ABSTRACT
Contemporary museums are under considerable pressure to change the ways they address the relationship between identity and citizenship in response to social, cultural and economic processes of globalization. The museum builds a linear settlement narrative from impoverished arrival through to economic and even political success in Canada. The idea of the Solidaridad museum was partially to serve as a community focal point, but also as a political centre for Latin Americans in Toronto. The museum has launched activities and events with supplemental exhibitions in transient locations, employing narratives that focus on political and group-identity messages. The museum maintained continual links with cultural groups in Chile and some connection to other transnational activists, displaying a concerted desire to maintain a political and cultural diasporic connection. Festivals, like museum structures, work to reinscribe geography, both as an embodied process and by staking a territorial claim that might transgress official lines and places.
