Antonia Mardones Marshall

My research is anchored in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology while drawing from and contributing to interdisciplinary scholarship.

I have conducted individual and collaborative research on international migration, race and ethnicity, national identities, popular culture, education, and public policies.

While I have experience in a variety of methods, my expertise lies in qualitative methods, including archival, ethnographic, and interview-based research.

During the last 15 years, I have developed five distinct lines of research:

1) Public policies and ethno-racial reform

My dissertation research, titled "Who is Afrodescendant: Classification Struggles and Legal Recognition in Argentina and Chile," examines the processes by which the Argentine and Chilean states have legally constructed different definitions of Afrodescendant populations. Through a multi-sited ethnography that included participant observation, archival research, and 105 in-depth interviews with Afrodescendant activists, state officials, academics, and NGO officials, my research reveals how different definitions of Afro-descent shape the type, impact, and intended beneficiaries of public policies. Overall, my dissertation furthers knowledge on how struggles around state actions and the law can include or exclude different groups based on who is considered a deserving subject of public policy and political rights. I have adapted one dissertation chapter as an article manuscript, published in the International Migration Review, one chapter is forthcoming in Revista Chungará, and another chapter was recently accepted with revisions in Ethnic and Racial Studies. I will plan to revise and expand my dissertation research to prepare a book manuscript.

I worked on a project with sociologist Mara Loveman, analyzing the distinct understandings of Blackness institutionalized in census questions in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. Using a combination of comparative and historical analysis alongside interviews with key actors, we ask why these three countries ended up with such different ways of framing a census question about people of African descent. Our research reveals that these differences are the product of relationships among activist organizations within each country and between activist organizations and the state. In this way, we illuminate how the project to count Black people in national statistics is simultaneously a project and politics of constituting Blackness. We are currently finalizing an article manuscript based on research from the project for submission to the American Journal of Sociology (AJS). The article builds from and extends upon original research conducted for my dissertation, and we are equal co-authors.

In 2024, I conducted research for a one-year postdoctoral position at MIGRA Mllenium Nucleus. My research analyzes how the increase and diversification of the immigrant population during the last decade has impacted how the Chilean state incorporates intercultural and anti-racist perspectives in the design and development of education and health policies. Based on archival research and 30 in-depth interviews with diverse central state officials and civil society actors from immigrant organizations and academia in Santiago, who have all participated in debates related to education and health policy reform, I compare how intercultural policies designed within the Education and the Health Ministries — which used to exclusively consider Indigenous populations — have (or have not) adequately responded to immigrants' arrival and diversification. By focusing on the role of different actors involved in policy reform, my research ultimately reveals how debates around the meaning of "interculturality" have shaped how immigrants are included/excluded in policy design. I am currently preparing an article manuscript based on this research.

Afro-Chileans protesting in Santiago, Chile, March 2017.

Photo posted in el desconcierto.cl.

2) Afrodescendant ethnogenesis in Chile

My article “Who is Afro-Chilean? Authenticity Struggles and Boundary Making in Chile’s Northern Borderland,” published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, examines the meanings assigned to Blackness by native-born individuals in Arica, northern Chile, who had recently begun to identify as Afrodescendants. Through ethnographic observation and 52 in-depth interviews, I found that Afro-Chileans elaborate context-dependent boundaries to define membership in their community. This boundary work allows them to distance themselves from Aymara Indigenous people, recently arrived Afro-Latin American immigrants, and “regular” Chileans, in an effort to present themselves as both Chilean and Afrodescendant. Each boundary helps them emphasize different aspects of their local, ethnic, and national identity, promoting distinct and sometimes conflicting ways of defining what being Afro-Chilean entails. This article won the 2023 Aristide Zolberg Distinguished Student Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association International Migration Section.

I have also worked on two collaborative research projects directly related to Afro-Chileans' process of ethnogenesis. The first project analyzes the scope and limitations of the recognition obtained by Afro-Chileans in the constitutional proposal written by an elected constituent assembly between 2021 and 2022, which occurred as a direct result of the Chilean social revolt of October 2019. Through a critical discourse analysis of assembly members' speeches, our research team identified the discursive axes that framed the rejection of initiatives regarding Afrodescendants’ rights. This research reveals how, in contexts in which a social crisis opens opportunities for deep reform, long-standing imaginaries of who is part of the nation can affect the possibilities of inclusion of marginalized groups. I am the first author of an article based on this research, titled "El Pueblo Tribal Afrodescendiente Chileno en el proceso constituyente, 2019–2022: De la exclusión al reconocimiento limitado" [The Afro-descendant Chilean Tribal People in the Constituent Process, 2019-2022: From Exclusion to Limited Recognition], published in Latin American Research Review (LARR).

