included , for the first time in our history and in accord to the state of the art of musicology , the Afro-Argentines of the colonial trunk . To that end , as a researcher devoted for more than twenty years to study it , the Director of the National Institute of Musicology Carlos Vega ( my workplace ) asked me to do the necessary paperwork . I delivered it with zealous hurry . However , I found nothing of it , but an elementary history reduced in time and space to almost an anecdote from the Rosas ’ epoch ( 1829- 52 ). That history was partly under foreignization , as the result of an ideological script at least from a century ago . As there is neither research nor dissemination without ideology or social commitment , I will begin to explain myself from the word game in the title . Musicologist and journalist Pablo Kohan published an article about the exhibition entitled " All music in one place . From Ricky Maravilla to Carlos Guastavino , the sound expressions that have had and have a place in our country " ( La Nación , April 28th , 2012 ). He also published it in the Yahoo group of the Argentine Association of Musicology . Some forum visitors commented and one of them made an observation about the unfortunate elitist treatment by the musicologist advisors , who “ descended from Olympus to daily practice and contributed with their research for providing concepts and expressing ideas that have a resounding realization .” I had read that comment , but the word Olympus , so beloved in its distant Greek resonance , struck me from a nearer and unpleasant place , since it matters me as an Argentine citizen and researcher . The Olympus was a clandestine detention center in Buenos Aires , during the last civic-military dictatorship , for people with adverse ideologies and for making them disappear . The military officer in charge was Commander Alfredo Astiz , a . k . a . The Blond Angel of Death . Why this association ? Because at that very moment I was transcribing the testimony of a survivor . She and her daughter were held there and the latter is still missing because of such extreme experience . Justifiably , when I refer to the history of the genocide against Africans among surviving compatriots of the slave trade — since our country was art and part of it for three and a half centuries —, they place themselves as the first desaparecidos : disappeared from Africa , disappeared from history , disappeared from censuses , disappeared from museums , disappeared from the national memory , disappeared from the social imaginary , disappeared from textbooks ... We already know , we live in a country of absences and all absence is intentional . My disappointment with the exclusion of Afro-Argentine music has nothing to do with my academic zeal , but with the commitment assumed to its representatives , who not only pre-exist the nation-state , since their presence is as old as the Hispanic ´ s going back to the 16th century , but it has been olympically ignored in the stagnant academic narrative — including musicology — that I will treat below in general . Disobeying the rules of the scientific method for producing avant-garde knowledge , the black question is dispatched with superficial and brief a priori assertions since the times of musicologist Carlos Vega until today . The instant and careless results derived not only from desktop hermeneutics , and biased or uncritical readings of dried sources , but above all from the speculation about how the events should have occurred , instead of from the ethnography and the exhaustive paperwork that corroborate how they actually occurred . Unlike other American countries where
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