Seminar on Afro-Latin American Studies: "Finding Florentina: The Many Faces of an Afro-Argentine Woman in Turn-of-the-Century Buenos Aires"

Speaker: Paulina L. Alberto

In early 1900s Buenos Aires, an Afro-Argentine woman who went by the name of Florentina Díaz (1845-1911) gained notoriety in the city’s popular culture. At a time when the law was the purview of wealthy white men, Florentina, an assertive self-taught lawyer and a zealous litigant, made herself into a boisterous and ubiquitous presence in courts and police stations. By her own count, she brought more than sixty lawsuits to local courtrooms between 1871 and 1910. Contemporary and posthumous periodical coverage, memoirs, plays and popular poetry delighted in mocking the “litigious mania” of the woman writers called “la negra Florentina,” dismissing her legal pursuits as ignorant, frivolous, or fraudulent. In 1900, Florentina was convicted of imposture and sent to prison. Yet her body of advocacy tells a more complicated story about the nature of identity and its legal expression in a post-abolition society singularly unwilling to consider slavery’s enduring legacies. This talk shares some early findings in the new book project that Lea Geler and I are co-authoring with this extraordinary Afro-Argentine woman at its center.

Free and open to the public, but registration is required. To register, please click here.