Aspiration Failure: A Poverty Trap for Indigenous Children in Peru?

This paper highlights a particular mechanism underlying the exclusion process of indigenous people in Peru by analyzing the role of aspirations in educational investment. Relying on the Young Lives dataset, we find that indigenous children do not limit their aspirations when compared to non-indigenous children with the same socio-economic background. Findings suggest that they do not have internalized racial schemas about their opportunities. However, aspirations are a channel of inequality persistence between ethnic groups, exacerbating the effect of socioeconomic status on educational achievement. Indeed, socioeconomic status predicts the level of aspiration which in turn impacts progress in language acquisition.