Very early on in my research, in my eagerness to find traces of Afro-descendants in nineteenth-century Argentina, I went to a periodical library in search of a certain newspaper, the rara avis among Afro newspapers in Buenos Aires, of which only its name – or names – and a picture of its cover were known: La Raza Africana o sea El Demócrata Negro. And there it was, in the list of microfilmed periodicals. A profound emotion came over me – those who do research know the feeling well – and I felt like sharing my joy with the librarian. I told her about my fruitless search in other periodical libraries and archives, about my dissertation in progress, and about the importance of the finding. In response to her puzzled look, I explained that it was a newspaper written by Afro-Argentines in 1858, the first newspaper written by descendants of enslaved Africans in these lands. The librarian responded in no uncertain terms: “That is impossible, Black people could not read … much less write!” I tried to develop my explanation, mentioning the other newspapers in existence in the late nineteenth century. Her response was even more ruthless: “There had been black people in the colony and in Rosas’s time.”Footnote ¹ I tried to rebut her arguments, but her incredulous expression and her shaking head made me stop … It was useless to attempt to erase the imaginary regarding Argentine Blacks in a brief conversation.

While I was aware that the presumed disappearance of Afro-Argentines had no grounding in fact, this experience was a turning point in my research, because it allowed me to perceive the true dimensions of the lack of awareness and the denial of the presence of Afro-descendants in Argentina. Up to that moment, I was unsure about the course of the research – in other words, which hypotheses would guide the analysis. I only had an interesting and diverse corpus of images, bibliographic readings on the subject, and various archive materials. Could the fruitlessness of that conversation (which could have been held with most Argentines without substantial differences in terms of content) be overcome by a research study that focused on the construction of that national imaginary, which confined the Afro-descendant (and Indigenous) population to the past, depriving it of any possibility of being a part of the country in the future? With the librarian’s responses in mind, I reexamined the visual and written materials at my disposal from a new standpoint. I thus undertook a study of representations and self-representations of Afro-descendants in the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on images related to Buenos Aires. My interest in this corpus of visual representations was related to the presumed disappearance of the population of African descent in the country and Argentina’s unavoidable whiteness, two complementary discursive operations deployed between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A number of questions immediately emerged. What happened to the Black people who appeared in paintings and engravings not only from the colonial period but also, and mainly, after independence? Was it possible for a population that was significant until the mid century to have disappeared in only a few years? These questions made me pay special attention to the way they were represented, and I realized that there was a repetition of specific iconographic nuclei that established the descendants of enslaved Africans in fixed social, historical, and labor roles that were sufficiently rigid to be considered stereotypes. Were these modes of representation related to the apparent absence of this Argentine population, derived from the invisibilization process to which it was subjected? A national imaginary founded on the notion of a culturally and racially homogeneous country of White European descent became embodied in “common sense” based on assumptions and prejudices. In this regard, Quijada observes that homogeneity became a highly coveted goal for nation-building in the nineteenth century, owing to its association with a greater capacity for progress, in opposition to heterogeneity, which was considered a feature of a primitive stage of civilization. This “zeal for uniformity associated with a certain level of cultural development was identified with a particular human group, the White race in its Indo-European version, and in multiethnic contexts favored particularly racialized versions of the drive toward homogenization.”Footnote ² Briones, in turn, focusing on Indigenous populations, examined the sociohistorical processes of othering that led to “national formations of otherness” and resulted in the nation’s whitening.Footnote ³ In particular, regarding Afro-descendants, Geler identifies particularities that allow her to propose the existence of a “prehistoric” otherness, since this otherness did not affect the historical development of the country because it disappeared. The process of the production of meaning involved in whitening resulted in the group being unmarked and assimilated into national whiteness, downplaying its participation in official history and expelling it from the Argentine social imaginary and collective memory.Footnote ⁴

What role did images play in this historical context? How do stereotypical visual representations reveal this process of invisibilization? Considering that they not only reflect a cultural perspective but also reveal an ideological position, in this case that of the dominant groups, I propose that the construction and recurrent use of visual stereotypes throughout the nineteenth century was one of the strategies employed in the process of the invisibilization of the descendants of enslaved Africans in Argentina.

