Juan José Cruz | "You Can't Go Home, Yankee:"Teaching U.S. History to Canary Islands Students | The History Teacher, 35.3

"You Can't Go Home, Yankee:"Teaching U.S. History to Canary Islands Students

Juan José Cruz
University of La Laguna, Spain

"I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN THE DAY a student came to class and told me: 'We take your class. We learn to look at the world from a critical standpoint, one that considers race, sex, and class. And we can't enjoy life anymore.'"¹ When I first read scholar bell hooks' sentence, I felt a kind of deep empathy I had not experienced for a long time. At that time, I realized then that I—a white, middle-aged, Spanish male—identified with the alternative teachings of an African American female professor at a prestigious institution in the United States. Like bell hooks, I have long struggled with the challenges of teaching an inclusive American history. I felt relieved that my experiences were not unique.

I work at the Philology School of a Spanish University, La Laguna (ULL). That necessarily means poor budgets for education and few employment opportunities for our students. Our university cannot contemplate sabbaticals, nor do professors receive grading assistance from graduate students. Additionally, our students' passivity leads to a reluctance to discuss topics or to question the teacher's opinions—behavior that can sometimes make our work less rewarding. Thus I feel comforted by those students who occasionally enter my office to discuss topics from our last class. Many times, my discussions with students lead us somewhere else, such as from history according to Hollywood, to the 2000 U.S. census, to how homophobia in the academy has led historians to consider President Buchanan's sexual orientation. A few times I have been rewarded with comments that ring like those I quoted from hooks. Some students actually complain, pointing out that "now we go to the cinema and it is not the same." Others thank me, not for making U.S. history more palatable, but for enabling them to become more skeptical towards their own society and for providing them with the tools to scrutinize the past of the Canaries and Spain. Most students in the class, of course, go about their business without commenting on the course. For these students, school is the means by which they will be given a degree. Because of the importance of tourism in the Canary Islands, many students work towards a degree in English, and this way their entry in the job market is eased—much more than if they had completed secondary education only. Also, becoming a high-school teacher of English does weigh in the decision of many students at La Laguna.

I teach two undergraduate courses related to the U.S., plus a graduate course in American culture and political liberalism. Presently, eleven credits (two semester courses) serve as the foundational courses for students interested in U.S. history and culture.² One of these undergraduate courses, a core subject for juniors, is purportedly a survey on the United States, officially dubbed "Historia y cultura de los países de habla inglesa, II," and I have arranged its syllabus as a combination of American culture and history. But since the history of the Canary Islands has been more closely related to Great Britain than the United States, and since most tourists in the Canary Islands come from Germany, I need to be quite imaginative in order to engage students in American history. Fortunately, I have never had my syllabus monitored by the Department. My troubles come at the beginning of every year, when I imagine how students may judge the centrality of a core subject on the U.S. in their curricula.

I have tested different tactics to introduce students to this subject, ever since I began to teach it in the mid-1990s. I have narrowed my teaching focus and have paid special attention to contrasting and comparing the societies and cultures of both nation-states, with special emphasis on the Canary Islands. I seek parallel developments between the United States and Spain, and point out why and to what extent they have diverged. Because of this, I am insistent on discussing the myth of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP). I like my students to consider how far their generation, more than others before, assumes cultural "Americanization" and what it means in the context of multiculturalism. In other words, in a perfect world, I would like my students to think about how we can make the U.S. past usable for ourselves. Discovering the nuances of a far more controversial history should enliven discussions about our own. As Gary Nash and his colleagues have written, history provides "the substance for the way a society defines itself and considers what it wants to be."³ As our discussions go, we may discover that American history has not been so peripheral to ours; as members of the "American Century," we have assumed in our collective identities many historical narratives of the United States.

This intellectual effort has to overcome wide resistance in the society at large, since our approach to the United States has been fragmentary and superficial. Migration from the Canaries used to be far more consistent and continuous to places like Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba than to the United States. The instructional system in the Canaries includes English as a second language from the first years of school but the boards of education use the British model. American canonical literature is not included in the high school curricula either. The current revision of the history standards going on in our system may also dispense with events like the American Revolution or the Civil War, and Spaniards might in the future have to rely more and more on the spate of popcult history we continuously receive by means of the movies.

