Re-Signifying and Negotiating Mapuche Identities in university spaces

• In Event: Producción cultural, identidades y racismo: mapuches en Chile

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to examines the experience of upward social mobility of the Mapuche people in Chile and how they negotiate their class and indigenous identities during university period and later at work, who are the first generation attending university. I use a Bourdieusian framework to analyse the process of social mobility transition, as it is this framework which has the most developed approach to understanding the dislocations experienced by the socially mobile. I conducted 40 life histories. The sample were women and men that identify as Mapuche people between 21 and 57 years old.
Mapuche population is characterized as a disadvantaged group, because since the period of the Spanish conquest, indigenous groups in Chile have faced economic, territorial inequalities, positioning unequal to the rest of the population. Moreover, the proportion of indigenous people who complete their higher education is less than a third of the proportion of non-indigenous people in the same situation (INE, 2002). However, an emergent group of Mapuche population have experienced social mobility, thanks to integration policies for indigenous population from the 1990s until now.
The data suggest that people deployed several strategies in order to negotiate mobility transitions and to ‘fit in’ to their new social location. In some cases, their mobility meant renegotiating and emphasizing their class identity, in other cases re-emphasizing or renegotiating their Mapuche identity. So, to fully analyse these strategies, social position, social identity and social mobility must all be understood in terms of both class and ethnicity.

Author

• Denisse S Sepúlveda, The University of Manchester