Rubios, Morochos, and Negros: Argentine Mass Culture and the Production of Racial Difference, 1930–43

Unlike other Latin American countries, Argentina has not tended to produce versions of national identity centered on the image of mestizaje. The violent erasure of Indians and Afro-Argentines enabled Europeanizing liberals to construct what some scholars have called a “myth of the white nation.” Yet whiteness could not perform the integrative function that it occasionally did in the United States. Instead, racial constructions tended to reinforce and exacerbate class divisions. One well known instance of this dynamic is the collection of racial insults that middle-class Argentines hurled at the lower-class followers of Juan and Eva Perón. But as I will demonstrate, the inter-articulation of race and class did not begin with Peronism. This paper will examine representations of race that circulated in the mass culture of the 1930s. It will argue that competition with imported North American mass culture encouraged domestic producers to highlight Argentina's racial distinctiveness. The images they produced tended to construct authentic Argentina as darker or less clearly white than the United States or Europe and to associate this image with the poor. Thus, Argentina's fractured national identity emerged not as the result of a top-down political program or of the musings of intellectuals but as a byproduct of the development of its capitalist culture industries. Before the emergence of Peronism, the Argentine cinema and radio already generated images of national identity that divided the population along race and class lines.