African descent and whiteness in Buenos Aires: Impossible mestizajes in the white capital city

Abstract

M. Mujica Lainez : Were all of our black people killed off during the war with Paraguay? When did they disappear? J.L. Borges : I can say something based on personal experience. In 1910 or 1912 it was common to see black people […] They were not killed off in our frontier wars nor in the Paraguayan war; but what happened to them later, I can't say […] M. Mujica Lainez : It's possible that their color faded [ puede ser que se hayan destenido ], and that many of the whites that we know are blacks. Manuel Mujica Lainez, Los portenos (1980), 27. In 1881, Jose Antonio Wilde – a renowned intellectual and doctor from the capital city of Buenos Aires – published his memoirs, Buenos Aires desde setenta anos atras , which would become a leading primary source for the study of the early post-independence period in the Argentine capital. Wilde portrayed the “mulatto” J. Antonio Viera, a celebrated nineteenth-century actor and singer, as follows: “His courteous demeanor and his manners left nothing to be desired, and as the saying goes, only his color was lacking [ el color no mas le faltaba ], or more accurately, he had an excess of it. ” In 2010, more than a hundred and thirty years after Wilde's book was first published, Paula, a portena (or resident of Buenos Aires city) who self-identifies as an Afro-descendant, said of herself in an interview: “Only my color is lacking [ a mi me falta el color nada mas ].” The extraordinary formal similarity between these two testimonies points to the historical persistence of a troubling relationship among perceived skin color, a supposedly expected “way of being,” and the (im)possibility of recognition and self-recognition within established social categories. For what does it mean for someone to lack or to have an excess of color ? In regard to what standard is someone's skin color judged to be too much or too little ? This verdict implies, among many other things, that there is something in that person – whether a “mulatto” or an “Afro-descendant” – that exceeds or does not fit into established social categories. In this chapter, I will explore this conceptual dislocation between appearances and ways of being, which, I argue, must be understood in relation to the absence of intermediate or mixed ( mestizo ) categories in Buenos Aires.