i) Family decisions from the perspective of the chain of events (1795)

Chain of events
An etnography study, conducted by (Auyero and Berti 2013), entitled “La violencia en los
márgenes” (referir a que no es el mismo libro que “Violence at the Urban Margins” (2015) This
ethnography, jointly conducted by a school teacher and a sociologist, proposes that there is a
need to transcend the representation of isolated events or the simple idea of “settling of scores”
in order to understand the forms of violence within a marginal neighborhood located in “El Gran
Buenos Aires”. In this way, an anger-driven conduct creates and links seemingly disconnected
events in the form of a sequence or chain of events, and thus making the continuous —temporal
— and extended —spatial— dimensions of violence the key element to analyze. This condition
is eloquently embodied when the authors describe the violence suffered by the mother of a drug
addict, threatened by a dealer with a gun on her head due to a debt of his son; afterwards, she is
threatening her son with calling the police to take him to prison, seeing that there is no way to
keep him under control. Finally, she is punished by her new husband because her “junkie” son
has stolen his TV for paying the drugs.

“Is in this cases that becomes imperative the need for a better and more comprehensive image to
provide a detailed account of the forms and uses of violence in the borders of the city. In this
particular case, the notion of chain and spillage seems to be more useful than simple retaliation.
We will explore this argument —that is, the violence that transcends reciprocal retaliation to
become a spillage-like event— through empirical demonstration and focusing on practical rather
than theoretical aspects. Before stating and claiming that different types of violence are
connected to each other, we want this ethnographic material to provide a picture of how these
linkages are generated in a real space-time context.” (Auyero and Berti 2013: 25-26).

Cadena de eventos desde la violencia a la educación

Unlike the different forms of physical urban violence, school selection represents the hopes and
illusions of parents who seek a brighter future for their children. However, those hopes do not
mean that school selection is a non-violent process. The chains of events that make sense of the
parent’s school selection are not restricted to time-isolated episodes, such as the acceptance into

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a particular schools as an isolated, delimited event. On the contrary, my intention in this paper is
to describe this decision as a social process, in which the reasons underlying the school decision,
as well as the maintenance and the successfully conclusion of it, can be “build” through
biographical evidence and the discourses elaborated by people around their lives and
experiences.

XXXX
In order to be effective in the long-term, early school decisions should be reinforced by a series
of everyday practices. This self-explanatory statement is not spontaneous. For example, the
concentration of all the children of a young marriage in what they considered as a “better
school”, after the successful enrollment of one of them, it is a very spontaneous practice for the
stabilization of school selection along time. Other strengthening mechanisms are the construction
of school responsibility and study habits since an early age, when parents pursue academic
success as a form of socio-cultural inclusion. A third set of practices, that can not be related to
isolated events but to a chain of events, is turning the school and its events into the lynchpin of
the social and urban experiences for the family. These last sets of practices, I speculate, are
related to forms of social belonging which are less mediated by the academic performance and
more concentrated in belongingness as a form of participation in a social space by the acquisition
of manners, taste, and -for the chilean case- even a sort of language and phonetic.

XXXX
In all of the three examples above, the school selection, understood as a chain of events, becomes
a consistent way of life in order to gain effectiveness in the long run. Therefore, the school path
that I am describing through this autoethnography is related, on the one hand, to the search for
inclusion in “traditional schools” containing important levels of socio-economic mixing and, on
the other hand, to a “desired seclusion” practice as far as neighborhood contacts are rejected. In
this context, the constant reinforcement of academic success transcends the educational sphere
and becomes an effective form of access and belonging to a specific socio-cultural universe. In
other words, the school becomes the center of the urban, social, economic and cultural life and,
through this process, allowing individuals to gain access to socio-cultural spaces different to
those of the neighborhood and the once directly related to the family's socio-economic level.

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XXXXX
The above paragraph sheds light on the question about how can a school selection biography
help to clarify urban phenomena. In saying this, I want to highlight two perspectives that provide
clues about this relationship: i) School paths are effective form of socialization with
territorializing capacities when deployed in everyday practices; and ii) territorialization acquires
the ability to transform urban forms once it transcends the individual sphere and becomes part of
the collective dimension. (por qué desde acá se entiende o justifica el paso a la sección ii)

ii) Educational studies from a territorial and an individual perspective

Cadena de eventos y territorialización

The parent’s choice of enrolling their children in a given school is part of a chain of events that
affects the history of a family, no matter whether this is a conscious decision or a sort of
“determination” just motivated by the lack of options. Furthermore, school selection, as the
connection of differents family decisions through time, has an unavoidable spatial dimension.
For example, commute to the school place from home everyday, participate in all sort of
extracurricular activities offered by the school, and become closer friend with classmates is a set
of actions deployed in long periods of time and not conceivable without a face-to-face
interactions. Indeed, social proximity between schoolmates, as a central part of family school
decision, only emerges through the repeated interaction in common places.

