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Abstract
Antepasados. Los afroporteños en la cultura nacional [Ancestors: Afroporteños in National Culture] was one of the most comprehensive museum exhibits to address the cultural heritage of Afro-descendants from Buenos Aires – known as afroporteños. It was open to the public from April to June 2016 at the Museo del Libro y de la Lengua [Museum of Books and Language]. The primary purpose of Antepasados was to recapture afroporteños’ cultural heritage and fill what scholars, curators, and the government saw as a “regrettable absence” in narratives about national identity. This study examines how Antepasados (2016) articulated the logic of whiteness in Argentina and the politics of race representation in museums and public history while recognising the erasure of Afro-descendants in official discourse. This exhibit acknowledges the contribution of afroporteños to national culture and identity, and shows how Argentine society is dealing with its racial reckoning, albeit with certain contradictions. Finally, this study inscribes the case of afroporteños into broader discussions about race in Latin America by reframing national identity and cultural heritage discourses in more inclusive terms within a country where an emphasis on whiteness has been predominant.
Acknowledgements
For their generous and insightful contributions to this essay, my warmest thanks to Claudia Lagos, María Pia López, Pablo Licheri, and the three anonymous Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies reviewers. I am grateful to the many colleagues and my dissertation committee who gave me valuable feedback when I presented this work at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Idaho State University. Grants from the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Summer Stipend, and support from the Global Studies and Languages Department at ISU made it possible for me to research and write this piece.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 According to Edwards, the phrase “they disappeared” [desaparecieron] refers to the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. More than thirty thousand people were disappeared owing to state-sponsored terror, torture, abductions, and death squads. The whereabouts of many of the disappeared, also known as desaparecidos, remains unknown. In the case of Argentina’s Black history, the phrase more than likely suggests the unknown answer to what happened to the Black population (2020, 121).
2 During the nineteenth century, whiteness became a natural part of what it meant to be Argentine and invisible as a racial construction (Alberto and Eduardo Citation2016, 27). However, “whiteness prevailed in Argentina in part through storytelling – in censuses, literature, history, statuary, art, genealogies, and so forth – that emphasised Argentina’s whiteness and European culture and placed indigenous people and Afro-descendants in the nation’s past” (Alberto Citation2016a, 671).
3 Lea Geler agrees with Solomianski on the myth of Buenos Aires as a “white-European” city where the majority of its population is descended from Europeans is still common (2016a,73)
4 It is crucial to consider that this whiteness ideology is both exclusionary and inclusive, and has been challenged in different ways over time. According to Alberto, “Argentines simultaneously adopted a system of racial classification and perception that broadened the category of whiteness to include an array of racial origins, phenotypic variations, and shades of color that elsewhere in Latin America might have been considered mestizo or mulato, dramatically narrowing the category of blackness” (2016a, 671).
5 However, recent scholarship has found in Afro-Argentine oral history a crucial source to address their so-called absence in the twentieth century. Family pictures, interviews, and journals are other sources that have helped reconstruct the Afro-Argentine experiences and role in the same period (Lamborghini and Frigerio Citation2011; Anderson Citation2017).
6 Maria Magdalena Lamadrid, an Afro-Argentine, founded África Vive in 1997, after being invited by the Interamerican Bank of Development (IBD) to present in Washington DC about her experience as an Afro-descendant in Argentina (Lamborghini and Frigerio Citation2011, 28). DIAFAR (Diáspora Africana de la Argentina, African Diaspora from Argentina) is one of the most salient racial activism movements in Buenos Aires. It is a nongovernmental organisation created more than ten years ago that defines itself as “descendientes de africanos y africanas esclavizadas nacidos fuera del continente africano. Nuestros antepasados fueron secuestrados y traídos a las Américas y el Caribe durante el proceso de colonización, aunque el tráfico de personas continuó después de la independencia por varias décadas” [enslaved African descendants that were born outside Africa. Our ancestors were kidnapped and brought to the Americas and the Caribbean during colonisation, although human trafficking continued after Independence for several decades].
7 Between January and March of 2014, an exhibition called “Los afroargentinos: Fotografías 1860–1960” (Afro-Argentines: Photographs 1860–1960) was launched at the gallery of the Teatro San Martín in Buenos Aires. The showing, curated by Juan Travnik and Abel Alexander, comprised seven private collections. In the word “afroporteños”, afro refers to the population of African descent from the port city of Buenos Aires [porteño].
8 Some topics of exhibitions held before my visit included the Argentine student movement, the influence of translation in national literature, the avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the life and works of Jorge Luis Borges.
