Editorial

This special issue of the journal devoted to exploring the Afro-Argentines population has been long in the making. During 2012, we published two special issues, Vol. 5, No. 1, January 2012, on Rewriting the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America, guest edited by Robert L. Adams, Jr. to highlight the history and contemporary conditions of the African diaspora populations in the Caribbean and Latin America, followed by African Diaspora in Brazil, Vol. 5. No. 2, 2012, guest edited by Fassil Demissie that explored the particular trajectory of African diaspora populations in Brazil and the various social, cultural networks and institutions that Africans and their descendants created and developed in Brazil. This issue is devoted to exploring the hidden and invisible history of blacks and the ways in which racial ideology and practice have attempted to erase the presence and memory of the African-descendant populations while valorizing whiteness in Argentina. Unlike other countries in South America, Argentina remains recalcitrant in its refusal to acknowledge the crucial part that Africans and their descendants played and continue to play in the country's history. Throughout the country's colonial and postcolonial history, a national myth was sustained by the prevailing racial ideology of the time which claimed that Argentina was not only white but also fundamentally European and the large-scale European immigration since the nineteenth century is held as proof that the Afro-Argentine population were not a factor in the construction of the national identity.¹ Indeed, nationalist historians claim that ‘Argentina was a criso de razas (crucible of races)’, in which Spaniards, Italians, and other European immigrant groups were fused into a new nation (Karush 2010). Indeed, this powerful national myth of the vanishing of Afro-Argentines population as an evitable process of history is captured in a statement made by the former Argentine President Carlos Menem during a diplomatic trip to the USA who declared: ‘Black people do not exist in Argentina; Brazil has that problem.’ Menem's remark has a long and established history informed by the dominant racial ideology, where the question of race and nation are said to apply less to Argentina than the rest of Latin America. This notion is so deeply ingrained in the national consciousness of the Argentine society that it serves to render the Afro-Argentine population into impossibility or ‘phantasmagorical remnants’ (Peñazola 2007).

In his much-quoted book, historian George Reid Andrews (1980) has drawn our attention to the alleged disappearance of the once-substantial population of people of African descent of Buenos Aires, arguing that it was at least as much a product of this racial ideology as it was the result of miscegenation, war, and disease. Following Andrews’ pioneering study, other scholars from diverse fields and backgrounds have begun to produce works that explore the issue of race in Argentinian history as well as the ways in which racial ideology and practice of the state and society worked both to exclude and marginalize the Afro-Argentines during the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Since the 1980s, a wave of robust and critical works have begun to appear, contesting Argentina's national narrative that the country is both ‘white and European’ and are reestablishing a new historiography of ‘those deleted voices which resound through their absence’ (Healy 2006), particularly the history of Africans and their descendants in the making of the Argentina's colonial and postcolonial history. This special issue takes its cue from this critical tradition and hopes that the pages devoted here will contribute to the important project of recovering the centrality of the African-descended populations, not only in Argentina but also in the wider Atlantic world.

Fassil Demissie

Department of Public Policy Studies, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA

Notes

1. Throughout the 1800, the ruling elites conducted a concerted campaign to ‘whiten’ the Argentine population through mass immigration of Europeans in the hope of progressively reducing number the Africans and their descendants which constituted as much as 30% of the population in places like Buenos Aires in the early nineteenth century (Andrews, 1980).