Which will be the trouble if a queen is black? Gender and ethnic visibility in the Provincial Immigrant’s Festival (Berisso, Argentina)

Abstract

The Provincial Immigrant’s Festival (Berisso, Argentina) is a festive context where local ethnic associations recreate a white imaginary of the nation, annually dramatizing an origin myth: the melting pot (white and european). The purpose of this article is to analyze, from a gender perspective, the process of Afro visibility and the disputes for social recognition undergone by the members of the Cape Verdean Association of Ensenada in their participation of the Provincial Immigrant’s Festival. To this effect, we focused on the analysis of the conflicts experienced by three Afro-descendant women in the central ceremony of the festival: the election of the Provincial Queen of the Immigrant. The methodological strategy supporting the research was qualitative, focused on extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Provincial Immigrant’s Festival (2010-2015), interviews with the members of the Cape Verdean Association of Ensenada, and three in-depth interviews with three former queens of the association, who participated in the elections of the Provincial Queen of the Immigrant (in 2001, 2008 and 2010). The originality of the article lies on the analysis of an object of study scarcely investigated by social sciences and repeatedly criticized by the feminist movement: the elections of queens and the participation of Afro-descendant women in these contexts. Without falling into a social anthropology that condemns –which only reveals the reproduction of canonical models of beauty, the sexualization of the female body and the existence of discriminatory practices during the elections of queens– we resolve to account for the reasons why those women participate in these events and the agency they develop there.