The second collaborative project is with two of the Afro-Chilean activists I interviewed for my dissertation. This project was conceived as part of their agreement to participate in my research as interviewees, with the aim of providing an opportunity for co-constructing knowledge with a historically marginalized community. Based on archival research and interviews, the research team is tracing the events that led to the creation of an Afrodescendant Development Office at the Arica Municipality as a means of institutionalizing Afro-Chilean organizations’ demands. The research team has analyzed how Afro-Chilean leaders took advantage of a political opportunity structure that resulted from the alignment of an international context of increasing transnational Afrodescendant activism with changes in local political governance. We will submit an article based on these results, provisionally titled "“Entre lo local y lo global: El rol del movimiento Afrochileno en la creación de una Oficina Afrodescendiente en la Municipalidad de Arica, Chile,” to Atenea, a highly-ranked interdisciplinary Chilean journal.

Afro-Chilean troup performing at Carnival in Arica, January 2018.

Photo by Antonia Mardones Marshall

3) Immigration and racialization

I have a longstanding interest in the role of immigration in how ethnoracial categories are constructed, negotiated, institutionalized, and reified. I first engaged in this line of inquiry doing research for my Anthropology undergraduate thesis, focused on how the new uses that immigrants made of public spaces in Santiago affected how Chileans perceived these immigrants. I identified in this research a number of stereotypes assigned to immigrants directly related to ideas around ethnic and racial differences.

In 2010, with support from a fellowship granted by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), I conducted quantitative data analysis and ethnographic research to identify obstacles to the integration of Colombian women into the Chilean labor market. In this research, I identified Colombian women’s perceived racial differences as a crucial determinant of their success and integration into Chilean society. I found that Afro-Colombian women were particularly discriminated against in the labor market, resulting in their segregation into precarious and gendered jobs and preventing their upward mobility.

In my Anthropology Master’s thesis at Columbia University, I continued to conduct research on Colombian immigrant women living in Chile. I leveraged participant observation and in-depth interviews to focus on how these women respond to processes of racialization and sexualization. The research revealed that Afro-Colombian women do not conform to the racial stereotypes assigned to them in Chile. Instead, they negotiate the racial labels imposed on them, constructing symbolic boundaries that allow them to develop empowering narratives about themselves and their place within Chilean society. I published an article based on these results titled "Migrantes colombianas y la negociación de identidades raciales en Chile" [Colombian immigrants and the negotiation of racial identities in Chile] in the Chilean electronic journal Kuriche.

In 2020, I conducted research in Arica, funded by the UC Berkeley Institute of International Studies, to examine how the arrival of immigrants perceived as Black shapes racial schemas and identities in Chile.

Through ethnographic methods, the research explored how local racialization processes influence immigrants’ racial identities and how Afrodescendant immigrants and Chileans negotiate the boundaries of blackness.

One of my dissertation chapters focused on the role of immigration in explaining how Afro-descent is legally constructed and institutionalized in Argentina and in Chile. Through ethnographic and archival research, I show how immigrants' participation in Afrodescendant movements and native-born activists' perceptions of immigrants frame claims and strategies for legal inclusion. Immigrants' early participation within the Afro-Argentine movement promoted heterogenous political framings but feelings of threat and competition drove Afro-Argentine activists to emphasize nativist claims. This has produced a diversity of legislation and policies that target different populations including immigrants. In Chile, immigrants have not participated in the Afrodescendant movement buy they have been present in the imaginaries of activists and state officials debating legislative and policy measures. Afro-Chileans' political success requires not being seen as foreigners by state officials, driving them to emphasize their national belonging. Thus, Black subjecthood has been institutionalized targeting Afro-Chileans who share a common history and culture while excluding immigrants. I have adapted this chapter as an article, published in International Migration Review (IMR), titled "Immigration and the Boundaries of Black political subjecthood in Argentina and Chile," which was awarded the 2025 James E. Blackwell Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association Racial and Ethnic Minorities section.

