In 1881, José Antonio Wilde – a renowned intellectual and doctor from the capital city of Buenos Aires – published his memoirs, Buenos Aires desde setenta años atrás, which would become a leading primary source for the study of the early post-independence period in the Argentine capital. Wilde portrayed the “mulatto” J. Antonio Viera, a celebrated nineteenth-century actor and singer, as follows: “His courteous demeanor and his manners left nothing to be desired, and as the saying goes, only his color was lacking [el color no más le faltaba], or more accurately, he had an excess of it.” In 2010, more than a hundred and thirty years after Wilde's book was first published, Paula, a porteña (or resident of Buenos Aires city) who self-identifies as an Afro-descendant, said of herself in an interview: “Only my color is lacking [a mí me falta el color nada más].”

The extraordinary formal similarity between these two testimonies points to the historical persistence of a troubling relationship among perceived skin color, a supposedly expected “way of being,” and the (im)possibility of recognition and self-recognition within established social categories. For what does it mean for someone to lack or to have an excess of color? In regard to what standard is someone's skin color judged to be too much or too little? This verdict implies, among many other things, that there is something in that person – whether a “mulatto” or an “Afro-descendant” – that exceeds or does not fit into established social categories. In this chapter, I will explore this conceptual dislocation between appearances and ways of being, which, I argue, must be understood in relation to the absence of intermediate or mixed (mestizo) categories in Buenos Aires.

In the 1930s, a series of mountain districts in Argentina began receiving thousands of tourists from Buenos Aires and other Argentine cities, attracted to the spellbinding vistas and the brisk mountain air. The most popular destinations, such as Lake Nahuel Huapi in Patagonia, the Andean foothills in Mendoza, the Sierra in Córdoba, and the Calchaquí and Humahuaca valleys in the Northwest, offered a diversity of climates and landscapes for the fledgling Argentine leisure class. The tourism industry brought roads, hotels, and vacation houses where only small rural communities existed before. It also placed the extreme opposites of the Argentine social, ethnic, and regional spectrum in contact with each other: while the privileged vacationers were urban Argentines of primarily European descent – some of them members of the old patrician elite and others middle-class children of the recent wave of European migration – the hosts tended to be poor, rural, dark-skinned peasants. Some of these peasants were indigenous people, such as the Kollas of Humahuaca or the Mapuche in Nahuel Huapi, while others were mestizo (criollo in Argentine parlance) with strong indigenous roots, such as the inhabitants of the Uco, Punilla, and Calchaquí valleys. The physical development of tourism displaced the existing populations but did not eliminate them. Instead, they became indispensable in sustaining the tourist economy as a source of cheap labor. Furthermore, the dark-skinned, “traditional” peasants became part of the tourist attraction itself, precisely because they represented a visual and cultural contrast with the wealthy, “modern,” and light-skinned Argentine tourists.

Arguably, the tourist encounter in these Argentine mountain destinations of the 1930s both revealed and shaped the complexities of national constructions of race and ethnicity. In particular, it hastened the process of racialization of the rural poor, analyzed by anthropologist Claudia Briones, in which the pre-immigration mixed-race population became integrated into the nation in a permanently subordinate position. The peculiarity of the Argentine case, however, rests precisely upon the myth of the white nation that prevailed among Argentine elites since the second half of the nineteenth century. The “darkening” of the subaltern classes not only failed to challenge the notion of a homogeneously white Argentina, but in fact strengthened it by associating dark skin with low socioeconomic status (and, in the case of the rural poor, with rurality), instead of reading dark skin as a sign of belonging to formally recognized, distinct “races.”

In 1973, the African American magazine Ebony sent its international editor, Era Bell Thompson, to Buenos Aires to do a feature on Argentina's tiny black community. Although Afro-Argentines represented nearly one third of the population of colonial Buenos Aires, they had since virtually disappeared from official records. Miscegenation, war, and disease contributed to this demographic decline, but as historian George Reid Andrews showed many years ago, the invisibility of Afro-Argentines was at least as much the product of racism and of the hegemonic idea of Argentina as a white nation. For the Ebony article, “Argentina: Land of the Vanishing Blacks,” Thompson interviewed every self-identifying Afro-Argentine she could find. Among them was Oscar Marcelo Alemán, a jazz guitarist who had enjoyed substantial fame and commercial success in Paris in the 1930s and in Buenos Aires during the 1940s and 1950s. By the time Thompson met him, Alemán had recently been rediscovered by Argentine jazz aficionados after a decade in obscurity, during which he had supported himself by giving guitar lessons in his home. Although he told Thompson that he was the son of a Spanish father and an Indian mother, Alemán insisted on his blackness: “‘Some of my six brothers are even darker than I,’ he smiled, ‘we think there was a black man somewhere.’”

