5 - “Ahora más que nunca”

Summary

Chapter 5 addresses new challenges that emerged for the Movimiento Negro during the COVID−19 pandemic. During the crisis, many Afrodescendants saw their precarious and sometimes informal housing and employment situations worsen. Additionally, the international media attention of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder invigorated the Movimiento Negro’s efforts to address police brutality and criminal (in)justice, as witnessed in numerous newspaper articles and virtual discussions on the theme, “Police Brutality Exists Here [Argentina] Too!” Here, I engage with Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work” as a disruptor of the immanence and imminence of Black death to analyze two pandemic-era campaigns that were about sustaining Black life: a mutual aid campaign to secure food, medicine, and housing for vulnerable African and Afrodescendent populations and a series of web events and projects to continue discussions about racism in Argentina at the community, national, and international level. The data suggests that despite fractures in the movement that emerged because of the pandemic, the movement is still gaining traction in institutional spaces.