Visualising Afro-Cultural Identities in Contemporary Argentina: The Case of Antepasados. Los afroporteños en la cultura nacional

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.

Keywords:

• afroporteños
• Argentina
• museum exhibition
• Antepasados
• identity
• national culture
• whiteness

Introduction

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Argentine lawmakers, politicians, and thinkers constructed national space and identity in canonical texts and political discourses as predominantly white. Indigenous and Afro-Argentine populations were largely dismissed until recently, when a growing interest in the nation’s non-white past emerged. Historical events, such as La Conquista del Desierto [The Conquest of the Desert] (1870s and 1880s), the Paraguayan War (1864–1870), and the Buenos Aires yellow fever outbreaks (1852, 1858, 1870, and 1871), declared the “disappearance” of Indigenous and, above all, Afro-descendant communities by the late 1800s (Molina and López 2001; Caggiano 2012, 2016; Ghidoli 2016a; Geler 2016a; Edwards 2020).¹ In 1887, lawmakers removed Afro-Argentines from the federal census and they did not appear in state records until the 2010 census under the category “Afro-descendant”. According to Anderson (2017), this resulted from the collaborative, organised effort of a vocal group of Africans, Afro-Latin Americans, and Afro-Argentines who compelled Argentine lawmakers to create the category. Although the percentage of Afro-descendants who identified as such was low, which reifies hegemonic notions of their lack of significance in Argentina, it was an important step toward acknowledging racial and ethnic diversity.

Twentieth-century Argentine thinkers and politicians have worked to position Argentines as “exceptionally white” in the Latin American context. One of the strategies consisted in contrasting themselves with neighbouring nations, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, whose populations are predominantly comprised of Indigenous people, mestizos, and people of African descent (Alberto and Eduardo 2016, 16). Furthermore, Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations are predominantly depicted as belonging to the nation’s distant past and as racial otherness (Alberto 2016a, 671).²Additionally, Afro-Argentines have been portrayed in Argentine visual culture through the reiterative use of stereotypes that associate them with servitude, poverty, filth, and comic characters (Frigerio 2002; Ghidoli 2016a, 2016b).

In whitening the nation, Buenos Aires imposed “un proyecto de argentinidad que logra someter a los territorios interiores en su dinámica de represión de lo autóctono y exaltación de lo europeo” [a project of argentinidad that manages to subdue the hinterland by repressing the autochthonous and by exalting Europeanness] in which lo negro [Blackness] is assumed as “un elemento incómodo en el entramado de los discursos hegemónicos” [an uneasy component in the web of hegemonic discourses] (Solomianski 2003).³ By the early twentieth century, it was unthinkable to consider Black Argentines from Buenos Aires or afroporteños as existing in the national imagination, while migrants, mostly from Spain and Italy, were welcomed as desirable for progressively “whitening” the population. The commonly spoken opinion that “there are no blacks in Buenos Aires; they disappeared” is an excellent example of such denial (Andrews 1980; Edwards 2020). The cultural hegemony of Buenos Aires, as the most critical epicentre of this ideology of whiteness, has spread across the rest of the country.⁴

However, since the last decades of the nineteenth century, Afro-descendants have challenged Argentine racial ideology and negotiated their inclusion in national discourses, even though “Afro-Argentine invisibility was almost complete in most of the twentieth century” (Geler 2010, 2016b, 74).⁵ Since 1996, racial activism groups, such as África Vive and Diaspora Africana de la Argentina (DIAFAR), have addressed and denounced structural racism in Argentina while looking for strategies to draw attention to their history and presence in the city.⁶ One strategy has been to reclaim the term “negro” [Black] while raising awareness of its pejorative and racialised use in various contexts in Buenos Aires. Negro/a is pejoratively used to describe people from rural provinces with darker, but not necessarily black, skin, Bolivian and Paraguayan immigrants, and sometimes people who, regardless of their skin tone, “lack refined tastes” (Solomianski 2003, 256). People in Buenos Aires use the term “negro/a” as a strategic marker of class difference in expressions such as “negros del alma” [black souls], “negros villeros” [blacks from shanty towns], and “cabecitas negras” [blackheads]. These terms all pejoratively refer to mestizo working-class individuals who earn low wages and live on the city’s outskirts (Geler 2016a).

Geler (2016b) defined pejorative uses of the term “negro/a” as negritud popular [popular negritude]. This exemplifies how race and class worked together to shape the identities ascribed to marginalised populations throughout the twentieth century (Lamborghini and Geler 2016). In this context, the term “negro/a” has been used to make visible both differences and power imbalances through the racialisation of ethnic and social groups (e.g. immigrants, working-class, and peasants) that do not fit into the dominant definition of the Argentine identity (Alberto and Eduardo 2016, 9–13). Porteños used to treat most Afro-descendants from Argentina as foreigners in Buenos Aires, and called them negro mota [“mota” refers to tightly curled hair], which Geler (2016b) defines as negritud racial [racial negritude]. This implies locating Blackness outside Argentina and normalising discrimination and whiteness as a racial ideology. Popular and racial negritude are unsteady categories and expressions of structural racism.

