In the dirty, crowded, and impoverished immigrant barrios of Buenos Aires of , a year-old girl arrives with little more than some clothes and her grandfather's violin. Leda, an Italian girl, was sent for by her cousin-husband, but widowed before her ship even lands in South America.
She soon finds comfort and excitement in a new kind of music that's filling the city's courtyards, bars and brothels: the tango.
In , tango is new, it's vibrant; at first the domain of the poor and working classes, it's coming into its own and gaining an elite audience. The music entrances Leda. But to play the tango β and survive β she has to pass herself off as a man. De Robertis tells Westervelt about her own immigrant background and why being queer means always coming out.
It includes people of African descent, immigrants from Russia, from Italy, from many parts of Europe who brought their instruments and their sounds and these sounds mixed in the cauldron of Buenos Aires to become a new music. So I wanted to explore the immigrant experience, and for a woman immigrant, the only way for her to fully access the underworld of the tango on her own terms without becoming a prostitute was to dress as a man.
The book opens in ; it's the year that the tango caught fire in Paris. And when it caught fire in Paris, then the elite of Buenos Aires began to pay attention and say, "Wow, we have this thing under out feet that we have disdained and Paris is listening.
