ESTAMOS ACÁ: AFRODESCENDANT YOUTH ACTIVISM, EDUCATION, AND RACIALIZED CITIZENSHIP IN ARGENTINA

Abstract

For young people of African descent in Argentina, their belonging and claim to the nation are largely negated by public denial of their existence. While the concept of mestizaje, or cultural and ethnic mixing, was prominent in the nation-building projects of many other Latin American countries (Sutton 2008), Argentina remains profoundly shaped, both demographically and ideologically, by nineteenth-century “blanqueamiento” policies aimed at “whitening” the nation by encouraging European immigration and obscuring its Afrodescendant and indigenous populations (Gordillo and Hirsch 2003). In the last decade, however, transnational Afrodescendant social movements and Argentina’s adoption of multicultural policies and rhetoric (Rahier 2012; Geler 2016) have fueled local activism and led to hard-earned achievements for Argentina’s Afrodescendant communities, such as the addition of an “afrodescendiente” category in the census of 2010. Within this context of shifting national policies and racial ideologies in contemporary Argentina my dissertation examines Afrodescendant young people’s civic-identity formation across institutional and community-based educational environments, where youth are emerging as key interlocutors in the relationship between the state and their diasporic communities. As students, Afrodescendant youth spend much of their time within Argentine educational institutions—institutions founded with the explicit mission of cultivating a “civilized” citizenry within a culturally and ethnically homogeneous nation (Ocoró Loango 2016). In 2005, the Argentine state promulgated a “Plan nacional contra la discriminación” (National Plan against Discrimination) that denounced the predominance of ethnic nationalism in education, but this has led to few institutional changes. Classrooms remain principal sites where Afrodescendant youth encounter various forms of racialization and exclusion, from peer bullying to Eurocentric history textbooks (INADI 2015). Meanwhile, outside the classroom, growing Afrodescendant social movements have opened up new spaces for youth to develop critical consciousness and advocate for their cultural belonging and political rights. I draw on a year of observations, interviews, and youth participatory action research (YPAR) with an Afrodescendant youth organization in Buenos Aires to illustrate how diasporic community-based activism provides Afrodescendant youth with a type of counter-classroom—a space for an alternative civic education that enables them to “imagine their social belonging and exercise their participation as democratic citizens” (Levinson 2005). While formal educational environments are imbued with racializing practices and national narratives that circumscribe citizenship in ways that place Afrodescendants outside the nation, young Afrodescendants are learning to craft broader definitions of Argentine citizenship through counter-storytelling (Solórzano and Yosso 2002) and praxis-based learning (Freire 1970; Ginwright and Cammarota 2007) in their diasporic community. Ultimately, this dissertation traces, contrasts, and connects the diverse educational experiences of Afrodescendant youth, both within their schools and in their diasporic communities, in order to provide a nuanced examination of how these young people are engaged in what Ong (1996) has called the “dual process of self-making and being made” as citizens.