Social vectors and body-biographical itineraries: Indigenous students’ health in the diaspora space in Brazilian universities

The presence of Indigenous students in the university is a very recent event in the Brazilian academic culture. Their presence produces intercultural borders in the diaspora space in universities. This article analyzed the health production of Indigenous students in the universities’ diaspora space, considering dynamics in which social vectors and body-biographical itineraries intersect. The qualitative project adopted the co-labor principles and the technique of semi-structured interviews. A total of 13 interviews were carried out, recorded in audio and video, with Indigenous students, conducted by Indigenous researchers participating in the project. The transcription and analysis of information took place co-laboratively. The experience of Indigenous students in the university diaspora is a complex process that involves immersion in new physical, cultural, political and social climates. These experiences involve multiple dimensions that affect health, requiring the reinstitution of its margins, in the production of new forms of resistance, both physiological and emotional, affective, social, and political. Racism, with different degrees of intensity and in different forms, permeates these experiences, which vary, in each case, due to: (1) the social, cultural, and political climate of the place of origin; (2) the intersection of social markers of difference, such as gender, age and phenotypic characteristics; and (3) the differences between academic environments. To the same extent that racism is perceived and evaluated by Indigenous students as one of the main pathogenic factors in the university’s diaspora space, the construction of “Indigenous identity” is perceived as a general resource of resistance and health production. We conclude that the reinstitution of the conditions and possibilities for the production of healthy subjectivities and collectivities at the university depends on the pluri-ethnic and pluri-epistemic refounding of the academic space, which must be carried out with and not for Indigenous students.