Re-signifying and negotiating indigenous identity in university spaces: a qualitative study from Chile

ABSTRACT

This article draws on life history interviews with Indigenous university students in Chile to demonstrate the ways these young people re-signify and negotiate their participation in higher education. International scholarship has emphasized the unequal conditions for minority groups to access higher education, but attention also needs to be given to the ways students forge new identity pathways for themselves within these racialized environments. Our analysis utilizes LatCrit studies to emphasize how marginal and hybrid identities enable forms of resistance and counter-narratives to dominant (white) ideologies and assimilatory practices. We focus on the concept of community cultural wealth and the empowerment that aspirational and resistant capital can give to Indigenous youth, providing alternative motives for their studies in relation to the Indigenous communities to which they belong. The paper contributes to this scholarship by underscoring positive aspects of Indigenous student resistance and agency from an understudied context in Latin America.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous
• community cultural wealth
• Latcrit studies
• Chile
• institutional racism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank each participant for their valuable time and contributions, Macarena Sepulveda for all her valuable support with the fieldwork in project 1. The authors also thank the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES), Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (CIIR) and Millennium Nucleus for the Study of the Life Course and Vulnerability (MLIV) for their institutional support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Andrew Webb http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2706-7670

Notes

1 Tribal Critical Studies is perhaps a more suitable framework for addressing indigenous young people’s experiences of education, but crucially less research has been conducted on resistance in this literature. LatCrit is a complementary branch of the same scholarship.

2 Exceptions exist, such as a handful of privately-invested secondary schools, and some university courses with additive forms (Richardson and Blanchet-Cohen 2000) of intercultural content, but the remainder of the education system is wholly mono-cultural.

3 Mapuche are one of the most endogamous indigenous groups in Latin America so it is likely all are mixed-race, but in Chile there is a marked difference between having two Mapuche surnames and only one. For example, some students suggested that because their paternal surname was Chilean and maternal surname was Mapuche, they were less discriminated than peers who had a paternal Mapuche surname.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (CIIR) [grant number FONDAP 15110006], and by Becas Chile [grant number 72140258].