Throughout his long career, audiences both at home and abroad perceived Alemán as a black man, a perception that was made possible by his dark complexion and his own avowal of a black identity, but also by his association with jazz music. Nevertheless, the precise meanings that attached to his blackness changed over the years. This chapter will trace the vicissitudes of his career while reconstructing the shifting discursive landscape within which that career developed. Alemán was a talented musician who played the music he loved, but as with any artist, both his musical creations and the popular reception of those creations were shaped by the world in which he lived. Alemán responded creatively to his audiences’ varied racial expectations, performing multiple black identities over the years. In the Parisian nightclubs of the 1930s, being black gave him a certain cachet. Similarly, once he returned to Buenos Aires in 1940, his racial identity strengthened his claim to being Argentina's most authentic jazz musician.

In 1889, an Italian visitor to Santiago del Estero praised the liberal “progress” sweeping this Northwestern provincial capital. He celebrated the new market, buzzing commercial center, and renovated homes filled with products from Europe and Buenos Aires. He emphasized his appreciation for the renovated kitchens that, in his view, “reveal[ed] a step forward in the manner of eating.” Citing writer Brillat-Savarin's famous aphorism ‘tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,’ he argued that this new manner of cooking and eating among the santiagueño elite embodied “true progress.” Even in this relatively sleepy city far from the national capital, cosmopolitan culinary practices had recently begun to have a marked impact. While our visitor did not specify the exact nature of the foods consumed, in Santiago, as in Buenos Aires and Córdoba, it was likely French fare or at least local dishes dressed up with French names and served at elegant, well-set tables.

The question of who Argentines were as well as what and how they should eat received a considerable amount of attention during the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth. Around the turn of the century, many Argentine scientists and politicians embraced a version of Lamarckian eugenics that held that changing a combination of biological and environmental factors, including people's diets, would improve the population. Given the association of French cuisine with high civilization across the Americas, Argentine elites (like their counterparts in Mexico or Brazil) publicly embraced French dishes to cement their own respectability and that of their nation. At the same time, in more private, quotidian settings, they also enjoyed specialties with local ingredients and techniques.

As massive numbers of immigrants – most from Italy and Spain – made their way to Argentina around the turn of the century, they shaped new ideas about what defined Argentine food. Even today, most urbanites describe Spanish and Italian influences as particularly prominent in the development of a national cuisine. As one elderly gentleman of Italian descent explained to me in Buenos Aires in 2003, “Here the main influence [on food] is Spanish and Italian […] After that there are evidently other influences.” Such notions about the roots of Argentine cuisine parallel racial ideologies that held that the massive wave of immigrants had displaced earlier Indo-Afro-Hispanic society and its legacies.

Race has long been a contentious issue in the study of Latin American politics. During the mid-twentieth century, contemporaries often viewed nationalist mass movements as testing existing racial hierarchies – challenges often welcomed by supporters and derided by opponents, which lent an added intensity to the era's political antagonisms. Typically, mid-century nationalist reforms were not framed explicitly as programs for racial uplift; their advocates preferred, instead, to emphasize ideals of modernization, social peace, and collective justice. Nevertheless, these movements promised, and in some cases delivered, improvements demanded by laboring majorities that included racially stigmatized sectors. At the same time, many of these movements embraced, to various degrees and with varying motivations, cultural nationalisms that valorized African and/or indigenous folkways and acknowledged the virtues of multiracialism and mestizaje. It is common in retrospect to associate this generation of nationalist movements – many of which were subsequently labeled “populist” – with paradigms of “racial democracy,” a concept coined by commentators toward the end of Brazil's nationalist government under Getúlio Vargas (1930–45), and which later worked its way into the conceptual toolkit of Latin American studies. The status of populist leaders as racial democrats has, however, stoked debate. If contemporary critics assailed these actors as dangerous demagogues, revisionists have focused on their limitations, arguing that ideas of racial harmony were illusory and acted as barriers to deeper change. By contrast, a more recent wave of post-revisionist scholarship is reappraising the social resonance of mid-century racial discourses.

The place of Peronism – Argentina's mid-century political movement first led by Juan D. Perón and Eva Duarte de Perón – in these discussions is unclear, despite its standing as one of Latin America's most famed expressions of “populist nationalism.” This isolation derives from the reasonable inclination to study Peronism within the framework of Argentine history, but also from entrenched ideas of racial exceptionalism that encourage viewing Argentina as a regional outlier. The conventional wisdom among historians has long maintained that race was of marginal importance to Peronist rule, especially compared to the centrality of class in articulating “the people” as a political subject. Researchers, however, are now subjecting these views to greater empirical scrutiny as part of a broader reconsideration of the history of race and nation in Argentina.

