blackness in argentina jazz, tango and race before peron

BLACKNESS IN ARGENTINA:JAZZ, TANGO AND RACE

BEFORE PERON*

On the question of race and nation, the dominant Latin Americanparadigm has never applied to Argentina. In Mexico, Brazil andelsewhere, twentieth-century nationalists crafted ideologies ofmestizaje that broke with European and North Americanmodels 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 nationalidentities that were at least as exclusionary as those producedby their North American counterparts. The only mixtures theycountenanced were those that followed from European immigra-tion. Just as the United States was a ‘melting pot’, Argentina was acrisol de razas (crucible of races), in which Spaniards, Italians andother immigrant groups were fused into a new nation. This ideol-ogy, visible in the well-known aphorism that ‘Argentines descendfrom ships’, marginalized Argentines of indigenous and Africandescent and eventually erased them from national consciousness.As George Reid Andrews showed over thirty years ago, thealleged disappearance of the once-substantial Afro-Argentinepopulation of Buenos Aires was at least as much the product ofthis ideological manoeuvre as it was the result of miscegenation,war and disease. Only recently has Argentina’s status as a whitenation begun to be openly contested.1

Nevertheless, even if non-whites have been pushed off thehistorical stage, race remains a pervasive category in Argentinesociety. 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, AndreaMatallana 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,‘Introduccion’, in Monica Quijada, Carmen Bernand and Arnd Schneider,Homogeneidad y nacion: con un estudio de caso. Argentina, siglos XIX y XX (Madrid,2000), 9.

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of endearment. Equally mysteriously, the insult usually alludes toindigenous rather than African ancestry. Typically, these usagesare traced to the Peronist era. During his first two terms in office(1946–55), Juan Peron built a powerful working-class movementthat challenged the nation’s hierarchies. Peron’s opponents at-tacked his followers in racial terms, labelling them cabecitasnegras (little blackheads) or simply negros, epithets aimed at thedark-skinned and black-haired migrants from the Argentine in-terior who had been pouring into Buenos Aires since the late1930s in search of industrial jobs. By applying the term ‘black’to these largely mestizo migrants and conflating this raciallydefined group with the working class and with the followers ofPeron, anti-Peronists constructed their own identity in both classand racial terms: they were middle-class, and they were white.2

Peronists, for their part, responded by embracing the racial slursdirected at them, just as they did with more obviously classistinsults like descamisado (shirtless one) and grasa (greaser).3

Historians have convincingly demonstrated the relevance ofthese racial categories to Peronist and anti-Peronist identities,yet they have had surprisingly little to say about the historicalprocess that produced this outcome. How was it that words thathad once been used to describe Afro-Argentines came to beapplied to Peronist workers?4

In the pages that follow, I unpack this history by exploring rep-resentations that circulated in mass culture during the crucialdecades preceding Peron’s rise to power. My examination ofthis mass culture yields two surprising findings. First,

2 Enrique Garguin, ‘ ‘‘Los argentinos descendemos de los barcos’’: articulacionracial de la identidad de clase media en Argentina (1920–1960)’, in Sergio EduardoVisacovsky and Enrique Garguin (eds.), Moralidades, economıas e identidades de clasemedia: estudios historicos 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 andOscar Chamosa (eds.), The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity inMid-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 andAlejandro Solomianski have underscored the significance of race and racism inmodern Argentine history: see Alejandro Frigerio, ‘ ‘‘Negros’’ y ‘‘blancos’’ enBuenos Aires: repensando nuestras categorıas raciales’, in Leticia Maronese (ed.),Buenos Aires negra: identidad y cultura (Buenos Aires, 2006), 88–93; AlejandroSolomianski, Identidades secretas: la negritud argentina (Rosario, 2003), 255–7.

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representations of Argentine blackness circulated widely on theradio and in the cinema in this period, particularly, though notexclusively, in connection with tango, the nation’s most popularmusical genre. Blackness had not yet been purged from the iden-tity of this allegedly white nation. Secondly, these images werebased on earlier popular cultural traditions, but they evolved indialogue with foreign imports. The mass cultural marketplace ofthe 1920s and 1930s was fundamentally transnational: since con-sumers had access to the latest imports from the United Statesand 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 racialimages accompanied the music, including the idea of blackness asa source of primitive authenticity and of black people as a nobleand long-suffering race. Under the powerful influence of thisprestigious 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 industriesproduced new representations in which blackness signalled anaffiliation with the poor. Thus, it was before the era of massiveinternal migration and before the rise of Peron that the hereticalmeanings of blackness were displaced onto class.

I

GAUCHOS, PAYADORES, AND CARNIVAL TROUPES:

AFRO-ARGENTINES IN POPULAR CULTURE

For more than a hundred years after Argentina won its independ-ence from Spain, cultural representations of black people weremarked by ambivalence. For Europhile liberal intellectuals whoconceived of the national story as a struggle between civilizationand barbarism, Afro-Argentines epitomized the latter. Between1835 and 1852, when the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas domi-nated Argentina, exiled liberals attacked him as the culminationof the nation’s savagery and cultural backwardness. Particularlygalling to the liberals was the support that Rosas seemed to enjoy

5 Matthew B. Karush, Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a DividedArgentina, 1920–1946 (Durham, NC, 2012). For an excellent study of the impact oftransnational culture on race in the Brazilian context, see Micol Seigel, UnevenEncounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham, NC,2009).

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from the population of African descent. In his famous short story‘El matadero’ (‘The Slaughterhouse’, 1838), Esteban Echeverrıadepicts the followers of Rosas as a violent, primitive and largelyblack mob, fighting over the intestines and brains of slaughteredcattle and terrorizing Rosas’s noble opponents.6 The image ofAfro-Argentines as treacherous supporters of Rosas became astaple of liberal literature. More broadly, antipathy to Afro-Argentines and to other non-whites helped motivate liberalenthusiasm 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 Elgaucho Martın Fierro (1872), read by generations of Argentineschoolchildren, is a case in point. The poem tells the story of anhonourable gaucho who is pressed into the federal army in orderto fight the Indians on the frontier. Hernandez, who ferventlyopposed the centralizing liberal governments of his day, offers anostalgic account of life in the pampas, a denunciation of thecorruption and greed of elites and a vigorous defence of thepoor but noble gauchos. In the poem’s most famous passage, adrunk Martın Fierro calls a black woman a cow and, in the duelthat ensues, kills the black gaucho who defends her honour. Theracism of the scene is impossible to deny. Fierro is a heroic char-acter with whom readers identify, and while no justification isgiven for his violent behaviour here, it is clearly legitimized bythe racial inferiority of his opponent. On the other hand, asAmy Kaminsky points out, Hernandez depicts the black charac-ters as ‘fully human’. The woman is quick-witted, responding toFierro’s insults in kind, while the man demonstrates the bravery ofa true gaucho.7 In Hernandez’s sequel, La vuelta de Martın Fierro(‘The Return of Martın Fierro’, 1879), Fierro, back from theIndian wars, encounters ‘el moreno’, the brother of the blackgaucho he murdered. Instead of a violent confrontation, thetwo face off in a payada, a musical duel in which two guitar-playing troubadours (payadores) try to outdo each otherwith improvised rhyming verses and riddles. As AlejandroSolomianski has argued, what is striking about the contest is theessential equality of the competitors; ‘el moreno’ matches Fierro

6 See Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley, 1991), 142–3.7 Amy K. Kaminsky, Argentina: Stories for a Nation (Minneapolis, 2008), 115, 113.





