BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY
African-Argentinians, the forgotten genocide
MARTÍN ALDALUR
The most "European" country of Latin America hides its African origin. Today, 200 years after its founding, it faces the problem of the integration of the excluded and the revision of a monolithic and European discourse.
It is winter in Buenos Aires and the cold wet air goes up from the River Plate. Patrician Park, a neighborhood composed of typical low-rise buildings and old industrial and closed warehouses, is surrounded by a light mist. We walk the Monteagudo street, bordering the park that gives its named to the neighborhood. It's Friday afternoon and it is already dark.
Dimly lit and with large trees in the middle of the park, we see improvised fires in which young people living on the streets warm themselves. They sniff glue and smoke 'paco' - coca paste-, they represent the sad reality of social exclusion, due to the multiple crises that have beaten Argentina. Some intellectuals are now talking of a new type of genocide, because we find ourselves in a country which produces food for over 300 million people. Poverty is avoidable.
We arrived at Caseros Avenue near the hospital Churruca and wait for the 28 bus. In front of us stands a monument commemorating the end of an epidemic, the end of another genocide. It happened more than one hundred years ago and saw the end of the black population. The most "European" of the Latin American countries had a significant African population until the late nineteenth century. Buenos Aires, as an entrance gate since the time of the Viceroyalty, was a place of trade and smuggling. Silver and slave labor circulated in a scoundrel city which apparently has little to do with the one we are visiting today.
Records say that towards1600 the first Africans arrived in Buenos Aires. By the end of the eighteenth century, in some cotton provinces like Santiago del Estero and Tucumán, the majority of the population was of African origin.
So what happened to this community in such a short time to make it disappear? Experts speak of a fatal combination of factors: multiple wars, bleaching policies and repeated epidemics of yellow fever and cholera.
We must remember that since the war of independence, the desert campaign or the bloody war with Paraguay, blacks were part of the front rows, real cannon fodder. "But their wives and freed children remained, being the foundation of the hidden mestizaje identity of Argentina", says filmmaker David Rubio, author of 'Defensa 1464', an interesting documentary that represents the present and past African-Argentinian reality.
TO 30 PERCENT OF THE POPULATION
Bleaching policies were carried out by all the Creole elites throughout Latin America during the nineteenth century encouraging the influx of European immigrants. Thus, "the black community in 1810 accounted for more than 30 percent of the population of Buenos Aires becoming 0.3% by the end of the century," says Rubio. The dominant discourse was becoming reality.
In 1871, Buenos Aires lacked basic sanitation. The yellow fever epidemic hit particularly severe in the Afro-Argentines, who were confined and abandoned to a safe termination.
After the epidemic a new city was rebuilt in the image of major European cities as the African component of Argentina's national identity was forgotten. But if we listened carefully to the sounds of time, we find cultural remains of this reality: the decadent candombe of River Plate, the word 'quilombo', or the tango itself, whose origin seems to be African, are examples of this. Even in the language: the Argentinians refer disparagingly to the poor living in slums, shanty towns, as negros (black), although, in fact, they are white.
Reduced to mere folklore, or an exogenous fact of national identity, the African-Argentinian culture seeks its place. There comes the bus and we left the square, look back and remember how, next to that monument, they recently opened mass graves which remind us of the thousands of forgotten victims of that other great Argentinian genocide.
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