The Erased Protagonists
Afroargentines and the Whitewash of History
“In America everything which is not European, is barbaric; there is no other distinction.” – Juan Bautista Alberdi, statesman and theorist, architect of the Argentine Constitution
When we think of Afroamerica, a hemisphere transformed by the forced population transfer of millions of West African slaves, rarely does Argentina spring to mind. The country is widely perceived to be the “whitest” in the region and many Argentines self-style themselves as “the Europeans of South America”. But as Néstor Ortiz Oderigo, one of the forefathers of Afroargentine studies, wrote: “[Argentina is] not different from the rest of the continent for not having a black population, but for not seeing that population as a part of [its] identity.”
In the late 18th century, a third of Argentina’s population were slaves or of African origin. In the city of Buenos Aires, often epitheted as the “Paris of the South”, Afrodescendants accounted for half the population in the early 19th century. When General San Martin’s Argentine army legendarily helped liberate Chile from Spanish rule, half of its members were former slaves granted freedom in exchange for military service.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Afroargentine population vanished, decimated as cannon fodder in the Paraguayan War, and devastated by subsequent epidemics of yellow fever and cholera.
But this shibboleth disregards the existence of a significant Afroargentine community today. Further, it glosses over the way in which the country and its consciousness was systematically and purposely “whitened” by its intellectual and governing class. A national mythology, stripped of Indigenous or Afroargentine features, was crafted to present Argentina as a melting pot of largely European immigrants. Unsavoury chapters of the past were excised. The indelible historical and cultural imprint of Afroargentines was erased and minimised. Tango for example, Argentina’s eminent cultural export, finds many of its melodic, rhythmic and choreographic roots in Afroargentine music and dance. Argentine cuisine, world-renowned for its asado barbecues, also owes much to the culinary contributions of Afroargentines.
What predominates today in Argentina is the product of that process, the unstated imaginary of a white nation, European in character. In 1997, Argentine president Carlos Menem was asked abroad at a university — “are there black people in Argentina?” Menem responded, “No, Brazil has that problem.”
Norberto Pablo Cirio is an Argentine musicologist, anthropologist and historian, who directs the programme of Afroargentine and Afrolatinamerican Studies at the University of La Plata.
He is one of the country’s foremost experts on Afroargentine history, with this research spanning Afroargentine oral and written literature, the Afroargentine press, and Afroargentine victims of state terrorism during the “Dirty War”. As Argentina’s celebrates the Bicentenary of its Independence this year, we spoke to Cirio to discuss Afroargentines in the country’s memory and oblivion:
Afroargentines of the tronco colonial (descendants of enslaved Africans taken to Argentina), as their name suggests, see themselves as pre-existent to the Argentine nation, like Indigenous peoples. They see themselves as forgers of Argentina: they made the country what it is. In what way?
From heroic acts on the battlefield (in other words, although they were under the command of white generals, they liberated us to a certain extent) to things that may seem quotidian, but are no less important, like the language we use that is of African origin: mondongo (intestines), mucama (maid), quilombo (brothel/mess). Or the food or the music that we recognize as “traditional”. These were very much shaped by the influence of Afroargentines.
But despite the historical role played by Afroargentines, in this country there is a naturalized perception that what is black is foreign. As I say when I teach on historical figures: “they are all white until proven otherwise.” So we have to challenge that hegemonic historiographical discourse because it is virtually impeccable until the present day, producing an à la carte history.
Where does that naturalized perception come from? How does the whitewash of Argentine history take place?
There were various generations of intellectuals that shaped the historical narrative almost monopolistically, like the so-called Generation of 1837. Then you have the Process of National Organization and the Generation of 1880, which had a very precise project to reposition the country as a global power based on a blind faith in progress and positivism, for which they turned to the United States and particularly Europe to obtain ideas, values, cultural practices, and populations. They opened the country to mass immigration to “regenerate” the Argentine “race”, which was largely composed of Indigenous peoples and Afrodescendants, who they saw to be unproductive, lazy, and culturally indifferent, incapable of regenerating themselves as workers.
The Generation of 1880, a governing elite, was made up of intellectuals, journalists, historians, and politicians; often these were multiple roles performed by one individual. They wrote the basis of what today we know as Argentine history, they disseminated their ideas through the press, and they governed the country. This generation marked Argentina with fire, and among their desktable certitudes, was an idea that Argentine slavery was relatively light compared to other American latitudes, that numerically the Africans were insignificant, and that they had basically disappeared, along with their traditions.