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rhyme for rhyme and riddle for riddle.8 By including these sym-pathetic portrayals of black characters, Hernandez carved out aspace for Afro-Argentines within the nation — a subordinatespace 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 nativistcelebration of rural tradition. Pulp fiction told tales of renegadegauchos, while the so-called criollo circus offered equestrianacrobatics, clowning and musical melodramas.9 These entertain-ments featured black characters prominently, and they purveyedboth racism and the more positive sentiments visible in MartınFierro. Most often, Afro-Argentines were the butt of jokes. Forexample, as the clown Pepino el 88, the Uruguayan actor JosePodesta, who virtually invented the criollo circus, performed aseries of ethnic stereotypes for comic effect. Among them wereAfro-Argentine characters ridiculed for putting on airs, tryingand failing to impress with fancy verbiage.10

The thriving popular theatre of the 1910s and 1920s tended toset its stories in the city, but its depiction of Afro-Argentinesreproduced the ambivalence of criollismo. In the short playsknown as sainetes, blacks were typically presented either as buf-foons or as criminals. As Donald Castro has argued, the presenceof Afro-Argentine characters in these plays followed from the factthat they took place in the conventillos (tenements) of the BuenosAires arrabales (slums), where Afro-Argentines remained a realpresence.11 The chief comic ploy of the sainete was ethnic stereo-type, a characteristic it inherited both from Spanish mannerismand from the circus humour of Podesta and others. Sainete writersmade fun of Italian, Spanish, Jewish and Middle Eastern immi-grants; the stereotype of the Afro-Argentine criminal fitted rightin. Positive depictions of Afro-Argentines tended to follow fromtheir association with criminality. In the play El Pardo Flores:escenas del arrabal (‘Flores the Black Guy: Scenes from the

8 Solomianski, Identidades secretas, 166–70.9 On criollista fiction, see Adolfo Prieto, El discurso criollista en la formacion de la

Argentina moderna (Buenos Aires, 1988). On the criollo circuses, see John CharlesChasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American PopularDance (Albuquerque, 2004), ch. 4.

10 My discussion of the representation of Afro-Argentines in criollista literature, thecircus and the sainete relies heavily on Donald S. Castro, The Afro-Argentine inArgentine Culture: el negro del acordeon (Lewiston, 2001), 71–2, 105–35.

11 Ibid., 132.





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Slums’, Cortazzo, 1918), the black protagonist is a powerfulcrime boss who is feared and respected and who demonstratesa certain moral fibre at the end of the play.12 Plays like this onedrew 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 blackgauchos, there were black compadritos. Racism persisted, yetAfro-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 otherpopular cultural practice generated representations of blackness:the pre-Lenten carnival. The tradition of candombes, publicdances organized by the neo-African societies or ‘nations’ ofBuenos Aires, stretches back to the colonial period in the Rıode la Plata region. After independence, Argentina’s liberal elitestried to crack down on these dances, while their nemesis, thedictator Rosas, encouraged and even attended them. Duringthe 1860s and 1870s the institution of the candombes began todecline, as did the associated forms of music and dance, alsoknown as candombe. Younger blacks increasingly rejected thesetraditions 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 theBuenos Aires carnival, but, surprisingly, those who performed itwere white. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s thousands of eliteyoung men, some with the most prestigious surnames inArgentina, 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

12 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, Sainetecriollo: democracia, representacion. 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 BuenosAires de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX’, in Hilda Sabato and Alberto Lettieri(eds.), La vida polıtica en la Argentina del siglo XIX: armas, votos y voces (BuenosAires, 2003). Marıa Guimarey, ‘Influencia afroamericana en los carnavales riopla-tenses: estudio comparativo de los corsos de Buenos Aires y Montevideo en la segundamitad del siglo XIX’, Telondefondo, no. 6 (2007), 5http://www.telondefondo.org/numeros-anteriores/6/numero64(accessed 29 Mar. 2012).





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the intricacies of candombe, they performed a crude, mockingimitation of Afro-Argentine dance.14

The vogue for blackface was a transnational phenomenon. Ablackface Spanish-language version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin playedin Buenos Aires in 1856, and a number of other North Americanblackface performers visited the city in the 1860s, including thefamous Christy Minstrels.15 Yet, unlike the North American min-strel shows, blackface carnival performances in Buenos Aireswere not a working-class entertainment. Instead, these were priv-ileged young men enjoying the transgressive atmosphere of thecarnival. Through their songs, performers impersonated blackmen lamenting their sad life or describing failed attempts at ro-mance with white women. Blackface carnival troupes poked funat black dance steps, singing styles, speech patterns and dress. Atthe 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 disdainand admiration for Afro-Argentines, while situating them firmlyin 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 ofblack guitarists and payadores, for example, continued into thetwentieth century. Perhaps the most famous payador, the Afro-Argentine Gabino Ezeiza, died in Buenos Aires in 1916. Thetabloid newspaper Crıtica depicted Ezeiza as a popular hero,rescuing his remains from an unmarked grave. In 1931, on theeve 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 mentionEzeiza’s ethnicity, the large drawing that accompanied the articlemade it clear that this ‘criollo improviser’ was of African descent.Just as Jose Hernandez had done in Martın Fierro nearly sixtyyears before, Crıtica’s discussion of Ezeiza linked blackness and

14 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.





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Argentine national identity.17 Despite the deep current of racismand mockery directed at them, Afro-Argentines continued to berecognized for their contributions to Argentine culture.

II

BLACKS AND BLACKNESS IN THE TANGO

Afro-Argentines also played crucial roles in the musical andchoreographic development of the tango. As John Chasteen andothers have demonstrated, the word ‘tango’ originally referred tothe dance styles of Afro-Argentines, and well into the twentiethcentury blacks continued to be associated with the genre.18

The early tango milieu included quite a few performers ofAfrican descent. Many of the great innovators of tango dancewere Afro-Argentine, including Luis Marıa Cantero, known asEl Negro Pavura.19 Likewise, Robert Farris Thompson has iden-tified thirty-five black musicians who were active in the tangoscene in Buenos Aires between 1890 and 1930. Among themost famous were the guitarist Jose Ricardo, who accompaniedthe legendary tango star Carlos Gardel from 1915 until 1928, thetango composer and musician Enrique Maciel, and the influentialbass player Leopoldo Thompson. Several of the earliest tangocomposers were also Afro-Argentine, including AnselmoRosendo Mendizabal and Placido Simoni Alfaro.20 Likewise,the pioneering Argentine film director Jose Agustın Ferreyra,whose movies often featured tangos and explored the marginalurban milieu associated with the genre, was the son of anAfro-Argentine mother and a white father.21

Not only were many of these artists well known, but so was thefact that they were black. Nearly all of them had nicknames thatidentified their race, including ‘el negro’, ‘el mulato’ and ‘elpardo’. 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, Crıtica brieflypublished 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’: un cine por instinto (Buenos Aires,

1969).





