Karush - 2012 - Blackness in Argentina Jazz, Tango and Race Befor

The Past and Present Society
BLACKNESS IN ARGENTINA: JAZZ, TANGO AND RACE BEFORE PERÓN

Author(s): Matthew B. Karush
Source: Past & Present, No. 216 (AUGUST 2012), pp. 215-245
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
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BLACKNESS IN ARGENTINA:
JAZZ, TANGO AND RACE
BEFORE PERON*
On the question of race and nation, the dominant Latin Ame

paradigm has never applied to Argentina. In Mexico, Brazil
elsewhere, twentieth-century nationalists crafted ideologies
mestizaje that broke with European and North American
models by celebrating the indigenous or African as crucial elem
ents in a new racial mixture. Yet most Argentine intellectuals re
jected this sort of hybridity and instead constructed national
identities that were at least as exclusionary as those produced
by their North American counterparts. The only mixtures they
countenanced were those that followed from European immigra
tion. Just as the United States was a 'melting pot', Argentina was a
crisol de razas (crucible of races), in which Spaniards, Italians and
other immigrant groups were fused into a new nation. This ideol
ogy, visible in the well-known aphorism that 'Argentines descend
from ships', marginalized Argentines of indigenous and African
descent and eventually erased them from national consciousness.
As George Reid Andrews showed over thirty years ago, the
alleged disappearance of the once-substantial Afro-Argentine
population of Buenos Aires was at least as much the product of
this ideological manoeuvre as it was the result of miscegenation,
war and disease. Only recently has Argentina's status as a white
nation begun to be openly contested.1
Nevertheless, even if non-whites have been pushed off the
historical stage, race remains a pervasive category in Argentine
society. The word 'negro' is a commonplace in everyday speech,
functioning both as a hateful insult and, paradoxically, as a term
* I should like to thank Paulina Alberto, Mark Healey, Alison Landsberg, Andrea
Matallana and Mike O'Malley for reading earlier versions of this article. Their com
ments greatly improved the finished product. Thanks also to Christine Ehrick,
Michele Greet and Rebekah Pite for their helpful suggestions.
1 George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800-1900 (Madison,
1980). On Argentina's self-image as a white nation, see Monica Quijada,
'Introduction', in Monica Quijada, Carmen Bernand and Arnd Schneider,
Buscar!
Homogeneidad y nacion: con un estudio de caso. Argentina, siglos XIX y XX (Madrid,
2000), 9.
Past and Present, no. 216 (Aug. 2012)© The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2012
doi: 10.1093/pastj/gts008
216 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 216
of endearment. Equally mysteriously, the insult usually alludes to

indigenous rather than African ancestry. Typically, these usages
are traced to the Peronist era. During his first two terms in office
(1946-55), Juan Peron built a powerful working-class movement
that challenged the nation's hierarchies. Peron's opponents at
tacked his followers in racial terms, labelling them cabecitas
negras (little blackheads) or simply negros, epithets aimed at the
dark-skinned and black-haired migrants from the Argentine in
terior who had been pouring into Buenos Aires since the late
1930s in search of industrial jobs. By applying the term 'black'
to these largely mestizo migrants and conflating this racially
defined group with the working class and with the followers of
Peron, anti-Peronists constructed their own identity in both class
and racial terms: they were middle-class, and they were white.2
Peronists, for their part, responded by embracing the racial slurs
directed at them, just as they did with more obviously classist
insults like descamisado (shirtless one) and grasa (greaser).3
Historians have convincingly demonstrated the relevance of
these racial categories to Peronist and anti-Peronist identities,
yet they have had surprisingly little to say about the historical
process that produced this outcome. How was it that words that
had once been used to describe Afro-Argentines came to be
applied to Peronist workers?4
In the pages that follow, I unpack this history by exploring rep
resentations that circulated in mass culture during the crucial
decades preceding Peron's rise to power. My examination of
this mass culture yields two surprising findings. First,
Enrique Garguin, '"Los argentinos descendemos de los barcos": articulation

racial de la identidad de clase media en Argentina (1920-1960)', in Sergio Eduardo
Visacovsky and Enrique Garguin (eds.), Moralidades, economtas e identidades de clase
media: estudios histdricos y etnograficos (Buenos Aires, 2009); Ezequiel Adamovsky,
Historia de la clase media argentina: apogeo y decadencia de una ilusion, 1919-2003
(Buenos Aires, 2009), chs. 9-11; Natalia Milanesio, 'Peronists and Cabecitas:
Stereotypes and Anxieties at the Peak of Social Change', in Matthew B. Karush and
Oscar Chamosa (eds.), The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in
Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina (Durham, NC, 2010).
3 Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class,
1946-1976 (Cambridge, 1988), 31.
4 From anthropology and cultural studies respectively, Alejandro Frigerio and
Alejandro Solomianski have underscored the significance of race and racism in
modern Argentine history: see Alejandro Frigerio, '"Negros" y "blancos" en
Buenos Aires: repensando nuestras categorias raciales', in Leticia Maronese (ed.),
Buenos Aires negra: identidad y cultura (Buenos Aires, 2006), 88-93; Alejandro
Solomianski, Identidades secretas: la negritud argentina (Rosario, 2003), 255-7.
BLACKNESS IN ARGENTINA 217
representations of Argentine blackness circulated widely on the

radio and in the cinema in this period, particularly, though not
exclusively, in connection with tango, the nation's most popular
musical genre. Blackness had not yet been purged from the iden
tity of this allegedly white nation. Secondly, these images were
based on earlier popular cultural traditions, but they evolved in
dialogue with foreign imports. The mass cultural marketplace of
the 1920s and 1930s was fundamentally transnational: since con
sumers had access to the latest imports from the United States
and elsewhere, domestic producers needed to emulate the stand
ards set by Hollywood movies and jazz music as well as to distin
guish their own offerings.5 In the case of jazz, particular racial
images accompanied the music, including the idea of blackness as
a source of primitive authenticity and of black people as a noble
and long-suffering race. Under the powerful influence of this
prestigious and ultra-modern import, tango composers and per
formers rediscovered the black roots of their own national music.
In this transnational context, Argentina's mass culture industries
produced new representations in which blackness signalled an
affiliation with the poor. Thus, it was before the era of massive
internal migration and before the rise of Peron that the heretical
meanings of blackness were displaced onto class.
GAUCHOS, PAYADORES, AND CARNIVAL TROUPES:

AFRO-ARGENTINES IN POPULAR CULTURE
For more than a hundred years after Argentina won its in

ence from Spain, cultural representations of black people
marked by ambivalence. For Europhile liberal intellectual
conceived of the national story as a struggle between civ
and barbarism, Afro-Argentines epitomized the latter. B
1835 and 1852, when the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas d
nated Argentina, exiled liberals attacked him as the culm
of the nation's savagery and cultural backwardness. Parti
galling to the liberals was the support that Rosas seemed t
Matthew B. Karush, Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of

Argentina, 1920-1946 (Durham, NC, 2012). For an excellent study of the
transnational culture on race in the Brazilian context, see Micol Seigel, Uneven
Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham, NC,
2009).
from the population of African descent. In his famous short story

'El matadero' ('The Slaughterhouse', 1838), Esteban Echeverria
depicts the followers of Rosas as a violent, primitive and largely
black mob, fighting over the intestines and brains of slaughtered
cattle and terrorizing Rosas's noble opponents.6 The image of
Afro-Argentines as treacherous supporters of Rosas became a
staple of liberal literature. More broadly, antipathy to Afro
Argentines and to other non-whites helped motivate liberal
enthusiasm for European immigration.
Nevertheless, alongside this persistent racism, Argentine liter
ary and popular cultures contained more complex and even posi
tive depictions of black people. Jose Hernandez's epic poem El
gaucho Martin Fierro (1872), read by generations of Argentine
schoolchildren, is a case in point. The poem tells the story of an
honourable gaucho who is pressed into the federal army in order
to fight the Indians on the frontier. Hernandez, who fervently
opposed the centralizing liberal governments of his day, offers a
nostalgic account of life in the pampas, a denunciation of the
corruption and greed of elites and a vigorous defence of the
poor but noble gauchos. In the poem's most famous passage, a
drunk Martin Fierro calls a black woman a cow and, in the duel
that ensues, kills the black gaucho who defends her honour. The
racism of the scene is impossible to deny. Fierro is a heroic char
acter with whom readers identify, and while no justification is
given for his violent behaviour here, it is clearly legitimized by
the racial inferiority of his opponent. On the other hand, as
Amy Kaminsky points out, Hernandez depicts the black charac
ters as 'fully human'. The woman is quick-witted, responding to
Fierro's insults in kind, while the man demonstrates the bravery of
a true gaucho.7 In Hernandez's sequel, La vuelta de Martin Fierro
('The Return of Martin Fierro', 1879), Fierro, back from the
Indian wars, encounters 'el moreno', the brother of the black
gaucho he murdered. Instead of a violent confrontation, the
two face off in a payada, a musical duel in which two guitar
playing troubadours (payadores) try to outdo each other
with improvised rhyming verses and riddles. As Alejandro
Solomianski has argued, what is striking about the contest is the
essential equality of the competitors; 'el moreno' matches Fierro
See Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley, 1991), 142-3.

