IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 9

Southern Cone country’s first moments, the racism of the ruling classes and the presumption of national whitening led to a “forgetting” of the participation of blacks in important national events, and lead to oblivion or ignorance on national holidays in which their actions were actually relevant. Freixa also points out how on national censuses blacks and mulattoes slowly went from being numerically important to a minority, only to become a memory of the past, finally. This is supported by anthropologist Norberto Pablo Cirio’s illustrative article “First SelfAdministered Census of Afro-Argentines of Colonial Origin.” It explores censuses from M