This historiographical and negationist discourse about Afroargentines managed to permeate into society and constitute itself as common sense, something which remains to this day. Bearing this in mind it’s possible to explain why our country, as opposed to nearly the rest of Latin America, thinks it has no Afro population or cultural expressions of this group.
This is also largely compounded through the educational system. To give you just one example, my primary school is called Sargento Cabral (after Sergeant Cabral) and in the seven years I studied there, although he was honoured for saving general José de San Martín from dying in the battle of San Lorenzo (what would have been South America’s fate without this act?) his blackness was never referenced.
What are some of the most popular myths that persist about Afroargentines as part of this historical legacy?
One of the main myths is this idea of light slavery. “But they didn’t suffer as much as others in the Americas. They were treated well because they were basically part of the family.”
Who says they didn’t suffer as much? Their descendants or white people? And if they didn’t suffer, how do you explain so many fugitive slaves, so many prohibitions of their culture? There is a scandalous social anaesthesia over the dimensions of pain; as if the only pain that mattered was physical, as if the prohibition of the use of their ancestral languages, their own names, their own religiosity, wasn’t valid. Slavery is slavery, here, in Brazil, in the United States. There was no greater abuse. It’s not something you can place on a spectrum.
Another myth is that there weren’t many slaves in Argentina. “There weren’t any plantations or mines here.”
Firstly, who says there weren’t? I’ve documented songs from black sugarcane cutters from Tucumán, the same ones that remembered stories from their elders recounting how their masters forced them to reproduce with enslaved women, in order to generate more productive “merchandise.” Secondly, the quantitative question of their existence is no reference point to make judgments about their relevance. Minorities have rights per se, and precisely because they are minorities, they need attention and care to protect their existence and identity, because they were historically affected.
Another certainty of common sense that negates the actual presence of Afroargentines of the tronco colonial is colour-blindness in the public sphere. People, perceiving their street environment to be an embassy of truth, exclaim: “Oh, but I don’t see them down the street.”
I usually ask in response: “What streets do you walk down? What are your streets?” Buenos Aires is an extensive city, spanning over 202km2, with over ten million people. There are lots of streets. Not everything has to take place in the radius of the tourist-friendly city centre. But as we know, common sense is lethargic and the limits of people’s vision are often confused with the limits of existence.
Culturally, common sense also sees Argentine identity as a set of symbolic expressions that have no connection to sub-Saharan Africa, despite the millions of slaves that were brought over the course of three and a half centuries…“But we don’t have black culture, like Uruguay or Brazil. The candombe that is played on the street is Uruguayan.”
If a cultural practice is not publically expressed, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. At a very asymmetrical moment between the nation-state and Afroargentines from Buenos Aires, Afroargentines decided with a pact of silence to withdraw their own candombe to the familial, private sphere, removing it from the streets. It was the best way they thought to preserve their culture before the negationist trample of a political and intellectual class. They were successful.
The candombe of Buenos Aires never became extinct; it found a life crafted under the terms its exponents thought to be necessary. Only today it is recovering its public protagonism through an empowerment of the Afroargentine community, seen through organizations such as Asociación Misibamba.
Finally, we see the racialization of culture, the speculation that (black) skin is an indication of the purity of (black) culture: “But the Afroargentines that are around today are not black.”
Generations of documentaries and Hollywood have propitiated an essentialist vision of culture: the greater the blackness of skin, the greater the knowledge of black culture. Its unhelpful, not to mention false, to correlate “nature” and culture. What happens is that having endorsed the certainty that being Argentine is synonymous to being white, the average citizen has a culturally poor vision of society’s diversity: they don’t understand chromatic nuances in a historical perspective, the mestizaje, and when they come across someone whose skin is markedly black, they infer they are undoubtedly a foreigner.
As opposed to other fields of knowledge, society — including a large part of the academy — is quite daring when it comes to Afro issues. I suspect that few people would confidently engage in debate when asked for example about nuclear energy…but when it comes to Afroargentines, everyone seems to be an expert, opining with impeccable, unquestionable rhetoric about “what happened to them”. And the verdict is: they disappeared. They’re not here.
Together with the central myth of disappearance, there’s also an ingrained ignorance, an erasure of the contribution of Afroargentines, from music to literature.
It’s true. But there’s also a fundamental absence of rigorous investigation, which can evidence and understand those contributions. Let’s take the example of Bartolomé Hidalgo, a founding author of the gauchesco movement, the first literature that was originally ours. We’ve all read Hidalgo here, his Cielitos patrióticos.
