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Ethnographic Rendez-vous
Over time, by being purely a spectator in the Manhattan tango field,
I became a conversation partner ready to offer my time to tired danc-
ers who would join me around the tango table between dances, and
who would find in me an unconditional and confidential listener. Oc-
casionally, at the beginning of my tango incursions, and more regu-
larly later, many would sit at my table throughout the evening to talk
about a variety of personal matters: from their temporary visa status
and broken relationships to their everyday disappointments. In some
cases, my informants’ demands for support exceeded the stipulated
rationality of the field encounter, which, although camouflaged un-
der the rubric of emphatic rendezvous, always has a temporal limit
whenever the data had been saturated or when new hypotheses (and
projects) led us to new research queries.
In the end, becoming a familiar figure (what most books on eth-
nographic research teach) in the tango field was no longer an issue.
My anthropological costume became meaningless in a space within
which the simple fact of being there led me to engage in conversation
with others, who finally acknowledged me as la antropóloga, “the
anthropologist,” who were ready to share their stories with me. Our
interviews became a sort of therapeutic catharsis, through which the
private would turn into meaningful public social experiences, worth
being reproduced and translated into the words of the ethnographer
(see Behar 1993 , Eunshil 1998 , Spivak 1988 ).
Epilogue: Tangoified Relationships
By entering the tango world, I had initially attempted to examine the
social relationships through which Argentines (tango artists and cus-
tomers) exchange valuable social resources on the basis of social soli-
darity, common interests, and friendship. Later on, tango-dancing halls
became an ideal niche from which to explore the tensions of gender
dynamics that characterized my participation in the field. I have been
there, at the milongas (as I often still am) eager to examine how tango
(or even better, its tangoified relationships) has become a socialized
metaphor for something else: for relationships to be established, for
social and economic transactions to take place, and for reciprocity to