7 Amy K. Kaminsky, Argentina: Stories for a Nation (Minneapolis, 2008), 115, 113.
rhyme for rhyme and riddle for riddle. By including these sym
pathetic portrayals of black characters, Hernandez carved out a
space for Afro-Argentines within the nation — a subordinate
space to be sure, but an essential one nonetheless.
As immigrants flooded into Argentina at the turn of the twen
tieth century, urban residents embraced criollismo, the nativist
celebration of rural tradition. Pulp fiction told tales of renegade
gauchos, while the so-called criollo circus offered equestrian
acrobatics, clowning and musical melodramas.9 These entertain
ments featured black characters prominently, and they purveyed
both racism and the more positive sentiments visible in Martin
Fierro. Most often, Afro-Argentines were the butt of jokes. For
example, as the clown Pepino el 88, the Uruguayan actor Jose
Podesta, who virtually invented the criollo circus, performed a
series of ethnic stereotypes for comic effect. Among them were
Afro-Argentine characters ridiculed for putting on airs, trying
and failing to impress with fancy verbiage.10
The thriving popular theatre of the 1910s and 1920s tended to
set its stories in the city, but its depiction of Afro-Argentines
reproduced the ambivalence of criollismo. In the short plays
known as sainetes, blacks were typically presented either as buf
foons or as criminals. As Donald Castro has argued, the presence
of Afro-Argentine characters in these plays followed from the fact
that they took place in the conventillos (tenements) of the Buenos
Aires arrabales (slums), where Afro-Argentines remained a real
presence.11 The chief comic ploy of the sainete was ethnic stereo
type, a characteristic it inherited both from Spanish mannerism
and from the circus humour of Podesta and others. Sainete writers
made fun of Italian, Spanish, Jewish and Middle Eastern immi
grants; the stereotype of the Afro-Argentine criminal fitted right
in. Positive depictions of Afro-Argentines tended to follow from
their association with criminality. In the play El Pardo Flores:
escenas del arrabal ('Flores the Black Guy: Scenes from the
Solomianski, Identidades secretas, 166-70.

9 On criollista fiction, see Adolfo Prieto, El discurso criollista en la formation de la
Argentina moderna (Buenos Aires, 1988). On the criollo circuses, see John Charles
Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular
Dance (Albuquerque, 2004), ch. 4.
10 My discussion of the representation of Afro-Argentines in criollista literature, the
circus and the sainete relies heavily on Donald S. Castro, The Afro-Argentine in
Argentine Culture: el negro del acordeon (Lewiston, 2001), 71-2, 105-35.
11 Ibid., 132.
Slums, Cortazzo, 1918), the black protagonist is a powerful

crime boss who is feared and respected and who demonstrates
a certain moral fibre at the end of the play.12 Plays like this one
drew on the 'cult of courage' that was intrinsic to criollista litera
ture. The urban compadrito (street tough) displayed the same ag
gressive masculinity as the gaucho, and just as there were black
gauchos, there were black compadritos. Racism persisted, yet
Afro-Argentines were also associated with distinctively Argen
tine locales and with certain positive character traits.
In addition to pulp fiction, the circus and the theatre, one other
popular cultural practice generated representations of blackness:
the pre-Lenten carnival. The tradition of candombes, public
dances organized by the neo-African societies or 'nations' of
Buenos Aires, stretches back to the colonial period in the Rio
de la Plata region. After independence, Argentina's liberal elites
tried to crack down on these dances, while their nemesis, the
dictator Rosas, encouraged and even attended them. During
the 1860s and 1870s the institution of the candombes began to
decline, as did the associated forms of music and dance, also
known as candombe. Younger blacks increasingly rejected these
traditions in favour of dancing the latest steps from Europe.
Afro-Argentine carnival troupes persisted, but they did not per
form either the music or the dance steps of the candombe.13
Nevertheless, the candombe remained a major part of the
Buenos Aires carnival, but, surprisingly, those who performed it
were white. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s thousands of elite
young men, some with the most prestigious surnames in
Argentina, blackened their faces and danced as members of car
nival troupes with names like Los Negros, Los Negros Esclavos,
Los Negros Candomberos, or La Perla Africana. Unschooled in
Ibid., 131. Castro also singles out Nemesio Trejo as the one sainetero who con
sistently depicted Afro-Argentines as heroes. On Trejo, see Silvia Pellarolo, Sainete
criollo: democracia, representation. El caso de Nemesio Trejo (Buenos Aires, 1997).
13 Andrews, Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 156-65; Oscar Chamosa, 'Lubolos,
tenorios y moreiras: reforma liberal y cultura popular en el carnaval de Buenos
Aires de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX', in Hilda Sabato and Alberto Lettieri
(eds.), La vida politica en la Argentina del siglo XIX: armas, votos y voces (Buenos
Aires, 2003). Maria Guimarey, 'Influencia afroamericana en los carnavales riopla
tenses: estudio comparativo de los corsos de Buenos Aires y Montevideo en la segunda
mitad del siglo XIX', Telondefondo, no. 6 (2007), <http://www.telondefondo.org/
numeros-anteriores/6/numero6> (accessed 29 Mar. 2012).
the intricacies of candombe, they performed a crude, mocking

imitation of Afro-Argentine dance.14
The vogue for blackface was a transnational phenomenon. A
blackface Spanish-language version of Uncle Tom's Cabin played
in Buenos Aires in 1856, and a number of other North American
blackface performers visited the city in the 1860s, including the
famous Christy Minstrels.15 Yet, unlike the North American min
strel shows, blackface carnival performances in Buenos Aires
were not a working-class entertainment. Instead, these were priv
ileged young men enjoying the transgressive atmosphere of the
carnival. Through their songs, performers impersonated black
men lamenting their sad life or describing failed attempts at ro
mance with white women. Blackface carnival troupes poked fun
at black dance steps, singing styles, speech patterns and dress. At
the same time, their stereotyped representations also 'folklorized'
Afro-Argentines, turning them into symbols of the nation's cul
tural heritage.16 The blackface candombe expressed both disdain
and admiration for Afro-Argentines, while situating them firmly
in the past.
Of course, Afro-Argentines had not disappeared. Blacks con
tinued to make significant contributions to Argentine culture,
particularly in the fields of music and dance. The tradition of
black guitarists and payadores, for example, continued into the
twentieth century. Perhaps the most famous payador, the Afro
Argentine Gabino Ezeiza, died in Buenos Aires in 1916. The
tabloid newspaper Critica depicted Ezeiza as a popular hero,
rescuing his remains from an unmarked grave. In 1931, on the
eve of a musical festival to celebrate Ezeiza's legacy, the news
paper described him as a 'wizard of rhyme' and a virtuoso of
'gaucho minstrelsy'. Although the author did not mention
Ezeiza's ethnicity, the large drawing that accompanied the article
made it clear that this 'criollo improviser' was of African descent.
Just as Jose Hernandez had done in Martin Fierro nearly sixty
years before, Critica's discussion of Ezeiza linked blackness and
On the blackface carnival troupes, see Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots,
59-63; D. Sanchez et al, 'El carnaval de los "blancos-negros"in Maronese (ed.),
Buenos Aires negra. By the 1880s, as Chasteen points out, some Afro-Argentine car
nival troupes blackened their own faces in imitation of the white blackface groups.
15 Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots, 60.
16 Sanchez et al., 'El carnaval de los "blancos-negros"', 142.
Argentine national identity. Despite the deep current of racism

and mockery directed at them, Afro-Argentines continued to be
recognized for their contributions to Argentine culture.
II
BLACKS AND BLACKNESS IN THE TANGO
Afro-Argentines also played crucial roles in the musical and

