BUENOS AIRES — Argentina is one of the most liberal countries in Latin America and the world, where abortion And same sex marriage are legal, non-binary identities recognized. These battles have been won through years of activism by different militant groups. Yet despite these progressive policies, structural racism and colorism persist.
Wari Alfaro, artist and photographer, was a member of Brown Identity Collectivea group of artists, educators and activists who identify as chestnuts Or brownxs since its beginnings in 2006. The word chestnut does not exactly translate to the color “brown” in this context, but is used as an umbrella term to refer to brown-skinned people who have indigenous characteristics and experience discrimination and racism in South America. Alfaro knew that the social violence, microaggressions, racial slurs, and negative stereotyping they were the target of weren’t just isolated events. “Racism in Argentina, but also in parts of Mexico, Peru and Bolivia, is directed against people of indigenous origin or with indigenous characteristics, and it intersects with social class,” Alfaro told Hyperallergic. “Visually and conceptually, our color is already constructed by perceptions of danger and poverty that are tied to our unequal treatment, denial of rights, or use of violence against our bodies.”
Argentina continues to maintain a myth to be 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 Afro-Latino communities. For this reason, racism was not an issue, as it was in the United States. But if it was true, why, I wondered when I was a kid, was the word Negro in Spanish consistently used as a racial slur towards people of African and Indigenous descent?
Images of whites dominated the media, educational narratives erased the slaughter of blacks and Indigenous peoples, and immigration policies favored Europeans from the founding of the country, all of whom contributed to this myth. “Many of us had already begun to question the lack of Aboriginal people and chestnut identities in progressive spaces and I realized that most people there weren’t like us,” says Alfaro, who also coordinates the project. Marrones Retratos (“Portraits “Brown”). Graduate of the Gender Studies, Politics, and Participation program at National University of General Sarmiento, Alfaro is responsible for communication of the women’s secretariat of the municipality of Pilar in Buenos Aires. “The spaces we occupy today have been dreamed about for years, and we had to work double and triple to get into them.”
At the beginning of the school year in March in Argentina, the artist and photographer Javier Colbarán, member of Identity Brown from Salta-Argentina, went out to take pictures of students. Colbarán works for the Salta newspaper, The Tribunoand won several awards for photographing this region for 15 years. With his images, he aims to document the daily singularity of the Andean territory and its 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 town’s waste disposal centre, proudly accompanied him to school.
“It’s our people, who have been invisible for a long time”, says Colbarán, “and today, being able to show a brown person accompanying his son on the first day of public school, the boy smiling, wearing his new shoes and his modern haircut, it’s very exciting for me. Colbarán explained how Salta, a province in the northwest of Argentina, is rooted both in its own traditions and in coloniality: “The images broadcast in the media here are predominantly white and far removed from what a salteno looks like.” Colbarán has also documented events related to climate change such as forest fires, droughts, deforestation and floods, as well as carnivals and religious celebrations, always revealing a human side of strength and beauty.
THE National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires is one of the first national museums in Argentina. To this day, it holds a painting from 1892 which is considered the first work of art to inaugurate the history of Argentine art and to justify the extermination of the natives. Painted by a white artist, Angel Della Valle, The Vuelta del Malon (The Return of the Indian Raid) shows a group of native “savages” robbing a church and taking a white woman with them. Since then, images of blacks, aboriginals and browns have been altered by the white gaze. Alfaro works to recover visual history by using his own gaze to make portraits of other maroons, as well as self-portraits.
“What would have happened if iconic works of art had our color? If we could have seen more images with our bodies, photographed with our cameras, with our hands, our gaze, our own decisions. Would our lives have been configured differently? And what do we want to say to the new generations of maroons? Alfaro asks in their work.
When Argentina won the FIFA World Cup last December and people took to the streets to celebrate, Alfaro came out to capture footage in the city of Buenos Aires. Camera in hand, they snapped photos and felt thrilled “to see people who looked like me smiling. It’s something you don’t see a lot,” they explained. “Usually our faces are associated with images that represent poverty, ignorance, delinquency, a thousand things except smiling faces that celebrate.”
As more and more artists, activists and educators found each other, the collective grew to over 100 people. In 2021 the book Marrones Escriben was published, compiled and edited by Florencia Alvarado, América Canela and Alejandro Mamani, with editorial support from Pablo Cossio and Ana Vivaldi. Created in collaboration between brown identity, the University of Manchester project “Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America”, the University of San Martin (UNSAM) and the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), the book is the product of years of workshops, conversations and interventions in public spaces. His critical essays, art and photography question the presence or absence of maroons in different spaces,
How many are we? What is a mirror? What color is the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires? And the jails? And the slums? Where are we? Where do you see your color? Who are your mirrors? Where are we in the art books? Where are we? In what kind of images? (translation by Ana Vivaldi)
“Slowly, Argentina is starting to give more voice to the issues of racism,” says Alfaro, who explained that the term was not discussed in school, in the media or in academic circles until recently. years. Today, the question is at least installed in public discourse. The work of the members of the collective is extremely diverse and tells stories of their experiences in different parts of Argentina and Latin America.
Alfaro and Colbarán agree that, in a country whose systemic racism has all but erased Indigenous and Mestizo narratives, the work needed to create, reclaim, archive and preserve is vast. Colbarán plans to donate all his footage to a memory project in Salta and wants to incorporate AI practices into his work. Both artists want to continue creating new cultural productions from a Marrón perspective. Alfaro is eager to capture more images of desire, embodiment, and maroons existing in the world. They add, “There’s so much work to do around creating these representations that we don’t see yet because there isn’t much.”
All interviews were conducted in Spanish and translated into English by the author.
