Argentina

By: Joy Elizondo

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Argentina

Second-largest country in South America, located in the southwestern corner of the continent and bordered by Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia.

Argentina is traditionally known for its early Spanish and nineteenth-century Italian and German heritage. The country today consists of 37.8 million people, over 85 percent of whom are of white European descent. Another 15 percent of the population is of indigenous or mestizo (European and indigenous) origin. Argentina had a large black population during much of the colonial and independence periods, but today the Afro-Argentine population is estimated at a few thousand and is often remembered as part of the country's folklore. Afro-Argentines have been incorporated in independence celebrations as soldiers, or in traditional dances called candombles. Scholarly research about this group has been limited to the colonial period and the slave trade, or to songs, portraits, and folklore studies from the 1950s. While the Indian has become a mythical symbol incorporated by nationalistic discourse in indigenismo (a literary and artistic movement which appropriated indigenous culture and images) and mestizaje (racial mixing), black contributions to Argentina's history have attracted little interest until fairly recently.

Political History

First founded in 1536, the present-day Argentine capital of BUENOS AIRES was not permanently settled until 1580 by Juan de Garay. In addition to having a shallow bay that forced ships to dock far out from land, the port was also officially denied trade with Spain, other European powers, and other Spanish colonies until 1776. With neither a supply of minerals nor a tropical climate that could produce exotic exports, Buenos Aires' economic potential paled in comparison to that of the precious metals of Potosí (in present-day Bolivia) and the former Inca capital of Cuzco (in present-day Peru). Buenos Aires also lacked the sugar, coffee, and tobacco of the Caribbean. The principal economic activity between 1603 and 1655 was the barter trade of agricultural products: hides, tallow wheat, and cecina (salted beef). Thus, despite the city's strategic port—used as a threat to ward off possible Portuguese advances—it was virtually ignored by the Spanish during much of the colonial period. Historian George Reid Andrews calls it “an imperial backwater until almost the end of the colonial period, which lasted from about 1500 to 1810.”

The colonial period ended when Criollo (native-born, white) leaders, with the help of General José de San Martín, declared independence in 1810 and won their freedom from Spain in 1816. The first 150 years of the new nation's history featured a series of military takeovers, and was a period characterized by the dictatorship of Juan Manuel Rosas (1835–1852). During this time Unitarians, who promoted centralized power and free trade, struggled with Federalists, who emphasized more evenly distributed power among the provinces, as well as protectionist measures. Rosas followed a Federalist path, even though his government was heavily dependent upon the support of local interests in Buenos Aires. By 1852 he had consolidated power and brought a measure of stability to Argentina, but he still refused to draft a formal constitution. This led to a split with some of his followers, who overthrew Rosas in February of that year. The constitution of 1853, drafted the following year and still in effect, established the Republic of Argentina. The province of Buenos Aires, however, claimed its independence, and only after a series of conflicts and the election of President Bartolomé Mitre in 1862 was the country unified.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an elite democracy consolidated itself in Argentina, and the country enjoyed economic growth of over 5 percent per year. This prosperity was driven largely by exports of beef and grain and was based to a great extent on foreign investment. The Argentine economy was particularly dependent on international markets, and the worldwide depression of 1929 precipitated a severe economic crisis in the country. The presidencies of Juan Domingo Perón (1946–1955, 1973–1974) forwarded nationalist and populist measures, establishing a base in the labor movement. Perón's wife, Isabel Perón, succeeded him as president after his death in 1974, but her tenure was cut short the following year by a military coup. After the military government launched an unsuccessful invasion of the disputed Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands), democracy was restored in 1983. The leftist Radical Civic Union coalition and the (Peronist) Justicialist Party have since contested political power.

Argentina has experienced extreme economic recessions, hyperinflation, and foreign debt since the 1980s. Its economy stabilized in the early 1990s, but by 2001 rapidly rising public debt had caused a financial crisis that led to violence and the resignation of President Fernando de la Rua. With high unemployment, a severely devalued currency, and a loss of foreign investment, Argentina faces a difficult task of economic recovery under President Eduardo Duhalde.

