Latin American and Caribbean migrant families in northern Chile: normative narratives, colonial distinctions and racialized parenting cultures

Drawing on qualitative data from an ethnographic study conducted in Iquique, Chile, in 2019, this article explores the discourses of Chilean teachers from a diverse school in northern Chile about the parenting cultures of migrant families. This paper specifically focuses on teachers’ narratives about parenting and migrant families within an educational and territorial context where various forms of national and local identification intersect. These overlapping identities are closely tied to Iquique, as a territory located in a Chilean region bordering Bolivia and formerly part of Peru prior to the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). The objective of this paper is twofold. First, I analyse how the teachers’ local identity shapes the ways in which they receive and understand Latin American and Caribbean families arriving in Iquique. Second, I describe how teachers build normative ideals about parenting cultures. The teachers participating in my study value migrants and their families in a hierarchical way and by producing distinctions. On one hand, some teachers invoke a local identity of Iquique to highlight similarities with migrant families from neighbouring countries. On the other hand, some teachers raise a normative family ideal to which migrant families are excluded due to their parenting cultures and caring practices, in which children can have an active role as caregivers.