Historically , The festival of San Baltazar was a mixture of Black culture and the celebration of a mindful Arabian king who was a referred saint but was never canonized. History has it that the reasons that reduced the population of the blacks in Argentina had to do with the use of the male population as “cannon fodder” in the Independence wars, the civilians who followed and, finally, the offensive against Paraguay (1865-1871), in addition to the cholera (1861) and yellow fever (1871) epidemics that caused great mortality among the poorest, including Afro-Argentines. “But, in addition, the birth rate was very low, even in comparison with other Latin American societies.
The masters avoided at all costs the marriage of a slave, as well as the pregnancy of a slave, with the argument that this prevented her from providing all the services for which she was purchased, in addition to the risk of dying in a birth problem ” . These are the facts that reduced the population of the African Argentines , but the Afro culture exists till date , even with the extermination character adopted by the European elites who opted for a white Argentina.
According to Norberto Pablo Cirio , an anthropologist who works at the National Institute of Musicology and has studied the phenomenon of San Baltasar for 30 years.He believes that understanding the celebration as “the party of blacks without blacks is inaccurate and leads to stereotypes of many years, where the question is presented in a dichotomous form and the miscegenation that is what fertilized Latin America is left aside”. “Chamamé is the only music that Correntinos recognize as distinctive, but a few years ago the upper class in Correntina didn’t want to know anything about this rhythm.
In this celebration, drums are added, Africanized, in what is another process of cultural appropriation ”, he adds. Argentine blacks have changed their skin, but they exist in all that soul that decides to overcome losses and bandages to simply dance to the beat of the drums.In Argentina, the historiographic forgetfulness aboutthe contribution and presence of the Afro-descendant population has been very similar The invisibility of blacks in history is tremendous, they are hardly mentioned , Their cultural activities exists till date but are hardly propagandized like other cultural activities, There was a manipulation that became official history in schools, and remained as canonical history, in which neither women, nor native peoples, nor Afro-descendants participated.
The Argentine white community in some instances refers to the African festivities as cultural patrimonies of the white Argentines .Prof. Pigna cites as an example of this process of invisibility the case of Maria Remedios del Valle, “who was a woman of African descent who participated in the armies of Manuel Belgrano, one of the liberators, in all her battles”.Because of her contributions, she was proclaimed mother of the Argentine motherland, “the only woman in our history”, points out the historian. 