In this context, Antepasados. los afroporteños en la cultura nacional [Ancestors: Afroporteños in National Culture] was one of the most comprehensive museum exhibits in Argentina to address the cultural heritage of afroporteños – Afro-descendants born in Buenos Aires since colonial times.⁷ Antepasados was open to the public from April to June of 2016 at the Museo del Libro y de la Lengua [Museum of Books and Language], a public institution affiliated with the National Ministry of Culture and the Mariano Moreno National Library. The museum opened its doors in 2011 in a two-floor building located in Recoleta in Buenos Aires, a white, upper-middle-class, elite neighbourhood and, until recently, one of the most expensive places to live the city. The first floor is devoted to a permanent exhibition on the history of books in Argentina. The second floor hosts temporary exhibitions, such as Antepasados, that typically last three months.⁸

The Antepasados exhibition and its accompanying catalogue featured the reflections of scholars, curators, and the government regarding the presence of afroporteños in the city, which questioned and stressed the construction of a predominantly white national identity. Antepasados recaptured afroporteños’ cultural heritage, filling a void in Argentine national discourses on identity and cultural heritage. However, this half-hearted, belated apology fails to recognise the attempt to erase from the national identity afroporteños’ cultural heritage, their contribution to Argentine Spanish, and the racism inherent in the attempted erasure. One of the exhibition’s most salient features was its interactive and interdisciplinary nature, which included a collection of sound recordings, books, pictures, texts, diagrams, maps, and games with which visitors could interact throughout their visit. Additionally, the exhibition catalogue comprised images, lithographs, and short texts highlighting the importance of recognising the African legacy in Argentine culture, language, and society. Renowned scholars, including Alberto Manguel, Marisa Pineau, Daniel Schávelzon, Óscar Conde, and Norberto Pablo Cirio, contributed to the catalogue and exhibition.

This study examines the Antepasados exhibition and its catalogue to analyse the display of afroporteños’ identities, history, and memory, while highlighting certain contradictions inherent in these displays. Although this exhibition made visible a culturally and socially marginalised group, I argue that it is a powerful representation of how Argentine society manages its racial reckoning. Antepasados recognised the erasure of afroporteños in official national discourses and acknowledged their contribution to national culture. Reconstructing the origin of the exhibition and catalogue photographs and examining the written texts are crucial to understanding how afroporteños have been partially recognised but simultaneously erased from the urban space and national identities.

The construction and display of afroporteño identity at the museum

According to Fernández Bravo “museums are theatres of memory, (…) spaces where conflicting versions of identity compete, struggle, and attempt to attach historical meaning to material culture” (2005, 78). Museums are also educational spaces of emulation, representation, observation, and regulation. In representing or recovering the past, the visitor “is never in a relation of direct, unmediated contact with the ‘reality of the artefact’ and, hence, with the ‘real stuff’ of the past. Indeed, this illusion, this fetishism of the past, is itself an effect of discourse” (Bennett 1995, 146–147). Any given exhibition’s selection and arrangement of artefacts produces a discourse about the past linked to the present in which the visitor is situated. Exhibition curators and organisers play a vital role in depicting narratives that reshape the past and produce dialogues about identity, race, memory, and cultural heritage.

Museums display past versions and represent collective identity narratives (Fernández Bravo 2005, 78). Identity is built upon the gesture of depicting the “other” as someone different from oneself and, simultaneously, integrating partial identification with the “other”. Without an image of the other, individuals cannot consolidate their own identity. The same process applies to constructing national identities and displaying images at the museum. Once curators and organisers place images and objects in the museum, they become constituent parts of a shared national identity and past. Although any exhibition’s meaning is incomplete, and visitors decide how to approach and interpret the narrative with which they are presented, an exhibition’s images and artefacts embody hierarchies of value, exclusions, and symbolic meanings (Clifford 1994, 259). Although the viewing process is selective, and curators create a display in narrative sequence, their perspective and position towards the exhibition topic are always present.

Before moving to a more detailed discussion of Antepasados, it is essential to consider the particular nature of the Museo del Libro y de la Lengua. It is not a traditional art or national history museum; it is a public museum that seeks to promote dynamic activities for a non-specialist broader audience, such as schoolteachers and students.⁹ Museum exhibitions address topics related to visitors’ experiences as speakers and readers within the Argentine culture (Biblioteca Nacional). Furthermore, the museum hosts various events and activities related to each exhibition, from educational talks and conferences to musical shows and interactive exhibits. Museum showings also incorporate art, technology, and sources from various disciplines for each temporary exhibition.

