In order to examine the social representation of the American population, we explored the discourse expressed in five textbooks of American geography that were published in Colombia between 1970 and 1990. We used tools proposed by Van Dijk (2008) and Wodak (2003) to study the ideological identity discourse of social groups, by tracking the positive portrayal of "us" and the negative representation of the "others". We found that the people of America are represented through the idea of race, a classification scheme that places the white category on the upper level as opposed to Indian and black, and through the ideology of development, which fosters a semantic polarization between Latin America and Anglo America