Afro-Porteños at the end of the nineteenth century: discussing the nation.

Argentina is a country that, even today, identifies itself as a modern, white, and European nation. This representation began to be projected in the last decades of the nineteenth century, framed in the state-consolidation and nation-building processes, which will be the historical context for this paper. It was also the time when a certain notion became broadly accepted: that Afro-Argentines, the descendants of formerly enslaved African people, had ‘disappeared’. By contrast, in that same period,Afro-Porteños(Porteñosare citizens of Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina) had not disappeared but constituted an important community, which produced numerous newspapers. Through the analysis ofAfro-Porteñonewspapers, their self-representations and discourses, some of the ways they negotiated with the ideology of modernity and Europeanism (that implied whiteness) will be discussed. The agency ofAfro-Porteñoswill be examined as we analyze howAfro-Porteñointellectuals promoted state values to their group and at the same time defended their community against discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]