The notion of “race” among afro-rioplatenses intellectuals (1870-1890)

Abstract

The Afro-rioplatense community of Buenos Aires and Montevideo had an intense life at the end of the 19th century, both in social dynamics and in intellectual production, which respond, in many ways, to their identity construction process within the new national states, in tension between two forces: one, external, from the context, which challenges and another, internal that responds from the subject itself.

Through his intellectuals, the community expressed a set of ideas and opinions in the communication channels offered by popular culture. They manifested themselves on a myriad of topics: needs of the community, social reality, local politics, philosophical reflections, denunciations, and, as a “society of color”, issues about the situation of the racial community.

In this work an approach will be made to the ideas that, on the racial side, five Afro-rioplatense intellectuals expressed from their written production, from a perspective that takes into account their historically conditioned subaltern and racialized position.

In the region, the civilization project and the civilization / barbarism binomial were part of the mentality of the dominant culture, which had an ideological ally in scientific racism. Barbarism and its human types – the original peoples, the gauchaje and the Afro-descendant population occupied a non-place within the new platense nations.

The opinion that Afro-rioplatense communities had about “race”, as will be seen, was some what different. The qualities of people did not derive from their biology, but from the much or little preparation and education. The backwardness of his situation as a «race» was not explained by innate reasons, but by historical and social causes.

Texts will be taken from the authorship of Zenón Rolón, Ernesto Mendizábal, Juan Blanco de Aguirre and the collective authorship of Andrés Seco and Marcos Padin, which will allow them to know what they understood by “race”.