The ambivalence of Blackness in early twentieth-century Argentinian comics: “Página del Dólar”

ABSTRACT

This article explores a dual dynamic of simultaneous subordination and limited inclusion of Blackness in Latin America, using the example of a 1920s’ Argentinian comic strip, “Página del Dólar”. The comic's representations of Black people are racist, but also ambivalent and complex. Going beyond common characterisations of the exclusion/inclusion dynamic as a mask of inclusion hiding the reality of exclusion, I argue that the simultaneity and interpenetration of exclusion-plus-inclusion are important for understanding Latin American racial formations. The dynamic works in multiple ways are not fully appreciated in the literature, which emphasises the reproduction of racial hierarchy: as well, it lends specificity to images of the nation; and it provides a moral benchmark for middle classes, especially in relational and ambiguous class and racial locations. The domain of humour is apt for conveying ambivalent meanings, because it provides distance for the reader (“it's just a joke”), while also transmitting important affective charge.

KEYWORDS:

• Blackness
• whiteness
• stereotypes
• racism
• class
• Argentina

A common premise in scholarly and activist discourse about race in Latin America is that Blackness has been invisibilised in national imaginaries, whether as a result of dominant ideologies of mestizaje (mixture), as in Mexico (Sue 2013) or Ecuador (Rahier 2014), or the imposition of ideas of European whiteness, as in Argentina (Alberto and Elena 2016) and Chile (Walsh 2019). While it may be true that in many official narratives of nationhood and in academic production (e.g. history, anthropology, geography), Blackness has been rendered invisible – or at least much less visible than Indigeneity – it is also the case that, especially in popular culture (especially music, dance, film, visual art, comics, etc.), there has always been a space made for a tame form of Blackness deemed acceptable by a mainstream that simultaneously ensures the continued subordination of Black people (Rahier 2014: ch. 6; Wade 2005). This has been very evident in countries, such as Cuba and Brazil, where there have been large Afrodescendant populations (Moore 1997; Vianna 1999), but also in countries such as Colombia and Mexico, where Blackness is often said to have historically been made invisible (Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar 2015; Wade 2000), as well as in the United States (Entman and Rojecki 2001; Hughey 2009).

I explore this dual dynamic of simultaneous subordination and limited inclusion in Argentina, a country where Blackness and Indigeneity are often characterised as having been erased from a national narrative constructed around mass European immigration, but where, in popular culture, especially in comics, Black and Indigenous figures have had a very lively presence (Alberto 2022; Frigerio 2013; Ghidoli 2016; Gutiérrez 2021; McAleer 2018; Merino 2015).

This exclusion-plus-conditional inclusion of Blackness, associated with ambivalent images of Black people, has been noted as a structural feature of Latin America (Da Costa 2014; Telles 2004; Vargas 2004; Wade 2020), as well as other regions, especially in artistic expression (Hall 1997; Hooks 1991, 157; Mercer 2015). My argument here is that importance and multiple functions of the exclusion/inclusion dynamic and ambivalent images of Blackness have not been analysed fully enough in the literature on Latin America. I think there is a tendency to present these functions individually, rather than acting together and also to characterise the dynamic mainly in terms of an overlying mask of inclusion belied by an underlying reality of exclusion, which I believe does not do justice to the complexity of the situation (Wade 2005). By bringing together in a single analysis the several functions of the exclusion/inclusion dynamic, I argue that we can better appreciate the importance for Latin American racial formations of understanding the simultaneity and interpenetration of exclusion and inclusion (Wade 2009, 175).

The functions of the dynamic are several. First, it is certainly true that one function is to facilitate practices that maintain racialised hierarchies, while apparently being inclusive and egalitarian. This facilitates squaring persistent racial exclusions with claims of being a democratic society – a contradiction perhaps inherent to liberal political orders (Baumeister 2000; Mehta 1997) and which has been especially important for Latin American nation-building elites, as a means of taking the moral high ground on the international stage, especially vis-à-vis the United States, seen as a home of “real” racism (Seigel 2009). Second, and less often noted, conditional inclusion – often making a virtue from a presence that cannot be entirely erased – permits the rootedness, authenticity and vitality discursively associated with subalterns to be made available as a resource to dominant sectors. This has been important for Latin American nation-builders, who might otherwise seem to be inauthentically aping European models (Adamovsky 2016b).¹ Third, and still less often noted (but see Alberto 2022), the stereotyped Black or Indigenous figure acts as a stable counterpoint for ideas about acceptable behaviour – deemed respectable, decent and modern. Because these ideas are construed relationally, they are always unstable and, especially for people trying to ascend the social ladder in contexts where class hierarchies are racialised, they can find an anchoring point in racial stereotypes, which are included as a benchmark from which to make judgements of exclusion. My argument is that it is important to take into account all these functions in order to grasp the complex ways in which inclusion coexists with exclusion, especially in Latin America, to sustain racial formations that are durably but flexibly resistant to real racial equality.

