{"id":37353,"date":"2014-09-15T01:47:58","date_gmt":"2014-09-15T01:47:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37353"},"modified":"2014-09-15T01:47:58","modified_gmt":"2014-09-15T01:47:58","slug":"argentina-rediscovers-its-african-roots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37353","title":{"rendered":"Argentina Rediscovers Its African Roots"},"content":{"rendered":"

Argentina Rediscovers Its African Roots<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2014-09-12<\/p>\n

Michael T. Luongo<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The chapel in the small lakeside resort community of Chascom\u00fas<\/a> is at best underwhelming. Its whitewashed brick exterior is partly obstructed by a tangle of vines and bushes, and its dim, one-room interior is no more majestic than its facade. Wooden pews and an uneven dirt floor are scarcely illuminated by sunlight from a single window. The gray, cracked, dusty walls are adorned with crosses, photos, icons \u2014 things people leave to mark their pilgrimage. A low front altar is layered with thick candle wax, flowers and a pantheon of black saints, Madonnas and African deities like the sea goddess Yemanja<\/a> of the Yoruba religion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite its unkempt state, this chapel, the Capilla de los Negros<\/a>, attracts a little over 11,000 tourists each year who come to see a church named for the freed slaves who built it in 1861.<\/p>\n

The chapel is \u201cwhere we can locate ourselves and point out the truth that we are here,\u201d said Soledad Luis, an Afro-Argentine from the tourism office who led me through the space. She knows it well. It sits on a plot her great-grandfather helped secure, and her family still gathers there weekly for a meal.<\/p>\n

Capilla de los Negros feels off the beaten path, but it is part of a list of slave sites in Argentina<\/a> created in 2009 by Unesco<\/a>. Its inclusion signals the growing consciousness of African heritage in Argentina, seemingly the most Europeanized country in South America.<\/p>\n

Argentina at one time had a robust African presence because of the slaves who were brought there, but its black population was decimated by myriad factors including heavy casualties on the front lines in the War of the Triple Alliance<\/a> against Paraguay<\/a> in the 1860s; a yellow fever<\/a> epidemic that rich, white Argentines largely escaped; and interracial offspring who, after successive generations, shed their African culture along with their features. And European immigration swelled the white population \u2014 2.27 million Italians came between 1861 and 1914.<\/p>\n

The demographic shift has been sharp. In 1800, on the eve of revolution with Spain<\/a>, blacks made up more than a third of the country, 69,000 of a total population of 187,000, according to George Reid Andrews\u2019s<\/a> 2004 book \u201cAfro-Latin America<\/a>.\u201d In 2010, 150,000 identified themselves as Afro-Argentine, or a mere 0.365 percent of a population of 41 million people, according to the census, the first in the country\u2019s history that counted race.<\/p>\n

But the culture the slaves brought with them remained. And in recent years, Argentina has gone from underselling its African roots to rediscovering them, as academics, archaeologists, immigrants and a nascent civil rights movement have challenged the idea that African and Argentine are mutually exclusive terms…<\/p>\n

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

Argentina Rediscovers Its African Roots The New York Times 2014-09-12 Michael T. Luongo The chapel in the small lakeside resort community of Chascom\u00fas is at best underwhelming. Its whitewashed brick exterior is partly obstructed by a tangle of vines and bushes, and its dim, one-room interior is no more majestic than its facade. Wooden pews […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,21,459,8,820,6940],"tags":[12089,676,17886,17885,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-37353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-latincarib","category-history","category-media-archive","category-religion","category-slavery","tag-afro-argentines","tag-argentina","tag-michael-luongo","tag-michael-t-luongo","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37353","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=37353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}