Slavery in the Early Colonial Period

A large Native American population occupied Argentina's interior provinces. Indians of the coastal area were nomadic. Despite a brief period of trade, colonizers soon began enslaving the coastal natives, who fled south. Slaving expeditions were formed, but the Indians' frequent attempts to flee left porteños (residents of Buenos Aires) without a stable labor force. Smallpox epidemics also decimated most of the Indian populations in the early decades of the seventeenth century. In part due to an uprising in 1604, native labor was imported in 1610 from Chile, Peru, and Tucumán. By 1612 such importation was prohibited. Settlers eventually dubbed the coastal Indians “unsuitable” for agricultural labor. Beginning in 1740, expeditions against the pampa Indians lasted into the next century. As a result of these expeditions, most Native Americans were either killed or placed in reservations, a process that culminated in the late 1870s with the so-called Conquest of the Desert. This military engagement was led by General Julio Roca, who subsequently became president (1880–1886, 1898–1904).

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Buenos Aires gradually became known for a flourishing illicit trade. The city and province prospered despite legal restrictions against their products: smuggled goods that evaded colonial taxes found eager markets in the interior, Paraguay, Chile, and Bolivia. According to sources, “during the 1620s, a major share of the income of the Caja Real of Buenos Aires came from confiscated contraband.” Illicit trade likewise extended to the importation of slaves, the first of whom arrived as early as 1587. Silver was illegally shipped from Buenos Aires in payment for goods and slaves. A series of asientos, or contracts to provide slaves, were granted primarily to Portuguese traders from 1595 until 1616, but at other times slave importation through Buenos Aires was prohibited. Dutch and English smugglers also took part in unlawful trade. Russell Edward Chace asserts that “contraband slaving … quite possibly supplied more blacks than did legitimate commerce.” Some of these slaves stayed on in Buenos Aires, but the majority were taken into the interior, to Chile, Upper Peru (now Bolivia), and Peru.

Slavery in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Throughout the seventeenth century, Portuguese slavers dominated the trade. Between the 1620s and 1630s approximately 1,500 slaves (10 percent of the Africans taken from Angola) headed for Buenos Aires. This movement stopped short in the 1640s, however, as Portugal was forced to turn its attentions to protecting its claims in Brazil from Dutch expansionists and to winning independence from Spain in Europe. By 1680, 22,892 black slaves had been legally imported.

In the eighteenth century, first the French (1701) and then the British (1713) were granted asientos. The Real Compañía Francesa de Guinea brought slaves from the Mina coast (present-day Cape Verde and Senegal) and the kingdom of Ardre. Between 1702 and 1714, 3,745 slaves were legally imported. The British South Sea Company was to introduce 4,800 slaves per year for forty years; 1,200 of these stayed in Buenos Aires. Slaves imported by the English came from the Gold Coast and the bays of Biafra and Benin. Chace asserts that most slaves imported through Buenos Aires came from Bantu-populated Angola-Congo regions.

In 1776 Spain established the new viceroyalty of la Plata, with Buenos Aires as its seat of government and authorized port. Two years later the Crown opened all the colonies to free trade with Spanish allies, but Buenos Aires had already developed long-standing illicit trade relationships with both the English and the Portuguese. Both of these connections would have a lasting impact on the slave trade in Argentina. After 1789 the “free” slave trade lifted restrictions on trade for American subjects. Slaves then came from Portuguese factories in Angola (they were called Congos, Angolas, Benguelas, and Luandas) and from Mozambique. Between 1750 and 1810 approximately 45,000 slaves were imported by both legal and illegal means, according to Sergio Villalobos. Chace claims that this traffic, along with the decline of silver production in Potosí, “appears to have been an important factor in pushing Buenos Aires to a position of economic and, eventually, political hegemony in Argentina.” Though the constituent assembly of the United Provinces officially banned the entry of new slaves into the nation in 1813, the slave trade continued until a pact with Britain in 1840 effectively ended it. Traders like the British South Sea Company representative in Buenos Aires, Felipe Sarratea, got rich from the trade.

Early slaves worked primarily as agricultural laborers and domestic servants. As many estancieros (ranchers) could not afford them, slaves were a status symbol in both urban and rural areas. Many were transported inland to Upper Peru to work in the silver mines. The major period of slave importation in Argentina lasted from 1742 to 1806. By the late 1700s nearly 50 percent of the population in the interior of the country was black, and between 30 and 40 percent of the population of Buenos Aires was black or mulatto, according to one source. By 1836 only 25 percent of Buenos Aires was black, and the percentage would continue to decline throughout the nineteenth century. In the early 1800s slaves who stayed in the province of Buenos Aires worked mostly in urban occupations, and under the dictator Rosas (1835–1852) they eventually became apprenticed as cobblers, tailors, barbers, hat makers, and so on.