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comment on their race.22 At a time when endemic racism pres-sured many mixed-race people to pass as white, Afro-Argentineswere acknowledged as legitimate and often expert practitioners oftango. Of course, the tango field was hardly a racial utopia. Aphotograph of the Afro-Argentine tango pianist and composerPlacido Simoni Alfaro in the music magazine La CancionModerna was accompanied by the headline ‘Un morocho quetiene el alma blanca’ (‘A dark guy who has a white soul’).23

This formulation, common in Argentina and elsewhere in LatinAmerica, suggested a sort of honorary whiteness, implying that aperson of African descent was worthy despite his or her race.

Early tango songs celebrated masculine aggression and the cultof courage in much the same way as criollista literature and thesainete. However, the advent of modern mass culture transformedthe tango, leading to significant shifts in the images of blacknessthat 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 withManuelita Poli’s performance of ‘Mi noche triste’ (‘My SadNight’, 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 fortheir works in favour of the cabaret. For their part, tango lyricistsnow obsessively revisited the melodramatic story of the humblegirl from the barrios seduced and eventually ruined by the brightlights of downtown.24 The move away from the bravado and vio-lence of the arrabales narrowed the space previously available forrepresentations of Afro-Argentines. The black compadritos andcriminals that had featured in so many early sainetes became lessprominent. Despite the ubiquity of black tango artists, Argentineradio and cinema had little room for representations of blackness.

22 See, for example, the photograph of Luis Marıa Cantero in La Cancion Moderna,3 Sept. 1928, and the photograph of Enrique Maciel with the singing star IgnacioCorsini in Radiolandia, 7 June 1941.

23 La 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 AiresStage Plays, 1919’, unpubd paper, 2009. On the tango’s ‘fallen woman’ theme, seeDiego Armus, ‘Tango, Gender, and Tuberculosis in Buenos Aires, 1900–1940’, inDiego Armus (ed.), Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria toAIDS (Durham, NC, 2003), 103–10.





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El Negro Ferreyra made dozens of films over a career thatspanned the silent and the sound era, yet none of them addressedAfro-Argentine topics or even featured black actors. Similarly,the tangos written by black composers did not refer to Africa orblackness either lyrically or musically.25 Tango provided Afro-Argentine artists with the opportunity to express their Argentineidentity, not their blackness.

But even if Afro-Argentine characters and themes were nowless visible, blackness had an undeniable cachet in the tangoworld, where ‘el negro’ became a common nickname, even forartists who were not of African descent. These ‘white negros’included Celedonio Flores, one of the foremost tango lyricistsof the 1920s, the bandleader and composer Ernesto de la Cruz,and the legendary dancer El Negro Lavandina, whose real namewas Salvador Sciana.26 Likewise, female tango singers with noapparent biological link to Africa, including Rosita Quiroga andSof ıa Bozan, were often called ‘la negra’. A letter to the editorprinted in the fan magazine Sintonıa referred to the singerMercedes Simone as ‘la simpatica negrita’,27 while CeledonioFlores called her ‘la negrucha’.28 The two uses of the nickname‘negro’ — to refer to people of African descent and to refer topeople associated with the popular world of the tango — wereconnected: Jose Ricardo, Leopoldo Thompson and Jose AgustınFerreyra were Afro-Argentines, but they were also members ofthe tango scene, and the presence of Afro-Argentines in thismilieu enabled the extension of the term ‘negro’ to white tangomusicians.

Despite a superficial similarity, this phenomenon was quite dif-ferent from the blackface carnival troupes of the late nineteenthcentury. The white negros of tango were not elites play-acting atblackness during a special time of the year set aside for such trans-gression. Rather, they were participating in a discourse of tangoauthenticity, which traced the genre’s origins to the brothels and

25 On the absence of blackness in Ferreyra’s oeuvre, see Solomianski, Identidadessecretas, 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 generosafines’, in Maronese (ed.), Buenos Aires negra, 27.

26 Interestingly, there is some debate regarding El Negro Lavandina’s race. RobertFarris Thompson argues that the dancer was probably Afro-Argentine: seeThompson, Tango, 252.

27 Sintonıa, 1 July 1933.28 La Cancion Moderna, 30 Apr. 1928.





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bars of the poor arrabales of Buenos Aires. Their artistic identitiesinvolved a commitment to the cultural practices that sprang fromthis milieu, and the nickname ‘negro’ signalled that affiliation.In fact, this use of racial language only made sense as a reactionto 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 lowcondition’, while ‘negrear’ was slang for having sex with suchwomen. Elite opponents of the politician Hipolito Yrigoyen,who won the presidency in 1916, referred to the followers of theRadical Party leader as ‘negreros radicales’, implicitly likeningthem to the Afro-Argentine supporters of Rosas in the previouscentury.30

By contrast, in the tango lexicon ‘negro’ was an affectionatenickname with a clearly populist connotation. Calling a glamor-ous star like Sof ıa Bozan ‘la negra’ was a way of stressing herconnection to the plebeian world from which the tango sprang.Celedonio Flores, El Negro Cele, earned his nickname from hisdeep empathy for the poor and his commitment to making poetryout of lunfardo, the disreputable lower-class slang of BuenosAires. The populist usage of ‘negro’ was also visible in tangolyrics. Enrique Cadıcamo’s tango ‘La negra del arrabal’, forexample, describes a poor woman who is as ‘proud as a queen’.In ‘Oıme negro’ (‘Listen to Me, Negro’, 1928), written andperformed by Rosita Quiroga, the singer is a well-worn tangostereotype: a young woman from a humble barrio who hasallowed herself to be seduced by a wealthy playboy. Now repent-ant, she pleads for forgiveness from the poor but noble man whomshe once ridiculed:

Grande fue mi culpa, negro mıo. My guilt was great, my negro.Tarde comprendı 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 manypues, quizas, de distraccion.31 Perhaps as a distraction.

29 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’ ofthe Todo Tango website,5http://www.todotango.com/spanish/biblioteca/letras4(ac-cessed 29 Mar. 2012). All translations of tango lyrics are my own.





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‘Negro’ here is a casual term of endearment, but it also marksthe class distinction between the good man she left and the richone who led her astray. Pride in popular cultural practices thatwere disdained by Argentine elites was a central element intango’s appeal, and the term ‘negro’ effectively expressed thispopulism.