choreographic development of the tango. As John Chasteen and
others have demonstrated, the word 'tango' originally referred to
the dance styles of Afro-Argentines, and well into the twentieth
century blacks continued to be associated with the genre.18
The early tango milieu included quite a few performers of
African descent. Many of the great innovators of tango dance
were Afro-Argentine, including Luis Maria Cantero, known as
El Negro Pavura.19 Likewise, Robert Farris Thompson has iden
tified thirty-five black musicians who were active in the tango
scene in Buenos Aires between 1890 and 1930. Among the
most famous were the guitarist Jose Ricardo, who accompanied
the legendary tango star Carlos Gardel from 1915 until 1928, the
tango composer and musician Enrique Maciel, and the influential
bass player Leopoldo Thompson. Several of the earliest tango
composers were also Afro-Argentine, including Anselmo
Rosendo Mendizabal and Placido Simoni Alfaro.20 Likewise,
the pioneering Argentine film director Jose Agustin Ferreyra,
whose movies often featured tangos and explored the marginal
urban milieu associated with the genre, was the son of an
Afro-Argentine mother and a white father.21
Not only were many of these artists well known, but so was the
fact that they were black. Nearly all of them had nicknames that
identified their race, including 'el negro', 'el mulato' and 'el
pardo'. Photographs of black tango dancers and musicians ap
peared in the mainstream entertainment press, often without any
17 Jornada, 22 Oct. 1931, 9. Censored by the Uriburu dictatorship, Critica briefly

published under this name.
18 Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots, 69.
19 Robert Farris Thompson, Tango: The Art History of Love (New York, 2005), 272.
20 Ibid., 176-9.
21 Jorge Miguel Couselo, 'El Negro Ferreyra': nn cine por instinto (Buenos Aires,
1969).
comment on their race." At a time when endemic racism pres

sured many mixed-race people to pass as white, Afro-Argentines
were acknowledged as legitimate and often expert practitioners of
tango. Of course, the tango field was hardly a racial Utopia. A
photograph of the Afro-Argentine tango pianist and composer
Placido Simoni Alfaro in the music magazine La Cancion
Moderna was accompanied by the headline 'Un morocho que
tiene el alma blanca' ('A dark guy who has a white soul').23
This formulation, common in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin
America, suggested a sort of honorary whiteness, implying that a
person of African descent was worthy despite his or her race.
Early tango songs celebrated masculine aggression and the cult
of courage in much the same way as criollista literature and the
sainete. However, the advent of modern mass culture transformed
the tango, leading to significant shifts in the images of blackness
that circulated in Argentina. With the consolidation of the record
ing and radio industries in the 1920s, the tango genre was increas
ingly purged of violence and impropriety. Beginning in 1918 with
Manuelita Poli's performance of 'Mi noche triste' ('My Sad
Night', Contursi) in the sainete entitled Los dientes del perro
('The Dog's Teeth', Weisbach and Castillo), the tango song de
veloped in conjunction with a new trend in the popular theatre.
Playwrights abandoned the conventillo as the favoured setting for
their works in favour of the cabaret. For their part, tango lyricists
now obsessively revisited the melodramatic story of the humble
girl from the barrios seduced and eventually ruined by the bright
lights of downtown.24 The move away from the bravado and vio
lence of the arrabales narrowed the space previously available for
representations of Afro-Argentines. The black compadritos and
criminals that had featured in so many early sainetes became less
prominent. Despite the ubiquity of black tango artists, Argentine
radio and cinema had little room for representations of blackness.
See, for example, the photograph of Luis Maria Cantero in La Cancion Moderna,
3 Sept. 1928, and the photograph of Enrique Maciel with the singing star Ignacio
Corsini in Radiolandia, 7 June 1941.
23 L<2 Cancion Moderna, 2 Apr. 1928.
24 The information on the transformation of popular theatre comes from Kristen
McCleary, 'Life Is a Cabaret? Recalibrating Gender Relations through Buenos Aires
Stage Plays, 1919', unpubd paper, 2009. On the tango's 'fallen woman' theme, see
Diego Armus, 'Tango, Gender, and Tuberculosis in Buenos Aires, 1900-1940', in
Diego Armus (ed.), Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to
AIDS (Durham, NC, 2003), 103-10.
El Negro Ferreyra made dozens of films over a career that

spanned the silent and the sound era, yet none of them addressed
Afro-Argentine topics or even featured black actors. Similarly,
the tangos written by black composers did not refer to Africa or
blackness either lyrically or musically.25 Tango provided Afro
Argentine artists with the opportunity to express their Argentine
identity, not their blackness.
But even if Afro-Argentine characters and themes were now
less visible, blackness had an undeniable cachet in the tango
world, where 'el negro' became a common nickname, even for
artists who were not of African descent. These 'white negros'
included Celedonio Flores, one of the foremost tango lyricists
of the 1920s, the bandleader and composer Ernesto de la Cruz,
and the legendary dancer El Negro Lavandina, whose real name
was Salvador Sciana.26 Likewise, female tango singers with no
apparent biological link to Africa, including Rosita Quiroga and
Sofia Bozan, were often called 'la negra'. A letter to the editor
printed in the fan magazine Sintonia referred to the singer
Mercedes Simone as 'la simpatica negrita',27 while Celedonio
Flores called her ia negrucha'.28 The two uses of the nickname
'negro' — to refer to people of African descent and to refer to
people associated with the popular world of the tango — were
connected: Jose Ricardo, Leopoldo Thompson and Jose Agustin
Ferreyra were Afro-Argentines, but they were also members of
the tango scene, and the presence of Afro-Argentines in this
milieu enabled the extension of the term 'negro' to white tango
musicians.
Despite a superficial similarity, this phenomenon was quite dif

ferent from the blackface carnival troupes of the late nineteenth
century. The white negros of tango were not elites play-acting at
blackness during a special time of the year set aside for such trans
gression. Rather, they were participating in a discourse of tango
authenticity, which traced the genre's origins to the brothels and
25 On the absence of blackness in Ferreyra's oeuvre, see Solomianski, Identidades

secretas, 231-4. On the same absence in the work of Afro-Argentine tango composers,
see Norberto Pablo Cirio, 'La presencia del negro en grabaciones de tango y generos
afines', in Maronese (ed.)> Buenos Aires negra, 27.
26 Interestingly, there is some debate regarding El Negro Lavandina's race. Robert
Farris Thompson argues that the dancer was probably Afro-Argentine: see
Thompson, Tango, 252.
27 Sintonia, 1 July 1933.
28 La Cancion Moderna, 30 Apr. 1928.
bars of the poor arrabales of Buenos Aires. Their artistic identities

involved a commitment to the cultural practices that sprang from
this milieu, and the nickname 'negro' signalled that affiliation.
In fact, this use of racial language only made sense as a reaction
to the snobbish racism of the Argentine elite. Most public dis
course about Afro-Argentines in this period was explicitly racist,
and in elite usage 'negro' was a common insult.29 The term
'negra' could refer, in Jose Gobello's words, to 'a woman of low
condition', while 'negrear' was slang for having sex with such
women. Elite opponents of the politician Hipolito Yrigoyen,
who won the presidency in 1916, referred to the followers of the
Radical Party leader as 'negreros radicales', implicitly likening
them to the Afro-Argentine supporters of Rosas in the previous
century.30
By contrast, in the tango lexicon 'negro' was an affectionate
nickname with a clearly populist connotation. Calling a glamor
ous star like Sofia Bozan 'la negra' was a way of stressing her
connection to the plebeian world from which the tango sprang.
Celedonio Flores, El Negro Cele, earned his nickname from his
deep empathy for the poor and his commitment to making poetry
out of lunfardo, the disreputable lower-class slang of Buenos
Aires. The populist usage of 'negro' was also visible in tango
lyrics. Enrique Cadicamo's tango 'La negra del arrabal', for
example, describes a poor woman who is as 'proud as a queen'.
In 'Oime negro' ('Listen to Me, Negro', 1928), written and
performed by Rosita Quiroga, the singer is a well-worn tango
stereotype: a young woman from a humble barrio who has
allowed herself to be seduced by a wealthy playboy. Now repent
ant, she pleads for forgiveness from the poor but noble man whom
she once ridiculed:
Grande fue mi culpa, negro mio. My guilt was great, my negro.

