From Congo to Tango: associations, leisure and identities among Afro-Porteños in the second half of the 19th century

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, enslaved Africans and their descendants have tried, in various cities of America, to articulate associations and societies in which they could express and legitimize their social networks and ethnic identity. Among these places stand out, by geographical proximity to the Rio de Janeiro, the Rio da Prata region, especially the city of Buenos Aires. Due to the configuration of the Atlantic slave trade routes, this is an area thathas received a large number of captives whose origin was similar to that of southeastern Brazil, where there was a strong supremacy of slaves from west-central Africa. Even if the number of slaves imported to Buenos Aires was significantly lower than in the Brazilian Imperial Court, in the second half of the nineteenth century there was still intense presence of African descentamong workers in the Argentine capital. For this reason, this presentation aims to analyze the singularities of the ways and strategies adopted by afro-portenhos to articulate their identities. The main objective is to reflect on the specific way in which they faced, in the Plata region, the tension between their ethnicity and their social profile