The simultaneity of racial inclusion and exclusion creates ambivalent images, which are dramatised and expressed in multiple ways.² The realm of humour is particularly apt because of its inherently double-edged character, working between being “just a joke” and conveying serious meanings with significant social consequences (e.g. of racial exclusion and inclusion; of racism and anti-racism) that are not clear-cut, partly because of the “jokey” context (Lockyer and Pickering 2008; Mercer 2015; Pauwels 2021; Rappoport 2005; Rosenthal, Bindman, and Randolph 2015; Sue and Golash-Boza 2013; Weaver 2016).

The humorous comic strip is an interesting site for exploring the ambivalences generated by inclusion-plus-exclusion (Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar 2015; Ng’weno and Siu 2018; Rivers 2008), because of its frequent use of stereotypes, including racial stereotypes, which, given their rootedness in the longue durée of racial hierarchies, have accumulated dense meanings and a potent affective charge, which makes them powerful and ambivalent operators in the grey zone between humour and seriousness (Pickering 2001). In an analysis of US superhero comics, Singer (2002, 107) remarks that racialised imagery is “anything but simplistic”: “If some titles reveal deceptively soothing stereotypes lurking behind their veneers of diversity, then others show complex considerations of identity”.

The Black (and Indigenous) characters that comics dramatise are both realistic (they index real social entities) and entirely unrealistic (they are fantastic and absurd stereotypes, depicted in cartoonish manner, often doing improbable or even impossible things). The staging is, at one level, humorous and not meant to be taken seriously, while, at another level, the joke only works if it seems to touch on an underlying reality of human social experience. The stereotypes that are so characteristic of comics are what Sara Ahmed calls objects of emotion, which include material objects, images, texts and statements. These objects have a history of circulating in the world, accumulating meanings and becoming “sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension” (Ahmed 2015, 11), but in ways that hide that history, naturalising their meanings and affective charges. As such, the stereotype is a key operator in a context that is by definition “just a joke” but which is also an arena for expressing social distinctions and tensions.

In this article, I explore these issues in relation to a 1923 Argentinian comic-strip called “Página del Dólar” (Dollar's page).³ This comic strip was a commercial advertisement for Dólar cigarettes. It appeared in the publication La Novela semanal, issued weekly from 1917 until 1927 and distributed in the main cities of the country (and in Montevideo) (Academia Argentina de Letras 2022; Pierini 2004; Sarlo 2000). When it started, LNS featured a main short story, punctuated by many advertisements. Gradually, it acquired more features – such as items of news, human interest and society events – although fictional stories remained the core. In 1923, LNS changed its format, becoming more of a magazine (Academia Argentina de Letras 2022). Around this time, “Página del Dólar” appeared and was published in LNS from late 1922 through to September 1923, drawn and authored by Arístides Rechain. The present article is based on thirty-five episodes published from 1 January to 3 September 1923.⁴ Episodes are always on one page and usually have four or six panels arranged in two columns; occasionally there are three or four panels arranged in a single column. At the bottom, there is a slogan for Dólar cigarettes. Given the relatively small sample, I used a hermeneutic approach to analysis, deriving themes inductively from a close reading of the episodes.

La Novela semanal and the emerging middle classes

LNS was one of the weekly publications in Argentina of this period, aimed at a growing reading public in the context of increasing urbanisation (Pierini 2004).⁵ These publications were cheap, portable and written in an accessible style, although some were labelled “novels” (i.e. “literature” of some kind). Highbrows critiqued them as lightweight and sentimental. The stories in LNS dwelt on how love faced obstacles of social convention (e.g. class homogamy) and moral duty (e.g. faithfulness between spouses or fiancés). Sarlo argues that the stories conveyed the moral that enduring happiness was achieved by working within the social rules, thus reflecting reigning limits on social mobility (i.e. you generally had to marry within your own social class). These publications were morality plays for the emerging urban middle class – teachers, public-sector employees, etc. – who were aspiring to an incipient and inchoate urban middle-class status and identity. Their content conveyed messages about being middle class by mobilising moral and aesthetic judgements about behaviour and taste, while also generating powerful affective intensities that drove sensations of love, jealousy, pride, contempt, fear and humour.

The emergence of class positions that were intermediate between the nineteenth-century opposition of elites and plebeians was a product of multiple factors, including the deepening of capitalist social relations, the strengthening of working-class social solidarity, increasing migration and urbanisation, the consolidation of a state bureaucracy and the diversification of occupations. Elites were interested in defusing the politicisation of class solidarity by promoting, via education and new mass media, the image of the ideal citizen who lived in a nuclear family, working hard, educating the younger generation, living respectably and being middle class (Adamovsky 2009). Middle-class status was influenced by the presence of millions of European immigrants. These were heterogeneous in terms of nationality, class and political leanings – and in terms of their “racial qualities” as perceived by the elite and by eugenicists, who preferred northern European Christians to the numerous southern Europeans and Jews who were arriving. Nevertheless, the immigrants’ nominal “whiteness” and their European origins provided a source of value for the construction of an image of Argentina as basically white and European – and centred on Buenos Aires (Aguiló 2018; Alberto 2022; Alberto and Elena 2016).

