"Production of Social Representations about the Senegalese migrants in the City of Buenos Aires 1995-2012"

KLEIDERMACHER, GISELE

Mexico D.F.

Workshop; Global South Workshop 2013; 2013

Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies y El Colegio de Mexico

In this research we propose to investigate social representations that the native population construes about the Senegalese population, who arrived in the City of Buenos Aires between 1995 and 2012. This migrant population is recent and few in numbers, that is why it has not been sufficiently studied, nor the impact or reception of said migration, generated in the host society. This becomes more important when taking into consideration the image that has been given to Argentina as a Euro-­descendant nation, even though the African presence in the area goes back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a product of the slave trade. We think that social reality is a space of positions based on the distribution of capital (Bourdieu, 2011), it follows that, according to a social position, there are certain looks and social relations. In this sense, we intend to investigate what social position Senegalese migrants occupy in the native imagination, as well as how migrants themselves perceive this game of positions. The choice for this perspective of study is that we conceive the social representations as a guided behavior. In this way, it provides as access to looks about otherness, and from them, understanding the dynamics of social interaction and cultural practices. We also understand that the representations occur socially and historically and that the production capacity of representations is not homogeneous, but a part of power and domination relations as the State has the legitimate monopoly to symbolize this;; In other words, to impose their own vision of the social world and the principles of division of which is supported (Bourdieu, 2001). We believe the discourses are the privileged ways from which we can reach the representations, and therefore, it is from them that we will analyze the contents of them. The ones from the native population will be achieved by the implementation of a survey developed for such purposes. However we also believe that reality is relational, and while power relations are asymmetrical, we require representations of migrants themselves, which will be constructed from interviews, participant observation and three life stories from which we will analyze their migratory paths and their relationship with the local population, contrasting the images produced about them and their own view of reality that welcomes. These talks will be complemented with the analysis of interviews and reports produced by the National Migration Direction (DNM) and the National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (INADI).