Abstract

This article analyzes the discourse of the Spanish school system on immigrant children and also the new culturalist approach that conceals old classist and racist models. By means of extensive ethnographic research on schools in the outskirts of Barcelona, the study provides evidence of the processes of racialization and educational exclusion of a specific migrant group: Dominican youth. In the host society, this population discovers the role of the negro - the racialized subaltern subject - which is represented by the Haitian population in their country of origin. Race is here conceptualized as a social and political construction - an invention - embodied and thus made real by the biographies of racialized subjects. The study considers various theoretical perspectives, privileging approaches that link discourses about race with those about class. The concept of class racism that emerges from this framework allows a reflection on how the subaltern migrant comes to embody the new racialized subject. An analysis is carried out of the stigmatising educational practices - concealed practices in several cases- applied in the host school, as well as the experience of subaltern schooling of the Dominican population, the protagonist of educational and social exclusion processes in Spain.