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PERFORMING COMMUNITY
Buenos Aires, 1910 In 1580, Juan de Garay, leading an expeditionary force down the Paraná River from Asunción (in today’s Paraguay), reestablished an abandoned trading post. Within a few years, the Río de la Plata region was being called “Argentina,” which means “silvery” in Spanish, reflecting the hope that riches would flow. This was not to be. The renewed town of Buenos Aires languished for decades as a poorly patrolled contraband port. Local settlers turned to cattle, hides, meat and the slave trade to survive. By the mid–eighteenth century, Buenos Aires had grown into the largest slave port in South America. The city’s population grew beyond 30,000 by the century’s end, with about a third of the local residents being Afro-Argentine slaves. The end of Spanish rule during the 1810s unleashed a half century of internecine conflict, pitting — in various guises — emerging oligarchic rancher, urban commercial, and merchant elites oriented toward the port of Buenos Aires against everyone else. Unitarians (unitarios), who were promoting centralization in Buenos Aires, fought with Federalists (federales), who were supporting greater power sharing with the interior. The continuing struggle between the Unitarians and Federalists took a particularly violent turn in late 1828 when General Juan Manuel de Rosas,
a Federalist caudillo from Buenos Aires Province, emerged as the most powerful figure in Argentina. Afro-Argentines constituted between a fifth and a quarter of the city’s population when Rosas arrived. Few Afro-Argentines were able to break through the discriminatory barriers imposed by slavery and racism. Collectively, they nonetheless benefited from a more lenient system than that found in the large plantation economies elsewhere in the Americas. Many black men became street vendors, while women earned extra money washing clothes for a variety of clients. Slaves worked the docks and slaughterhouses, and many AfroArgentines headed into the countryside to labor on estancias (ranches). A gradual process of emancipation produced a highly variegated racial landscape. As Afro-Argentines became ever freer, they “disappeared.” The community’s share of the city’s overall population declined from nearly a third to being negligible. This “disappearance” has been overstated. African Argentine mutual aid societies, newspapers, magazines and informal associations, ranging from Church-sponsored cofradas to self-organized ethnic associations known as “nations,” existed into the twentieth century, long after AfroArgentines themselves were said to have “disappeared.”
