Abstract

SABAROTS, Horacio. La construcción de estereotipos en base a inmigrantes "legales" e "ilegales" en Argentina. Intersecciones antropol. [online]. 2002, n.3, pp.97-109. ISSN 1850-373X.

This paper is a comparative study of anthropological research on Japanese immigrants to Argentina and their descendents, and immigrants from other Latin American countries (fundamentally Bolivians). Research took place during the 1980s and 1990s, respectively, which enables the impact of neoliberal structural changes on the social imaginary around immigrants to be explored. The central point is to show the differential construction of stereotypes according to the origin of the immigrants, which undoubtedly include a racist component. Such differential imaginary construction - namely, 'legal', desirable immigrants versus 'illegal', undesirable immigrants - is consistent with racist ideology and, more generally, with prejudices that rely on a hierarchical view of humanity (biological and cultural). An interpretation is proposed that, without losing the specificity of the process of stigmatization, analyses racism and prejudices in general as dynamic constructions that are related both to historical trends (in this case, the crisis of the 1980s and 1990s neoliberalism) and to the origin myth of the Argentinean nation. The myth that this country is a 'melting pot of races', open to immigration, is a covering discourse for an ideology of progress that includes and excludes particular groups.

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