In early December 2013, several urban centers in Argentina experienced a wave of turmoil that brought to light the sensibilities that have historically racialized the national geography – a racialization whose existence has long been denied by Argentine official discourse. In the province of Córdoba, thousands of police officers demanded a salary increase by withdrawing from the streets and remaining in their barracks, while undercover officers instigated the looting of stores in order to create a public demand for their presence. The news of the lack of police repression quickly spread, and thousands of men and women from poor neighborhoods began storming stores and supermarkets to grab anything they could, from food to television sets. The unrest spread to other provinces, most notably Tucumán, where the same pattern of a police walkout and subsequent looting unfolded. With several cities shaken by riots, a significant portion of the population felt that the streets were dissolving amid a vortex formed by the expansiveness of los negros [the blacks] – the racialized term used in contemporary Argentina to name the poor and people of indigenous or mestizo [mixed] background.

On the streets as well as in social media and the online forums of Argentine newspapers, thousands of people called for the violent extermination of “esos negros de mierda [those fucking blacks].” Armed vigilantes promptly began shooting at “los negros” as if the latter were savage hordes determined to overrun settlers circling the wagons on a hostile frontier. When La Nación (Argentina's leading conservative newspaper) informed its readers that “a young man” was shot dead in Córdoba, marking the first deadly victim of the violence, most readers posting comments on the paper's online edition celebrated his death as an act of civilizing justice. Many objected to the use of the phrase “a young man” to name what was just a negro. One reader further dehumanized the victim by declaring, “Too bad it's only one. I wish there were two hundred negros dead.” Similar comments flooded Twitter under the hashtag #Negros de mierda. When the violence subsided two days later – after the federal government sent forces to Córdoba and the provincial government there and in Tucumán acquiesced to police demands – over ten people were dead and hundreds were wounded.

In Argentina's Southern Patagonian region one often hears that the Tehuelche people were the “only” and the “true Argentine Indians,” that they “became extinct [se extinguieron],” and that only a handful of “descendants” remain. Paradoxically, this utterance (“se extinguieron”) – in the passive voice, with no subject, in which there seems to be no agent responsible for the alleged extinction – takes place in a context of the re-emergence of the Tehuelche people and of an indigenous communitarian reorganization that involves the Tehuelche, as well as the Mapuche and Mapuche-Tehuelche. The supposed “disappearance” of the Tehuelche is the result of interrelated discourses and practices that a range of agents constructed and deployed over the course of more than a century, in which the ideology of “degenerative mestizaje” played a central role. In this chapter I argue that in the mid-twentieth century, the Argentine state, in its eagerness to “whiten” and homogenize its citizenry, suppressed the category mestizo (a term traditionally referring to people of mixed European and indigenous origins) from its bureaucratic terminology and replaced it with euphemisms – notably, the term descendiente [descendant] – that encompassed a range of interrelated racial, ethnic, class, and national classifications. Using a varied documentary corpus, this chapter analyzes the changing uses of classificatory terms like “mestizo” and “descendiente” over the course of the long twentieth century in what is today the province of Santa Cruz, in Southern Patagonia. In so doing, it sheds light on the tensions between those who had the power to classify and those who were classified, on the strategies used by the latter to enter or to exit taxonomic categories, and on the consequences of those categories in the daily lives of generations of local people who at different times acknowledged varying degrees of indigenous ancestry. Finally, this chapter contributes, from the perspective of Patagonia, to the emerging picture of the regional variations within Argentine ideologies of whiteness, and situates these regional and national ideologies within a broader Latin American context.

Latin American ideologies of mestizaje and whitening, as well as ideologies of racism, have varied widely across time and space, reflecting different patterns in the ways colonial and then national elites constructed hegemony and subalternity. As anthropologist Rita Segato argues, racial ideologies vary according to the particular “matrix of diversity” within every “national formation.”

