A Postcolonial Reading of El Instructor Popular, a 19th-Century Mendoza Educational Newspaper

Abstract

Currently, there is a significant number of works (articles, books, etc.) that historically and critically analyze the Argentine education system. If we focus on the second half of the 19th century, the time of its institutional foundation simultaneously with the constitution of the Argentine nation-state, we find diverse documents that somehow facilitate following the course of a complex history. Among those documents, educational publications stand out as valuable analytical materials. As usual in every analyzes, there are methodological risks related to the tensions between archives and theoretical categories and different keys to reading them. Very often the documents are pre-understood in theoretical repertoires that offer interpretations that become dominant in the field of educational research. This article proposes some exercises with documentary records taken from the newspaper published in the 19th century, El Instructor Popular, in numbers published by the pedagogue Carlos Vergara as editor. We aim to show how a kind of archive organization, in levels, movements or symbolic operations, dynamically invents figures for subjectivity, reconfigure temporalities and spatialities, and design practices that seem to be more persistent than expected.