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

Whether united in love, honor, or against mutant rabbits, the three films here envision a multicultural nation based on a deeply rooted monocultural framework – perhaps a nation that "has" multicultural subjects instead of "being" multicultural. The three Asian protagonists embody the multicultural entities that the nation can possess in order to overcome the limitations of a nation that homogenized itself by force, but they also function as mediators to reshape the national identity. The Asian characters' central role in these three examples of contemporary national narratives testifies to Argentina's growing desire to proclaim itself as tolerant and diverse. However, these films keep their distance from multicultural negotiations on the ground – such as shifting boundaries of identity and class, and ensuing cultural and racial conflicts – not only by insisting on a preexisting definition of the nation as described earlier, but also by borrowing from stereotyped notions of the traditional oriental and portraying the Asian heroes as caricatures, or as primarily allegorical characters that have little footing in Argentina's reality. Resorting to the figure of the samurai, both mythical and mystical, to the beautiful and morally unbendable heroine of the anime, or to notions of traditional filial piety, the films construct characters that are unmistakable allegories of values – honor, morality, hard work, patriarchy – that are thought to be lost in Western modernity but that can be rescued from an orientalized imagination of the East.

The myth of Samurai, the anime of Mujer conejo, and the fairy tale of Un cuento chino propose a new (but also expressly renewed) national character largely removed from the seemingly conflictive Asian-Argentine populations whose official inclusion the multicultural state still resists and whose tension with the majority population and dominant culture has been, according to the existing scholarship, central to their experience. By leaping into the mythical, the oneiric, and the fantastic, these films construct the postmodern multicultural nation through "precisely the occlusion of the margins and the poor," reducing Asians to values that can be appropriated into the national character but occluding their marginalized condition in today's Argentina. While it is unlikely that Asian-Argentine communities would recognize themselves in the national heroes portrayed in these cinematic fables, my point is less about the lack of verisimilitude of the invoked Asians and more about the unequal power relations – of representation and recognition – that they potentially naturalize. The representations of Asians as heroic figures in the construction of the new national space are unprecedented and laudable, and certainly make great strides in changing the racial thinking of a nation that prided itself on being European from its foundation. But Asians' omission from official discourses and their reductive representations in contemporary cultural manifestations continue to limit their meaningful participation in the nation.

A cultural discourse that produces unlikely – even if idealized – images of Asian-Argentines, especially in the context of a lack of official representation and recognition, risks laying norms for national inclusion that might be impossible to meet.

If to a certain extent, the three films analyzed here can be read as instructions on how to build a multicultural nation, *La Salada* (2014), a more recent film by the Argentine-Taiwanese filmmaker Juan Martín Hsu, moves away from a prescriptive multicultural ideology to examine some on-the-ground processes of multiculturalism in today's Argentina. The title refers to the Feria La Salada in the province of Buenos Aires, reportedly the biggest informal market in South America with 30,000 stalls that sell clothing, pirated DVDs, toys, and food. The fair was first established by a few Bolivian immigrants in the 1990s but grew astronomically after the 2001 economic crisis when working-class people who could no longer afford regular prices began to pour in from all over the country. In this sense, *La Salada* represents the real margins of a nation in crisis, which the film explores through the multicultural "salad" of its occupiers.

Following the lives of Korean, Taiwanese, and Bolivian immigrants (some more recent than others) who work in the market, *La Salada* depicts their common experience of displacement as newcomers to the nation as well as existing power relations, not only with the dominant culture but with each other. This film is not free of common – and at times, dangerous – stereotypes and essentializations such as the subservient Bolivian who works hard despite constant abuse, and the Korean who does not know a word of Spanish after almost two decades in Argentina. However, it avoids reducing minorities to heroes, victims, or cultural ambassadors, and rather attempts to capture different aspects of Asian and Bolivian experiences (arguably the most denigrated groups in Argentina).

Asian-Americanist Lisa Lowe argues that in relation to the articulations of an Asian-American identity, acknowledging heterogeneity (of, for example, national origin, experience of immigration, and relation to the country of origin), multiplicity (as "several different axes of power" determine social relations), and hybridity (cultural practices that are produced by the "histories of unequal and unsynthentic power relations") is crucial in order to overcome the essentializing discourses of the dominant culture.