Textbooks, Postcards, and the Public Consolidation of Nationalism in Latin America

Abstract

The existing macro-historical scholarship tends to assert rather than demonstrate the wider impact of nationalism. Yet, state-sponsored national ideologies permeate the broader reaches of society to varying degrees. To investigate variations in the consolidation of official nationalism, this paper combines the content analysis of school textbooks as state-regulated and picture postcards as primarily market-driven sources. Building on this novel methodological approach, we find that textbooks published in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru promoted a similar popular nationalism that portrayed the lower classes as “true” national subjects. However, picture postcards from the same period demonstrate that the consolidation of this official national ideology varied. In Mexico and Peru, the new state-sponsored conceptions of nationhood gained presence in public life, but they did not to take hold in Argentina. We conclude that studying the top-down nationalist messages promoted by states should not be equated with studying their ideological impact in public life.

Varieties of Indoctrination: The Politicization of Education and the Media around the World

“…Thus, as the final dimension of indoctrination potential, we need to include the effort devoted to political education, assuming that emphasizing these topics in the curriculum is a direct attempt by the regime to teach its core political principles and norms. 11 Our concept of indoctrination potential bears similarity to the understanding of nation building as a state-driven process of centralization (Wimmer 2018), standardization (Lipset and Rokkan 1967), and the assertion of power over agents and producers of culture (Kyriazi and vom Hau 2020). But unlike nation building, indoctrination has a stronger political, rather than cultural, focus.…”

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“…A point in case is Greenfeld (2001) who draws on major works in the history of economic thought in England, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Japan to infer variations in national consciousness. Her almost exclusive reliance on the publications of renowned thinkers, however, also points to important limitations and reinforces an ongoing debate around what particular kinds and combinations of social texts are most suitable to study the prevalence of nationalism between and within countries (Brubaker et al, 2006; Kyriazi & vom Hau, 2020).…”

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“…Balcells (2013) finds support for Darden's thesis, showing that Catalan national identity is not as salient in French Catalonia today as it is in Spain, as the first round of mass schooling with national content took place under French rule. The systematic inculcation of identities, whether through mass schooling with national content (Darden & Mylonas 2016), through the reification of categories by enumeration in censuses (Lieberman & Singh 2017), or through state control over the cultural machinery (vom Hau 2019, Kyriazi & vom Hau 2020, causally influences the nature of national identification in a country.…”