“It’s like there is a veil placed over racial issues”: AfroBrazilians’ educational experiences negotiating transnational racialization and the pedagogy of mestizaje of the Americas

Abstract

ABSTRACT “As the experiences of AfroLatinx groups continue to gain momentum in academic conversations, AfroBrazilians’ identity and racialized experiences remain undertheorized. Anchored by the conceptual framework of AfroLatinidades and methodologically situated in the realm of qualitative research, this study draws from oral history interviews to document AfroBrazilians’ educational experiences across transnational contexts. In contextualizing AfroBrazilians’ experiences transnationally, this study is attentive to the complex ways AfroBrazilians mobilized racial understandings to negotiate their multiple subjectivities in Brazil and in the U.S. Research findings revealed that educational discourses, curriculum, pedagogy, and policies play a key role in shaping how AfroBrazilians are forced to negotiate the politics of race within and outside educational spaces. I argue that AfroBrazilians’ lived experiences illuminate how racialized ideologies, such as mestizaje, colorism, and racial democracy, manifest in educational contexts and shape pedagogical discourses across the Americas. Such racial discourses inform AfroBrazilians’ deracialized learning experiences, which I call ‘Pedagogy of Mestizaje’.