{"id":60541,"date":"2021-02-10T02:05:21","date_gmt":"2021-02-10T02:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=60541"},"modified":"2021-02-10T02:06:05","modified_gmt":"2021-02-10T02:06:05","slug":"the-hidden-history-of-black-argentina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=60541","title":{"rendered":"The Hidden History of Black Argentina"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Hidden History of Black Argentina<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Review<\/a>
\n2021-02-08<\/p>\n

Uki Go\u00f1i<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nAllsport via Getty Images<\/em>
\nDiego Maradona<\/a> (front, center) with family and friends in Villa Fiorito, Argentina<\/a>, 1980<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

A century of European immigration brought with it a comprehensive effort to erase the country\u2019s multiracial past. Only recently has that been reversed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Erika Denise Edwards<\/a>, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic<\/em><\/a> (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2020).<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThis country has no tradition of its own,\u201d Argentina\u2019s master writer, Jorge Luis Borges<\/a>, told me in an interview in 1975. \u201cThere\u2019s no native tradition of any kind since the Indians here were mere barbarians. We have to fall back on the European tradition, why not? It\u2019s a very fine tradition.\u201d The words grate to modern ears, but they seemed true to Borges\u2019s world. His own grandmother, Frances Anne Haslam, had come from Staffordshire, England<\/a>. And by 1920, when Borges turned twenty-one, over half the population of his native Buenos Aires<\/a> had been born in Europe<\/a>, the result of a vast wave of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century immigration.<\/p>\n

According to this idea of Argentina\u2019s roots, our capital city of Buenos Aires is \u201cthe Paris of South America,\u201d and \u201cwe are all descendants from Europe,\u201d as then President Mauricio Macri<\/a> said at the World Economic Forum<\/a> in Davos, Switzerland<\/a>, in 2018. A corollary of this claim is one made by an earlier president, Carlos Menem<\/a>, to a Dutch audience at Maastricht University<\/a> in 1993 that, because Argentina had abolished slavery as early as 1813, \u201cwe don\u2019t have blacks.\u201d At a later lecture\u2014bizarrely enough, at Howard University<\/a> in Washington, D.C.<\/a>\u2014Menem added, \u201cthat is a Brazilian problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

For me, the myth of a European-only Argentina reached its breaking point last November, with the death of the soccer star Diego Maradona<\/a>, arguably the greatest player who ever lived. He transcended the world of sports to become a figure of hope and defiance for millions of Argentines…<\/p>\n

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

A century of European immigration brought with it a comprehensive effort to erase the country\u2019s multiracial past. Only recently has that been reversed.<\/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":[12089,676,31301,7399,7400,7401,31300,31299,31298],"class_list":["post-60541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-history","category-media-archive","tag-afro-argentines","tag-argentina","tag-diego-maradona","tag-erika-d-edwards","tag-erika-denise-edwards","tag-erika-edwards","tag-new-york-review","tag-the-new-york-review","tag-uki-goni"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60541","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=60541"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60544,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60541\/revisions\/60544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}