In a more general sense, an ambivalent, almost schizoid feeling towards the United States persists in our culture. The anti-American feeling fed into Spanish society—especially after the 1898 War—was alternatively adopted by the right and the left.⁴ Conservatives who had hailed Franco for his ability to keep Spain neutral in World War II, by the 1950s gave acclaim to the United States as leader of the Free World. In the 1960s and 1970s, progressives collapsed the struggle for democracy at home with anti-imperialist, pro-Third World views on international politics. At the same time, American popular culture made inroads among that generation with icons like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Bob Dylan. Ambiguity about America and American culture persists to date. In different years students have revealed their interest to learn about the Panama invasion and the Gulf War; the fact that Spanish forces were a small fraction of the International Coalition in the Gulf War contributed to some anxiety. The more recent bombing of Belgrade led to my first teach-in in class, including a showing of Emir Kusturica's Do You Remember Dolly Bell? Last year, a student wondered what the U.S. government eventually would resolve to do if Venezuelan Hugo Chávez continued his approach to Fidel Castro to the point of risking oil sources. For three or four years in a row, students have initiated classroom discussions about the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Commerce for not taking measures against U.S.-based transnational companies that abuse child and female labor in the Third World. "Including sweatshops in U.S. cities?," I have asked them, to complicate the issue further.

Despite these anti-American antics, practices coming from the United States are used by students in their late teens and early twenties to mark political positions of their own. I am particularly intrigued by the current use of rap music to voice anti-Spanish, nationalist politics. Aboriginal populations decimated by the Castilian colonization in the fifteenth century are currently being remembered by a local pop group named Soul Sanet. Not only their rhythm, but their look and poses remind me of early rappers, especially the 1980s rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Popular Caribbean music, which for decades had been disdained as amusement for people with a lower level of education, has become a craze since it was reshaped in the United States as "salsa" music. It is interesting to witness the confluence of meanings that one can see in a Latin music festival in Tenerife: A Nuyorican group singing and dancing onstage, with Cuban and separatist Canary flags flying over the audience.

By the end of the Cold War, Spain had already been immersed in a process of cultural revision, antedating the thorough reviews of historico-cultural interpretations that would take place in Eastern Europe;⁵ here, discussions concerned not racial affiliation but local versus central rule. The pursuit of a pre-Hispanic or pan-Hispanic—versus Spanish—heritage in the Canaries partially responds to what David Lowenthal calls a personalized Western sense of identity.⁶ I would add that the hybridized Western model adopted here is coming not from the "First" or the "Third" world, but from some borderland that has been validated by antecedents in America—a point that further emphasizes the importance of teaching American history and culture here.

I strongly advise students to come to terms with the certainty that in a culture that privileges technology and business careers over jobs in the social sciences and the humanities, they must confront a shrinking job market that offers not only fewer economic opportunities, but much less social prestige as well. Let me add that last year, 85% of students enrolled in my courses were women, a demonstration of how gender subordination works within academic disciplines here. There is yet another aspect related to the job market that complicates teaching American history at La Laguna. Since it is a minor field, "historia y cultura" cannot aspire to make undergraduate students extremely competent in the research opportunities American studies and history can offer. Only after taking their graduate courses can they reasonably have a more thorough knowledge of the United States.⁷ Current legislation restricts circulation of personal data concerning the socioeconomic situation of our students.⁸ However, their reaction to my comments, their language skills (in English or Spanish), the lack of travel experience all make manifest that a majority of them belong to the lower-middle class or working class. A few would be considered in the United States to belong to the working poor, and finally, the least of them are very well placed in the local bourgeoisie. Not surprisingly, a good proportion of them study on scholarships granted by the Spanish government. For this reason, more than a dissertation on America, our students first need a BA degree (in their case in English) that at least will enable them to secure a position and enter the middle class. Or so they believe—and I infer their parents have a similar feeling, from a few exchanges I have had after commencement. Statistics confirm that a college degree, any degree, considerably increases the chances of steady employment in Spain. But for those students with a degree in humanities, the waiting period until the first job arrives is much longer than for graduates with degrees in business or technology. This situation is especially acute for former students no longer eligible for a scholarship allowance and living in families affected by unemployment or underemployment. Fortunately these examples are not the rule, but sometimes commencement carries mixed blessings in some households.

