El Tango Entre Dos Américas: La Representación Del Tango En Estados Unidos, 1910–1939

The extensive literature on tango generally takes as its point of departure that the music and the dance were born in Buenos Aires, exported to the salons of Paris and other European cities, where they were embraced and legitimized, and reclaimed by Argentina as a national cultural symbol. El tango entre dos Américas is a refreshing and overdue addition to this literature, a fascinating and well-documented exploration of the experience of tango in the United States during several decades of critical importance to its discovery and dissemination. Relying heavily on press coverage from major cities in the United States, sources such as Caras y Caretas in Argentina, and to some extent on secondary literature, Matallana does more than compare the United States' relationship to tango with that of Europe; she investigates the roots of the differences, and the reader comes away with a much more vivid picture of the evolution...