Mass Schooling, Postcards and Resonance of Official Nationalism in Latin America

• In Event: Nation-Building, State-Making, and Mass Schooling

Abstract

This paper accomplishes two aims. Substantively, it maps the extent to which the understandings of nationhood promoted by public schools in mid-20th century Mexico, Argentina, and Peru were resonant beyond the sphere of education and gained relevance in public discourse. In doing so, we introduce an unconventional data source for the historical study of nationalism – picture postcards – and draw on an image database of more than 3,500 postcards to develop a comprehensive approach that can be further refined and applied to similar studies. As such, the paper contributes to solve the “evidence problem” that confronts much of the historical scholarship on mass schooling and its effects on nation building.

It is by now well-established that—at least during much of the 20th century—public education constituted the major nationalizing institution of the state. Yet, the actual nationalizing effects of schooling are often more asserted than demonstrated. Much of the existing scholarship treats the expansion of mass education as indicative of wide-spread national indoctrination (e.g., Gellner 1983; Darden and Mylonas 2016). Such a perspective, however, conflates institutional development with ideological impact. And even those studies that unpack the “blackbox” of schooling and explore the wider resonance of educational contents (e.g., vom Hau 2009; Weber 1976) often remain confined to the realm of education itself and do not systematically explore the spheres of public discourse and everyday life.

Yet, state-sponsored conceptions of nationhood promoted at schools do not necessarily have much in common with everyday understandings of nationhood (Brubaker et al. 2006). This begs the question of how to study the extent to which official national ideologies are resonant in public life, especially in the context of historical research. In response we pursue a visual content analysis of postcards. This cultural artifact is a particularly suitable window at the wider diffusion of official ideological contents, largely because postcard production has been market-driven and tailored towards mass consumption, and is not state-controlled. Moreover, postcards are on constant display, thereby signaling particular understandings of nationhood across the national territory. And given that postcards are a visual medium, their consumption is not conditional on literacy.

To illustrate the empirical usefulness of this approach we draw on a comparative historical analysis of Mexico, Argentina, and Peru. A content analysis of primary school textbooks reveals striking parallels. Over the course of the 20th century the contents of official national ideologies in these Latin American countries underwent a major change. The previously dominant liberal nationalism, characterized by political-territorial yet highly exclusionary understandings of nationhood, became substituted by popular nationalism, set apart by cultural and class-based conceptions of the national community. Postcards then provide insights into the wider resonance of these ideological changes. In Mexico the new popular nationalism became fully consolidated as a hegemonic discourse that informed public life; in Argentina it remained fiercely contested and did not gain hegemony; and Peru ultimately falls in between the two other cases.

Authors

• Anna Kyriazi, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals

• Matthias vom Hau, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals