7 The Coloniality of Social Studies and History Textbooks in Puerto Rico Portrayals of Taíno Religious Beliefs and Spanish Colonial Conquest Rafael V. Capó García Textbooks are a useful and fascinating window into the world of state- sanctioned historical narratives. They advance official interpretations of supposedly valuable and necessary knowledge, “particular ways of selecting and organizing that vast universe of possible knowledge” (Apple, 1991, p. 3), and “they claim that ‘this is certain knowledge and this is the knowledge you need’ ” (Issitt, 2004, p. 685). The year 2018 saw the publication of The Palgrave Handbook of Textbook Studies, a compilation of perspectives by experts in the field of textbook studies. While most of its chapters include English-language studies from Latin America, Africa, or Asia, only two chapters explicitly draw on texts from the Global South (Bromley & Lerch, 2018; Oteíza & Achugar, 2018). Andreassen and Lewis’ (2014) edited volume Textbook Gods also lacks in its in-depth representations of the Latin American community. Textbooks as a medium for qualitative research have not received the attention they deserve (Issit, 2004; Reed, 2018), and in Latin America this is even more of the case. My chapter seeks to contribute to the field of textbook studies from a Caribbean point of view where Europeans and Indigenous Americans first clashed with one another. I argue that although many Puerto Rican social studies and history textbooks today critique colonialism and Eurocentrism, they do so from within Eurocentrism itself. These textbooks fail to question the inherent violence of colonial enterprise and instead embrace the discourse of harmonious mestizaje that frames genocide against Indigenous populations as an unintended consequence of civilization. Textbooks oversimplify Indigenous ways of knowing and project them as palatable forms of folklore that constitute one of the roots in the holy trinity of Puerto Rican identity—the mixture of the Indigenous Taíno, White Spaniard, and the African negro.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003482291-8