IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 113

(Carnese, Avena, Goicochea et al.
2006).
The 2010 National Census included a
relevant question and revealed that
0.37% of the population (about 150,000
people) acknowledges itself as such.
Even so, this measurement should not
be taken too seriously given issues with
its theoretical, practical and instrumental structuring.

Porteño Candombe scene in the basement
of the Casa Suiza during a carnival at the
Buenos Aires, ca. 1965 (anonymous)

Over time, this population began to
generate its own sui generis culture as a
result of its ancestral Africanness, and
its forced, and generally violent contact
with white, Creole society and a few
native towns.3

Afro-Argentine Music: A Diagnosis of
this Art’s State
Afro-Argentines were of little interest
for academe, generally, and for musicology, particularly. This despite the
fact that an indexing of relevant works
by historian Miguel Ángel Rosal (2011)
seems encouraging. After studying it, I
can say that:
1) The majority of the studies is historical in nature and covers the “Golden”
age of slavery (XVIII century - @
1850), as if the topic had no relevance
after that date.
2) There is a dearth of theoretical
frameworks that allow better interpretations of the empirical evidence, since
merely sharing the facts does not explain them.
3) There are fewer socially oriented
works and much of the discussion is
unscientific (due to speculation, writing
style, the generalization of partial information, taking literary texts as nonfiction, use of unverified, third-party
facts and even implying they have been
personally obtained, analyses replacing
ethnography with media information,
silly anecdotes, impressionistic or irrel-

What I understand as Afro-Argentine
culture is a mixture of knowledge and
practices acknowledged as belonging to
Afro-Argentines of colonial origin. It
contains concrete and/or structural elements that allow one, in principle, to
associate them—to some greater or
lesser degree—with those of the original systems of what is called the Black
Atlantic (Gilroy 1993). Yet, they were
also generated after slavery, in a context
that increasingly interconnected with
the African Diaspora in the Americas,
to the present day.
To this universe of intangible
knowledge and practices we must add
tangible goods that have replaced others. In a historical perspective, this has
to do with the characterization of any
object originating in preceding centuries
(texts, domiciles, archaeological remains, etc.) for the use of or produced
by enslaved black Africans and their
descendants (who socially characterized
as blacks) (Cirio 2011b).

113