A Review of Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina

 Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentinaby Paulina L. Alberto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022, 510 pp.)

A few years ago, I was in the early phases of developing a new Black history course. I spent months contemplating the three pillars I wanted to prioritize for the class: the historical trends and transformations to cover; the concepts we would analyze and debate; and how to bring the history and ideas together in a way that would engage and interest the students. 

For some reason I struggled to come up with an idea that excited me, and I was still at an impasse when I caught a captivating report on the local radio station about jazz singer Nina Simone. I no longer recall the specifics of the piece, but I distinctly remember feeling inspired by the way in which the story pulled me in and sparked my curiosity about Simone’s life and the times in which she lived. I completely tuned out the next few stories that aired as my imagination and thoughts ran wild while my mind happily explored Simoneland. Suddenly the new course topic came to me—Black history through the biographies of fascinating and influential people. 

Some historians would take exception to my syllabus composed of biographies and similar readings, citing (once more popular) criticisms about the perceived purpose and accepted approaches of historical scholarship. These include arguments that history books should examine the past in the collective and not as an individual’s experience, and that a study’s periodization should be set by historical developments, eras and shifts, not by a person’s random birth and death dates. In other words, the questions historians ask and the analytical frameworks they establish should be broader and more open than a singular life can prompt.  

Paulina Alberto’s book, Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina quashes these misgivings. More than a traditional biography, Black Legend is an exemplary blueprint on how historical work based on one subject can function simultaneously as a microscope that provides revelatory detail and minutiae, and as a telescope that offers a sweeping look at myriad dynamics within a society. Alberto beautifully contextualizes Grigera within his multigenerational Afroporteño (Black in Buenos Aires) family and community, and within evolving phenomena related to racial narratives and ideologies, demographics, urbanization, tactics for racial inclusion and equality, local and national politics, and cultural expressions. 

Raúl Grigera’s life was interesting enough to warrant a narrower study of his experiences: he rose to fame in his twenties as an icon of Buenos Aires tango nightlife and died as a perceived has-been who did not possess the work ethic, intelligence or skills to sustain a decent life on his own. Instead, Alberto took the immense challenge to cover almost two hundred years of history (1800s to the present), starting with the lives of Grigera’s great-great- grandmother and (likely) great-grandfather, and concluding with the contemporary Afro-Argentine movement for visibility and rights. Alberto uses Grigera, his familial and communal origins and his legacy to dissect and subvert the stories about race told in Argentina, especially those that describe the trajectory from a multiracial society that supposedly embraced a colorblind nationalism toward the desire for and presumed attainment of whiteness. Even as Afro-Argentines became less prominent in the latter phase, Blackness remained as a prevalent descriptor of anyone deemed uncivilized, unsavory and ill-suited to hold political rights. 

For about a century Grigera has been understood within these racial tales, utilized as an allegory and an anecdote to confirm the fate they narrate for all Afro-Argentines. Alberto criticizes the longstanding practice to mindlessly and lazily regurgitate these clichés, and she tears down the stereotypes with painstaking research and her “historically informed imagination to ‘get the documents to speak’” (p. 10). In the process, Black Legend uncovers many falsehoods and overlooked facts about Grigera and the Afroporteño history he is assumed to parallel and embody. For instance, stories that Blacks had disappeared in Argentina by the early 20th century caused Grigera to be remembered as the sole (and thus hypervisible, to use Alberto’s term) survivor of a died-out race. Alberto demonstrates that, in fact, Grigera operated in an Afroporteño community that was still very alive and active. 

However, the narrative of Black extinction dovetailed with the common Afro-Argentine strategy to obtain rights and privileges by catering to elite White standards and by prioritizing national, class, professional, and neighborhood identities, which rendered Blacks increasingly invisible as a cohesive racial group. Afroporteño society was in flux but was certainly not dead, and, relatedly, Grigera was not a bizarre anomaly that materialized out of nowhere. Grigera also outlived the stories that assumed he, like all Afro-Argentines, had ceased to exist decades before he actually passed away.  

