ABSTRACT
Bourdieu’s conceptual work offers us tools for understanding racially unequal schooling conditions and the tentative balance between agency and structure within them. This chapter sets out empirical evidence of new racism in Chilean education from qualitative interviews and focus groups with 7th to 12th grade Mapuche students, and is analysed through a Bourdieusian theoretical lens. The chapter examines attitudes towards school-oriented issues such as school choice, relationships with teachers, peers, educational expectations, discrimination, and the inclusion of indigenous knowledges. In particular, it draws attention to the role that racialised habitus plays in the repetitive work of schooling to adjust young Mapuche students’ expectations about normative education. The final part of the chapter focuses on examples of how a minority of students are able to resist these racial projects through critical narratives. The argument follows that indigenous identities are precariously balanced in institutional contexts such as schools, where racial criteria operate to reproduce colonial ideas of inferiority and backwardness but under a new guise of political correctness and tolerance.
