Five UNR historians wrote the book "Unpublished Santa Fe. Research Topics for Reflecting on the Teaching of Its History."
How did the province of Santa Fe become a boot? How did the native peoples of this region coexist with the European conquistadors and Creole militias? What relationships did the communities establish with the natural environment in which they lived? These concerns guide the book "Unpublished Santa Fe. Research Topics for Thinking about the Teaching of its History," written by UNR historians Evangelina de los Ríos, María Celeste Forconi, Carolina Piazzi, María Paula Polimene, and Romina Zampa.
Aimed at practicing and preservice teachers, it is intended as a catalyst for reflection on the social science content taught in classrooms. This material's unique feature is that it addresses the cultural diversity and heterogeneity of Santa Fe's population in a different way than more traditional historical accounts.
In this sense, it conveys that the boot map underwent a long process of territorial construction in which a variety of agents, not only Europeans but also Indigenous and mestizo, intervened. Focusing on Santa Fe "allows us to break with narratives that emphasize the hegemony of Buenos Aires as the builder of the nation-building process and to see the role of other territories," the authors emphasize. It also exposes differences between the history of Buenos Aires and that of Santa Fe.
The content is structured along three axes. The first is "Territory," conceived as a construct that transcends the idea of a simple terrain, the stage for social processes. It understands that the boot-like physical shape of our province today was not always so, but rather expresses the chain of many human actions that contributed, over several centuries, to shaping its current contours.
The second axis, "Border," addresses the cultural diversity of the province. It examines the relationships between chroniclers, governors, settlers, military personnel, missionaries, and businesspeople, as well as indigenous populations. It also considers another formulation of the term "border," analyzing the relationships between humans and animals through a social and environmental framework.
The third axis, "Agents," adopts a ground-level approach that allows for the analysis of social processes based on the concrete practices of its protagonists. It does not only consider the elite but also other social strata whose practices have contributed to the construction of Santa Fe's history.
The kitchen of research
Each chapter shows the "backstage" of the investigation, showing how the historians reconstructed the processes based on various documentary sources, such as material from judicial, government, and military officials, chronicler records, the press, historical cartography, images, and interviews.
Far from dictating an effective recipe for researching history, the authors emphasize that the paths are not unilinear, but rather winding and, at times, haphazard. They also invite reflection on changes and continuities in different situations, bringing the past and the present closer to students through the study of history.
As a final appendix, the book features a special section entitled "Resource Log." As its name suggests, it offers a list of a wide variety of teaching resources that are essential inputs for planning teaching tasks and even facilitate their search. The materials are available in different formats, which facilitates their use in the classroom, taking into account the diverse infrastructure realities of Santa Fe schools. Popular texts, maps, images, audiovisual productions, and historical documents, among others, make up a broad corpus to encourage the creativity of Santa Fe teachers when bringing social studies content to their students.
The researchers share their work observing the history of Santa Fe and their concern that scientific production is not widely disseminated at educational levels and cultural venues. Therefore, the book's objective was to build a bridge between research and classroom work. In this sense, the book was subjected to critique by teachers and cultural professionals, which was taken into account before publication. "From a scientific perspective, it is a commitment to become closer to society, to disseminate what we do, and to show that it is useful," Forconi expressed.
With this work, they propose bringing scientific innovations into the classroom: new topics and approaches to complexify the political, social, and environmental history of Santa Fe. They discuss the linear and teleological narrative, incorporating advances and setbacks, failed processes, uncertainties, fears, and conflicts. In other words, they seek to humanize the teaching of history by emphasizing human agency over and above the mere fact of a specific date and place.
This work promotes an anthropological perspective to address otherness in time and in a space that is both close and alien due to this temporal distance. The idea is to recover historical transformations as a product of human decisions in different circumstances to motivate analysis and debate that connect Santa Fe's past with its present.
To this end, they revive the paradigm of Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who views the construction of knowledge based on traces of the past found in available sources, like detectives following clues and indications. "The work in the classroom could be like that of a detective, searching for clues left by historical figures that allow us to reconstruct processes," they explain.
Published two years ago in print and recently as an e-book by Prohistoria Ediciones, this book is the result of a project funded by the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Productive Innovation of Santa Fe entitled "Santa Fe Investigated/Santa Fe Taught. Innovative Proposals for Addressing its History from the Colonial Period to the Early 20th Century," based at the Institute for Regional Socio-Historical Research (Conicet-UNR). The authors are historians trained at the Faculty of Humanities and Arts of the UNR and members of the CEHISO laboratory at ISHIR.
Journalist: Victoria Arrabal