Argentina in Black and White: Race, Peronism, an
Eduardo Elena's chapter "Argentina in Black and White: Race, Peronism, and the Color of Politics, 1940s to the Present" examines how racial thinking has shaped Peronist politics across more than seven decades, situating Argentina within broader debates about race and nationalist movements in twentieth-century Latin America. Elena begins by noting that Argentina has long been treated as a regional outlier on questions of race, with scholars traditionally arguing that class rather than race defined Peronism's political identity. The chapter challenges this consensus by tracing how racialized conceptions of citizenship, identity, and nationality have operated within and around Peronism from its founding years to the Kirchner era, using conceptual tools drawn from comparable Latin American cases without reducing Peronism to a regional template. During the First Peronism of 1943 to 1955, Elena identifies three overlapping tendencies that governed the movement's approach to race. The first was an acceptance of Argentina's dominant self-image as a white, European-descended nation, a myth reinforced by mass immigration from Europe in previous decades. The second was a stress on national unity and inclusion that muted but did not challenge this whiteness, welcoming all citizens into the Peronist fold without acknowledging racial difference. The third was an outright rejection of race as a valid social category, a stance shaped in part by the post-World War II discrediting of biological racism and by the need to rebut accusations of fascist and anti-Semitic sympathies leveled at the regime by domestic and international critics. These tendencies combined to produce what Elena calls the "nationalization of whiteness," a vision of popular integration premised on assimilation to a white Argentine mainstream. The chapter illustrates this dynamic through close readings of Peronist propaganda, including the short film Fin de semana and the speeches of Eva Perón, showing how racial difference was acknowledged obliquely if at all, and how the racial slurs directed at the Peronist base by opponents, most notoriously the epithet cabecita negra, went largely uncontested by official spokespeople. The fall of the Perón regime in 1955 and the long period of proscription and resistance that followed brought significant shifts. The chapter traces how, between 1955 and 1976, left-leaning sectors within Peronism became far more willing to acknowledge nonwhiteness openly, to critique racial prejudice, and to recognize indigenous and mestizo populations as central to Argentine identity. Elena attributes these changes to several converging forces: the social impact of rural-urban migration and the growth of shantytowns, which made the presence of darker-skinned Argentines impossible to ignore; the influence of Third Worldist and anti-colonial ideologies, from the Cuban Revolution to the writings of Frantz Fanon; the emergence of liberation theology and its pastoral engagement with impoverished communities; and the stimulus provided by historical revisionism, which recast the nineteenth-century past as a struggle between Europeanizing elites and a native-born pueblo. Elena examines the work of intellectuals such as Germán Rozenmacher and Hugo Ratier, whose writings on the cabecita negra brought questions of racial mixture and discrimination into sustained critical focus within Peronist culture. He also documents how activist organizations like the Juventud Peronista and publications like El Descamisado gave greater visibility to indigenous communities and to the everyday racism faced by working-class Peronists, bringing the movement closer to the mestizo nationalisms of mid-century populisms elsewhere in the region. Yet Elena is careful to note the limits of these shifts: paternalistic stereotypes persisted, the movement's top leadership remained largely silent on racial matters, and right-wing Peronist factions actively deployed anti-Semitic and racist violence against rivals within the movement itself. The Proceso dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 brutally interrupted these emerging tendencies, combining Catholic-Western nationalist ideology with documented anti-Semitic torture practices and the violent demolition of shantytowns. The chapter then traces how, after the return to democracy, Peronism gradually incorporated the language of multiculturalism, culminating in the Kirchner governments' explicit celebration of Argentina's indigenous, African, and mestizo heritage as essential to national identity. Elena reads this shift as a product of both global multicultural norms promoted by international organizations and the return to influence of the seventies generation of left Peronists, though he notes that Kirchnerista pluralism coexists with ongoing racialization of poverty, in which to be poor in Argentina remains strongly coded as negro and Peronist. Throughout, Elena argues that race in Argentina functioned less as a legal framework of formal exclusion than as a flexible political language for drawing partisan boundaries, distinguishing elite from plebeian, and defining who counted as the authentic pueblo. Peronism neither championed anti-racism consistently nor remained untouched by racial thinking; instead, it adjusted reactively to domestic and transnational pressures over decades of conflict. The cumulative process has been one of gradual erosion of white exceptionalism rather than frontal assault, and its outcomes remain contested and unresolved.
By Eduardo Elena · First published 2011 · Genre: History, Political Science, Racial Studies · 4 chapters
Contents
- Introduction
- "Nationalizing Whiteness" during the First Peronism
- The "Browning" of Peronism, 1955–76
- Peronist Pluralism and its Discontents