A Strange Emblem for a (Not So) White Nation: "La Morocha Argentina" in the Latin American Racial Context, c. 1900-2015

This article explores the origins of La morocha argentina as an unofficial national emblem, the personification of the quintessential Argentinean woman, from its emergence in the early twentieth century to the present. A typical character of vernacular popuhr culture, the Argentinean "morocha" is compared to the "morenas" featured in other Latin American countries, to find simaoerities and differences. The racial uncertainty of the "morochas"—who, unlike the "morenas," were not always marked as being of dark complenon—helped undermine the official discourses of the Argentinean nation, which described it as racially white and ethnically European. The ambivalence of the "morocha argentina" was crucial in contexts in which open challenges of that myth were stil unfeasible. Thus, despite claims of racial exceptionalism, the making and trajectory of this emblem proves that Argentina's racial regime is a variant of the Latin American "color-continuum" racial formations. By analyzing the Argentinean case in comparative perspective, this article abo seeks to contribute to a better understanding ofnonbinary racial modeb and, more generally, of ethnicity "beyond groupism"—to put it in Roger Brubaker's terms. In other words, it aims to reconsider ethnicity as a process, the outcome of group-making projects, rather than (only) as the expression of preexisting ethnic entities.