Thinking the nation: Representations of nations and the Pacific Rim in Latin American and Asian textbooks

The study of a nation's history in official textbooks is productive for understanding a nation's self-representation and representations of other nations. Hidden beneath the chronology of kings, queens, and wars, is often an implicit narrative, a representation of the way a nation wishes to be seen by its own people, how a nation views other nations, and who represents 'the other' within its borders. As the construct of the "Pacific Rim" becomes increasingly concretized in governmental actions, economic practices, and cultural activities, we are interested in knowing how various nations in the region depict themselves, other nations, and the region in textbooks. In this article, we consider how the official histories of selected nations portray the Pacific Rim as a region, how Latin American and Asian neighbors portray each other in textbooks, and how Asian and Latin American nations represent nations outside the region. We organized a seminar from January to March 1998 to examine textbook examples from China, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Peru, and Thailand capitalizing on the convergence of scholars at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies (CILAS), University of California, San Diego (UCSD), under the auspices of the APEC Study Center, for the conference, "Cultural Encounters Between Latin America and the Pacific Rim." Elementary and secondary textbooks were surveyed. Our overall purpose was to determine what official histories say about a nation, its people, and specifically other Pacific Rim nations. Four themes emerged from our analysis of the textbooks: (1) Historical representations have a decidedly political quality; (2) All but one of the history textbooks we studied has a narrative structure, although different nations emphasize different narratives; (3) Textbook narratives extol the exceptional qualities of the nation; (4) "The other" (neighboring nations, other nations within the Pacific Rim region, and indigenous peoples) are not treated evenly in textbooks. The Pacific Rim as a region was discussed indirectly in only Chile's textbooks through a discussion of APEC and in Mexican textbooks in the form of a map of the region. These findings show that textbook narratives continue to focus on 'thinking the nation,' even as the concept of the nation is being replaced by regional alliances.