In the 60s with clean buckets on the sidewalk, in the 70s with water pumps and in the 80s with dances at the big soccer clubs. However, the festivities carnival They have a long history that starts with Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.
It was the man from San Juan, when he was President of the Republic, who organized the first official corsican from Buenos Aires, in 1869.
He had met them 22 years earlier, during one of his trips to Europe (1845-1847). He counts on Trips in Europe, Africa and America (1851) that when I come to Rome The bell tower of the Roman capitol “exploded” calling the festivities and he was fascinated.
During Sarmiento’s term, when Valentín Alsina was the governor of Buenos Aires, the central celebration took place along five blocks in the neighborhood Monserratbetween Victoria Street -now Hipólito Yrigoyen- and Plaza Lorea, where the “burial of the doll” that would be the “sick” King Momo was held.
sarmiento carnival
The historian Enrique Puccia recounted that the guides of the Sarmiento Birthplace Museum and Library recounted that Sarmiento himself, as the first president, would drive around those 5 blocks in an official open-top car and they drenched it; far from getting angry, “he was hilarious with laughter.”
The Diario de Cuyo published (sarmiento and the carnivalValeria Sacchi) that some witnesses had seen the then president walking with a vicuña poncho and his head covered by a hat, distributing and receiving “squirts of waterlaughing at the swinging jaw”.
is Monserrat The “Porso Commissions” were set up and the same neighbors made donations to set up ornamental boxes and decorate the blocks with colorful pennants and garlands from sidewalk to sidewalk.
Heir to the epic homeland and prelude to the generation of 80, the privateering was organized as a military parade. It started with the marches and then followed the comparsas divided into three “corps”: infantry, cavalry and carriages, always in that order.
there was awards for the best in each area and also surprises: San Benito was only made up of “ladies”; there was a parade of princesses; ornamental floats; parade of children’s masks, etc.
Some of the most famous troupes at the dawn of privateering were Tenorios, Estrella del sur, Símbolo Republicano,
Salamanca, Porvenir del Plata, Stella di Roma, Negros Porteños, Inhabitants of the Moon, Little Ants, Little Angels, Sons of Lucifer and Progreso del Plata.
De Sarmiento and the water knob
Sarmiento had a predilection for murgas Inhabitants of the moon, some of those members would be famous as emilio miterDelfín Huergo, Alberto Casares, Ireneo Portela and none other than Francisco Pascasio Moreno, the future “Perito” who was only 20 years old at the time.
In carnival everything –or almost everything- was allowed and the preponderant spirit was social satire –this is how Sarmiento understood it even when he encouraged privateering in San Juan during his term as governor.
sarmiento they were invited to take the tea at home with a promising legend: “They will have the opportunity to meet to the crazy…”.
Knowing that one of the members of the murga was imitating him, Sarmiento asked him to do it and then told them to do the same with his Minister of the Interior Dalmacio Vélez Sarsfield, who was there. “They’re all sucking” The author of the Civil Code of Argentina reacted in pure Cordovan from Calamuchita.
In gratitude for his hospitality, the murga baptized Sarmiento “The Emperor of Masks” and in 1873 he had tin coins minted, with the profile of the president with an imperial crown, and sent him one as a gift.
Carnivals for everyone”, Sarmiento thought.
Carnival festivities already existed in colonial times, but they did not go far due to the excesses of the participants.
For this reason, the Sarmiento initiative was well received and had an unexpected social repercussion: it allowed the visibility of the descendants african american.
Yes, there were still a lot of blacks in Buenos Aires. Not as many as in 1810, when it was estimated that they represented 30% of the population, but there would be some 8,000many of whom would have miraculously survived in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) or had not been sent to the battlefront.
In Monserrat, a large part of those present at the carnival festivities were Afro-descendants and they made so much noise that the area earned the nickname of “Drum Quarter”by improvised popular orchestras with the percussion of marimbas, massacallas, tin maracas and drums.
carnivals of before
According to Enrique Puccia, author of Brief history of the Buenos Aires carnivalin the days of celebrations the streets were “a swarm of people” since afternoon.
Balvanera was soon another of the Buenos Aires neighborhoods that filled with color for the carnivals. However, in 1894, when Avenida de Mayo was inaugurated, the popular carnival festivities moved to that very European Gran Vía. With a wide road, sidewalk and boulevard, it was able to receive more people and the parade of floats and troupes was speeding up.
