The Politics of Race in Argentina

Figure 48. Eva Perón and a group of miners during the celebration of her birthday on May 7, 1951.

Mallo started to paint multi-racial women around 1940, when she had been living in Buenos Aires for around three years, and painted her last such work in 1952. Throughout that time, Argentina was a country that proudly defined itself as “White,” in opposition to other countries with more obviously Indigenous and/or African populations, like Brazil. Moreover, Argentinians traditionally reverted to “class” rather than “race” to explain social inequalities.[1] Of course, these claims that “class” vs. “race” were the defining features of a culture are in and of themselves implicitly racialized and speak to a kind of “color blindness” that often only affirms White supremacy. It is true that White people predominated in Argentina because of a series of epidemics in the nineteenth century, participation in the wars of independence, and miscegenation with European immigrants significantly decreased the number of people visibly of African descent in the country.[2] However, the existing population was further marginalized in popular discourse. Lea Geler and María de Lourdes Ghidoli suggest that, by 1930, the Afro-Argentinean population had been marginalized from mainstream Argentinean society using various strategies, including associating them with a nostalgic past, and caricaturing and exoticizing their bodies.[3] From his part, Ezequiel Adamovsky noted that both Afro-Argentinean and Indigenous communities in Argentina suffered for decades the consequences of a society that, instead of directly excluding them from the nation, “forced them to ‘dissimulate’ any mark of their diverse origin as a condition to participating as citizens in the life of the nation.”[4] Only in some instances, and in a purely anecdotical way, specific members of the Afro-Argentinean community were particularly lauded. For instance, that was the case of Argentinean actress and singer Rita Lucía Montero (1928-2013), who was born in a family descendent from enslaved Africans and was exalted as one of the most important performers of the golden age of Argentinean Cinema, participating in numerous films since the 1940s.[5] (Fig.49)

When she first arrived in Latin America, Mallo largely associated with the white mainstream. During her first years in Argentina, she spent most of her time in Buenos Aires, but in 1939 she also started to spend summers on the coast of Chile (where she stayed in Viña del Mar and Valparaíso), or in Uruguay (in Punta del Este and Punta Ballena).[6] Both in Buenos Aires and at her Chilean and Uruguayan destinations she was normally surrounded by women belonging to a selective social circle which included intellectuals, actresses, and wives of elite male friends.[7] (Fig.50) According to photos of events that Mallo attended, these women aligned with the kind of Caucasian archetype featured in Head of Woman (1941).

Around the same time, Mallo also began painting a Head that she dated 1940-1944, but that was apparently unfinished according to the title by which is known: Estudio para cabeza de mujer [Sketch for Head of Woman]. It pictures a woman with her hair styled in beautiful braids and adorned by a red flower. The painting includes an annotation that states, “Punta del Este el 29 de febrero de 1940,” so she likely did it while staying in the Uruguayan city popular among wealthy Argentineans as a health resort. Known as the “St. Tropez of South America,” it is still a city marked by manifest contrasts between the rich and the poor. In Sketch for Head of Woman (Fig. 51), Mallo included the following two lists of curious and seemingly contradictory terms:

1940   Convención?   Ramplón    Pobreza   Ignorancia   Tosco

1944   Mito   Belleza   Riqueza   Cultura s. XX   Aristocracia

These annotations, made in connection to the portrait but probably also to the place where it was made, reveal that Mallo was aware of contemporaneous social tensions and issues of class in the Argentine-Uruguayan context. She conceptualized her Sketch for Head of Woman and the series that followed during a period in which social, class and racial tensions intensified, especially in Buenos Aires. At this time, the migration of workers from the interior of the country increased substantially. This mass of workers, which was multiethnic (including many people of European descent but also many who were mixed-race), increased anxiety among Argentinean elites, and their racism was manifest in the derogative name they used to refer to this population: “cabecitas negras” (black little heads). However, the coming of the Peronist regime in 1946, [8] which marked a decisive turning point in Argentinean history, occasioned new reforms in order to valorize the native communities that were living in rural areas around the country.[9] In Argentina, there have always been communities of Mapuches, Tobas, Diaguitas, Aymaras, Guaraníes, Kollas, and many other groups with Indigenous roots. However, the Censo Indígena Nacional [Indigenous National Census] of 1966-1968 was the first official attempt to quantify as well as locate Argentinean Indigenous populations. For centuries, this big sector of society had been pushed aside and suffered from discrimination. As Perón’s regime especially supported the so-called “cabecitas negras,” being a Peronist follower started to be associated with being “Black,” irrespective of one’s skin tone.[10] According to Ezequiel Adamovsky, Peronist leaders were ambivalent about the myth of a White-European Argentina, but their political discourse clearly gave the traditional ‘criollo’ a predominant role in the construction of the nation in ways that allowed mixed-race people, Indigenous people, and African-Americans to be more visible and thus challenge the apparent white homogeneity and supremacy of the country.[11]

The ambiguity of the Peronist position regarding race was exemplified by the curious case of the sculpture of Eva Perón that the diplomats of the Argentinean embassy of Paris commissioned from Sesostris Vitullo in 1953 (Fig. 52). The artist created a sculpture in stone with clear mixed-race features and depicted Eva as “the liberator of the oppressed races of America.”[12] It was supposed to be exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art of Paris but, when the diplomats saw it, they tensely reacted and decided to move it to a basement, where it was hidden until 1973 when Orlando Barone published the outcome of his research about it in the Argentinean magazine Crisis. In his article, Barone asked for the recovery and public presentation of the sculpture.[13] This anecdotal incident is actually quite illustrative of how unprepared were Mallo’s contemporaries for an open discussion on both the political role of women and racial minorities and how the combination of the power of both could have been perceived as a threat.

I have here discussed how the Peronist regime allowed for the growing legitimacy of multiple identities within Argentina as a way to highlight the visibility of issues of race at the time. This socio-political context likely initiated Mallo’s interest in diversifying Argentinean notions of female beauty by means of creating a catalog of racial types. It does not seem to be a pure coincidence that the last painting of the series, from 1952, depicts a woman who seems to have features indicative of multiple races and whose title is Argentina (Fig.53). Much on the contrary, this clearly indicates Mallo’s intentions: that she supported the diversity of the population in Argentina. Although the artist claimed to have hated Juan Peron’s regime, which she defined as a “contubernio” [plot, conspiracy],[14] and criticized Eva Perón,[15] her series of Heads of Women ended up paradoxically aligning with the Peronist desire to diversify Argentinean society and enlarge the number of cultural and ethnic sources in which the nation was rooted.

Figure 49. Actress and singer Rita Montero and her father (Severo Miguel Montero) with mother and daughter (María Magdalena “Magda”) from a neighboring family. Unidentified photographer, c. 1936.

Figure 50. Maruja Mallo (second on the right) and friends during a summer in Punta del Este, Uruguay.

Figure 51. Detail from Maruja Mallo’s Sketch for a Head of Woman, 1940-1944. Photo: María Cimadevilla.

Figure 52. Sesostris Vitullo. Eva Perón, arquetipo símbolo [Eva Perón, Archetype Symbol] 1952. Stone of Gard, h: 1.12 m. Collection Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.

Figure 53. Maruja Mallo. Argentina, 1952. Oil on canvas, 49 x 40.7 cm
© Maruja Mallo