Healing the Border Wound: Fronteras Americanas and the Future of Canadian Multiculturalism

Abstract

Guillermo Verdecchia's Fronteras Americanas, a very successful one-person show which premiered in Toronto in 1993, deals with two kinds of borders: those within the American continent, which result in stereotypes of the south; and those within the individual, which bring about a personal struggle to find home. In this essay I look at how Fronteras both reproduces and subverts what can be called "the ideology of Multiculturalism, " an ideology which has instituted acculturation behind a liberal discourse of integration. The negotiation between ideological compliance and challenge is found in the content of the play as well as in some of its means of production, such as venue and language. Fronteras's most powerful ideological subversion, however, is its final suggestion for a new way to imagine Canada.

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