It is situations like these that oblige me to extract some "usable past" in American history. As I tell my students right before my first lecture, "Listen, I wish I could provide you with a decent job; instead, all I can do is help you understand our times and how we arrived here. And you can do this yourselves from the very moment you wake up: you turn the TV set on and can see a sitcom 'made in the USA;' you can turn an FM station at any time, and guess what you can listen to—American music; if you go to your nearest multicine [Cineplex] you will figure out why 8 out of each 10 films advertised are Hollywood blockbusters, despite the reputedly high quality of Spanish cinema; so many Spanish people know about Hemingway, or Truman Capote or Fenimore Cooper, whereas they could hardly mention anything about Spanish writers" and so forth. "The best place to search for an answers," I tell them, "is the 'belly of the beast,' as José Martí named it." Should I not mention the name of the Cuban hero as the source for this quote, the least aware among my students would think I was quoting some arcane Asian proverb. But from that moment on, a tacit agreement has been established with the class about what this subject is to be about.

Reactions vary. Some students look piqued; others look upset, some others, bored; most simply smile as if to acknowledge quips middle-aged tenured professors can safely afford. Being trained in literary criticism, my students know about postmodernism and deconstruction. It has been more difficult for them to understand what Jameson meant by "the logic of late capitalism"; they do not understand what post-fordism is, and few would be able to articulate what fordism was, even though many could locate Henry Ford on a timeline. I suggest that they look back to the past, and with the help of historical experience, discover what answers people like them should find to prevent the ravages of flexible specialization (they would not know what that means), junk jobs (they do), and so forth in their lives.

Many of these undergraduate students have been exposed to different literary interpretive schools, in a number of courses dealing with African-American literature, Anglo-American literary criticism, and post-colonial literatures. No doubt this fact should facilitate discussions on historical schools, or at least the jargon that refers to them. However, classical writers have been given far more importance in the curriculum, and students take core literature courses more in line with the New Criticism, or the Whig school, than with newer literary and historical interpretations. It is hard for me to estimate how much literary surveys that privilege the classics shape students' analysis of less canonical works. My experience suggests that a Neohistoricist approach that renders literary works into historical documents needs much work on my part before students are able to see through the manipulation of texts for different purposes, including their canonization as pieces of art. It is more difficult yet to convince them that those works can transcend the times when they were written and reach us in a different way. Models that insist on not trespassing the values, the mentalité of the societies where those masterpieces were written, consciously or unconsciously entrench a so-called esthetic paradigm that restricts the political discussions inherent in any historical commentary. "Granted that historians bear a responsibility to those who lived in the past," as David Harlan explains, "our primary responsibility must be to those of us who live in the present."⁹ In agreement with that idea, I look to find some new meanings in the interpretation of the main events studied in the courses, especially in the survey courses. Ideally, students should be able to transcend the author's intentions, and interpret those literary pieces in the light of the historical network in which we are involved. They should learn that history is not just the background for a text; history is constructed by a collection of documents, literary texts among them.¹⁰ That is the task of my students to disclose. As far as I am concerned, I am locked in a Quixotic effort to dismantle the fortified interests that have kept disciplines like literature and the arts away from historical scrutiny.

In my courses, I also resort to visual media because they provide a good amount of information about the country and culture. Like most Spaniards, my students are quite familiar with American popular culture: especially film, television (overwhelmingly dubbed into Spanish), and music—and their generation more so than mine. I understand the reasons offered by scholars who dismiss the use of popular culture in the classroom. But I believe the recipients of popular texts—including both a God-fearing and patriotic senior citizen in America's heartland and my most transgressor student—do not necessarily have to be part of a globalized mass of inert consumers. The same way that a literary text can provide a scope for a historical comment, a film or a pop song offers insights into the cultural logic of fordism. And more so in texts specifically released from the constraints of academic criticism, and created to negotiate an indefinite number of social contradictions; they were (and continued to be) in the market "with a sense of how things are and should be."¹¹

I am very reluctant to lower my standards, even though I may understand all about the environment around the course—from its peripheral position in the curriculum to the diminishing eagerness of students to read each passing year, in almost any subject and at any school, and their unquestioning reliance on images as holistic texts.¹² Notwithstanding all of this, I feel an obligation to help my students understand the workings of American history in our own lives as members of a global corporate society.¹³ I believe they should assume we all may be victimized by a dreaded renewed form of colonialism—actually, a transnational economy that ravaged many areas of America before it started to affect us. We are all subject to the dismantling of the nation-state as guarantor of civil rights. I do not intend to obviate the plain differences that exist between both societies; logically, the developments in either region—Spain, including the Canary Islands on the one hand, the United States on the other—diverge on too many occasions. Other times, parallel situations in both regions require the assistance of an academic to make them understandable to students. Students need to understand the complexities that underlie the meanings of the "American Century" and the circumstances that made it possible. I feel our efforts work when students make comments like "now we go to the cinema and it is not the same."

