Argentina Rediscovers its African RootsThe chapel in the small lakeside resort community of Chascomús is at best underwhelming. Its whitewashed brick exterior is partly obstructed by a tangle of vines and bushes, and its dim, one-room interior is no more majestic than its facade. Wooden pews and an uneven dirt floor are scarcely illuminated by sunlight from a single window. The gray, cracked, dusty walls are adorned with crosses, photos, icons — things people leave to mark their pilgrimage. A low front altar is layered with thick candle wax, flowers and a pantheon of black saints, Madonnas and African deities like the sea goddess Yemanja of the Yoruba religion.
Despite its unkempt state, this chapel, the Capilla de los Negros, attracts a little over 11,000 tourists each year who come to see a church named for the freed slaves who built it in 1861.
The chapel is “where we can locate ourselves and point out the truth that we are here,” said Soledad Luis, an Afro-Argentine from the tourism office who led me through the space. She knows it well. It sits on a plot her great-grandfather helped secure, and her family still gathers there weekly for a meal.
Capilla de los Negros feels off the beaten path, but it is part of a list of slave sites in Argentina created in 2009 by Unesco. Its inclusion signals the growing consciousness of African heritage in Argentina, seemingly the most Europeanized country in South America.
Argentina at one time had a robust African presence because of the slaves who were brought there, but its black population was decimated by myriad factors including heavy casualties on the front lines in the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay in the 1860s; a yellow fever epidemic that rich, white Argentines largely escaped; and interracial offspring who, after successive generations, shed their African culture along with their features. And European immigration swelled the white population — 2.27 million Italians came between 1861 and 1914.
The demographic shift has been sharp. In 1800, on the eve of revolution with Spain, blacks made up more than a third of the country, 69,000 of a total population of 187,000, according to George Reid Andrews’s 2004 book “Afro-Latin America.” In 2010, 150,000 identified themselves as Afro-Argentine, or a mere 0.365 percent of a population of 41 million people, according to the census, the first in the country’s history that counted race.
But the culture the slaves brought with them remained. And in recent years, Argentina has gone from underselling its African roots to rediscovering them, as academics, archaeologists, immigrants and a nascent civil rights movement have challenged the idea that African and Argentine are mutually exclusive terms.
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Some see creating tourist trails, with plaques and brochures, as a way to educate locals and tourists alike about this long-suppressed history. In my several visits the last few years and during my time living in the country, the trail led me to the other Argentina, one that is just starting to be woven into the country’s narrative about itself.
MY FIRST STOP required some dancing shoes. I dropped in on a tango lesson at the Movimiento Afrocultural on Buenos Aires’s Calle Defensa in San Telmo. The cultural institution was started in 2009 to promote African and African-Argentine heritage. As I scanned its events calendar, there were many activities that had an obvious African bent, but tango?
“There are no doubts that tango has an African origin,” the teacher, Veronica Rueco, told me. Together, we watched locals and tourists practice their dance moves in the center, a converted warehouse whose walls were lined with candombe drums carved with images of slave ship hulls filled with chained human cargo. “The only doubt is the exact story of how it came about.”
The dance form, she went on to note, was created in the late 1800s, the result of a fusion of African and European immigrant culture. (The term tango is thought to originate from a Niger-Congo term that survived the trans-Atlantic passage along with the slaves, according to Dr. Erika Edwards of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.)
The center’s director, an Afro-Uruguayan named Diego Bonga, leads a drum circle that draws a diverse crowd. The night I attended there were Porteños (from Buenos Aires), Chileans, Uruguayans and even a woman from Iran. The curious peered through the gates at us. Those onlookers are part of the party on Sundays, the neighborhood’s busiest day, when antiques vendors line Defensa, and Plaza Dorrego becomes an open-air milonga, or tango salon, with performers, locals and tourists dancing past midnight. That day, Movimiento Afrocultural holds a candombe parade. Spectators become participants, dancing on the cobblestones in the jittery shake of a murga comparsa, an Argentine dance popular during Carnival season, also rooted in African culture.
I followed the musicians down Defensa as they reached Plaza Dorrego, yellow lights casting a 1920s postcard sepia dream tone over dancers moving two by two. I watched as bystanders searched for the source of the loud, boisterous music. They began stepping in sync with the candombe, bringing to life again their abandoned African forebears.
My next visit was a little less lively. It was underground. It’s no secret that underneath Old Buenos Aires lies a latticework of tunnels, used by colonial smugglers to avoid Spanish tariffs and by priests to travel between Jesuit churches like San Francisco and San Ignacio at the Manzana de las Luces historical site.
