The Discursive Construction of Mexican in Textbooks in Contrast to the Narratives of Their Readers

Institutional Discourse in Crisis?

Abstract

The aim of this contribution is to present some of the findings from a broader research project (García Agüero 2021). Specifically, the discussion will cover, on one hand, the discursive strategies employed to create the idealized notion of Mexican within a generation of textbooks for first-grade children (1993-2008); on the other hand, it seeks to demonstrate that the nationalist discourse the government intended to instill did not permeate the minds of these children, suggesting that it could be considered a discourse in crisis. This work is situated within the framework of Critical Discourse Studies from a cognitive perspective (Hart 2010). For the multimodal analysis of the manuals, resources from social semiotics (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006) and cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1987; Fillmore 2006; Langacker 1987) are utilized. For the analysis of spoken discourse, reliance is placed on narrative analysis (De Fina 2006, 2009; Wortham 2001).