The accounts of el negro Raúl the celebrity also state that the niños bien, the famously rambunctious and entitled class of elite young White men of Buenos Aires, invented him by adopting Grigera as a sidekick who existed merely for their entertainment. In exchange for chump change and perks, such as the chance to hobnob with the city’s affluent population in swanky venues, Grigera allowed himself to be their plaything and the butt of their sadistic jokes and pranks, or so the story goes. As Alberto argues, this defamed image of Grigera likely originated and was immortalized in comic strips. In the same way that Whites had characterized the Afro-Argentine population as submissive and feckless, el negro Raúl’s reputation as a dominated buffoon shrouds the nuances and probable true nature of his relationship with the niños bien and disregards the initiative he took to cultivate his fame. In fact, both Grigera and the Afroporteño community at large found ways to create their own opportunities and forge a path in a nation anxious to see Blacks erased from the national landscape. 

In the first several years of his celebrity, before the clownish caricatures prevailed, Grigera had crafted an appealing image of himself as a popular, fashionable and intriguing socialite of Buenos Aires’s posh nightlife and tango scene. He was entrepreneurial as well, becoming a leader of Afroporteño social life by organizing dances for the Black community. The larger Afroporteño population was also significantly more proactive in shaping their destiny than the tales of passive Black disappearance suggest. Some did deprioritize their racial identity in the ways described above, but some Blacks also fought to maintain a dignified presence and the memory of Afro-Argentine contributions to the nation. Here, again, Alberto’s study of Grigera restores Afro-Argentines as protagonists in national history and delegitimizes the portrayal of them as mere pawns of White elite racial engineering. 

      In addition to encapsulating the reasons I was drawn to biographical texts for my new course, I found Black Legend compelling because of my own research interests. As a historian of racial nationalism, I am excited by the ways that the book delves deeply into the everyday manifestations of these narratives about race and nation. Besides the impact of race-based laws, it can be difficult to detail how such ideals affected and contoured life on the ground in the past, much less demonstrate how that transpired over several generations. Her analysis of Grigera’s 13-month confinement in a reformatory for male minors a few years before becoming a celebrity (because his father believed he was “spending too much time on the streets, being disobedient and keeping company with lowlifes”) is a great example of the connections the book makes between ideology and lived experience (p. 129-130). 

Alberto discusses the pessimistic branch of positivist thought that existed during Grigera’s confinement, which ushered in a resurgence of fear about the biological impact of Blackness on the Argentine race at the beginning of the 20th century. Blacks were perceived as an injurious and contaminating group whose inferiority was scientifically proven and even visible in their physical features. These pseudo-scientific theories influenced reformatory officials, so it is not surprising that they were reflected in Grigera’s intake form at the Marcos Paz reformatory, especially his designation as “degenerate” in the description of his appearance. Alberto contends that it is more than likely that “Raúl’s visible African descent would have awakened, in the minds of reformatory officials, latent connotations of negros’ unfitness for civic life, citizenship, and the exercise of free will, only underscoring the justness of his confinement” (p. 154). In other words, perhaps more than any other factor, Grigera’s race naturalized his confinement. None of the other files of “delinquent” youth that Alberto reviewed at Marcos Paz included young men who would be identified as Black, and Grigera was the only one classified as “degenerate.” Because this reformatory had a reputation for cruelty, exploitation of minors, and even sexual abuse, it is difficult to imagine that Grigera’s race and “degenerate” label did not “single him out for particular pain and humiliation” (p. 159). This case also illustrates the meticulous manner in which Alberto “got the documents (here the intake form) to speak”—that is, to tell more of the story than what is recorded on paper—via relevant context.

Through the life of el negro Raúl, Black Legend makes complex, multilayered processes accessible and fascinating for scholars, students, or any reader interested in Latin America (especially Argentina or Buenos Aires), race, culture, Black studies or urban studies. The book will surprise those who have bought into Argentina’s self-made White image in particular: the history it examines will feel both familiar to and unique from that which many of us are more knowledgeable about in societies such as Brazil or the United States. Raúl Grigera also deserves to have the disparaging portrayal of him laid to rest and his story retold in such a comprehensive, painstaking, and respectful manner. In this endeavor, Alberto brings Grigera and his Afroporteño family and community to vivid life, reversing the morbid tendency to kill them off prematurely. For these reasons and many more, Black Legend is a stunning achievement.