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14 - Nineteenth-Century Afro-Argentine Origins of Tango
- from Part IV - Interdisciplinary Tango Studies
- Edited by Kristin Wendland, Emory University, Atlanta, Kacey Link
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Tango
- Published online:
- 15 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 March 2024, pp 245-263
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Summary
Paulina L. Alberto uses original research about a multigeneration family of Black musicians to illustrate different stages of musical experimentation that fed into tango. In doing so, she sheds new light on the relationship between the Afro-Argentine musical and dance tradition of candombes and early tango, and she challenges the entrenched racial narrative of Afro-Argentine “disappearance” over the course of the nineteenth century.
Chapter 4 - Community Life
- Edited and translated by Paulina Laura Alberto, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, George Reid Andrews, University of Pittsburgh, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Book:
- Voices of the Race
- Published online:
- 25 August 2022
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- 01 September 2022, pp 160-195
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These articles represent a wide array of reporting in the Black press on social activities within the Black community.“Society” pages and local gossip columns provide an invaluable window into experiences of community life – including births, deaths, literary functions, and activities organized to support and sustain the papers themselves – that were, otherwise, rarely written into the historical record.For instance, readers sometimes turned to Black newspapers for help in locating missing family members. Contenders for leadership in Black organizations frequently criticized one another in the newspapers. Music and social dancing played a central role in coverage of community organizations. Dance parties could be celebrated as dignified and joyful or denounced as disreputable or unworthy. The interest that White compatriots took in Black dancing and music could be grounds for jubilation – signs that racial prejudice was eroding – for criticism of lax club leadership, for debates about whether to allow White men to attend dances in Black clubs, or for concern over performances of Carnival groups that reproduced harmful stereotypes.
Chapter 6 - Africa and African Culture
- Edited and translated by Paulina Laura Alberto, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, George Reid Andrews, University of Pittsburgh, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Book:
- Voices of the Race
- Published online:
- 25 August 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 September 2022, pp 229-254
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Views of Africa in the Black press evolved dramatically in the ninety years covered by this volume. The first generation of Afro-Latin American journalists had grown up with African parents and grandparents and were often sympathetic to their social and cultural practices. By the turn of the century doctrines of scientific racism, with their visions of Africans and their descendants as the bearers of genetic and cultural inferiority, led to much more negative views of Latin America's African heritage, even within the Black press. Emerging critiques of scientific racism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s produced a rehabilitation of that heritage, though some doubts persisted. Ethiopia’s tenacious resistance against Italian invasions in the 1890s and 1930s, the region’s role in World War II, and decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s further raised Africa’s profile and image in the Black papers.
Chapter 2 - Community (1880–1900)
- Paulina L. Alberto, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Book:
- Black Legend
- Published online:
- 06 January 2022
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- 06 January 2022, pp 71-122
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Later stories about Raúl claimed that his sad destiny was the result of his situation as the only son of a father who died prematurely. In sync with broader racial narratives of Black disappearance, the stories used the trope of orphandom to cast Raúl’s father as the dying Afro-Argentine community and Raúl as its last straggling offshoot. My story, by contrast, zeroes in on Raúl’s father Estanislao, who did not die young; in fact, in the 1880s and 1890s he was at the helm of his own large family in the Grigeras’ ancestral home. Estanislao was a member of the elite or “high life” of the city’s Afrodescendant community. He was a trained pianist, church organist, and classical composer who carried on, but also transformed, his male ancestors’ involvement with candombe into something more refined and acceptable. Although he did not write for the Black press that surged in Buenos Aires in these decades, he appears constantly in its pages in the company of many other Afro-Argentines, famous and unknown. Against the grain of contemporaneous narratives of near complete Black disappearance and later stories about Raúl, “Community” tells a rich story of a Black community at its peak: its newspapers, social organizations, Carnival bands, constant dance parties, courtship and romantic intrigue, and anti-racist activism. Reconstructing Estanislao’s life within this energetic community allows me to imagine the kinds of lessons about politics, masculinity, comportment, fashion, music, and revelry the young Raúl would have absorbed in his parents’ home. I also narrate the strains on this family as they, like their predecessors, struggled with disease, infant mortality, and racism. The chapter’s main theme is the role of elite Black cultural producers and intellectuals, like Raúl’s father, in bringing about the “disappearance” or invisibility of Afro-Argentines through their attempts to conform to cultural norms and avoid racial stereotypes and stories about “buffoonish” or “barbaric” Black people. Estanislao’s generation is key to understanding how the lines of race were redrawn between 1880 and 1900 – at the height of an extremely conservative form of liberalism – to produce a seemingly homogeneous, yet internally stratified, White nation. It was their politics of Black respectability and assimilation, in concert with broader social transformations, that laid the groundwork for Raúl to appear in later stories as a forlorn anomaly. Raúl rejected these politics of respectability, leading to conflict with his father.