Being middle class was a tenuous status, due in part to the heterogeneity of the intermediate strata and the absence of factors that could produce a coherent identity. Part of the uncertainty was located in equivocations around race. On the one hand, there was a powerful current of racism rooted in Europhile elite perspectives, which were disdainful of Afro and Indigenous (and Jewish and Asian) people and ancestries. Indeed, the Afro and Indigenous elements of the nation were in the process of being erased from the national imaginary (for example, through genocidal military campaigns and through forms of census counting). On the other hand, these same elements were being unevenly incorporated into a class structure that, while it was being ideologically deracialised, also incorporated the idea of a “criollo” identity seen as authentically Argentinian, in part due to its notional connection to traces of Blackness and Indigeneity (Adamovsky 2016b).⁶ For example, the figure of the gaucho, so important to the Argentinian criollo national imaginary, was linked to Indigeneity while also being the emblem of a Hispanicised rural culture that was the genocidal enemy of Indigenous peoples (Adamovsky 2019; McAleer 2018). Emerging urban middle sectors had to manage the ambiguities of racialised belonging: on the one hand, being identified as negro or indio was anathema to people whose values were oriented towards European whiteness; on the other hand, being criollo was also desirable in a context in which elite Europeanness could also be seen as inauthentic, ostentatious, weak, effete and morally lax (McAleer 2018; Merino 2015).

The figure of el negro in early twentieth-century Argentina

Paulina Alberto's study of the Afro-Argentine man Raúl Grigera (1886–1955) includes an exploration of Arturo Lanteri's 1916 comic strip, in the magazine El Hogar, titled “Las aventuras del negro Raúl” and based on Grigera. Alberto argues that the comic marked a turning point in the way Grigera, a celebrity Black figure in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, was represented in public. Prior to that – for example in a 1912 interview in the weekly Fray Mocho – Grigera was presented as a pretentious dandy, a Black man who rubbed shoulders – especially in demi-monde contexts – with an elite he could never fully be part of (Alberto 2022, 178–179). He came across as a complex, alluring and engaging character, with some traces of counter-cultural heft based on ideas about his lower class, criollo and authentic origins (Alberto 2016, 692).

In 1916, however, Hipólito Yrigoyen, a politician from the left-leaning Unión Cívica Radical party, who was reviled as negro/indio by his conservative enemies, was elected president in Argentina's first elections with universal (male) suffrage. Alberto comments:

The political events of 1916 accelerated the semantic transition of the term negro that had begun at the turn of the century, consolidating its shift away from a racial or “ancestral” sense and toward a “popular” sense: a slur against people whose “ways of being” - regarding culture, class, and now especially politics - marked them as insufficiently qualified for full belonging in the modern White nation (Alberto 2022, 247).

The shift Alberto notes is a key feature of Argentina's racial formation, in which the word negro – especially as used by the middle classes – has come to include not just people with African phenotypical features or ancestry, but anyone in the lower classes, irrespective of phenotype (although such people are often brown-skinned and dark-haired due to Indigenous and African ancestry). Negro can be a merely descriptive term, but its class connotations always open the possibility of its being a slur directed at those perceived as behaving in a vulgar or disreputable fashion (Geler 2016). The slur's relational character make it dangerously sticky, which means social climbers are comforted by having a clear model of Blackness that (they hope) is visibly very different from them.

From 1916, then, and culminating in the 1930s, el negro Raúl becomes a complete stereotype. Raúl was “criollo to the death”, in Lanteri's own words (Alberto 2022, 232), but he also became the stereotyped negro – monkey-like, over-sexed, lazy, parasitic and always the hapless victim (but of his own making). This move towards showing negros as simply laughable caricatures was reflected in how Afro-Porteño public figures were portrayed. Many of them had become acceptable by behaving in ways deemed “respectable” and achieving success according to bourgeois standards; their Blackness – which they often tried hard to play down – was not always remarked upon in public commentaries. After 1916, however, they were increasingly subject to re-readings as stereotypical negros (Alberto 2022, 251–259).

While Lanteri included in his comic elements of earlier versions of Grigera as an appealing criollo figure, he gave pride of place to the harshly demeaning stereotype. He attacked Yrigoyen and his Radicals via the bogeyman image of a negro aspiring to middle-class status and, worse still, to political power. He ridiculed the negro attempting to emulate urbane behaviour, attempts that were shown as pretentious, hubristic and doomed to failure – the laughable, grotesque and pathetic attempts of a mono con frac (a monkey in a tail coat). An unmistakably Black character (who was based on a real, well-known and clearly Black social climber) was a useful figure to activate, in the minds of aspiring middle-class people, meanings and affects that circulated around fears of failing to appear sufficiently respectable and properly behaved. Because these values were intimately linked to whiteness and modernity, a Black man was an especially resonant figure.

Lanteri's target audience was those aspiring to middle-class status, for whom the message was: if you want to be middle class, don't be a negro (Raúl), i.e. don't behave like a negro (Alberto 2022, 238). These people were some of the readership of El Hogar. The magazine reported the lifestyles of the wealthy but was cheap enough to justify a weekly print run of over 150,000 copies. It allowed middle-class aspirants to learn about matters of class distinction – not least through the explicit “moral” lesson with which Lanteri ended each episode – and to work through and displace their hopes and fears about their own aspirations and behaviours in a world in which the relational status of being middle class was particularly uncertain (Alberto 2022, 232, 237).

