Between Foreigners and Heroes: Asian-Argentines in a Multicultural Nation

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 · 11,749 words

First lines

Argentina's economic crisis of 2001 triggered a crisis in national identity that cast doubt on the nation's long-held beliefs about its racial and cultural exceptionalism as a white and therefore modern nation. In the decade after the crisis, Argentina experienced a major shift in racial discourse, redefining itself as a multiracial and multicultural nation. The newly adopted multiculturalism does not entirely displace older understandings of race and nation – as Gastón Gordillo demonstrates in Chapter 9 of this volume, the increased visibility of nonwhites has heightened racial violence in contemporary Argentina – but it does mark a radical departure from previous official discourses that insisted on the nation's homogeneous whiteness. Argentina's rather abrupt multicultural turn has to do in part with the expediency of multiculturalism, which helps articulate both populist and elite reconfigurations of the national narrative. In one sense, the multicultural discourse that focuses largely on Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples disavows previous claims of Europeanness to adopt a populist Latin-Americanist position as an antidote to the globalization of neoliberal capitalism. It is within this context that a contestatory working-class coalition using the racial marker "negro" also arose.$^1$ Simultaneously, however, multiculturalism is often seen as a sign of neoliberal globalization – as the transnational flow of capital triggers migrations and diversifies cultural consumption – and as a marker of first world status in a global climate in which the notion of development encompasses the "preservation – or even cultivation – of ethnoracial diversity. "$^2$ In this context, a vast network of institutional, academic, political, and cultural discourses along with popular ethnic activism dismantled notions of white homogeneity to establish Argentina as multicultural. Afro-Argentine and indigenous peoples – who had been considered "disappeared" – claimed their legitimate space within the nation; Argentines of European descent who [10] had melted into the *crisol de razas* [melting pot] began to assert their ethnicities; and diversity became a key measure of social justice.$^3$

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Asian diaspora · Argentine society · multiculturalism · immigration · ethnic identity · national identity · racialization · citizenship · cultural politics · Latin American studies · Asian Latin Americans · diaspora studies

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