Although the national project of whitening started to take shape after Juan Manuel de Rosas’s fall (1852), based on the ideas and writings of intellectuals such as SarmientoFootnote ⁵ and Alberdi,Footnote ⁶ and was marked by Roca’sFootnote ⁷ rise to the presidency in 1880, I consider visual representations beyond the period from 1852 to 1880. This decision is based on the fact that this analysis is framed in the long term. It aims at tracing the survival of iconographic nuclei that are activated at specific historical moments and at elucidating the possible variations of meaning of these representations. It is essential to frame the research in the long-term perspective to account for the construction of a national imaginary shaped in the late nineteenth century but whose origins are found in previous decades, from which the Afro-descendant population was excluded.

Having stated my purpose, I would like to explain other strategies that were employed to achieve this invisibilization. The first was the manipulation of statistical records, a procedure uncovered by Andrews, who observes that the use of the trigueñoFootnote ⁸ category in official records of the province of Buenos Aires tended to incorporate the various ethnic groups in the “White” category.Footnote ⁹ The author does not take into account the censuses carried out in the second half of the nineteenth century, among which are the parish census of Buenos Aires (1855), two national censuses (1869 and 1895), and the Buenos Aires municipal census (1887), since only the latter included an entry that distinguished between “Whites” and “Other Colors,” while none of the others included any racial classification.Footnote ¹⁰ According to that municipal census, the population of “Other Colors” amounted to 1.8 percent, a number that was significantly smaller than the previous one recorded for the same city in 1838, which was 26 percent.Footnote ¹¹ Otero’s analysis of the role played by the national statistical system, especially the population censuses carried out between 1869 and 1914, in the symbolic creation of the nation is of interest. The ideological postulates underlying the design of the censuses, such as the information that was considered relevant to be included in them, based on the distinction of people following a modern nationality criterion to the detriment of a racial one, had a homogenizing effect.Footnote ¹² Quijada in turn complements this perspective: “Everything seems to indicate that the flood of immigration and the resulting collective perception of an increasingly lighter population, together perhaps with an official will to ‘whiten’ the population, contributed to dilute the African element in the European majority, thus rendering it invisible.”Footnote ¹³ In this regard, the published summary of the 1895 national census announced that Afro-Argentines had almost disappeared from the country: “The population will be completely unified, forming a new and beautiful race which is the product of all the European nations made fruitful on American soil.”Footnote ¹⁴ However, the analysis of the 1887 census questioned the veracity of the data recorded in its tables. Its director, Francisco Latzina, wrote: “Regarding the color of the inhabitants, I must confess that the census numbers are not very reliable, since they show 98.1% White people (blanco) and only 1.8% people of color. The latter are obviously Blacks (negros, mulatos and zambos). There is no doubt that the census categorizes a significant number of mestizos as White people.”Footnote ¹⁵

Geler conducted an extensive analysis of statistical measurements, in particular those of the 1887 municipal census, in an attempt to elucidate how the Afro-Porteño population was underestimated, and notes that “the intentionality observed in the preparation of the censuses is in tune with … that of public discourse, the elaboration of the official history, public education, militarization.”Footnote ¹⁶

Another strategy employed in the process of invisibilization of Afro-descendants in Argentina is to obscure the cultural contributions of this population group through discursive operations and concrete practices of cultural appropriation. I would like to clarify that I am not referring here to the term appropriation coined by Chartier, which implies a construction of meaning through the uses and interpretations of cultural objects.Footnote ¹⁷ Rather, I allude to an appropriation whereby the middle and upper classes include in their cultural repertoires elements identified as originating in the lower or dark-skinned classes, often “mystifying their origins and repositioning them in hierarchies of value,”Footnote ¹⁸ simultaneously obliterating their Afro character. One paradigmatic example is tango, whose African roots have long been rendered invisible.Footnote ¹⁹