With the move of the corso to Avenida de Mayo, a new element was promoted: the costume, the great star of the carnival. In general they were the typical costumes of the communities, sewn for the children by the immigrant housewives. On the day of the festivities, the seamstresses proudly took a photo of their children and sent them to relatives in Italy, Spain, Poland, Russia, or wherever.
Water, streamers and dances
The carnival “is a tradition of humanity that is perpetuated through the centuries. It is a necessity of the spirit. The people show themselves as they are in these days of authorized disorder, their state of morality and culture can be measured more in the midst of the madness of carnival, than in public elections or in intimate acts of life (…) said Sarmiento and quotes Valeria Sacchi.
And he knew what he was talking about. One of the best known murgas at that time was an elite society, The Blacks, that members were not exactly tales but young whites from the Buenos Aires aristocracy, who painted their faces with burned cork for the occasion. Ramírez y Ezcurra, Lainez, Costa y Gascón, Rojas, Ocampo, Lynch, Cané and Miter (who made sparks with Sarmiento) were some of the surnames that appeared among its members.
His songs imitated the Castilian defects of Afro-descendants and he mentioned them as “black candombero”, “negrillo bozal”, “black trumpet”, with certainty that he recorded the slave-owning past. Conflicts arose and the neighbors complained about the public fights between comparsas, for which the post-Sarmiento authorities prohibited the presence of Afro-descendant communities and their candombes abandoned the streets to retreat to the private sphere.
Carnivals in the 20th century
The tradition of carnival balls continued into the 20th century, but from the streets they went to the theaters.
It is known that in 1921, Francisco Canaro he performed in style at the Teatro de la Opera, with an orchestra made up of 12 bandoneons, 12 violins, 2 cellos, 2 grand pianos, a flute and a clarinet. expensive july It did not shrink and almost simultaneously brought joy to the great carnival balls at the Teatro San Martín (Esmeralda 255), with an orchestra of 40 musicians on stage.
And they were not the only ones, because the theaters ColiseumPoliteama, Astral, Casino, Victoria, Smart and Pueyrredón de Flores were among the many that joined.
And of course, the great Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, which in 1934 joined the carnival dances with a very complete program, from classical to fox trot.
carnivals in clubs
A little later, the carnival scene reached the sports clubs and stadiums who competed with each other with unequal resources to have the best-known orchestras.
San Lorenzo, River, Careers, Independent of AvellanedaAtlanta, Chacarita, Vélez Sarsfield and Ferro Carril Oeste competed for the great directors: Alfredo De Angelis, Carlos Di Sarli, Juan D’Arienzo, Aníbal Troilo, Osvaldo Pugliese…
And if there were no orchestras, the carnival was not missing. Some neighborhoods are literally “encouraged” by the star drivers of the moment: Leo Rivas, Juan Alberto MateykoJuan Carlos Mareco, Miguel Ángel Merellano, Rubén Machado, Edgardo Suárez, etc.
And if there was no orchestra or entertainer or figures on stage, people would “shake their bodies” listening to recorded music and dance until dawn, while “playing” carnival with perfume launcher, snow sprays, innocent colored streamers and piles of confetti. At the dances, sorry President Sarmiento, water was prohibited. And he was lucky to have moved on to bronzes before ecological awareness was born.
Other sports venues that were initially in the B of the clubs, also positioned themselves among the most sought after for the dances in February.
The Club Atlético Correos y Telégrafos, for example, which was the union club of “the postmen” became famous in the 70s as Club Communications -to dry- and was the headquarters of the massive Radio Miter Carnivals that had Francisco “Mochín” Marafioti (María Graña’s husband and producer of CBS Records) as musicalizer. He played music and the dance was “pica”.
Lucky couple were sharing with Communications, the Municipality Clubs, villa malcolm, Avellaneda regattasLucense Center, Asturian Centerthe Darling Tennis of La Boca and Unidos de Pompeya, just to mention the Buenos Aires, what’s up!
All the revisionists of the 70s and 80s cite the San Lorenzo Club as the best example of the rage for carnival dances. It operated in the Old Gasometer on Av. La Plata and became synonymous with the “greater carnival of Buenos Aires”.
Due to its setting last summer from international figures such as Juan Manuel Serrat and Roberto Carlos until SandroPalito Ortega and Leonardo Favio, including Los Wawancó, The catsManal, Fresh Paint, Katunga, Ointment and even Those of the Suquíathat sweetened the night with their voices from the Uritorco.
Even when she was barely 17 years old, María Cristina Lancelotti appeared as vocalist of the Los Antillanos orchestra at the carnival balls in the Asturian Center and it was then that she became a a singing star, Valeria Lynch.
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