In Argentina and abroad, tango has known an increasing popularity over the last ten years. However, we often overlook the fact that tango is a term referring to a complex structure of popular artistic expressions, i.e. music, dancing and lyrics, forming an Argentinean identity. Indeed, identities are constantly shaped by relationships influenced by social classes, races and gender. Those discursive constructions offer a constant re-interpretation of cultural objects. The aim of our analysis consists in comprehending how an identity is reflected in tango and how to identify the social discourses which have built the tango along different periods and according to particular modalities. To answer to those questions, we will refer to the corpus of choruses and strophes constituted by the ethnologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche in his book Textos Eroticos del Rio de la Plata as well as tango lyrics published between 1900 and 1935. This period corresponds to two stages of the evolution of tango referred to by musicians as the Guardia Vieja and the Guardia Nueva. The study of the poetic work of the Gotan Project group and of the pictorial work of the Argentinean surrealist painter Juan Carlos Liberti will complete our corpus of cultural objects of the contemporary era. In the first part of the study, we analyze the institutional definition of tango based on the study of the discourse of historians who signed the request to UNESCO for the inclusion of tango among cultural objects belonging to the universal immaterial heritage. In this part, we will shed light on the stakes associated to the definition of tango and expose our current critique on the subject. In the second part, we will question the symbolic struggles which are at the root of the different chapters making up tango’s history. A look back on the first tangos gathered by Lehmann-Nitsche—whose themes are brothels, qualified as ‘prehistoric’ and as such, marginalized by critics—will allow us to re-establish the popular origins of tango