Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina (Afro-Latin America)

Celebrities live their lives in constant dialogue with stories about them. But when these stories are shaped by durable racist myths, they wield undue power to ruin lives and obliterate communities. Black Legend is the haunting story of an Afro-Argentine, Raúl Grigera ('el negro Raúl'), who in the early 1900s audaciously fashioned himself into an alluring Black icon of Buenos Aires' bohemian nightlife, only to have defamatory storytellers unmake him. In this gripping history, Paulina Alberto exposes the destructive power of racial storytelling and narrates a new history of Black Argentina and Argentine Blackness across two centuries. With the extraordinary Raúl Grigera at its center, Black Legend opens new windows into lived experiences of Blackness in a 'white' nation, and illuminates how Raúl's experience of celebrity was not far removed from more ordinary experiences of racial stories in the flesh. "A few writers evoke Raúl's connection to the commonplaces of the city's African past: slavery, the neighborhood of Montserrat and its percussive candombe rhythms, the dance troupes of carnival. But they struggle to narrate the passage of time between these hazy, distant memories and Raúl's tangible twentieth-century presence. Some surmise (without accounting for the generations that separated Raúl from slavery) that he was the son of enslaved parents who "had adopted the surname of the family they had served."4 Others find it easier simply to have him materialize. "He appeared one day in one of the city's many holes," storytellers declared, "airs of a forgotten Congo ruffling his wooly hair, the winds from Montserrat carrying the sounds of their candombes."5 Or, "He appeared on the city's streets like a jet-black doll"-a lifeless object-"dropped by a carnival troupe."6 The main character of these stories has no verifiable history; he "appears" fully formed, sometime in the early 1900s, as "el negro Raúl.""-- Provided by publisher. A Note on Terminology -- Introduction: Racial stories -- Ancestors (1850-1880) -- Community (1880-1900) -- Youth (1900-1910) -- Celebrity (1910-1916) -- Defamation (1916-1930) -- Deaths (1930-1955) -- Epilogue: Afterlives (1955-present)