A row has erupted in Mexico after the government distributed a history textbook to primary schools which makes no mention of the Spanish conquest.
The chronology of the text neatly avoids the issue by ending before the Spanish arrived in the early 1500s…
The arrival of the conquistadors resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and the colonisation of Mexico.
The new history textbook, published and distributed free by the education ministry, omits what historians agree was one of the most important eras in the country’s history – the arrival of the Spanish led by Hernan Cortes in 1519 that led ultimately to colonisation until Mexico gained independence in 1821.
Some opposition politicians have accused the conservative government of President Felipe Calderon of deliberately discouraging a critical analysis of the conquest.
The government is even accused of being closer to the Spanish conquerors than to Mexico’s indigenous population.
Has Mexico been taking lessons from US revisionists?
Sounds like the sort of crap I’d expect from the state board of education in Texas or Kansas.
Eideard 
Has Mexico been taking lessons from US revisionists?
Or the creationist movement in the USA…
We could give the Mexican government the benefit of the doubt here, as they do promise the next textbook will cover the Spanish period in detail.
I should point out I recently watched a five part BBC series The History of Scotland and I was grossly disappointed when they stopped, just as James I was handed all of Britain and was destined to be unsuccessful in his determination to make it Great.
Now I’m waiting for the second five part series, due this autumn. With the current debate over full political independence for Scotland happening now, the timing is immaculate.
I can’t believe Mexicans won’t eventually be publishing the story of the next, critically important period in their history.
Well this isn’t too surprising. Mexico is a pretty racist country, like the rest of “Latin” America its usually towards the majority of Mestizos, Indigenous and African peoples who make up the majority. The indian is fine when they’re in the past but dead to the state in the present. This also happened in the bicentennial where Univision casually called the invasion, a meeting between cultures and said “let’s not talk about invasion this was a meeting.” Ach
During the Spanish colonial period the Spanish elites (españoles) in Hispanic America created and institutionalized a hierarchical system of race classification known as the sistema de castas or the sociedad de castas that was based on the principle that people varied according largely to their birth, color, race and origin of ethnic types. The system of castas was more than socio-racial classification. It had an impact on every aspect of life, including economics and taxation. A parallel system of categorization based on a perceived degree of acculturation to Hispanic culture, which distinguished between gente de razón (people of reason IE: Hispanics) and gente sin razón (non-acculturated natives), concurrently existed and worked together with the idea of casta, which later gave rise to the English word caste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta See also ‘Laws of the Indies’ and ‘Encomienda’.