s and exported to the world at the beginning of the twentieth century. The paper also examines the confluence of nationalism in Argentina with European ideas of exoticism and primitivism in defining an arena in which tango could be referred as gaucho music and dance.
Tango; Primitivism; Argentinian Identity; Gaucho Dress