A comparative approach of dealing with diversity: the managing of immigration and education in Spain and immigration and health in USA

This article looks at the management of cultural diversity and the construction of difference in two different contexts, Spain and the United States, and two areas of management and policy intervention, education and health. By researching these two cases with the same unit of analysis, we will show the existence of certain dynamics that create and reproduce differences and cultural-ethnic boundaries, and how these logics generate inequality between groups that are continuously essentialized. The analysis, as multisituated, and the result of ethnographic research in both contexts, takes into account that the public policies analyzed understand themselves as processes of recognition of ‘cultural diversity’ in terms of ‘interculturality’.