Ethnic Play: Representing European Immigrants and Afro-Argentines on the Stages of Buenos Aires, 1910–20

Between 1900 and 1920, hundreds of stage plays were written and performed each year by native-born Argentines, depicting the everyday milieu of Buenos Aires – a city beset by rapid demographic changes driven by immigration.  A subset of these plays, referred to as sainetes, specialized in formulaic plots which focused on ethnic stereotypes of the newly arrived immigrant populations.  
While a great deal of scholarship from the field of literature has focused on the production of the most well-known saineteros, very few historians have examined this rich body of cultural production.  In addition, while many historians have debated the fate of Afro-Argentines in the wake of the arrival of hundreds of thousands European immigrants, almost no one has systematically examined cultural representations of interactions between these two groups.
 In this paper, I describe the rich, albeit stereotypical, portrayal of Afro-Argentines in sainetes.  Almost exclusively limited to men, I analyze the most frequent character types depicted, such as neighborhood cantors, gauchos, delivery boys, and even jealous lovers, or "Othellos."  I argue that stage representations, which by definition focused on local details of the city and its inhabitants, evidence a continual presence of Afro-Argentines in the popular imagination of the nation.  These plays also give insight into the ways in which second generation Argentines, that is the playwrights, viewed, understood, and depicted the relationship between immigrants and Afro-Argentines, and the ways in which audience members understood such depictions.