Antepasados reformulates how Argentine society handled its African heritage and identity. The curators gathered sources from Argentine visual culture and recent contributions from anthropology, journalism, history, linguistics, and music scholars. In addition, they created visual technologies – interactive screens, games, and maps – inviting the audience to consider the role of afroporteños in the national identity construction process.

The Antepasados visit began on the museum’s second floor, depicting the slave trade routes from Africa’s western and south-eastern coasts to the Americas.¹⁰ One route directly connected Africa with the port of Buenos Aires, one of the regions that imported enslaved people (Figure 1). Curators displayed the route maps with a text that informed the audience about the UNESCO’s El proyecto de la ruta del esclavo [Slave Route Project], an international project that started in 1993.¹¹

Figure 1. Slave trade routes from the Western and South-East coast of Africa to the Americas shown in the exhibition and catalogue. Source: Antepasados. los afroporteños en la cultura nacional, Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno y Museo del Libro y de la Lengua (Manguel 2016). Exhibition Catalogue.

The visit continued with a set of exhibition panels devoted to afroporteño journalism from the nineteenth century, entitled “Periódicos afroporteños”. The first display was a collage with the titles and publication years of newspapers such as La Broma, La Perla, La Juventud, La Igualdad, and La Luz. This was followed by a section devoted to afroporteños’ contribution to the language and music through the twentieth century. The primary artefacts in this portion of the exhibition were puzzle games and recordings of payadas and songs composed by Gabino Ezeiza, perhaps the most famous payador (Castro 1994, 13).¹² Next, visitors engaged in a puzzle game on the origin of words such as tango or quilombo. The next section displayed books by scholars on afroporteños.¹³

Antepasados’ depiction of afroporteño identities and their contribution to the national culture is part of a continuous effort to recover and build a collective and more inclusive memory. This counterhegemonic memory, sometimes unofficial, has attempted to give voice to marginalised groups, such as Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations. According to Adamovsky and Alberto, the 2001 economic crisis destabilised “official visions of national identity that (…) stressed Argentina’s exceptional status in Latin America as a homogeneously white, largely middle-class nation” (Adamovsky 2009, 458; Alberto 2016b, 297). In addition, 2010 marked the bicentenary of Rio de la Plata’s independence from Spain, which was crucial in constructing a counterhegemonic memory, because it motivated Argentina and other Latin American countries to reconsider their official and historical narratives and national identity in more inclusive terms (Alberto 2016b, 290–291).¹⁴ Similarly, public pressure from non-white activists, United Nations economic and political support, and the policies of left-wing governments, such as that of former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, have questioned dominant discourses on national identity and racial ideology.¹⁵

A critical approach to the catalogue and visual archive of Antepasados

At first glance, the exhibition catalogue cover – a collage of pictures of the African-descent population in vivid colours – catches the visitor’s attention (Figure 2). However, more detailed scrutiny reveals that organisers used the word “ante-pasados” [ancestors] to introduce and frame the main topic of the exhibit: the role of afroporteños in national culture. The prominence of this word at the centre of the image composition, in black letters that contrast with the background colours, and a font style designed to appear ancient, captures visitors’ attention and invokes the distant past. This visual construction of the front page creates the notion that afroporteños belong to a time the audience can neither recognise nor directly relate to. Furthermore, the dash between “ante” and “pasados” indicates that this exhibition is about something that precedes even the timeline customarily used to report past actions.

Figure 2. Cover of the exhibition catalogue. Source: Antepasados. los afroporteños en la cultura nacional, Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno y Museo del Libro y de la Lengua (Manguel 2016). Exhibition Catalogue.

Alberto Manguel, an accomplished Argentine intellectual and the National Library director, wrote the foreword to the catalogue (Figure 3), which exemplifies the museum’s approach to addressing the construction of afroporteños’ identify and the memory of them in contemporary Argentina.¹⁶ Manguel wrote:

Figure 3. Foreword from the exhibition catalogue. Source: Antepasados. los afroporteños en la cultura nacional, Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno y Museo del Libro y de la Lengua (Manguel 2016). Exhibition Catalogue.

