After the Gardel´s grin: tango and social discursivity in the decade of thirty and forty in Costa Rica

Abstract

A detailed examination of the reasons why the famous singer and actor Carlos Gardel represents an emblematic instance in the reception and the dissemination processes of tango in Latin-America makes evident the need to emphasize the media and commercial function that the cultural industry (cinema and radio) performed in the construction and dissemination of the Gardelian myth. Nonetheless, such reasoning is insufficient to understand the ideological impact that the Gardelian figure had on Latin American sociocultural discourse and subjectivity and still does. Based on one of the main theses of Karl Marx related tothe so-called “fetishistic character of merchandise and its secret” (Der Fetischcharacter der Ware und sein Geheimnis), as well as the theoretical notion of the “Star System” created by Edmond Cros and the socio-critic studies, the main objective of this article is focused on the reflection about the specific aesthetic-ideological role that Carlos Gardel has fulfilled as a form of social consciousness, which shapes an ideological representation of the Latin American cultural subject framed in the modernization, economic crisis and cultural industrialization processes during the 1930’s and 1940’s in the Costa Rican urban context.