French
DeutschCarmen Platero
María del Carmen Platero (August 3, 1933 – March 16, 2020), known as Carmen Platero, was an Afro-Argentine playwright and actress who worked to promote Afro-descendant culture in Latin America. In 1987, she co-founded the theater group Comedia Negra de Buenos Aires.
Early life and education
[edit]Carmen Platero was born in 1933 in La Plata, Argentina.[1][2] She was one of seven children born to Tomás Nemesio Platero and Ana Francisca Prola, who moved the family to Tandil when Carmen was 3 years old.[1][2] Her family was descended from enslaved Africans brought to Argentina, and her grandfather was the prominent Afro-Argentinian Tomás Platero IV.[1][3][4][5]
Platero attended the normal school in Tandil, and then, starting in 1959, continued her studies at the Escuela de Teatro La Plata, where she found her true passion.[1][2][4][5] After graduating from the theater school in 1964, she worked to improve her craft under Augusto Fernandes and Carlos Gandolfo.[2][4]
Career
[edit]Platero is known for her work as a playwright and actress.[1][2][6] Her first major performance, in Roberto Habegger's one-woman show Tango para solo de mujer, came in the early 1970s.[2]
Across her career, she worked to study and share Afro-Argentine culture, often in partnership with her sister Susana.[1] One of their first major projects together was Afroamérica 70, a show that incorporated work by the likes of Nicomedes Santa Cruz and Nicolás Guillén.[2] Their 1975 piece, Calunga Andumba, more directly paid homage to Afro-Argentine culture, rather than Afro-Latin culture broadly; performances of the show were shut down after the 1976 Argentine coup d'état.[2][4]
A few months after the coup, in December 1976, Platero and her family went into exile in Spain.[2][5] In 1979, they moved to Costa Rica, where she continued her work to promote Afro-descendant culture in Limón.[2][5][7] The year after Argentina returned to democracy in 1983, she returned to her home country.[2][5]
Once back in Argentina, with Susana, she founded the Comedia Negra de Buenos Aires in 1987.[1][2][4] With the theater company, they staged an updated version of Calunga Andumba to great success.[2]
In 2017, she worked to co-organize the Afro-Argentine studies summit Afrotandil.[1]
Platero also taught acting from Tandil to Costa Rica and Spain.[1][6] She wrote various other plays, including Epilogo, Rastros, Vigilia, and Memoria mayor.[2] Her first novel, Tango con acento en la o, was published in 2017.[2][5][8]
Personal life and death
[edit]Carmen Platero was married to the journalist Tomás Saraví, with whom she had four children.[1][2]
She died in 2020, in Tandil, at age 86.[1][2]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Necrológicas". El Eco (in Spanish). 2020-03-28. Retrieved 2024-08-27.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Saraví Platero, Juan (2020-04-19). "Carmen Platero: resistencia, arte y cultura afrodescendiente". Agencia Paco Urondo (in Spanish). Retrieved 2024-08-27.
- ^ Platero, Tomás (1994). "Nuestra gran abuela María Clara: Una historia de la esclavitud hacia la libertad". Afro-Hispanic Review. 13 (1): 52–54. ISSN 0278-8969.
- ^ a b c d e "30 años de la compañía teatral Comedia Negra de Buenos Aires". Secretaria de Cultura (in Spanish). 2017-11-07. Retrieved 2024-08-27.
- ^ a b c d e f Gortázar, Alejandro (2017-08-07). "África entre dos orillas". La Diaria (in Spanish). Retrieved 2024-08-27.
- ^ a b "Carmen Platero, argentina de origen africano, en las 24 Horas de Cine Nacional". UNICEN (in Spanish). 2011-10-12. Retrieved 2024-08-27.
- ^ Menjivar, Jennifer Gomez; Flores, Hector Nicolas Ramos (2022-12-20). Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-8894-6.
- ^ "«Tango con acento en la o» de Carmen Platero". Feria del Libro Tandil (in Spanish). 2018-06-26. Retrieved 2024-08-27.