“¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?” Guillermo Prieto en la prensa infantil (1888; 1895-1896) ed. by Yolanda Bache Cortés (review)

Yolanda Bache Cortés’s “¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?” anthologizes selected works of one of late nineteenth-century Mexico’s most important authors, Guillermo Prieto.¹ The work is a joy to read, thanks to the elegant simplicity with which Bache Cortés expresses her thoughts, and to her impeccable command of the Spanish language. The book’s production values are similarly outstanding in terms of images, graphics, titles, and photographs, all directly relevant to the text. The book also provides different symbols to mark each entry in the index and each footnote. Cumulatively, these features endow the text with a playful format, but without diminishing the seriousness of the work’s content.

Beginning with its evocative title, which calls to mind the playful way in which Mexican children of an earlier era answered questions with questions, Bache Cortés draws the reader into a narrative describing the vicissitudes of childhood in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the collection manages to insert glimpses of the adult world at the same time. The book reproduces the weekly accounts published by Guillermo Prieto, with purposes of instructing and entertaining children in Mexico City. He couched most of his narratives in the form of dialogues, using informal expressions that provide brief, easy-to-understand explanations of customs, often bearing a moral. Bache Cortés not only compiles Prieto’s stories, but also modernizes them for the benefit of contemporary readers. Her collection brings order to, and in some cases completes, those stories, especially where the original syntax might prove difficult to follow, or where the original narrative suffers from missing words, phrases, or even titles.

Bache Cortés is eminently qualified for this work. She holds a prominent position at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, where her teaching and prolific publications focus on nineteenth-century Mexican literature. She has published articles on newspaper supplements for children, and this new study of Guillermo Prieto’s work serves to connect writing for children with her ongoing research. In creating “¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?”, she collects material from the 1890s, particularly from weeklies such as El Escolar Mexicano: Periódico de Instrucción Moral y Recreo dedicado a la Niñez y los profesores de Enseñanza Primaria, and El Niño Mexicano: Semanario de Instrucción Recreativa para Niños y Niñas, newspapers where the works of Prieto and similar authors appeared between 1888 and 1896.

“¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?” depicts an invaluable cross-section of late nineteenth-century society, in the nation as a whole and central Mexico in particular. To the modern scholar of Mexican education, it offers a series of vignettes written by one of the Porfiriato’s² most distinguished authors, whose writings reflect the philosophical influences prevalent among educators of the time. Linguists will find in this book a copious source of names, expressions, and terminologies that were in vogue during Mexico’s pre-Revolution Belle Époque, a time when economic growth and technology followed European norms, to transform the nation. Finally, a wide spectrum of scholars in the social sciences will find in the characters, dialogues, and situations of Prieto’s narratives the mechanisms of power and ideology that informed Porfirian social relations. Indeed, prevailing stereotypes of gender, age, and socioeconomic level are present in force throughout Prieto’s work. Without a doubt, “¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?” fills a void for our understanding of children’s education and acculturation in Mexico. It challenges the reader, and provides an extraordinary body of material for consideration. This fine work will be useful both for the classroom and the research library, and constitutes a solid contribution to...