Between Foreigners and Heroes: Asian-Argentines
"Between Foreigners and Heroes: Asian-Argentines in a Multicultural Nation" by Chisu Teresa Ko examines the ambiguous and contested position of Asian-Argentines within Argentina's shifting national identity discourse, particularly in the decade following the country's severe economic crisis of 2001. Argentina's 2001 economic collapse triggered a profound crisis of national identity, destabilizing the country's long-held self-conception as a white, European, and therefore modern nation. In response, Argentina underwent a significant multicultural turn, officially redefining itself as a multiracial and pluricultural society. This shift, promoted through institutions such as INADI (Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminación, la Xenofobia, y el Racismo) and reflected in revised national census categories, extended recognition primarily to Afro-Argentine and indigenous populations, who had long been considered effectively "disappeared" from the national narrative. However, Ko demonstrates that Asian-Argentines remained largely excluded from these official and institutionalized forms of multicultural recognition, trapped in a paradoxical condition of simultaneous hyper-visibility and invisibility. Hyper-visibility for Asian-Argentines, particularly those of Korean and Chinese descent, has historically been negative. Korean-Argentines faced accusations of tax evasion and labor exploitation during the 1980s and 1990s, while Chinese-Argentines have been targets of persistent xenophobic stereotypes about criminal connections and unethical business practices. This visible marking of difference paradoxically justified the group's exclusion from national belonging, since their perceived foreignness was treated as immutable and disqualifying. Ko argues that this exclusion is compounded by structural omissions: the 2010 Bicentennial census, groundbreaking for including Afro-descendant and indigenous categories for the first time, contained no Asian category, rendering Asian-Argentines statistically and, by extension, ontologically absent from the redefined nation. Official statistics track only foreign-born Asians, thereby institutionally reproducing the assumption that Asians cannot be Argentine. The existing scholarly literature on Asians in Argentina, concentrated on Japanese, Korean, and Chinese communities and drawn largely from the social sciences, has addressed immigration history, assimilation, discrimination, and diaspora formation. Ko observes that while this scholarship is valuable, its tendency to treat Asian-Argentines strictly as members of distinct ethnic colectividades or transnational diasporas can inadvertently reinforce the boundaries that position them as outsiders, overlooking their role in formulations of Argentine national identity itself. Multicultural recognition in Argentina has depended heavily on the convergence of ethnic activism, academic discourse, institutional projects, and community self-representation, a convergence that has benefited Afro-Argentines and indigenous peoples but has not materialized for Asian-Argentines in comparable ways. Ko turns to contemporary Argentine cinema to analyze how cultural manifestations have begun to fill this representational gap. Three films serve as the chapter's central case studies: Sebastián Borenzstein's Un cuento chino (2011), Gaspar Scheuer's Samurai (2012), and Verónica Chen's Mujer conejo (2013). All three feature Asian protagonists and engage directly with questions of national identity in post-crisis Argentina. Ko argues that these films reflect a broader post-Bicentennial desire to criticize past projects of Argentine modernity, including the nation-building projects associated with racial homogeneity, military adventurism, and neoliberal capitalism, while simultaneously seeking to restore and unify a coherent national narrative. In each film, Asian characters are positioned as outsiders who nonetheless perform a crucial mediating function for Argentine national identity. They enter a temporally displaced version of the nation populated by foundational types such as the gaucho, the gringo immigrant, and the criollo, and their interactions with these figures allow the films to project a renewed national unity. In Un cuento chino, the Chinese protagonist Jun catalyzes the romantic and familial union of two Argentine characters who embody the classic city-country divide of Argentine cultural mythology, thereby symbolically restoring national wholeness. In Samurai, the Japanese protagonist Takeo gradually sheds his samurai identity to become a "strange gauchito," symbolically inheriting and renewing the national character by fusing the gaucho's bravery with the samurai's honor. In Mujer conejo, the Chinese-Argentine protagonist Ana Yang defends the nation against a threatening Chinese mafia and its genetically engineered plague of mutant rabbits, uniting gaucho, criollo, and European immigrant figures in a common defense, though her own identity remains ambivalently suspended between Argentineness and Chineseness. Ko argues that while these representations mark genuine progress over the historically negative portrayals of Asians in Argentine culture, they ultimately construct Asian-Argentines as allegorical and instrumental figures rather than as complex social actors. The films appropriate orientalized stereotypes and mythical registers, invoking samurai honor, anime heroism, and fairy-tale sensibility, to produce multicultural symbols that serve the nation's need for self-renewal without engaging the actual social conditions of Asian-Argentine communities. The multicultural nation these films envision is one that "has" multicultural subjects rather than genuinely "being" multicultural, maintaining a monocultural framework beneath its diverse surface. In Sara Ahmed's terms, these narratives produce unity-from-diversity in ways that preserve existing racial and cultural hierarchies while offering symbolic recognition. Ko contrasts these three films with Juan Martín Hsu's La Salada (2014), directed by an Argentine-Taiwanese filmmaker, which depicts the informal market La Salada in the province of Buenos Aires as a site of genuine multicultural complexity. This film follows Korean, Taiwanese, and Bolivian immigrants navigating power relations among themselves and with Argentine society, presenting heterogeneity, multiplicity, and hybridity in ways that resist reduction to allegory or national instrumentalization. Ko suggests that La Salada points toward an emerging representational practice more adequate to the real conditions of Argentina's incipient multiculturalism. The chapter's overarching argument is that the official omission of Asian-Argentines from census categories, institutional discourse, and academic recognition, combined with their reductive representation in cultural production as heroic but ultimately foreign figures, sustains unequal relations of recognition and risks setting impossible norms for their national inclusion. Meaningful participation in Argentina's multicultural nation requires not only symbolic visibility but sustained, institutionalized, and accurate forms of acknowledgment that have so far been denied to people of Asian descent.
By Chisu Teresa Ko · First published 2010 · Genre: History, Ethnic Studies, Immigration Studies · 6 chapters
Contents
- Introduction
- Asians' Invisibility in Official Discourses
- Asians as Immigrant Subjects in Academic Discourse
- Asian-Argentines in Cultural Discourses
- Asian-Argentines as Mediators of the Nation
- Conclusion