Framing Afrodescendants in a country

Abstract

In 2010, for the first time since 1895, the Argentine census asked those living within its national territory if they were of African descent. While the inclusion of this question followed broader regional shifts to integrate questions on race and ethnicity into national censuses, this historic disjuncture is most astounding in Argentina. No country in Latin America has more successfully constructed itself as a nation donde no hay negros, where there are no blacks, than Argentina. Through a frame analysis of digital texts produced in Argentina between 2010 and 2012 regarding the new census question, this Master's thesis uncovers how government, media and Afro organizational actors understood the meaning of Afrodescendant and the purposes of the census question. As such, this research seeks to expand research on the African diaspora in the Americas by analyzing how racial politics of identification work in a nation-state of hegemonic whiteness.