Blacks in Argentina

Erika Edwards is a colleague of mine in the History department here at UNC Charlotte. She works on Argentine history and has a great post at the Urban History Association blog about the disappearance of the black population. Argentina had a policy--common elsewhere as well--of whitening (blanqueamiento).

In effect, Sarmiento, and similar intellectuals joined the larger Latin American process of blanqueamiento, or whitening. Blanqueamiento serves as an operative word to describe the late-nineteenth-century state-led modernization process. Like Argentina, many other Latin American countries looked to European immigrants as the way to bring civilization. Historians have argued that this ideological erasure is one of the main reasons for the disappearance of people who identified as black in Argentina.

Go check out the whole thing.