9 The intended audience for the museum exhibitions are schoolteachers, students, and a non-specialised audience, according to Maria Pia Lopez, former director of the museum until 2015.
10 The exhibition’s itinerary is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5KOBXfldes.
11 In Argentina, the project was called La ruta del esclavo en el Río de la Plata: Aportes para el diálogo intercultural [The Slave Route Project in the River Plate: Contributions to an Intercultural Dialogue]. For an overview of how the project developed in Argentina, see Marisa Pineau’s La ruta del esclavo en el Río de la Plata: Aportes para el diálogo intercultural (Pineau Citation2011).
12 Gabino Ezeiza (1858–1916) was the most famous Black payador who moved the art of the payada from “an entertainment found only in the rural bars (pulperías) and at the gaucho campfire, to become part of circus and theatrical productions” (Castro Citation1994, 13). Payada is a folk music tradition and performance of improvised ten-lined stanzas accompanied by guitar. According to Castro (Citation1994), payada is a musical tradition of the gaucho and one of the musical cultural symbols of Argentineness, along with urban tango (10).
13 According to the exhibition and the catalogue, the word tango came from the African word tango and the Quichua tampú, which means sitio [place], reunión [meeting], and posada [lodge]. Currently, tango is one of the most popular musical genres in the Rio de la Plata region. Quilombo means union in Quimbundo. In Lunfardo, an African language, quilombo meant prostíbulo [brothel], and then lío/barullo/desorden [mess] and gresca [quarrel]. Quilombo is still used in Argentine Spanish to indicate a disaster or big mess.
14 The interest in revisiting Argentina’s national history and identity is part of a regional trend in which Latin American countries, such as Colombia, Peru, and Chile, also celebrated the bicentenary in 2010. Before that, in 1992, a celebration of the five hundred years of the Colonisation of the Americas by Cristobal Colón opened a conversation on the so-called ideology of whiteness, specifically in the Southern Cone, and the importance of acknowledging Indigenous and African descendant heritage (Andrews Citation2004).
15 Regarding public policies, the 2013 passage of Law No. 26,852, which establishes 8 November as the “National Day of Afro-Argentines and African Culture”, is notable because the national government seeks to recognise Argentina’s African heritage through this law. This day was chosen in homage to María Remedios del Valle, an Afro-Argentine woman nicknamed the “Mother of the Homeland”. In a different measure, the option of identifying oneself as a person of African descent was included as a response to the racial origin question in the last national census in 2010; 150,000 people recognised themselves as Afro-Argentines (Pineau Citation2016).
16 Even though Museum Director María Pía López and National Library Director Elsa Barber planned the exhibit, Manguel assumed the direction of the library once Mauricio Macri was elected president in December 2015. López resigned when the new administration decided to eliminate the position of museum director, and fired around twenty workers from the museum between December 2015 and February 2016. In 2019, with Alberto Fernández’s election as president, the position of museum director was re-opened.
17 Mazamorra is a typical Argentine dessert made with white corn, sugar, vanilla, and milk. Mazamorrera were primarily Black women who had sold mazamorra in the streets since colonial times.
18 This way of celebrating Independence Day in schools has to do with the role of these institutions in constructing a homogeneous national identity based on specific values, symbols, and ideas. Although the history of education in Latin America has examined the role of schools in nation-building and belonging, it also has shown that they have done so without sufficiently problematising storytelling that is racist towards Afro-descendants and Indigenous populations, not considered a constitutive part of the nation (Ocoró Loango Citation2016, 36).
19 The curse of Ham is based on the interpretation of a Bible passage (Gen, 9:18–25, RSV) in which Ham saw Noah, his father, naked and then he cursed his son by saying: “Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers” (Goldenberg Citation2003, 1). This has been understood as God meant to curse Black Africans with eternal slavery as Ham is considered to be the father of Black Africa (1). In other words, the curse of Ham is “the idea of a biblically mandated curse of slavery imposed on black Africans” (168).
20 According to Pettway (Citation2020), centuries before slavery became synonymous with blackness in the “New World”, “Church fathers had already sanctioned the practice (…). African slavery in medieval Catholic theology was not an arcane philosophical question, but rather a pressing political matter. The fifteenth-century papal bulls that sanctioned Portugal to enslave West Africans and granted authority in the Americas were momentous because they birthed a world in which decisions about Africans and indigenous peoples would be made in their absence and without their consent” (18–19).