Argentina suffers from what marketing experts would call an “image problem.” The country rarely fares well in the global media spotlight, where it is frequently trotted out as an example of spectacular political or economic failure. But seldom are the results of this scrutiny so unflattering as when issues of race and national identity come to the fore. As we write this Introduction, the 2014 World Cup provides the latest occasion for commentary. In a piece titled “Why So Many World Cup Fans Dislike Argentina,” The New York Times informed readers that “across Latin America, Argentina has the most people rooting against it” – not just because of the country's past successes on the field against its regional rivals but, more pointedly, because of “how some Argentines projected their perceptions of economic and cultural superiority in the region.” For the article's authors, the ugliest aspect of this ethnocentrism lies in “the ways in which some Argentines have traditionally viewed their nation, which received millions of European immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: as a dominion of racial pre-eminence in the region.” A piece in the Huffington Post took a similar angle, asking “Why Are There No Black Men on Argentina's Roster?” Unlike other Latin American “rainbow nations […] conceived by the blend of American-Indians, Spaniards, and enslaved Africans,” Argentina's seemingly all-white roster confirmed, for the author of this piece, the country's exceptionally violent history of “purg[ing] their African roots from their socio-historical landscape and conscience,” and even of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide,” in its eagerness to become “South America's whitest country.”

These journalistic assessments are all too familiar. The image of Argentina as a racial outlier in Latin America has become deeply engrained in popular and even academic discourses over the last century, and it shows few signs of fading. Whether celebrating the country's white and European character or condemning the discrimination and violence that sustained this image, commentators in Argentina and abroad have largely agreed in placing Argentina well outside of the narratives of racially mixed nationhood that characterize much of modern Latin America. The image of Argentina as a racial outlier makes for a good story, whether in the world of sports, in journalism, or in the classroom: it rings true and, as the World Cup coverage demonstrates, it often carries an important moral critique of racism and ethnocentrism.

With its large percentage of inhabitants descended from European immigrants, Argentina has not had as obvious a racial Other as such Latin American countries as Brazil or Mexico. Scholars have begun to examine in detail Argentine notions of blackness – sometimes identified with persons of African ancestry, more often with mestizos from the Interior, and frequently with poor people of varied backgrounds – and how they have changed over time. Yet the construction of whiteness is equally deserving of attention. The prevailing historical narrative contends that before the advent of Peronism, “the nation had been constructed as homogeneously white.” It also suggests that Argentines viewed immigrants from Europe and the circum-Mediterranean region as uniformly white. My research indicates that this was not necessarily the case for Jews, whose whiteness was suspect despite their European and Mediterranean origins. How can one conceptualize the racial constructions of Jews, whom Argentines rarely described in explicitly phenotypical terms, yet sometimes seemed to regard as a race apart? How did Jews assert their whiteness? The reflections of two famous literary figures, Manuel Gálvez and Leopoldo Lugones, provide initial clues.

In the early 1900s, an unruly gathering of Eastern European Jews shocked Manuel Gálvez. Aware of his research on the white slave trade, a Jewish antiprostitution organization had invited him to serve on its board, and he and other leaders sat on the stage at the inaugural meeting. According to the young writer, the many poverty-stricken people in the audience moved about “as if possessed by a sickly nervousness,” joking, murmuring, scolding each other, their babies shrieking at their mothers’ breasts. Apparently incited by one of the speakers, the ill-smelling crowd turned into a “jungle of arms that waved in a threatening manner, the faces congested with fury,” as many screamed insults, shook their fists, and emitted ever more sour odors. The board members fled the auditorium when the throng began to throw chairs and other objects at them. “In my life I have never attended such a monstrous scandal,” Gálvez claimed many years later. He believed that traffickers had hired the mob to break up the gathering. Whether these people received payment or not, the author regarded them as uncontrollable animals, as observers often have depicted people of color.

This book is the outcome of many years of conversation among the editors, contributors, and various audiences and readers. Most of the chapters first took shape in a series of panel presentations delivered at the Latin American Studies Association conferences in Toronto (2010), San Francisco (2012), and Washington, D.C. (2013). The volume's authors have also shared their research with colleagues in venues across Argentina as well as with students, activists, and wider publics there and elsewhere. Along the way, we encountered a spectrum of reactions to our project: from enthusiasm and encouragement, to thoughtful critiques, to skepticism and even hostility. Indeed, the range and intensity of these responses not only helped us sharpen our arguments and reframe our assumptions, but they also strengthened our conviction that questions of race and nation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Argentina merit rethinking.