La historia que estudió mi generación (nací en 1948) fue una de ausencias. Ausentes de la crónica estaban las culturas de los pueblos indígenas que vivieron en estas regiones durante tantos siglos. (…) Ausente también estaba la historia de los afroargentinos (o negros, como los llamaban nuestros profesores), descendientes de los esclavos liberados por un elogiado decreto de la Asamblea del Año Trece, todos supuestamente muertos durante las epidemias de fiebre amarilla de 1852, 1858, 1870 y 1871. (Manguel 2016)

[The history that my generation studied (I was born in 1948) was marked by absences. Absent were the accounts of the Indigenous peoples that lived in this region for so many centuries. (…) Absent as well the history of Afro-Argentines (or blacks, as our professors called them), descendants of those enslaved people freed by a lauded decree from the Assembly of the Year XIII, all of whom had supposedly died during the yellow fever epidemics of 1852, 1858, 1870, and 1871.]

According to Manguel, the national history taught in schools has been an effective means through which official narratives about the absence of Afro-descendants have come to dominate the collective imagination from generation to generation. The museum added that “muchas generaciones tuvieron sus actos escolares con la Negrita mazamorrera o el encargado de encender los faroles, pero el recordatorio se erigía al mismo tiempo que se declaraba parte de un pasado irrecuperable” [many generations celebrated Independence Day at school with plays that featured the “Negrita mazamorrera” or the streetlamp lighter, but their memory was celebrated while simultaneously being declared part of an irretrievable past] (Manguel 2016).¹⁷ The fact that girls dressed up as Black mazamorreras and boys as Black streetlamp lighters, including blackface, for many celebrations such as Independence Day implies that the educational system has long reinforced stereotypes associating afroporteños with street peddlers, low-status jobs, and subservient through identity performances.¹⁸

Even though the representatives of the two institutions – the museum and the library – in charge of the exhibition agreed with the assertion that afroporteños’ identity has been erased in the context of national history, their arguments differed substantially. According to Manguel, the symbolic and discursive strategies that explain this absence have to do with prejudices derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Spanish literary canon, where blackness became an object of discrimination. Manguel argued that:

la estética judeo-cristiana del mundo occidental consideró, desde sus lejanos orígenes, la negritud como algo anormal y temible. Una leyenda medieval cuenta que después del asesinato de Abel, Dios maldijo a Caín, y cambió el color de su piel, transformándolo en el primer hombre negro: la marca de Caín sería, por lo tanto, la negritud, emblema de lo que la sociedad judeo-cristiana excluye (…) en el mundo de la lengua castellana, son herederos de ese prejuicio el padrastro del Lazarillo de Tormes y el payador “moreno” a quien Martín Fierro apuñala. (2016).

[The Judeo-Christian aesthetic in the Western world, from its earliest beginnings, considered Blackness to be something terrible and abnormal. A medieval legend tells how after the murder of Abel, God cursed Cain and changed the colour of his skin, transforming him into the first Black man: Cain’s mark would be, therefore, blackness, which the Judeo-Christian society excludes (…) in the Hispanic-speaking world Lazarillo de Tormes’s stepfather and the “dark-skinned” folk singer that Martín Fierro stabbed inherited such prejudice.]

The black mark of Cain, although far less common than the curse of Ham, had an advantage “since the Bible mentions a ‘mark’ put on Cain, even if it doesn’t specify what it was. (…) Cain, history’s first murderer, was a far more sinister character than Ham, who merely looked at his father’s nakedness” (Goldenberg 2003, 178).¹⁹ According to Goldenberg, a linguistic confusion in translation between Cain feeling “deeply sad” and becoming “black”, as punishment, would have been the source of the tradition in the Armenian Adam-book that Cain became black, which then travelled through Western thought (182). After being disseminated through European literature and art, a curse of blackness on Cain became a metaphor for evil that reinforced a classification system of white-positive, black-negative; good-white, evil-black; white-light, black-darkness.

However, given its profound implications in the Atlantic slave trade, in which Black and slave were inextricably joined in the Christian mind, it is remarkable that the curse of Ham, in its various forms, has been more influential than the mark of Cain. In fifteenth-century Portugal, Gomes Eanes de Zurara in Crónica dos feitos de Guiné (1453) used the curse of Ham to justify the enslavement of Black Africans and, therefore the European colonialist expansion (Goldenberg 2003, 175; Branche 2006, 33–43). According to Branche (2006), Gomes Zurara’s chronicle is a significant “early inscription of the modern encounter of European [from Portugal] and non-European [West African coast] and (…) occupies a place in the broader European master narrative of discovery, colonization, and the creation of a worldwide racial order” in Africa and the Americas (2006, 33–43). Branche stated that Zurara’s chronicle labels “blacks and other colonized people as inferior, under various rubrics, and articulates a justification for their subjection, thereby setting a discursive precedent for subsequent colonial writing” (2006, 43). Zurara’s perspective is just one example of a broader context in which the curse of Ham was used to justify enslavement, anti-Blackness and racism that lies at the core of the establishment of global capitalism.

