Shock Marketing Meets the Erasure of Afro-Argentine History
BUENOS AIRES — A fast-food operation in the Buenos Aires province has ignited fresh outrage over the casual use of racial slurs in Latin American marketing, drawing intense scrutiny to Argentina’s deeply complex and often criticized history regarding race and the erasure of its Afro-descendant population.
The establishment, operating under the name “Big Nigga Burgers” in Llavallol, has sparked severe backlash from international observers and anti-racism advocates for utilizing an explicit, highly offensive anti-Black racial slur as its central brand identity and primary menu item, the “Big Nigga Combo.”
The Shock-Value Marketing Trend
While the name uses a deeply offensive American racial slur, its implementation highlights a recurring disconnect in Argentina’s commercial landscape, where business owners frequently deploy shock-value or culturally insensitive branding to drive digital engagement.
Local defense of such naming conventions often claims a “lack of malicious intent” or points to linguistic differences, arguing that the terms are adopted via American pop culture and hip-hop without an understanding of their historical weight. However, international human rights advocates point out that stripping a racial slur of its violent context to sell food trivializes systemic oppression for marketing metrics.
The controversy follows a broader pattern of tone-deaf branding in the region, echoing previous scandals where businesses have used offensive historical references or caricatures to stand out in a hyper-competitive digital market.
Contextualizing Argentina’s History of Afro-Descendant Erasure
The casual monetization of an anti-Black slur strikes a particularly painful chord when viewed through the lens of Argentina’s historical treatment of its Afro-Argentine population.
During the colonial era, Buenos Aires was a major port for the transatlantic slave trade, and by the early 1800s, Black people made up more than a third of the city’s population. However, through a systematic combination of state policies and historical myth-making, Argentina successfully propagated a national narrative of absolute whiteness—frequently claiming that its Black population “disappeared.”
Historians and activists point to several key factors behind this erasure:
- Disproportionate Military Conscription: Afro-Argentine men were systematically funneled into the front lines of high-casualty conflicts, including the War of Independence and the devastating Paraguayan War (War of the Triple Alliance), decimating the male population.
- The Yellow Fever Epidemic (1871): The deadly outbreak heavily hit marginalized, low-income neighborhoods where the majority of Afro-Argentines were concentrated, due to a severe lack of municipal infrastructure and medical care.
- State-Sponsored European Immigration: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Argentina’s constitution and leadership explicitly promoted mass European immigration to deliberately “whiten” the country’s demographic makeup.
- Constitutional and Statistical Erasure: National censuses completely stopped tracking race for decades, effectively erasing Afro-Argentines from official data and creating the false public perception that they no longer existed.
“The myth of Argentine whiteness was built on the literal and statistical elimination of its Black population,” says historical consensus among Afro-Argentine advocacy groups. “When a modern business uses a global anti-Black slur so casually, it is a direct symptom of a society that has spent generations pretending Black people and Black history do not exist within its borders.”
Escalating Reputational and Social Demands
As digital delivery platforms like Rappi continue to face calls to de-platform establishments using explicitly racist branding, local activists are leveraging the moment to demand deeper accountability.
For the growing Afro-Argentine revitalization movement, the fight against offensive storefronts is about much more than a burger joint—it is a battle against the ongoing structural racism and historical amnesia that continues to marginalize the country’s Afro-descendant community.
