Argentina, with a carnival in its DNA

Everything breaks, everything is subverted. Hierarchies are no longer valid. The essence of carnaval is the challenge and to dive into that festivity is that the essayist Ezequiel Adamovsky presents The black party. A history of the ancient Buenos Aires carnival and its legacy in popular culture (21st century), his new book in which he meticulously reconstructs the celebration and tells how class and gender hierarchies were challenged, but above all, the historian focuses on ethnic-racial transgressions that involved the border that separated whites and blacks.

A few days after receiving a Konex Prize (Political Essay), the historian met with Viva in the La Paternal neighborhood.

–The black party is an investigation that took you more than twelve years. How and why did you decide to face it?

–For a long time I have been embarking on a great research question that has to do with how color differences and ethnic differences affected Argentine history and particularly in the formation of class identities. In my work on the middle class I had seen that middle class identity and the sense of Argentineness itself is closely associated with the idea that we are white. And the question I had is how that affects the identities of popular classes. And searching through the archive it was very difficult for me to find that this was thematized in a verbal, argumentative way. I began to see that it appeared in cultural consumption, in some popular emblems. From there came the text of the gaucho, my previous book. AND I was attracted to the carnival because I had known for a long time that at the end of the 19th century, troupes of black Afroporteños and troupes of sooty white people who imitated them coexisted in the carnival space.. I was certain that there was surely going to be an important key to understanding that link and what black and white mean for the popular classes. That’s what attracted me to carnival.

–Why do you think that the Buenos Aires carnival has received, until now, little attention from historians?

–The truth is that popular culture has received little attention from historians in general. We have a super robust historiography, important in economic history, political history, intellectual history, it is very strong. For some reason, popular culture remained more in the hands of anthropologists or sociologists, and historians have paid less attention to it.. I imagine that because of that, and perhaps because of the presumption of a popular festival that is also not particularly Argentine, because the carnival is everywhere, the presumption that it would have little to tell us about our history. And I found quite the opposite.

–How do you explain the intensity of the 19th century carnival in Buenos Aires?

–One of the things that surprised me was the intensity and magnitude of the party. This is very little remembered. It is explained for me for two reasons. First, because we must understand that it was a society with few occasions for fun. There was no television, there was no cinema, there was no radio, there were no football games to go see, there were no places to go dancing. The carnival was a unique occasion to have fun. It was also a unique opportunity to find a partner, whether stable, temporary or ephemeral. And there is also an extra reason, which is that Buenos Aires was probably the most ethnically segmented city in the world at that time. Half of the Buenos Aires population, since the middle of the 19th century, and throughout the rest of the century, was foreign, of different nationalities, with different languages, who had arrived on a Creole population that was also already safe, segmented between whites and blacks. . The carnival was a meeting space for that segmented peoplea space in which emotional ties began to be built between these very different people. And also a space that allowed those ethnic differences to be processed, either to sustain them, or to transcend them, and to build new popular or national identities.

–How were the sense of belonging and the diverse ways of being Argentine forged?

–This narrative according to which we are a white and European country arrived at the end of the 19th century. Sarmiento clearly had a Europeanizing project, but he did not even remotely imagine that it was a white country. Quite the opposite. He was disturbed by the non-white presences in this country and was very aware of them. There is an episode in the history of the carnival that I deal with in the book, which is that at the end of the 1860s, during the Sarmiento government, the political elites of the country and the city tried to take the festival by storm, a party that had always been very plebeian, and turn it into a kind of pedagogical tool to transmit the vision of a country founded on what they called “civilization”, which was a country with European customs. To do this, it was necessary to remove the carnival’s most distinctive feature, which was the water game, considered a barbaric and brutal thing due to its intensity. In 1868 they prohibited water play and in 1869 they created the first parade. That was a big change in the carnival. The parade was held with the idea that it would be a place where the troupes would parade all together, guided by the troupes of elite young people. And then also for the luxurious carriages of each family to parade. That is to say, a glassmaker’s sample of an Argentine town led paternally by the elite. That assault on the carnival was short-lived, because finally the popular classes regained control of the festival and the upper classes ended up having to distance themselves from the celebration. That is the moment in which that encounter occurs, that very curious phenomenon of the presence of Afro-Porteños in the carnival and of whites who imitate them, which begins a little before the whitening pressure of the State. And then, well, one of the symptoms of that pressure is that at the end of the century the State is going to prohibit the Candomber troupes, both those of whites and those of blacks.

–How was the impact of the popular classes with that racist component of Argentine society?

–The way I interpret it is that the approach of whites to Afro-rooted culture that occurred at the end of the 19th century is in dissonance with the official discourses of the Nation at the end of the century and proposes a vision of Argentina and the popular linked to the black. And it is a vision that will be in competition with the vision of middle class, white and European Argentina throughout the 20th century. There are some characteristic features of our culture, very distinctive, not very comparable to other places, which have to do with the association that exists in our country between being lower class and being black. This association that occurs so much in the racist insult, regardless of whether one has white or black skin, is called black or little black head. In our country, popular class identities have also taken up black as an emblem of plebeian pride.. And this has been taken up again by both people with brown skin and people with white skin. That association, that kind of blackening of the white that exists in our popular classes has competed and created dissonance with respect to the official discourses of the Nation and also with the middle class identity and that claim to embody the Argentine nation.

–You explain the miscegenation in the book and the reason for the decline of the Afro population, which many people deny that we have had in the country.

–There is a whole series of fantasies, sometimes well-intentioned, in relation to the disappearance of black people in Argentina. Many times this is presented as a complaint that the State exterminated them, eliminated them or took away their presence and so on, and sometimes this ends up confirming the idea that this community disappeared. Those of us who study the issue clearly see that it did not disappear, it was always there. It lost visibility due to political and cultural pressures, but it was always, always there.

• He was born in Buenos Aires in 1971 and has a doctorate in History and an essayist.

• He studied at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires and obtained a doctorate at University College London. He currently works as a full professor at the National University of San Martín (Unsam) and as a Principal Investigator at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Conicet). He was a professor at other universities in Argentina and abroad and a Guest Researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France.

• He is the author of Euro-Orientalism: Liberal Ideology and the Image of Russia in France, c. 1740-1880 (2006), History of the Argentine middle class (2009), The marchita, the shield and the drum: a cultural history of the emblems of Peronism (con Esteban Buch, 2016), The untamed gaucho (2019) e History of Argentina, biography of a country (2020), among others.

• He has been awarded the James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize (2009), the National Prize (2013), the Bernardo Houssay Prize (2015), the Ibero-American Book Award (Latin American Studies Association, 2020) and the Konex (2024).