‘Switzerland of the Americas’: Racism and higher education in Uruguay

Abstract

This work aims to provide an overview of the responses to racism in higher education institutions in Uruguay, where a manifest ethnic-racial mind frame is quite recent, both in society in general and in educational institutions in particular. Uruguay was molded and imagines itself closer to Europe than to Latin America in its ethnic composition, customs and culture. This is due, in part, to a strong presence of migratory flows from Spain and Italy at the stage of national formation, as well as deliberate actions of invisibilization toward indigenous and African ethnic groups and social types such as gauchos. The identity accounts have been left with this false and discriminating imprint, which is characteristic of a history written from a single perspective. This article begins with a contextualization aimed at understanding the impact of the colonial invasion on the indigenous people who inhabited the geographical area that today corresponds to the Uruguayan territory, to then describe the invisibilization of everything indigenous and African in the process of building the Uruguayan identity. It then addresses the re-emergence of the ethnic issue at the beginning of the 1980s and current transformations, with emphasis on higher education. Measures aimed at responding to racism affecting indigenous and Afro-descendant individuals and communities were recorded for this work from documentary searches and consultation with the main national institutions of higher education, and social and ethnic organizations.