I honestly don’t remember the last time I saw a Latinx story on Australian television. We’re more likely to see ourselves in American media, which used to be almost exclusively stories about Latinx migrants in the USA. Usually criminals embroiled in gang issues, or at the very least, beholden to it.
We can see that and similar tropes in the 2001 film Crazy/Beautiful, in the way Carlos Hernandez lives in relative poverty. Or more recently, in the TV series 13 Reasons Why, where Tony Padilla hides his gang family membership from his white friends and the rest of the school.
It’s only in the last few years that we’ve seen stories such as Narcos (2015) or Coco (2017) become more commonplace—the former admittedly problematic by playing into stereotypes of Latinx drug crime and the latter by playing into Indigenous/Afro-Latinx erasure—these stories are nevertheless actually placed in Latin America proper.
But what does this say to Latinx youth in Australia? The Latinx migrant in the USA’s experience is not like that of a Latinx migrant in Australia. Due to the centuries of proximity and migration, the displacement that someone like Junot Díaz, award-winning Dominican American writer, has experienced is unlike ours. While certainly Other, his stories still occur in racial enclaves, with access to other Dominicans, other Latinxs: Central, Caribbean, and South.
Latinx migrants in the USA have access to people like them, to ethnic enclaves where Spanish can be fostered and not lost, where cultural traditions, media, and food are easily accessible. They grow up within their culture to a degree, and thus their personal expressions and performances of identity are seen as ‘authentic’ expressions of culture to both White America and other Latinxs in the USA.
Latinx youth in Australia grow up without access to people like themselves, and without representation within their immediate context. We lack easy access to our foods, to our language, to our media and cultural traditions. We grow up further displaced from our culture, and thus our personal expressions and identity performances are often questioned. We are either too white or inauthentically imitating North American latinidad performances. We are playing at reflections of reflections.
There are no popular representations of Latinxs in Australia; there is no latinxaustralianx popular figure to look to. There is not popular pedagogy for what a popular expression of growing up Latinx and Australian should look like. This is as liberating as it is dangerous, because we are at greater risk of losing our culture and being assimilated into White Australia.
The problem is compounded when Australians, through the media they consume, then get an idea of what a Latinx person is like. Orange is the New Black has introduced an entire generation of Australians into hegemonic ideas of how Latinx people conduct themselves in day-to-day life. Cultural stereotypes around one’s ability to dance, or their being a smooth talker, having easy access to drugs, being feisty, and holding a strong superstition around Santería are common. These expressions of the Latinx experience not only do not apply to Australia, they also reinforce the notion that there is only one way to be Latinx.
Of course, as with most stereotypes, individuals rarely live up to this, and cultural fetishists are quick to point it out to you. There are any number of people who are enticed by the idea of dating a Latinx person but are quickly disappointed when we do not live up to their expectations of what dating a brown person should be like.
Throughout it all, white people neither see us as one of them, nor see us as Latinx. Last night at a networking event I was out and the first thing I was asked after telling someone my name is Saúl was the ever-inane “Where are you from?”. After clarifying that I was born in Venezuela but raised in Australia, the follow-up was the usual “Oh yeah, you can really tell.” It’s like receiving one slap for being obviously ethnically Other, and then a return backhand when I don’t fit their idea of how a Venezuelan should talk, walk, and carry themselves. It may seem small, but to someone like myself who faces these questions every day, it is a constant reminder you do not belong.
Is there a need for the Latinx Australian experience to be explored or represented in Australian media? To an extent yes, but any Latinx craving representation must be cognisant that it will not be like North American representations of Latinx experiences. We won’t see ourselves in small urban communities where we speak Spanish, hear salsa/chicha playing out the front of a family owned business, with black and brown kids running about yelling Spanglish curses at each other.
Instead what we will see is youth growing up either on the outside of, or joining in on, groups of other racial Others. We’ll see Chileans and Dominican youths finding more solidarity in the Greek, Italian, and Lebanese communities than white ones. Or we’ll see them reject their Latinx culture and ask to play footy instead of soccer and baseball to fit in at school, only to be rejected by White Australia all the same.
We’ll see late-teen Mexicans and Peruvians hanging out with other Latinxs speaking in perfect English with a range of Australian accents ranging from working to middle class. Having found their people. Trying to reclaim their culture, their language, throwing culturally inappropriate Cinco de Mayo parties without the slightest clue of what that is or why; just trying to feel close to something, to belong to something.
We’ll see early- to mid-twenties Colombians and Venezuelans making friends with international students from Colombia, Brazil, and Venezuela and realising that while they are not at all like the White Australia that othered them, they are not at all like the Latinxs international students who are newly-arriving. That while they may know all the salsa classics and their parents’ music, their idea of Venezuela and Colombia is frozen in 1993.
The Latinx Australian experience for me has been one of constantly living on the margins. It has been about coming into the realisation that people do see race, no matter how egalitarian they believe themselves to be. About trying to reclaim my latinidad, my venezolanidad, through learning to dance and by improving my Spanish, but nevertheless finding that not only does White Australia not consider you True Blue Australian™, it also doesn’t consider you Venezuelan. That Venezuelans who are arriving come from a culture and place other than my own and I am not like them; to them I am not Venezuelan either, I’m white.
Am I Venezuelan, or am I Australian? I am both, and more.
About the author
Saúl A. Zavarce C. is a Melbourne-based Venezuelan-Australian Human Rights advocate who migrated to Australia in 1992. He identifies as a mestizo and gender-queer, with Indigenous, Afro-Venezuelan and European heritage. He is the Head of Advocacy at the Venezuelan Australian Democratic Council and Campaign Officer at Plan International Australia. He holds a Master of International Relations, specialising in gender and radicalisation theory from Monash University.