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Paper short abstract

An ethnographic approach to Argentine archives uncovers Afro-descendant micro-resistances and argues that archival silences and fragmentary records expose anthropological tensions in archival fieldwork

Paper long abstract

This paper treats the archive as a site of ethnographic encounter, foregrounding the voices of racialized populations that dominant discourses sought to erase in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century. This erasure coincided with—and was actively produced by—the expansion of archival forms of knowledge production that shaped and consolidated imaginaries of Argentina as a “white” nation.

Police photographs and classificatory records, press coverage, and journalistic narratives repeatedly reinforced negative social representations of Afro-descendants, its supposed demographic decline, and its presumed lack of cultural and political significance in Argentina. Yet, drawing on fragmentary judicial files, this paper traces the voices of Afro-descendant individuals accused and convicted of theft, revealing forms of resistance that undermine these representations. These subjects navigated and appropriated dominant legal and moral languages in their defense, criticized police profiling, participated in political life, and operated within networks of power involving police officers and judges.

The analysis reflects on how archival silences and contradictions are analytically productive, allowing to reconstruct the perspectives from which archives were created. Documents, as well as their conditions of production and circulation, are approached as active agents in the making of racial stereotypes. At the same time, the sources reveal that social imaginaries and stereotypes were not static but were continually negotiated and contested in everyday practices. By attending to these dynamics, the paper highlights the methodological and theoretical tensions in archival fieldwork and shows how working with archival materials can generate new anthropological reflections on historical processes of racialization.