If Alberto's study traces a move from a sympathetic to a harsher tone in the portrayal of one character who acted as a lens onto Argentinian society, Alejandro Frigerio's study of the representation of Black people in the weekly magazine Caras y Caretas between 1900 and 1910 conveys a less ambivalent picture. Caras y Caretas was different from El Hogar – less staid and genteel, more tilted towards the bohemian demi-monde – but, with a similar price tag of 20 cents, it also catered to the emerging literate middle class, with a print-run of nearly 250,000 copies at some points between 1898 and 1939 (Frigerio 2013, 153, 155). Although he notes that the overall context of nation-building tended to highlight inclusion, while internal boundaries of exclusion were simultaneously reaffirmed, Frigerio nevertheless documents that representations of Black people in the magazine were uniformly negative. Black people were linked to the past and seen as in a process of extinction and doomed to haplessness. They were almost always stereotyped as untrustworthy, associated with servile occupations, and infantilised and animalised, while their physical blackness was seen as inferior to whiteness.

María de Lourdes Ghidoli compares nineteenth-century representations of Black bufones (theatrical jesters, fools or buffoons) with comic strips from the 1930s that appeared in the children's magazine Figuritas in Argentina. Aligning with Alberto's argument about changes in the depiction of Raúl Grigera, Ghidoli contends that the nineteenth-century stereotyped images retained at least some suggestion of humanity and that this was supplanted by the more grotesque imagery of the comic strips that animalised Black people and made them foreign. Her view is that stereotyping was “one of the strategies in the process of invisibilisation suffered by the Afro-Argentine population” (Ghidoli 2016: para. 3), an argument that begs the question of why creators who wanted to erase Blackness from the national imaginary would choose to make Black figures very visible – indeed hypervisible, as I discuss below – in popular cultural outlets.

These three studies provide a context for exploring “Página del Dólar”. Published in 1922–1923, it appears in the last year of Yrigoyen's first term as president and during the start of the 1922–1928 term of his Radical party successor, Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear. As such, according to Alberto's argument, the representation of Black people should be highly and uniformly negative – as one might also conclude from Ghidoli's study and by extrapolation from Frigerio's account. In addition, in one of the few observations on “La Pagina del Dólar” to be found in the literature, Ann Merino says that the Black protagonist “is exploited as the unhappy jester laughed at with malice” and as evidence she cites a single highly racist example, where he is compared to a monkey (Merino 2015, 153). Gociol and Rosemberg (2000, 285) remark that “prejudice colours the whole strip” and also cite just two clear examples.

I think that, while there are plenty of features of the comic that fit well with these accounts, there is more complexity, which illustrates the workings of dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. In particular, the elements that Alberto associates with pre-1916 representations of el negro Raúl and that are only just present in Lanteri's comic strips, are significant aspects of “Página del Dólar”. But, of course, sympathetic portrayals also have specific functions in a dynamic of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, as I will show.

Arístides Rechain

Part of the complexity of “Página del Dólar” may derive from the author. Rechain (b. Rosario, 1888–1962) was an illustrator who worked for many newspapers and magazines in Buenos Aires. For LNS he did “Página del Dólar” in 1922–1923 and “La familia de don Sofanor” from 1925: both comic strips featured families that were or rather aspired to be middle class and thus functioned as commentaries on class mobility. Focusing on a Black family, “Página” spoke to middle-class readers locating themselves vis-à-vis Blackness and whiteness in the racial order.

Rechain also portrayed racialised themes in a complex way in a 1937 comic-strip adaptation for the children's magazine, Billiken, of General Lucio V. Mansilla's Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (1870), which related the general's trip to the Ranquel Indigenous people. Rechain's adaptation faithfully conveyed the ambivalence in Mansilla's account of typically late nineteenth-century racist attitudes to Indigenous peoples, moderated by some sympathy for their bad treatment at the hands of white people.

Rechain also did political caricature. He was involved in Descamisada, a magazine that supported populist leader Juan Perón in 1946–1948 (Adamovsky 2016a, 175) and he worked as an artist in Perón's early government. Rechain's openness to ambivalence and his political leanings to the left are significant in assessing “Página”: he seems to have been more sympathetic to Black characters than Lanteri, who was clearly opposed to Yrigoyen.

“Página del Dólar”: Policarpio, Sinforosa and family

Rechain's comic strip features a rotund Black man, Policarpio, his equally portly wife, Sinforosa and occasionally, their children – an older son (who at one point is in the army – issue 296) and triplets who are born during the series (272). The family scenario would have been familiar to readers from another family-based comic strip by Arturo Lanteri, “Don Pancho Talero”, published in El Hogar in 1922 and inspired by George McManus's “Bringing up Father” (launched in the US in 1913).

