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Afro-Argentine Music:
Notes for a Social History of
Silence
Norberto Pablo Cirio
“Carlos Vega” National Institute of Musicology
Argentina
They would always hit us blacks; they can save it, now.
My father would always tell me:
When they come and ask you a question, just stay quiet.
Horacio Rodrolfo Pérez, Afro-Porteño

Porteño Candombe dance by Bakongo, at the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Rector Center Buenos
Aires, 2009 © Pablo Cirio

A

rgentina is no different from
the rest of America due to its
lack of an Afro-descendant
population, but instead because it does

not acknowledge it as a fundamental
part of its history, culture and present. It
goes back to the arrival of the European
conquistadores in the sixteenth century,

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