How Black Argentina Became White

Rachel Dolezal was a white woman who moonlighted as a Black woman for social acceptance. She claimed to be a transracial Black woman and even rose to be the chapter president of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington. Upon people discovering her organic white heritage, she was ridiculed for impersonating a Black woman. Many of us are unfamiliar with the fact that thousands of Black women masqueraded as white women before Rachel Dolezal, often for similar purposes. This is how Argentina became white.

Unlike many Latin American countries, 97% of Argentina's population is White. Amerindians make up 2.4% of the population, and only .4% are Afro-Argentine, the lowest of all Latin American countries. Yet, there was a time when the ethnic composition of Argentina was vastly comprised of Indigenous peoples and Africans. How did Argentina go from Africans representing 15% of the population in the middle of the 19th century to just 1% today? Some scholars argue that it was a consequence of survival by Black women.

Historian Erica Edwards argues that attempts by Black women to escape the stigma of blackness by recategorizing themselves and their descendants as white began as early as the late eighteenth century. That is to say that Black women in Argentina were well aware of the limits placed on them as Black women and found ways to transmogrify themselves into white women for social mobility and survival. Enslaved Black women in Argentina could achieve manumission for themselves and their children and ascend the social, political, and economic ladder through marriage, baptism, third-party manumissions, and learning a trade.

The government instituted draconian laws to control the upward mobility of African women. Because of these laws, Black women began to imitate non-Black women to rise to the status of la señora. Those of African descent were believed to have “bad blood.” Black women married Spanish men to navigate this prejudice and ascend the social hierarchy. The children of these Black women were considered free through the Free Womb Act, which declared that children born of free parents were liberated.

The government sought to institutionalize whiteness through the re-education of free and free African descendant girls. Black girls were enrolled into special schools that indoctrinated them with a new whiteness ideology while stripping them of their Black heritage and culture. The strategy was successful, and African girls were re-educated, bringing institutionalized whitening.

Black women attempted to resist and re-categorize themselves as white through various means to escape the stigma of blackness and subvert racial and social hierarchies in late eighteenth-century Argentina. From legal means to employing a marriage strategy to amalgamating identity, Black women used various strategies to amalgamate into whiteness. The causality of Black invisibility is due to intimate relationships between various actors, such as Spanish men, Black women, slaveholders, and political elites.