‘Negro’ was not the only term used in this way. The bandleaderFrancisco Canaro gave the singing star Azucena Maizani the nick-name Azabache (‘Jet Black’).32 The name described Maizani’sdark hair, but, like ‘negro’, ‘azabache’ also commonly referred topeople of African descent and, as a result, had a populist ring.Similarly, Afro-Argentines were often called ‘morocho’, as in thecase of Placido Simoni Alfaro, the morocho with a white soul, butthe term could also be applied to whites. ‘El morocho del Abasto’,one of Carlos Gardel’s most common nicknames, linked thisvague reference to darkness with Gardel’s roots in a lower-classneighbourhood 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 earlyclassics was ‘La morocha’ (Saborido and Villoldo, 1905), whoselyrics celebrate the passionate and faithful lover of the prototyp-ical Argentine gaucho. On one level, the song simply describes abrunette, 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 tangorepertoire throughout the 1930s and 1940s. As late as 1951 thetheme was revisited in the tango ‘El patio de la morocha’ (Moresand Castillo). Unsurprisingly, this version links the morocha tothe poor but beloved neighbourhoods of the past, but it alsostresses 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 tangomilieu. The 1920s witnessed the explosion of soccer as a massspectator sport, and the sport soon came to rival the tango forpopular appeal. Sports reporters, particularly those who wrotefor the enormously popular tabloid Crıtica, used words like‘morocho’ and ‘negro’ to describe and celebrate the humble

32 Francisco Canaro, Mis bodas de oro con el tango y mis memorias, 1906–1956(Buenos Aires, 1957).





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origins of star players. Manuel Seoane, one of the biggest soccerstars 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 Crıtica’s editor, the writer Pablo RojasPaz 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 forCarlos Gardel and the white ‘negros’ of tango; they expressedpride in popular culture and thereby connected these figures totheir non-elite fans. Of course, an unselfconscious racism per-sisted in sports as well. Crıtica described Alejandro de los Santos,an Afro-Argentine who played for the Buenos Aires soccer teamHuracan, as ‘un negro lindo’ and illustrated a brief story abouthim with several thick-lipped, smiling caricatures.35 The articlepraised de los Santos’s soccer skills and his good sportsmanship,but the cartoons were clearly mocking. The persistence of thismore traditional racial logic gave the affectionate use of ‘negro’ aheretical charge.

III

THE MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF JAZZ

Representations of blackness did not exist in a hermeticallysealed national space. At the most basic level, Argentine attitudesabout race bore the imprint of classification schemes, prejudicesand stereotypes that originated in Europe. More specifically, thenineteenth-century Argentine vogue for blackface reveals theearly influence of North American racial attitudes and culturalpractices. During the 1920s and 1930s this influence grew expo-nentially. As a result of Argentina’s economic development, aswell as of the advent of the cinema, the phonograph and theradio, local consumers were incorporated into transnationalmass cultural circuits to an unprecedented extent. Hollywoodstudios were particularly aggressive in their pursuit of theArgentine market, nearly destroying their domestic competitionduring the 1920s. The Argentine film industry recovered afterthe introduction of sound in 1933, but even then local products

33 Crıtica, 17 May 1928, 2; 18 May 1928, 9; 24 May 1928, 10.34 See Pedro Orgambide, Todos tenıamos veinte anos (Buenos Aires, 1985), 109.35 Jornada, 1 Sept. 1931, 9.





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continued to be outnumbered by foreign imports: the forty-ninedomestic movies released in 1940 represented just 10 per cent ofthe total number of films shown in the country that year.36

Foreign players also dominated the recording industry. TheNorth American companies Victor, Columbia and Brunswick,together with the German conglomerate Odeon, controlled themarket, selling both their extensive foreign catalogues and theirrecordings of local acts.37 Finally, the explosion of commercialradio broadcasting during the 1920s created another conduit forforeign cultural influence. By the middle of the 1930s there wereover a million radio sets in Argentina, or roughly one for every tenpeople. In the city of Buenos Aires alone, more than twenty radiostations broadcast throughout the day, and foreign music had asignificant presence on most of them.38 This flood of importedmass culture exposed Argentines to foreign attitudes, tastes andlifestyles, exerting a powerful influence on local ideas about race.

Among the most influential of these imported cultural productswas jazz. Argentines were introduced to this new brand of dancemusic in 1918, when the Victor recordings of Paul Whiteman’sband and of the Benson Orchestra became available in BuenosAires.39 Within just a few years, tango bandleaders like RobertoFirpo and Francisco Canaro as well as singers like Gardelincluded foxtrots and ‘shimmies’ in their repertoire.40 By theearly 1930s dozens of local bands specialized in jazz, NorthAmerican jazz bands toured the country and the entertainmentmagazines 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 waseasily the second most popular genre. In 1936, 20 per cent of

36 On Hollywood’s penetration of the Argentine film market, see Jorge AlbertoSchnitman, ‘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 (BuenosAires, 1994), 180–5.

38 Robert Howard Claxton, From Parsifal to Peron: Early Radio in Argentina, 1920–1944 (Gainesville, 2007), 146, 149; Andrea Matallana, ‘Locos por la radio’: una historiasocial de la radiofonıa en la Argentina, 1923–1947 (Buenos Aires, 2006).

39 Sergio Pujol, Jazz al sur: 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.





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all music programmes on the radio were dedicated to jazz.42 InArgentina jazz acquired two sets of associations. As a NorthAmerican import, jazz music was a powerful symbol of modernityand cosmopolitan fashion. However, by the 1930s Argentinesalso came to see jazz as a black musical genre, or at least onewith deep roots in black culture. Both these associations — jazzas modern and jazz as black — informed the way Argentinesthought about their nation’s most popular musical form — thetango — and, by extension, their own identity.

The jazz and tango booms in Argentina were contemporan-eous, since both resulted from the development of the newmass cultural technologies in the first few decades of the twentiethcentury. In other words, when tango began to take shape as agenre on stage, on recordings and on the radio, jazz constitutedan influential part of the entertainment landscape. The prestige ofjazz shaped audience expectations and preferences. Having beenexposed to the latest US hits, Argentine audiences expectedrecordings of local music to live up to North American produc-tion standards, and they responded to tangos that shared certainmusical affinities with jazz. The biggest jazz star of the late 1920swas the white bandleader Paul Whiteman, and his refined, tech-nically sophisticated ‘concert-hall sound’ epitomized modernityfor Argentine listeners.43 In order to compete with records likethese, Argentine musicians needed to offer music that emulatedtheir orchestral sophistication and danceability, which in this con-text functioned as aural signifiers of modernity.

During the 1920s a generation of innovative bandleadersknown as the New Guard transformed tango into a sophisticated,modern dance music, taking jazz as their model.44 The NewGuard included Osvaldo Fresedo and Juan Carlos Cobian, butit was most clearly associated with the violinist and bandleaderJulio de Caro. De Caro sought to elevate tango’s musicality bybroadening its use of harmony and counterpoint and, later, bycreating a symphonic tango, but his image as an innovator andmodernizer 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: una historia (Buenos Aires, 1992), 45–9; Luis Adolfo Sierra, Historiade la orquesta tıpica: evolucion instrumental del tango (Buenos Aires, 1985), 90–7.Neither of these accounts emphasizes the influence of jazz.





