A character for the (white) Argentinian nation. The black Benito ,theater and urban popular world Costeño in the end go the XIX Century.

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, the black population of Buenos Aires had been of cially declared «disappeared», consolidating the process of its in- visibility. However, in the context of the local popular theater movement, the character of the «black» continued to have a particular relevance. Understand- ing the theater as a space for construction of subjectivity and communitas −that was of fundamental importance in the shaping of the popular world in Buenos Aires−, I will focus on Benito, a character in the play Justicia criolla, written by Ezequiel Soria, which was featured in Buenos Aires in 1897. I will propose that the analysis of this successful character lets us see some of the guidelines by which whiteness and the native-popular were being imposed and negotiated, while producing the marginalization of Afro-Argentineans into oblivion