Race in Buenos Aires. Blackness, Whiteness, African Descent and Mestizaje in the White Capital City

Abstract

This article analyzes how racial categories are produced and reproduced in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital city. To that end, this article focuses on the cases of three Afro-Descendant porteña women who, by local standards, are fully white.  Their stories allow us to explore, in the first place, how categories like “black,” “white,” and others are used and understood in contemporary Buenos Aires and how this use configures two types of blackness (racial blackness and popular blackness) and makes it impossible for mestizaje categories to emerge. In the second place, through these cases this article explores how people’s very “ways of being” are at play, creating a discriminatory and oppressive environment for people at risk of not matching the ideal of the nation.