ABSTRACT
This paper raises questions about the limits of multiculturalism by reflecting on the settlement experiences of Salvadoran refugees who arrived in Australia and Canada in the 1980s. The situation of small groups of Salvadorans in the ‘Anglo’ outposts of American empire might be seen as of marginal importance, for the end of the Cold War has defused the discourses of ‘communist insurgency’ and ‘people’s struggle’ through which El Salvador was produced as an ‘issue’ by the Western media. The global ‘slaughterscape’ 2 has also deflected attention from Central America’s ‘desplazados’, generating new groups of refugees with claims to dwindling reserves of compassion and material aid. In the context of critical reflection on multiculturalism in Australia and English Canada, however, the Salvadoran case presents a paradigmatic challenge to the foundational concept of ‘ethnic community’, for refugees from civil conflicts construct the boundaries of ‘imagined community’ in terms of social and political divisions not easily papered over by ‘ethnicity’. The Salvadoran case also calls into question assumptions of cultural integrity and stability embedded in the idea of multicultural formations in which ‘ethnic’ and ‘dominant’ cultures are clearly specifiable and incommensurably ‘different’. As citizens of a country with access to the products of global culture for those who can afford them, and a long history of economic migration to the United States, Salvadoran refugees are bearers of culture(s) whose ‘difference’ from whatever might be specified as ‘Australian’ or ‘Canadian’ is rarely as clear-cut as romantic notions of Central American alterity might lead us to expect. This is not an argument for denying diversity, for global culture is inflected through disparate social formations and narratives of nation, and is in any case more contradictory in its effects than the glossy fantasies of a world united by Benetton or Coca-Cola might suggest. It is, however, an argument for rethinking multiculturalism in terms which do not presume the existence of ontologically 164given cultural communities, and for taking account of what Appadurai has called the ‘complex, overlapping, disjunctive order’ of the ‘new global cultural economy’. 3
