What Is Controversial about the History of Afro-Descendants in Argentina?

Argentina has become known as the whitest and most European nation in Latin America. The percentage of people who identify as Afro-descendants in Argentina today is no higher than 0.4% of the total population (“Censo Nacional De Población, Hogares Y Viviendas 2010” 2012, 298). In contrast to this, Buenos Aires was one of the most important harbors for slave trade in Latin America during colonial times (Williams 45). Thousands of slaves arrived in Buenos Aires to be sold into the Argentine hinterland or serve as labor force in the Federal Capital. The 1778 Census portraits an Argentine society, which consisted of 30% Africans and Afro-descendants, and this number is estimated to have grown to 40% by the 1850s, while only roughly forty years later, in 1887, the overall Afro-Argentine population was estimated to be a mere 2%. In the second half of the nineteenth century the Afro-descendant population in Argentina suffered a significant decline in numbers, which lead to its virtual disappearance in the overall Argentine society.

The decline of the Afro-Argentine population has gotten more and more attention in the past few decades, in academia as well as in the general population. Historians like George Reid Andrews, Leslie Rout, Lea Geler and Alejandro Frigerio have tried to rewrite the history of Afro-Argentines and lately more and more Afro-Argentine organizations and activists emerge revisibilizing Afro-descendants in twenty-first century Argentina. It is this recent visibilization of Afro-descendants which renders the narrative of the non-existent Afro-Argentine population questionable.