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Ethnographic Rendez-vous
had been a source of confusion in other venues, in the tango world,
I was ultimately welcomed as a familiar figure where my intellectual
endeavors no longer surprised anyone. In the end it became the so-
cial space in which my gendered invisibility achieved its maximum
expression. Curiously, in a social field where flamboyant characters
are the norm, I became the opposite sort of character. Within the cos-
mopolitan tango sociography, a concoction of multiple nationalities
and professions (including anthropologists who do dance tango), my
presence at the tango salons was not only finally understood but often
expected and, almost always, welcomed. By becoming a non-dancing
tanguera, my own place in the tango world was finally created.
Nevertheless, my journey from my own country to my peripheral
role in the U.S.-centered intellectual geography left me, at the close
of my ethnographic adventure, with a variety of unsolved conun-
drums: Who am I in multicultural America? How have my own so-
cial networks, including the ones I developed in the tango field, led
me to achieve my own share of social capital that has helped draw my
path to the American dream? In the end, the Argentine tango scene
has allowed me to be among my own for just enough time to travel
back across the virtual bridge to my amorphous New Yorker persona,
a transition that has mingled my dual cultural identities (Anzaldua
1999 , Maher 1998 ).^6
Being among my tango friends, like being in Buenos Aires, has fos-
tered my longing for familiar voices, assumed attitudes, self-explana-
tory silences. I can be an anthropologist among them but, above all, I
am another Argentine looking for recognizable features in the faceless
Manhattan crowd. Far from being a means to uncover my bodily ex-
periences through dance steps, the tango world has become my gate-
way to escape from my often oppressive alien self, a purposive drive
that has rescued me from the chaotic endless resistance to anonymous
representation that is a feature of social life in New York City.
Notes
1. An earlier version of part of this article was presented at the 2003 American Anthro-
pological Association Annual Meeting in Chicago. I thank Vincent Crapanzano for his in-
sightful comments on my paper during the session. I am also grateful to Sherry Ortner,
