Acculturation or transculturation? The invisibility of Afro-Argentines in the ‘white’ nation

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper contests the myth of Argentina as a white-Europeanised nation by examining the invisibility of Afro-Argentines and Afro-descendants from official accounts of the nation. Rather than a process of complete acculturation and assimilation leading to the ‘disappearance’ of the Afro-Argentine population, as is the popular view, what occurred was an appropriation of contributions by Afro-Argentines into white culture. In this way, we examine the potential of transculturation as a critical concept to defy one of Argentina’s most enduring myths.