Although the enormous influence of Luso-Hispanic Catholicism on Latin Americans’ beliefs is undeniable, Manguel’s reasoning suggests anti-Blackness comes from religion rather than colonisation and a need to justify slavery in the age of the Atlantic slave trade, colonial power structures, and subsequent projects of national identity.²⁰ Additionally, his reasoning failed to acknowledge a long process in which ritual practices that comingled African beliefs with Catholic symbols formed a new tapestry of religious performance in the Americas. It denies how Afro-descendants appropriated Catholic symbols of sacred authority and commissioned them in their own interest to advance Black freedom or an antislavery aesthetic. Therefore, the so-called “Hispanic-speaking world” did not necessarily inherit the symbolism and colour prejudice from the Judeo-Christian aesthetic; this was a more complex process.

Manguel’s assertion that racism came from the Judeo-Christian tradition provided a nuance of Argentine racial thinking. Whiteness became highly naturalised as a neutral or unmarked category rather than a complex racial formation process in which racial difference was undesirable. Based on a character in Lazarillo de Tormes, Manguel associated the Judeo-Christian tradition with racism in the Hispanic world. He argued that Lazarillo de Tormes’s stepfather – an enslaved Black person with whom his mother cohabited – inherited the racist perception towards the Afro-descendant population that originated in the Judeo-Christian tradition (Figure 3). Certainly, Lazarillo de Tormes is a foundational text of the Spanish literary canon, introducing socially marginalised protagonists such as Lázaro into the mainstream Spanish culture. However, in the context of the exhibition and catalogue, this novel’s mention is an overgeneralisation that is somewhat disconnected from the way in which Afro-Argentine’s physical presence and depiction in literature pose challenges to assertions of whiteness.

Argentine literary canonical works, such as El matadero by Esteban Echevarría and Martín Fierro by José Hernández, are considered seminal to national identity construction. They have been crucial to producing racism towards Afro-Argentines in the nineteenth century.²¹ Manguel acknowledged this but argued that the moreno [dark-skinned] folk singer that Martín Fierro stabbed suffered the prejudice against people of African descent inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Although Fierro’s encounter with the moreno portrays the meeting of a gaucho and a character of African descent, the identity production and racial contact in this anecdote are more complex than Manguel’s comments suggest. Hernández and other nineteenth-century authors portrayed racialised characters by placing them on the city outskirts and the pampa. This strategy progressively marginalised Afro-descendants’ characters and reinforced a racial discourse of whiteness. Furthermore, writers in the nineteenth century depicted difference and otherness as something that took place in regions and provinces, but not in Buenos Aires.²²

Similarly, Afro-Argentines had to confront their progressive erasure or ideological disappearance from national culture and identity, while their identities were portrayed as abject, inferior, marginal, savage, and childlike. Before the “Palabras Preliminares” [foreword] by Alberto Manguel, the second page of the catalogue features Figure 4, which was included in the catalogue with neither credits nor descriptions of the subjects, decontextualising its symbolic value. Visual studies scholars argue that photography is not a neutral or transparent technology that reflects reality or social and personal aspirations. Instead, it is part of a complex network of discursive strategies in Western art (Poole 1997, 195). Visual sources are potent representations of racial thinking, shape ideas of nationhood, and enable the representation of race (Alberto and Eduardo 2016, 17).

Figure 4. Picture displayed in the exhibition and on the second page of the catalogue. Source: Antepasados. los afroporteños en la cultura nacional, Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno y Museo del Libro y de la Lengua (Manguel 2016). Exhibition Catalogue.

Figure 4 encodes marginality and poverty through the background and the children’s clothing. They are in the back of a sub-optimal wooden dwelling; the house is dilapidated, clothing is on the roof, and a dirt road surrounds it. It is also important to note that the two children to the right of the child at the forefront are not facing the camera; thus, the audience focuses on the only child that appears to be wearing clean clothes and who looks phenotypically whiter. In contrast, the child with the darkest skin is not wearing shoes and, like the others, his clothes are dirty, worn, and full of tears.

Furthermore, Figure 4 reinforces a hegemonic mode of seeing Black people. From the perspective of the Argentine ideology of whiteness, visual codes are crucial to identifying ethnic or racial differences embedded in class, culture, gender, and property (Alberto and Eduardo 2016, 12). The children are next to a set of drums, which are deeply associated with the cultural performance and artistic expressions of the African and Afro-descendant community, both in the colonial period and in contemporary candombe celebrations in Buenos Aires.²³ The drums in the foreground are called the llamador and the repiqueteado, “dupla mínima que se requiere para el candombe porteño. Lo que tienen los niños en las manos son los cetros de los reyes de esa entidad” [the basic pair required to play candombe from Buenos Aires. The kings’ sceptres are what the children have in their hands] (Cirio 2015). Afroporteños’ identity through phenotypical features, such as the children’s skin colour, class-based markers, including their clothing and surroundings, and specific artistic practices, such as playing African drums. By presenting a photograph featuring children alone, the afroporteño community is also symbolically infantilised.