El vacío de territorialización perspectiva individual en los estudios educacionales en Chile.

However, chilean researchers involved in the study of school segregation (XXXX, XXXX) lack
for a systematic understanding of the individual and territorial dimension involved in school
selection. They only consider the existence of different social groups cohabiting inside the
classroom but they do not delve into the existence of a real social interaction between students
and, evenmore, they do not relate school social interaction with proximity in terms of dwelling.
In contrast, the perspective that is gaining ground in the educational debate is that related to a
structural approach to the effects of the market-oriented logic on the quality and equity of

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education (Bellei 2014, XXXX, XXXX). However, the active dimension of parents school
selection, not only as sort of explicit service’s consumption, but as an extended social practice
for integration as well as exclusion, is not properly addressed in Chilean educational studies.

Antes el estudio de… ahora el cambio en la institución escolar debe ser visto desde las personas
que actúan
In anycase, this change in the school institution can not be seen only as a transformation
resulting from the sole implementation of a market-oriented logic within the education system,
nor is the consequence of the neoliberal policies enforced by the military dictatorship governing
Chile during the 70s and 80s. People from problematic urban areas are aware that their schools
are spaces of relegation (XXXX) in the same way that the people from the socio-economic elite
know which schools secure the reproduction of class privilege (XXXX). The family decision of a
particular school relay at the very bottom of socio-urban exclusion when the former becomes
extended social practices. That means to understand family decision as a chain of events which
create life patterns, that are at the same time social and territorial. This life patterns are related
but also reinforcing socio-urban institutions that are strong in terms of peer integration and very
weak in the integration of social difference.

Territorialización definición
To analyze the territorial dimension of parents school selection becomes useful the concept of
“everyday regionalization” as proposed by Benno Werlen (1993, 2004a, 2004b) in action
oriented human geography. The concept refers to how human practices and thoughts give
meaning to places and by this process create them as social entities which human can relate to
for further practices. This is exactly the same meaning that I give to the notion of
“territorialization” as the capacity of human beings, with their action as well as with their
institutions, to create, meaningfully but sometimes also materially, the places with which social
action is constantly linked and embedded.

Dos dimensiones de la territorializacion

In this sense, the territorialization process enacted by school decision shows two dimension: i) in
the individual level and the everyday life; and ii) in the collective life or institutional level in the

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middle term. These two levels are connected through the biographical chains of events in which
specific social processes and urban transformations are strengthening following the line of a
selective inclusion-exclusion.

Dimension Individual
As an example of territorialization enacted by people I highlight the reinforcing of the school as
social and territorial center of life above the socio-economic boundaries of the neighborhood.
This is specially relevant, since not all families have resources to move house and relocate in
what they consider their “right place in the city”. Those parents with ascending social aspirations
for their children, but living in any kind of deprived neighborhood, send them to semi-private
schools located outside their neighborhood. Other parents, report an important economic effort to
keep the match between the socio-economic level of the school and the one of the neighborhood.
This means living in proximity to the school selected for their children.

Dimensión institucional
Territorialization enacted at the level of the institution can be illustrated by the general
interconnection between schools and students place of residence. Unlike the cases of France,
Germany or Canada, Chile has no “catchment areas” [1] to link schools, students residence, and
neighborhoods. The lack of this regulation does not mean an absence in the territorial
interconnection of this entities. On the contrary, private elite schools locate their school or
relocate new schools in close proximity to their “target customer” and it is possible to see not
just a few examples, of traditional school selling their facilities in the wealthy downtown and
moving their institution two new and very homogeneous upper class neighborhood.

Cierre: integración-exclusion selectiva

Focusing on the individual territorialization, every life path in terms of school selection reveals a
selective exclusion-inclusion processes. In this context every form of belonging to a given order
—even to social mixing— implies a certain level of rejection over other potential forms/places of
integration. This does not mean that integration, or even the increase in integration levels at
schools, is an impossible task for public policies. On the contrary, this confirms that integration

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models are very selective in nature and they require a deep attention. (decir algo del paso a la
parte metodológica)