the population and culture of African descent are more evident, such an argumentative line sustains that only a few slaves were brought to the Argentine territory and they were " treated well and even with affection." They practiced some musical traditions, but became extinct as they were disappearing and positioning themselves against the surrounding culture and society as if they were water and oil. At least with respect to music, the national identity was reduced in such a manner from three to two foundational roots: aboriginal and creole, in chronological order. This double death certificate— they could not reproduce themselves and their culture neither influenced nor remained in the present— was challenged by sound ethnographic investigations in approximately onethird of the Argentinean territory: the provinces of Corrientes, Chaco, Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Buenos Aires and Autonomous City of Buenos Aires), and by historical research in almost every aspect of the Argentine music: folk or traditional, academic and popular( jazz, rock— in broad sense— and tango). I have been publishing the results in paper, audio, video and internet. However, nothing seemed to be sufficient for a sample in the path of our music during the last two centuries. So, what did the exhibition show? The hidden script of the only two images used( one of foreign origin) is the old and familiar discourse— falling short of the current state of the art— with at least a century of delay that does not satisfy almost anyone, starting with some Afro-Argentines who visited the exhibition and left more disappointed than me, because they carry the painful and silent history of exclusion and alienation on their own body: " If you see a black on the street, it is from another country, isn ´ t it?". Then, what does the old and familiar discourse bring? The only space-time coordinate for locating the Afro- Argentine music is the past, more accurately in the Rosas ´ s epoch with its candombes for the tyrant, despised as lascivious and demonic by the so-called unitary whites, such as the historian José María Ramos Mejía, mentioned in the exhibition. The issue was illustrated with a version of the well-known painting by Martin Boneo Federal candombe, Rosas ´ epoch( ca. 1905). Facing it, inexplicably, the second and last image on the subject is a picture by Pedro Figari depicting a Uruguayan candombe. Herein comes the second commonplace of academic thinking about this music: Everything was more or less the same. With more or less tambour, the Uruguayan can give account of the subject, since the speculation is that both margins of the River La Plata share a common past, the so-called River Plate music. If this comment may sound like unnecessary suspicion, then the same criteria could be applied for displaying joropo as an Argentinean creole genre, since Creoleness is more or less the same elsewhere and there weren ´ t national borders. Also, a bust of Chopin would have been suited in the section of academic music, because his compositions were played in Argentina and our musicians imitated him until satiety. That was not done. So, why did they do it with the Afro-Argentine music? In the middle of the 20th century, Néstor Ortiz Oderigo said that, regarding the black people,“ everybody dare to do something and they dare to do everything”. To make things worse, the intentional use of the black color to demonstrate the ideological limitations of musical expression during the military dictatorship emphasizes that black is exclusively used in negative sense. What an undeserved prize for our colonial and republican past! Let ´ s recall that we took advantage of the
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