IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 9 ENGLISH | Page 71

deaf and look other way when I ask for
doing something about it."
Up to now, something is hold that seems
absent: the African culture is relegated as
absolutely irrelevant in Argentina. The very
rulers fail to articulate a coherent inclusive
proposal and undertake isolated actions
with little or no impact and social benefit.
They hardly go beyond the good intentions
or innocuous acts.
In the second arrest of Adriana Izquierdo
and his sister Graciela, their Afro
phenotype was enough to abduct them
before the arrival of tourists for the Soccer
World Cup: the city should look as much as
possible as European. The old ideals of the
nineteenth century white republic were
revived. Adriana concluded that "the color
weighed heavily on the dictatorship and
therefore, it was really at that time that they
wanted to conceal our African history and
say that we do not exist in Argentina."
In this line, you can subtly read the
biological / cultural affiliation of the
victims to their immediate action before or
after suffering the state violence. From the
hermeneutical perspective, such a violence
may have been experienced as sensory and
emotional revival of the ancient pain
inflicted to their ancestors, who were also
detained-disappeared persons from both
Africa and History.
Among the first documented expressions by
Afro-Argentinean is their recognition as
being "the first disappeared persons in
history." One of the interviewees said that
their ancestors had been "kidnapped from
Africa." The terms disappearance and
abduction carry a burden of excessive
violence, especially since the very existence
of the witness herself proved the
inaccuracy. Then, her human corporeality
moved in time and space coordinates to the
before-and-after hinge of her existence: "I
was really kidnapped from Africa."
Thus, the harshness of human trafficking
was revealed in the victim’s perspective and
this motivated me to study the subject
against the official historiography. I needed
the voice and skin, the pain of life and death
narrated from the sensorial and vital
experience. And of course, from the music,
so essential in the relevant ethos.
Orfilia Montero did not express it directly,
but I believe I have understood it well. The

extreme experience of being kidnapped,
handcuffed, blindfolded and surrounded by
weapons and odd, alien and aggressive
voices, recalled in her corporeality that
experience of their ancestors, who were
loaded onto slave ships on a one-way trip
without knowing why or what for or where
to. At this point of the anthropology, we
can disregard positivism. I saw her eyes
shining of absence and her nervous hands,
and felt how her words were increasingly
turning into whispers fearing the old ears
that had given her and hers away.
Perhaps she filled so the void that would
occupy the face of her daughter Mirta, who
was never found. I even bother to classify
that performance as interview and prefer to
understood it as a conversation in a very
special moment as part of a friendship
cultivated for years. It was difficult to me to
get an idea of what she was expressing, and
much harder for her to verbalize such
extreme experience, which went beyond
herself to the disappearance of a daughter.
She never got tired of waiting for her
daughter. And thusly Orfilia left this world.
If the abductions and disappearances caused
by the Argentinean military can be
compared to those in Africa from the
sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the
forced labor by many detainees is another
bridge of shared sense, as Ramón Camilo
Juárez stated with regard to the case of his
mother, Alicia País, during her captivity in
ESMA:
"Here, the day of this meeting of African
descent, we commented about the chains
herein, the shackles worn on the feet, and
about how that ancestrally caused in their
bodies a sense of empathy with the pain of
the disappeared detainees [ ...]. Some of the
survivals here spent several years doing
slave labor, because they were shackled,
enclosed within walls, in a space of 1 meter
70 centimeters. And they were brought to
work 8 hours without any wage, doing
slave labor and returning to that place with
one meal a day [...]. Herein they were also
just a number."
This a profound comment because, as it
happens in oral history, the testimonies
include not only events to be narrated, but
also their conceptual development, the
interpretations that they may have had
according to the narrator who lived the

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