In this thematically organized monograph, Erika Denise Edwards examines how and why Afro-Argentines seemingly vanished from Còrdoba, Argentina, in the early nineteenth century. The book begins on a personal note, with Edwards recalling how during her first visit to Còrdoba in 2002, as a student on study abroad, she was repeatedly told that Argentina had “no blacks. They disappeared.” To understand how Afro-Argentines were erased from Còrdoba's history, Edwards examined ecclesiastic, court, and other governmental records from the late colonial and early Republican era. Her book traces the individual histories of several Afro-Argentine women to argue that “black invisibility” was achieved through the agency of Afro-Argentine women who refashioned and resisted the racial hierarchy that placed them at the bottom of Còrdoba society.
Edwards illustratively focuses on the cases of several Afro-Argentine women who “whitened” themselves by marrying or becoming the concubines of elite men. Although wives secured greater privileges than did lovers, Afro-Argentine women in both situations successfully overcame colonial-era racial restrictions against wearing fine dresses and jewels and exercising power over servants within their homes. The privilege Afro-Argentine concubines and wives enjoyed questioned the colonial racial hierarchy and, in many cases, upset Church and crown officials. Yet, critically, the ability of these women to transgress racial boundaries highlights the fluidity of those colonial divisions. At the crux of the author's argument is the fact that Afro-Argentine women who married Spanish men in Còrdoba had their children's baptisms inscribed in Spanish (rather than casta) records, ensuring that their children would be considered “white” and enjoy all the privileges that entailed. In 1776, the Spanish crown attempted to curtail this fluidity through the Royal Pragmatic on marriage, which empowered parents to stop their children from entering into “unequal marriages.” As parents could protest only marriages to individuals of African descent, Afro-Argentine brides responded by finding witnesses to declare they were of Amerindian or Spanish parentage and not African.
In the national period, the state ended indigenous tributary servitude and enacted gradual abolition. As a consequence, colonial-era racial categories collapsed, allowing for the adoption in censuses of a broadly defined non-white “pardo” category, which replaced colonial categories like “mestizo” and “mulato” that had highlighted African and/or Amerindian ancestry. Additionally, government officials invested in public education to transform pardos into loyal and civilized citizens, whether they were former slaves or indigenous tributaries. These factors together erased the colonial distinctions between individuals of African and Amerindian ancestry and further helped Afro-Argentines disappear from the historical record. Edwards concludes that generations of miscegenation, flexibility within the racial hierarchy, and shifting degrees of inequity between individuals of African and Amerindian descent created pathways for Còrdoba's Afro-Argentines to “erase” their African ancestry and, in turn, construct a better social position for themselves and their descendants.
The book's heavy use of vignettes might have made it a natural selection for teaching. Unfortunately, however, Edwards limits her readership by not providing her readers with some basic but important historical foundations upon which she builds her arguments. In particular, non-experts would greatly benefit from an explanation of why Africans and Amerindians were legally classified so differently by colonial Spanish American officials. Certainly, this would have required Edwards to go beyond the history of Còrdoba, but this digression would have made her arguments more accessible to a broader readership. Without this foundational work non-experts will likely struggle for a full grasp of Edwards's sound and logical arguments on how and why Afro-Argentine women successfully resisted and refashioned racial hierarchies to empower themselves and their descendants.
Despite this missed opportunity to produce a text for both experts and non-experts, Edwards's work promises to excite scholars interested in Afro-Argentine history with her gendered and provincially focused contribution to this field. Moreover, researchers interested in the broader field of Latin American racial history will enjoy this examination of how colonial-era racial hierarchies were reconfigured in the early national period.
