‘We’re a bit browner but we still belong to the white race’: making whiteness in the context of South-South migration in Chile

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the context of rising South-South migration to Chile, this article examines how Chileans redefine and claim whiteness in a multicultural working-class neighborhood in Santiago. It contributes to regional racial studies by analyzing how whiteness is constructed in multicultural neighborhoods where different national and racialized identities that share a colonial past converge, and where the nation-state has historically pursued a progressive whitening through the adoption of racist state policies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how Chileans construct a white racial identity vis-à-vis the presence of, and through ordinary interactions with, Latin American and Caribbean migrants. As is the case elsewhere, in contemporary Chile whiteness is an ongoing everyday social construct that is not only conveyed as a discourse, but also through the practice or performance of power in the social textures of urban life. Making and enacting whiteness becomes a way in which racial hierarchies of belonging are materialized to achieve a higher status in an unequal racialized society. This study reveals how Chileans claim to be ‘white(r)’ than the South-South migrants they interact with, reproducing a Chilean hegemonic discourse about national identity, through the many practices of everyday life. The article’s main argument is that making whiteness through these ordinary occurrences reproduces anti-indigenous and anti-black racism.