Intercultural Fair and the staging the migrant in an urban school of Chile

Abstract

This article focuses on the educational context as a privileged space to analyze the construction of inclusion/exclusion processes of immigrant students in the Chilean educational system. This study presents the results of an ethnographic research carried out in a secondary school in Santiago, capital city of Chile, where its own intercultural program is developed. This research goes deeper into how a school evaluates circumstances of potential discrimination in its classrooms. Firstly, it categorizes the supposed existing differences among the students. Then, the school developed several awareness-raising strategies for its educational community based on these hypothetical differences. Specifically, this article analyzes the staging of immigrant and intercultural issues on a specific activity of the school, called “The Intercultural Fair”, which commemorate every year the October 12th “Encounter of Two Worlds”.