Paulina Alberto's Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling provides a biography of ‘El negro Raúl’, a famous and almost mythical figure of porteño (Buenos Aires) nightlife from the 1910s–1930s. However, the book is much more than a biography − it is historical revisionism at its best. Although there are scores of stories about ‘El negro Raúl’, most paint a portrait of a man with no background, family or community. One who apparently appeared out of nowhere in the mid-1910s, represented the last of a dying race, rose to fame as the ‘buffoon’ of a group of rowdy wealthy White men, and then died in disgrace. What is fascinating, as Alberto's research uncovers, is that these stories are mostly copied, some to the point of plagiarism, from a 1916 comic strip of which ‘El negro Raúl’ was the titular character and protagonist. The comic strip was the first in Argentina to be produced by a local Argentine, but it was also replete with racist stereotypes, caricatures and assumptions.

Alberto asks how Raúl Grigera, and other Afro-Argentines, might have experienced their own supposed disappearance and what a more humane and fact-based history of Raúl might reveal. To answer these questions, Alberto uncovers hundreds of textual and visual sources (institutional logs, periodicals, probate reports, religious and civil registries) to tell the story of five generations of Raúl's family and an alternative story of his life during the height and aftermath of his celebrity. In doing so, Alberto reconstructs a more complete narrative of Afro-Argentine history from 1850 to the present. The book provides an eloquent and compelling argument, ‘from an unexpected place on the margins of the Black Atlantic – of the undeniable power of racial stories to make race and unmake lives, and the urgency of putting new stories in their place’ (p. 17).

We learn this history over six chapters, organised chronologically, each covering ten to 30 years of important stages of Grigera's life. They includes his ‘Ancestors’, ‘Community’, ‘Youth’, ‘Celebrity’, ‘Defamation’ and ‘Deaths’. The introduction situates the substantive nature of the book within the theoretical framework of racial storytelling and the epilogue is aptly titled ‘Afterlives (1955–Present)’. Each chapter starts with the existing stories about Raúl at aforementioned stages and then builds a convincing case for why they are not only insufficient as historiography but also reproduce racial narratives about Black Argentines. These deficits are corrected through Alberto's use of primary sources to give an account of Raúl's and other Afro-Argentines' histories that is not based on recycled racist stories.

For example, in Chapter 4, ‘Celebrity (1910–1916)’, we learn that − in contrast to existing stories that paint Raúl as a ‘buffoon’ to wealthy young White men − prior to the defamatory 1916 comic strip, periodical archives showed that Raúl was a well-known Black socialite who was often the master of ceremonies in the purportedly defunct Afro-porteño dance parties known as candombes. In Chapter 6, ‘Deaths (1930–1955)’, Alberto overcomes the scandal of institutional and periodical archives by going beyond the archive to the ‘morgues’ of popular twentieth-century periodicals to find additional photographs and notes that journalists chose not to print. Existing stories use Raúl's final years spent in a mental institution as a moral tale for Blacks who seek a higher station in life and for people who lack a work ethic yet seek the high life, and as evidence of the disappearance of Afro-Argentines. Alberto excavated sources to render these years such that Raúl's humanity and agency, in posing for journalists and telling his version of his life, become visible, while also connecting his predicament to the increased policing and institutionalisation of non-White citizens as a result of a series of conservative military coups, economic crises and moral panics about the mass immigration of working-class people from the interior.

Most scholars of Afro-Latin American studies are now familiar with the ‘Black legend’ of Black disappearance in Argentina. Some scholars are even documenting the Black experience in present-day Argentina. But between the supposed disappearance of Afro-Argentines in the late nineteenth century and their increasing present-day visibility looms a void. Connecting contemporary Afro-Argentines to those who ‘disappeared’ proves a difficult and elusive task, as there is a paucity of historical data on Afro-Argentines in the twentieth century. Black Legend makes a ground-breaking contribution to filling this void by countering Argentina's ‘Black legend’ with the biography of Grigera, a true ‘Black legend’, who stood ‘out as an unapologetically Black celebrity in a White city’ (p. 27).

In addition to Alberto's much-needed contribution to the history of Afro-Argentines in the twentieth century, readers who are particularly familiar with class and racialised landscapes in Argentina will also appreciate the delicate yet rigorous nature with which Alberto approaches the complexity in contemporary class-based meanings of the word ‘negro’. What Alberto (along with Eduardo Elena) successfully accomplishes in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2015) – historically documenting the capaciousness of the category of White – she also successfully achieves in Black Legend in a different yet related way. She documents the ‘semantic transition of the term negro […] away from a racial or “ancestral” sense and toward a “popular” sense: a slur against people whose “ways of being” – regarding culture, class, and now especially politics – marked them as insufficiently qualified for full belonging in the modern White nation’ (p. 247).

Thus, while Black Legend is a must-read for scholars of Afro-Argentine studies, its theoretical grounding in the power of ‘racial stories’ to impact lived experiences and the potential of new stories to upend racial narratives situate it as a text that will be of interest to students of the African diaspora, and race and ethnicity more broadly. Alberto accomplishes this by drawing from and contributing to existing scholarship that theorises the scandal of the archive and racial narratives, such as Saidiya Hartman's ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (Small Axe, 12: 2 (2008), pp. 1−14) and Imani Perry's More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York University Press, 2010). Moreover, Alberto's skill for connecting the changes in the lives of Raúl, his family and the Afro-porteño community to shifting socio-political and cultural environments places this book among the important histories of Argentina. For example, we learn in Chapter 5, ‘Defamation (1916–1930)’, that the 1916 racist comic strip that provided the narrative on which most future stories of Raúl were based, reflected fears of White elites during the campaign and later election of Hipólito Yrigoyen, the first president to upset a long line of oligarchs who ruled the county since the end of Argentina's civil war. While existing books on the history of Argentina have covered topics such as popular and high culture, gender, economics and politics, unlike Black Legend they fail to address how the meanings of race, particularly Blackness, in Argentina were intimately tied to power struggles between various political factions.

As I read this book from my hotel room in the neighbourhood of Monserrat, a mere nine blocks from the ‘house on calle México’ which was owned by the Grigera family for multiple generations and provided so much of the archival data that allowed Alberto to render a more complete and fact-based version of Raúl's history, I thought of the one thing this brilliantly written monograph does not accomplish but can and should. For the many Argentines I have met over the past ten years who share what they ‘know’ of a famous Afro-Argentine named ‘El negro Raúl’ upon learning of my research in Argentina, the book begs for a Spanish translation and would find a significant readership in Argentina.