True Left

“Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, Peruvians from the Incas – but Argentinians descend from the ships,” goes an old saying that encapsulates Argentina’s perception of itself as a nation of transplanted white Europeans.

But that Eurocentric view is being vehemently disputed as not only outdated but also factually untrue by a generation of young Afro-descendant researchers and activists who wish to rewrite the accepted version of Argentinian history.

“Argentina needs to understand that it is both very racist and very Afro,” said black activist and researcher Alí Delgado.

University lecturer Patricia Gomes is another Afro-descendant researcher intent on demolishing Argentina’s mythical self-image as a white nation. “In Argentina it used to be said that here there were no blacks, therefore there was no one to be racist with – and hence there was no racism,” she said.

Delgado and Gomes point to recent studies of population surveys and genetics that paint a far different picture from Argentina’s accepted history: one recent study concluded that up to 9% of today’s Argentinians may have ancestry from Africa.

The reason is simple: between the 16th and 19th centuries – long before the wave of European migration – more than 200,000 enslaved Africans arrived at the twin ports of the River Plate, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, capital cities of what are now Argentina and Uruguay.

“The number of slaves who arrived to the region of the River Plate is almost half of those who arrived in the US, which gives an idea of the magnitude of slave traffic in the River Plate region,” according to Alex Borucki, a Uruguayan academic at the University of California Irvine, who co-manages the SlaveVoyages website that traces every ship carrying enslaved people that reached the Americas.

In 1778, Africans and Afro-descendants made up 37% of the population of what is now Argentina, according to a census by its Spanish colonialist rulers. In some major provinces the proportion was more than 50%.

That number did not drop significantly after independence from Spain in 1816: Afro-descendants accounted for 30% of the population of Buenos Aires for decades after independence. But after that, the number is unknown, because Argentina’s census bureau stopped collecting racial information.

“Census data was manipulated to erase us first from the statistics – and then from the history books,” says Gomes. “From the end of the 19th century the state meticulously began to make us invisible to present Argentina as homogeneous and of European descent.”

Argentina’s “whitening process” has been studied in depth by US academic Erika Edwards in her book Hiding in Plain Sight, published last year by University of Alabama Press.

“The whitening project was a successful endeavor in terms of the erasure of blackness,” said Edwards. “The idea that somebody could be the descendant of a slave is just not there.”

That belief in a strictly European Argentina continues to percolate. “We are all descendants from Europe,” said President Mauricio Macri at the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos.

It wasn’t until the 2010 census that an option was included for Argentinians wishing to self-identify as Afro-descendants. “That inclusion was very important but unfortunately it was restricted to only a small segment of the population, with the resulting projection suggesting that only half a percent of the population self-identify that way,” said Gomes.

Delgado and Gomes prefer data from a 2005 study conducted by Afro-descendant researchers that projects 5% of the population as having at least one African forebear.

A genetic study conducted by the University of Brasília in 2008 reached a different conclusion, finding that 9% of current-day Argentinians are of African ancestry.

Argentina’s pro-European immigration policy was initiated under its 1853 constitution at a time when the country’s post-independence thinkers and politicians were obsessed with the dichotomy of Civilization and Barbarism – the title of a 1845 book by Domingo Sarmiento, the country’s seventh president. In this Manichean view, Afro-descendants were placed squarely on the barbarism end of the scale.

“If it was not possible to physically eliminate Argentina’s Afro-descendants, the decision was to at least eliminate them symbolically, to create a discourse that there are no blacks in Argentina, that Brazil has that problem,” says Edwards.

The entrenched poverty of many Afro-descendants goes hand in hand with Argentina’s structural racism, says Delgado.

“There are no black journalists or politicians, but Argentina’s poor barrios are full of Afro-descendants. So are our prisons, just like in the United States.”

Another 2015 study of 175 Argentines found 67% white, 28% Amerindian, 3.6% black and 1.4% East Asian.
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Buenos Aires is culturally highly European (e.g., we attended a performance of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov at the famous Teatro Colon opera house).

I have the vague impression that Argentina has gotten more mestizo since then due to immigration from poorer South American countries such as Bolivia and Paraguay.

So, Argentina is kind of like Mexico, only less Amerinidian. Mexico still have distinctly indio populations who speak Indian languages and wear Indian clothes. In contrast, practically everybody in rural Argentina speaks Spanish and wears European clothes.
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it’s hard to find much about Argentina Indians. Mexico has been fairly solicitous intellectually of its indios since the Revolution, with the government devoting a lot to training anthropologists, restoring their mighty pyramids, and building impressive ethnographic museums as part of the national ideology of la raza cosmica. But Argentina hasn’t showed much interest in their own Indians
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White Argentine leaders such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, ex-president of Argentina (1868-1874), crafted a different narrative to erase Blackness because they equated modernity with whiteness. Sarmiento wrote “Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism” (1845), which detailed Argentina’s “backwardness” and what he and others perceived as the need to become “civilized.” He was among those who shared a vision for the nation that associated it more strongly with European, rather than African or Amerindian, heritage.
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    With its history of slavery behind it, Argentina’s leaders focused on modernization, looking to Europe as the cradle of civilization and progress. They believed that to join the ranks of Germany, France and England, Argentina had to displace its Black population — both physically and culturally.

    In many ways, this was not unique to Argentina. This whitening process was attempted throughout much of Latin America, in places such as Brazil, Uruguay and Cuba.

    What makes Argentina’s story unique in this context, however, is that it was successful in its push to build its image as a White country.

    For example, in the 1850s, the political philosopher and diplomat Juan Bautista Alberdi, who was perhaps best known for his saying “to govern is to populate,” promoted White European immigration to the country. Argentine president Justo José de Urquiza (1854-60) supported Alberdi’s ideas and incorporated them in the country’s first constitution. Amendment 25 clearly stated: “The federal government shall foster European immigration.”
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In fact, ex-president Sarmiento remarked toward the end of the 19th century: “Twenty years hence, it will be necessary to travel to Brazil to see Blacks.” He knew that Black Argentines existed but suggested that the country would not recognize them for long. Argentina’s landscape was soon transformed, as 4 million European immigrants answered the government’s call to migrate between 1860 and 1914. That clause remains in Argentina’s constitution today.
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Morocho, an inoffensive label, continues to be used in Argentina today. This term, which references those who are “tan-colored,” has been used as a way of distinguishing non-White people.

www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15029/argentina-designates-hezbollah

   

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Argentina Designates Hezbollah a Terror Group
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    The public registry is a historical landmark containing over 1,000 entries of individuals and entities tied to terrorism in Argentina, including Hezbollah.
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    Just a day after the registry was created, the Financial Intelligence Unit of Argentina (UIF-AR), led by Mariano Federici, ordered the country-wide freeze on Hezbollah's assets in our country.

    Before this executive action by President Macri, Hezbollah was not officially recognized [as a terrorist organization] in Argentina. If someone wanted to raise their flag, they would have been able to do so. Previously, the only people in Argentina labeled as terrorists were those considered terrorists by the U.N. Security Council.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Argentina

   

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The Jewish population in Argentina is the largest in Latin America, the third largest in the Americas, and the world's seventh largest outside Israel.