"Me invisibilizan": Afrodescendant youth narratives of educational experiences and the making of raced citizens in Argentina

• In Event: Interculturalidad e inclusión educativa

Abstract

In Argentine classrooms, Afrodescendant youth encounter various forms of racialization and exclusion that buttress the pervasive national myth that Argentina is a “white nation.” Recent studies have revealed that Argentine textbooks (Álvarez 2015) and school celebrations of nationhood (Ocoró 2010) limit educational representations of Afrodescendants to the slaves of Argentina’s colonial past. This research questions how educational environments re-inscribe "racialized citizenship" (Reiter 2013, Perry 2016) in Argentina and how Afrodescendant students engage in the “dual process of self-making and being made” as citizens (Ong 1996).

Utilizing a constructivist view of narrative (Bruner 1987; Ochs and Capps 1996), this paper analyzes Afrodescendant youth narratives of racialization and invisibilization in educational contexts as acts of “self-making”, through which their racial identities and understandings of the nation are actively shaped. In the process of sharing their narratives, Afrodescendant youth (re)construct and interpret both their educational experiences and what it means for them to be Afrodescendant in Argentina. Youth narratives reveal that Afrodescendant young people locate classroom racialization in both top-down processes, such as instructional content and activities, and in diverse quotidian interactions with their instructors and peers. Yet, it must be stressed that Afrodescendant youth are not passive agents within white pedagogical spaces, but rather critically interpret and challenge discourses of race and nation in their schools. Youth narratives, alongside twelve months of ethnographic research, reveal various strategies employed by Afrodescendant youth and their advocates to resist the normativity of whiteness in the classroom and assert Afrodescendants into formations of argentinidad.

Author

• Eryn Berger, Temple University