Stereotypes built through image and gesture

STEREOTYPES BUILT THROUH IMAGE AND GESTURE

Immigration from poor countries has significantly increased in Southern Europe since 1996, just as it had done previously in northern Europe and the United States. Therefore, there is a growing need to evaluate the differences and similarities among students into high schools, their racist attitude and prejudices, as a tool to achieve integration and social cohesion in Spanish society. This paper is focused in a part of a Research Project for the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (reference: EDU2009-09425). It aims to evaluate the recognition of alterity by Spanish and Latin American Student and if national identity is built by a “white identity”. We have developed a questionnaire, carried out into different Spanish high schools and delivered to 2000 pupils, where pupils have to assign a nationality to different people’s pictures, some of them “celebrities” and others not. This part of the questionnaire analyses not only colour attribution, but also stereotypes construction, through gestures and image, among pupils from Spain and Latin American. The methodology used has been a codification of the results, and a statistic analysis and correlations methods with SPSS software. The quantitative data of this part of the research shows significant differences among immigrant students from Latin American and their native peers. Those students from Ecuador have medium (13) and low rates (15) of stereotypes in comparison with Spanish pupils, who have high rates of stereotypes mainly (270). This results highlights that multiculturalism and migration processes make less visible the stereotypes and that the attribution of national identity is not made by ethnic or colour prejudices.