Cofradías, Naciones, and Mutual Aid Societies

Slaves and slowly increasing numbers of free persons of color formed religious and social groups throughout the colonial period. Cofradías (religious lay brotherhoods) played an important role in Afro-Argentine life, supporting the Catholic Church by collecting alms, maintaining church buildings, paying priests for masses, and preparing celebrations for patron saints. Though they were strictly regulated by the particular religious orders and priests, these were the first separate organizations of Afro-Argentines. Andrews identifies the cofradía of San Baltasar, founded in 1772, as the first black organization of this type in Buenos Aires.

At the end of the eighteenth century the naciones (ethnic associations begun both by free persons of color and slaves) emerged. The naciones were independent social and cultural organizations. They worked to buy freedom for members who were still slaves, make loans to members to buy houses, pay for members' funeral expenses, and sponsor public dances and cultural activities. During the early 1800s women assumed increasingly important roles in the naciones, as vast numbers of black and mulatto men were either fighting or killed in military battles (the skirmish with Great Britain in 1806–1807, the wars for independence from 1810 to 1816, the civil wars throughout the 1820s, and wars against Brazil and the Indian population). Mutual aid societies, which developed later, placed less emphasis on ethnic origins and more on black Argentine unity.

Independence, Abolition, and Emancipation

Independence from Spain was declared in 1810, but it was not completely won until 1816. As early as 1806 slaves served in civic militias, where they received military instruction to ward off possible attacks by other European colonial powers. A few notable recruits gained their freedom in 1807 after successfully warding off British assaults on Buenos Aires. From 1810 to 1815 Spanish slave owners were required to contribute slaves on a massive scale to the armies of General San Martín. The legal status of the drafted slaves was changed to liberto (indicating an intermediate position between slavery and freedom), and black soldiers were promised freedom after five years of service in black regiments. With independence—and effective transfer from Spanish to Criollo rule—came opportunity for emancipation.

Abolition, like independence, was only achieved after a long and arduous process. In Argentina, as in many of the former Spanish colonies, a series of laws and proclamations that first restricted the slave trade and then gradually emancipated slaves were staggered over decades. There were three legal statuses for blacks in the nineteenth century: slave, liberto, and free. Slaves won their freedom either by manumission or, more frequently, by coartación (self-purchase), as they did throughout much of Latin America. Libertos were for the most part men who agreed to serve at least five years in the military; many men joined military regiments to fight in wars of independence from the Spanish Crown. Women, particularly urban slaves, most often bought their freedom through coartación. Those who worked as domestics sometimes enjoyed greater access to limited informal economic opportunities. Although some sold food or mended and washed clothing to supplement their masters' incomes, others were allowed to save for their freedom.

In 1813 the law of the free womb was passed, freeing all slaves born after January 31, 1813. However, subsequent restrictions curtailed the measure—for example, a number of years of servitude came to be required for freedom (similar in principle to the service exacted from military libertos). According to Andrews, in 1810, 22.6 percent of the black population was free. In 1827 the figure was 54.8 percent. Slavery as an institution was not abolished, however, until 1853 in Argentina, and in 1861 in Buenos Aires, when the Unitarians realized their dream of a united nation under the hegemony of Buenos Aires. Between 1830 and 1860 large numbers of blacks continued to serve in the regular national army, taking different sides in the various Unitarian/Federalist civil wars that lasted into the 1840s. Blacks fought in the Indian extermination campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s, seeking the social and economic mobility promised by politicians like Rosas. Black officers such as José Maria Morales and Domingo Sosa rose to prominence during this time.

Postabolition to the Present

Marta Goldberg shows that conditions for persons of color were, according to national census figures, often worse after abolition. Their life expectancies plunged as infant mortality rose. Artisan slaves had been well cared for because of their revenue-producing potential, whereas free black persons were now competing with poor whites and an increasing influx of unskilled labor from Europe. Chace writes, “manumission meant little more than the actual release from the bonds of servitude, because free blacks were accorded much the same treatment as slaves.” Blacks were excluded from education, religious orders, and many government positions. In some of the more rural regions, blacks, whites, and Indians intermarried and formed the multiracial gaucho class. Later a symbol of Argentine nationalism in literature and popular accounts, the gaucho's image would be gradually whitened.