21 See Lewis (Citation1996) for an overview of Afro-Argentine written expression during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
22 For a more recent approach to placing otherness outside of Buenos Aires see Gastón Gordillo’s “Se viene el malón: las geografías afectivas del racismo argentino” (Citation2020). Gordillo examined how in Córdoba and Tucumán, “negros” has a pejorative connotation as it is used to refer to poor people and anyone who has an Indigenous or mestizo appearance (1). Furthermore, this use of negro exemplifies a tense oscillation between neglecting the existence of a racialised, non-white Otherness placed outside Buenos Aires and simultaneously acknowledging it.
23 Candombe is an African-based rhythm and dance in Buenos Aires, Brazil, and Uruguay.
24 From this point forward, the use of “Nation” corresponds with African-based associations and/or brotherhoods whose origin could be traced back to colonial times. According to Borucki, “nations” were one of the ways in which Africans and their descendants bound to each other when arriving in Buenos Aires and a crucial component in Black identity formation. Africans and their descendants formed these associations to give material support to their celebrations held outside the framework of the Catholic Church (2015, 99).
25 Montserrat and San Telmo are historical and traditional neighbourhoods in downtown Buenos Aires. Visiting San Telmo is considered a “must-do” for tourists who visit the city. Recently, the city has increased the number of San Telmo hotels, flea markets, and restaurants to meet tourist demand, leading to gentrification that mainly affects the local population. However, one of the most important cultural centres for the Afro-descendant community, the “Movimiento Afrocultural San Telmo” [San Telmo Afrocultural Movement], is in San Telmo.
26 According to Geler, Lamborghini and Frigerio, one of the hypotheses about Afro-Argentines’ invisibility and so-called absence in the city in the twentieth century has to do with their gentrification from Buenos Aires to the Gran Buenos Aires, the city’s metropolitan area (Lamborghini and Frigerio Citation2011, 23; Geler et al. 2020, 3–6). More recently, the majority of the Afro-Argentine population live in Merlo, La Matanza, and Lanús in the Gran Buenos Aires. However, some Afro-Argentines who were teenagers in the 1950s said that by that time, they lived closer to downtown to work and enjoy the nightlife (Lamborghini and Frigerio Citation2011, 23).
27 In a broader context, this is known as the racialisation of the social class relations [racialización de las relaciones de clase] and refers to the visual, discursive, ideological tools used to depict Whiteness as belonging to the upper class and Blackness to a low status and urban poor/working class (Frigerio 2022; Caggiano Citation2012, 85; Geler Citation2016a).
28 Regarding afroporteños’ material culture, at the beginning of his book the archeologist Daniel Schávelzon (Citation2013) wonders: “¿por qué nada ha quedado de esa población –y de su cultura material– evaporadas por sortilegio misterioso e inexplicable?” (19) [why has nothing of that population – its material culture – remained, evaporated by mysterious and inexplicable spell?]. Even though there is an absence of material culture, Schávelzon states that Blackness is part of the collective memory that Argentines have not embraced or recognised as part of their own identity.
29 During the nineteenth century, elites considered Indigenous populations as a threatening otherness because of tensions over access to land, which led to their forced displacement.
30 It is important to note that in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, mondongo is also the name of a soup that includes cow offal, vegetables, and in some cases, yucca, potatoes, and plantains.
31 Raúl Grigera (1886–1955), known as El Negro Raúl, was a famous Afro-Argentine dandy-turned-beggar from early 1900s Buenos Aires. For more information about Grigera see Alberto (Citation2016a). He inspired the composition of many tangos. For instance, the musician Ángel Bassi named one of his “tangos criollos” “El Negro Raúl” (Cáceres Citation2010, 35).
32 Norberto Pablo Cirio, who contacted Élida Juana for his study of Argentine idioms, was able to get information about this picture. His book ¡Tomá Pachuca! Historia y presente de los afroargentinos [Take that, pachuca! Past and Present of the Afro-Argentineans] (2018) is an ethnographic work comprising interviews, recordings, and photographs that document the African influence on Argentine Spanish.
33 The exhibition’s opening is available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9irxZdiB0c&t=3610s.
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Liz Moreno-Chuquen
Liz Moreno-Chuquen was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. She is an assistant professor at Xavier University in the Department of Classics and Modern Languages, where she teaches Spanish Language and Latin American literature and culture. Before joining Xavier University, she was an assistant professor of Global Studies and Languages at Idaho State University. She specializes in Afro-Latin American Literature and Visual Culture. Her research examines the depiction of minoritized populations and racialized geographies in literature, cinema, photography, and museum exhibitions. She primarily focuses on how racial ideologies play a crucial role in the politics of representation of racialized women and geographies in Southern Cone and Colombia. In her teaching, she exposes students to a hemispheric perspective on Afrolatinidad in Latin America and the United States.