The construction of Chubut’s past in the provincial historical discourse: representations of the Spanish exploratory and colonizing experience in Chubut, Argentina, in school textbooks (1978-2006)

Abstract

The following paper proposes to analyze the ways in which Chubut school textbooks have represented the Spanish exploratory and colonizing experience in the current territory of Chubut, Argentina. We start the article by explaining the role of education and school textbooks in the conformation of a territory’s history and identity, and then we briefly refer to the role played by “Hispanity” in the nation and the province, especially since the early 20^th century, but also in current time. After describing what we call the “Spanish experience” in Chubut, we analyze five school textbooks, seeing how this experience is represented in each of them. The article ends by explaining that the assigned role varies between one text and the other but, despite its continuous appearance, its importance never manages to be bigger than other historical episodes of Chubut, chiefly, the Welsh settlement.