African Descent and Whiteness in Buenos Aires: Impossible Mestizajes in the White Capital City

Abstract

Since the early twentieth century, and even today, Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina, identifies itself as a modern, white, European city. This representation is based in part on the broadly-accepted notion that Afro-Argentines, the descendants of formerly-enslaved African people, have "disappeared". This idea, which emerged as the nineteenth century came to a close, led to the complete invisibilization of Afro-Argentines during the twentieth century, and was sustained by the belief that a White-European population was more suitable for a modern nation. As a result, during the twentieth century whiteness was the only category available through which Porteños (people born or living in Buenos Aires) could identify themselves. "Whiteness" was a broad concept that included people of different degrees of European, African, and indigenous ancestry, but inclusion into this category came at a price. People who might (in other Latin American contexts) have been placed in intermediate color or racial categories (mestizos) had to manage to whiten themselves, or to risk marginalization. And since the nineteenth century, whiteness has implied not only a particular perception of color and other visual cues, but also a set of behaviors or "ways of being" considered European or civilized. Similarly, "blackness" is rarely used in Buenos Aires to refer to Afro-descendant populations (since they are considered inexistent), and instead is widely used, usually by members of the white middle and upper classes, to signal lower-class status and a set of behaviors considered "uncivilized," grotestque, or vulgar.This article analyzes the cases of three Afro-Descendant porteña women who, by local standards, are fully white. Their stories allow us to explore how whiteness is constructed in everyday life´ strategies that range from silence about ancestors, to redacting family histories and archives, to altering personal behaviors, to using intermediate color terms like "pardo" or "moreno" as equivalents to whiteness. The article analyzes not only how categories like "black," "white," and others are used and understood in contemporary Buenos Aires, but also how people´s very "ways of being" are at play, creating a discriminatory and oppressive environment for people at risk of not matching the ideal of the nation. At the same time, the article considers how the contemporary international politics of recognition for Afro-descendants (including the use of that term itself) pulls people who wish to claim African descent but who do not fit visual standards of "blackness" toward a troubling biological essentialism.