La identidad narrada en los ejemplos de "Per incominciare... lo studio della lingua spagnola nelle scuole medie inferiori" de Juana Granados

In Juana Granados’ (1901-1978) works, covering different Hispanic subjects, the textbook "La lingua spagnola" (1960), re-printed until 1993, is of particular significance. In this paper we deal with the first version of this bestseller, i.e. "Per incominciare... lo studio della lingua spagnola nelle scuole medie inferiori" (1937), a school manual conceived within the frameworks of the curriculum standards set by the Italian Fascist Government. Along with the fragments of literary or relevant works in the culture of that time, the vast majority of the examples in the manual are anonymous and, therefore, attributed to the author, although they can be extracted from other source texts that Granados does not quote. These ‘humble’ text play an important cognitive role in the formation of mental models and in shared beliefs; although this is a second language manual, these examples are designed to structure the image of the students' own culture and to build the identity of Italian teenagers.