How a nation took shape through two classrooms, educating European immigrants in one while assimilating Indigenous peoples in the other, hardwiring race, class, and identity into modern Chile
The German Turn is the history of Chile’s settler ideological project of the 1880s exemplified in education. Romina A. Green Rioja’s big-picture interdisciplinary analysis boasts four historiographies in conversation within the Chilean context. She examines the histories of education, settler colonialism and immigration, Native mission schools, and Mapuche studies at the state and local levels. Chile’s state-building goal was to position the country in the global capitalist economy. Education was seen as a civilizing force for the Mapuche, and the overall goals were to unite the country; teach Chilean students to adhere to class, race, and gender structures; and prepare them for occupations according to these configurations.
Green Rioja finds that Chilean society and state policies demarcated the lines of ethnic, national, and racial preference and exclusion, offering inclusion for those of European ancestry and distance for those of Indigenous descent. Education’s dual role as a tool for inclusion and exclusion ultimately shaped former pupils’ class trajectories and racial belonging. The degrees of belonging depended on community connections, family wealth, and government scholarships that facilitated integration, assimilation, separatism, or the compartmentalization of group identity with the Chilean national identity. The book further considers global-transnational studies on immigration, settler colonialism, and education, showing Chilean policies that appear insular actually align with global patterns and shared policies by other forming nations. This work is a must-read for historians and Latin Americanists to understand Chile’s modernization and its impacts on social structures.