No matter how much historical studies have been pushed aside in many curricula in the humanities, field specialization cannot escape historical insights. By this, I mean that the English Department, or the Sociology Department, or the Art Department, instructs a range of narratives that invariably follow a chronological order of some sort. When "American literature I" is taught, students rightly expect a survey that begins in the 1630s Puritan compacts and ends sometime in the Twentieth century; "English Literature III" studies Shakespeare, Milton, Congreve, and others in that chronological order. Recognizing the centrality of that fact gives more credence to the use of a historical vision for our students' understanding of how the past is connected to our lives.

The timelines of the courses I teach have varied year after year. I am conscious of the time and credit limit in my course loads, so I need to be very comprehensive and efficient in the use of time allotted in my classes. Theoretically, a survey of all American history should begin in 12,000 BC, when the first Americans migrated from Asia, and end in, for example, the 2000 election. Alas, I cannot do that! Since my courses are the first time students are exposed to American history in any systematic way, I need to be very careful to not let many facts, events, or names be dropped from class lectures or students would be lost when they read the textbooks.¹⁴

Thus, I have resolved to offer courses structured along the following schedule in alternate years:

ALTERNATIVE A:	Early Republic through Gilded Age (9 weeks) Progressive Era and New Deal (1 week)

ALTERNATIVE B:	Early Republic through Reconstruction (2 weeks) Gilded Age through New Deal (8 weeks)

Regardless of how fast I try to lecture, or how cooperative the class is, a ten-week schedule embracing two centuries of the United States is simply an academic chimera¹⁵; expedient teaching may make students at least theoretically accountable to the basics of American history. I doubt they would be much more fluent than they were when they came into the classroom for the first time, and I am afraid they may be more confused yet. I prefer to eschew expediency for the use of logic. We will never be able to study the first human migrations from Asia, but an explanation of the Indian Wars—and the role of the Spanish presidios and misiones to antagonize Indians against Anglo settlers—can provide a view of the presence of Native American peoples in North America. The 1876 election that ended Reconstruction also provides matter for discussion in class that includes not only the comparisons with the 2000 returns, but also the parallel way the Spanish oligarchy secured its political ascendancy in the elections that took place from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the coming of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s.

Usually my core course enrolls an average of 150 students; about 40 seniors, on average, enroll in my elective on the 1960s. The subject is organized into one two-hour lecture and four discussion classes, where written or audiovisual texts related to previous lectures are discussed. Selecting appropriate discussion texts is always a difficult decision, and although I initially give a handout with a list of texts, sometimes I alter it by substituting another text I find more appropriate to the idiosyncrasies of the class.¹⁶ In the last two years, the Internet has also been a part of our plans, since I relay pages I find of interest to them; or vice versa, if a student shares with me some information s/he has found on the net, I can resend it to the rest of the class who are connected. Although the lecture is a good occasion for me to introduce my views and make students familiar with the topics, I give more relevance to the discussions, where I work hard to gain the confidence of the students and freely exchange our ideas. Traditionally, power relations in the Spanish educational system¹⁷ have discouraged the free exchange of ideas, while students have been expected to rely on the authority of the instructor. This traditional model of education does not work well with the content my courses.

In order to break the ice, our first discussion class consists of a field trip to downtown La Laguna, walking for about half a mile into the historical center and then to a visit to the Museum of History. My purpose for this session is to make them conscious that history—literary, social, and political—is something we have to constantly encounter, even when we go downtown to shop. I make comparisons between the Canaries, Spain and the United States that will resurface throughout the course. But more than emphasize just content, I point out that they will learn how all of our historical records have been socially constructed, and that we as scholars have the obligation to question those constructions. (I would be unsure of their reaction if I were to say "deconstruct" instead.)