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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 themusical quality of tango were a self-conscious response to whathe saw as the ‘serious threat’ posed by jazz.46 He intended todemonstrate that the tango, ‘like waltzes or jazz’, could be thebasis for a sophisticated music.47 In the light of these efforts, deCaro was often described as an Argentine Paul Whiteman.48

Faced with the status of jazz as modern music par excellence,Argentine cultural producers tended to emphasize tango’snational authenticity. The opening montage of Los tres berretines(Susini, 1933), one of Argentina’s first sound films, sets imagesof congested city streets to a Duke Ellington recording. But, withthe 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’ (popularpassions) of the film’s title, alongside soccer and the movies.Tango’s association with both the popular and the national wasa recurring theme in Argentine movies. In Gente bien (‘DecentPeople’, Romero, 1939), a poor girl is seduced, impregnated andabandoned by a selfish aristocrat before being rescued by a groupof humble musicians. The melodramatic opposition between thegood poor and the evil rich is signified musically: the musiciansprefer to play tangos, but the wealthy revellers they play for wouldrather do ‘gringo’ dances like the foxtrot.

Jazz was thus modern, foreign and the preferred dance music ofsnobbish elites, but these were not the genre’s only associations.By the late 1920s the genre was also increasingly associated withblackness. Although the first jazz bands heard in Argentina were

45 For one contemporary critic who does link de Caro’s innovations to jazz, see JulioNudler, ‘Julio de Caro: tango y vanguardia’, in Fernando D’Addario et al., Musicaargentina: la mirada de los crıticos (Buenos Aires, 2005), 45–8. On de Caro’s ‘violin-cornet’, see Julio de Caro, El tango en mis recuerdos: su evolucion en la historia (BuenosAires, [1964]), 51–2.

46 Sintonıa, 2 Sept. 1937.47 De Caro, El tango en mis recuerdos, 98.48 Sintonıa, 2 Mar. 1935; 2 Sept. 1937. Similarly, another member of the New

Guard, the ‘master of the modernist tango’ Juan Carlos Cobian, was said to havebrought back innovations from a trip to North America: La Cancion Moderna, 2 July1928.





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white, the visit to Buenos Aires of Sam Wooding’s New York-based band in 1927 exposed Argentines directly to AfricanAmerican jazz musicians. Two years later Josephine Baker, the‘Black Venus’ who had gained such notoriety in Paris, performedon stage and on the radio in the Argentine capital.49 Baker’sAfrican sexuality was as exotic and as scandalous in Argentinaas it had been in Europe. One Porteno reviewer compared her to amonkey, but also called her ‘the symbol of the rhythm of thecurrent moment’, thereby linking her simultaneously to savageryand modernity. To describe Baker’s performance, the reviewerresorted to a local analogy: ‘A beautiful and shiny black bodythat shakes rudely and wildly, to the candombe sound (al soncandombero) of horns played by other blacks with a simianair’.50 The critic made sense of this novel phenomenon by assim-ilating it to a piece of local tradition. He fixed the same exoticizinggaze on Baker as the blackface carnival troupes of the nineteenthcentury had on Afro-Argentine candomberos. A similar exoti-cism is visible in the caricatures of smiling black people thatlocal jazz bands often painted on their bass drums (see Plate 1).Like blackface performance, these images were ambivalent: as aracist gesture, the cartoon figures underscored the distance thatseparated 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, thesebands needed to remind their audiences of the blackness oftheir music.

The growing influence of African American bandleaders in theUnited States during the swing era of the 1930s reshaped the wayjazz was received abroad. In Argentina jazz aficionados prized therecords of artists such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington,Coleman Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson. The immensetalents 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

49 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: presencia y negacion (Buenos Aires, 2001), 202.





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failed to mention their race. They considered black musicians as acategory apart. One typical article labelled Ellington ‘the firstfigure of black jazz’, while another discussed the business prac-tices of ‘the black trumpeter and singer Luis [sic] Armstrong’.According to the jazz reviewer for Sintonıa, the latest release bythe Fletcher Henderson Orchestra had ‘all the characteristics ofblack ‘‘swings’’ [sic]’, namely, an emphasis on rhythm and onsoloing. 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 thisexample’.51 The Argentine jazz critic Leon Klimovsky arguedthat only Ellington had fully succeeded in making serious musicout of jazz. As a result, ‘all jazz with artistic pretensions revolvedaround the absorbing influence of Duke Ellington’. But evenKlimovsky saw something of the natural, untutored genius inEllington, who betrayed ‘the brilliant audacity of the intuitive’.52

In short, the prominence of African American jazz musiciansreignited the Argentine interest in blackness, even as it creatednew opportunities for discussion and meditation on the questionof race.

This fascination with North American blackness is visible aswell in the emergence in the mid 1930s of two female Argentinejazz singers. Both sang in English, copied the vocal styles ofwell-known African American singers and took on stage namesthat emphasized their connection with African American culture.Lucy Bolognini Mıguez, who performed as Lois Blue and wasoften photographed in blackface, was celebrated for her ‘compre-hension’ of and ‘affinity’ for jazz music (see Plate 2).53 For herpart, Paloma Efron specialized in African American folk songsand performed as Blackie, an English translation of ‘negrita’, theterm 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 Americanculture. After achieving some success in Buenos Aires, Blackietravelled 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: Sintonıa, 9 Mar. 1935.52 Sintonıa, 24 June 1937.53 Ibid., 14 Sept. 1935.





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and travelled in Mississippi in order to get to know ordinaryAfrican Americans and ‘try to immerse [herself] in their simplesouls’.54

Blackie’s idea of jazz as a sophisticated, modern music based ona primitive folk culture was widespread in Argentina. Accordingto one letter-writer to Sintonıa, 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 commercialmusic 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 bestand most primitive folkloric elements . . . Where better to find[inspiration] than in the uncontaminated health of its primitive

1. The jazz band of the Companıa Argentina de Broadcasting.From Sintonıa, 2 Sept. 1933.

54 Ibid., 11 June 1941, 65. On Blackie, see also Sandra McGee Deutsch, CrossingBorders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880–1955 (Durham,NC, 2010), 101–4.

55 Sintonıa, 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.





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language?’57 And if making sophisticated music out of primitivefolklore was the essence of jazz, then it was also the epitome ofmodernity. 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 asthey did their jazz counterparts: both were engaged in transform-ing authentic folk culture into modern art. One magazinedescribed tango as ‘urban folklore’ and argued that ‘folklore . . .is the basis of all the great musical creations of the world’.58 In a1938 radio script, the noted tango lyricist and screenwriterHomero Manzi described Gardel’s repertoire as ‘folklore’ thatmight 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 hadboth been orchestrated without losing their authenticity.60 Inshort, the image of jazz as black, or at least as a sophisticatedmusic rooted in primitive black culture, legitimized tangoinnovation.