Hidalgo was born in Montevideo, son of José Hidalgo and Catalina Jiménez, natives of Buenos Aires and of a modest social condition. Nothing here is surprising, but some quotations from period figures draw our attention. In 1817, Joaquín de la Sagra calls him a ‘mulatillo’ (little mulatto). The father Castaneda describes him as ‘the dark Montevidean”.
Now, we have to continue investigating. Having a pair of quotations isn’t enough to deduce that Hidalgo was Afro, but if he was, we’re talking about one of the pillars of our identity, gauchesco poetry.
In my research into the culture of Afroargentines from the tronco colonial, one of my concerns has been establishing the Afro ancestry of figures that are central to the shaping of Argentine society and culture, because as I’ve mentioned, in this country “we’re all white unless demonstrated otherwise.” So I always start with questions.
What do we know about Monteagudo for example? What was he like? White? Who says he was white? Well it seems like he wasn’t. Then you have to enter into his work, analyze it, read between its lines, undertake stylistic studies comparing it to ideologies from the dominant narrative at the time, and see if there are coincidences or not. That doesn’t let you by itself assume that all the creations of an Afrodescendant were created along Afro coordinates, but it also doesn’t let you think the opposite, that their blackness was a mere accident of history, situating them in Eurocentric coordinates naturalized as “universal”.
Following these indications, pursuing these leads, can take you nowhere or they can change the pulse of history. White is not the only colour in history. We have to start painting our world with a broader palette, the broadest possible. The act of colouring history is, in some way, a subversive act, because we’re offering an alternative to the dominant narrative, giving another version of events. Hopefully blackness will enlighten us.
What about the origin of tango music?
Tango occupies an undeniable centrality in Argentine identity and its black ancestry is the target of challenges both heated and baseless, as they are rooted not so much in evidence-based arguments but in prejudices backed by decades of desktable certitudes. Basically, no argument against the black ancestry of tango has taken the inconvenience of profoundly researching Afroargentine music. It’s a complex debate, both ethnographically and theoretically, but rarely is the latter taken into account; often it seems like a mere collation of facts is enough to allow for scientific analysis.
Despite the whitening of history and culture, in Argentine society racial language is ubiquitous. The word “negro” (black) is used with frequency. How do you explain this usage in a society that thinks it has no black citizens?
The best Argentine insult is to call someone “negro”. It’s the insult of insults. But that concept of “negro” is displaced from its originary racialization towards the idea of social class. When you’re talking about “negros” today in Argentine, you’re usually not talking about people who are racially black, but you are thinking of them, at least on an archetypal level, to reduce the Other to a minimal level of humanity.
That’s how the concept of cabecita negra (literally, little black head) emerged to name people from the interior of the country that were a product of the mix of Indigenous peoples with Europeans. As José Ingenieros said: “the worst of the white race with the Indigenous race which was all bad”. According to the historical narrative concocted by Generation of 1880, everything was degenerated by this infamous group: criminals, rapists, vagrants, prostitutes.
Society though has forgotten the third Argentine root in the anti-Argentine confabulation of the cabecita negra: the Afroargentines, who also mixed with Europeans and Indigenous peoples. We have three, not two roots; we have to think of things in a tripartite way.
In your writings you also mention how the invisibility of Afroargentines owes itself in part to a lack of distinction between different groups of Afrodescendants.
Exactly. We can’t forget that there are many groups of Afrodescendants in Argentina, and one of Argentina: the Afroargentines of the tronco colonial, the descendants of slaves brought during the colonial era to what is now Argentina and during the first decades after independence (slavery was abolished in 1853 in the provinces and in 1861 in Buenos Aires).
Then we have Cape Verdeans who arrived with Portuguese passports at the beginning of the 20th century, as part of the mass immigration. Halfway through that century we see the arrival of Afro-Uruguayans, followed by Afro-Ecuadorians, Afrobrazilians, and Afrodescendants from other American nations, and during the 1990s, immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
In many situations, all these groups are placed under the indistinct label of “Afro”. I think that conceals more than it contributes. There are state institutions that have under their remit a mission to work on Afro issues, such as combating racism or discrimination. They put on “Afro” festivals but they rarely explain the particularities or origins of each group, relying instead on the sensationalism of colour. The public results are expected: there’s lots of interest, but in the words of a man I once overheard at a festival: “very nice, all these foreigners.”
Under such proposals, Afroargentine culture is diluted. That’s why Afroargentines from the tronco colonial rarely participate, preferring to show themselves separately, following their own dynamic of empowerment and cultural promotion.
