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

While the study of Asians in Argentina has remained largely underdeveloped, a growing body of work, mostly from the social sciences, is filling this scholarly gap. Concentrated on three major East Asian groups – Japanese/Okinawan, Chinese/Taiwanese, and Korean – the existing scholarship is primarily concerned with the history of immigration, migration patterns, and socio-anthropological issues of discrimination, assimilation, and identity formation. More recent works have taken a new direction, placing these groups within the framework of transnational diasporas. Although the Chinese population is reportedly the largest Asian group and the fourth-largest immigrant group in Argentina (commonly estimated by government agencies, scholars, and media to be above 100,000 people), it has received the least scholarly attention, possibly because of its recent arrival, as we will see later.$^{16}$ On the other hand, the Japanese community, smaller in size, with an estimated population of 40,000, has received the most scholarly attention.$^{17}$ The prominence of Japanese-Argentines has to do with the group's relatively long history, its particularly favorable image compared to other Asian groups, and the broader development of Nikkei studies in Latin America.$^{18}$ Outside these three major groups, there are only a handful of academic and institutional publications regarding people of Southeast Asian descent, such as the Laotian refugee community.

A common thread in this multidisciplinary body of work is its approach to Asian-Argentines as immigrant subjects or as members of distinct ethnic communities or colectividades (e.g., colectividad coreana) who hold strong ties to countries of origin and are distant from the majority population, mainstream culture, and hegemonic Argentine national identity. These works attest to the reality that as non-European immigrants, Asians have shared a common experience of discrimination, stereotyping, and rejection from the nation. Through an emphasis on Asians' ethnic groupness, these works reveal a history of unequal power relations between Asians and the dominant culture, and they portray ethnic or diasporic modes of identification as a way to challenge this condition. Nonetheless, I suggest that thinking of Asians strictly as colectividades can unwittingly reproduce the boundaries that make them outsiders by overlooking spaces of hybridity and multiplicity among Asians, and, most crucially, by disregarding their role in formulations of Argentine national identity.

Among these studies of Asians in Argentina, the earliest works sketch the history of immigration of specific ethnic groups, the socio-historical circumstances that triggered migration, the complex routes of arrival and departure, and their settlement patterns. What emerges from these works is the existence of a constant flow of Asians to Argentina since the early twentieth century. Reflecting the socio-economic and historical circumstances of their countries of origin, East Asian communities settled successively in Argentina – Japanese arrived in the first half of the twentieth century, Koreans in the second half of the twentieth century, and Chinese at the start of the twenty-first century. A small but steady wave of Japanese immigration to Argentina started around 1909 and continued into the 1960s, with a break during World War II, gradually stopping as Japan emerged as a global economic power.$^{19}$ Korean immigration began substantially in the 1960s and reached a period of intense growth in the 1980s and 1990s; Mirta Bialogorski, a leading scholar of the Korean-Argentine community, estimates that the Korean-Argentine population reached 40,000 during this time.$^{20}$ This larger population stimulated the growth of Korean-Argentine associations, as well as churches, radio stations, and newspapers catering to Korean-language speakers.$^{21}$ More recently, a modest wave of Taiwanese immigration in the 1980s and a larger group of immigrants from the Chinese mainland in the 1990s and 2000s have established a significant Taiwanese/Chinese community.$^{22}$ The economic crisis of 2001 diminished the Korean and Taiwanese populations, as many re-emigrated to neighboring countries or to the United States and Canada, but a wave of immigration from mainland China reached its peak during the post-crisis years.$^{23}$