La Milonguita (aka a young cabaret girl between 14 to 20's yrs old, that dances with many men)

The typical tango-lyric story of "la milonguita" is marked by poverty, ambition, the easy life and then... the fall, decay, death often through tuberculosis. Her story is part of the urban changes that turn Buenos Aires into a metropolis.
As the city began to expand with "los barrios" or neighborhoods, new career paths made it possible to move up the social ladder.
In a relatively short time, the Buenos Aires society was diversified and became more complex. Between the end of the first decade of the 20th century and the 1940's, people of the districts began to frequent "los cafés" or coffee houses and cabarets in the Buenos Aires center, and politicians looking for votes walked the neighborhoods making political campaigns. The extension of the free time outside the family homeworld, offered to many new encounters with great opportunities.
Thus a new consuming public was profiling or stereotyping itself, common people, of the districts, that listened to tangos and danced, read newspapers, magazines and went to the cinema, frequented new socialization fields, from the local club to the "society of promotion" and the bar. The expansion of the transport network facilitated an endless number of interchanges between the world of the neighborhoods and the one of the center. Buenos Aires had not only grown but was also more communicated. The mainstreet in the heart of the city, "La calle Corrientes", became the "neutral territory" on which the culture of the center and the one of the districts "were to taste".
In the decade of the 1920's, the center was already a definitive "free time" reference of the Bueno Aires locals. For 1923, it was considered that something more than seven million people went to spectacles such as operetas, theaters, dances, comedies, vaudevilles, films. Between the very diverse supplies of the center stood out the brothel, the dance academy, the coffee house and the night club. Some districts also offered those opportunities, but their "erótica" was not associated with the world of the center where the supply was more varied and for all budgets. At night, in the center of Buenos Aires, men of diverse social origin shared the entertainment adventure offered by women of humble origin.

It was in that world of interchanges that the milonguita's melodramatic trip form from the district to the center took place, of her moral fall and "pale tuberculosis end". The life of these taxi "milonguitas" and "milongueras" (women between 25 and 40) was hard. It was a life of shame, violence, alcoholism, drugs and diseases like tuberculosis. As the rates of syphillis and other sexually transmitted diseases were alarming, a "femme fatale" became more dangerous than an alluring and seductive "flor de lujo y de placer" (flower of luxury and satisfaction), a luxury girl whose charms traped her lovers in bonds of irresistible desires. The threat of these diseases give another connotation to femmes fatales and tango as the forbidden dance.
The leaving from the district to "el centro" is in poems the moment of treason to the origin, the home, the maternal love. It changes the scene, and in that change, the identity of "la muchacha de barrio" or the district girl, begins to alter itself. The tango lyrics place the "milonguita" in the city center and particularly in the night club. From 1880 on, a Paris fever developed and the Argentine society of Buenos Aires reflected a strong desire to imitate whatever French Paris had to offer. Like in Paris, cabarets, night clubs were opened and flourished, and gradually tango advanced from the obscurity of the bordellos to the multicolor lights of city night life, cultivating salon culture codes or etiquette. The night club or "El cabaret", was a place of "Les années folles - decadence", a place in which it was possible to give loose to erotic fantasies and creating a market for commercial sex.
The tango was the dance and music par excellence of the night club. Attracted by the payment, much better than those than they received in the suburban brothels, the tango musicians undertook their trip to the center. First cabarets appeared outside the center, in Palermo and the low sides of Belgrano. Following its Parisian equivalent, they were summer-restaurants, where it was possible to dance and listen to the fashionable orchestra, by nights near a park. In 1920, they worked all the year as cabarets or restaurant-cabarets, and unfolded luxury and elegance. They were "social epicenters" where the rich ones spent their time and money.

Three types of women circulated in the night club: 1, the "artistas", the consecrated artists, singers ("las cancionistas") sometimes dressed like men; 2, the "copears"; much like a café waitress whose job involved convincing her male customers of the possibility of sexual or romantic intimacy with her in a personalised way, thus they gave conversation and danced with the clients, accompanied them in the drink and, after one long and patient ceremony, sold love and sex; and 3, the "queridas" y "mantenidas", lovers or maîtresses of the clients with money who found in the night club an intimate and permisive space. For most of them, it offered young women from poor families with little education and skills an opportunity to earn a living which was not as arduous as farm or factory work, even though the hours were long. It was women who moved away of the domestic ideal life in the barrio. Some women had chosen a more independent life, maybe for that reason perceived by many men as a danger or a threat to the domestic order. However, there is often a trafficking of women behind the scene and the idealization of a luxurious life is very misleading. Some young girls could be euphemistically titled 'escort' girls in a new world with an overwhelming passion for consuming.

Through time, as the male / female population balance was getting more equal in Buenos Aires, dating became more normal and the scene changed. Now, both men and women went to crowded tango dance halls and confiterías, where they danced very close, the woman’s head over her partner’s right shoulder, so he could whisper in her ear and vise versa, this "cheek to cheek-style" was called "apilado" ("piled up", packed tightly together). Later, with the appearance of the tango in the milonga dance clubs and the salón in the family houses, the tanguero public transformed. From 1940, the tango had to express something else than the eroticism of the bordells and cabarets louche. The aesthetic focus was no longer on sexual desire and carnal pleasures but on the elegant appearance which can be called an illusory deception or over-mystification of the feminine idea with tangos like “María”, “Malena”, “Gricel”, “Ninguna”, “Naranjo en flor”.

The aesthetic perceptions experienced today, mark the same perception transformation to idealization or glorification of the perfect embodiment. It looks as if beauty is no longer seen as an object of desire, but as a public object of scientific research and styling. Researchers Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) term this particular perspective "self-objectification", and describe it as a form of self-consciousness that is characterised by habitual and constant self-monitoring of one's outward appearance to a prescribed ideal image.
A lifestyle-oriented social promotion happened when Buenos Aires began to expand and new career paths made moving-up possible. In recent years, especially since Argentina's disastrous economic crisis of January 2002, tango tourism has become an important source of revenue for the city's economy and Argentinian males can get an income as a taxi-dancers. Taxi dancers rent themselves to foreign tango tourists for the social dance only, a strange turn. (There are also Argentinian female taxi dancers, though fewer than males, strictly no-sex). Yet, beyond all these social realities is the true comfort of the music that musicians composed, great tangos that touched and still do the space around us.

There have been many tango orchestras in Buenos Aires that hymned "milonguita" and her course of life. Among them there are those that we have listened and adored:

Orchestra of Alfredo De Angelis with singer Carlos Dante
"Milonguita" 11-06-53

Orquestra of Ricardo Tanturi with singer Horacio Roca
"Milonguita" 16-08-50

Orchestra of Osvaldo Fresedo with singer Roberto Ray
Estercita "Milonguita" 3-3-44

Orchestra of Florindo Sassone
"Milonguita" instrumental

Orchestra of Ismael Spitalnik
"Milonguita" with singer Aldo Calderón

Orchestra of Aníbal Troilo with singer Nelly Vázquez
"Milonguita" 13-1-66

Orchestra of Enrique Alesio
"Milonguita" with singer Jose Berón

Orchestra of Jorge Dragone with singer Argentino Ledesma
"Milonguita" 1964


(Parts of this article were post on line at a tango forum)