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their rhythms would merge as they learned to dance – and survive – together.
    LIVES AT THE MARGINS
    The living spaces of the poor, native and foreign born, were very different from the grand houses and mansions of the city centre and the middle-class suburbs. In 1871, an epidemic of yellow fever in the south of the city, where most of the richer families then lived, drove them to look for new homes in healthier environments. Theymoved north, to the areas that still remain the habitat of the prosperous – Florida, Belgrano and the Barrio Norte. The grand houses they left behind, their patios and backyards, and the alleys in between, became home to hundreds of families moving towards the capital, where they lived in makeshift rooms, each housing at least one family, surrounding open courtyards with shared sinks. These were the conventillos , where the immigrants mingled with the refugees from the countryside in an overcrowded and promiscuous environment.
    The sediment of the population flowed across the wet floor; the rooms were small and narrow, and through their open doors you could glimpse the grubby rooms, full of boxes and trunks, broken chairs and tables with three legs, mouldy mirrors, comic strips pinned to the walls, and that strange disorder wherever four or six sleep together, and where everything has to be given a place somewhere.
    Outside the door a metal pan is boiling . . . and the floor is covered with potato peelings, onion skins, cabbage leaves. They mark the room’s frontier, just as the fences mark the limits of the great pampa ranches . . . 9
    The majority of European immigrants crowded into these conventillos , or into the ramshackle wooden houses on the riverbank in the areas close to the docks. La Boca, with its brightly painted facades, housed them in suffocating intimacy. Most of the new arrivals were men between fifteen and thirty years old, far from home and marginalized from the host culture (despite the formal welcome that had been extended to them), without their families, and yearning for affection and the comfort of women. This concentration of young males created a world of repressed sexual desire, well served by the burgeoning sexindustry, in an atmosphere of male competition and ritual violence.
    In these early days the immigrants would huddle together in the face of a cold and unwelcoming city. The Italians gathered in La Boca district whose painted houses reminded them of Genoa or Naples. The Spaniards, who were the second largest group, gathered on the Avenida de Mayo, while the Jews of Eastern Europe hovered around the Plaza 11 de Septiembre. The English migrants were for the most part entrepreneurs and chose to live beside their Argentine associates in and around Belgrano. And in the suburbs, the arrabales , the recent arrivals from the pampa played their guitars and remembered the homes they had left behind.
    In every area the language and habits of home were repeated and reproduced. And while the different groups met regularly in the crowded streets down by the river, their relationship was tense and suspicious in this first decade of the new Argentina. The young men roamed the streets, watching and listening, waiting for the moment when they could visit the brothels whose tantalizing music filled the night streets. The working week was long and tough. Going home in the evening through dark streets must at times have been frightening. Home was a conventillo – noisy, crowded and dirty. You might share one room, where you lodged with a family. And each week the tension would rise as the time for the landlord’s weekly visit approached. He might throw some families out, raise the rents arbitrarily, or drive more families into the overcrowded space. Small wonder that the street seemed so seductive.
A typical conventillo .
    In the 1870s, the beautification of Buenos Aires had hardly begun; the streets in the poor districts were not lit, and the conditions that had