Material objects at the Museum of History are highly useful to make comparisons between both countries. Examples abound: the Neoclassical style of the houses at San Agustín Street (where the Museum is) invites comparisons with American Federal style; an old town plan of La Laguna showing the first gridiron prompts comments on the Laws of Indies and the plans for misiones and presidios in the American Southwest; distinctions between the cottage and the factory industrial systems are evident on the museum panels that display handmade clothing and other craft items, items that were later to be replaced by British-made goods. The panel on emigration strikes an emotional chord in all classes, and students relate having yet-unmet relatives somewhere in the Americas. The museum also allows other unintended comparisons between the Canary Islands and the United States. The visitor may be surprised at the material silence concerning the slave trade (of either Canary aborigines or Africans) and the forced immigration of Southern European workers, especially Portuguese, who were brought here to work in sugar refineries before the cane industry was established in the Caribbean Basin. Also absent is discussion of the state's reinforcement of backward social structures that took place in the countryside in postwar Spain. Instead, a cautious distribution of material overlaps references to the export of tomatoes and bananas with the rise of tourism in the 1960s. A cynic would say the exhibit proves correct Walt Rostow's theory of the stages of economic development. I'd rather underscore how these museum panels give a transnational meaning to Michael Frisch's comments that "it is tempting to speculate that the kind of statement that seem acceptable when applied to distant periods would beg too many questions, would be too transparently inadequate as description of a world viewers know at closer hand."¹⁸ Exhibits at La Laguna, then, can be propitious in explaining the rationale that purged slavery from Rockefeller's Williamsburg, or left unmentioned the shattering effects of taylor-fordism on the "common man" celebrated at Ford's Greenville museum. The more recent—and more controversial—Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995 serves as a good discussion topic for both courses. Students in the survey can discuss and compare grand narratives of redemptionism: Castille's crusade to evangelize the natives, or the American Frontier thesis itself. The reaction of those students enrolled in the elective on the 1960s—who often comment on how the Cold War consensus required veiling episodes like Hiroshima—can be quite stimulating.

Because my students lack a comprehensive background in American history, I support my lectures by using some textbooks, although I do not rely solely on any particular text. I fondly recall the first textbook in American history I read cover-to-cover, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. More recently I have been enthusiastic about the American Social History Project's Who Built America, especially the second volume. Some colleagues ask me why I don't just assign Zinn as the sole textbook where students can find all the information they may need. Zinn's text is included in my basic bibliography, and I resort to it and cite it frequently. However, I tend to believe that students doing a survey in our context should be informed through different sources, besides those of the counter-consensus. I believe this not out of any commitment to re-establish history à la Gingrich. It is very easy, comfortable, and secure to perform the "anti-Yankee" instructor outside the United States. I believe that to start with a critical view of American history in a course attended primarily by individuals unfamiliar with either content or historiographical concerns will do little to help me achieve my goals: to help students use that information in order to become critical thinkers by themselves. When I first started to teach the core subject, I adopted The Enduring Vision as the basic textbook, although I cover some topics—especially those dealing with U.S. foreign policy—with more critical texts.¹⁹ In successive years, I have further reduced the students' reliance on the Boyer text only, as I have introduced information from monographs such as Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Foner's Reconstruction, Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, and so on.²⁰ For my elective on the 1960s I have never relied heavily on any one textbook. The second volumes of both Boyer and Who Built America can be consulted; however, they should be complemented with monographs such as Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets, Anderson's The Movement and the Sixties, Gitlin's The Sixties, Farber's The Age of Great Dreams, Carson's In Struggle, and Kendrick's The Wound Within, among those I cite or quote most frequently in the classroom.²¹

American history teachers hotly debate whether to explain content, or to first infuse a philosophical framework to select and hold what events and individuals have more historical relevance. In a context outside the United States, this debate would further be inflamed by the intellectual confrontation about American exceptionalism as chauvinism and as imperialism. If U.S. scholars are confused about this model, we foreign teachers must be more so, since on many occasions the exceptionalist paradigm is abused and American history is simplified into a narrative of the rise and hegemony of the United States. This can be quite poignant in such a "post-patriotic" society like Spain. It is not easy here to understand how the presumed internal homogeneity of the U.S. nation-state may allow for a more complex heritage within its borders; or that such a notion like popular nationalism, based on the unique character of America, can be so pervasive and have permeated so many aspects of social life in the country.²²