The discourse of black folk authenticity that accompanied jazzin Argentina helps explain how blackness acquired its populistcachet in the tango world. While the virulent racism of the fin desiecle worked to whitewash representations of Argentine nationalidentity, jazz pushed in the opposite direction. The notion thatjazz 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 inthe 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 wasexperienced in Argentina. Eventually, tango composers, lyricistsand performers would move beyond this vague affiliation withphenotypical darkness into an explicit affirmation of Afro-Argentine popular culture.

57 Ibid., 15 Apr. 1937.58 Radiolandia, 9 July 1938; 17 Aug. 1938.59 Cited in Anıbal Ford, Homero Manzi (Buenos Aires, 1971), 84.60 Sintonıa, 2 Sept. 1937.





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2. Lois Blue (Lucy Bolognini Mıguez). From Sintonıa, 14 Sept. 1935.




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IV

THE REDISCOVERY OF BLACKNESS

Inspired by the prominence of blackness in transnational massculture, a small but influential group of scholars began to rewritethe history of the tango, foregrounding the contributions ofAfro-Argentines. Despite its strong current of racist condescen-sion, Vicente Rossi’s 1926 book Cosas de negros carefully docu-mented the Afro-Argentine musical culture of the nineteenthcentury and made the case for the essentially African roots ofthe tango.61 Rossi’s arguments were controversial but influential.During the 1930s Bernardo Kordon wrote a series of articles inSintonıa seeking to prove that ‘tango is of pure African origin’.62

For their part, Hector and Luis J. Bates, whose 1936 work Lahistoria del tango originated as a popular radio show, argued for thehybrid origins of the tango. But they accepted Rossi’s descriptionof the African roots of the milonga, a recognized precursor to thetango, and they described the Afro-Argentine candombe as animportant contributor in its own right to the choreography,rhythm and musical structure of the modern tango.63 By the1930s the notion that people of African descent had helped tocreate Argentina’s most popular musical genre was no longer par-ticularly controversial. The widespread understanding of jazz as asophisticated elaboration on the crude musical practices of poorAfrican Americans legitimized this idea and even made it attract-ive: with verifiably black origins, tango could be every bit asmodern as jazz.

Similar transnational influences are apparent in the work of theUruguayan painter Pedro Figari, whose depictions of candombedances appeared at roughly the same time as Rossi’s work. Amodernist well acquainted with the work of post-Impressionistslike Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, Figari lived andworked in Paris from 1925 to 1933. His paintings of nine-teenth-century Afro-Uruguayan drummers and dancers were

61 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’sracism, but others have pointed out that his primary intention was to uncover andvalorize the black contribution to Argentine culture: see Andrews, Afro-Argentines ofBuenos Aires, 213; Castro, Afro-Argentine in Argentine Culture, 83.

62 For Kordon’s articles on the African origins of tango, see Sintonıa, 6 and 13 May1937 and 19 Aug. 1937, among others.

63 Hector and Luis J. Bates, La historia del tango, i (Buenos Aires, 1936).





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shown frequently in Buenos Aires and in other Argentine cities.Celebrated by Jorge Luis Borges among others, Figari’s workcreated an iconic image of blacks as an important part of thepast in the Rıo de la Plata region. His interest in paintingblack people betrayed a utopian primitivism akin to that of PaulGauguin.64 Influenced by the European fascination with black-ness, Figari’s paintings helped construct a black past forArgentines to remember. Together with the writings of tangoscholars like Rossi, Kordon and the Bates brothers, these paint-ings assimilated the Argentine past to a transnational model inwhich the primitive music and dance of black people representeda vital precursor to a modern, European-dominated nationalculture.

During the 1930s the project of recovering the Afro-Argentineroots 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 inthe revival of the milonga, the up-tempo precursor to tango thatRossi and others had linked to the candombe. Beginning in theearly 1930s, milongas regained their position on Porteno dancefloors and on the radio as tango bands increasingly featured themin their repertoires. By the end of the decade the recovery of themilonga had been explicitly linked to a renewed interest in theAfro-Argentine culture of the past. In particular, Homero Manzihad begun to write lyrics with Afro-Argentine themes for milon-gas by Sebastian Piana and by Lucio Demare: ‘Pena mulata’,‘Negra Marıa’ and ‘Papa Baltasar’, to name three of the mostwell known. Other lyricists and composers quickly followed suit.

In 1941 the magazine Radiolandia signalled the importance ofthis trend, declaring, ‘the candombe is reborn within Argentinedance’. Describing the work of Piana, Manzi, Demare and others,the magazine was enthusiastic about this ‘process of re-creatingthe black Rıo de la Plata’: ‘We point out these developments withtrue joy. It is a way to renovate our songbook and open a path forlyricists and composers that will furnish more than one poetic andmusical surprise’.65 The milonga renaissance was partly a re-sponse to those who believed that New Guard composers had

64 Marianne Manley, Intimate Recollections of the Rıo de la Plata: Paintings by PedroFigari, 1861–1938 (New York, 1986); the comparison to Gauguin is on p. 14. See alsoSolomianski, Identidades secretas, 235–7.

65 Radiolandia, 7 June 1941.





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forsaken the essence of the tango in their rush to imitate jazz.For these proponents of traditionalism, black cultural elementslinked the new music to an authentic Argentine past. But milon-ga’s connection to the candombe and to Afro-Argentine culturemore generally functioned as more than just a guarantee of na-tional authenticity. It also anchored and explicated the milonga’sreassertion of rhythm. Radiolandia situated the new music in thecontext of an international boom in African-derived musicalgenres from Brazil, Cuba and the United States.66 The rise ofBrazilian samba, Cuban son and American swing in the 1930srepresented a ‘liberation of the drum’ throughout the Americas.The milonga’s quicker tempo and more syncopated rhythm —understood as essentially African characteristics — made it alogical choice for bands looking to compete in this new environ-ment.67 The black candombe provided tango composers withwhat the blues gave their counterparts in jazz: primitive sourcematerial for a modern, heavily rhythmic dance music.

This renewed interest in the Afro-Argentine culture of the pastalso influenced radio theatre and cinema. In the 1930s serialmelodramas set in the Rosas period were a staple on radio broad-cast schedules and invariably featured black characters andostensibly Afro-Argentine music.68 Similarly, tango films set inthe seedy arrabales of Buenos Aires used black extras in the sameway they used old-fashioned clothing: as an easy way to providea ‘period’ feel.69 By the 1940s the candombe had entered the cin-ema. Pampa barbara (Demare and Fregonese, 1945), a drama setin the 1840s, features the candombe ‘Calun Gangue’, composedby Lucio Demare with lyrics by Homero Manzi, who alsoco-wrote the screenplay. In a scene set in a Buenos Aires tavern,a multiracial crowd dances as black drummers and guitaristsaccompany a black singer, played by the white actress MarıaEsther Gamas wearing dark make-up. According to Gamas, the

66 According to Robert Farris Thompson, Piana himself was inspired by theseinternational 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 santafederacion: romances de la tiranıa (novela radiotelefonica) (Buenos Aires, [1930s]).

