Representations of the National and the Foreign in Material and Visual Culture of Mexican Children's Textbooks: The Lecciones de Cosas

During General Porfirio Díaz’s rule (1876-1911) educators commonly turned to Edward Austin Sheldon’s  (1823-1897) Lecciones de Cosas, a text inspired in the innovations of Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Cheap editions abounded alongside the profusely illustrated European editions that arrived from Paris, Madrid or Barcelona.  Sheldon’s so-called “object-teaching” and “object-lessons” established the intuitive method in which teachers used everyday objects, furniture, animals, and other quotidian minutiae in lessons. The text advanced the liberal secularization project.
In helping to form proper future citizens, the images and texts in these manuals communicated domestic and foreign attitudes towards those that did not fit the norm, inculcating, perpetuating, and promoting ideologies, attitudes, and ideas about race, class, gender, and the nation.  How did these manuals and their illustrations of transatlantic material life impact Mexican children’s sense of self?  How did they condition them, particularly those who lived in rapidly modernizing urban centers, to perceive the country’ under-developed areas rural hinterland either as backward or as foreign?  Conversely, how did images and texts help to construct this contrast between the developed or modern national and the underdeveloped other, particularly when similar representations of Mexican rural “quaintness” reverberated in images of Africa or Asia?  How were these texts crucial to urban Mexican children’s assimilation of racial prejudices from abroad and become intertwined with regional and classist stereotypes about the peasantry or workers?  Most significantly, in the case of elite children educated abroad (diplomats’ children) how did these teaching materials help them to understand themselves as Mexicans?
Research for this paper is based on reviewing Lecciones de cosas texts from the 1850s to the 1920s, as well as memoirs and correspondence detailing educational experiences in Mexico ca. 1870s-1930s.