Figure 5 corresponds to a report about the Camundá Nation, “El patrimonio de los Camundás” [The Heritage of the Camundás], written by Matías Juncal and published in 1908 by the well-known magazine Caras y Caretas (Borucki 2015).²⁴ The purpose of the piece was to inform readers of the afroporteño community’s economic difficulties (Figure 5). Juncal explained that several families had been living for decades in the house that had long served as the African Camundá Nation’s central meeting place. A caption, located on Figure 5’s right side, indicated that in the back of the house, “los antiguos camundás bailaban sus danzas africanas (…) convertido en depósito de cajones para sufragar los gastos de alquiler” [the old Camundás danced their African dances (…) (but it had now been) turned into a storage space for boxes to defray the costs of rent] (Juncal 1908).

Figure 5. Reportage about the Camunda Nation, “El patrimonio de los Camundás” [The Heritage of the Camundas]. Source: Matias Juncal, “El patrimonio de los Camundás”, Caras y Caretas. Semanario Festivo, Literario, Artístico y de Actualidades, 495, Año 11 (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional de España, 1908).

Juncal’s article noted that the house was at 1253 Avenida Chile, in the city’s heart, and it denounced the building’s gradual dereliction. The property was owned by the National Council on Education, and when they charged the Camundá Nation for inhabiting the space, it forced them to leave. The feature suggested that the increased cost of living was a factor in the gradual displacement of afroporteños from their traditional San Telmo and Montserrat neighbourhoods towards the city’s periphery.²⁵ This displacement exemplified afroporteños’ difficulty in accessing private property, continuing their traditions, and maintaining a good quality of life.²⁶ Notably, this speaks to the gentrification that affected the afroporteño population in the first decades of the twentieth century and the ways in which race and social class work together to produce a fixed afroporteño cultural identity.²⁷

The report also emphasised the symbolic and cultural richness of specific spaces – the house of the nation – that afroporteños used to celebrate rituals and festivities, like candombe, that are associated with the afroporteño community. The drums and chairs that appear on the right side of Figure 5 are “reliquias” [relics] of the Camundá community, which has vanished, according to Juncal’s (1908) reportage.²⁸ Although Juncal stated that the afroporteño population was around 50,000 people in 1908, he lamented the disappearance of a nation known for its candombe and participation in Buenos Aires’ annual carnivals. He exclaimed, “¡Nación desaparecida!… ¡Ruinas!… ¡Restos de pasadas glorias! (…) Cuánto mejor negocio no hubieran hecho los camundás, negándose a desaparecer (…)!” [Oh, vanished nation!… Ruins!… Remains of a glorious past! (…) What a better deal the Camundás would have made, by refusing to disappear (…)!] (Juncal 1908). Afroporteños’ presence in the city is acknowledged, but they are held responsible for their disappearance, even asked to “n[egarse] a desaparecer” as if this were a voluntary action or choice.

The decontextualised use of one picture from the report on the Camundás to introduce the exhibition catalogue reinforces stereotypes that have denied afroporteños’ identities in the national culture. Furthermore, Figure 4 reveals that, although afroporteños’ presence is acknowledged, they are depicted in Juncal’s report as poor, dirty, and infantile. Although Juncal did not portray them as constituting a threatening otherness in the same way that Indigenous groups were depicted in the nineteenth century, they have been excluded from national culture through paradoxical symbolic manoeuvres.²⁹ Although Juncal lamented the displacement of the Buenos Aires Camundá Nation and Antepasados curators admitted that afroporteños were absent from hegemonic narratives of national culture, they failed to comment on the structural racism and national whiteness that underlie this ideological erasure.

One difficulty scholars researching Afro-Argentines have faced is the scarcity of primary sources on afroporteños during the first decades of the twentieth century (Lamborghini and Frigerio 2011, 22). An exception is Cosa de negros [It is a Black Thing] by Vicenti Rossi, published in 1926, eighteen years after the publication of “El patrimonio de los Camundás” in Caras y Caretas. About the settling of afroporteños, Rossi (1958) stated:

La banda oriental del Plata fue un pandemonio de negros; poblaban todos los rincones de Buenos Aires siendo de su particular dominio unas veinte manzanas comprendidas en la jurisdicción de las parroquias San Telmo, Concepción, Santa Lucía y Montserrat, que formaban el famoso Barrio del Mondongo (…). En los barrios del centro, donde había aglomeración de ‘naciones’ se les designaba ‘barrios del tambor’. (79)

[The eastern strip of the River Plate was a black pandemonium; they [the Black population] populated every last corner of Buenos Aires, being under their specific control some twenty blocks under the jurisdiction of the San Telmo, Concepción, Santa Lucía, and Montserrat parishes, which together made up the famous Mondongo neighbourhood (…). In the areas at the centre of town, where there were large concentrations of specific ‘nations’, they were referred to as ‘drum neighbourhoods’.]

