From Colonial Performers to Actors of ‘American Liberty’:Black Artists in Bourbon and Revolutionary Río de la Plata

Abstract

From the late eighteenth century through most of the nineteenth, Buenos Aires and Montevideo were hosts to a joint theatrical circuit characterized by the regular comings and goings of impresarios, artisans, musicians, and actors between the two cities. The military conflicts that shaped this period actually encouraged these connections, as they stimulated both exile and repatriation between one locale and the other. Africans, and particularly their Rioplatense descendants, were an integral part of popular entertainment circuits in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Some of the first Argentinean historians of theater and music, among them Vicente Gesualdo and Teodoro Klein, were aware of this connection and included in their initial scholarship links that connect the history of free and enslaved Afro-descendants to the early theater of Río de la Plata.