Chapter 2 gives a history of Black resistance from the 1980s until the emergence of the social movement’s umbrella organization, the Comisión 8 N, in 2013. Scholars have documented that late nineteenth-century Afro-Argentine resistance occurred through a strong Black press and mutual aid societies. The literature lacks an empirical analysis of contemporary issues, which I take up in this chapter. I trace the current movement to civil society organizations founded primarily by Black women in the mid 1980s after the country’s return to democracy. I unpack an oft-repeated phrase of my interlocutors, “poner el cuerpo,” – to put one’s whole being into an effort, but also a radical act of taking up space – to contextualize the social movement’s emergence. Moreover, I argue that the radical act of taking up space in visible locations marked as “White spaces” is central to the politics of visibility that led to some of the movement’s successes. While the human rights movement and the Kirchner administrations provided a political opportunity for cultural and ethnoracial activism, Black activists’ continued resistance, despite setbacks, led to the traction and birth of the movement.

In the conclusion, I return to two central arguments: the importance of studying Black organizing in spaces of Black invisibility and that we cannot understand social movement mobilization, solidarity, and outcomes from a solely macro- or solely micro-level analysis. Pain into Purpose shows that by putting international, national, local, and interpersonal histories in conversation we can come to understand how even in a country where the disenfranchised group includes a small minority that is largely invisible, a social movement can indeed emerge, gain traction, and achieve some of its goals. Finally, the conclusion explores new directions that the Movimiento Negro and research on the movement may take given its increasing visibility and representation amid the simultaneous persistence and widespread denial of racism.

This chapter introduces Argentina’s Black movement and situates it within discussions of Black movements in Latin America and social movements theory more broadly. I introduce evidence that the movement has made progress in combating historical erasure and racism and show that despite societal denial, activists mobilize collective emotions to raise awareness, increase participation, and access state resources. The book argues that emotions, both at the societal and interpersonal levels, play a crucial role in the efficacy of transnational Black social movements in spaces of invisibility. Focusing on Argentina’s understudied Black movement, I employ critical race theory and Black feminist perspectives to examine racialization processes, challenge myths of homogeneous Whiteness, and highlight Afrodescendants’ marginalization in Argentina. Additionally, I show that this study contributes to understanding emotions in social movements by analyzing emotional opportunity structures and the role of emotions in mobilization, particularly within the context of Black feminist activism.

Chapter 4 introduces the concept of a Black feminist toolkit to show that at the microlevel, Black women succeed at growing movement participation and solidarity by utilizing transnational Black feminist politics to convert experiences of pain into purpose. Here, I examine the processes through which affective and emotional bonds serve as political devices for mobilization in race-based social movements, utilizing and expanding the concept of collective emotional energy levels. Furthermore, I engage with Vilma Piedade’s concept of dororidade, a combination of the Portuguese words for pain, solidarity, and sisterhood, to illuminate why and how affective processes of mobilization are critical to Black women’s participation in Argentina’s feminist and Black social movements. I argue that Black women activists and artist-activists equip their constituency with what I name a Black feminist toolkit, which gives them a collectivized knowledge, language, and confidence to process the otherwise crippling forms of quotidian and institutional racism that they experience.

In Chapter 3, I illustrate the macro-level role of a society’s emotional history, defined as the collective emotional response to historical events, in galvanizing state support. I argue that by leveraging the opportunities offered by the Kirchner moment and the bicentennial, with its opening toward new histories of women, people of color, and other marginalized communities, Black activists successfully employed discursive and emotional repertoires of the human rights movements in interactions with the state. For example, societal shame and haunting tied to the concept of “the disappeared” provided the political currency to achieve state-level recognition by calling on the government to address the historically attempted genocide of Afro-Argentines as a human rights issue. This strategic activism resulted in Law 26.852, the National Day of Afro-Argentines and Black Culture, as well as other Movimiento Negro successes at the state level.

