Las historias de un blady woggie: stories of South American migration to Australia

The paradigm shift from the White Australia Policy to multiculturalism in 1973 was a reaction to the failure of assimilation and the arrival of new waves of non-European migration from the mid-1960s. Many Latin American migrants were assisted into the country by the Australian Government through migration schemes and humanitarian programs, nevertheless, they arrived in a country unreceptive to cultural difference. The state policy of multiculturalism simultaneously encouraged and contained ethnic diversity in order to maintain a dominant Anglo-Celtic culture, protected and maintained since federation. Critical multiculturalism and the postcolonial themes of exile, ambivalence and hybridity are employed in a close reading of a collection of stories written by Chilean political refugee, Luis Alfonso Abarca, to understand the ways the texts responded to these functions of multiculturalism.The text entitled, Las historias de un blady woggie (1992) written by Chilean political refugee Luis Alfonso Abarca, utilises the crónica to reflect upon the shared experiences of the community they were written for. A textual analysis will explore some ways South American migrants interacted with the dominant culture and how, from their marginal positions, they create hybridised cultural understandings, reframing pre-existing notions of collectivism and gender. Research into the migrant experience through Latin American-Australia n literature highlights the limitations of multiculturalism, creating new spaces to debate the dominance of national cultural belonging and the imposition of essentialised ethnic cultural characteristics.