The family is clearly middle class: Policarpio is almost always dressed in a suit, usually a dress coat with waistcoat; Sinforosa's clothes are less specific, but she is usually well dressed, especially when outside the house – a notable feature is her striped stockings, which feature in the strip, as I discuss below. Policarpio and his wife host and attend social occasions with white people who are at least middle class, perhaps elite (275, 294); Policarpio goes hunting with a white man, presumably a middle-class pursuit (297); Sinforosa interviews a white woman for a nanny's job, indicating that they have the income to employ domestic servants (281). Policarpio appears to be employed, although we never discover what he does (he sometimes carries a bag that could be a doctor's bag – 273, 296). However, on one occasion, seeking employment, Policarpio goes to the gym of a famous boxer, Firpo, who is advertising for “trainers of colour”, reputed to be strong: a boxing trainer is not a typical middle-class occupation (280). In another episode, Policarpio and Sinforosa appear in the police station after a domestic fight, which hardly conforms to norms of middle-class behaviour (289).

The names are worth a mention, as they are both fairly unusual: Policarpo and Sinforosa were both early Christian saints and martyrs. It may be that Rechain is making ironic reference here to pretentious choices of name among social climbers. It may be that African-American traditions of choosing unusual names (Cook, Parman, and Logan 2022) have also been a part of Afro-Argentine history. In any event, these names make the couple stand out as unusual.

The simple visual style of the comic strip drawings creates the impression of two people who stand out. The graphic style has little detail and this highlights the fact that both Policarpio and Sinforosa are tall and very portly. Their physical bodies are very full and present on the page and sometimes they exceed the confines of the panels they appear in. Their faces, and their arms when visible, are depicted as very black and they are both quite often shown wearing at least some black clothes. Policarpio's coat is usually black; Sinforosa sometimes wears tops with bold designs in black and white. Occasionally they are both shown wearing plain white clothes, with minimal detail, against which their black skin stands out, highlighting a black–white contrast. By comparison, most white people are “empty” – they consist of a few lines, even when they are shown as big-bodied, and their bodies very rarely go beyond the limits of the panels. The simplicity of the style thus lends itself to a relative positioning of bodies that emphasises black–white colour difference and marks out stark contrasts. The simple visual style combines with simple narratives to create an effect in which Policarpio and Sinforosa are, in some ways, stereotypes that speak for themselves: no more details of appearance or plot are necessary and readers can fill in the blanks from their own archive of images about Black people. All this indicates that Blackness is being made hypervisible – a matter to which I return in the conclusion.

In terms of assessing the racist content of the strip, it is undeniable that the whole family is caricatured following established conventions of racial stereotyping. The infants are drawn literally as baby chimpanzees. Policarpio and Sinforosa have very black skin and the big white lips of the classic minstrel figure. In Argentine terminology, these are unmistakably negros negros (Black Blacks, or real Blacks) or negros mota (Blacks with African tightly coiled hair) – as was el negro Raúl (Alberto 2016, 688) – and, as such, they are dehumanised in classic racist fashion, with the Black characters portrayed as acquiescing in their own animalisation. In one episode (276), the couple is at the zoo with their son, looking at a gorilla: the son says it looks like Policarpio; Policarpio himself wonders why the beast looks so familiar; and the animal calls him hermanito (little brother) (see Figure 1). In another, a doctor attends an afflicted Sinforosa: Policarpio says she eats like a wolf, snorts like a horse and sleeps like a dormouse. The doctor suggests he call a vet (287).

Figure 1. “Look, what a repulsive face!”; “But where have I seen that ugly face before?”; “Dad, how like you he looks!” (“Página del Dólar”, Arístides Rechain, La Novela semanal, issue 276, 26 February 1923.).

Policarpio is generally portrayed as hapless, ignorant and stupid – very much in the mould of el negro Raúl and the stock Black bufón (jester, buffoon) figure of the theatre (Alberto 2016, 687). Things frequently turn out badly for Policarpio and, while occasionally this is not his fault, usually it is as a result of his dim-wittedness or ineptitude. When at the seaside, for example, he appears ignorant of the whole beach scenario and almost drowns (274); during confession at the church, he is unable to answer simple questions posed to him by the priest about the basics of Christianity (284); on one occasion, he tells Sinforosa that he's been pickpocketed because, although he felt the hand in his pocket, he thought it was his own – she upbraids him as an idiot (290). Sinforosa herself, on seeing a small notice at the top of a telegraph pole, thinks it might have something important to say and sends Policarpio up the – as it turns out, freshly painted – pole to investigate, leaving him covered in paint (269).

Policarpio sometimes reveals himself to be linguistically incompetent or naive: when an army officer tells him his son, a battalion bugler, is in the cells because he “tocó de mala manera La Generala” (he played badly La Generala, the name of a 1912 Spanish operetta), he misunderstands that his son inappropriately touched the General’s wife (la generala) (296); at the family dinner table, he gets a stock saying the wrong way round (282); at a baptism, when the priest says that his baby can’t be officially named with the diminutive form Policarpito, he says, “Don’t worry we’ll put the ‘pito’ [a slang term for penis] on him at home” (277); in the incident in which the couple appears in the police station after a domestic fight, he and Sinforosa misunderstand the policeman to be offering them 100 pesos when he is actually imposing a fine (289).

