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Creating Tropical Yankees: Social Science Textbooks and U.S. Ideological Control in Puerto Rico, 1898-1908. By José-Manuel Navarro. (New York: Routledge, 2002. xii, 227 pp. $75.00, ISBN 0-415-93116-9.)
José-Manuel Navarro's thesis is the following:
United States educational policies in Puerto Rico displayed an underlying ideological unity. Throughout the first decade of colonial control, United States policy makers fostered assimilation, Americanization and de-Puerto Ricanization through educational practices that sought to make Puerto Ricans into Tropical Yankees, the Caribbean variants of the nativeborn white citizens of contemporary Boston, Philadelphia, Topeka, or New York, (p. 195)
In an examination of Spanish educational policies from 1508 to 1898, Navarro shows that Spanish colonial institutions did what one would expect them to do: transmit to their students the values of loyalty to Spain and to Catholicism and teach them the geography and history of...