Lunfardo was first described by the Argentine intellectual elites as a criminal jargon. Partly influenced by the criminal world, it was in fact the poor and marginalized masses of European immigrants in Buenos Aires that generated it, masses that were portrayed by the elites as uncivilized. This paper frames this initial depiction of Lunfardo within the larger dichotomy between “civilización” and “barbarie” that informed the social discourse in 19th-century Argentina.
	Through this recontextualization, we observe how some of the cultural products employing Lunfardo to voice the marginals’ problems and realities eventually came to represent and identify Argentine cultural identity worldwide.