The Peronist Melting Pot: Racial Differences and Images of the Nation in the Origins of the Peronista Movement

EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY

San Francisco

Congreso; XXX International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA); 2012

LASA

Nineteenth-century Argentinean elites postulated that the nation that they were building was embodied in a white-European people. Inhabitants of African and Amerindian origins were declared extinct or irrelevant. However, racist aggressions were profusely used by the “decent” part of society whenever the lower classes embarked in political action. Both Yrigoyen’s and Peron’s followers, for example, were discredited as being “negros”, i.e., not good enough to enjoy citizenship. In turn, racist assumptions had an lasting impact in the job market, where those with darker skins tended to have worse opportunities. The aim of this presentation is to argue that, despite arguments in the contrary, hints of a non-diasporic “negro” identity can be traced in Argentina’s 20th century. Reactions to the discrimination on “racial” grounds in the job market and in the political arena can be found in the first half of that century. However, they did not appear explicitly in political discourses, but rather indirectly, through the use of certain keys and symbols that alluded to the negro mark. Argentinean lower classes chose not to confront openly with the mandatory whiteness of the Argentinean nation, but rather to question and subtly undermine its solidity. The presence and political function of such keys and symbols will be empirically explored by studying the political discourse and the practices of the  Laborista and union activists of Berisso. It will be argued that they enlarged the sense of the “racial melting pot” without openly confronting with the dominant narrative of Argentinean (white) national identity.