Diversidad en los Libros del Rincón: Los Mensajes tras el Discurso

Abstract

The main purpose of this dissertation was to create a framework to analyze pedagogic literature for children as a cultural discourse. Furthermore, I proposed the examination of discourse as a socio-cultural critique of both epistemes and politics regarding education, as well as the prototypical identity of Mexican people. The hypothesis was: the discourses created by production elites (composed by political actors, and other organizations with power in the Mexican context) and distributed through Mexican literature for children in the Libros del Rincón 2013-2014 catalogue, seek to influence the formation of children’s identities to create a Mexican citizen prototype who collaborates with the economic, politic, and epistemic relations that are regulated by the Nation-State. Said prototype is established through the models represented as desirable in the corpus, which also implies the transmission of preferred messages that favor mestizaje and cisheteronormativity, both of which are determined by colonial networks.

Henceforth, the first chapter analyses the stereotypes used to model the literary characters in the corpus. The second chapter examines the representation of the characters, the ideal reader in the Mexican context, and the profiles of the authors. The third chapter theorizes about the narrative agency of the characters through a semiotic analysis of the actantial, thematic, and patemic roles; moreover, this chapter scrutinizes the human agency of women, the LGBTQ+ collective, the Mexican indigenous cultures, people with disabilities, and people with physical characteristics that make them vulnerable to discrimination. Lastly, the fourth chapter reviews a historical panorama of educational policies in Mexico as well as an analysis of the cultural discourses as a social critique.