69 Both Tango (Moglia Barth, 1933) and Riachuelo (Moglia Barth, 1934), two of theearliest Argentine sound films, contain images of white men dancing with blackwomen: Currie Thompson, ‘From the Margins to the Margins: The Representationof Blacks in Classic Argentine Cinema’, Post Script, xxix (2009), 5.





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film-makers cast her as the candombe singer because she was thenperforming in a stage version of Richard Wright’s Native Son; ifshe 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 whiteactress because of her performance as an African Americanwoman reveals the transnational logic of the turn to blacknessin Argentine mass culture.

The black-themed milongas of the late 1930s and early 1940s,virtually all of which were written by whites, probably bore onlythe most general resemblance to actual Afro-Argentine musicaltraditions.71 Instead these songs used a variety of transnationalmusical and lyrical devices to signal their connection to Africandiasporic culture. These devices included call-and-response songstructure, the use of percussion instruments including handdrums, and onomatopoeic lyrics, as well as choruses featuringwords chosen more for their rhythmic properties than for theirmeanings.72 Lyrically, many of the songs traffic in nostalgia,describing Afro-Argentine culture as a thing of the past. InHomero Exposito’s ‘Azabache’ (‘Jet Black’, 1942), a blackspeaker uses stereotypical speech patterns — the ‘r’s pronouncedas ‘l’s — to profess his love for a black woman:

¡Ay, morenita, tus ojos Ay, morenita, your eyesson como luz de azabache! Are like jet-black light!Tu cala palece un sueno Your face is like a dream¡un sueno de chocolate! A dream of chocolate!. . . . . .¡Candombe! ¡Candombe negro! Candombe! Black candombe!Nostalgia de gente pobre Nostalgia of poor peoplePor las calles de San Telmo On the streets of San Telmoya se ha perdido el candombe.73 The candombe has been lost.

70 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 in1951: see Thompson, ‘From the Margins to the Margins’, 7–8.

71 The one Afro-Argentine actively involved in composing black-themed milongasin this period was Enrique Maciel, the long-time song-writing partner of Hector PedroBlomberg. Blomberg and Maciel wrote a great many songs for the singer IgnacioCorsini, 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, ‘EnriqueMaciel’, Todo Tango, 5http://www.todotango.com/spanish/creadores/emaciel.asp4(accessed 29 Mar. 2012).

72 Cirio, ‘La presencia del negro en grabaciones de tango y generos afines’, 39–40.73 See n. 31 above.





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In addition to nostalgia, many milongas emphasized the povertyand suffering of Afro-Argentines, while others depicted blacks aspredisposed to singing, dancing and joyous celebration. Thesestereotypes had Argentine precursors, but they were also quitecommon elsewhere in the Americas.

As well as reproducing old stereotypes, the commercialrepackaging of the Afro-Argentine past revitalized the linkbetween blackness and an explicitly class-based populism. Inother words, the subversive implications of the Afro-Argentinerevival tended to be displaced from race to class. Micol Seigel hasshown how Afro-Brazilian musicians were able to take advantageof the international vogue for blackness in the 1920s, improvingtheir 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 traditionswas made less threatening by the fact that it could be depicted asre-creating a culture that had disappeared. Yet, on the other, theabsence of a large black community meant that racial signs floatedfree 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 clearanti-elitist message. This association was particularly apparent inthe repertoire of Alberto Castillo, the biggest tango star of the1940s and 1950s. Despite being a physician from a middle-classfamily, Castillo cultivated an explicitly lower-class style and per-sona. The lyrics to his 1942 hit ‘Ası se baila el tango’ (‘That’s Howto Dance the Tango’) were peppered with lunfardo and proudlyinsisted on the genre’s connections to the poor: ‘¿Que saben lospitucos, lamidos y shushetas, que saben lo que es tango, quesaben de compas?’ (‘What do rich boys, dandies and fops knowabout 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 audienceand symbolically knocking out the rich. In 1943 he embarkedon a solo career, leaving Ricardo Tanturi’s band when the recentlyinstalled military government prohibited the use of lunfardo onthe radio. Faced with this ban on ‘improper’ words, Castillo

74 Seigel, Uneven Encounters, ch. 3.





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needed a new means of expressing his affiliation with the poor;he found it in the candombe revival. The following year Castillorecorded 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 hadbecome the singer most clearly identified with Afro-Argentinemusic.

After Peron’s assumption of power in 1946, Castillo’s populisttake on the tango fitted well with the new regime. Meanwhile, hispredominantly working-class audience and his ostentatious classpride earned him the hostility of the anti-Peronist middle class.Castillo typically performed in the gaudy ties and wide lapelsof a divito, proudly adopting a declasse sartorial style associatedwith Peron’s followers.76 The cartoonist Guillermo Divito origin-ally developed this exaggerated image in order to poke fun atlower-class tangueros, but they responded by embracing thestyle. Interestingly, the divito suit had both transnational andracial referents. One of Divito’s colleagues remembered that thecartoonist had been inspired by ‘the elegant clothing of theHarlem blacks in movies’.77 The divito outfit, worn by AlbertoCastillo as a symbol of his affiliation with the working class, wasessentially a zoot suit. Fans of Osvaldo Pugliese, a major tangocomposer and bandleader of the 1940s, were also known to dressin the divito style. The zoot suit’s African American associationsresonated with the African-inspired music of Pugliese numberslike ‘Negracha’ (‘Black Woman’, 1948).78

In his stage shows Castillo performed his candombes accom-panied by Afro-Argentine and Afro-Uruguayan dancers anddrummers. When he became a movie star after 1946, he wastedlittle time in bringing the candombe to the screen. In the film Untropezon cualquiera da en la vida (‘Anyone Can Stumble in Life’,Romero, 1949), Castillo plays a humble and kind-hearted guy

75 On Castillo’s performance of ‘Ası se baila el tango’, see Jose Pedro Aresi, ‘AlbertoCastillo, el cantor de los milongueros (El tango es danza de rango)’, Todo Tango,5http://www.todotango.com/spanish/biblioteca/CRONICAS/acastillo.asp4 (ac-cessed 29 Mar. 2012). On his adoption of the candombe, see Hector AngelBenedetti, ‘Evolucion: siguiendo a Castillo los bailarines dibujaban sobre el piso’, inalbum notes to Alberto Castillo, Tango de coleccion, no. 10 (Buenos Aires, 2005).

76 Horacio Salas, El tango (Buenos Aires, 1995), 290–7.77 Pablo de Santis, Rico Tipo y las chicas de Divito (Buenos Aires, 1993), 71.78 Thompson, Tango, 201–2.





