Paper short abstract

In Santiago schools shaped by Haitian and Venezuelan migration, everyday talk of the ‘normal’ Chilean pupil marks some bodies and accents as out of place. Participatory action research shows how these practices construct the ‘white Chilean student’ as a civic ideal in education.

Paper long abstract

Chile has long been narrated as relatively homogeneous and “mestizo”/Europeanised; in the last decade, accelerated South–South migration has made racial difference more visible in public schools in Santiago. Building on critical whiteness scholarship and debates on the coloniality of power, and drawing on participatory action research conducted by the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Chilean Anti-Racist Education (MRACE) in municipal schools that enrolled large numbers of Haitian and Venezuelan students, this paper examines how everyday school interactions produce the figure of the “white Chilean student” as the unmarked norm of national belonging.

Combining classroom observation with co-designed workshops, collective mapping and student–teacher dialogues, I trace how evaluative categories such as “good student”, “respectful”, “clean”, “well spoken” and “participative” become proxies for whiteness. These seemingly mundane judgements attach to bodies (skin colour, hair), to sensory registers (smell, noise) and to linguistic practices (Spanish with an accent; Haitian Creole), while also intersecting with classed imaginaries of order and aspiration. In polarised debates about migration and diversity, “we” narratives are assembled through comparisons with the racialised “migrant other”, legitimising differential discipline, lowered expectations and exclusion from participation spaces.

By foregrounding the making of whiteness—rather than only the marginalisation of non-white students—this paper offers an ethnographic account of how racial hierarchies are consolidated through schooling, and reflects on the possibilities and limits of participatory methods for unsettling them.