Ansina, el prócer negro: black existences between the legitimacy of a political claim and exclusion from national rhetoric in post-abolition times in Uruguay (1934-1952)

Abstract

The article investigates the request from organized black groups that every city in Uruguay should have a street named in honour of Ansina, whom these same groups recognized as the black leader of Uruguayan independence. It analyzes the problems of black freedom that guide the field of post-abolition studies in the Americas, and also considers the context of the centenary of independence of the centenary of independence (1930) and the abolition of slavery (1942) in Uruguay, under the context of World War II. acial political organization had been a reality since the 1870s, but this text argues that it was in the first half of the 20th century that the development of a political identity that was both black and Uruguayan reached the national territory. The main sources are the newspapers of the black press of Melo, Acción (1934-1952) and Orientación (1941-1945), created by the oldest Casa de la Raza in activity in that period, Centro Uruguay, founded in 1923. The aim is to demonstrate the process surrounding the request, which at the time was already criticized for supposedly being based on an invention, in order to elucidate political identity and public uses of the past by black people, as elements that made up a black counter-historical project.