Abstract
In this paper I describe how I slowly learned, in the early 1990s, that Afro-Argentine candombe had survived in a very vital way into the 1970s at the Shimmy Club dances. Through a brief autoethnography, I show the degree of invisibility that Afro-Argentines and their culture had during the 1980s and 1990s, and I point out how the Shimmy Club dances were vital in the persistence and transmission of black culture and in the construction of an Afro-Argentine collective identity. In the second part of the paper, I provide a wide variety of testimonies from Afro-Argentine men and women who participated in these dances between the 1950s and 1960s. Through a polyphonic record of memories, the Afro-Argentine participants themselves convey to us the emotional relevance that these dances had in their lives - a social experience that academics generally ignored or underestimated.
Keywords:
Afro-Argentines; sociability; collective identity; candombe