Thus, to make students understand the ideologemes underlying America as an idea in the making sometimes includes arguments in the classroom or in my office. Initially, students are somewhat familiar with the myth of exceptionalism because they know of the writings of the Puritans and the successive re-interpretations of their thought. The class assumes that "chosen people" and "city upon the hill" became Barthean myths in framing a national mentality. It is harder for them, though, to follow the convolutions of Puritanism into abolitionism and slavery at the same time; isolationism and imperialism; nativism and political democracy, the success of reform movements and the relative failure of radical politics, and so on. They would not be able to see the continuation between the Crevècoeur question ("What is the American, this New Man?") and the Sombart question ("Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?"). The temptation to place the American experience outside contemporary political and social models because it resorted to "local initiatives, to build political coalitions across space to resist the intrusion of external threats" is quite alluring. An explanation of early American history in those terms here can provoke charges of self-righteousness and imperialism, or on the contrary, appreciations for a community that aimed to "make it new" from the very beginning.²³ Either way, students must confront these patterns of an incoherent historical narrative. I am persuaded that had it not been for the effect of cultural productions, especially those of the popular variety, American history might have turned into some obscure, even unintelligible field. And if the ruling ideas of the exceptionalist framework spark disagreement, the dissimilarities between the promise and realization of American ideals provoke a greater degree of controversy. Every year, one can listen to a student who questions the United States as a qualified democracy.

Additionally, the class can benefit from at least learning about some historiographical trends that legitimated those dissimilarities. Students are naturally surprised that one "popular" figure like President-to-be Woodrow Wilson had endorsed "the united effort [...] of bodies of men; the opinion of men who make public opinion" to dispel the ideological dangers implied in teaching a "'history of doubt.'"²⁴ I like to contrast subversive modernist aesthetics with conservative mores, mores that struggled to wrestle history from professional historians and retold myths to "inspire the children with patriotism."²⁵ Students are intrigued when they learn that the consensus school arose within the same society that created rock and roll, James Dean, and the Beat Generation. Accordingly, capitalism and democracy had become interdependent; suburbanization had implemented the achievement of a classless society; functionalism demonstrated that failures were marginal and proved that success should be the norm in a community reeducated into the individual-centered sensibility (the "covenant of works" of the Puritans is hummed about). As a distinctive repressive instrument of the new status quo, McCarthyism caused hundreds of teachers to lose their jobs; the "counterprogresssive history" (a clumsy term even for Spanish speakers used to polysyllables) of the time believed it had eluded presentism by "focusing attention on what had united Americans rather than what had divided them." A gleaming past was sought in Disneyland and Rockefeller's Williamsburg, previously cleansed of the stains of slavery.²⁶ This outline of historiography, sketchy though it may be, alerts them to the interested optimism in titles as suggestive as The Liberal Tradition in America, People of Plenty, or The Vital Center. Inevitably the New Criticism literary school is then linked to the oeuvre of the Nashville Fugitives; and new perspectives arise to explain why literature textbooks of the period focused on the artfulness that Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and James shared in uniting Americans, instead of keeping them divided (F. O. Matthiessen to the contrary). After that, I hope students are prepared to reread Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination with different eyes.²⁷

Students smile when I call the consensus interpretation of America's past "history according to Doris Day"; they realize then that so many people are excluded or minimized in these intellectual and cultural accounts that reality inevitably leads to a happy end. The Frontier Thesis, as Laurence Veysey suggests, could have been feasible, but very few individuals ever lived in such a situation like the one described by Turner or Hollywood's constructions of the Frontier.²⁸ My students come to terms with the fact that the same way the study of American literature had ignored very many works not considered canonical, master sociohistorical narratives have suppressed the experiences of a majority of individuals. And I make my opinion clear that the master narrative of consensus could sometimes be very insidious: its tidy, wartless affirmation of liberty disregarded the victims of racism and patriarchy, sugarcoated efforts to harness the white working class, and legitimized the repression of dissent. If students are able to see through the making of the Frontier myth in American popular texts, they are then in a position to analyze why conservative visions and class harmony became essential in spreading consensus.²⁹

