UC Riverside

How can we move beyond the hegemony of market fundamentalism? Against this backdrop, my ethnographic research focuses on tango as social dance, which in this dissertation, I explore within a political economic context. As the dominant political economic paradigm in the world today is neoliberal capitalism, which cherishes competition as a foundational value, this research has necessarily involved a separate genre of tango dance, competition tango, and shows how it can be conflated with social tango. I have used participation-observation fieldwork, interviews, and secondary sources, to study the social tango scenes, as well as formal tango competitions, in the two urban centers of Buenos Aires and Los Angeles. The first chapter lays the historical groundwork for the chapter that follows. In the second chapter, after describing the Mundial, the world’s largest tango competition, and how it is enacting neoliberalism by way of “tradition,” I categorize and discuss the various social tango spaces of Buenos Aires. I argue that las milongas populares, which are hotbeds for social and political progressivism, have emerged as a primary challenge to both the heteropatriarchal and the socioeconomic aspects of neoliberalism. The third chapter discusses how a conflation of social and competition tango, unlike Buenos Aires, has permeated the tango scene of Los Angeles. This, I argue, is due to the prevailing receptivity of the scene to the insistence on the Argentine “authenticity” of the tango that the competitions are presenting. While a very considerable portion of the social tango scene in Buenos Aires has emerged as a site of resistance to neoliberal capitalism, Los Angeles tango is by and large perpetuating neoliberalism.

The overarching argument of this dissertation is that tango has the dual capacity to on the one hand, promote individualism, and on the other, to foster solidarity and social cohesion. It can both affirm neoliberal capitalism and its values, and act as resistance to it through a compelling practice of sensitivity to others. Most importantly, this practice of sensitivity, and of cultivating harmony and cooperation among individuals, can be seen as a way of moving (dancing) beyond the hegemony of neoliberalism and into vaster potentialities.