In 1881, José Antonio Wilde – a renowned intellectual and doctor from the capital city of Buenos Aires – published his memoirs, Buenos Aires desde setenta años atrás, which would become a leading primary source for the study of the early post-independence period in the Argentine capital. Wilde portrayed the “mulatto” J. Antonio Viera, a celebrated nineteenth-century actor and singer, as follows: “His courteous demeanor and his manners left nothing to be desired, and as the saying goes, only his color was lacking [el color no más le faltaba], or more accurately, he had an excess of it.” In 2010, more than a hundred and thirty years after Wilde's book was first published, Paula, a porteña (or resident of Buenos Aires city) who self-identifies as an Afro-descendant, said of herself in an interview: “Only my color is lacking [a mí me falta el color nada más].”

The extraordinary formal similarity between these two testimonies points to the historical persistence of a troubling relationship among perceived skin color, a supposedly expected “way of being,” and the (im)possibility of recognition and self-recognition within established social categories. For what does it mean for someone to lack or to have an excess of color? In regard to what standard is someone's skin color judged to be too much or too little? This verdict implies, among many other things, that there is something in that person – whether a “mulatto” or an “Afro-descendant” – that exceeds or does not fit into established social categories. In this chapter, I will explore this conceptual dislocation between appearances and ways of being, which, I argue, must be understood in relation to the absence of intermediate or mixed (mestizo) categories in Buenos Aires.