Afroargentines

“Most Argentines, if you ask, will tell you: ‘In Argentina there are no black people.’” So opens Afroargentines, a prizewinning documentary that unearths the hidden history of black people in Argentina and their contributions to Argentine culture, society, and history, from the slaves who fought in the revolutionary wars against Spain, to the contemporary struggles of black Argentines against racism and marginalization. The video uses historical material from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries alongside interviews with black Argentines from a variety of backgrounds: intellectuals and taxi drivers, immigrants from Africa and native Afroargentines. The story that unfolds provides a counternarrative to the national myth of Argentina’s exclusively European heritage.

Afroargentines also exposes how the whitewashing of the Argentine self-image came about. Racist ideas about blacks as dangerous for national progress brought about such genocidal state policies as the drafting of blacks into the most dangerous positions in the army and their quarantining during the cholera epidemics, even as race mixture both diminished the black population and spread African blood throughout the Argentine population, including those who now consider themselves “white.” But the descendants of the first black Argentines live on, their numbers bolstered by recent black immigrants. Afroargentines also represents their stories, depicting the lives of black immigrants from Cape Verde (such as the parents of co-director Jorge Fortes) and West Africa. These immigrants have made their own contributions and faced their own challenges in Argentine society.

Afroargentines responds to contemporary racism and marginalization by presenting the voices of individual Afroargentines, who recount their experiences of workplace discrimination, skinhead violence, the difficulty of interracial relationships, the double burden of black women, and the dangerous internalization of stereotypes by black Argentines themselves. They describe how Afroargentines have resisted racism through music, the media, and an incipient and growing political mobilization. Afroargentines provides an important challenge to the marginalization of blacks in Argentine official history by rescuing the story of Argentina’s black cultural legacy from oblivion. It is also a gripping tale of the ways in which individual black Argentines have resisted and coped with everyday racism and are claiming their rightful place within Argentine history and culture.

Afroargentines
dir. Diego Ceballos & Jorge Fortes
Argentina, 2002, 75 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles

Bibliography
Aidi, Hisham. “Blacks in Argentina: Disappearing Acts.”     http://www.africana.com/articles/daily/index_20020402.asp
Andrews, George Reid. The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800-1900.
    Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980.
Lewis, Marvin A. Afro-Argentine Discourse: Another Dimension of the Black Diaspora.
    Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press, 1996.
Molina, Lucia. “’Forgotten’ and ‘Disappeared’-Yet Still Present.” African Roots/American
    Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas, ed. Walker, Sheila S. Lanham: Rowman &
    Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001.

To download order form plese click here: