Criollismo, política y etnicidad en las ideas y el folklore de Eusebio Dojorti (Buenaventura Luna)

Abstract

This article analyzes Buenaventura Luna’s career as a folk musician, writer, and radio entertainer in Argentina, from about 1937 to 1955, by tracing connections to his earlier life as Eusebio Dojorti (his real name), an activist of the radical “Bloquista” movement of San Juan and later on as a supporter of Juan Perón. A similar cultural program can be discerned in both his political ideas and his musical and radio endeavors. Luna was convinced of the necessity to vindicate the criollo, long oppressed under elitist projects that systematically favored European immigrants. But unlike nationalists and other participants in the folklore movement, Luna was not so much interested in rescuing the “spiritual” legacy of traditions as in improving the lives of the lower classes. With this aim in mind, Luna produced a noteworthy body of work in which he challenged the official discourses of the nation— according to which Argentina was a white European country—by illuminating the ethnic heterogeneity of the native population and the diversity of its colors. But in doing so, Luna was not only proposing an intellectual project but also dealing with his own personal experience as a dark-skinned provinciano living in “white” Buenos Aires.