Since the early nineteenth century, Argentine elites sought to distinguish their nation from the rest of Latin America by portraying Argentina as fundamentally white. Throughout the 1800s, leading politicians and intellectuals conducted campaigns to "whiten" the Argentine citizenry through the exclusion and/or elimination of undesired races like Afro-Argentines and indigenous groups, and through the programmatic support of mass immigration from Europe.

The purpose of this project is to examine how cultural discourses interacted with political mechanisms to posit whiteness as the de-racialized norm for the Argentine citizenry at key moments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the years following independence, the period of mass immigration at the turn of the nineteenth-century, Juan D. Perón's rise to power in the 1940s and 50s, and contemporary times. This dissertation analyzes the cultural production that is fundamental to each period, including nineteenth-century political texts and foundational narratives; the theater of the grotesco criollo , a popular theater for immigrants during the early twentieth century; populist visual art and anti-populist literature of the Peronist era; and finally, contemporary film, performance, and literature.

This dissertation argues that inherent to the construction of a white racial identity is a constant reconfiguration of the non-white and specifically of the category "negro"—from its reference to Afro-descendents in the nineteenth century to its twentieth-century use as a broader category referring to the working class or inhabitants of urban slums, many of them indigenous-descended migrants from Argentina's interior and, more recently, from neighboring countries.

Today, however, in the context of a populist government and state-sponsored multicultural initiatives inspired by global trends, Argentine discourses on race are in flux. Examining the cultural manifestations that contest and destabilize the racial narratives of the modern nation, along with the continued practices of racial exclusion, this project considers the shifting yet ubiquitous place of race in the configuration of Argentine national identity.