The word “mondongo” refers to the cow entrails that were cast away once the remaining parts of the animal had been utilised. It also refers to the Mondongo Nation of Bantu origin.³⁰ Along with other African nations, such as the Munonque, Tanca, Banguela, Humbuero, and Conga, they formed areas in the city known as the barrios del tambor (Rossi 1958, 79). In colonial times, mondongo was one of the most popular dishes that enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants cooked and ate. Furthermore, mondongo is an important dish of national significance with recognised Afro-Argentine roots. The other term, “tambor”, involved the idea that these vicinities were noisy from the sound of drums and the celebration of candombe dances and rituals. The term could also be derived from tambo, which means “dancing place” (Rossi 1958, 80).

The above news article from Caras y Caretas and the text by Rossi are essential sources that acknowledge afroporteños’ presence in Buenos Aires during the early twentieth century. More recent references are to the “Mondongo neighbourhood” where “los negros se reunían en terrenos baldíos cercados con alambre y recubiertos con sacos de arpillera” [Black people met up (there) in empty plots closed off with wire fences and covered in burlap sacks] (Cáceres 2010, 28). These neighbourhood gatherings are crucial to understanding afroporteños’ musical expressions, such as the candombe, and tango’s syncretic origin – African and European (Cáceres 2010, 16–36). Today, these neighbourhoods are known for their great historical and touristic value. Nevertheless, Antepasados failed to comment on these communities. Instead, they presented afroporteños settlement in the city as an event that took place in colonial times without any influence on the city’s more recent history (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Map of Buenos Aires that includes markets, brotherhoods, and African Nations displayed in the exhibition and the catalogue. Source: Antepasados. los afroporteños en la cultura nacional, Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno y Museo del Libro y de la Lengua (Manguel 2016). Exhibition Catalogue.

However, emphasising the afroporteños’ history in the city could be an attempt to visualise a counternarrative about the city’s so-called “white” legacy and identity. The area in Figure 6 marked with a red circle (number nine in the figure’s reference list) was described as “la zona donde se concentraban la mayoría de las Naciones” [the zone where most of the Nations gathered]. The street names in that area correspond to those of the previously analysed Mondongo neighbourhood. Figure 6 exemplifies what Susan Pearce asserted are the most outstanding features of museum exhibition artefacts: “they act, like language, as the communication systems through which society is constituted (…) they play a role in the interpretation of past” (1994, 145). Antepasados uses an old map of the city to remind the audience of colonial power’s influence and dynamics over the economy, society, and religious beliefs. The map numbers correspond to places where the slave trade was conducted, churches where brotherhood members socialised, and neighbourhoods where Africans and their descendants lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the exhibition does not refer to the Mondongo neighbourhood, and Figure 6 reiterates that afroporteños’ presence is limited to fixed roles performed in colonial times, the exhibition tried to depict Buenos Aires’ history and identity in other ways.

In a broader view of afroporteño identities, the exhibition could have incorporated a less hegemonic archive of visual culture, in which images and artefacts were chosen and contextualised to create an afroporteño narrative beyond stereotypes, fixed roles and class distinction, and prejudices. For example, one of the images featured on the catalogue cover (Figure 7) displayed the Obella family in a section devoted to the African influence on Argentine music next to a picture of el negro Raúl [The Black Raúl] and a set of headphones, through which visitors could listen to Gabino Ezeiza’s payadas.³¹

Figure 7. The Obella family in 1913, detail from the cover of the exhibition catalogue. Source: Antepasados. los afroporteños en la cultura nacional, Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno y Museo del Libro y de la Lengua (Manguel 2016). Exhibition Catalogue.

Images depicting afroporteños surrounded the exhibition’s title (Figure 7). A picture at the bottom right corner portrayed an afroporteño family whose representation does not follow the stereotypes and social class markers examined throughout this study (Figure 7 on the right). The family’s clothing and the photo’s background suggest middle- or upper-middle-class. The Obella family was from Lanús, an administrative subdivision of the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area. Élida Juana Obella, a granddaughter born in 1944 in Buenos Aires, kept the photograph. Élida Juana commented that her grandparents were Catholic, but maintained some traditions with African roots, such as playing the drums and singing during burials (Cirio 2015).³²

The Obella family portrait’s visual presentation contrasts with the marginality and poverty depicted in the figures previously analysed. The family posed with both parents seated, everyone looking at the camera, and all wearing their Sunday best. A close analysis of this pose suggests wealth and status, as opposed to the performance of labour one might see in the case of the mazamorrera, the cleaning lady, the laundress, the streetlamp lighter, or the street vendor, which are typical subjects in the depiction of Afro-Argentines in the nineteenth-century. Having a family picture taken by a professional photographer was a social marker of status and prestige following photography’s arrival in Argentina in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This photograph could have been taken in a studio where middle- and upper-class families went to create a family archive. The photograph produces a more inclusive visual discourse that encodes affiliation, prestige, and a sense of afroporteño belonging in the city. Furthermore, it problematises the hegemonic production of Afroporteños’ cultural identity as belonging to a low status/social class.

