Working on Latin America in Australia is a lonely business. The challenges start at the top of the governmental structure, most recently in the form of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s categorical statement, “We are an Indo-Pacific nation; our interests are firmly in our region” (2017). Indeed, in 2012 and 2013 there was an internal effort at the Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to develop and implement an integrated strategy for Latin America, an initiative that was bluntly rebuffed with a quip about Australia being focused on Asia and a reminder that most of the policymakers in Canberra had made their careers focusing on China and were not going to look beyond it.
This has predictable knock on effects in the academy, where few scholars are working on Latin America and, outside of a sparse, lucky handful (including this reviewer), those who do study the region face tremendous difficulty getting Australian Research Council funding. Even in institutions with major centers and concentrations of Latin American expertise, support approaching even a shadow of that given to the study of China and Indonesia remains rare and episodic. Yet despite these obstacles, there is a small and quietly growing community of Latin Americanists, some of whom are global leaders in their discipline, including two contributors to this edited volume.
Of course, civil society and business are wisely off doing their own thing rather than waiting for government or the academy to come to their aid. Indeed, one of the perennial ironies is the stark contrast between the federal government’s disinterest and the vibrancy of Latin cultural scenes in Australia’s major cities, or business interest in investing in markets across the Pacific. This leaves Canberra constantly playing a game of catch-up while state government policymakers are often already working closely with local firms to support new entrants into Latin American countries. In fact, this has been precisely this reviewer’s observation over the last five years, when events held in Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, have been oversubscribed while seminars and conferences in Canberra during the center-right coalition government have become notable for the lack of national-level policy engagement, let alone participation.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the interesting volume under review here is largely a product of Melbourne-based scholars and practitioners, edited by Elizabeth Kath at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT), itself an institution that has seen its linkages to Latin America grow rapidly over the last decade.
The book is branded in the title as a survey of Australian-Latin American relations, but perhaps a more accurate characterization can be found in the subtitle, New Links in a Changing Global Landscape. While it gives attention to changes in the nature of transpacific relations, the story of this book is more one of the evolving place and profile of Latin America and things Latin American in Australia over the last 35 years. In many ways, this is a far more interesting field of study than a repeat of the latest survey of the state of formal affairs on a political and economic level (Carr and Minns Reference Carr and Minns2014).
For the political anthropologist interested in understanding how diaspora communities grow, penetrate, and ultimately influence the foreign policy of a given government, this book is of particular interest. Those more interested in the future of Australian-Latin American relations will benefit from this book for the same reasons, because it charts out how matters related to the eastern side of the South Pacific have permeated the Australian popular, political, and corporate consciousness, which, in turn, points to how domestic political levers may be pressured in the future to broaden Australia’s policy orientation beyond China and the United States.
Attention in the first several chapters is squarely focused on cultural and demographic change. After setting out the general state of play in the first chapter, Kath joins with a team of co-authors to chart the two big waves of Latin American immigration to Australia. Whereas the first major wave was heavily grounded in flight from oppression to an environment with little in the way of welcoming diaspora communities, the second wave, from the 1990s, stems partly from the search for better opportunities, but also from the serendipity that has come with a global rise in international travel. This has also brought a rising sense of confidence and presence as the numbers with Latin heritage in Australia have grown, and as migrants have arrived in a process of conscious choice and less due to a desperate need to search out security.
These changing motivations in migration and the greater ease with which migrants adapt to Australia are the subject of the next chapter, by M. Laura Vázquez Maggio. True to the Australian government’s marketing material, Vázquez Maggio’s extensive interviews point to a significant number of migrants’ choosing to arrive for security reasons and a search for the good life.
Travel and the influx of Latin Americans to Australia have helped shape the country’s cultural life. Barry Carr, one of the world’s leading scholars of Mexican history, teams up with John Sinclair to chart the rise of Mexican food in Australia, with a particular focus on the Melbourne area. The interesting point they make is that many of the taquería chains that have sprouted across the island over the last half-dozen years were started by traveling Australians, not Mexican migrants. This has created an important beachhead for the normalization of things Latin American in the wider Australian cultural context. Indeed, this phenomenon is not limited to Mexican food in Victoria, but can also be found with the appearance of Brazilian churascarias in Sydney’s Darling Harbour or the opening of the excellent South American–inspired Frank Bar and Grill on the waterfront in Hobart, Tasmania.
