Narrm & Nepantla

In 1983, three years into El Salvador’s twelve-year civil war, a small group of seventy-five Salvadorans arrived under the terms of Australia’s Refugee and Special Humanitarian Program. Over the subsequent three years, around 10,000 additional Salvadorans arrived in Australia; today the country is home to the third largest Salvadoran population outside of El Salvador.

Unlike in the United States, where there has been continual arrival and deportation of Salvadorans across decades, over 90 percent of the Salvadoran-born Australian population arrived before 2001. Australian policy linked Salvadoran immigration specifically to the civil war and its aftermath.

Distanced by decades and by sea and land borders, Australian Salvadorans thus experience “refugeeness” in relative isolation from both El Salvador and other countries that are home to the Salvadoran diaspora today. This distance and isolation (between lejos y lejano) has been exacerbated by the fact that public displays of culture (such as festivals or speaking Spanish in public spaces) are not as common within Australia as in parts of the United States. In the context of Australian colonialism and border imperialism (including the aftermath of the white Australia policy), cultural erasure was a requirement of assimilation.

Both this image and its title (Narrm is the Wurundjeri name for Melbourne) center the Salvadoran experience of “in-betweenness” (Nepantla) in Australia, challenging assimilationist policies by making visible a unique, diasporic lucha that stands in solidarity with First Peoples on what remains unceded land.

Figure 1.

Narrm & Nepantla. Tania Cañas and Camilo Ernesto Perez Landaverde, 2019. Photo: Donatella Parisini. Courtesy: Tania Cañas and Camilo Ernesto Perez Landaverde.