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Bridget María Chesterton, Erika Denise Edwards. Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 775–776, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae098
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Buenos Aires never fails to grab the attention of English-language scholars. The city’s vast archives, intellectually friendly environment, and rich past all have cemented Buenos Aires as the place where scholars congregate. Secondary cities, such as Córdoba, in the interior of the nation, rarely get studied in English. This has meant a dearth of understanding about the way interior cities in Argentina functioned by non-Spanish reading scholars. However, Erika Denise Edwards’s praiseworthy study of Córdoba, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic, is bound to encourage scholars to look beyond the environs of Buenos Aires to uncover the lesser-known narratives of Argentine history. This splendidly written text ensures that future scholars of Argentina will be encouraged to understand the importance of interior perspectives and realities.
Looking to understand the apparent dissidence between the high numbers of African-descended Argentines in the later colonial and the early national period, to its emergence as a “white nation,” Edwards argues that women played a fundamental role in “whitening” the country by discursively hiding their racial identities through honor, dress, and education while concomitantly using the courts to ensure that their newfound status as decent Spanish women were upheld in society. By tracing “whiteness” through women, Edwards changes both the common historical narrative in Argentina and popular wisdom that Afro-descended men in Argentina “disappeared” in both civil and international war and disease following independence.
