The Power and the Money

Observatorio Argentino 36: What happened to the Afro-Argentines?

Today Argentina is not known for having a large black population.  

Being a country of Europeans is a deep part of Argentina’s national identity. The census stopped recording race in 1869. A bit more than 80 years later, when Josephine Baker visited, she was surprised at the absence of black people. So she asked Ramón Carilio, the dark-skinned minister of public health, where the black population lived. Carilio felt free to joke, “There are only two — you and I.”

When Era Bell Thompson visited Argentina in 1973 to report on the black population there, she recorded one Argentine’s ironic complaint about the United States: “Argentines are lumped in with all the rest of the Spanish-speaking peoples, even though we are white.” She had no problem finding black people, but she described them as “Not a viable, but a vanishing black people: relatively few in numbers, relatively free of racial discrimination and relatively content.”

Even now, some Argentines still joke — admittedly with some accuracy — that an Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish and wants to be British. This view of Argentines is not only in Argentina: in 2001, when María Lamadrid visited Panama in 2001, immigration officials refused to believe that a black woman could actually be Argentine.

But  we know that colonial Argentina was heavily African! A census of Buenos Aires held in 1778 revealed a black population of 35%. (See Luis Wainer, La Ciudad de Buenos Aires en los Censos de 1778 y 1810.) As late as 1855, local B.A. surveys recorded race. George Andrews (page 41) estimated the total African population of Argentina in 1800 to be 69,000, roughly 22% of a total population around 310,000. 

So what happened to all the black Argentines? In comments, Luciano suggests that Argentine governments may have engaged in genocide, conscripting blacks to disproportionately fight in the War of the Triple Alliance and live in disease-ridden neighborhoods. 

The genetic ancestry data cited in the last post, however, shows only about a 4% presence of African genetic markers. That is a lot less than 22%! Does that provide evidence of some great genocide or expulsion in 19th-century Argentina?

Possibly not.

The Argentine-born population of Argentina grew by about 2.0% per year between 1800 and the first national census in 1869. (The link goes to the census; the data on the Argentine population is on page 686.) That is only slightly lower than the 2.2% rate of natural increase in the United States between 1800 and 1870, as estimated by Michael Haines. (See Table 1.) We know that the rate of natural increase in Argentina was 1.3% per year in 1869-95 and 1.6% per year in 1895-1947, so 2.0% for 1800-69 is likely on the high end. (We have no direct observations of the 1800 population; the 310,000 is an educated guess.)

If you assume that the Afro-Argentine population should have grown at the same rate of natural increase as the overall population, then you would have expected about 1.1 million Afro-Argentines by 1947, roughly 7% of the total population of 15.9 million. Intermarriage would not change the expected prevalence of African genetic markers: it does not matter if 7% of the population is of purely African descent or if the entire population has 7% of their ancestors from Africa. In other words, the mass immigration from Europe and the Levant can explain 15 percentage points of our estimated 18 point drop in the proportion of African ancestry. 

That still leaves a mystery, because 4% is lower than 7%. But it is a much smaller mystery. One possibility, of course, is that Afro-Argentines suffered differentially high mortality due to actions by the Argentine state.

But there are other possibilities that should first be eliminated before we conclude that President Domingo Sarmiento presided over a great crime. It may be that the 4% estimate of the proportion of African ancestry in the Argentine population is too low. More likely, our estimate of the 1800 population may be too low: if there were actually 450,000 people in the country in 1800, then the expected proportion of African ancestry would be 4% today. 

There is a lot of room for more scholarship. But the mystery is smaller than the headline figures would indicate ... and there may well be no mystery at all. 

¿No hay racismo en México?

I moved to Mexico in 1996 for my doctoral research. I lived in Colonia Alamos, a declining middle-class area, and went to a mediocre gym in Narvarte. I have a vivid memory of one of my workout friends there telling me, quite emphatically, the title of this blog post. The context was a discussion of what he did not like about the United States.

Mexican families, like American families, and border-crossing families, show a wide variety of skin colors.

My wife has noted that she gets far less unwanted attention for her skin color than she received 13 years ago. No one asks to touch her hair. Stares and catcalls have also disappeared.

The only strange incident occurred in a Comercial Mexicana on M.A. Quevedo Boulevard, where an elderly gentleman asked my wife where she was from. When she said, “Estados Unidos,” he insisted that she wasn’t telling the truth. “No, where are you really from?” That one was odd. Mexicans know full well that one out of eight Americans are black, and the former President of the United States was not exactly an obscure figure down here. But really, that was it.