With regard to Afro-Argentine studies, it should be noted that they include research from different disciplinary fields. There is a large and growing number of books and articles, and from the 1980s onwards a significant renewal of scholarly interest can be observed.Footnote ²⁰ However, the pioneering works carried out before that decade should not be overlooked. Among them are the studies by Studer, Rodríguez Molas, and Ortiz Oderigo.Footnote ²¹

The watershed I located in the 1980s is Andrews’s research,Footnote ²² a work that revitalized the studies and paved the way for other perspectives. According to the author himself, his initial interest was focused on explaining the purely demographic phenomenon of the decline of the Afro-Argentine population toward the end of the nineteenth century. However, as he delved into the archives and newspaper collections, he discovered an extremely rich source of information on the cultural, social, economic, and political life of this community at the very moment when its inevitable extinction was being proclaimed. Since Andrews’s work, there has been a break not only in the quantity but also in the approaches to research. There are many scholars who address the subject, and it would be unproductive to dwell on each of them, given the limited space I could devote to them. However, I strongly encourage their reading.Footnote ²³

In the fields of art history and visual studies, there are extremely few works in our field, most of them descriptive.Footnote ²⁴ Although not strictly in the disciplinary area of visual studies, I would like to include here a work by Frigerio that examines how Afro-descendants were represented by cartoonists, writers, and humorists in the magazine Caras y Caretas in the 1910s. The anthropologist observes an apparent contradiction in the discourses of the contributors to the weekly, who oscillate between considering Black people as a thing of the past and effectively coexisting with them in the present. Frigerio concludes that these presumed discrepancies respond to the fact that we have gone from an ethnic-racial conception of “Blacks” to a racialized conception, in which skin color becomes the primary differentiating element, to the detriment of the group’s cultural characteristics.Footnote ²⁵ Continuing with local studies, I believe it is worth including Penhos’s research on representations of Indigenous people in the nineteenth century. With a theoretical framework that encompasses cultural history, visual studies, and anthropology, the author approaches a subject that involves identities, nation-building, and the exclusion of certain social groups from the national imaginary.Footnote ²⁶ Her works are also relevant because she adopts an analytical perspective that seeks to broaden the corpus of images to be studied beyond those taken into account by traditional art history.Footnote ²⁷

The lack of research on visual representations of Afro-Argentines led me to analyze how the subject is studied in other regions. From the very wide range of books and articles on the subject, I examine only a few that are of particular interest, whether because of the corpus of works they examine or because of the theoretical and methodological frameworks they employ, keeping in mind the unquestionable differences present when examining diverse regional contexts. First, Boime examines the intersection of visual culture and power in the United States in the nineteenth century, a period marked by the tension between slaveholders and abolitionists. The author rejects the shortsighted perspective held by some art historians regarding the nearly autonomous development of artistic practices, independently of economic, political, and social forces. He argues that both the so-called fine arts and popular art “contribute to develop ideas, define social attitudes, and fix stereotypes” and that “images … serve as instruments of persuasion and control.”Footnote ²⁸ He then highlights the employment by both artists and spectators of a “visual coding” system associated with contemporary texts, which reflected social and racial hierarchies, and demonstrates how those visual codes influenced both the oppressors and the oppressed who struggled for recognition, power, and control over their own lives. McElroy and Gates Jr. in turn demonstrate why it is necessary to focus on how African Americans are represented, since the generally negative stereotypes deployed by White artists contributed to the construction of a certain Black identity, while the few positive stereotypical examples functioned to counter negative stereotypes.Footnote ²⁹

In Europe, the work of Pieterse, who analyzed the ways in which Africans were depicted in Western popular culture between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, stands out. His book White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture provides a comparative historical analysis of the visual stereotypes of Black people constructed by White people, which generally resulted in the production and affirmation of an economically and culturally subordinate position of the Afro-descendant population, both in specific societies and globally. It examines their historical contingency and relativity – that is, the ways in which these simplifying images have changed from period to period.Footnote ³⁰

Of special interest is an article by Stuart Hall in which, based on stereotyping as a representational practice, he examines how racial difference was represented over time, analyzing visual examples from popular culture. The author focuses on its mode of operation – essentializing, reducing, naturalizing – its relationship to power, and its connection to more unconscious effects (fantasy, fetishization).Footnote ³¹