Chapter 5 addresses new challenges that emerged for the Movimiento Negro during the COVID−19 pandemic. During the crisis, many Afrodescendants saw their precarious and sometimes informal housing and employment situations worsen. Additionally, the international media attention of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder invigorated the Movimiento Negro’s efforts to address police brutality and criminal (in)justice, as witnessed in numerous newspaper articles and virtual discussions on the theme, “Police Brutality Exists Here [Argentina] Too!” Here, I engage with Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work” as a disruptor of the immanence and imminence of Black death to analyze two pandemic-era campaigns that were about sustaining Black life: a mutual aid campaign to secure food, medicine, and housing for vulnerable African and Afrodescendent populations and a series of web events and projects to continue discussions about racism in Argentina at the community, national, and international level. The data suggests that despite fractures in the movement that emerged because of the pandemic, the movement is still gaining traction in institutional spaces.

Chapter 1 provides an empirical analysis of one of the principal grievances of Argentina’s Black social movement – anti-Black racism – with an analysis of the mechanisms of racialization in the country. While erasure and denial, racial formation processes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are still present, amid growing activism and an increasingly visible transnational Black community, the primary contemporary method of racialization is through foreignization. While Miriam Gomes provides the concept, I document with empirical examples how “foreignization,” the assumption that Black people and culture are never from Argentina, hence never Argentine, functions as a racialized mechanism that reproduces the pervasive myth of Argentina’s homogeneous Whiteness. I illustrate this mechanism by analyzing four racialized practices that were salient throughout my fieldwork: afrophilia, afrophobia, curiosity, and insecure Whiteness. By showing how both Blackness and Whiteness are constructed in racialized encounters, I demonstrate how racial hierarchies are reproduced by illuminating the symbolic capital invoked through such exchanges.

This chapter analyzes recent conservative efforts to build parties in Latin America. Its main case study is Argentina’s Republican Proposal (PRO) party, one of the most important examples of conservative party-building in Latin America. This chapter explains the success of right-wing parties born in nonauthoritarian contexts through the strategic decisions of leaders about whether to invest in high-cost resources (ideational and organizational) that will allow parties to take root in inhospitable contexts. This chapter demonstrates that the competitiveness of right-wing parties has been driven by three factors: programmatic innovation by personalistic leaders; organizational mobilization of both core and noncore constituencies; and an elite fear of the "Venezuela model."

Chapter 4 continues the previous chapter’s translational approach to the performing body, exploring the potential and limitations of what Walter Mignolo terms the “decolonial gesture” through three award-winning Argentinian productions. Building upon contemporary theories of coloniality, the chapter examines the performers’ and their audience’s linked participation as site for considering how the translational might effectively engage onstage with the “other.” In Timbre 4’s Dínamo (Dynamo), the decolonial gesture is initiated in a performer’s own dramaturgy of nontranslation, which not only impedes linguistic communication but also triggers audience critical self-awareness. In Guillermo Cacace’s production of Mi hijo sólo camina un poco más lento (My Son Only Walks a Bit Slower), a Spanish-language production of a Croatian play, the decolonial gesture resides in the director’s translational reconfiguration of actor-spectator empathy and seemingly contradictory approaches to casting disability. In the chapter’s final case, Sudado (Sweaty/Stew), a collectively devised production, decolonial gesturality is complicated at multiple translational levels through the translocation of the Peruvian immigrant to the Buenos Aires stage. The chapter argues that theatre can offer opportunities for decolonization, but only if they emerge from within theatre’s assembled collective, which translationally determines the creation, construction, communication, and reception of the decolonial gesture.

Chapter 2 considers the limits of performance translation, drawing from the author’s experiences working with three internationally acclaimed Argentinian theatre artists. The chapter first examines the potential “over-translatedness” of Claudio Tolcachir’s global sensation, La omisión de la familia Coleman (The Coleman Family’s Omission), in which audience identification seemingly transcends cultural difference and risks “over-translatability.” Considerations of the “local” underscore the translational limitations of “American realism” and challenges in staging plays bearing a culturally bound performance style for which there is no obvious US or UK equivalent. A case in point is the grotesco criollo, a tragicomic genre and acting style developed in 1920s Buenos Aires and still informing local theatre making. To illustrate, the chapter discusses the author’s and Rafael Spregelburd’s collaborative search for countering anticipated “under-translatedness” when bringing his plays to US stages. At the same time, the “untranslatable” can function as a productive performance strategy, thus the chapter concludes with an examination of Lola Arias’s Campo minado/Minefield, in which three Argentinian and three British ex-combatants reenact their 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War experiences. While translation is built into the multilingual production through projected supertitles, the untranslatable asserts itself at nearly the play’s end in a provocative moment of untranslatability.

