| 500 signifies the quincentenary of the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492. This was the first piece that I made from cutting and weaving color plates, which I cut from a geography textbook intended for second-graders. The book was published in the twenties, and compared the lives of children from around the world. What was most emphasized in this geography book, even for such young students, wasn’t the culture or customs of peoples around the world, as much as the sources for commodities like metals or rubber or coffee. |
Naturally for its time, it glossed over the hardships endured by those children from less industrialized countries, like “Pedro” from Peru, and “Bobo,” from Senegal, particularly those hardships resulting from their native countries’ colonization by Europeans, Americans, and the Japanese. Although even in Western nations like France, the exemplary child was a farmboy from Normandy called “André,” because every foreign archetype was from an agrarian background. |
This could have been just an author’s technique to reinforce the origins of raw commodities with different nations, or a perhaps a way to point out the richer material life of the average American child. As culturally insensitive as the book is, it reveals how much a second grader in the twenties was expected to learn about the world, which is considerably more than most American adults know today. |
