Afroargentinos (Spanish) | |
---|---|
Total population | |
Sub-Saharan ancestry predominates 302,936 (2022 census)[1] 0.66% of the Argentina's population | |
Regions with significant populations | |
Predominantly in the Greater Buenos Aires and in the Argentine Northwest | |
Buenos Aires | 128,804[1] |
Buenos Aires City | 40,670[1] |
Córdoba | 18,366[1] |
Santa Fe | 16,560[1] |
Salta | 10,632[1] |
Languages | |
Majority: Spanish Minority: Wolof · Portuguese · Haitian Creole | |
Religion | |
Majority: Catholicism Minority: Sunnism · Traditional religion | |
Related ethnic groups | |
Sub-Saharan Africans Black Latin Americans · Black Americans · Black Canadians · Black Jamaicans · Others |
Afro-Argentines (Spanish: Afroargentinos), also known as Black Argentines (Spanish: Argentinos Negros), are Argentines who have predominantly or total Sub-Saharan African ancestry.[2] The Afro-Argentine population is the result of people being brought over during the transatlantic slave trade during the centuries of Spanish domination in the region[3][4] and immigration.[5]
During the 18th and 19th centuries they accounted for up to fifty percent of the population in certain cities,[6] and had a deep impact on Argentine culture. Some old theories held it that in the 19th century the Afro-Argentine population declined sharply due to several factors, such as the Argentine War of Independence (c. 1810–1818), high infant mortality rates, low numbers of married couples who were both Afro-Argentine, the War of the Triple Alliance, cholera epidemics in 1861 and 1864 and a yellow fever epidemic in 1871.[7]
Research in recent decades cites a strong racial intermixing with whites and indigenous peoples in the 18th and 19th centuries as the main reason for the decline of the black population in Argentina.[7] That mixing was promoted by governments of those times as a method to, in a first era, make non-whites (both indigenous and black people) racially closer to whites during the construction of a modern society, as they saw it; and in a second era, make them decline gradually through their "dilution" into a white majority that it was to become as such with the promotion of a mass immigration from Europe and Middle East that started to arrive since then (mid-19th century) until the 1940s.[8] At the same time, non-whites frequently sought to have offspring with whites as a way to make their racially mixed child escape from slavery in the colonial period, and later, from discrimination.