Paper short abstract:

The paper explores indigenous youth’s experiences of racism and discrimination in the Peruvian city of Pucallpa by unpacking the interplay between self-identification and "interculturality" among young urban Amazonians.

Paper long abstract:

Based on 33 months of fieldwork among university students in the Amazonian metropolis of Pucallpa, Peru, my paper focuses on how indigenous youth conceptualize their ethnic belonging in the city, where they attend “intercultural” universities; novel institutions which aim to incorporate ancestral knowledge into academic education. The intercultural educational project and the ambitions that it fosters target young Amazonians on the basis of their ethnic heritage, through processes which I describe as “marking” indigenous people and “un-marking” of mestizos (non-indigenous). My research recognizes that such processes profoundly shape Amazonian youth’s positionality, particularly regarding lived experiences of racism and discrimination. In particular, I explore how the emic category of culture comes to be used as a marker of ethnic difference, bound up in notions of the centrality of knowledge in constituting and negotiating young Amazonians’ ethnicity. On the one hand, Amerindian youth are understood as being the depositaries of a wealth of culture and knowledge now largely lost which, if recovered, would help to lead Peru to a future of prosperity and scientific and technological development. On the other hand however, these views coexist with structural racism, which places indigenous people at the very bottom of the Peruvian social pyramid. My ethnography shows how young Amazonians who self-identify or are marked by others as “indigenous” within the intercultural university classroom, and, more generally, within the city, find themselves in a rather untenable position, confronted as they are with the contradictory sets of values attached to their indigeneity.