Tarde comprendi tu inmenso amor. I understood your immense love too late.
Nadie de tu modo me ha querido. No one has loved me like you.
Y yo a muchos he servido And I have served many
pues, quizas, de distraction.31 Perhaps as a distraction.
On racism in the weekly magazine Caras y Caretas, see Frigerio, ' "Negros" y
"blancos" en Buenos Aires'.
30 James, Resistance and Integration, 31; Jose Gobello, Nuevo diccionario lunfardo
(Buenos Aires, 1994), 180.
31 For the full Spanish lyrics, see under the song title in the 'Indice alfabetico' of
the Todo Tango website, <http://www.todotango.com/spanish/biblioteca/letras> (ac
cessed 29 Mar. 2012). All translations of tango lyrics are my own.
'Negro here is a casual term of endearment, but it also marks

the class distinction between the good man she left and the rich
one who led her astray. Pride in popular cultural practices that
were disdained by Argentine elites was a central element in
tango's appeal, and the term 'negro' effectively expressed this
populism.
Negro was not the only term used in this way. The bandleader
Francisco Canaro gave the singing star Azucena Maizani the nick
name Azabache ('Jet Black').32 The name described Maizani's
dark hair, but, like 'negro', 'azabache' also commonly referred to
people of African descent and, as a result, had a populist ring.
Similarly, Afro-Argentines were often called 'morocho', as in the
case of Placido Simoni Alfaro, the morocho with a white soul, but
the term could also be applied to whites. 'El morocho del Abasto',
one of Carlos Gardel's most common nicknames, linked this
vague reference to darkness with Gardel's roots in a lower-class
neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. Once again, the effect was popu
list: if Gardel was morocho, or off-white, he was of the people,
rather than the elite. Perhaps the most enduring of tango's early
classics was 'La morocha' (Saborido and Villoldo, 1905), whose
lyrics celebrate the passionate and faithful lover of the prototyp
ical Argentine gaucho. On one level, the song simply describes a
brunette, yet the term 'morocha' invoked racial associations and,
like Gardel's nickname, linked national authenticity to phenotyp
ical darkness. The original 'La morocha' was a staple in the tango
repertoire throughout the 1930s and 1940s. As late as 1951 the
theme was revisited in the tango 'El patio de la morocha' (Mores
and Castillo). Unsurprisingly, this version links the morocha to
the poor but beloved neighbourhoods of the past, but it also
stresses her blackness: the singer remembers her 'black eyes'
but also her 'brown face' (cara bruna).
The populist use of these colour words spread beyond the tango
milieu. The 1920s witnessed the explosion of soccer as a mass
spectator sport, and the sport soon came to rival the tango for
popular appeal. Sports reporters, particularly those who wrote
for the enormously popular tabloid Critica, used words like
'morocho' and 'negro' to describe and celebrate the humble
Francisco Canaro, Mis bodas de oro con el tango y mis memorias, 1906-1956
(Buenos Aires, 1957).
origins of star players. Manuel Seoane, one of the biggest soccer

stars of the era and the son of working-class Spanish immigrants,
was known as El Negro, despite his phenotypical whiteness.33
When, at the request of Critical editor, the writer Pablo Rojas
Paz launched a regular soccer column, he took on the pseudonym
'El negro de la tribuna' ('The black guy in the stands').34 'Negro'
and 'morocho' here functioned in the same way as they did for
Carlos Gardel and the white 'negros' of tango; they expressed
pride in popular culture and thereby connected these figures to
their non-elite fans. Of course, an unselfconscious racism per
sisted in sports as well. Critica described Alejandro de los Santos,
an Afro-Argentine who played for the Buenos Aires soccer team
Huracan, as 'un negro lindo' and illustrated a brief story about
him with several thick-lipped, smiling caricatures.35 The article
praised de los Santos's soccer skills and his good sportsmanship,
but the cartoons were clearly mocking. The persistence of this
more traditional racial logic gave the affectionate use of'negro' a
heretical charge.
Ill
THE MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF JAZZ
Representations of blackness did not exist in a hermetically

sealed national space. At the most basic level, Argentine attitudes
about race bore the imprint of classification schemes, prejudices
and stereotypes that originated in Europe. More specifically, the
nineteenth-century Argentine vogue for blackface reveals the
early influence of North American racial attitudes and cultural
practices. During the 1920s and 1930s this influence grew expo
nentially. As a result of Argentina's economic development, as
well as of the advent of the cinema, the phonograph and the
radio, local consumers were incorporated into transnational
mass cultural circuits to an unprecedented extent. Hollywood
studios were particularly aggressive in their pursuit of the
Argentine market, nearly destroying their domestic competition
during the 1920s. The Argentine film industry recovered after
the introduction of sound in 1933, but even then local products
33 Critica, 17 May 1928, 2; 18 May 1928, 9; 24 May 1928, 10.

34 See Pedro Orgambide, Todos teniamos veinte arios (Buenos Aires, 1985), 109.
35 Jornada, 1 Sept. 1931, 9.
continued to be outnumbered by foreign imports: the forty-nine

domestic movies released in 1940 represented just 10 per cent of
the total number of films shown in the country that year.36
Foreign players also dominated the recording industry. The
North American companies Victor, Columbia and Brunswick,
together with the German conglomerate Odeon, controlled the
market, selling both their extensive foreign catalogues and their
recordings of local acts.37 Finally, the explosion of commercial
radio broadcasting during the 1920s created another conduit for
foreign cultural influence. By the middle of the 1930s there were
over a million radio sets in Argentina, or roughly one for every ten
people. In the city of Buenos Aires alone, more than twenty radio
stations broadcast throughout the day, and foreign music had a
significant presence on most of them.38 This flood of imported
mass culture exposed Argentines to foreign attitudes, tastes and
lifestyles, exerting a powerful influence on local ideas about race.
Among the most influential of these imported cultural products
was jazz. Argentines were introduced to this new brand of dance
music in 1918, when the Victor recordings of Paul Whiteman's
band and of the Benson Orchestra became available in Buenos
Aires.39 Within just a few years, tango bandleaders like Roberto
Firpo and Francisco Canaro as well as singers like Gardel
included foxtrots and 'shimmies' in their repertoire.40 By the
early 1930s dozens of local bands specialized in jazz, North
American jazz bands toured the country and the entertainment
magazines all included regular jazz columns. Most importantly,
jazz conquered significant space on Argentine radio. Music pro
grammes accounted for 62 per cent of broadcast time in 1933,41
and though tango music dominated these offerings, jazz was
easily the second most popular genre. In 1936, 20 per cent of
On Hollywood's penetration of the Argentine film market, see Jorge Alberto

Schnitman, 'The Argentine Film Industry: A Contextual Study' (Stanford Univ.
Ph.D. thesis, 1979), 43-79; the 1940 figure is on p. 72. See also Kristin Thompson,
Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-34 (London, 1985),
esp. 78-9.
37 Sergio Pujol, Valentino en Buenos Aires: los anos veinte y el espectaculo (Buenos
Aires, 1994), 180-5.
38 Robert Howard Claxton, From Parsifal to Peron: Early Radio in Argentina, 1920
1944 (Gainesville, 2007), 146, 149; Andrea Matallana, 'Locospor la radio': una historia
social de la radiofonia en la Argentina, 1923-1947 (Buenos Aires, 2006).
39 Sergio Pujol, Jazz alsur: la musica negra en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1992), 21.
40 La Cancion Moderna, 16 Apr. 1928. On Firpo, see Pujol, Jazz al sur, 20-1.
41 Matallana, 'Locos por la radio', 101.
BLACKNESS IN ARGENTINA Z29
all music programmes on the radio were dedicated to jazz. " In

Argentina jazz acquired two sets of associations. As a North
American import, jazz music was a powerful symbol of modernity
and cosmopolitan fashion. However, by the 1930s Argentines
also came to see jazz as a black musical genre, or at least one
with deep roots in black culture. Both these associations — jazz
as modern and jazz as black — informed the way Argentines
thought about their nation's most popular musical form — the
tango — and, by extension, their own identity.
The jazz and tango booms in Argentina were contemporan
eous, since both resulted from the development of the new
mass cultural technologies in the first few decades of the twentieth
century. In other words, when tango began to take shape as a
genre on stage, on recordings and on the radio, jazz constituted
an influential part of the entertainment landscape. The prestige of
iazz shaped audience expectations and preferences. Having been
exposed to the latest US hits, Argentine audiences expected
recordings of local music to live up to North American produc
tion standards, and they responded to tangos that shared certain
musical affinities with jazz. The biggest jazz star of the late 1920s
was the white bandleader Paul Whiteman, and his refined, tech
nically sophisticated 'concert-hall sound' epitomized modernity
for Argentine listeners.43 In order to compete with records like
these, Argentine musicians needed to offer music that emulated
their orchestral sophistication and danceability, which in this con
text functioned as aural signifiers of modernity.
During the 1920s a generation of innovative bandleaders
known as the New Guard transformed tango into a sophisticated,
modern dance music, taking jazz as their model.44 The New
Guard included Osvaldo Fresedo and Juan Carlos Cobian, but
it was most clearly associated with the violinist and bandleader
Julio de Caro. De Caro sought to elevate tango's musicality by
broadening its use of harmony and counterpoint and, later, by
creating a symphonic tango, but his image as an innovator and
modernizer was informed by jazz. Beginning in the mid 1920s, de
42 Ibid., 95.
43 Pujol, Jazz al sur, 21.
44 On the transition from Old Guard to New Guard, see Luis Labrana and Ana
Sebastian, Tango: unahistoria (Buenos Aires, 1992), 45-9; Luis Adolfo Sierra, Historia
de la orquesta tipica: evolution instrumental del tango (Buenos Aires, 1985), 90-7.
Neither of these accounts emphasizes the influence of jazz.
Caro played a violin-cornet specially designed for him by tech

