“Los Racistas Son Los Otros” (The Racists Are Others): Immigrant Youth, Racial Denial, and Other E(Race)sures

• In Event: Encountering Race: Discourses of Race and Racialization and the Education of Immigrant Youth in the United States and Europe

Abstract

Our post-WWII/ postcolonial era, scholars have noted, is marked by an explicit turning away
from race (Gilroy, 1998; Balibar, 1991). Contemporary democracies now respond to and come to terms with race by seeking to erase the terms of “racial conception and consideration, determination and deliberation” (Goldberg, 2006). These discourses of denial are invoked even as social organization continues to function along racial lines—as a tacit “race consciousness” continues to materialize in the differential allocation of resources in schools and in the dynamics of social control and power in broader society (Winant, 2006).

Over the course of the last decade, Spain’s cultural, social, and political landscape has undergone significant transformations as a result of global migration flows (Chacón Rodriguez, 2003). The presence of transnational migrants from the Global South serve to challenge dominant notions of belonging, diversity, and national identity. Events such as the highly publicized assault of a young Ecuadorian woman by a Catalan/Spanish “citizen” on Barcelona’s metro (in 2007) carry the tacit themes of ‘race,’ nation, and identity. Yet at the same time that processes of “racial Europeanization” articulate in encounters such as these, ‘race’ and racialized social arrangements are disavowed and rendered invisible in the dominant national imaginary (Goldberg, 2006). Within the context of an old/new immigration society like Catalonia, Spain, nationalist and liberal discourses of democracy, cosmopolitan multiculturalism, and tolerance have served to reproduce the dominant narrative that “the racists are the others” (Calvo Buezas, 1989), casting ‘race’ beyond the boundaries of the nation and thus rendering its effects unspeakable.

This paper aims to take up the question of “race” in the day-to-day experiences of immigrant youth. Drawing upon insights from critical race studies, cultural studies, and the anthropology of education, it centers on the lived experiences of minoritization/racialization of immigrant young people coming of age in liberal democratic societies seemingly “beyond race.” It pays careful attention to the consequences that these racial erasures have for immigrant youth who in their everyday journeys through school and communities encounter processes of racialization and exclusion (Maira & Soep, 2005; Opotow, 2004). Reporting on an ethnographic study conducted with immigrant youth (namely from Morocco and Latin America) in a secondary school in Barcelona, Spain, I situate the analysis within the broader historical, sociopolitical, and ecological contexts that frame youth’s lives to ask, how do these e(race)sures mediate youth’s sense of belonging and exclusion? As the findings reveal, the experiences of immigrant youth throw into stark relief how ‘race’—as a set of dynamic conditions that shift over time and contexts—operates as the unspoken text in the everyday experiences of immigrant youth that is intimately entangled with the interests of nationalism and empire. The analysis also centers on the ways in which such “entanglements” are encountered, contested, and transformed by immigrant youth, as well the various challenges of “speaking race” and naming the deleterious effects of racialized phenomena in a context where ‘race’ operates as a non-category.

Author

• Anne Rios Rojas, University of California - Santa Cruz