{"id":24493,"date":"2012-07-25T02:05:14","date_gmt":"2012-07-25T02:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24493"},"modified":"2012-10-10T13:50:29","modified_gmt":"2012-10-10T13:50:29","slug":"blackness-in-argentina-jazz-tango-and-race-before-peron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24493","title":{"rendered":"Blackness in Argentina: Jazz, Tango and Race Before Per\u00f3n*"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blackness in Argentina: Jazz, Tango and Race Before Per\u00f3n*<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Past and Present<\/a>
\nVolume 216, Issue 1<\/a> (August 2012)
\npages 215-245
\nDOI: 10.1093\/pastj\/gts008<\/a><\/p>\n

Matthew B. Karush<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of History
\nGeorge Mason University<\/em><\/p>\n

On the question of race and nation, the dominant Latin American paradigm has never applied to Argentina. In Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere, twentieth-century nationalists crafted ideologies of mestizaje<\/a> that broke with European and North American models by celebrating the indigenous or African as crucial elements in a new racial mixture. Yet most Argentine intellectuals rejected this sort of hybridity and instead constructed national identities that were at least as exclusionary as those produced by their North American counterparts. The only mixtures they countenanced were those that followed from European immigration. Just as the United States was a \u2018melting pot\u2019, Argentina was a crisol de razas<\/em> (crucible of races), in which Spaniards, Italians and other immigrant groups were fused into a new nation. This ideology, visible in the well-known aphorism that \u2018Argentines descend from ships\u2019, marginalized Argentines of indigenous and African descent and eventually erased them from national consciousness. As George Reid Andrews<\/a> showed over thirty years ago<\/a>, the alleged disappearance of the once-substantial Afro-Argentine population of Buenos Aires was at least as much the product of this ideological manoeuvre as it was the result of miscegenation<\/a>, war and disease. Only recently has Argentina\u2019s status as a white nation begun to be openly contested.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, even if non-whites have been pushed off the historical stage, race remains a pervasive category in Argentine society. The word \u2018negro\u2019 is a commonplace in everyday speech, functioning both as a hateful insult and, paradoxically, as a term of endearment. Equally mysteriously, the insult usually alludes to indigenous rather than African ancestry. Typically, these usages are traced to the Peronist era. During his first two terms in office (1946\u201355), Juan Per\u00f3n<\/a> built a powerful working-class movement that challenged the nation\u2019s hierarchies. Per\u00f3n\u2019s opponents attacked his followers in racial terms, labelling them cabecitas negras<\/em> (little blackheads)…<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blackness in Argentina: Jazz, Tango and Race Before Per\u00f3n* Past and Present Volume 216, Issue 1 (August 2012) pages 215-245 DOI: 10.1093\/pastj\/gts008 Matthew B. Karush, Associate Professor of History George Mason University On the question of race and nation, the dominant Latin American paradigm has never applied to Argentina. In Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere, twentieth-century […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,21,459,8],"tags":[676,11391,11389,11390,1392,11388],"class_list":["post-24493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-history","category-media-archive","tag-argentina","tag-juan-peron","tag-matthew-b-karush","tag-matthew-karush","tag-music","tag-past-and-present"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}