Chapter 1 - Ancestors (1850–1880)
- Paulina L. Alberto, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Book:
- Black Legend
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- 06 January 2022
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- 06 January 2022, pp 18-70
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The stories about Raúl claimed that it was impossible to know where he came from; that he came “from nowhere.” This chapter shows exactly where he, and so many other Afro-Argentines, came from and how they made their way in a rapidly changing society. But it also illustrates why Afro-Argentines have been so difficult to locate in the historical record. The eve of the abolition of slavery (1853–61) saw the emergence of the racial narratives of Black collective demise and disappearance that would haunt Raúl decades later. “Ancestors” relates the experiences of Raúl’s grandparents’ generation to introduce two intertwined themes that frame the book as a whole: the tendency for Afro-Argentines in the post-abolition period to become at once invisible (through liberals’ removal of racial and caste categories) and punitively hypervisible (when they did not conform to purportedly universal patterns of behavior, politics, and culture that were actually based on White and European models). After briefly situating several generations of Raúl’s ancestors who arrived from Africa and moved from slavery to freedom (thus providing background on colonial and early Republican Buenos Aires), the chapter follows Raúl’s paternal grandparents, Domingo and Cayetana, as they made a life together in the small house they owned, started a family, and built ties of spiritual kinship to the city’s vibrant Black community. Because Domingo was the second-generation leader of a famous candombe (a space for Africans and their descendants to gather, play ritual music, and dance), his social networks allow me to tell a robust and surprising new history of Afro-Argentine music and sociability (continued in subsequent chapters).
Chapter 4 - Celebrity (1910–1916)
- Paulina L. Alberto, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Book:
- Black Legend
- Published online:
- 06 January 2022
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- 06 January 2022, pp 175-225
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The defamatory posthumous stories about Raúl explained his celebrity as accidental, an extension of Afro-Argentines’ supposed servility, imitativeness, and minstrel-like buffoonery. He was, in their view, nothing but a “broken puppet” of the city’s elite, who kept him as their personal buffoon. “Celebrity” uncovers a completely different story: one in which Raúl made himself into a charismatic Black icon of the city’s popular culture and bohemian nightlife – a Black legend. This feat of self-making – his gamble that being boldly and unapologetically Black would allow his star to rise – is Raúl’s astonishing and unsung achievement. Shortly after his release from the reformatory, Raúl began to live a life that made celebrity possible. He did so largely by tapping into countercultural currents in the city’s rich popular culture: a flickering fascination with Blackness, and a partial re-claiming of Argentina’s maligned Black roots as an emblem of nativist pride or bohemian outcast glamour. Using contemporary texts and images, the chapter reconstructs Raúl’s scintillating persona as "el murciélago" (the bat) – a stylish and mysterious “creature of the night” who played a starring role in many of the city’s after-hour hotspots, especially in the bohemian world of the tango, Argentina’s emerging national dance. Indeed, by tracing Raúl’s presence in early tango dances to which he brought the candombe of his ancestors and neighbors, I am able to tell a new history of the impact of Afro-Argentine dance and music on Argentina’s national rhythm, to show that it did not disappear in the late nineteenth century, as is widely believed. The chapter pays special attention to images (photographs for which Raúl posed, cover art of tangos named for him, and others), as well as to semi-fictional texts read against the grain, in order to paint a portrait of Raúl’s successful efforts at self-fashioning as a Black dandy and Black celebrity.