Terry: There are moments in the history of the arts when a group of artists arrives in some particular place, like Paris in the twenties, for example...Hemingway, Richard Wright, the writers...

Horacio: And Picasso and Dali...

Terry: To be sure! Here in San Francisco in the fifties with the...

Horacio: The Beatniks.

Terry: Exactly. And at those times, there's...they're not very frequent in the history of the arts...there's a gigantic and sudden flourishing of artistic activity. New York in the fifties, with Jackson Pollack and Motherwell and Klein. The South American Boom of the sixties and seventies, with the works of Garcia Marquez, Vargas Lllosa, Manuel Puig, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende, Borges...the list is very long. Jose Donoso. Eduardo Galeano. Ernesto Sabato. It was an extraordinary advance of ideas and works. It's my theory that that's the way it was also during the Golden Age of the tango.

Horacio: But the Golden Age isn't done with yet, eh?

Terry: (Laughter) I agree. So, how can you explain it, in the case of Buenos Aires?

Horacio: Because there's a circumstance that makes Buenos Aires into the Paris of the Americas, but one which has a much richer root system, I think. Because Paris, which to be sure is a center of Anglo-Latin culture, like the French race itself, doesn't contain anything that the Buenos Aires tango contains in a very powerful way. The tango is a combination of the Indian and the American, which includes the Indian who has now disappeared but who still remains in the gaucho and in the compadrito. And it exists in the very essence itself of the tango and the idea of the city, with its port, and the great abundance of culture from the rest of the world. And that's very strong.

The immigration and the scholars and musicians who came, cultivated musicians who came, too. They all came. I include everyone here in this port city. I mean even Rubén Dario got here, too, and all the scholars of that time, and it became a kind of council, because Buenos Aires has that additional attractiveness, that it's an American city, an Indo-American city. Because even though the black people have disappeared from Buenos Aires, the indigenous blood — with all the importance it carries of the national poem "Martín Fierro" and all the gaucho poetry — has not.

And just so, I was thinking yesterday that if the Cowboy is the equivalent of the Gaucho, the Cowboy doesn't have a literature. He's got the movies, but no literature. The Cowboy doesn't have "Martin Fierro". Gaucho literature is a unique case, and it's the very basis of the tango. And that's where the attractiveness of Buenos Aires comes from, no?, the city with a European aspect and an American content. That's why it seems to me logical that it's such a magnet.

Terry: I have a theory about the tango: the tango is porteño (i.e. from the port city of Buenos Aires), naturally. But there's been a great deal of emigration from Buenos Aires.