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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 toperform on the radio before a live audience. With a large blackchorus behind him, he sings ‘Candombero’, whose lyrics, by LuisAlberto Carballo, hint at Castillo’s complex relationship withblackness. Alternating with the chorus, Castillo sings:

Hay que poner atencion You have to pay attentionAtencion, atencion! Attention, attention!Candombe va a comenzar, Candombe is about to begin,A reır, 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.79 To be able to dance it.

Castillo’s character insists that only black people can dancecandombe, while the singers in the chorus seem to lend himtheir cultural authority. Since the black faces of those behindhim actually call attention to Castillo’s whiteness, this is not anattempt at passing as black. Instead, this overt identification withlong-suffering yet joyful black people reinforces Castillo’s popu-list stance.80 Similarly, the tango ‘Moneda de cobre’ (‘CopperCoin’, 1942), a staple of Castillo’s repertoire with the Tanturiband, links tango’s embrace of the plebeian world of the barrioswith a positive valorization of blackness. The lyrics, by HoracioSanguinetti, tell the familiar story of a poor young woman whoacquires wealth and status in a cabaret before being discardedwhen she gets old and loses her looks. In this version, though,the woman is a beautiful mulatta, a ‘bronze queen’, who is nowcruelly labelled ‘copper coin’ because she is old and worthless.

Castillo’s populist affiliation with blackness, like Argentina’smass cultural re-encounter with blackness more generally, wasa performance in dialogue with the transnational. His candombesrelied heavily on drums, instruments notably absent in tangorecordings before this period. This use of percussion as well asthe music’s deep syncopation enabled Castillo’s candombes tosound convincingly like an Argentine contribution to the menu

795http://www.hermanotango.com.ar/Letras%20270707/CANDOMBERO%20cand.htm4(accessed 29 Mar. 2012).

80 As Currie Thompson has pointed out, several Argentine films of the 1940s and1950s have heroes who defend blacks mistreated by racist rich people: Thompson,‘From the Margins to the Margins’, 7.





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of rhythmic dance genres popular throughout the Americas. Ofthese foreign styles, the Cuban son, or rumba as it was known inthe United States and in Argentina, was most similar to the newcandombe, and it was no accident that Castillo became closelyassociated with performers of this genre. He performed alongsidethe Cuban singer and dancer Blanquita Amaro, and went on toco-star in three films with Amaro’s chief rival in Argentina, theCuban ‘rumbera’ Amelita Vargas. Produced in the 1950s, thesemusical comedies included both ‘rumba’ and candombe, andthey made Castillo’s music and performance style seem modernand cosmopolitan.81

V

CONCLUSION

As Alberto Castillo’s career indicates, positive images of black-ness circulated widely in Argentina’s transnational mass cultureof the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, particularly in connection withtango. Through these images, the tango was constructed as asophisticated, modern dance music built out of primitive blackraw materials. Although North American influence was crucial,this process did not constitute simple Americanization. Not onlydid tango retain its own distinctive sonorities, dance steps andlyrical concerns, but the influence of jazz was also mediated bylocal responses to the import. That is, Argentine audiences andartists made their own meanings out of jazz and the images ofblackness that accompanied it. Since the nineteenth century,whites had both scorned and admired black gauchos, compadritosand candomberos. Tango performers and composers now drewon these images to create a music that was both modern and au-thentically Argentine. The resulting associations between black-ness and tango implied a populist national identity that was oftenexplicitly contrasted to foreign imitations: the real Argentina wasnot the country of the rich kids who danced the foxtrot, but of the‘negros’, both black and white, who invented the tango.

Peronist rhetoric echoed the populism and nationalism of thisdiscourse, an affinity that accounts for Castillo’s association withthe regime. And yet some of the regime’s iconography seemed to

81 Roberto Selles, ‘Alberto Castillo’, Todo Tango, 5http://www.todotango.com/spanish/creadores/acastillo.asp4(accessed 29 Mar. 2012).





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push in the other direction. In particular, Evita’s famous bleachedblonde 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 betweenblackness and populism. In 1944 the radio and movie actress EvaDuarte was a brunette who had begun a very public affair with theminister of war, Colonel Juan Peron. She was cast in a supportingrole in the film La cabalgata del circo (‘Circus Parade’), and shedyed her hair for the part. As her film career ended and her pol-itical career began, her blonde hair became a key element in herpublic image. The rags-to-riches story that was so much a partof Evita’s image — her ascent from illegitimate birth and relativepoverty to wealth and power — was figured symbolically in hertransformation from humble brunette to prestigious and power-ful blonde.

The artificiality of Evita’s hair colour was as important as itsblondeness. As one of her biographers notes, her blonde hair didnot look natural; it was ‘a theatrical and symbolic gold’ thatseemed to give her a halo, even as it signified ‘wealth and socialascent’.82 In ‘Oro falso’ (‘Fool’s Gold’), a tango written the verysame year that Evita became a blonde, the lyricist, HomeroExposito, explained the logic. The song describes another legend-ary blonde, a beautiful cabaret dancer named ‘La rubia Mireya’:

Mireya jamas fue 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 songlleno de tangos el barrio mas pobre, Filled the poorest barrio with tangos.. . . . . .Morocha esta en la historia de mi

pueblo.She is morocha in the history of my

people.El oro del cabello es oro falso.83 The gold of her hair is fool’s gold.

Exposito’s lyric associates the dark morocha with both povertyand national authenticity. In his version, dark hair belongs in thebarrios, while blondeness is associated with the frivolous and dan-gerous world of the cabaret. In the same way, Evita’s blondenesscalled attention to the authentic Argentine morocha underneathher artificial coiffure. Her dyed hair let her have it both ways:she could be an exalted and privileged blonde, while deep down

82 Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, Eva Peron: A Biography, trans. Shawn Fields (New York,1997), 79.

83 See n. 31 above.





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she remained a humble brunette. Through this performance,she embodied the idea that under Peronism the noble andlong-suffering poor could attain the status of the blondes of theArgentine elite.

In their appeals to the symbolism of colour, the Perons weremaking use of an existing discourse, rather than inventing a newone. As this article has shown, the populist associations of termslike ‘negro’ precede Peronism by at least a couple of decades. Infact, I would argue that the snobs who disdained mestizo migrantsto Buenos Aires were responding to this populism. In the tangomilieu, in particular, white artists who wanted to signal their af-filiation with the poor had already created a black identity forthemselves. Colour words like ‘morocho’ and ‘negro’ alreadyreferred to dark phenotype, lower-class status and a counter-hegemonic national identity; it was only natural for elites toapply them to the dark-skinned lumpen that had invaded theircity. Of course, the tango was not the exclusive cultural patrimonyof the poor. New Guard musicians offered elite and middle-classaudiences a form of tango that avoided the allusions to blacknessfavoured by Alberto Castillo. Moreover, like their ancestors,who blackened their faces to dance candombe in the streets ofBuenos Aires, Argentine elites of the 1940s could be simultan-eously dismissive of, and attracted to, the blacks beneath themin the social hierarchy.

George Mason University Matthew B. Karush





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blackness in argentina jazz, tango and race before peron

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