Celebrities live their lives in constant dialogue with stories about them. But when these stories are shaped by durable racist myths, they wield undue power to ruin lives and obliterate communities. BLACK LEGEND is the haunting story of an Afro-Argentine, Raúl Grigera (“el negro Raúl”), who in the early 1900s audaciously fashioned himself into an alluring Black icon of Buenos Aires’ bohemian nightlife, only to have defamatory storytellers unmake him in the decades that followed. In this talk, Paulina Alberto exposes the destructive, persistent power of racial storytelling and discusses how the story of Raúl Grigera contributes to narrating a new history of Black Argentina and Argentine Blackness across two centuries. Grigera’s trajectory opens new windows into lived experiences of Blackness in a “White” nation, and illuminates how one man’s experience of celebrity was not far removed from more ordinary experiences of racial stories in the flesh.

Paulina L. Alberto, an Argentine-born historian of Afro‑Latin America, is Professor of African and African American Studies and of History at Harvard University. Her work explores Afro-Latin American lives, thought, and politics as they unfolded in the aftermath of slavery, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. She is the author of TERMS OF INCLUSION: BLACK INTELLECTUALS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRAZIL and BLACK LEGEND: THE MANY LIVES OF RAUL GRIGERA AND THE POWER OF RACIAL STORYTELLING IN ARGENTINA.  She is co-editor of RETHINKING RACE IN MODERN ARGENTINA AND VOICES OF THE RACE: BLACK NEWSPAPERS IN LATIN AMERICA, 1870-1960.

Alberto’s first book was awarded the Roberto Reis Prize for Best Book in Brazilian Studies (BRASA) and the Warren Dean Prize for Best Book in Brazilian History (CLAH). BLACK LEGEND received the Bolton-Johnson Prize for the Best Book in Latin American History (CLAH) and the Southern Cone Section Award for Best Book in the Social Sciences (LASA).