nicians from the Victor Company. The look of the instrument,
which used the bell of a cornet in order to amplify de Caro's solos,
offended traditionalists with its obvious allusion to jazz in
strumentation.45 Moreover, de Caro's attempts to improve the
musical quality of tango were a self-conscious response to what
he saw as the 'serious threat' posed by jazz.46 He intended to
demonstrate that the tango, 'like waltzes or jazz', could be the
basis for a sophisticated music.47 In the light of these efforts, de
Caro was often described as an Argentine Paul Whiteman.48
raced with the status ot jazz as modern music par excellence,
Argentine cultural producers tended to emphasize tango's
national authenticity. The opening montage of Los tres berretines
(Susini, 1933), one of Argentina's first sound films, sets images
of congested city streets to a Duke Ellington recording. But, with
the modernity of Buenos Aires (and of domestic film-making)
thus established, jazz disappears from the film. On the contrary,
it is tango that emerges as one of the three 'berretines' (popular
passions) of the film's title, alongside soccer and the movies.
Tango's association with both the popular and the national was
a recurring theme in Argentine movies. In Gente bien ('Decent
People', Romero, 1939), a poor girl is seduced, impregnated and
abandoned by a selfish aristocrat before being rescued by a group
of humble musicians. The melodramatic opposition between the
good poor and the evil rich is signified musically: the musicians
prefer to play tangos, but the wealthy revellers they play for would
rather do 'gringo' dances like the foxtrot.
Jazz was thus modern, foreign and the preferred dance music of
snobbish elites, but these were not the genre's only associations.
By the late 1920s the genre was also increasingly associated with
blackness. Although the first jazz bands heard in Argentina were
45 For one contemporary critic who does link de Caro's innovations to jazz, see Julio
Nudler, 'Julio de Caro: tango y vanguardia', in Fernando D'Addario et al., Musica
argentina: la mirada de los criticos (Buenos Aires, 2005), 45-8. On de Caro's 'violin
:ornet', see Julio de Caro, El tango en mis recuerdos: su evolution en la historia (Buenos
<\ires, [1964]), 51-2.
46 Sintonia, 2 Sept. 1937.
47 De Caro, El tango en mis recuerdos, 98.
48 Sintonia, 2 Mar. 1935; 2 Sept. 1937. Similarly, another member of the New
Suard, the 'master of the modernist tango' Juan Carlos Cobian, was said to have
Drought back innovations from a trip to North America: La Cancion Moderna, 2 July
1928.
white, the visit to Buenos Aires of Sam Wooding s New York

based band in 1927 exposed Argentines directly to African
American jazz musicians. Two years later Josephine Baker, the
'Black Venus' who had gained such notoriety in Paris, performed
on stage and on the radio in the Argentine capital.49 Baker's
African sexuality was as exotic and as scandalous in Argentina
as it had been in Europe. One Porteno reviewer compared her to a
monkey, but also called her 'the symbol of the rhythm of the
current moment', thereby linking her simultaneously to savagery
and modernity. To describe Baker's performance, the reviewer
resorted to a local analogy: 'A beautiful and shiny black body
that shakes rudely and wildly, to the candombe sound (a/ son
candombero) of horns played by other blacks with a simian
air'.50 The critic made sense of this novel phenomenon by assim
ilating it to a piece of local tradition. He fixed the same exoticizing
gaze on Baker as the blackface carnival troupes of the nineteenth
century had on Afro-Argentine candomberos. A similar exoti
cism is visible in the caricatures of smiling black people that
local jazz bands often painted on their bass drums (see Plate 1).
Like blackface performance, these images were ambivalent: as a
racist gesture, the cartoon figures underscored the distance that
separated the professional white musicians from black savagery,
yet the images also implied a connection with black authenticity.
Since the connection between jazz and blackness was an import
ant part of the genre's appeal, and since white Argentine per
formers were twice removed from the music's origins, these
bands needed to remind their audiences of the blackness of
their music.
The growing influence of African American bandleaders in the
United States during the swing era of the 1930s reshaped the way
jazz was received abroad. In Argentina jazz aficionados prized the
records of artists such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington,
Coleman Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson. The immense
talents and professional self-presentation of these musicians de
manded a more complex response than simple exoticism.
Argentine critics and commentators raved about the musical in
novations of African American jazz musicians, but they also rarely
Pujol, Jazz al sur, 29-33, 44-7.

50 Cited in Beatriz Seibel, 'La presencia afroargentina en el espectaculo', in Dina V.
Picotti (ed.), El negro en la Argentina: presenciay negacion (Buenos Aires, 2001), 202.
failed to mention their race. They considered black musicians as a

category apart. One typical article labelled Ellington 'the first
figure of black jazz', while another discussed the business prac
tices of 'the black trumpeter and singer Luis [szc] Armstrong'.
According to the jazz reviewer for Sintonia, the latest release by
the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra had 'all the characteristics of
black "swings" [sic\\ namely, an emphasis on rhythm and on
soloing. Yet the reviewer explicitly rejected certain racial stereo
types: 'To those who still believe that people of colour are in
capable of producing genuine melody, we recommend this
example'.51 The Argentine jazz critic Leon Klimovsky argued
that only Ellington had fully succeeded in making serious music
out of jazz. As a result, 'all jazz with artistic pretensions revolved
around the absorbing influence of Duke Ellington'. But even
Klimovsky saw something of the natural, untutored genius in
Ellington, who betrayed 'the brilliant audacity of the intuitive'.52
In short, the prominence of African American jazz musicians
reignited the Argentine interest in blackness, even as it created
new opportunities for discussion and meditation on the question
of race.
This fascination with North American blackness is visible as
well in the emergence in the mid 1930s of two female Argentine
jazz singers. Both sang in English, copied the vocal styles of
well-known African American singers and took on stage names
that emphasized their connection with African American culture.
Lucy Bolognini Miguez, who performed as Lois Blue and was
often photographed in blackface, was celebrated for her 'compre
hension' of and 'affinity' for jazz music (see Plate 2).53 For her
part, Paloma Efron specialized in African American folk songs
and performed as Blackie, an English translation of'negrita', the
term that was so often affixed to female tango singers. This nick
name suggested the fundamental affinity between tango and jazz,
even as it signalled Paloma's identification with African American
culture. After achieving some success in Buenos Aires, Blackie
travelled to the United States in 1937 and spent three years study
ing African American music and culture. Although she sought out
'cultured' musicians like Ellington, she also studied folk music
51 All these articles are from a single issue: Sintonia, 9 Mar. 1935.
52 Sintonia, 24 June 1937.
53 Ibid., 14 Sept. 1935.
1. The jazz band of the Compania Argentina de Broadcasting.

From Sintonia, 2 Sept. 1933.
and travelled in Mississippi in order to get to know ordinary

African Americans and 'try to immerse [herself] in their simple
souls'.54
Blackie's idea of jazz as a sophisticated, modern music based on
a primitive folk culture was widespread in Argentina. According
to one letter-writer to Sintonia, the emotional core of jazz lay in
'the sadness of a race wounded by many years of suffering'.55
Bernardo Kordon, who frequently attacked jazz as a commercial
music that threatened to obliterate Argentina's native traditions,
ridiculed local disc jockeys for describing jazz records as 'an ex
pression of anguish or joy of the black race'.56 For its defenders,
though, jazz's roots in primitive music were a source of strength.
Leon Klimovsky argued that jazz 'is a rich stylization of the best
and most primitive folkloric elements . . . Where better to find
[inspiration] than in the uncontaminated health of its primitive
54 Ibid., 11 June 1941, 65. On Blackie, see also Sandra McGee Deutsch, Crossing
Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880-1955 (Durham,
NC, 2010), 101-4.
55 Sintonia, 23 Mar. 1935.
56 Ibid., 19 Apr. 1937. The magazine also printed a satire of this sort of jazz critic:
see ibid., 9 Feb. 1935.
language?' ' And if making sophisticated music out of primitive

folklore was the essence of jazz, then it was also the epitome of
modernity. In this sense, jazz offered a model that might be emu
lated by musicians working in other genres. In fact, commenta
tors often described tango musicians in much the same terms as
they did their jazz counterparts: both were engaged in transform
ing authentic folk culture into modern art. One magazine
described tango as 'urban folklore' and argued that 'folklore . . .
is the basis of all the great musical creations of the world'.58 In a
1938 radio script, the noted tango lyricist and screenwriter
Homero Manzi described Gardel's repertoire as 'folklore' that
might serve as 'the foundation for the great Argentine music'.59
For his part, Julio de Caro defended himself against the accus
ation that his 'modern orchestrations' would rob the tango of its
'traditional flavour', by arguing that the foxtrot and rumba had
both been orchestrated without losing their authenticity.60 In
short, the image of jazz as black, or at least as a sophisticated
music rooted in primitive black culture, legitimized tango
innovation.
The discourse of black folk authenticity that accompanied jazz
in Argentina helps explain how blackness acquired its populist
cachet in the tango world. While the virulent racism of the fin de
siecle worked to whitewash representations of Argentine national
identity, jazz pushed in the opposite direction. The notion that
jazz was rooted in the culture of downtrodden African Americans
— 'the sadness of a race wounded by many years of suffering' —
reinforced the link between blackness and ennobling poverty.
Populist colour nicknames like 'negro' and 'morocho' partici
pated in the same logic. The prominence of Afro-Argentines in
the tango milieu lent plausibility to tango's assertion of blackness,
but it was jazz that made this assertion desirable. In other words,
the white negros of tango were products of the 'jazz age' as it was
experienced in Argentina. Eventually, tango composers, lyricists
and performers would move beyond this vague affiliation with
phenotypical darkness into an explicit affirmation of Afro
Argentine popular culture.
57 Ibid., 15 Apr. 1937.

