The Spanish word tanguero has become an integral part of the language of the tango. Learning a bunch of Spanish words to spice up a conversation or to imply a certain expertise in tango circles is one of the many fringe benefits of being a tanguero. For years confessional tango lists have had their heated discussions about who is a tanguero, what makes a real tanguero, and how does somebody become a tanguero? For people in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid nineties the answer was simple: they could become tangueros by simply sending $100 to a fledging tango association run as a family business.
For independent thinkers, the answers to so many important questions come from using common sense and logic to parse the abundant wealth of available facts. First of all, take notice of the suffix ‘e-r-o’ that is attached to the word tango to form the word tanguero. This ending along with the feminine gender ‘e-r-a’ is used in Spanish to associate a word with a profession or trade, a craft or skill, a qualifier for an activity. For example, a person who plays the guitarra (guitar) is called a guitarrero; a person who joins the marina (navy) is called a marinero; the owner of a verduleria (produce stand) is a verdulero; a person who builds or sells colchones (matresses) is called a colchonero; a person who drives a camion (big rig) is called a camionero.
Now, a person who’s lifestyle abides to the codes of the tango inner culture in Buenos Aires is called a milonguero because his main social activities take place at the milonga, the exclusive place where tango people dance tango.
Back in the early nineteen nineties when the first foreigners began arriving in Buenos Aires in search of the holy grail of tango, they thirst for knowledge included the need to attach a label to everything they saw and everybody they met. For example, noticing a particular dancer’s way of dancing, they would ask “how would you call yourself?” The dancer would answer,
-Rodolfo, Mingo, Eduardo, etc.
- No, no, no, how do you call what you do?
- I teach tango, I manage a dance hall, I drive a taxi, etc.
Eager foreigners and puzzled dancers laughed nervously at the confusion. The nagging desire to put a magic label to the people they admired so much on the dance floor eventually lead to the inspiring moment when someone with a good memory for High School Spanish used the rule we explained above. They coined the term tanguero to label anybody who had anything to do with any tango activity, but mostly those people who were solely interested in dancing.
Back home, at cocktail parties and water cooler chats some people began to enjoy the pleasure of answering “I’m a tanguero” to the question about what they did in their spare time. It was up to those who really knew the depth of the word tanguero to salute tangueros and tangueras everywhere reminding them that real tangueros wear cleats.
