Time to tango

The expat life turns the immigrant story on its head, plopping our sympathetic, cultural curiosity into an exotic locale-as-playground. Since Argentina’s currency devaluation in early 2002, Americans have fled to Buenos Aires -- exotic, beautiful and relatively cheap -- following the story lines of ‘20s Paris or Prague in this decade. Arthur Phillips’ novel “Prague” offers a glimpse into a relatively spoiled expat subculture in the Czech Republic’s capital city that feeds off undervalued currency, enacting melodramas of the leisure class amid political turmoil.

Fortunately, such solipsism is absent from Brian Winter’s memoir, “Long After Midnight at the Nino Bien: A Yanqui’s Missteps in Argentina.” The Texan had good timing. With a semester in Spain under his belt, the college graduate moved to Buenos Aires in 2000, well before the influx of expats. After a few weeks spent wandering and learning about the country’s history, Winter was invited to the Nino Bien, a milonga (tango dance hall), where he meets many of the portenos (Buenos Aires residents) in this story.

The tango is the lens through which we see such characters as Johnny Walker Black Label fanatic “El Tigre,” a former sailor who danced with Madonna during the filming of “Evita,” and the daintily tattooed red-haired tango teacher Mariela. Winter sets their personal woes and life experiences within Argentina’s complex history, making their situations drip with meaning.

Winter quickly found work reporting for the Reuters news agency just as the economic crisis of 2001 was unfolding. It turned Buenos Aires into, among other things, a “city of lines,” in which residents waited to withdraw their life savings from banks. He depicts it all: the city’s famed architecture, why Eva Peron was so loved and just what happened to Buenos Aires’ once-large black population. He finds remnants of past crises in old currency -- australes, pesos, “nuevos pesos” -- that give an antique market the feel of a “museum of past failures.” But always he returns to the tango. “[J]ust as the country endures its most terrible crisis . . . people are rediscovering the tango,” insists Luis, owner of the Nino Bien.

The tango may be a needed filter in discussing Argentina’s endless lists of coups and failed starts, but after an entertaining overview of President Juan Peron, Winter’s comment that the leader “had a tango singer’s flair” feels predictable. Yet his discussion of this “Enron of countries,” synonymous with corruption and mismanagement, and his portrayal of its people’s unshakable melancholy is so vivid it begs for expansion.

Winter, now an editor at USA Today, is funniest and most direct when mocking himself, as when he unwittingly asks an elderly woman in Spanish whether he can do something unmentionable to a bus, takes tango lessons in, of all places, the city’s Armenian cultural center or later, in Mexico City, describes himself as “the most grotesque creature imaginable -- a Texan with an Argentine accent.”