The returned “others”. Invisibility and exclusion in the Mexican education system: ethnographic data from Oaxaca

Abstract

The current diaspora returning from the United States to Mexico is made up of a significant number of Mexican children of school age. However, although having new and different educational needs, this childhood is subjected to strong processes of disregard and exclusion in the Mexican educational system. The objective of this work is to analyze how these processes are concatenated in the schools of the State of Oaxaca and what repercussions they have on these children. For this, a qualitative methodology of anthropological field work carried out between the years 2018 and 2019 used different ethnographic techniques to obtain data: participant and non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews and informal conversations. The main findings point to the existence of invisibility processes of returned children in the macro, meso and micro structures of the educational system that, correspondingly, cause their exclusion in the same structures.