In nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, enslaved and free Africans and Afrodescendants worked primarily in the domestic sphere and as street vendors. This is partly what Prilidiano Pueyrredón, portraitist and painter of costumbrista scenes, addresses in his painting Patio porteño en 1850 (c. 1860). The composition focuses ontwo women at the left, one Black and the other white, who appear to be a servant, given her tattered clothing, and her employer, respectively.

Through the figures’ tense exchange of glances and gestures, the artist stages the hierarchies and socio-racial roles that operated before and after the abolition of slavery in Argentina in 1853, thus exceeding the anecdotal character attributed to the picturesque aesthetics of costumbrismo. 

These supposedly innocuous modes of representation, which persisted even into the first decades of the twentieth century, suggest the continuity of these hierarchies and modes of visuality generated under slavery. This 1918 painting by Ana Weiss not only adopts and sustains this aspect of the national imaginary regarding Afrodescendant women in Argentina (keeping them in servant roles, something shared broadly with other hemispheric cultures). It also reinforces this through its title: La amita (literally, “Little Mistress,” but with the connotation of “Sweetie”).

However, the unease generated in Pueyrredón’s work—through gestures and the disdainful glances of the white women, which hint at potential conflicts in post-abolition Argentine society—seems to dissolve in Weiss’s image. Rather, she composes a scene of intimate domestic harmony, in which the white woman, her back to the Black woman, returns with an apprehensive expression the gaze from outside of the frame, which transforms her into an image. Meanwhile, the Black woman, absorbed in her work—in her being for the other—officiously cares for the white body.

Dressed in luxury attire—such as an expensive designer outfit and handbag—the influencer, tending to her phone, petulantly and disdainfully ignores the Black maid photographed next to her. Like Weiss’s image, the Afrodescendant woman, here anchored in a servile position through her uniform and hairnet, appears absorbed in her work, while the white woman—distant and oblivious to her—nonchalantly awaits the fruits of her labor. The decision made by the photographer for the celebrity magazine Caras to include a servant in this composition exposes, once again, the traces of slavery and racial stereotypes: the continued equation of Blackness with servitude. ■

In nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, enslaved and free Africans and Afrodescendants worked primarily in the domestic sphere and as street vendors. This is partly what Prilidiano Pueyrredón, portraitist and painter of costumbrista scenes, addresses in his painting Patio porteño en 1850 (c. 1860). The composition focuses ontwo women at the left, one Black and the other white, who appear to be a servant, given her tattered clothing, and her employer, respectively.

Through the figures’ tense exchange of glances and gestures, the artist stages the hierarchies and socio-racial roles that operated before and after the abolition of slavery in Argentina in 1853, thus exceeding the anecdotal character attributed to the picturesque aesthetics of costumbrismo.

These supposedly innocuous modes of representation, which persisted even into the first decades of the twentieth century, suggest the continuity of these hierarchies and modes of visuality generated under slavery. This 1918 painting by Ana Weiss not only adopts and sustains this aspect of the national imaginary regarding Afrodescendant women in Argentina (keeping them in servant roles, something shared broadly with other hemispheric cultures). It also reinforces this through its title: La amita (literally, “Little Mistress,” but with the connotation of “Sweetie”).

However, the unease generated in Pueyrredón’s work—through gestures and the disdainful glances of the white women, which hint at potential conflicts in post-abolition Argentine society—seems to dissolve in Weiss’s image. Rather, she composes a scene of intimate domestic harmony, in which the white woman, her back to the Black woman, returns with an apprehensive expression the gaze from outside of the frame, which transforms her into an image. Meanwhile, the Black woman, absorbed in her work—in her being for the other—officiously cares for the white body.

Dressed in luxury attire—such as an expensive designer outfit and handbag—the influencer, tending to her phone, petulantly and disdainfully ignores the Black maid photographed next to her. Like Weiss’s image, the Afrodescendant woman, here anchored in a servile position through her uniform and hairnet, appears absorbed in her work, while the white woman—distant and oblivious to her—nonchalantly awaits the fruits of her labor. The decision made by the photographer for the celebrity magazine Caras to include a servant in this composition exposes, once again, the traces of slavery and racial stereotypes: the continued equation of Blackness with servitude. ■