Black Dandy or Buffoon? The Racial Limits of Public Self-Fashioning for Argentina’s “El Negro Raúl,” 1910s–20s

In early 1900s Buenos Aires, a black man in top hat and coattails rose to spectacular fame.  For the next two decades, Raúl Grigera (“El Negro Raúl”) was an eccentric fixture of the city’s posh downtown: a young, handsome, dark-skinned dandy who joined the sons of aristocrats in bohemian extravaganzas by night and charmed coins from passersby by day.  The city’s rich cultural scene took notice of this flamboyant black man in a city painstakingly fashioned to show off the nation’s Europeanness.  From the early 1910s, he appeared as a recurring character in tango lyrics, magazine articles, newspapers large and small, city and neighborhood chronicles, poems, plays, memoirs, novels, and the works of amateur historians.  Though these stories largely diverged from the historical record of Raúl’s life, they faithfully mirrored each other (and dominant racial ideologies) in portraying Raúl as a laughable, inexplicable, and doomed anomaly in the white nation.

            By reading these stories alongside archival sources about Raúl’s life, in this paper I explore the relationship between Raúl the man and his collectively-scripted character.  Did he choose to step into this role, and under what constraints?  Can we understand him as a street performer whose elaborate act spanned almost two decades? Contemporaries overwhelmingly described him as a “buffoon,” but only a very few imagined this to be a choice: a performance, job, or means of subsistence.  Most dismissed Raúl’s “buffoonery” in deeply racialized terms: as an aversion to honest work, evidence of ingrained servility, or mental degeneration.  If anything, it was his failure to embody the role of dandy (proscribed by his blackness) that made him so funny.  Can we discern Raúl’s performativity from the sources? What would “performance” mean in a context in which racial ideologies denied black men the capacity for self-fashioning, self-representation, and creative authorship?