Haitian woman in Santiago, Chile, January 2019.

Photo by Pablo Mardones

4) Immigration and education

I began researching immigrant children's integration in the Chilean public school system in 2008, when I worked as a research assistant on a documentary film featuring a school in Santiago with a high number of immigrant students. In that research I found that this school played an important role in supporting immigrant children's legal regularization in the country. My research also revealed that teachers and administrators had to create strategies to deal with the cultural diversity produced by the arrival of immigrants, making up for the lack of institutional guidelines from the Education Ministry. Those strategies included giving visibility to the histories and cultures of other countries of the region in school activities and in the classroom.

During 2020, I conducted research with two colleagues with immigrant children in public schools in Arica, Chile, which drove us to produce our documentary film, "Una Escuela Llamada América" [A school called America], focused on immigrant children's educational and social integration processes. We conducted participant observation at school classes and events, and interviewed teachers, administrators, immigrant children, and their families. The research revealed that although the teachers and administrators made efforts to help immigrant children integrate, they lacked the institutional guidelines and resources to do so, and many times replicated homogenizing discourses and practices that affected immigrant children's adaptation processes. The research also showed how immigrant children perceived that their cultural and racial differences were a factor of exclusion, which they needed to overcome by performing better than their classmates. An article reflecting on this filmmaking experience, titled “Una Escuela Llamada America: Documentary film and photography as ethnographic tools for reflexive social research,” was published in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology.

I am currently collaborating with other MIGRA Millenium Nucleus researchers on a study about Venezuelan immigrant children in Arica who have lived and attended school in other South American countries before arriving in Chile. As a consequence of their educational trajectories, many of these children present learning gaps and school lag. Using a sample of six public elementary schools in the city of Arica, the research team conducted in-depth interviews to identify the strategies and practices that teachers and administrative staff use to deal with these children's learning gaps. We have submitted an article based on this research to Educational Studies and are currently working on two additional article manuscripts.

Children in class in Arica, September 2019. Photo from documentary "Una Escuela Llamada America".

5) A sociohistorical reconstruction of Cumbia music

Since 2011, I have been working with an interdisciplinary team of researchers — the Colectiva Tiesos pero Cumbiancheros — on a socio-historical and political-cultural reconstruction of the process by which cumbia music arrived in Chile and was adapted and appropriated. Cumbia music has been commonly considered in Latin America as an expression of mestizaje, born from the fusion of Indigenous, African, and Spanish musical expressions. Focusing on the aesthetic and social particularities that cumbia acquired in Chile, the research team has analyzed how cumbia suffered a whitening process, first to accommodate to the musical tastes of Colombian elites and later to be exported throughout Latin America. The Colectiva Tiesos pero Cumbiacheros has published numerous academic and non-academic articles, has presented their results in both conferences and non-academic venues, and disseminates their results periodically on their webpage, www.tiesosperocumbiancheros.cl.

In 2016, we published a book titled Hagan un Trencito: siguiendo los pasos de la memoria cumbianchera 1949-1989 [Make a train*: following the steps of cumbia memory 1949-1989]. The work was based on 5 years of ethnography and over 40 in-depth interviews with older musicians who were protagonists in the adaptation of cumbia music between the 1950s and 1980s. In 2017, the book was nominated by the Chilean Music Copyright Society for the Pulsar Best Music Book Award. That same year, the book was selected by the Chilean National Culture and Arts Council, to be printed and delivered to all public libraries in the country.

* The expression "Hagan un trencito" refers in Chile to a group dance choreography typically performed in cumbia parties, where dancers hold each other's waist and move forward emulating a train, as shown on the book cover.

In 2019, the Colectiva Tiesos pero Cumbiancheros published a chapter about Chile in the book El libro de la cumbia. Resonancias, transferencias y transplantes de las cumbias latinoamericanas [The book of cumbia. Resonances, transfers, and transplants of Latin American Cumbias], a compilation by Juan Diego Parra Valencia published in Colombia, which covers the development of cumbia music throughout the Latin American region.

"Hagan un trencito" displayed at a bookstore, June 2018.

Photo by Coordinación Biblioteca Los Ríos.

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