Excessive behaviours of various kinds also figure. On more than one occasion, Policarpio gets drunk and, in one episode, carousing in the street, he shouts, “Viva el Peludo”, referring to Yrigoyen's nickname and revealing himself as a political Radical, as well as the kind of man who gets completely drunk in public (293). In another episode, he comes home drunk and Sinforosa, finding a blond hair on his coat and suspecting him of philandering, beats him harshly with a stick, while their eldest son looks on, asking Policario why he didn't retaliate by treading on Sinforosa's corns (278). The indirect reference to sex – in this case interracial – is made more explicit in the incident in the confessional box, referred to above, when the priest says that the rumour mill has it that Policarpio has a liking for las faldas (“skirt”); Policarpio replies that actually he hates skirts but loves bodies. Again a linguistic naivety – perhaps portrayed as disingenuous here – that reveals an underlying promiscuity and licentiousness. In another episode, Sinforosa takes Policarpio to a shop to buy herself some fancy new garters; he casually declares himself in favour of red ones, “like the ones [she had] before”, provoking a rebuff from Sinforosa that “no one liked those red garters” (298). Previously Policarpio has revealed that he is aroused by Sinforosa's striped stockings, much to her disdain (290). Such episodes hint at stereotypes of Black licentiousness.

These are all aspects of character and behaviour at odds with Policarpio's and Sinforosa's middle-class economic position and aspirations to middle-class status in the 1920s’ Argentina: the ignorance, the linguistic naivety or incompetence, the drunkenness, the domestic violence, the explicit interest in sex. The last two, in particular, relate to the family context of “Página del Dólar”, which makes this comic strip different from “Las aventuras del negro Raúl” and aligns it with other family-based comic strips, such as Rechain's own “La familia de don Sofanor”. Given that a “respectable” family life is a key value of a middle-class habitus, linked to the “proper” education of children, the presence of domestic violence (in front of children) and sexual licence in Policarpio's household are indicators to the reader that Black family life is the opposite of what “decent” family life should look like.

In terms of aesthetics, too, the couple sometimes betray a vulgarity at odds with middle-class bourgeois tastes. The applicant for the nanny position in Policarpio's household is rejected by Sinforosa when she hears the women's boast that the husband of her previous employer was always happy with her “services”. In response, the applicant, an elegantly dressed young white woman, snaps “Ha, ha! What are you pretending to be, with your elegance, vieja medias rayadas (old woman with striped stockings)?” (281). The striped stockings are a fashion faux pas, taken – perhaps with particular disdain by a white woman applying for a nanny's position – to indicate a crass lack of taste. Policarpio's own sartorial habits – usually featuring a dress coat – are perhaps suggestive for the reader of the type known in nineteenth-century Cuban popular theatre as negros catedráticos (Black professors), which Fernando Ortiz describes in condescending tones as those Black men who

barely emerging from slavery and in their eagerness to rise, took advantage of any occasion to wear a dress coat and top hat, like the powerful whites, and to talk in a refined manner, like eminent people … and, aspiring to pass for superior people, … won only ridicule, indifference and disillusionment (Ortiz [1950] 1965, 129).

In another demonstration of behaviour completely inappropriate to a middle-class habitus, Policarpio dreams he finds himself at the gates of heaven, where he naively and outrageously fondles St Peter's beard, saying “Nice beard for cleaning combs” (268). St Peter is flabbergasted at Policarpio's manners, but admits that he is simpático and grants him a wish – which, of course, turns out badly. The naïve but simpático Black man was a stock figure of Argentine popular theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century – similar in some ways to an Uncle Tom figure, albeit without the connotations of moral virtue. Simpático means friendly, nice and congenial, but also amusing: the term has a patronising edge to it, which, when applied to a racialised subaltern, connotes the image of el negro permitido – the acceptable Black man (Rahier 2014, 146).⁷ Chisu Teresa Ko argues that, in Argentina, the negro simpático was edged out after 1916 by more one-dimensional images of the grotesque and laughable Black man (cited by Alberto 2022, 236).

Policarpio often comes across as simpático: for example, he is shown taking off his dress coat, rolling up his sleeves and easily corralling a recalcitrant pig that several white people had not been able to control, much to their amusement (270). Apparently, he still has a knack, doubtless acquired during the rural and humble upbringing that it is implied he must have had. In another episode, Policarpio comes across as not only simpático but also vivo (cunning, smart, a trickster) – another stock image of the Black man (Alberto 2022, 202). He is seen in a fancy restaurant, ordering pasta and wine in a pretentious and ignorant way – “a bottle of Rhine, but de quel bon” (a mispronounced attempt at French, meaning “one of the good ones”). He proceeds to eat his spaghetti standing on his chair, to the horror of the white waiter, who nevertheless continues to attend to him solicitously. At the end, Policarpio asks the manager what he’d do if a client said he had no money to pay the bill. The manager says he’d give the customer two kicks up the backside, whereupon Policarpio presents his rear to the man and says “OK, then, take payment!”, cleverly getting his meal for free (301).

