<scp>Tropical Counterpublic</scp> : <i>Popular Music and Politics in Neoliberal Argentina</i>

Abstract During the 1990s, the Conurbano, the vast urban area surrounding Buenos Aires, became the site of an innovative popular politics, as poor people responded to a deepening crisis provoked by neoliberalism with a new repertoire of collective action. At the same time, the Conurbano was also the site of a hugely popular music and dance scene, the so-called Movida Tropical. Breaking with interpretations that depict tropical music as explicitly apolitical, consumerist, even frivolous, this article argues that the Movida Tropical helped create the conditions that made possible a political culture of resistance to neoliberalism. The Movida constituted its participants as a counterpublic, a visible, audible collective whose joyful social interactions expressed opposition to dominant aesthetic hierarchies. Operating within the spaces afforded by neoliberalism’s contradictions, it embodied a working-class aesthetic that resisted appropriation, marginalization, and dismissal while revalorizing provincial roots and sparking new Latin American affiliations.