This book is the outcome of many years of conversation among the editors, contributors, and various audiences and readers. Most of the chapters first took shape in a series of panel presentations delivered at the Latin American Studies Association conferences in Toronto (2010), San Francisco (2012), and Washington, D.C. (2013). The volume's authors have also shared their research with colleagues in venues across Argentina as well as with students, activists, and wider publics there and elsewhere. Along the way, we encountered a spectrum of reactions to our project: from enthusiasm and encouragement, to thoughtful critiques, to skepticism and even hostility. Indeed, the range and intensity of these responses not only helped us sharpen our arguments and reframe our assumptions, but they also strengthened our conviction that questions of race and nation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Argentina merit rethinking.

If the subjects treated in this volume touch a nerve for some readers, it is surely because the chapters reconsider the conventional wisdom about Argentine politics, culture, and society held by many commentators in Argentina and abroad. Raising questions about the racial dimensions of inequality, identity, and power in Argentina is itself controversial. And even among those who agree that those are crucial questions, disagreements persist over how best to pose and answer them. To pick one telling example, the very title of this book, Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, may provoke some unease. In the United States, references to race as a social dilemma or as an academic area of inquiry are commonplace. Yet in contemporary Argentina, the term raza carries a strongly negative connotation and is thus far less frequently invoked: indeed, it is common for raza to be placed within quotation marks even in the writings of researchers who use the concept to expose problems of discrimination. This circumspect treatment of raza is intended to emphasize its socially constructed, rather than essential or biological, character (despite the fact that other social constructs like género [gender] and clase do not require this kind of treatment), or to signal the concept's status as archaic and somehow foreign to Argentina. The pages that follow devote considerable attention to unraveling the many languages of race in Argentina employed since the early twentieth century and assessing their political implications.