Between Parades and Wiphalas: School and the Construction of Citizenship in Bolivia

This article presents a reflection on the role of the school in constructing citizenship and the mechanisms employed to this end. Based on ethnographic research in two schools, and in the framework of the Educational Revolution, I underline paradoxes and contradictions that indicate both processes of discrimination and processes of reification in students who self-identify as "Aymara". Parades and Wiphalas (the Indigenous Peoples' flag and new national emblem since 2009) have become symbols of the schools and form the backbone of the behaviors and values that the school institution seeks to transmit to its students. Family expectations, often left aside, are woven into the reasoning in order to highlight the complex relationship between what is familiar and what is foreign, as well as challenges to interculturality, understood as a tool for emancipation.