We are pleased to announce that Antonia Mardones Marshall, Principal Investigator at the MIGRA Millennium Nucleus and Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Tarapacá, has been selected for the Luksic Visiting Scholars and Fellows Program at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) for the 2026–2027 academic year.
This program supports outstanding scholarship on Latin America and fosters academic exchange and collaboration between researchers from the region and the Stanford academic community.
During her residency, Mardones will advance her book project, Unsettling Whiteness: The Struggle for Afro-Descendant Recognition in Argentina and Chile, based on her doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley. The project offers a comparative analysis of how Argentina and Chile have constructed and institutionalized racial and legal categories to recognize Afro-descendant populations, in contexts historically shaped by the denial of their presence.
Drawing on extensive empirical research—including participant observation, archival analysis, and more than one hundred interviews—the study examines how interactions between international organizations, state actors, and Afro-descendant movements shape processes of legal recognition. It shows how these processes define who is recognized and under what conditions, while also reproducing and transforming racial hierarchies in the region.
The project develops a comparative framework to explain why states adopt different approaches to the institutionalization of ethnoracial categories. While Argentina has linked Afro-descendant recognition to a broader human rights agenda, Chile has followed a model more closely aligned with Indigenous recognition, emphasizing territorial belonging and cultural heritage.
During her time at Stanford, Mardones will work on completing the manuscript and developing a new chapter exploring how Indigenous legal recognition has influenced Afro-descendant claims-making. She will also engage with interdisciplinary academic spaces such as the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Migration, Ethnicity, Race, and Nation (MERN) workshop, contributing to international scholarly dialogue on race, migration, and the state.
This achievement represents an important recognition of her academic trajectory and strengthens the international projection of the MIGRA Millennium Nucleus. It will also contribute to building new research collaborations and fostering knowledge exchange between Chile and the United States, particularly benefiting academic development in northern Chile.
We warmly congratulate Antonia Mardones on this achievement and on her contribution to advancing high-impact research on Latin America.
Our work is important, so we appreciate it if you cite the use of the code and figures available in this repository.
MIGRA, N. (2024). MIGRA Repository (Version 2.0.4) [Computer software].
@software{MIGRA_Repositorio_MIGRA_2024,
author = {MIGRA, NÚCLEO},
month = may,
title = {MIGRA Repository},
version = {2.0.4},
year = {2024}
}