Research on visual representations of Africans and Afro-descendants in nineteenth-century Latin America is concentrated in Brazil. I will refer to a few examples. In an early book, Kossoy and Carneiro analyze images of Blacks in Brazil throughout the century. In this book, the authors recover the sense of a vision shaped by a European world view.Footnote ³² They try to restore the role played by Blacks through a series of images, many of which were produced by European travelers or followed the dominant nineteenth-century photographic portrait pattern. Another example is the mega-exhibition, held in the year 2000, celebrating the 500th anniversary of Pedro Alvares Cabral’s “discovery” of Brazil, as documented in the exhibition catalogs. One section is “Negro de Corpo e Alma,” with texts by the artist and curator Emanoel Araujo.Footnote ³³ The exhibition included works presenting an exoticized view of Black people, as well as creations by descendants of Africans who have shaped Brazilian culture and identity.

Examples of more recent research are those of Bittencourt, Conduru, Machado Koutsoukos, Lotierzo, and Amancio. In her thesis, Bittencourt examines the painting A Baiana to analyze representations of Black women from a racial and gender perspective.Footnote ³⁴ In his book, Conduru explores Afro-Brazilian cultural issues and their artistic manifestations from the arrival of Africans in Brazil to the present.Footnote ³⁵ Machado Koutsoukos has studied how free and enslaved Blacks were represented in photographs in Brazil in the nineteenth century. He focuses on the different meanings and uses of the photographs and how they were shared, as well as on how the subjects participated in the construction of these portraits.Footnote ³⁶ Lotierzo focuses on a painting, A Redenção de Cam (1895) by Modesto Brocos, showing how it illustrates different dimensions such as racial theories, gender, religion, and aesthetics.Footnote ³⁷ Amancio examines the relationship between Arthur Timotheo da Costa’s paintings and the construction of modernity in Rio de Janeiro between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ³⁸

It is important to note that this research study is framed within the cultural and social history of art. For this reason, the concept of representation developed by Marin and Chartier is essential. For the former, “to represent,” on the one hand, has a transitive or transparent dimension, according to which the represented stands for something else, substitutes something, or makes an absence present; on the other hand, it has a reflexive or opaque dimension, which consists in showing itself and is capable of referring to itself, acquiring a life of its own, and producing an effect.Footnote ³⁹ When reflecting on this second connotation of the term, Marin shifts his attention to the study of the devices and mechanisms whereby all representations present themselves as representing something else.Footnote ⁴⁰ Likewise, when examining the intersection between texts and images, the author’s proposal regarding the power of the latter is relevant. Images have a specific character that hinders their “irreducibility to the texts”:Footnote ⁴¹ Image and discourse develop in different spaces of meaning and, for that reason, the logic of production of meaning generated by discourse does not apply to images.Footnote ⁴² In this regard, it is essential to discern how the powers of an image were activated or deactivated at a given historical moment, bearing in mind that it is not only a matter of representations but also one of practices – that is, concrete operations carried out. And here it is necessary to incorporate the concept of representation proposed by Chartier, who points out that “representations of the social world … are always determined by the group interests that forge them. Hence the necessary relationship between discourse and the position of those who deploy it.”Footnote ⁴³ This proposal is of very significant interest for this research. It allows us to understand the symbolic struggle between dominant and subaltern groups, which, using the systems of representation as weapons, “bring into conflict the images that the groups believe they project of themselves and those that are imposed on them against their will.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Two fundamental notions are present throughout this book: invisibilization and stereotypes. Regarding the former, it should be noted that a process of invisibilization involves various historiographic, statistical, and cultural strategies and mechanisms deployed by the dominant groups and sometimes by the subaltern groups themselves. These mechanisms lead to a lack of individuation, marginalization, and desocialization. As mentioned earlier, I believe that the construction and recurrent employment of stereotypes constituted a powerful strategy in this process of invisibilization. To delimit the second notion, I follow authors who have dealt extensively with the term. Among them is Hall, who proposes the existence of a racialized regime of representation structured on the basis of binary oppositions (Black/White, barbarism/civilization, nature/culture, and so on) that aim at naturalizing this difference. This naturalization follows a simple logic according to which, if the differences between Whites and Blacks were cultural, they could perhaps be modified, but if they are natural they are outside of history and therefore permanent and fixed. “‘Naturalization’ is therefore a representational strategy designed to fix ‘difference’, and thus secure it forever.”Footnote ⁴⁵ I would like to clarify that forever operates in a specific cultural historical horizon. Stereotyping is no doubt a part of this racialized regime, and the author defines it as a significant representational practice that reduces people to a few simple and essential features presumably fixed by nature.Footnote ⁴⁶ Dyer in turn analyzes the concept from both a sociological perspective – how stereotypes operate in social thought – and an aesthetic perspective – how stereotypes operate in fiction. For the author, they are a way of ordering the complex and chaotic data of the world that allows making sense of a society through generalizations, modeling, and typifications. However, the importance of stereotypes lies in who controls and defines them – that is, whose interests they serve. Dyer observes that ruling groups establish normalcy through social- and stereotypes. This habit has enormous political consequences. It is a premeditated attempt to fashion society according to their worldview, value system, sensibility and ideology. They make this worldview appear “natural” and “inevitable” to themselves and everyone else. The more they succeed, the more they establish their hegemony.Footnote ⁴⁷