Paralleling the importance of food for building the Latin American profile in Australia is music, which benefits from an astonishingly vibrant and eclectic music scene, most easily sampled through ABC Radio JJJ. As with food, travel has combined with migration to create a unique antipodean flavor, which is set out by Mara Favoretto. Focusing on questions of hybridity, Favoretto highlights how many arriving Latin American musicians had to adapt to local conceptions of what their sound was about. The result is a blended musical culture that mixes languages, beats, and styles in a manner that is almost explicitly inclusive and accessible to the rest of the country. Indeed, music is often the anchor of public functions designed to build Australian public and policy interest in the Americas.
The final four chapters of the book turn their attention to the business end of the bilateral relationship. Alexis Esposto and John Fien set the scene in the first of them by reviewing past economic linkages before setting forth a series of recommendations for the future. While the review is useful, the propositions they present are in keeping with the wistful “if only the government would” tone that usually dominates public colloquia or Track II diplomacy functions. What is missing is a sense of where some real bite and innovation can be put into the process, an idea of how bilateral links can be driven forward in a trade context that is always going to be limited by geographic realities.
Here, the next chapter, by Adrian Hearn, himself an accomplished musician in addition to being a leading expert on China-Latin America relations, is particularly instructive. He examines the common experiences of Australia and Brazil with respect to China. Instead of focusing on notional spaces for increasing bilateral links, he highlights how each country is grappling with the same challenges in dealing with its major trading partner. Although not necessarily popular with the proud policymakers in Canberra, this is possibly a more useful avenue to follow by seeing where mutual learning to address pressing policy challenges might be pursued, something Hearn is actively doing with his colleagues at the University of Melbourne and various levels of government in Victoria.
Perhaps the most problematic chapters of the book are the final two. Angel Calderón’s review of Australian-Latin American trade in educational services covers the basics adequately and does complete the critical task of reminding the reader that education is one of Australia’s largest export sectors. The problem is that he does not move past what many in Latin America are increasingly seeing as the predatory character of bilateral educational engagement. Some mention is made of growing research collaboration, but not nearly enough attention is given to the surge in Australian university interest in Latin America, which accompanied the launch of several high-profile postsecondary external scholarship programs in countries like Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and, most notably, Brazil, with its Science Without Borders (SWB) program. To put it bluntly, Australian universities are heavily dependent on foreign student income and have reached the limits of their student recruitment possibilities in the Asia-Pacific. These Latin American scholarship programs were seen almost as a lifeline by the major research universities, including the RMIT, which receives one of the largest shares of the SWB students in Australia and where Calderón is the principal adviser for planning and research.
The following chapter, by Victor del Rio, stands more as a case study of how to drive bilateral research cooperation. While not conceptually problematic, the chapter overdoes the technical detail at the expense of greater elaboration of the procedural challenges and their solutions, which would help followers build on the good example of the synchotron initiative. Del Rio has long been an indefatigable proponent of greater connections between Australia and Latin America. His narrative is perhaps an ideal conclusion to this volume, because it highlights the extent to which the expansion of bilateral linkages remains hostage to the availability of individual advocates with the energy to push policymakers into action.
As the book highlights, the structural factors are not in place to make pan- Pacific engagement an automatically obvious option for Chinacentric Australia. Moreover, the evidence presented in the book makes it doubtful that this situation will change anytime soon. That said, Kath’s neatly edited volume also makes clear that the door is not closed and that there is a substantial, if overshadowed, ferment of activity. Nothing is stopping Australians from engaging with and advancing linkages with Latin America. Just don’t expect more than passing assistance from government or a wider explosion of societal excitement about opportunities on the eastern, as opposed to northwestern, edge of the Pacific.