58 Rad.ioland.ia, 9 July 1938; 17 Aug. 1938.
59 Cited in Anibal Ford, Homero Manzi (Buenos Aires, 1971), 84.
60 Sintonia, 2 Sept. 1937.
2. Lois Blue (Lucy Bolognini Miguez). From Sintonia, 14 Sept. 1935.
IV
THE REDISCOVERY OF BLACKNESS
Inspired by the prominence of blackness in transnati

culture, a small but influential group of scholars began t
the history of the tango, foregrounding the contrib
Afro-Argentines. Despite its strong current of racist co
sion, Vicente Rossi's 1926 book Cosas de negros carefully
mented the Afro-Argentine musical culture of the nine
century and made the case for the essentially African r
the tango.61 Rossi's arguments were controversial but in
During the 1930s Bernardo Kordon wrote a series of art
Sintonia seeking to prove that 'tango is of pure African
For their part, Hector and Luis J. Bates, whose 1936 work La
historia del tango originated as a popular radio show, argued for the
hybrid origins of the tango. But they accepted Rossi's description
of the African roots of the milonga, a recognized precursor to the
tango, and they described the Afro-Argentine candombe as an
important contributor in its own right to the choreography,
rhythm and musical structure of the modern tango.63 By the
1930s the notion that people of African descent had helped to
create Argentina's most popular musical genre was no longer par
ticularly controversial. The widespread understanding of jazz as a
sophisticated elaboration on the crude musical practices of poor
African Americans legitimized this idea and even made it attract
ive: with verifiably black origins, tango could be every bit as
modern as jazz.
Similar transnational influences are apparent in the work of the
Uruguayan painter Pedro Figari, whose depictions of candombe
dances appeared at roughly the same time as Rossi's work. A
modernist well acquainted with the work of post-Impressionists
like Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, Figari lived and
worked in Paris from 1925 to 1933. His paintings of nine
teenth-century Afro-Uruguayan drummers and dancers were
Vicente Rossi, Cosas de negros: los orijenes del tango y otros aportes al folklore riopla
tense (1926; Buenos Aires, 1958). George Reid Andrews has emphasized Rossi's
racism, but others have pointed out that his primary intention was to uncover and
valorize the black contribution to Argentine culture: see Andrews, Afro-Argentines of
Buenos Aires, 213; Castro, Afro-Argentine in Argentine Culture, 83.
62 For Kordon's articles on the African origins of tango, see Sintonia, 6 and 13 May
1937 and 19 Aug. 1937, among others.
63 Hector and Luis J. Bates, La historia del tango, i (Buenos Aires, 1936).
shown frequently in Buenos Aires and in other Argentine cities.

Celebrated by Jorge Luis Borges among others, Figari's work
created an iconic image of blacks as an important part of the
past in the Rio de la Plata region. His interest in painting
black people betrayed a Utopian primitivism akin to that of Paul
Gauguin.64 Influenced by the European fascination with black
ness, Figari's paintings helped construct a black past for
Argentines to remember. Together with the writings of tango
scholars like Rossi, Kordon and the Bates brothers, these paint
ings assimilated the Argentine past to a transnational model in
which the primitive music and dance of black people represented
a vital precursor to a modern, European-dominated national
culture.
During the 1930s the project of recovering the Afro-Argentine
roots of contemporary popular culture crossed over from intel
lectual inquiry and avant-garde artistic production to commer
cial mass culture. Within the tango scene, it was most apparent in
the revival of the milonga, the up-tempo precursor to tango that
Rossi and others had linked to the candombe. Beginning in the
early 1930s, milongas regained their position on Porteno dance
floors and on the radio as tango bands increasingly featured them
in their repertoires. By the end of the decade the recovery of the
milonga had been explicitly linked to a renewed interest in the
Afro-Argentine culture of the past. In particular, Homero Manzi
had begun to write lyrics with Afro-Argentine themes for milon
gas by Sebastian Piana and by Lucio Demare: 'Pena mulata',
'Negra Maria' and 'Papa Baltasar', to name three of the most
well known. Other lyricists and composers quickly followed suit.
In 1941 the magazine Radiolandia signalled the importance of
this trend, declaring, 'the candombe is reborn within Argentine
dance'. Describing the work of Piana, Manzi, Demare and others,
the magazine was enthusiastic about this 'process of re-creating
the black Rio de la Plata': 'We point out these developments with
true joy. It is a way to renovate our songbook and open a path for
lyricists and composers that will furnish more than one poetic and
musical surprise'.65 The milonga renaissance was partly a re
sponse to those who believed that New Guard composers had
Marianne Manley, Intimate Recollections of the Rio de la Plata: Paintings by Pedro

Figari, 1861-1938 (New York, 1986); the comparison to Gauguin is on p. 14. See also
Solomianski, Identidades secretas> 235-7.
65 Radiolandia> 7 June 1941.
238 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 21 6
forsaken the essence of the tango in their rush to imitate jazz.

For these proponents of traditionalism, black cultural elements
linked the new music to an authentic Argentine past. But milon
ga's connection to the candombe and to Afro-Argentine culture
more generally functioned as more than just a guarantee of na
tional authenticity. It also anchored and explicated the milonga's
reassertion of rhythm. Radiolandia situated the new music in the
context of an international boom in African-derived musical
genres from Brazil, Cuba and the United States.66 The rise of
Brazilian samba, Cuban son and American swing in the 1930s
represented a 'liberation of the drum' throughout the Americas.
The milonga's quicker tempo and more syncopated rhythm —
understood as essentially African characteristics — made it a
logical choice for bands looking to compete in this new environ
ment.67 The black candombe provided tango composers with
what the blues gave their counterparts in jazz: primitive source
material for a modern, heavily rhythmic dance music.
This renewed interest in the Afro-Argentine culture of the past
also influenced radio theatre and cinema. In the 1930s serial
melodramas set in the Rosas period were a staple on radio broad
cast schedules and invariably featured black characters and
ostensibly Afro-Argentine music.68 Similarly, tango films set in
the seedy arrabales of Buenos Aires used black extras in the same
way they used old-fashioned clothing: as an easy way to provide
a 'period' feel.69 By the 1940s the candombe had entered the cin
ema. Pampa barbara (Demare and Fregonese, 1945), a drama set
in the 1840s, features the candombe 'Calun Gangue', composed
by Lucio Demare with lyrics by Homero Manzi, who also
co-wrote the screenplay. In a scene set in a Buenos Aires tavern,
a multiracial crowd dances as black drummers and guitarists
accompany a black singer, played by the white actress Maria
Esther Gamas wearing dark make-up. According to Gamas, the
6 According to Robert Farris Thompson, Piana himself was inspired by these

international musical trends: see Thompson, Tango, 131.
67 'Liberation of the drum' is a phrase coined by Ned Sublette, Cuba and its Music:
From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago, 2004), 433.
68 See, for example, Hector Pedro Blomberg and Daniel Viale Paz, Bajo la santa
federacion: romances de la tirania (novela radiotelefdnica) (Buenos Aires, [1930s]).
69 Both Tango (Moglia Barth, 1933) and Riachuelo (Moglia Barth, 1934), two of the
earliest Argentine sound films, contain images of white men dancing with black
women: Currie Thompson, 'From the Margins to the Margins: The Representation
of Blacks in Classic Argentine Cinema', Post Script, xxix (2009), 5.
film-makers cast her as the candombe singer because she was then
performing in a stage version of Richard Wright's Native Son', if
she was convincing as a North American black woman, they fig
ured, she should have no problem playing an Afro-Argentine.70
The inclusion of a candombe lent credibility to the film-makers'
re-creation of the Argentine past, but the choice to cast a white
actress because of her performance as an African American
woman reveals the transnational logic of the turn to blackness
in Argentine mass culture.
The black-themed milongas of the late 1930s and early 1940s,
virtually all of which were written by whites, probably bore only
the most general resemblance to actual Afro-Argentine musical
traditions.71 Instead these songs used a variety of transnational
musical and lyrical devices to signal their connection to African
diasporic culture. These devices included call-and-response song
structure, the use of percussion instruments including hand
drums, and onomatopoeic lyrics, as well as choruses featuring
words chosen more for their rhythmic properties than for their
meanings.72 Lyrically, many of the songs traffic in nostalgia,
describing Afro-Argentine culture as a thing of the past. In
Homero Exposito's 'Azabache' ('Jet Black', 1942), a black
speaker uses stereotypical speech patterns — the 'r's pronounced
as Ts — to profess his love for a black woman:
Ay, morenita, tus ojos Ay, moremta, your eyes
son como luz de azabache! Are like jet-black light!
Tu cala palece un suerio Your face is like a dream
un suerio de chocolate! A dream of chocolate!
Candombe! j Candombe negro! Candombe! Black candombe!

