Afro-Porteños at the end of the nineteenth century: discussing the nation

Abstract

Argentina is a country that, even today, identifies itself as a modern, white, and European nation. This representation began to be projected in the last decades of the nineteenth century, framed in the state-consolidation and nation-building processes, which will be the historical context for this paper. It was also the time when a certain notion became broadly accepted: that Afro-Argentines, the descendants of formerly enslaved African people, had ‘disappeared’. By contrast, in that same period, Afro-Porteños (Porteños are citizens of Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina) had not disappeared but constituted an important community, which produced numerous newspapers. Through the analysis of Afro-Porteño newspapers, their self-representations and discourses, some of the ways they negotiated with the ideology of modernity and Europeanism (that implied whiteness) will be discussed. The agency of Afro-Porteños will be examined as we analyze how Afro-Porteño intellectuals promoted state values to their group and at the same time defended their community against discrimination.

Keywords:

• Afro-Porteños
• Buenos Aires
• nineteenth century
• subaltern intellectuals
• nation-state
• agency

Notes

1. For further information about Afro-Porteño newspapers, see Geler (2010, 2008).

2. Although here I will focus on the descendants from enslaved Africans, the same process of invisibilization was suffered by the immigrants coming from African countries during the first decades of the twentieth century. The most remarkable example is the Cape Verdeans, whose presence is not recognized in the collective images of the nation (Maffia 2010).

3. This kind of botanical metaphor was a fundamental part in the nation-building processes that were taking place at that time (Alonso 1994) and supported the consolidation of the imagined national community (Anderson 1991).

4. A society was being formed in an economic context that would allow a very high social mobility in the future decades.

5. Rotker (1999) points out that the binary opposition established by Sarmiento between civilization and barbarianism, with all its derivations, structured the second part of the Argentine nineteenth century and gave rise to a form of understanding the society from the dualism of antagonist fields.

6. In this sense, according to the Afro-Porteños’ vision, the indigenous peoples seemed to represent that total exclusion, based on their ‘savagery’, which had to be avoided (Geler 2010).