Whitened Geographies and Education Inequalities in Southern Chile

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on critical geographies and sociologies of race and education to explore ways in which the meanings and conducts of whiteness are reproduced in and through Chilean secondary education in an indigenous-majority area. We focus on links between socio-economic, geographical and racial criteria to understand how the privileges of whiteness are naturalised in the region's educational provision and among Mapuche indigenous pupils. Although socio-economic inequalities are widely recognised to structure inequality between young people in Chile, we highlight the pervasiveness and unmarked nature of whiteness in the educational system in relation to the socio-spatial segregation of Mapuche pupils, secondary teachers' attitudes and young peoples' self-positioning in the nation. These combine to marginalise and disempower Mapuche populations across the landscape of rural secondary schools in the Araucanía region of Chile.

Keywords:

• Whiteness
• Race
• Indigenous
• Critical Geography
• Educational Segregation
• Inequality

Notes

[1] National statistics have until recently been collated according to non-racial criteria, hindering a quantitative analysis of overlapping inequalities (see, for example, Elacqua 2009).

[2] Other indigenous groups in Chile, such as the Aymara, tend to be omitted altogether from this binary.

[3] Based on 2002 census data.

[4] These concerns frame state initiatives of interculturalism as a form of cultural recognition without economic or political redistributive effects, diverting attention from indigenous communities’ unanswered demands for territorial and water rights, political autonomy and an end to state-sponsored transnational development projects on ancestral lands.

[5] The four schools are ranked 118th, 154th, 178th and 179th of 201 in regard to average university entrance test scores.

[6] The national curriculum refers to these differences in more ambiguous terminology: general formation (formación general) and differentiated formation (formación diferenciada).

[7] In reference to our earlier assertion that education inequalities are concentrated in the most northern and southern regions of Chile, 60 of the 85 schools with 95 per cent or over school population classified as vulnerable are located in regions 1–2 or 9–14.

[8] These narratives closely mirror racialised contexts in northern Canada where aboriginal students are categorised as coming from families with ‘social problems’ (see, for example, Van Ingen and Halas 2006).

[9] The textbook dedicates two pages to describe indigenous peoples today, but crucially they omit information between 1883 and 1993.

[10] One of the case study schools performs significantly better than the other three but all have results below the regional average.

[11] Unlike wealthier families (Elacqua 2009), rural indigenous households in the Araucanía make ‘choices’ on the basis of limited access to information.

[12] In another paper we document how a minority of Mapuche secondary pupils view rights organisation interpretations of citizenship, civic belonging and land claims as just and legitimate (Radcliffe and Webb 2014).

[13] Indeed, some of these practices are either already incorporated into intercultural bilingual education, and/or comprise components of Mapuche indigenous organisation demands.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number RES-062-23-3168].