The Obella family portrait holds a great performative and cultural value as a source that provides a counternarrative of Afroporteños’ social class distinction and their belonging to the city. It exemplifies a less stereotypical and impoverished depiction of afroporteño identity. However, neither the catalogue nor the exhibition provided additional information or comments on the Obella family, which would have enriched the visitor’s perception of afroporteño identity and legacy. Removed from the context of their production, circulation, and conservation, images like this portrait are malleably susceptible to being used to validate pejorative or reiterated narratives about ethnic differences in the city. Although photographic archives of Afro-descendants are scarce, they constitute critical sources for a counterhegemonic reconstruction of afroporteño identities and cultural expressions.

Final remarks

Antepasados opened the possibility of reflecting on ethnic and racial differences in a city where a racial ideology of whiteness still predominates. The curators and organisers opened a discussion about how to depict afroporteños’ identities as the past, limited to the colonial period and the nineteenth century. The corpus analysed in this study visually reinforced, rather than questioned, this hegemonic discourse on afroporteño identity, the structural racism, and the ideology of whiteness. The artefact and picture selection produced a visual discourse that denied their contributions to national culture and contradicted the purpose of making visible, recovering, and recognising the role of Afro-Argentines in Argentina’s development as a nation.

This portrayal of afroporteños through the lens of prejudice and stereotypes limit afroporteños’ identities to social roles such as domestic servants, laundresses, or street vendors (as in the mazamorrera and the streetlamp lighter). The reiteration of those social roles could imply an anti-Blackness gesture or a rejection of Blackness in the national identity construction process. Although afroporteños performed these jobs during colonial times in the nineteenth century, in the context of Antepasados they were used as a leitmotiv to make this population invisible. From a cultural perspective, afroporteños are perceived as marginal subjects whose acknowledged presence in Argentine culture has been limited to their linguistic and musical influence over Argentine Spanish and popular music, while ignoring their broader influence. Antepasados could have adopted a more critical perspective by including afroporteños’ input regarding how their identities were depicted in the exhibit, and constructing an alternative collective memory that challenged the dominant one.

Updating the afroporteños’ presence and belonging in the city remains a challenge for scholars, public institutions, curators, and the afroporteño community. For the Antepasados opening, the museum invited Daniel Schávelzon and Pablo Cirio – scholars whose work was exhibited and cited – and Federico Pita, an afroporteño activist from DIAFAR, to present on the importance of exhibitions such as Antepasados.³³ While Schávelzon and Cirio pointed out the exhibition’ benefits and their own research contributions, Pita took the opportunity to criticise the gesture of assuming afroporteños as objects of study but not as producers of their own narratives. Furthermore, he pointed out the importance of approaching the afroporteño community currently seeking to develop their political agenda through activism.

Moreover, Pita stated that including afroporteños’ voices and perspectives in the construction and display of their legacies, history, memory, and identities is still pending. For example, none of Antepasados’ pictures, texts, or artefacts addressed afroporteños’ presence in the last decades, nor did they overcome the social stigmas associated with Blackness, such as poverty, marginality, slavery, and servitude. However, Antepasados laid the groundwork for upcoming visual depictions and exhibitions that address Afro-Argentines and afroporteños’ participation, resistance, and persistence despite the marginalisation and enforced invisibility they have faced.

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.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend under Grant FT-278982-21.

Notes on contributors

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.

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 2016, 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 2016a, 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 2011; Anderson 2017).

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 2011, 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 2011).

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 1994, 13). Payada is a folk music tradition and performance of improvised ten-lined stanzas accompanied by guitar. According to Castro (1994), 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 2004).

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 2016).

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 2016, 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 2003, 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 (2020), 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 (1996) 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” (2020). 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 2011, 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 2011, 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 2012, 85; Geler 2016a).

28 Regarding afroporteños’ material culture, at the beginning of his book the archeologist Daniel Schávelzon (2013) 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 (2016a). He inspired the composition of many tangos. For instance, the musician Ángel Bassi named one of his “tangos criollos” “El Negro Raúl” (Cáceres 2010, 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.