Race has long been a contentious issue in the study of Latin American politics. During the mid-twentieth century, contemporaries often viewed nationalist mass movements as testing existing racial hierarchies – challenges often welcomed by supporters and derided by opponents, which lent an added intensity to the era's political antagonisms. Typically, mid-century nationalist reforms were not framed explicitly as programs for racial uplift; their advocates preferred, instead, to emphasize ideals of modernization, social peace, and collective justice. Nevertheless, these movements promised, and in some cases delivered, improvements demanded by laboring majorities that included racially stigmatized sectors. At the same time, many of these movements embraced, to various degrees and with varying motivations, cultural nationalisms that valorized African and/or indigenous folkways and acknowledged the virtues of multiracialism and mestizaje. It is common in retrospect to associate this generation of nationalist movements – many of which were subsequently labeled “populist” – with paradigms of “racial democracy,” a concept coined by commentators toward the end of Brazil's nationalist government under Getúlio Vargas (1930–45), and which later worked its way into the conceptual toolkit of Latin American studies. The status of populist leaders as racial democrats has, however, stoked debate. If contemporary critics assailed these actors as dangerous demagogues, revisionists have focused on their limitations, arguing that ideas of racial harmony were illusory and acted as barriers to deeper change. By contrast, a more recent wave of post-revisionist scholarship is reappraising the social resonance of mid-century racial discourses.

The place of Peronism – Argentina's mid-century political movement first led by Juan D. Perón and Eva Duarte de Perón – in these discussions is unclear, despite its standing as one of Latin America's most famed expressions of “populist nationalism.” This isolation derives from the reasonable inclination to study Peronism within the framework of Argentine history, but also from entrenched ideas of racial exceptionalism that encourage viewing Argentina as a regional outlier. The conventional wisdom among historians has long maintained that race was of marginal importance to Peronist rule, especially compared to the centrality of class in articulating “the people” as a political subject. Researchers, however, are now subjecting these views to greater empirical scrutiny as part of a broader reconsideration of the history of race and nation in Argentina.

Argentina suffers from what marketing experts would call an “image problem.” The country rarely fares well in the global media spotlight, where it is frequently trotted out as an example of spectacular political or economic failure. But seldom are the results of this scrutiny so unflattering as when issues of race and national identity come to the fore. As we write this Introduction, the 2014 World Cup provides the latest occasion for commentary. In a piece titled “Why So Many World Cup Fans Dislike Argentina,” The New York Times informed readers that “across Latin America, Argentina has the most people rooting against it” – not just because of the country's past successes on the field against its regional rivals but, more pointedly, because of “how some Argentines projected their perceptions of economic and cultural superiority in the region.” For the article's authors, the ugliest aspect of this ethnocentrism lies in “the ways in which some Argentines have traditionally viewed their nation, which received millions of European immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: as a dominion of racial pre-eminence in the region.” A piece in the Huffington Post took a similar angle, asking “Why Are There No Black Men on Argentina's Roster?” Unlike other Latin American “rainbow nations […] conceived by the blend of American-Indians, Spaniards, and enslaved Africans,” Argentina's seemingly all-white roster confirmed, for the author of this piece, the country's exceptionally violent history of “purg[ing] their African roots from their socio-historical landscape and conscience,” and even of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide,” in its eagerness to become “South America's whitest country.”

These journalistic assessments are all too familiar. The image of Argentina as a racial outlier in Latin America has become deeply engrained in popular and even academic discourses over the last century, and it shows few signs of fading. Whether celebrating the country's white and European character or condemning the discrimination and violence that sustained this image, commentators in Argentina and abroad have largely agreed in placing Argentina well outside of the narratives of racially mixed nationhood that characterize much of modern Latin America. The image of Argentina as a racial outlier makes for a good story, whether in the world of sports, in journalism, or in the classroom: it rings true and, as the World Cup coverage demonstrates, it often carries an important moral critique of racism and ethnocentrism.

This book is the outcome of many years of conversation among the editors, contributors, and various audiences and readers. Most of the chapters first took shape in a series of panel presentations delivered at the Latin American Studies Association conferences in Toronto (2010), San Francisco (2012), and Washington, D.C. (2013). The volume's authors have also shared their research with colleagues in venues across Argentina as well as with students, activists, and wider publics there and elsewhere. Along the way, we encountered a spectrum of reactions to our project: from enthusiasm and encouragement, to thoughtful critiques, to skepticism and even hostility. Indeed, the range and intensity of these responses not only helped us sharpen our arguments and reframe our assumptions, but they also strengthened our conviction that questions of race and nation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Argentina merit rethinking.

If the subjects treated in this volume touch a nerve for some readers, it is surely because the chapters reconsider the conventional wisdom about Argentine politics, culture, and society held by many commentators in Argentina and abroad. Raising questions about the racial dimensions of inequality, identity, and power in Argentina is itself controversial. And even among those who agree that those are crucial questions, disagreements persist over how best to pose and answer them. To pick one telling example, the very title of this book, Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, may provoke some unease. In the United States, references to race as a social dilemma or as an academic area of inquiry are commonplace. Yet in contemporary Argentina, the term raza carries a strongly negative connotation and is thus far less frequently invoked: indeed, it is common for raza to be placed within quotation marks even in the writings of researchers who use the concept to expose problems of discrimination. This circumspect treatment of raza is intended to emphasize its socially constructed, rather than essential or biological, character (despite the fact that other social constructs like género [gender] and clase do not require this kind of treatment), or to signal the concept's status as archaic and somehow foreign to Argentina. The pages that follow devote considerable attention to unraveling the many languages of race in Argentina employed since the early twentieth century and assessing their political implications.