Lesser known are the tunnels that run under residential buildings like the one at Defensa 1464 in San Telmo. The complexity of that structure, which is the subject of a 2009 documentary directed by David Rubio, was uncovered by Freda Montaño, an Afro-Ecuadorean who runs the restaurant Rincón Ecuatoriano and once lived there. The colonial-era building’s history has partly been obscured by a new belle epoque facade that it got at the turn of the last century, a period when Buenos Aires consciously mimicked Paris. Still,
Ms. Montaño said she found tunnels in the basement and a small door meant “for someone who services the house, so as not to interfere with what is being done by the white people.” She said that neighbors told her the tunnels lead to Parque Lezama, where slaves were sold and then transported underground to the households purchasing them.
Plaza San Martín, home to the statue of Argentina’s liberator, José de San Martín, was the city’s other main slave auction site. These sites, along with entire districts within Buenos Aires’s colonial core, are part of Unesco’s slave route heritage listing but remain largely unmarked by historical plaques.
Ms. Montaño opened a short-lived cultural center at Defensa 1464 but was forced to close when the landlord wanted to sell the house. She says she hopes the city buys it and creates a museum, and believes that demonstrating the tunnels’ relationship to slavery will benefit tourists and locals alike, “where the world knows nothing of this because people say in this country there are no Afro-descendants.”
Slavery’s connection to the tunnels under this building is unclear, though academics like Pablo Cirio, director of Afro-Argentine studies at the National University, said they were used “to transport goods and live workers — read human slaves — but no serious studies prove it.”
Another network of tunnels lies underneath El Zanjón de Granados museum in San Telmo. They lead through a dried-out, brick-covered creek used as a sewer system. The city’s smallest house, Casa Mínima, is part of the museum complex, and tours explain that it was owned by a freed slave, among Buenos Aires’s few open recognitions of its slave past.
There have been other attempts to examine Argentina’s African roots in Buenos Aires, including a now-closed maritime museum discussing the slave trade in the La Boca neighborhood. And during Argentina’s 2010 bicentennial, cultural institutions sought to mark the country’s diverse past. The National Historical Museum grouped paintings from the museum’s permanent collection of the five-decade-long Emancipation era. The exhibition center Casa Nacional del Bicentenario occasionally surveys African influences in Argentine music. Outside the capital, in San Antonio de Areco, there are exhibits on Argentina’s black gauchos, or cowboys, in the Museo Ricardo Güiraldes and Museo Las Lilas de Areco. Near Cordoba, the Museo de la Estancia Jesuítica de Alta Gracia, part of Unesco’s slave trail list, also contains exhibitions on the relationship among Jesuits, natives and African slaves.
But those attractions all look backward. As part of the shift toward embracing Afro-Argentine culture, the country is beginning to welcome contemporary African influence. El Buen Sabor restaurant in the Villa Crespo neighborhood, for example, was started by a Cameroonian in 2008. The small, yellow space seats perhaps two dozen, but its reputation is outsize. I caught up with its owner, Maxime Tankouo, during one of my visits. “I was seen as a little weird here when I arrived” in 2001, he said. “It was eight days before I saw someone of my race.” He said, “I mix many things, Moroccan, African, Cameroon, all in the same plate.” At first Mr. Tankouo was supported largely by French and other tourists. Now locals are the majority of clients.
These new immigrant arrivals are unintentionally bridging a gap that has already been partly overcome. Even traditional restaurants have an Afro-Argentine touch, albeit unintentional. “Our gastronomic symbol has an African character,” Nicolás Fernández Bravo, a University of Buenos Aires social anthropologist, said of the asado, the Argentine grill consumed by nearly all visiting tourists. He told me of the 19th-century Argentine literary classic “El Matadero” by Esteban Echeverría, with descriptions of cows being butchered and the dividing out of the mollejas, or glands. “Sweetbread parts were given to the slaves,” he said. “This is now part of the general meal, and thought of as a special delicacy, but at one time this would never have been eaten among the elites.”
Argentina still wrestles with its complicated identity. Back at the chapel, Ms. Luis told me she is often the first Afro-Argentine local tourists have met, some arguing she is from elsewhere. Because of this, she said, “the history of blacks must be told to you by blacks.”
Her boss, José Fares, head of Chascomús tourism, explained that the chapel is one way Argentina can overcome its own myths, recounting the Argentine axiom, “ ‘the Mexicans descended from the Mayans, the Peruvians from the Incas, and us, from the boats.’ We Argentines think we are the Europeans of South America.”
Ms. Luis reminds us that her ancestors came by boat, too, saying: “They immigrated. We were brought here.”
Source: The New York Times, September 9, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/travel/argentina-rediscovers-its-african-roots.html
