To contribute, thank and adapt. Historical discourses and teacher’s social representations about migratory diversity

Abstract

This article examines the way in which the notion of instrumentality of migration is presented in the discourses of the political elite of Argentina at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, pointing out some similarities with those that currently circulate among the members of the school system. Through a qualitative strategy based on the principles of Grounded Theory, a corpus made up of works by authors like Ramos Mejía, Ingenieros and Rojas is analyzed, as well as a series of focus groupsandin-depth interviews with teachers and directors of primary and secondary schools of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. The hypothesis that guides the investigation refers to the fact that it is possible to observe how certain imaginaries present in those discourses can be traced in the social representations of teachers and directors, conceived as socializing agents of one of the institutions through which the State administers ethno-national diversity. With the intention of avoiding a mechanical and deterministic analysis, the purpose is to consider that these discourses, as historical and ideological traces, have an impact on the construction of social representations about otherness and on the formation of intercultural links marked in many cases by the discrimination and prejudice.