Race has long been a contentious issue in the study of Latin American politics. During the mid-twentieth century, contemporaries often viewed nationalist mass movements as testing existing racial hierarchies – challenges often welcomed by supporters and derided by opponents, which lent an added intensity to the era's political antagonisms. Typically, mid-century nationalist reforms were not framed explicitly as programs for racial uplift; their advocates preferred, instead, to emphasize ideals of modernization, social peace, and collective justice. Nevertheless, these movements promised, and in some cases delivered, improvements demanded by laboring majorities that included racially stigmatized sectors. At the same time, many of these movements embraced, to various degrees and with varying motivations, cultural nationalisms that valorized African and/or indigenous folkways and acknowledged the virtues of multiracialism and mestizaje. It is common in retrospect to associate this generation of nationalist movements – many of which were subsequently labeled “populist” – with paradigms of “racial democracy,” a concept coined by commentators toward the end of Brazil's nationalist government under Getúlio Vargas (1930–45), and which later worked its way into the conceptual toolkit of Latin American studies. The status of populist leaders as racial democrats has, however, stoked debate. If contemporary critics assailed these actors as dangerous demagogues, revisionists have focused on their limitations, arguing that ideas of racial harmony were illusory and acted as barriers to deeper change. By contrast, a more recent wave of post-revisionist scholarship is reappraising the social resonance of mid-century racial discourses.

The place of Peronism – Argentina's mid-century political movement first led by Juan D. Perón and Eva Duarte de Perón – in these discussions is unclear, despite its standing as one of Latin America's most famed expressions of “populist nationalism.” This isolation derives from the reasonable inclination to study Peronism within the framework of Argentine history, but also from entrenched ideas of racial exceptionalism that encourage viewing Argentina as a regional outlier. The conventional wisdom among historians has long maintained that race was of marginal importance to Peronist rule, especially compared to the centrality of class in articulating “the people” as a political subject. Researchers, however, are now subjecting these views to greater empirical scrutiny as part of a broader reconsideration of the history of race and nation in Argentina.