The author’s distinction between social types and stereotypes is also interesting. The difference between them resides in whether they are within or outside the parameters defined by the dominant groups as normal. Regarding representations, we can say that iconographically they are constructed in a similar manner; however, social types are more flexible in their conception and are located within normality. Stereotypes, on the other hand, are more rigid and imply a preestablished implicit narrative known by all, always within a given historic, social, and artistic context.Footnote ⁴⁸

Bhabha has also theorized on the term. Referring to fixity as a key concept for the ideological construction of alterity in colonial discourse, he argues that stereotype is its greatest discursive strategy and defines it as “a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated … as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Hall observes that a very interesting aspect of Bhabha’s proposal is returning to the Foucauldian power/knowledge pair, emphasizing the asymmetrical relationship between dominant and subaltern subjects: Both are strategically located within the same discourse and both are trapped in the circulation of power, albeit in an unequal manner. As a result, the subjects subjected to stereotyping themselves often fall into the trap of this type of representational practice. Over the discussion on the notion of stereotype hovers the Gramscian idea of hegemony, revisited by Williams in relation to the cultural realm – a form of power based on the leadership of one group in various fields of activity, which produces a series of more or less crystalized meanings that correspond to the interests of the ruling group.Footnote ⁵⁰ This implies a widespread consensus on the part of the rest of the population, which operates on the basis of the belief that these meanings are natural and therefore inevitable.

The aspects that characterize a process of stereotyping can be summarized as follows:

• It reduces the members of a group to a few simple features (physical, moral, behavioral) that are easy to understand and remember, exaggerating them and making them immutable.

• It is structured as binary opposites, separating the normal and acceptable from what is not; it establishes exclusion, symbolically fixing limits and excluding all those who do not “belong.”

• This practice develops especially where there are power inequalities, and this power is exerted against the subordinate groups. It is important to note that the effectiveness of stereotyping resides in the fact that it invokes the existence of a consensus in the society where it is implemented.

• The reiteration of stereotypes nurtures and molds the social imaginary.

• The protagonists of stereotyping themselves often endorse these generalizations.

• The stereotypes have tangible consequences in everyday life.