Ambivalent narratives

It is clear that “Página” reproduces racial stereotypes, laden with meanings and an affective charge from the history of colonial and post-colonial racism. Yet among and sometimes within the stereotypes, there is ambivalence, which is already evident in the image of Policarpio as simpático and capable of being vivo. These are stock images, with their own affective intensities linked to pleasure, attraction and reassurance, which derive in part from their patronising and limiting character. For example, Policarpio's success with the pig moves an onlooker to remark, “The first time a negro does something good”, and the reader is reassured by the picture of a smiling, helpful Black man. But the images show some complexity. Policarpio's pig-wrangling skills show him as someone unpretentious who is not afraid to get his hands dirty and reveal an authentic origin and criollo character that has valued and attractive features for the middle classes. More cuttingly, the white waiter and manager in the restaurant episode described above are themselves the butt of the joke. Or in the incident with Sinforosa and the prospective nanny, the white woman comes across as ridiculous, with her pretentious over-dressing and her inappropriate boasts about her “services” to the husband of her previous employer. At the end of this episode, Policarpio reflects: “What bad luck! I’ve always said los negros tomamos la borra y ni olemos el café (us Blacks are always left with the grounds and don't even smell the coffee)”. That is, Black people make an effort but can't enjoy the fruits of their labours – an incisive commentary on a white middle-class exclusivity that is itself terribly pretentious.

There are also episodes where Policarpio comes out on top, to the detriment of white people. As Gociol and Rosemberg observe (2000, 285), he is “quick with his answers and smart in his retorts”, while an anonymous commentator notes that, although depicted as “practically a chimpanzee in a dress coat”, Policarpio “takes the opportunity to make fun of the whites, while they laugh at him” (Escuela Panamericana de Arte 1968, 7). In one episode, Policarpio is ill and, fearing for his life, asks Sinforosa to bring to his bedside the landlord and the local shopkeeper, who come and ask what his last wish is. He says that they have already granted his final wish, which is to die as Jesus did – between two thieves (295). Here white people are portrayed as rapacious money-grabbers. In another episode, Policarpio and Sinforosa are hosting a party and she introduces to him a series of well-dressed white guests: for each one, he makes a scathing aside based on their appearance and compares them to animals; he ends by saying he doesn't like making his house into a zoo in order to give a party (294). The white people are all blithely unaware of his comments, which turn the tables on the common technique in which Black people are animalised – he even compares one man to a monkey (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. “My dear Policarpio, I am going to present the guests to you”; “Gosh, what odd-looking specimens”; “Señor Jacinto Donoso”; “Sir Monkey would suit him better”. (“Página del Dólar”, Arístides Rechain, La Novela semanal, issue 294, 2 July 1923.).

At another social event, Policarpio comes across as vulgar and clumsy when he makes a series of rude remarks to a white man about the appearances of three women sitting across the room – who all turn out to be members of the man's family. But Policarpio wins out as he delivers a clever back-handed remark to the man – “Congratulations! You look just like your mother”. The man accepts the “compliment” with gratitude, coming across as idiotic, while Policarpio appears as plain-speaking and authentic – a criollo unafraid to tell it like it is, especially to the well-heeled classes (275).

The incident mentioned above of linguistic incompetence, in which Policarpio gets a stock phrase mixed up, involves a priest who habitually comes to their house to eat, but on this occasion has not shown up. He eventually arrives and Policarpio asks him an ignorant question about whether the sun is far from the earth. The priest, tucking into his meal, answers that a stone thrown towards the sun would take many years to arrive. Policarpio has the last laugh as he quips: “However, I think that if a priest was thrown from the sun at 11.30, by 12.00 he’d be at the table eating with us” (282). The priest is shown as a greedy, slightly buffoonish figure, while Policarpio's linguistic infelicities and ignorance of basic facts are redeemed by his down-to-earth speaking of truth to power.

The message for the middle-class reader, conveyed through the humorous distancing and simplification that comic-strip representations allow while also generating affective reactions of fear and anxiety, is that middle-class white people can also be pretentious, greedy and stupid, and that being white is no guarantee of admirable behaviour. The apparent certainty provided by the benchmark embodied in the Black figure is destabilised by these representations.

Interestingly, the messages around the image of the family as whole are also somewhat mixed and not all the imagery contrasts the Black family with middle-class family values. In one episode, Policarpio is shown in a bewildered state, holding newborn triplets, with admiring neighbours looking on (272). Other scenes show the family together, either as a threesome (273, 276, 277, 281, 282, 292) or more rarely all six of them (280, 292). These last two are among the few occasions on which many bodies are depicted in close proximity or overlapping each other in a panel, something that the simple style of the comic-strip rarely features. These two instances show Policarpio, his wife, older son and the triplets all together. One is in a domestic setting in which they are all around Policarpio, who is reclining in an armchair with a cigar; the other features an outing to a river, where they all line up in order of size, almost hiding, behind Policarpio who is negotiating with a white boatman about a crossing. In these scenes, the Black family has a serene unity, with Policarpio as paterfamilias.

These stories complicate the picture of Policarpio as simple buffoon and grotesque idiot, doomed to misadventure. Of course, they also draw on familiar images of Black people – as simpático, vivo, guardians of values of honesty and authenticity – which themselves are part of an overall racist formation, but it is important to draw out the complexities involved in order to understand how a racial hierarchy can operate by simultaneously deploying tactics of inclusion – not always entirely limited and conditional – as well as exclusion; and how contradictory meanings, emotions and affects are generated that make the reader constantly reassess their own social location in the racialised class formation.

