Criollismo, política y etnicidad en las ideas y el folklore de Eusebio Dojorti (Buenaventura Luna)

EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY

STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE

University of Texas Press

Año: 2016 vol. 34 p. 242 - 271

0730-9139

This article analyzes Buenaventura Luna?s career as a folk musician, writer,and radio entertainer in Argentina, from about 1937 to 1955, by tracingconnections to his earlier life as Eusebio Dojorti (his real name), an activistof the radical ?Bloquista? movement of San Juan and later on as a supporterof Juan Perón. A similar cultural program can be discerned in both his politicalideas and his musical and radio endeavors. Luna was convinced of thenecessity to vindicate the criollo, long oppressed under elitist projects thatsystematically favored European immigrants. But unlike nationalists andother participants in the folklore movement, Luna was not so much interestedin rescuing the ?spiritual? legacy of traditions as in improving the livesof the lower classes. With this aim in mind, Luna produced a noteworthybody of work in which he challenged the official discourses of the nation?according to which Argentina was a white European country?by illuminatingthe ethnic heterogeneity of the native population and the diversityof its colors. But in doing so, Luna was not only proposing an intellectualproject but also dealing with his own personal experience as a dark-skinnedprovincianoliving in ?white? Buenos Aires.