The historical period under consideration and the population group involved in this book make the concept of race essential. Regarding that concept, Quijano argues that, in its modern connotation, it has no known history before the Americas, since the new social relations established, configured as relations of domination, gave rise to new identities (indio, negro, and mestizo, among others), which were associated with hierarchies and labor and social roles. The next step was codifying these identities according to skin color.Footnote ⁵¹ This is evident in the caste paintings created in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the eighteenth century. Katzew observes that these works were produced by civil and ecclesiastical authorities to represent the diversity of colors of the Hispanic American population for a mainly European audience. It was a form of self-representation that sought to create an order in the increasingly confusing colonial social body. The notion of racial hierarchy is at the heart of these works, since the existence of hierarchical relations was necessary for the imperial order, threatened by the emergence of castes.Footnote ⁵² Since the end of World War II, however, researchers have been reticent to employ the concept of race, often replacing it with that of ethnic group. In this respect, Stolcke observes, “it was a matter of emphasizing that human communities are historical, cultural phenomena, rather than groupings endowed with moral and intellectual traits of a ‘racial’ origin and therefore hereditary. … A change in terminology, however, does not necessarily transform reality or the way it is perceived.”Footnote ⁵³ From the latter, I understand that race is a highly effective category in this particular case, since it is impossible to leave it aside, given that it plays a central role in the narratives of Argentine nationhood based on racial homogeneity. Wade in turn has examined the notions of race and ethnicity, observing that they are forms of social identity constructed on the basis of historical continuities. He also proposes that the concept of race in particular must be employed in an analytical manner, since it is not a notion based on biological considerations (genotype, phenotype) but is related to a specific history, that of colonialism: “denying a specific role to racial identifications or to the discriminations based on them is to blur the particular history through which such identifications acquired their effective force.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The character of social construction acquired by the idea of the nation is also fundamental for this research. In this regard, I take into account the theorizations developed by Anderson and Hobsbawm. The former defines the nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Its existence is based on the creation of horizontal relations that establish imagined kinships between individuals who, however, never meet. Anderson operates on the basis of an ontological conception, taking into account the dominant discourses and leaving aside what actually happens in practice. For this reason, critical voices have raised doubts as to whether the concept can be directly applied to any geographical region, since each one has its own history. Chatterjee expresses it clearly: “If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?”Footnote ⁵⁶ Hobsbawm in turn observes that the nation can only be associated with a certain class of modern territorial state and focuses on the concept of nationalism. According to the author, nationalism is basically a political criterion that adopts a concept of the nation prior to the constitution of nation-states, while the real nation can only be recognized a posteriori. They are phenomena that, in order to be fully understood, must be studied from below, despite having been established from above.Footnote ⁵⁷

Narratives – historical accounts, memoirs, fictions – and images – engravings, oil paintings, photographs, illustrated publications – created by the dominant groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are an invaluable and extremely interesting source in which the stereotypes of Afro-descendants were deployed. Their dissemination through the various possible means – the educational system, the press, high culture – have inscribed these stereotypical representations in the national imaginary, often enduring over time. Hence, in this study, not only the relationship between visual language and written discourses but also their connection to the other cultural structures in place at the time, are fundamental. In this respect, Baxandall demonstrates how significant other apparently peripheral cultural practices are to understanding the art of the period. These structures compose a visual culture integrated by key concepts and codes that can be analyzed from the standpoint of both the image and the word.Footnote ⁵⁸ For that reason, as I said, I employ both textual sources and images, taking into account their interrelation. In this methodology, the proposals of Clark and Crow are also relevant. The former inquires into the conditions for artistic creation and proposes that it is necessary to underscore “the connecting links between artistic form, the available systems of visual representation, the current theories of art, other ideologies, social classes, and more general historical structures and processes.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Crow in turn argues that the intersection between sources and images is not transparent but is traversed by mediations to which the art historian must be attentive in order to establish the articulations at play between both discourses.Footnote ⁶⁰ These approaches provide the necessary tools to examine a variety of aspects concerning inquiries in art history, including the formal analysis of the works without neglecting the circumstances of their production and their producers, their relationship to the systems of representation in force, their functions, the intended audience for these images, and the critiques deployed in their regard.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I examines representations of Afro-descendants made by individuals of what, for simplification, we shall denominate the White society, Part II focuses on self-representations by the members of the Afro-Porteño community itself, and Part III investigates a portrait of Bernardo de Monteagudo. It should be noted that these representations include both visual and written documents, with the latter predominating for self-representation. Partly because of this, the parts are organized differently. In the first, the images take center stage, distributed in iconographic nuclei not necessarily in chronological order. This choice, however, does not result in an illustrated history of the period or in a repertoire of images isolated from their historic-artistic context of production, circulation, and reception. For Didi-Huberman, it is impossible to do a history of images strictly following a chronological model, since “the image is not in history as a point on a line” but contains various heterogeneous times.Footnote ⁶¹ In other words, in order to historicize images, it is necessary to create an archive that cannot easily be organized as a pure and simple narrative. That is why I believe that an organization structured on the basis of iconographic nuclei, encompassing a timeframe that includes diverse historical/political periods in the country, will prove more fruitful in demonstrating the hypothesis. Furthermore, these nuclei are not only related to their own time period but are anchored in the long term. However, these iconographies are selected not only according to a morphological association between the images, to the repetition of a form; rather, this same form implies overlapping meanings and imaginaries over time. In other words, they are images that are activated and acquire certain meanings in a cultural context and, therefore, respond to the needs of a specific historical moment.