Nostalgia de gente pobre Nostalgia of poor people
Por las calles de San Telmo On the streets of San Telmo
ya se ha perdido el candombe.7 The candombe has been lost.
Cesar Maranghello, Artistas argentinos asociados: la epopeya trunca (Buenos Aires,

2002), 130. The first film version of Wright's book was actually made in Argentina in
1951: see Thompson, 'From the Margins to the Margins', 7-8.
71 The one Afro-Argentine actively involved in composing black-themed milongas
in this period was Enrique Maciel, the long-time song-writing partner of Hector Pedro
Blomberg. Blomberg and Maciel wrote a great many songs for the singer Ignacio
Corsini, some of which featured Afro-Argentine themes. It is worth noting, though,
that it was the white Blomberg who wrote the lyrics. See Raul Lafuente, 'Enrique
Maciel', Todo Tango, <http://www.todotango.com/spanish/creadores/emaciel.asp>
(accessed 29 Mar. 2012).
72 Cirio, 'La presencia del negro en grabaciones de tango y generos afines', 39-40.
73 See n. 31 above.
In addition to nostalgia, many milongas emphasized the poverty

and suffering of Afro-Argentines, while others depicted blacks as
predisposed to singing, dancing and joyous celebration. These
stereotypes had Argentine precursors, but they were also quite
common elsewhere in the Americas.
As well as reproducing old stereotypes, the commercial
repackaging of the Afro-Argentine past revitalized the link
between blackness and an explicitly class-based populism. In
other words, the subversive implications of the Afro-Argentine
revival tended to be displaced from race to class. Micol Seigel has
shown how Afro-Brazilian musicians were able to take advantage
of the international vogue for blackness in the 1920s, improving
their status and raising the prestige of their music.74 By contrast,
in Argentina black musicians were a visible but tiny minority.
In this context, international trends had a very different impact.
On the one hand, the valorization of Afro-Argentine traditions
was made less threatening by the fact that it could be depicted as
re-creating a culture that had disappeared. Yet, on the other, the
absence of a large black community meant that racial signs floated
free of local referents and were thus available for resignification.
Sympathy for the suffering Afro-Argentines of the past could in
dicate sympathy for the downtrodden of the present.
In fact, the new candombe-milongas of the 1940s had a clear
anti-elitist message. This association was particularly apparent in
the repertoire of Alberto Castillo, the biggest tango star of the
1940s and 1950s. Despite being a physician from a middle-class
family, Castillo cultivated an explicitly lower-class style and per
sona. The lyrics to his 1942 hit 'Asi se baila el tango' ('That's How
to Dance the Tango') were peppered with lunfardo and proudly
insisted on the genre's connections to the poor: 'tQue saben los
pitucos, lamidos y shushetas, que saben lo que es tango, que
saben de compas?' ('What do rich boys, dandies and fops know
about tango, what do they know about rhythm?'). On stage,
Castillo punctuated this line by throwing punches like a boxer,
celebrating the aggressive masculinity of his popular audience
and symbolically knocking out the rich. In 1943 he embarked
on a solo career, leaving Ricardo Tanturi's band when the recently
installed military government prohibited the use of lunfardo on
the radio. Faced with this ban on 'improper' words, Castillo
Seigel, Uneven Encounters, ch. 3.
needed a new means of expressing his affiliation with the poor;

he found it in the candombe revival. The following year Castillo
recorded Osvaldo Sosa Cordero's 'Charol' ('Patent Leather'),
a candombe about an impoverished black cart-driver. 'Charol'
was a big hit, and Castillo would go on to record dozens of can
dombes.75 The most aggressively populist of tango singers had
become the singer most clearly identified with Afro-Argentine
music.
After Peron s assumption of power in 1946, Castillo's populist
take on the tango fitted well with the new regime. Meanwhile, his
predominantly working-class audience and his ostentatious class
pride earned him the hostility of the anti-Peronist middle class.
Castillo typically performed in the gaudy ties and wide lapels
of a divito, proudly adopting a declasse sartorial style associated
with Peron's followers.76 The cartoonist Guillermo Divito origin
ally developed this exaggerated image in order to poke fun at
lower-class tangueros, but they responded by embracing the
style. Interestingly, the divito suit had both transnational and
racial referents. One of Divito's colleagues remembered that the
cartoonist had been inspired by 'the elegant clothing of the
Harlem blacks in movies'.77 The divito outfit, worn by Alberto
Castillo as a symbol of his affiliation with the working class, was
essentially a zoot suit. Fans of Osvaldo Pugliese, a major tango
composer and bandleader of the 1940s, were also known to dress
in the divito style. The zoot suit's African American associations
resonated with the African-inspired music of Pugliese numbers
like 'Negracha' ('Black Woman', 1948).78
In his stage shows Castillo performed his candombes accom
panied by Afro-Argentine and Afro-Uruguayan dancers and
drummers. When he became a movie star after 1946, he wasted
little time in bringing the candombe to the screen. In the film Un
tropezon cualquiera da en la vida ('Anyone Can Stumble in Life',
Romero, 1949), Castillo plays a humble and kind-hearted guy
On Castillo's performance of'Asi se baila el tango', see Jose Pedro Aresi, 'Alberto
Castillo, el cantor de los milongueros (El tango es danza de rango)', Todo Tango,
<http://www.todotango.com/spanish/biblioteca/CRONICAS/acastillo.asp> (ac
cessed 29 Mar. 2012). On his adoption of the candombe, see Hector Angel
Benedetti, 'Evolucion: siguiendo a Castillo los bailarines dibujaban sobre el piso', in
album notes to Alberto Castillo, Tango de coleccion, no. 10 (Buenos Aires, 2005).
76 Horacio Salas, El tango (Buenos Aires, 1995), 290-7.
7/ Pablo de Santis, Rico Tipoy las chicas de Divito (Buenos Aires, 1993), 71.
78 Thompson, Tango, 201-2.
from the barrios, a role he would reprise in virtually all his eight
een films. In this case, his character also happens to be a promis
ing tango singer, and in the film's final scene he gets the chance to
perform on the radio before a live audience. With a large black
chorus behind him, he sings 'Candombero', whose lyrics, by Luis
Alberto Carballo, hint at Castillo's complex relationship with
blackness. Alternating with the chorus, Castillo sings:
Hay que poner atencion You have to pay attention
Atencion, atencion! Attention, attention!
Candombe va a comenzar, Candombe is about to begin,
A reir, a gozar, Let's laugh, let's enjoy,
Hay que ser de mi color You have to be my colour
; Su color, su color! His colour•, his colour!
Para poderlo bailar. To be able to dance it.
Castillo s character insists that only black people can d

candombe, while the singers in the chorus seem to lend him
their cultural authority. Since the black faces of those behind
him actually call attention to Castillo's whiteness, this is not an
attempt at passing as black. Instead, this overt identification with
long-suffering yet joyful black people reinforces Castillo's popu
list stance.80 Similarly, the tango 'Moneda de cobre' ('Copper
Coin', 1942), a staple of Castillo's repertoire with the Tanturi
band, links tango's embrace of the plebeian world of the barrios
with a positive valorization of blackness. The lyrics, by Horacio
Sanguinetti, tell the familiar story of a poor young woman who
acquires wealth and status in a cabaret before being discarded
when she gets old and loses her looks. In this version, though,
the woman is a beautiful mulatta, a 'bronze queen', who is now
cruelly labelled 'copper coin' because she is old and worthless.
Castillo s populist affiliation with blackness, like Argentina's
mass cultural re-encounter with blackness more generally, was
a performance in dialogue with the transnational. His candombes
relied heavily on drums, instruments notably absent in tango
recordings before this period. This use of percussion as well as
the music's deep syncopation enabled Castillo's candombes to
sound convincingly like an Argentine contribution to the menu
<http://www.hermanotango.com.ar/Letras%20270707/CANDOMBERO%20
cand.htm> (accessed 29 Mar. 2012).
80 As Currie Thompson has pointed out, several Argentine films of the 1940s and
1950s have heroes who defend blacks mistreated by racist rich people: Thompson,
'From the Margins to the Margins', 7.
of rhythmic dance genres popular throughout the Americas. Of

