Between Foreigners and Heroes: Asian-Argentines in a Multicultural Nation by Chisu Teresa Ko

During the 2010 Bicentennial celebrations, Argentina heightened its efforts to reject previous ideas of homogeneity and redefine the nation as diverse. In this process, the state agency INADI (Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminación, la Xenofobia, y el Racismo) has become a major official promoter of diversity and tolerance, with 550 employees in 2011, up from thirty-five in 2005, and a ten-fold increase in budget in six years. The agency's web channel (webINADI) reflects its understanding of diversity; the organization's video campaigns, for example, a key tool to educate the public about discrimination and to promote cultural, racial, and gender diversity, almost entirely lack Asian presence. As of 2014, only one video depicts an Asian: as part of an animated series for children, "Somos iguales y diferentes," the video asserts the equality of non-normative peoples within the nation and shows one Asian girl dressed in a kimono with chopsticks in her hair. Given that the campaign's portrayal of excluded identities extends to a white woman with a British accent, the near-complete absence of Asians is striking. While no single such omission can have enormous impact, the conspicuous absence of Asians across official discourses can reproduce their invisibility and validate some common assumptions. about their foreignness, numerical insignificance, inability to assimilate, and status as temporary migrants.

In another decisive example, the Bicentennial national census of 2010, which was ground-breaking for its simultaneous inclusion of two long-absent racial categories (afrodescendiente or "Afro-descendant" and pueblo originario or "indigenous peoples"), had no Asian category. In the broader context of Latin America's contemporary racial politics, Argentina's revised national census is not exceptional. Latin American nations that had previously avoided specific racial categorizations in favor of consolidating national identities under notions of "melting pots" or mestizaje began in recent years to reshape their nationhood through redesigned national censuses that produced statistical data about their diverse ethno-racial composition. According to sociologist Mara Loveman, by 2010 all Latin American nations except the Dominican Republic "included, or had publicly committed to include, at least one direct query to capture indigenous and/or Afro-descendant individuals. " But Loveman also points out that despite an overarching impulse to render visible racial diversity, "those of Asian descent remained statistically invisible in the national censuses of nearly all Latin American countries," including Argentina.

Sociologists Edward Telles and René Flores note that Latin American censuses also tend to omit "white" as a category – out of seventeen national censuses carried out in the 2000s, only Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, and El Salvador included a white category. Telles and Flores interpret this as a sign that "whites are not supposed to exist according to some national ideologies (e.g., mestizaje in Mexico), or perhaps [as] further evidence that whiteness is simply not problematized as it is for nonwhites. " Given that whiteness in Argentina has been the very founding ideal of its dominant national identity, the omission of white in Argentina's census does not render white people invisible. As much as the new census attempts to recuperate two major groups that were historically eliminated from the modern nation, it also reaffirms white as Argentina's default population. In this context, the omission of Asians, who belong neither to the deracialized normativity of whiteness nor to the newly included categories of Afro-descendant and indigenous peoples, automatically discards them from Argentina's redefined nation. Loveman rightfully asserts that official census classification can be simultaneously inclusionary and exclusionary.

That is, census classification does not necessarily mean inclusion, and it also risks essentialization and greater state control. However, given that Argentina has historically denied the existence of racial minorities, their inclusion or exclusion from the census can be particularly charged with political and symbolic meaning.

Asian-Argentines' statistical – and, by extension, ontological – uncertainty results not only from their omission in the census but also from a broader lack of sustained official data. Estimates cited by the government, media, and scholars come from a variety of sources – each with different measuring criteria – but no comprehensive and official information helps us understand