“Viste la fotito de ‘Blancaflor’?” a.k.a “Racism un Buenos Aires”

Argentina is a racist and discriminatory country, but I honestly think that people here are not aware of it. A person from abroad need only go to the supermarket and check out the logo of ‘Blancaflor’ flour to find racism, but many Argentinos might discard it as something ‘cultural’ or ‘histórico’. It’s because most of us ‘porteños’ are sort of brainwashed from birth to not recognize blatant racism when we are pouring it into a mix with eggs and sugar. An example of this is the typical primary-school ’25 de mayo’ play most schools put on, where some of the children get their faces painted black with charcoal to portray the ‘esclavos’ of the times, selling ‘pastelitos’ or carrying laundry on their heads in the role of the ‘lavandera’. We were kids, we thought painting our faces black was fun; we thought slaves smiled all the time and were happy as they sang along the streets selling their goods. But slaves weren’t happy, I mean, they were slaves for fuck’s sake, but we sort of distort history to make it all nice and fluffy and kid-friendly.

    One of the things that makes it easier for schools and other institutions to carry on their unconscious discrimination, I feel, is because of the lack of black people in Buenos Aires. Seeing black people is quite a rare occurrence in this country, which is weird since Argentina had many slaves and has a big African influence, from words in our slang like ‘mina’ to one of the most important Argentine heritages, the tango. Like my boss said once, “you can’t seriously think a white person came up with that dance”. There are many historical reasons why the black population of Argentina has decreased greatly, which is quite extreme since if you look back at the 18th and 19th centuries, black people made up more than 50% of the population in some northern provinces. The theories of the decrease of black population are many: a) in the War of Paraguay (1865-1870), black people made up most of the Argentine army, and both sides of this dispute suffered huge losses, b) epidemics, especially the yellow fever outburst of 1871, and slaves with little means were easier targets for disease, c) emigration, particularly to Uruguay, where the black population was historically larger than here and the political climate more favourable for them, d) the huge influx of white European settlers between 1850 and 1950, which doubled the country’s population, displacing the black Argentine population.
    During Juan Manuel de Rosa’s government (1835-1852), the black population of Buenos Aires was 30%, and slavery was officially abolished by the ‘Constitución Nacional’ in 1853 and finalized in 1860, but by 1887 the official black population of the country was only 1.8%. Sounds weird, right? But if you look at the ‘Censo Nacional’ of 1895 you can find these words uttered by the ‘Estado’: “No tardar· en quedar la población unificada por completo formando una nueva y hermosa raza blanca”. Explicitly racist, huh?
    New studies have shown, though, that Argentina’s decline in black population was actually a sort of process of ‘invisibilización’ of the afro-argentine population and its cultural roots, like slowly making them disappear in records and historiography. A census in 2005 of two Argentine neighbourhoods showed that 3% of the population knew they descended from Africans. There are conflicting theories about those who say the black population was systematically eradicated or emigrated from Argentina, while on the other hand there are those who say black people were sort of omitted from Argentine history starting from the second half of the nineteenth century due to the aims of making a “unified and beautiful white race”. I guess the Argentine government, receiving such huge numbers of immigrants in this period, was trying to unify everyone and make everyone an ‘Argentino’, but it is a shame that they included the words ‘blanca’. More than a shame though, it was fucking stupid and evil. In 2002 there was a huge public manifestation because a migrations employee accused an argentine citizen of falsifying her passport, saying ‘no podÌa ser argentina y negra’, and it turns out that the employee was wrong and, duh, you can be argentine and black. We can all get together, see? No matter if ‘blanco’ or ‘negro’ or ‘rosa’ or ‘verde’ we are all Argentinos.
    The mystery of ‘where did the black people go?’ might not ever get a definitive answer, but we’ll see. In the end, though, all that matters is that we are all Argentinos. And we all love ‘milanesa’. Because if you don’t then no matter if your skin is fuschia with brown dots, you are not an Argentino. I kid, I kid.
    To the ‘gente de todos los colores’
    El Pendejo Porteño