Well, that was it unless you count some odd moments where people, always female, and usually young, want to touch my daughter’s hair. Now, in Mexico City strangers feel free to rub my kids’ heads all the time. Any kids’ heads, in fact. What makes it a little strange is that when it is just me and the girl, people just rub her head; when it is me and my wife and our girl, well, then they ask permission. You could interpret this in several different ways, I think.

And anyway, these are anecdotes! Since when is this blog about anecdotes? This blog is about science™! So let’s do some science. 

Eva Arceo (CIDE) wanted to see how skin color affected life outcomes in Mexico. So she persuaded the Mexican statistical agency (INEGI) to add a question to the 2016 Modulo de Movilidad Social Intergeneracional survey. INEGI provided each respondent with a color palette and asked them to match it to their skin tone.

The palette (at right) as Dr. Arceo notes, is far from perfect and self-identification is not the best way to go about this, but the palette was developed by the Proyecto sobre Etnicidad y Raza en América Latina in conjunction with scholars at Princeton University, so it is what they used. (I think my skin color is an H? Maybe I? Like I said, it is not perfect.) 

Well, here is the histogram of the results. 

 

And here is how skin color lined up with years of schooling:

 

Here is how it lined up with relative income:

 

The results held when she accounted for the educational level of the respondents’ parents and their family income when the respondent was 14 years old. 

There were a few weird results that I would not take too seriously. (The author did not.) For example, when you account for parental characteristics, the educational level of people with skin color G or H spikes up compared to everyone else, including paler people. (I suppose that as an overeducated person of skin tone H, I should be more predisposed to believe this.) More plausibly, the rise in income level by skin color becomes steeper and more monotonic when you adjust for education and parental characteristics.

This result jibes with experimental studies. Rosario Aguilar (CIDE) found that voters were more likely to support white candidates with the same platform; Eva Arceo (CIDE) and Raymundo Campos (Colmex) found that employers were more likely to call in white applicants for interviews. And as Prof. Arceo points out, it should not be a surprising finding in a country where advertisements still commonly call for “tez blanca.”

But it is a little depressing. 

North Carolina in historic and geographic perspective

Political events over the past few years in North Carolina have been quite depressing. Extreme gerrymandering diluted representation. In 2012, the Democrats won the popular vote for the federal House but lost most of the seats. In 2016, a 53% GOP margin for House votes won them 77% of seats; a 55% margin for state senate turned into 68% of the seats; in the state lower chamber, 53% of the vote got them 62% of the seats. (See here. For maps showing the power of gerrymandering in the state, see here.) 

Then, when the Republican governor lost re-election in 2016, the legislature moved to strip the Governorship of most of its power. 

But this is not unprecedented.

First, let us compare across space: Maryland is as gerrymandered as North Carolina, only in favor of Democrats. Is is true that Republicans benefit more nationally from gerrymandering (only Illinois and Maryland have a strong Democratic bias) but N.C. is not at all unique.

Second, the legislative power grab after the election is unique in the 21st century — the Maryland legislature did not try to strip Governor Hogan of his power in 2014 — but it is not unique across American history. First, consider Louisiana under Huey Long. For all the shenanigans, Governor McCrory did not move to destroy the opposition when he was in power the way Long did back in 1928-35. 

More ominously, consider Redemption in North Carolina. In the 1868 election, Republicans solidly trounced the Conservative Party. In 1870, however, the Conservatives managed to come back by effectively casting themselves as the white people’s party ... and using terror tactics by the Ku Klux Klan. Governor William Holden called out the militia to fight the KKK, but the Conservative nonetheless won the legislative elections. They first moved to prevent legislators from being seated from districts where the state militia arrested KKK terrorists. They then impeached Governor Holden. In 1876, the Conservative Party renamed itself the Democratic Party, becoming part of the national Democratic coalition. It took them until 1898 to fully disenfranchise the black population. (See also here.)

By those standards, North Carolina has so far been quite civilized. No riots, no extrajudicial killings or warrantless arrests, no declarations of martial law, and the courts have reined in the lame duck power grab and may reverse the gerrymander. Vigilance is warranted. Protest is warranted. And political mobilization is needed. But worse things have happened and worse has been overcome.