Their disappearance is one of Argentina's most enduring mysteries. In 1810, black residents accounted for about 30 percent of the population of Buenos Aires. By 1887, however, their numbers had plummeted to 1.8 percent.
So where did they go? The answer, it turns out, is nowhere.
Popular myth has offered two historical hypotheses: a yellow fever epidemic in 1871 that devastated black urban neighborhoods, and a brutal war with Paraguay in the 1860s that put many black Argentines on the front lines.
But two new studies are challenging those old notions, using distinct methods: a door-to-door census to determine how many Argentines consider themselves black, and an analysis of DNA samples to detect traces of African ancestry in those who consider themselves white.
The results are only partially compiled, but they suggest that many of the black Argentines did not vanish; they just faded into the mixed-race populace and became lost to demography. According to some researchers, as many as 10 percent of Buenos Aires residents are partly descended from black Argentines but have no idea.
"People for years have accepted the idea that there are no black people in Argentina," said Miriam Gomes, a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires who is part black and considers herself Afro-Argentine. "Even the schoolbooks here accepted this as a fact. But where did that leave me?"
It left her as part of a practically invisible fringe, a group whose very existence had been snubbed by the country's early statesmen. The nation aggressively courted "the reviving spirit of European civilization" -- in the words of 19th-century Argentine social architect Juan Bautista Alberdi -- and promoted an image of a European country transplanted on South American soil.
"Argentina was interested in presenting itself as a white country," said George Reid Andrews, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has specialized in black history in Latin America. "Its ideologues and writers put a great emphasis on the yellow fever epidemic and the war, and it was feasible to pretend that the black population had simply disappeared as immigration exploded." [...]
| Read the rest of Monte Reel's registration-required Washington Post article "In Buenos Aires, Researchers Exhume Long-Unclaimed African Roots"
posted in articles on May 8, 2005 2:19 AM | t (1)
« Previous phile: Just use it very simply as a way to talk about what was a more complicated realm.
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Just a quick link to note that the same has happened in Mexico and probably throughout much of Latin America.
Your post was pointed out to me by Oso. FYIAfricans in Latin America
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