Chapter 1 develops the book’s theoretical frame as well as provides initial experiential examples. In the author’s practice, theatrical translationality has inspired reconsiderations of actor-training practices, rehearsal processes, and artist-audience expectations, and it has modified her approaches to translation and direction. To illustrate, the chapter first turns to the author’s decades-long working relationship with Argentinian dramatist Ricardo Monti and the collaborative process in translating and publishing ten of his lyrical and imagery-rich texts into English, and her experience in directing the English-language translation of his play Visit with US actors. The chapter then shifts to a scholarly perspective to apply a theory of translationality to the radical revisionary processes at work in Argentinian playwright-director Daniel Veronese’s “Chekhov Project,” a multi-production endeavor that involved not only his versions of Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya but also an original play, Mujeres soñaron caballos (Women Dreamt Horses). The chapter concludes with the author’s reflections on translating Veronese’s original play for a New York theatre festival, interpreting its success as largely the result of a translational collaboration between text, author, translator, director, cast, and producer. A theory of translationality accommodates and encourages these interlinked theatrical and performance elements, experiences, and participants.

Contemporary Performance Translation opens with a consideration of the impossible but necessary stakes in translating for the stage, taking inspiration from the author’s own collaborations with Argentinian playwrights in translating their work for the English-language stage, with particular attention paid to the ten-play translation project with dramatist Ricardo Monti. The project’s theoretical frame of translationality is developed in conversation with current artistic and critical approaches to contemporary theatre and performance translation. A translational approach to performance translation, precisely because of the complexities brought about by its linguistic, cultural, aesthetic, and technical engagements, has great potential for complicating the often-assumed unidirectional destiny of a given translation and for exposing the dangerous asymmetries contained within the increasing globalization of English. An overview of the four central chapters and conclusion complete the introduction.

This chapter presents a case of nonelectoral strategies of political influence by agrarian elites in Argentina and the limitations of such strategies. Until 2008, Argentine landowners influenced politics through lobbying and, when this failed, through protests. The chapter presents evidence of how Argentine agrarian elites did not invest in electoral representation prior to 2008 because they did not experience an existential threat. It also shows how landowners decided to enter the electoral arena with the rise of an existential threat in the form of confiscatory taxes in 2008. Given Argentine agrarian elites fragmentation, they deployed a candidate-centered strategy, sponsoring the candidacies of a dozen agricultural producers for Congress under diverse party affiliations. However, institutional features and ideological differences among producers’ associations blunted the effectiveness of the strategy and led to its abandonment. Later on, with the consolidation of Propuesta Republicana (PRO) as a viable electoral alternative and the continuity of hostile polices, part of the Argentine agrarian elite has engaged in party-building. However, economic cleavages within Argentine agricultural producers continue to undermine the kind of sector-wide party-building effort that we saw in Chile during the democratic transition.

If one is looking for the mechanism connecting war to state formation in Latin America, the obvious place to start is the Paraguayan War (1864-1870), the single most deadly war in the history of the region. This chapter provides the most detailed discussion of this case in the state formation literature and a narrative covering state formation in the River Plate Basin (i.e., Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay). I discuss how earlier, lower intensity wars affected the balance between central and peripheral elites and take a brief detour to cover the effect of the Siege of Montevideo on Uruguayan politics, potentially explaining the current Uruguayan exceptionalism in terms of its state capacity levels. I then illustrate how preparation for war led to incipient state formation amidst polarization in all contenders of the Paraguayan War and discuss the war itself, illustrating how the result of contingent battles affected the domestic fate of the state formation. Finally, I discuss how war transformed political parties and the military, two key institutions, setting the basis for long term state capacity growth in the allies, and its decline in Paraguay.