If the subjects treated in this volume touch a nerve for some readers, it is surely because the chapters reconsider the conventional wisdom about Argentine politics, culture, and society held by many commentators in Argentina and abroad. Raising questions about the racial dimensions of inequality, identity, and power in Argentina is itself controversial. And even among those who agree that those are crucial questions, disagreements persist over how best to pose and answer them. To pick one telling example, the very title of this book, Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, may provoke some unease. In the United States, references to race as a social dilemma or as an academic area of inquiry are commonplace. Yet in contemporary Argentina, the term raza carries a strongly negative connotation and is thus far less frequently invoked: indeed, it is common for raza to be placed within quotation marks even in the writings of researchers who use the concept to expose problems of discrimination. This circumspect treatment of raza is intended to emphasize its socially constructed, rather than essential or biological, character (despite the fact that other social constructs like género [gender] and clase do not require this kind of treatment), or to signal the concept's status as archaic and somehow foreign to Argentina. The pages that follow devote considerable attention to unraveling the many languages of race in Argentina employed since the early twentieth century and assessing their political implications.

Argentina's economic crisis of 2001 triggered a crisis in national identity that cast doubt on the nation's long-held beliefs about its racial and cultural exceptionalism as a white and therefore modern nation. In the decade after the crisis, Argentina experienced a major shift in racial discourse, redefining itself as a multiracial and multicultural nation. The newly adopted multiculturalism does not entirely displace older understandings of race and nation – as Gastón Gordillo demonstrates in Chapter 9 of this volume, the increased visibility of nonwhites has heightened racial violence in contemporary Argentina – but it does mark a radical departure from previous official discourses that insisted on the nation's homogeneous whiteness. Argentina's rather abrupt multicultural turn has to do in part with the expediency of multiculturalism, which helps articulate both populist and elite reconfigurations of the national narrative. In one sense, the multicultural discourse that focuses largely on Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples disavows previous claims of Europeanness to adopt a populist Latin-Americanist position as an antidote to the globalization of neoliberal capitalism. It is within this context that a contestatory working-class coalition using the racial marker “negro” also arose. Simultaneously, however, multiculturalism is often seen as a sign of neoliberal globalization – as the transnational flow of capital triggers migrations and diversifies cultural consumption – and as a marker of first world status in a global climate in which the notion of development encompasses the “preservation – or even cultivation – of ethnoracial diversity.” In this context, a vast network of institutional, academic, political, and cultural discourses along with popular ethnic activism dismantled notions of white homogeneity to establish Argentina as multicultural. Afro-Argentine and indigenous peoples – who had been considered “disappeared” – claimed their legitimate space within the nation; Argentines of European descent who had melted into the crisol de razas [melting pot] began to assert their ethnicities; and diversity became a key measure of social justice.

This proliferation of ethnicities has more recently extended to Asians in Argentina, as evidenced by their changing position in cultural discourses. In the context of Argentina's incipient multiculturalism, cultural manifestations featuring Asians as protagonists, rather than as exotic or awkward peripheral characters, have gained popularity.

With the start of the new millennium, Argentine readers appear to have developed a taste for a new kind of racial storytelling. Faithful black servants pining for their white mistresses, white captive women falling for their indigenous captors, and enslaved “Hottentot” princes seducing white socialites are some of the unlikely characters populating a new crop of historical fiction, set mostly in Argentina's turbulent nineteenth century. The corpus of stories spotlighting the lives, loves, and tribulations of nonwhite Argentines is expanding rapidly, primarily through novels aimed at adult audiences but also in short story collections and youth literature. Some of these works have won critical acclaim and prizes, and others – largely ignored by the literary establishment – have become mass-market bestsellers.

The popularity of these works in present-day Argentina is striking given the efforts of past generations of Argentine politicians, thinkers, and writers to set their nation apart, racially and culturally, from its neighbors. This project itself rested substantially upon a particular kind of racial storytelling – historical, political, or literary narratives that, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, idealized or asserted Argentina's homogeneous whiteness and Europeanness as part of a “civilizing” process. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, proponents of this “white legend” of Argentine racial history declared indigenous people and Afro-Argentines to have disappeared through war, disease, or peaceful assimilation. Throughout the twentieth century, celebrations of Argentina as a “perfectly white” country of immigrants “descended from the boats,” a “melting pot” of primarily European ethnicities, came to enjoy widespread acceptance among Argentina's urban educated sectors. The notion of Argentine whiteness and exceptionalism has also been indirectly reinforced by what we might call a “black legend” of Argentine racial history. This critical counter-narrative, embraced at different times by historians, politicians, ethnic activists, and other public figures, provides a dark (rather than rosy) vision of Argentine whiteness: it sympathizes with the indigenous and Afro-Argentine victims of nineteenth-century “civilizing” campaigns and denounces the violence and discrimination that led to their “extermination” or “genocide.”

Yet this newer crop of tales offers a different kind of racial storytelling, paralleling the recent rise in Argentine public life of what I call “brown legends” of Argentine racial identity.