The Artists Resisting the Myth of "White" Argentina
The work of Identidad Marrón Collective fights systemic racism and erasure of Indigenous and mixed-race narratives in the country.
Carolina Drake 8 hours ago
- click for image -
https://archive.ph/nmsNr/5ee977eee7a0e021cc353dc85c62831d13b3865a.webp
Javier Corbalán, "Valentines Day in Salta" (2023) (photo courtesy the artist)
BUENOS AIRES — Argentina is one of the most liberal countries in Latin America and the world, where abortion and same-sex marriage are legal and nonbinary identities recognized. These battles have been won thanks to years of activism from different militant groups. Yet, despite these progressive policies, structural racism and colorism persist.
Wari Alfaro, an artist and photographer, has been a member of Identidad Marrón Collective, a group of artists, educators, and activists who identify as marrones or marronxs since it began in 2006. The word marrón does not translate exactly to the color “brown” in this context, but is used as an umbrella term to talk about people with brown skin who have Indigenous features and are the subject of discrimination and racism in South America. Alfaro knew that the social violence, micro-aggressions, racial slurs, and negative stereotypes of which they were the target were not just isolated events. “Racism in Argentina, but also parts of Mexico, Perú, and Bolivia, operates over people of Indigenous descent or with Indigenous features, and it intersects with social class,” Alfaro explained to Hyperallergic. “Visually and conceptually, our color is already constructed by perceptions of danger and poverty which are linked to our unequal treatment, the negation of rights or use of violence against our bodies.”
Argentina continues to sustain a myth of being a “White” country in South America. A general argument I heard growing up in Buenos Aires, whenever I mentioned racism, was that Argentina didn’t have communities of Afro-Latinos. Because of that, racism was not an issue, as it was in the United States. But if that was true, why, I wondered as a child, was the word negro in Spanish used constantly as a racial slur toward people of African and Indigenous descent?
- click for image -
https://archive.ph/nmsNr/64ee71c30761e16d6eb2b69172137a5b9f14ea08.webp
Javier Corbalán, “Carnival Celebrations of Salta, ‘Carnabal del Norte'” (2023) (photo courtesy the artist)
Images of White people have dominated the media, educational narratives have erased the massacre of Black and Indigenous people, and immigration policies have favored Europeans since the country’s foundation, all of which have contributed to this myth. “A lot of us had already started questioning the lack of Indigenous and marrón identities in progressive spaces and realized most people there did not look like us,” says Alfaro, who also coordinates the project Retratos Marrónes (“Brown” Portraits). A graduate of the Gender Studies, Politics, and Participation program at Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Alfaro is in charge of communications for the women’s secretariat at the Municipality of Pilar in Buenos Aires. “The spaces we are occupying today have been dreamt about for years, and we’ve had to work double and triple to get into them.”
When the school year started this March in Argentina, artist and photographer Javier Colbarán, a member of Identidad Marrón from Salta-Argentina, went out to take pictures of students. Colbarán works for Salta’s newspaper, El Tribuno, and has won various awards for photographing this region for 15 years. With his images, he aims to document the everyday uniqueness of the Andes territory and his community. This time, he decided to tell the story of a six-year-old boy starting first grade at the local public school with 1,400 students in one of Salta’s most populated neighborhoods. The boy’s parents, who work at the city’s waste disposal site, proudly walked him to school.
More:
https://hyperallergic.com/816909/the-artists-resisting-the-myth-of-white-argentina/
Or:
https://archive.ph/nmsNr#selection-1383.0-1395.377
