Using Hispanic Literature

Before we ended last class, Jeff brought up an interesting point: why should we bother teaching Hispanic literature when it doesn't pertain to any of our students except the Hispanic ones? What if we don't have any Hispanic students?

***This is not a personal attack on Jeff. It is not an attack on anyone or anyone's ideas. Our conversation just got me thinking about some things.***

Jeff also mentioned having a bad experience with a piece of Hispanic literature.

Here's what I think (because it's the most important thing ever):

I think the bad experience can be chalked up to book choice. If we judged all literature by authors of a certain ethnicity by an experience with a book by one author, nobody would read anything. If you (the general, all encompassing "you") have a disagreement with a black person, does that mean you'll never associate with another black person? Or does a fight with your parents mean you'll never associate with white parents again? Think of books as people.

As for the books' being meaningless to other students, I think that's crazy. If you pick a good book, it will be culturally relevant, it will contain symbolism, metaphor, allusion, interesting syntax and word choice, many literary devices, et cetera. I hated Lord of the Flies, but I know that reading it was worthwhile and I still got something out of it. Beyond that, we must recognize that we are a nation of immigrants and that we already read literature from all over the world, the difference is that Hispanic authors/characters are noticeably "other." I'm not Irish, but I've still read and enjoyed James Joyce and Flannery O'Connor. We ask our students to read literature by Tolstoy and Golding, Austen and Wiesel - none of these authors is an American, they're just all white. And we feel that their literature will benefit all people. So, we've had Hispanic and Chinese and Japanese and Middle Eastern people living in the United States since its inception. These people are immigrants (just like all white people) and they're United States citizens. They deserve a voice. They're no more "other" than Elie Wiesel (Transylvanian) is, they're just more obviously not white (our idea of American). And each of our white students knows someone who is not white and will continue to meet people who are not white, so seeing another culture will benefit white students. Additionally, Hispanic does not always equal immigrant. There are Hispanic people in this country who were born here, whose parents were born here. And they, too, deserve to see their cultural history represented.

Try this logic: why do we teach the Holocaust? World War II sure, we participated in that, but we didn't have concentration camps (well, not for Jews anyway). So why do students need to know about it? It has nothing to do with the U.S., and our joining the war could be justified by talking about Hitler's literal attempt at world domination and Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor. So why all this Holocaust stuff? It doesn't affect most of our students, does it? What would happen if we left it out?

Hispanic authors in world literature classes, certainly. But in American literature classes, too. Because immigrants are United States citizens. Most of the Authors we talk about reading in secondary classrooms are U.S. citizens with Hispanic heritage, people who grew up in the States, people who experienced hardship (which translates to all students who've experienced it). These people are members of our country and our culture. They just haven't choked their own cultural history to death the way most whites have (unless there's a celebration that involves drinking, then we're proudly Irish or Polish or German or whatever we normally shrug off for "American").

If nothing else, we should teach Hispanic and other literatures because they help our students. Those who struggle the most are often those facing language and cultural barriers. Remember the statistics from our last class. Hispanic dropout rates, almost across the board, are much higher than they should be. If bringing Hispanic literature and culture into the classroom helps these students succeed, then is it not worth it? The nonHispanic students aren't going to fall behind because of it, they'll learn too, and using Hispanic literature may help your "worst" students to succeed. And isn't that really the job of teachers? To help our students learn how to succeed?

We also talked about how immigrant students should learn "our" way of life because they're in our country now. And this is true. To be successful in this country, students must know the societal and cultural norms of our country, they must know their new home's history (which they are a part of), they must know how the professional world expects them to act (though I would argue that we need to explicitly teach this one to all students). But more and more companies and secondary schools and universities express in their mission statements and goals the need for global citizens. Culturally diverse literature is good for everyone.