‘In defense of the people of color of South America’: a new source for twentieth-century Afro-Argentine history and thought

Abstract

Buenos Aires’ robust Afrodescendant press in the late nineteenth century has allowed scholars to reconstruct Afro-Argentine thought and associational life during a nation-building process aimed at forcefully integrating Afrodescendants into a citizenship imagined as homogenous, racially white, and culturally European. This scholarship has helped to refute narratives of ‘disappearance’ of Black populations and to replace the diagnosis of ‘invisibility’ with affirmative stories of Black life and presence in the nineteenth century. In contrast, the twentieth century has been characterized by a lack of sources written by and about Afro-Argentines. This research note brings to light an early twentieth-century Afro-Argentine magazine previously unknown to scholars–Falucho: Revista quincenal ilustrada. Defiende los intereses de la gente de color en Sud América (1927–1928). It highlights the publication’s key features and suggests new avenues for research into a period that remains under-explored in the scholarship. This illustrated bi-weekly magazine is a vital source for contesting enduring ideas of Afro-Argentines’ waning sociability, providing a rare glimpse into how Afro-Argentines negotiated their positions as Argentines and Latin Americans ‘of color’ at a time when their collective non-existence was entrenched in the national imaginary, and when anti-Black racism was at an apex.