Race and Racism in Mexican History Textbooks: A Silent Presence

Abstract

In Mexico, the defence of the mestizo national identity and the consequent assimilation of the Indigenous people and customs was the base of the education system for most part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After the emergence of the Zapatista movement in 1994 and the contemplation of international recommendations in the configuration of the curriculum, the ideas of multiculturalism and interculturality and the defence of a pluricultural identity have been, to some extent, included in the textbooks. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the representation of certain populations — identified as ethnic and racial groups in the Mexican History textbooks for secondary education — in order to understand the current transformation in conceptions of Mexican national identity. In order to do that, four of the books endorsed by the Secretary of Public Education from 1993 to 2010 were selected by a non-probabilistic random sample. In particular, the sections where those groups are represented (from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century) were analyzed using critical discourse analysis. The main argument of this chapter, drawing on the analysis of the textbooks in the 1993 and 2006 programmes, is that these groups are a silent presence: while some sections about their History have been added, they are not part of the main narrative.