Cortés Saavedra, Andrea Monserratt; (2024) Producing migrant otherness: An ethnographic study in a school in northern Chile. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

How is difference understood in relation to migrant children in a border region in northern Chile? How do migration and the arrival of migrant children in Chilean schools shape Chilean identities? These are some of the key questions that this thesis addresses. In academic and popular discourse, Latin American migration to Chile is often treated as a recent phenomenon, with most research focusing on the experiences of adults. However, in the border regions of the country, South-South mobility is a permanent aspect of social life. This ethnographic study focuses on Iquique, a city located in northern Chile, and offers insights into the complex, contradictory, and shifting ways in which teachers and children produce national identifications, forms of belonging, and migrant otherness in a school attended by children with diverse origins. This study encompasses the particular, relational, and simultaneous ways of producing difference and, at the same time, generating a specific type of Chilean identity linked to Iquique, a city in a region that shares a border with Bolivia and which, before the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), belonged to Peru. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that included interviews, observations, informal conversations, and review of media and documents, this thesis explores and examines how teachers and school staff constituted and mobilised ‘national values’ – Chilenidad – and how these were indexed to an Iquiqueña identity, which I call Iquiqueñidad. Both are rooted in the country’s colonial heritage and are central to the daily construction of difference. The thesis argues that Iquiqueñidad, a powerful but contested notion, brings together shared but opposing meanings. It is strongly anchored in a sense of belonging to the local territory that endows Iquiqueños with a distinctive position to understand and frame migration and difference. The entanglement of Iquiqueñidad and Chilenidad also works as a way of doing community through bordering processes and, further, by stratifying migrant children according to their countries of origin. Specifically, Chilean schools, as strongly institutionalised spaces and promoters of national values within the framework of Iquiqueñidad and Chilenidad, function as a space of ‘civilising’ attitudes. Migrant children, for their part, respond in a flexible and contingent manner to the ways in which they are positioned by Chilenidad and Iquiqueñidad. Sometimes migrant children take up ‘Chilean values’ in an effort to belong to the school. At other times, given the way some teachers associate obedience and discipline with certain nationalities, migrant children embrace otherness as a way of positioning themselves closer to what teachers think is an ideal student. In yet other moments, some students attempt to become ‘more Chilean’ while simultaneously rejecting assimilation to Chilenidad. This ethnographic study contributes to bigger debates about childhood, migration, and identity by examining these themes relationally and by taking as central elements the identities and values deployed at national and regional levels to produce migrant otherness.

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