Latin American Dick and Jane: Race and National Identity in Puerto Rican Textbooks

• In Event: Piruetas Transnacionales: Preserving Identity through Eating, Drinking, Learning and Music Making

Abstract

During the 1920s through late 1960s, American educational publishers in conjunction with Puerto Rican educators, created a series of Spanish-language textbooks which attempted to preserve Puerto Rican cultural norms while also introducing young people to U.S. culture and history. Math, science, literature, and health books projected idyllic island children and families, often depicted as white, who blended traditional Puerto Rican and American values, a la the popular "Dick and Jane" readers in the U.S. Puerto Rican textbooks also circulated throughout other Caribbean islands, such as the Dominican Republic as textbooks of choice. Interestingly, with the wave of Puerto Rican migrants to the U.S. in the 1950s, teachers struggling to find Spanish-language materials for students, and the Puerto Rican Department of Migration in New York, began supplying these books to New York City school children. Once again, these textbooks were reinvented as a way of preserving Puerto Rican customs and ideals, but this time in migrant youth.

Author

• Marilisa Jimenez