Most freed urban slaves stayed in urban areas, working as apprentices in the trades mentioned above. By this time well-established community organizations had taken root; these were descended from the colonial cofradías, naciones, and mutual aid societies that flourished through most of the century. A healthy black press produced a number of literary journals. Yet by the 1850s a cultural move toward integration meant that, as Andrews points out, young people exhibited little interest in continuing the traditions of the naciones: the dances, meetings, and so forth. Young Afro-Argentines preferred to dance to waltzes and other European music.

After the 1850s the percentage of Afro-Argentines in the population precipitously declined, as mentioned earlier. The causes of the population decline were various: a rash of nineteenth-century wars in which blacks heavily participated, racial intermarriage motivated in part by the shortage of black men and the possibility of social mobility for children of mixed blood, high mortality rates specifically due to yellow fever, and the decline of the slave trade after 1813. More important, however, were official efforts to pattern Argentina after European nations. These attempts to whiten the population were reflected in policies to attract European immigrants as well as the campaigns to exterminate the Native American populations. Intellectuals such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Carlos Octavio Bunge, and José Ingenieros advanced theories of scientific racism, providing a justification for such measures. Creole elites had written for years about plans to attract European immigrants to temper the “degenerate” qualities of Argentina's diminishing black and decimated indigenous populations. By the second decade of the twentieth century, approximately one-third of the country's population was foreign-born.

While a number of Latin American countries pursued policies of racial Whitening, Argentina stands out for its “success” in this area. Goldberg cites a few cases of discrimination and some historians interested in black Argentines, but concurs with most scholars and popular accounts that Afro-Argentines have virtually disappeared. Andrews mentions “a small trickle of black immigration from Portuguese Africa, particularly from the Cape Verde Islands” as well as blacks who continue to migrate to the capital from the interior, called cabecitas negras (literally, little black heads). Certainly the earlier distinction between pardos (mulattoes) and morenos (blacks) seems to have disappeared, according to Andrews. He mentions that some forms of popular entertainment have featured Afro-Argentine themes; two such dramatic productions are the 1940 musical Candombe de San Baltasar and a 1947 play, Cuando había reyes (When There Were Kings), which recounts the lives of a black community under Rosas. Some candombles have also survived and are performed in festivals by both black and white Argentines. Andrews states that one remnant of the Afro-Argentine community in Buenos Aires as of 1976 was the Shimmy Club, “a group that has no activities other than sponsoring occasional dances … in a working-class area near Congress.” Many mixed couples dance to a Tango orchestra and to “an electric Brazilian-tropical band.”

Overall, however, the substantially reduced numbers of Afro-Argentines—by some accounts the population totals only a few thousand—have enabled Argentina to deny the historic relevance of blacks and portray theirs as a white nation free of racism. An article appearing in The Montreal Gazette in 1998 quotes a Buenos Aires museum director's response to the possibility of an Afro-Argentine exhibit: “We have too many important events and personalities to show. We can't waste space putting things that don't have any relevance to our history.” The country's self-image coexists with continued manifestations of racism. The same article explains that when the Argentine soccer team was to play either the Brazilian or Nigerian team in the Olympic finals, a sports newspaper ran the headline, “Bring on the Monkeys,” eliciting protests from the governments of both potential opponents.

As of the late 1990s efforts by scholars like Andrews, Goldberg, Chace, and others seek to confront such persistent racism and ensure that the historic significance of Afro-Argentines is not forgotten. A group called Africa Vive (Africa Lives), formed in 1996, has worked to raise awareness of Afro-Argentine history and culture. In 2001, representatives of Africa Vive and other Afro-Argentine groups persuaded a government minister to hold a ceremony to honor the country's black military heroes. The official gave a speech praising the honored soldiers and also awarded honorary degrees to the leaders of several black organizations. Such developments give Afro-Argentine leaders hope that the national culture eventually will fully embrace, rather than try to erase, its African roots.

See also Afro-Latin America, Research on; Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; Free Womb Laws; Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean; Transatlantic Slave Trade.

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