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Abstract
This paper explores expressions of sociocultural and political subjectivity among indigenous youth located within four secondary boarding schools in the Araucanía Region of Chile. For rural indigenous students, these schools are a primary site in which they come to gain a sense of themselves as members of civil society and as future citizens. Drawing on young peoples’ experiences in boarding facilities and expressions regarding sociopolitical positioning, we analyse the ways Mapuche youth engage with the racially and class-inflected hierarchies of inequality present in the school, the region and beyond. Within these school spaces, little intellectual space afforded young people to consider how civic inclusion can be renegotiated in relation to indigenous identifications. Nevertheless, the young people demonstrate a capacity to engage critically with national discourses from media and schooling. Whilst not widely engaged in politicized youth activism, the pupils demonstrated agency by positioning themselves critically in quotidian and negotiated re-workings of the meaning of citizenship.
Notes
1 Sexual, urban, ecological, cultural, cosmopolitan, consumer, multicultural and post-orientalist are just some of the adjectives and affixes used in relation to citizenship (Jopkke, Citation2007).
2 Ong (Citation2006) contends that governmentality and hegemony are achieved via routine practices of discipline and surveillance in both state and civil institutions so as to create diffused and implicit forms of racism.
3 The term Mapuche is used for single individuals of that group, or a group.
4 Exceptions are found in the literature on critical pedagogy and critical race theory (Morgan, Citation2000).
5 Mapuche citizenship rights have been widely researched, and whilst a number of studies gesture at the implications for youth in educational settings (e.g. Richards, Citation2013), pupils’ experiences and narratives have not been directly addressed.
6 Moreover, studies on Latin American schooling and racialization focus on primary education (Canessa, Citation2004, Citation2012; Lazar, Citation2010), and teacher training colleges (Luykx, Citation1999).
7 Classroom practices including teacher–pupil relationships and curricular content are beyond the scope of this article.
8 Mass urban migration and declining numbers of Mapuzungun [Mapuche language] speakers removed some of the previous tropes which categorized ethnic differences.
9 The selection process of the schools was premised on specifics related to types of education provision, controlling for similar indigenous intakes. Differences between these schools cannot be elaborated here, but will be provided in later publications.
10 The dynamics of identifying indigenous respondents in this way is discussed below.
11 In 1997, education reform implemented the Full School Day raising weekly hours from 36 to 42 in secondary schools, without extra teaching resources. Average school days in each of the case study schools were 8.5 hours long.
12 The authors acknowledge that home communities and peer influence contribute alternate values; but these are unlikely to be as pervasive in the boarding schools.
13 F refers to focus group number, and where cited, each participant was assigned a number from 1 to 8 to denote the person speaking.
14 Pupils associated this lack of civic participation with geographical isolation owing to poor transport and extreme poverty.
15 See Richards and Gardner (Citation2013, p. 269) for an incidence of racism directed against an older woman in her early schooling.
16 Nevertheless, another suggested discrimination was worse for foreign migrants: ‘The state does [treat all people in Chile equally] but not the foreigners, especially not the Peruvians … because I've seen how they insult them on television’ (P5F24).
17 Slavery of the Mapuche was authorized by the Spanish crown from 1608 until its prohibition in 1674.
18 A forthcoming paper addresses these issues in greater detail.
19 In Chile, citizenship education was demoted from a curriculum subject to a strand of social science in 1998.