Proud Taínos / Unfortunate Blacks: Divergent Constructions of Ethno-Racial Resistance in School Textbooks in Puerto Rico

Speaker: Dr Isar Godreau, University of Puerto Rico at Cayey

In Puerto Rico as in Latin America, indigeneity occupies a privileged space in discourses about national belonging while blackness takes a marginal space of folklorized inclusion. This paper explores how this discourse is reproduced in school textbooks. Based on an analysis of elementary textbooks used for social studies in present-day Puerto Rico, it explores how the histories of racialization and ethnoracial formation of Indigenous peoples, on the one hand, and of Afrodescendants, on the other, guide their very distinct representation in content and illustrations. While African ancestors are represented as anonymous, victimized, and marginally belonging to the nation, the indigenous Taínos are depicted as honorable ancestors who resisted and defended the territory. I complement this analysis with the opinions expressed by a group of 23 fourth-grade students about how they visualize resistance to the Spanish colonial regime in each case.

Biography:

Isar Godreau is a researcher at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, where she directs several interdisciplinary research programs and grants. She is the author of Arrancando mitos de raíz: guía para la enseñanza antirracista de la herencia africana en Puerto Rico (2013) and Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism and US Colonialism in Puerto Rico (2015 Frank Bonilla best book award). Dr. Isar Godreau completed her BA at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras and later obtained her Ph. D in cultural anthropology from the University of California Santa Cruz (1999).