Chapter 1 examines a widespread iconography in time and space: the representation of servants of African origin. I examine how this recurrent visual trope resulted in a stigmatizing factor for this population group, associating its members with an enslaved past. Chapter 2 explores the way in which the close relationship established between the Afro-Porteño population and Juan Manuel de Rosas, both contemporaneously and later, had a negative effect on the Afro-Porteño population and later served to render it invisible by confining it to that historical moment. Chapter 3 focuses on grotesque representations, those images whose contemplation provokes in the viewer an ambiguous and paradoxical response, a mixture of horror, pity, and laughter. The main figure related to this category of the grotesque is that of the buffoons, which, like the previous iconographic motif, derives from a long tradition in Western visual culture. In Chapter 4, the last one of Part I, I examine how three modes of representation overlap – portrait, type, and stereotype. To this end, I focus on the portraits of three people of African descent in the nineteenth century, each one eminent in their own field of action.

Part II of the book examines how Afro-Porteño intellectuals struggled against the oblivion to which their community was subjected early on. As mentioned earlier, self-representations are more commonly found in written documents, whose existence was only possible thanks to the constitution of a Porteño public sphereFootnote ⁶² and an Afro-Porteño public counter-sphereFootnote ⁶³ after the fall of the Rosas regime in 1852, sustained by the rise of associationalism, citizen mobilizations, and the periodical press. The latter became a key element in political life and an effective way for community groups and individuals to make their activities known. This is the context of the publications analyzed in the two chapters (Chapters 5 and 6) of Part II. We inquire into how Afro-Porteños confronted the stereotyping strategy applied to them. In this sense, in the analysis we consider them not as mere receivers but as more or less active producers of discourses generated as a result of this stereotyping. We should not lose sight of the fact that it is a community in search of recognition and survival, and therefore in constant negotiation with society at large.

Chapter 5 focuses on two biographical compilations of Afro-Argentines considered role models for the community.Footnote ⁶⁴ These compilations not only present a written portrait of each of them but also include a corresponding visual portrait, a feature that enriches this research. The aim is to inquire into whether the construction of their own imaginary sought to confront the racial stereotypes disseminated by the larger society, described in Part I of the book. Chapter 6 follows in part the same line as the previous one, continuing to focus on the life stories of some nineteenth-century African ancestry artists. In this case, we focus on four artists: Fermín Gayoso, Rosendo Mendizábal, Juan Blanco de Aguirre, and Bernardino Posadas.

The book ends with Part III, Chapter 7, which examines the construction of a stereotype of a different nature from those studied. The discovery of a portrait of Bernardo de Monteagudo allowed me to reflect on the theoretical impossibility for a descendant of enslaved Africans to be part of the pantheon of national heroes. It is a different image from that which was and continues to be widely disseminated, in which the face of the Tucumán hero was represented with undeniably “White” features. Comparing both portraits demonstrates an extreme case of whitening that enabled deploying a reverse stereotype.

This book’s research focuses on nineteenth-century images. However, I occasionally resort to contemporary representations that demonstrate the persistence of the employment of stereotypes when referring to people of African descent. These representations also allow us to highlight the prejudices – attitudes toward the members of a group – associated with stereotyping and the resulting racism – possible actions taken against those members.