Racialized surveillance of Roma in Chilean commercial spaces: Everyday racism and the politics of visibility

This article examines how Roma (Gitano) individuals in Chile experience and respond to racialized surveillance in commercial spaces. Based on original ethnographic research, it argues that seemingly isolated incidents of profiling or exclusion reflect systemic anti-Roma racism embedded in Chile’s urban racial order. Through repeated practices of hyper-surveillance, public shaming, and spatial monitoring, Roma are cast as permanent suspects, reinforcing symbolic racial boundaries despite the absence of formal ghettoization. Yet these encounters are not met with passivity. Participants resist through affect, legality, and performative dignity—turning pockets inside out, demanding accountability, invoking consumer rights, or reaffirming cultural identity under pressure to assimilate. These everyday acts contest racialized logics of visibility and reassert Gitano presence in the city. By positioning commercial spaces as key sites of racial governance and resistance, the article calls for institutional reform and contributes to broader debates on race, surveillance, and contested urban space in Latin America.