IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 76

Royalty, created in 1776.
On the
celebration of this date, every year,
school children recreate the memorable
United Provinces of the Río de la Plata.
Some of the young actors are white,
those playing the Primera Junta, as are
most of the audience members.
Sometimes, one sees darker, black faces
that occasionally play common figures,
like avocado sellers, mixed-race
Andeans, and sellers of other, popular
products that are often consumed. Yet,
for July 9th, the day independence was
declared in 1816, there are no black
actors. Generally, what one sees at many
educational establishments are that all
the actors are white. For quite a number
of historians who interpreted the nation’s
past many decades ago, May 25th, 1810,
marks the birth of the Argentine country,
State, and nation. In fact, the version
created by the father of official history,
Bartolomé Mirte, who was President
from 1862-1868, is very popular: it was
key at the actual, central moment of the
country’s organization. His work
highlighted the value of this moment as
foundational
for
Argentina’s
consciousness. Yet, more recent,
historical criticism explains that the birth
of Argentine nationality was a process
prior to 1810, and that it was constructed
using a state policy that encouraged
massive immigration (as a constitutive
pillar of an incipient nationality), among
other things, and drew foreign capital to
build the infrastructure it needed to
modernize. In the Argentine case, as in
so many others, the State preceded
nationality and not vice versa, as Mitre’s

version of history initially conceived.
Mitre was the first professional historian
who demonstrated the existence of a
nation. There was no room in his country
project for blacks, something about
which many of his peers forewarned him
(see IDENTIDADES 4). As a result, the
thesis of blacks as the “first to
disappear” was successfully promoted;
this whitening version of history, a
veritable myth, is today defended, to the
point that theatrical representations of
this founding myth regarding July 9th is
propagated
at
schools.
The
abovementioned ‘explanation’ became
hegemonic in nature; the substance said
explanation relates how black and
mulatto inhabitants slowly went from
constituting an important number of
people, to a minority and, eventually, to
be only a memory of the past. In the1810
census, they identified 9,215 inhabitants
of a total of 32,559. By 1778, the Río de
la Plata’s Vice-Royalty’s first census
shows them as 92,000 of 200,000
inhabitants, a noteworthy 46%. Yet, the
1895 national census showed only 454
blacks in a population of nearly 4
million. So the myth that there are no
blacks in Argentina because they
disappeared is repeated ad nauseum or,
in any event, if there had been any, their
presence is due to some vestige of a
nostalgic, colonial past. The school play
of what is supposed to have been
Argentina’s origins is nothing more than
a reminder that 1810 constitutes the
divide through which blackness is
defined as not constitutive of the
national, as something strange and

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