Buenos Aires.

Cortázar’s Hopscotch is the visible peak — a novel that is half Paris and half Buenos Aires, written by an exile who never quite resolved the choice. The current carries the boom back to its city of dispatch; Borges’s Paris years are part of the same flow.

The Latin American boom is, structurally, a current running south. García Márquez is read in Buenos Aires before he is read in Mexico; Fuentes and Rulfo travel southward by post; the literary supplements of La Nación are where the boom is curated. The decade-long flow is the strongest pairing in the index.

Fado and tango share a structural sadness; in the 1980s they begin to share players. Mariza tours Buenos Aires; Astor Piazzolla makes records that quote the modulations. The current is a feeling more than a flow, but it is documented.