Conclusion

Like el negro Raúl in “Las aventuras”, Policarpio and family functioned as hyper-visible Black people at a time when the category negro in Argentina was losing its genealogical and even phenotypical referents and becoming a term defined by ways of being, linked to lower class status, incivility, vulgarity, poverty and dirt (Geler 2016, 218–220). These were all traits long associated with Black people in racist imagery, but now being applied to wider segment of the population by the middle class and the elite. In this context – which was also one of the “disappearance” of actual Afro-Argentine people – unmistakably Black figures remained as important nodes, whether real or fictitious. As Alberto (2016; 2022) argues, they served as a reminder for the emerging middle classes of what it meant to be negro – how not to behave – and as a counterpoint to their own claims of whiteness and family-based respectability.

In “Página”, however, more than just visible, Blackness is rendered hypervisible. Alberto notes that Blackness was made hypervisible (and hyper-audible) in early twentieth-century Argentina through racial stereotyping and pigeonholing, while it was simultaneously made invisible through negation and erasure (2022, 26). A similar dynamic has been observed in Mexico, where there has been “hypervisibility in the forms of racial stereotyping” – for example, in comics – alongside “invisibility in official narratives of nationhood and national identity, and in academic production” (Ng’weno and Siu 2018, 78). In a related way, Vargas (2004) describes the “hyperconsciousness of race and its negation” in Brazil, which functions as a mode of reproducing white supremacy, as it involves people being very aware of racial difference and acting on it in racist ways, but in a veiled fashion that allows the simultaneous denial that racism is an issue. While much has been made in Latin America of the processes of invisibilisation and erasure that affect Black and Indigenous (and Asian) people, this has to be seen alongside the processes of hypervisibilisation in which specific stereotyped images of such people are deployed as powerful and affect-laden nodes of signification that act as relational counterpoints to notions of mixedness and whiteness.

Within this, however, it is important to appreciate the complexities of the images involved. Hypervisible and stereotyped images of Blackness can also carry nuance and ambivalence – and this cements their function as counterpoints. The portrayal of Policarpio and family in “Página” is more textured and multifaceted than the images from 1900 to 1910 in Caras y Caretas that Frigerio analyses or the images that Ghidoli explores from the 1930s’ Figuritas magazine. The depictions also show that some of the ambivalences that Alberto identifies in pre-1916 depictions of el negro Raúl – which showed him as in some ways an alluring and engaging figure, and which Landeri continued to use to some extent, drawing on “the overlapping, countercultural conventions of rural-inspired criollismo and urban literary bohemia to create an appealing Black protagonist” (Alberto 2022, 232) – were still important elements in 1923 in the hands of an artist like Rechain, who was more sympathetic to the Radical political currents of Argentina. These nuances in images of Blackness work in tandem with critiques of white middle-class pretension and greed, keeping readers in a state of anxious self-reflection.

There is no doubt that, in Rechain's hands, Policarpio and his family served the purpose of reinforcing the views of the emerging white middle classes about what negros were like and the oxymoronic character of a middle-class Black family. But it is important that the images of Black figures such as Policarpio – and Indigenous figures such as the comic-strip hero, Patoruzú (McAleer 2018) – should be more complex than just simple bestial grotesque stereotypes and do more than simply reaffirm white superiority. They also served as legitimations of national (in this case “criollo”) authenticity and rootedness; and they bolstered the claims of racial democracy and racial innocence with which Latin American elites and nation-builders (and the wider public) regularly distanced and differentiated themselves from the United States (FitzGerald and Cook-Martín 2014; Seigel 2009). It is necessary to grasp the complex role played by such Black characters in the changing racial formations of Argentina and more widely in Latin America.

Acknowledgements

This article comes out of the project Comics and Race in Latin America, funded by the AHRC (AH/T004606/1) and directed by James Scorer, University of Manchester. The author is grateful to the project team for feedback on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Funded by the AHRC (AH/T004606/1).

Notes

1 Cf. the so-called “magical Negro” films of the United States, in which Black people are shown as saviours of troubled white people (Gabbard 2004; Hughey 2009).

2 For a discussion of ambivalence in Latin American racialised sexual interactions see Wade (2009); and in Mexican danzón circles, Malcomson (2023).

3 The article comes out of the project Comics and Race in Latin America, funded by the AHRC (AH/T004606/1) and directed by James Scorer, University of Manchester. I am grateful to the project team for feedback on earlier drafts.

4 Numbers 268–303 of LNS. Previous numbers from late 1922 were not available for consultation in the National Library in Buenos Aires during a research visit in May 2022.

5 LNS claimed 400,000 readers in 1922 (Sarlo 2000). The population of Buenos Aires rose from about 1.5 m in 1914 to nearly 3 m in 1947.

6 Criollo is a complex term: its basic meaning is a person, animal or plant typically of European (or less often African) descent, but born in the Americas and thus distinctive. This gives it connotations of authenticity and nativeness, but also of mixture and thus – compared to “pure” Europeans – inferiority in global racial hierarchies.

7 The indio permitido (permissible indio) is Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's term for the Indigenous figure seen as acceptable by the dominant classes (Hale 2004).