Nacionalismo territorialista en textos escolares: representaciones de la Patagonia en la dictadura militar argentina (1966-1983)

school textbooks have long been taken as one of the primary sources for the field of the history of education, since they are instruments of basic formal socializing. either as editorial written records, as didactic tools, or as records of school memory, school textbooks institute - and sometimes crystallize - conceptions and interests reflected in their "official" contents. recent investigations focusing on the reality at schools have emphasized the textbooks' importance in the construction of national identities, and also of identities of socio-cultural, socio-ethnical, and regional.this article starts from a historiographical inquiry about school textbooks with the intent of reconstructing the various discursive textual and iconographic accounts in which patagonia was represented in the primary schools of the provinces of río negro and neuquén during the argentinian dictatorship periods of 1966-1973 and 1976-1983. in essence, a group of narratives about patagonia and its inhabitants was brought forward based on three cores of meaning: that of the indigenous, uncultivated and desert territory; that of the promise of progress and tourism; and that of national sovereignty. we shall argue that nationwide school textbooks of eminently political, but also ethnical and racial, slants became means of formation and, above all, auxiliary devices in the shaping of an ideological, political and pedagogical line proper to the military catholic nationalism.