“How do you think you would feel if you had to go to live in another country?”

Invisibilization of migrant students in the official manuals of Argentina

Abstract

In this article we analyze material produced by the Ministry of Education of the Argentine Nation and recommended by the Education, Migrations and Human Mobility program to work on the topic of migrations in primary schools. We investigate how people who migrate are discursively constructed—who they are, what characteristics they have, what types of activities they perform, and how their subjectivity is presented—and from what point of view they are represented. This allows us to understand which knowledge is recovered and which is not, what facets or characteristics of people who migrate are incorporated. The results of the analysis show that, despite of not reproducing stigmatizing or xenophobic representations, the material reaffirms some stereotypes and supports an unidimensional vision of migrants. Furthermore, it presents the information from a nationalist point of view, which exalts identification with Argentina, presupposes that all teachers and students were born in that country and, therefore, does not address migrant students. In this way, foreigners are placed as the other, who is spoken of, but who does not constitute a legitimate interlocutor. We inscribe our work in Critical Discourse Analysis and develop a qualitative methodology.