Sarmiento’s make-over: How the Bachillerato Popular Trans Mocha Celis is transforming Argentinian education

• In Event: Queering the Left Turn: Contested National Imaginaries in Latin America

Abstract

“El Bachi” is not your typical Argentinean high school. Every day, students are greeted by a huge banner with the image of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento—founding father of the Argentinean nation and the man credited for making education mandatory, secular and free. However, this Sarmiento is in full make up, has blond hair, and carefully plucked eyebrows. This image effectively encapsulates the ethos of the Bachillerato Popular Trans Mocha Celis: to bring forth the hidden curricula around issues of gender, sex, and sexuality that permeate the educational system and shape notions of citizenry and national belonging, etc. The high school was born at the intersection of two major shifts in Argentinean recent history: the development of “popular schools” after the economic crash of 2001; and the passing of the “gender identity law” in 2012. We propose that Mocha Celis rearranges the politics of managing bodies until recently unintelligible to the State, by both demanding that the policies address their needs while coopting (some would say queering) the basic tenets of universality of Argentinian identity (thus appealing to, and breaking from, nationalist discourses). In this paper, we are being critical of how the left is using that double entendre in their workings of the high school. We show how the Bachillerato “queers” a national imaginary as it re-appropriates it. Using popular media, fieldwork conducted between 2014-2016, and interviews with key stakeholders, we propose a better understanding of Mocha Celis as a radical institution that also maneuvers conservative understandings of access to education, of the validation of difference, even of belonging to a problematic construct of nation.

Author

• Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, American University