The debt the Argentine state has isn’t with “the Afrodescendants”; it’s with Afroargentines from the tronco colonial. That’s the group the state enslaved. Other Afrodescendant groups came here largely voluntarily in the condition of immigrants. They have another relationship with the state, other demands, despite a common struggle against racism, in its multiple expressions. These distinctions are fundamental. When we demand for example inclusion of Afro themes in school curricula, in museum scripts, well what are we going to include?
We have to be cautious, exhaustive and perseverant because governments rarely understand subtleties. They typically pursue circumstantial initiatives, empty of content, that don’t substantively change the tragic reality of a historically-constituted inequality. Officials forced to attend to this issue are ill-prepared and seek immediate effects, often in the form of undisguised photo opportunities with the most phenotypically “black” people.
What are some of the most important demands made by Afroargentines of the tronco colonial today?
A lot of demands are related to labour precarity, to health, to education. Afroargentines have those problems but they’re not central. The fundamental problem relates to inclusion in history. Once, they invited the communities to the Ministry of Labour, for some conversations to problematize the concept of “black labour” (trabajo en negro, illegal labour). And during that day, I was surprised to hear one of the community leaders say: “what I want is to enter into history.” Instinctively I didn’t like the phrase, because I heard it from a Eurocentric perspective: I thought that he was the one who wanted to enter into history, for his person to be remembered. But if we remember that in many sub-Saharan languages there is no singular first person, but a plural first person (us), then the “I” he had spoken was an “I” that referred to the community. Entering into history was not entering into the Guinness World Book of Records, it was vying for Afroargentines to be recognised, included in Argentine history, hence that is my concern, as an activist-academic.
What do you think of the response of state and cultural bodies to education around the historical role of Afroargentines?
There’s little to celebrate. I see few telling results that improve the reality for most Afroargentines. There are lots of events, lots of performances, almost all of them under a festival theme, but the lacerating problems remain, denting the quality of life of Afroargentines and their relationship to national history.
In museums it’s hard to see any significant improvements. The conceptual pen flies faster than facts on the ground. Many museographers I’ve spoken to are aware of the latest insights, but when it comes to staging exhibitions, stereotypes and absences continue scripting their best intentions.
At too many events, Afroargentines are invited but only do “their thing”, to perform music. Not to debate, not to give their vision of history. They’re a decorative, artistic element. Wouldn’t it instead be interesting, provocatively original to hear an Afroargentine recount national history from their ancestral experience, as a descendant of slaves?
Do you think there’s any possibility of genuine political change regarding the invisibility of Afroargentines in Argentine history?
There is, but the corridors that matter are not those within ministries, but those where communities live. 90% of community members do not want to approach the subject or get involved. That’s what we have to address first, not pursuing an abundance of festivals and events, that are not conceived for and by Afroargentines, but are crafted for other sectors of middle and upper-class society that are consumers of culture.
You know how difficult it is for an Afroargentine, for example, in Ciudad Evita, to overcome their shame of talking in public? You don’t just invite people and say “come, it’s all good”; first you have to work on self-esteem, which is often low. I’m aware of many Afroargentines who are still trying to understand who their ancestors are, because there’s always one grandmother lost in the oblivion of the wardrobe of shame. Afroargentines are still trying to learn about their past. To get from there to participating in cultural activities, to opening a door to an academic, to putting pressure on a ministry, there’s light years. That’s why visibilization starts with fortifying the pride of belonging.
Finally, what has focusing on Afroargentine history and culture taught you?
I’ve always tried to understand and complete history from another perspective, from the counter-hegemonic perspective of the excluded, and through that process, you live robbing yourself of illusions. You begin to understand how your history was told, and how you can tell it in another way. You realize there is no single history, no truth with capital letters, but truths. As the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe says, the history of the enslaved is never a neat, linear, complete history, it’s riven and choked by silences, inequalities, rough edges, that hinder making everything convincingly explainable. But I also think, isn’t the history of nations, like Argentina, equally riven and choken by silences, resembling not so much an exhaustive narrative of the past, but an a la carte history useful to dominant society?
When you start to understand the plot of the Afro dimension of Argentine history, just like Indigenous history, the myths crumble and nothing remains the same. But that is totally fecund. It’s constructive, not destructive. Once we’re there, we can work to write a better history, and from there, push to make a better world. For everyone, not for the same people as always.
A shorter version of this piece was published on African Arguments.
