BLACK IN BUENOS AIRES

Oscar Alemán and the Transnational History of Swing

In 1973, the African American magazine Ebony sent its international editor, Era Bell Thompson, to Buenos Aires to do a feature on Argentina's tiny black community. Although Afro-Argentines represented nearly one-third of the population of colonial Buenos Aires, they had since virtually disappeared from official records. Miscegenation, war, and disease contributed to this demographic decline, but as historian George Reid Andrews showed many years ago, the invisibility of Afro-Argentines was at least as much the product of racism and of the hegemonic idea of Argentina as a white nation. For the Ebony article, "Argentina: Land of the Vanishing Blacks," Thompson interviewed every self-identifying Afro-Argentine she could find. Among them was Oscar Marcelo Alemán, a jazz guitarist who had enjoyed substantial fame and commercial success in Paris in the 1930s and in Buenos Aires during the 1940s and 1950s. By the time Thompson met him, Alemán had recently been rediscovered by Argentine jazz aficionados after a decade in obscurity, during which he had supported himself by giving guitar lessons in his home. Although he told Thompson that he was the son of a Spanish father and an Indian mother, Alemán insisted on his blackness: " 'Some of my six brothers are even darker than I,' he smiled, 'we think there was a black man somewhere.'"

Throughout his long career, audiences both at home and abroad perceived Alemán as a black man, a perception that was made possible by his dark complexion and his own avowal of a black identity, but also by his association with jazz music. Nevertheless, the precise meanings that attached to his blackness changed over the years. This chapter will trace the vicissitudes of his career while reconstructing the shifting discursive landscape within which that career developed. Alemán was a talented musician who played the music he loved, but as with any artist, both his musical creations and the popular reception of those creations were shaped by the world in which he lived. Alemán responded creatively to his audiences' varied racial expectations, performing multiple black identities over the years. In the Parisian nightclubs of the 1930s, being black gave him a certain cachet. Similarly, once he returned to Buenos Aires in 1940, his racial identity strengthened his claim to being Argentina's most authentic jazz musician. Yet as a black jazz musician, he challenged ideas about Argentine national identity in ways that ultimately limited his career horizons.

Alemán's artistic production as well as his commercial successes and failures illuminate the transnational construction of blackness in the middle decades of the twentieth century and complicate our understanding of race in Argentina. Scholars have generally interpreted Argentine racism as a by-product of the desire to join the modern, civilized world. Yet Alemán's career demonstrates that other transnational forces were also at work. Under the influence of North American jazz and French "negrophilia," Argentines were powerfully drawn to blackness as an emblem of modernity. Alemán's reception in his own country was shaped by local appropriations and reworkings of these transnational discourses as well as by Argentine attitudes toward Brazil, where the guitarist had spent many of his formative years. Anthropologist Alejandro Frigerio has argued convincingly that Argentina's self-image as a white nation is premised on the active denial of phenotypic evidence of African ancestry and the firm association of blackness with foreignness. In this way, Afro-Argentines are located in the nation's past and rendered invisible in the present. Yet at the same time, the ambiguous status of blackness in Argentina created space for Alemán to reinvent himself as an attractive exotic in his own country. By developing an exciting and entertaining musical style and by navigating these complex racial discourses, Alemán became a star for two decades in a country thought to be averse to any reminders of its own blackness.

Beginnings: Criollismo and Exoticism

Oscar Alemán was born in 1909 in the remote province of Chaco in northeastern Argentina. As a child, he performed alongside his father and siblings in the so-called Moreira Sextet, a music and dance troupe that specialized in the traditions known collectively as criollismo. The dominant trend in Argentine popular culture during the first two decades of the twentieth century, criollismo involved the celebration of the nation's rural traditions. During this period of massive immigration and rapid modernization, native Argentines looked back nostalgically to the culture of the legendary gauchos, brave and violent cowboy figures who roamed the vast pampas, or plains, outside Buenos Aires. At the same time, many foreign-born newcomers also embraced these cultural practices as a means to assimilate. Both groups were likely to read the pulp fiction that narrated the heroics of gaucho rebels, to join criollista clubs, and to attend the criollo circus, where gauchos performed equestrian feats. Although Alemán never explained why his father, the Uruguayan-born Jorge Alemán Moreira, used his maternal surname for the family group, it was likely a strategic choice. While "Alemán" sounded foreign, "Moreira" would have reminded audiences of the most popular literary gaucho of the period, Juan Moreira, whose exploits were first described by Eduardo Gutiérrez in a pulp serial published between 1878 and 1880 before becoming a staple of criollista literature and theater. Alemán's father chose the group's name, its costumes, and its repertoire with an eye toward cashing in on the popular craze for gaucho traditionalism.

At the age of five or six, Oscar accompanied his family to Buenos Aires, where they performed at two well-known venues, the Teatro Nuevo in Luna Park and the Parque Japonés. Oscar specialized in dancing the malambo, a stiff-backed, stamping dance performed by gauchos in head-to-head competitions. A 1917 photograph shows him dressed in elaborate gaucho costume, dancing with his sister while his father sits behind them strumming a guitar. The photograph leaves little doubt that audiences would have seen the two children as Argentines of African descent. With his dark complexion and traditional costume, Oscar embodied a well-known criollo type: the black gaucho. Blacks were quite visible in the culture of criollismo, particularly as competitors in payadas, the improvisatory rhyming duels waged by gaucho guitarists....