In 2002, the fifth-generation Afro-Argentine was kept from leaving the country by a customs officer who insisted there are no Black Argentines and asserted her passport was fake.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2021-12-02 20:32Z by Steven

This year’s November celebration of African culture in Argentina is dedicated to the memory of Maria Magdalena Lamadrid — “La Pocha” — an Afro-Argentine activist who died in September. In 2002, the fifth-generation Afro-Argentine was kept from leaving the country by a customs officer who insisted there are no Black Argentines and asserted her passport was fake.

Christiana Sciaudone, “Argentine movement tries to make Black heritage more visible,” The Associated Press, November 26, 2021. https://apnews.com/article/immigration-entertainment-discrimination-migration-race-and-ethnicity-0d18920b22e0eab19f28202c591ef0ea.

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Argentine movement tries to make Black heritage more visible

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy on 2021-11-27 21:51Z by Steven

Argentine movement tries to make Black heritage more visible

The Associated Press
2021-11-26

Christiana Sciaudone

Julia Cohen Ribeiro poses for a photo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Friday, Nov. 12, 2021. Ribeiro had never identified as anything other than Brazilian in her country of birth. Then at age 11, she was shocked when people on the street and in school in Buenos Aires insisted that she was Black. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — It wasn’t until Julia Cohen Ribeiro moved to Argentina that she discovered she was Black.

Her hair was curly, but her skin was light. She had never identified as anything other than Brazilian in her country of birth. Then 11, she was shocked when people on the street and in school in Buenos Aires insisted that she was Black.

“I was never told I was Black growing up,” said Ribeiro, now a 25-year-old film student at the University of Buenos Aires. The daughter of a white mother and Black father, she has since embraced that identity and joined a burgeoning Afro-Argentine movement that seeks to eliminate the persistent myth that there are no Black people in the country and to combat discrimination against them.

The 2010 census recorded about 150,000 people of African descent in Argentina, a nation of 45 million, but activists estimate the true figure is closer to 2 million following a surge of immigration — and because many Argentines have forgotten or ignore African ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

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