In 1973, the African American magazine Ebony sent its international editor, Era Bell Thompson, to Buenos Aires to do a feature on Argentina's tiny black community. Although Afro-Argentines represented nearly one third of the population of colonial Buenos Aires, they had since virtually disappeared from official records. Miscegenation, war, and disease contributed to this demographic decline, but as historian George Reid Andrews showed many years ago, the invisibility of Afro-Argentines was at least as much the product of racism and of the hegemonic idea of Argentina as a white nation. For the Ebony article, “Argentina: Land of the Vanishing Blacks,” Thompson interviewed every self-identifying Afro-Argentine she could find. Among them was Oscar Marcelo Alemán, a jazz guitarist who had enjoyed substantial fame and commercial success in Paris in the 1930s and in Buenos Aires during the 1940s and 1950s. By the time Thompson met him, Alemán had recently been rediscovered by Argentine jazz aficionados after a decade in obscurity, during which he had supported himself by giving guitar lessons in his home. Although he told Thompson that he was the son of a Spanish father and an Indian mother, Alemán insisted on his blackness: “‘Some of my six brothers are even darker than I,’ he smiled, ‘we think there was a black man somewhere.’”

Throughout his long career, audiences both at home and abroad perceived Alemán as a black man, a perception that was made possible by his dark complexion and his own avowal of a black identity, but also by his association with jazz music. Nevertheless, the precise meanings that attached to his blackness changed over the years. This chapter will trace the vicissitudes of his career while reconstructing the shifting discursive landscape within which that career developed. Alemán was a talented musician who played the music he loved, but as with any artist, both his musical creations and the popular reception of those creations were shaped by the world in which he lived. Alemán responded creatively to his audiences’ varied racial expectations, performing multiple black identities over the years. In the Parisian nightclubs of the 1930s, being black gave him a certain cachet. Similarly, once he returned to Buenos Aires in 1940, his racial identity strengthened his claim to being Argentina's most authentic jazz musician.