Haitian Immigrants in Chile's Educational System: How Antiblackness Affects Integration Through Education

• In Event: Perspectivas y Problemas en Educación: Storytelling Across the Americas

Abstract

Purpose
This paper presents stories of Haitian immigrants living in Valparaiso in order to highlight the narratives of this population’s experience in the Chilean educational system. The dominant narrative of Haitians in Chile has been constructed through anti-black racism manifested in discrimination based on appearance and language use, rendering them one of the most vulnerable migrant populations in the country (Vargas Carlier, 2018). As a site of socialization, schools enter the immigrant narrative as a nucleus of the overall anti-black experience. Due to the difference between the languages used by Haitian immigrants and Chilean citizens, an emerging dynamic equates the use of Spanish to whiteness (Campus- Bustos, 2019). Through Critical Race Theory (CRT)’s tenets of storytelling and whiteness as property, the narratives of Haitians immigrants in the Chilean educational system allow us to understand how Chileans exclude Haitian immigrants from claiming Chilean culture as their own. Storytelling allows these narratives to serve as a point of departure for creating dignified methods of responding to the quotidian human rights abuses endured by Haitians as black immigrants in Chile.

Theoretical Perspective/Methods
This paper utilizes the voices of Haitian immigrants to demonstrate how language manifests a tangible experience of whiteness as property. As immigrants, Haitians experience confusion and limited access to services through a lack of knowledge about Chile’s educational system (Campos-Bustos, 2019). Understanding whiteness as property allows us to perceive how the language barrier between Haitian immigrants and Chilean society keeps the privileges, benefits and assumptions connected to whiteness out of reach -- and therefore, protected -- from access by black bodies (Harris, 1993). In the educational system, whiteness as property paints a picture of the Haitian immigrant as less intelligent and less capable of contributing to Chilean society when compared to other immigrant groups due to the color of their skin. Consequently, schools play dual role of providing an academic and social education not only for the immigrant children but also their families. The stories in this paper demonstrate (1) the awareness of this layered anti-black racism working against Haitian immigrants in comparison to other groups and (2) the ability of Haitian immigrants to construct a reality that critiques and challenges the complexity of structural racism.

Results/Significance
In my analysis in this paper, I demonstrate how understanding whiteness as property provides a window into the complexity of the anti-black racism that greets Haitian immigrants when they come to reside in Valparaiso, Chile. Awareness of all the ways they are purposely excluded creates an interesting space for resistance and agency that I believe Chilean society was not and is not prepared to experience. This is most present in the classroom, an obligatory space of interaction between immigrants and Chilean citizens. This space that immigrant children navigate continuously affects not only their development and socialization but also the understanding that their parents begin to construct of their immigrant experience.

Author

• Pía Molina, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay