A Strange Emblem for a (Not So) White Nation: La Morocha Argentina in the Latin American Racial Context, c. 1900-2015

EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY

JOURNAL OF SOCIAL HISTORY

Oxford University Press

Lugar: New York; Año: 2016 vol. 50 p. 386 - 410

0022-4529

This article explores the origins of La morocha argentina as an unofficial nationalemblem, the personification of the quintessential Argentinean woman,from its emergence in the early twentieth century to the present. A typical characterof vernacular popular culture, the Argentinean ?morocha? is compared to the?morenas? featured in other Latin American countries, to find similarities anddifferences. The racial uncertainty of the ?morochas??who, unlike the?morenas,? were not always marked as being of dark complexion?helped underminethe official discourses of the Argentinean nation, which described it as raciallywhite and ethnically European. The ambivalence of the ?morochaargentina? was crucial in contexts in which open challenges of that myth were stillunfeasible. Thus, despite claims of racial exceptionalism, the making and trajectoryof this emblem proves that Argentina?s racial regime is a variant of the LatinAmerican ?color-continuum? racial formations. By analyzing the Argentineancase in comparative perspective, this article also seeks to contribute to a better understanding of nonbinary racial models and, more generally, of ethnicity ?beyondgroupism??to put it in Roger Brubaker?s terms. In other words, it aims to reconsiderethnicity as a process, the outcome of group-making projects, rather than(only) as the expression of preexisting ethnic entities.