Buenos Aires in the 20s and 30s: although every attempt at periodisation is controversial, these decades, perhaps as no other, witness change in a spectacular manner. What is in play is not only the aesthetic avant-gardes, or economic modernisation, but rather modernity as a cultural style which permeates the fabric of a society which offers little resistance, whether in the projects of its political élites or in its density of life. The impact of the socioeconomic processes, initiated in the second half of the 19th century, altered not only the urban landscape and ecology but also the lived experiences of its inhabitants. Thus, Buenos Aires is interesting as a physical space and as a cultural myth: city and modernity presuppose one another because the city is the stage for those changes brought on by modernity, it exhibits them in an ostensible and sometimes brutal fashion, it disseminates and generalises them.

Carlos Gardel (1890-1935) became a legendary figure not only in Argentina but all over Latin America. He pioneered tango as a form of popular music. His tragic death in a plane crash at age 45 only heightened his mythical personality. His funeral was attended by enormous crowds of fans.

Leisure life could not be complete without an afternoon at the racetrack. This 1929 photo of the Hipódromo Argentino shows another facet of the "roaring" 20s in Buenos Aires. (Taken from Ricardo Luis Molinari's Buenos Aires: 4 Siglos. Buenos Aires: Tipográfica Editora Argentina, 1980, p. 402.)

Published between 1924 and 1927, Martín Fierro's 45 issues provided a venue for avant garde ideas, including early writings of Borges. In mid 1925 it had reached a circulation of over seven thousand, atypical for an artistic-literary magazine.