Identidad Marrón
Written by Identidad Marrón, ed. Ana Vivaldi
Identidad Marrón (Brown Identity) is a collective that emerged as a response to Argentina’s invisible racism. It aims to create a meeting point, and space of visibility for Indigenous and mixed-race people considered in Argentinian terms as “negrxs populares” (dark-skinned working class people), whom the collective defines as “Marronxs”. “Marronxs” are people with Indigenous ancestry who may or may not recognise themselves as such, as well as the city-born children of campesinos, Indigenous people, and immigrants from the countryside and neighbouring countries. They promote anti-racist strategies and affirm the non-white skins and faces that the myth of a white Argentina has tried to silence.
Identidad Marrón is dedicated to problematising structural, institutional, and interpersonal racism; it is a political, legal, artistic and cultural project from a Global South perspective; it is an anti-racist response to the invisibility of racism in Spanish-speaking Latin America.
The collective works critically on racism in art and culture. With an anti-racist critique, they seek to demolish the myth of white Argentina, which is reproduced in the arts, to build new ways of looking at each other based on artistic creation by Marronxs and for Marronxs. Identidad Marrón wants Marronxs to cease being the object of a hegemonic gaze and to begin being subjects who build their own reality and take over the spaces from which they have been silently excluded.
The group is organised along various lines of work: some subgroups work on art, justice, education and access to social rights; others work on the environment and feminism. Anti-racism is the common thread uniting all this work. It is an anti-racism with class consciousness that caters to the masses.