The construction of a positioning and ethnographic complex in the african diaspora: the case of angolan students from Lins-SP

Abstract

From 2004 to 2015, the city of Lins -SP received, proportionally, the largest flow of African students from São Paulo countryside. About 140 students from the Portuguese-speaking Countries (Palop) resided and studied there: Angola, Cape Verde, Sao Tome & Principe, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. However, there are preponderant young people from Angola, around 120, being the only ones that speak out as Angolan community. In stating this discourse, angolan’sstudents agency and negotiate a set of representations, affirm differences and promote identification processes. Thus, there is the emergence of a position of ethnic character led by students expression of the ascribed attribution of blackness, historically and daily to people of African origin in their collective experience. Students in their collective experience in Brazil go through a process of racialization and, in reaction to this denial, produce, through a process of ethnicization, an ethical and political position that, in turn, intersects both cleavages, race and ethnicity. That is, just as important as the intersection and articulation of both cleavages is to explore the process, the “how” students perform this agency and negotiation.