¿De dónde sos?: (Black) Argentina and the mechanisms of maintaining racial myths

Abstract

Afrodescendant activists in Argentina challenge the belief that there are no Black Argentines, and therefore an impossibility of anti-black racism in the country. Insufficient data on race, the complex separation of the word negro (black) from phenotype, and the myth of Argentina as a “white” nation that falls outside the purview of Latin America’s racialized nations have resulted in a dearth of scholarship on this case. Drawing from twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyses processes of racialization through micro-level exchanges that reproduce existing racial hierarchies. I argue that “foreignization” is a racialized mechanism that reproduces the pervasive myth of Argentina’s homogeneous whiteness. I illustrate this mechanism through the analysis of three patterns of racialized encounters that were salient during my fieldwork: afrophilia, curiosity, and insecure whiteness. The present data shows that Argentina is an important case to consider in our understanding of race in Latin America.

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