these foreign styles, the Cuban son, or rumba as it was known in
the United States and in Argentina, was most similar to the new
candombe, and it was no accident that Castillo became closely
associated with performers of this genre. He performed alongside
the Cuban singer and dancer Blanquita Amaro, and went on to
co-star in three films with Amaro's chief rival in Argentina, the
Cuban 'rumbera' Amelita Vargas. Produced in the 1950s, these
musical comedies included both 'rumba' and candombe, and
they made Castillo's music and performance style seem modern
and cosmopolitan.81
CONCLUSION
As Alberto Castillo's career indicates, positive images of

ness circulated widely in Argentina's transnational mass
of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, particularly in connect
tango. Through these images, the tango was construc
sophisticated, modern dance music built out of primitiv
raw materials. Although North American influence was
this process did not constitute simple Americanization. N
did tango retain its own distinctive sonorities, dance ste
lyrical concerns, but the influence of jazz was also medi
local responses to the import. That is, Argentine audienc
artists made their own meanings out of jazz and the ima
blackness that accompanied it. Since the nineteenth c
whites had both scorned and admired black gauchos, com
and candomberos. Tango performers and composers now
on these images to create a music that was both modern
thentically Argentine. The resulting associations betwee
ness and tango implied a populist national identity that w
explicitly contrasted to foreign imitations: the real Argen
not the country of the rich kids who danced the foxtrot, bu
'negros', both black and white, who invented the tango.
Peronist rhetoric echoed the populism and nationalism
discourse, an affinity that accounts for Castillo's associat
the regime. And yet some of the regime's iconography se
Roberto Selles, 'Alberto Castillo', Todo Tango, <http://www.todotan

spanish/creadores/acastillo.asp> (accessed 29 Mar. 2012).
push in the other direction. In particular, Evita's famous bleached

blonde look appears on its surface to reflect a very different aes
thetic. However, a closer inspection reveals that Evita's self
presentation was deeply informed by the association between
blackness and populism. In 1944 the radio and movie actress Eva
Duarte was a brunette who had begun a very public affair with the
minister of war, Colonel Juan Peron. She was cast in a supporting
role in the film La cabalgata del circo ('Circus Parade'), and she
dyed her hair for the part. As her film career ended and her pol
itical career began, her blonde hair became a key element in her
public image. The rags-to-riches story that was so much a part
of Evita's image — her ascent from illegitimate birth and relative
poverty to wealth and power — was figured symbolically in her
transformation from humble brunette to prestigious and power
ful blonde.
The artificiality of Evita s hair colour was as important as its
blondeness. As one of her biographers notes, her blonde hair did
not look natural; it was 'a theatrical and symbolic gold' that
seemed to give her a halo, even as it signified 'wealth and social
ascent'.82 In 'Oro falso' ('Fool's Gold'), a tango written the very
same year that Evita became a blonde, the lyricist, Homero
Exposito, explained the logic. The song describes another legend
ary blonde, a beautiful cabaret dancer named 'La rubia Mireya':
Mireya jamas rue rubia. Mireya was never blonde,
porque Mireya crecio sin luna, Because Mireya grew up without a moon,
su juventud de risa y canciones Her youth of laughter and song
lleno de tangos el barrio mas pobre, Filled the poorest barrio with tangos.
Morocha esta en la historia de mi She is morocha in the history of my

pueblo. people.
El oro del cabello es oro falso. The gold of her hair is fool's gold.
Exposito's lyric associates the dark morocha with both poverty

and national authenticity. In his version, dark hair belongs in the
barrios, while blondeness is associated with the frivolous and dan
gerous world of the cabaret. In the same way, Evita's blondeness
called attention to the authentic Argentine morocha underneath
her artificial coiffure. Her dyed hair let her have it both ways:
she could be an exalted and privileged blonde, while deep down
Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, Eva Peron: A Biography, trans. Shawn Fields (New York,
1997), 79.
83 See n. 31 above.
she remained a humble brunette. Through this performance,

she embodied the idea that under Peronism the noble and
long-suffering poor could attain the status of the blondes of the
¿?
Argentine elite.
In their appeals to the symbolism of colour, the Perons were
making use of an existing discourse, rather than inventing a new
one. As this article has shown, the populist associations of terms
like 'negro' precede Peronism by at least a couple of decades. In
fact, I would argue that the snobs who disdained mestizo migrants
to Buenos Aires were responding to this populism. In the tango
milieu, in particular, white artists who wanted to signal their af
filiation with the poor had already created a black identity for
themselves. Colour words like 'morocho' and 'negro' already
referred to dark phenotype, lower-class status and a counter
hegemonic national identity; it was only natural for elites to
apply them to the dark-skinned lumpen that had invaded their
city. Of course, the tango was not the exclusive cultural patrimony
of the poor. New Guard musicians offered elite and middle-class
audiences a form of tango that avoided the allusions to blackness
favoured by Alberto Castillo. Moreover, like their ancestors,
who blackened their faces to dance candombe in the streets of
Buenos Aires, Argentine elites of the 1940s could be simultan
eously dismissive of, and attracted to, the blacks beneath them
in the social hierarchy.
George Mason University Matthew B. Karush

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The Past and Present Society

BLACKNESS IN ARGENTINA: JAZZ, TANGO AND RACE BEFORE PERÓN

On the question of race and nation, the dominant Latin Ame

of endearment. Equally mysteriously, the insult usually alludes to

Enrique Garguin, '"Los argentinos descendemos de los barcos": articulation

representations of Argentine blackness circulated widely on the

GAUCHOS, PAYADORES, AND CARNIVAL TROUPES:

For more than a hundred years after Argentina won its in

Matthew B. Karush, Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of

from the population of African descent. In his famous short story

See Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley, 1991), 142-3.

Solomianski, Identidades secretas, 166-70.

Slums, Cortazzo, 1918), the black protagonist is a powerful

the intricacies of candombe, they performed a crude, mocking

Argentine national identity. Despite the deep current of racism

BLACKS AND BLACKNESS IN THE TANGO

Afro-Argentines also played crucial roles in the musical and

17 Jornada, 22 Oct. 1931, 9. Censored by the Uriburu dictatorship, Critica briefly

comment on their race." At a time when endemic racism pres

El Negro Ferreyra made dozens of films over a career that

Despite a superficial similarity, this phenomenon was quite dif

25 On the absence of blackness in Ferreyra's oeuvre, see Solomianski, Identidades

bars of the poor arrabales of Buenos Aires. Their artistic identities

Grande fue mi culpa, negro mio. My guilt was great, my negro.

'Negro here is a casual term of endearment, but it also marks

origins of star players. Manuel Seoane, one of the biggest soccer

THE MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF JAZZ

Representations of blackness did not exist in a hermetically

33 Critica, 17 May 1928, 2; 18 May 1928, 9; 24 May 1928, 10.

continued to be outnumbered by foreign imports: the forty-nine

On Hollywood's penetration of the Argentine film market, see Jorge Alberto

all music programmes on the radio were dedicated to jazz. " In

Caro played a violin-cornet specially designed for him by tech

white, the visit to Buenos Aires of Sam Wooding s New York

Pujol, Jazz al sur, 29-33, 44-7.

failed to mention their race. They considered black musicians as a

1. The jazz band of the Compania Argentina de Broadcasting.

and travelled in Mississippi in order to get to know ordinary

language?' ' And if making sophisticated music out of primitive

57 Ibid., 15 Apr. 1937.

THE REDISCOVERY OF BLACKNESS

Inspired by the prominence of blackness in transnati

shown frequently in Buenos Aires and in other Argentine cities.

Marianne Manley, Intimate Recollections of the Rio de la Plata: Paintings by Pedro

forsaken the essence of the tango in their rush to imitate jazz.

6 According to Robert Farris Thompson, Piana himself was inspired by these

Candombe! j Candombe negro! Candombe! Black candombe!

Cesar Maranghello, Artistas argentinos asociados: la epopeya trunca (Buenos Aires,

In addition to nostalgia, many milongas emphasized the poverty

Seigel, Uneven Encounters, ch. 3.

needed a new means of expressing his affiliation with the poor;

Castillo s character insists that only black people can d

of rhythmic dance genres popular throughout the Americas. Of

As Alberto Castillo's career indicates, positive images of

Roberto Selles, 'Alberto Castillo', Todo Tango, <http://www.todotan

push in the other direction. In particular, Evita's famous bleached

Morocha esta en la historia de mi She is morocha in the history of my

Exposito's lyric associates the dark morocha with both poverty

she remained a humble brunette. Through this performance,

George Mason University Matthew B. Karush

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