Further into my courses, I suggest that truisms like "America as an unfulfilled promise" have been revised by other historians who contested—and even reviled—conformity. Commenting on ideas put forth in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States³⁰ helps to qualify the Founding Fathers (now, no longer the benevolent figures celebrated by the mass media). Addressing such historiographic issues also allows me to introduce the Beards and the rise of critical Progressivism, which students of English should know for a better understanding of American literary naturalism. Beyond that first-sight advantage for their careers, they may acknowledge that in the absence of a significant Marxist tradition, the Beardian model was invigorated by historians educated through the experiences of the civil rights struggles, gender-based liberation movements, Vietnam, and the exhaustion of the postwar party system.³¹

Such historiographical knowledge, some students might complain, is ancillary to what their academic and professional interests are presumed to be. I do not agree. An individual who takes compulsory and elective courses that adopt the paradigm of multiculturalism needs to be informed of the roots of that new paradigm. I am not persuaded by the aesthetic celebration of differences that they learn about in other subjects. I am more interested in learning about and from the controversies that shaped and continue to shape the lives of the last two generations, in Spain and in the United States. Thanks to cultural practices of their own, peoples unmentioned by the consensus school managed to keep their identities outside the mainstream channels. They vindicated a more complex America and their achievements have finally been awarded a long-overdue recognition. As Leon Fink points out when referring to the counter-narrative that has arisen in labor studies, "it is the excavation of that very public contest with the rulers that has delivered so much energy to the field over the past thirty years."³² His words recall the current situation in Spain. At the end of the Franco regime, a debate broke out among social scientists and intellectuals about the revision of our collective memory. The experiences of those persecuted by the dictatorship—some of whom had endured prison sentences or were exiled—have counted quite far in the current discussions about the nature of Spain as either a nation-state or a state with no definite nationality of its own. A more recent phenomenon in this country, immigration—mostly from Latin America and Africa—is introducing race and ethnicity into the discussion on multinational Spain.

Even though some students enjoy the comparisons between the revision of history in the United States and that in Spain, not all of them seem to be comfortable with de-centering a linear and core narrative. Some students are simply confused, while others are perhaps afraid of unraveling a historical account where grand names and dates to remember mean little. Instead, for these students, U.S. history is too complicated by race, ethnicity, gender. The U.S. party system, social stratification, and labor segmentation create complications of their own. To learn and to love African American literature, for example, is one thing; to insert it into sociohistorical frameworks which explain a racialized job market, lowered class consciousness, and fragmented "women" as a unitary concept, is something different. These issues do not necessarily make the field more difficult, but certainly more demanding. It strikes me as unusual that students who do question the canon in such subjects like postcolonial literatures or literary criticism, for example, take longer in applying this model to other disciplines. While deep social and cultural forces in both the U.S. and Europe have shaped curricular revisions, society (that is to say, where students come from) does not accept so easily that those changes transcend currilcula. As a result, the narrative that credits what James Green describes as the "overwhelming emphasis on elites as makers of history" lingers on longer that could be logically expected.³³

This apparent contradiction is still more striking at ULL, in a department where most of its students seem to come from middle-to-lower socioeconomic groups. I frequently comment in my lectures and discussions about the culture and life of the working classes. De-centering the narrative should include not only widely accepted topics, but also those dealing with African American life or the struggles of middle-class women for their civil rights. One might think that the world the white ethnic working classes made, including racial antagonism, could help students feel more empathy with the model proposed.³⁴ Comparisons may be set up between the archetype of the reactionary American worker and the way Canary workers racialized their culture in regions like Latin America. In areas where the race issue used to be far more prominent than in the Islands themselves, Canary immigrants took advantage of their presumed whiteness: The thrifty, law-abiding, and hard-working isleño—as opposed to the spendthrift, uncontrollable, and lazy native—became a powerful archetype in emigré communities. Whiteness reinforced the distinctive identity of the group as well as served the interests of both the local oligarchies and Spanish authorities eager to supply an escape valve to alleviate overpopulation.

Not always do the discussions confirm my predictions. Students appreciate Toni Morrison's Beloved, Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," and John Sayles' Lonestar movie, to note three random examples. However, texts directly related to the experiences of the white working class do not receive such favor: Sister Carrie is too dreadful, as are Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives and Uli Edel's film Last Exit to Brooklyn, to suggest another three examples in contrast. Even though our respective national histories do not always follow the same course, social class needs to be towed back to a more central position in Spain, too: in our discussions, in the curriculum, and in our construction of life. Perhaps educational systems like ours promote the class transcendence that so many individuals hope to achieve. Attitudes in the classroom often contradict the notion that a consciousness of economic subordination exists in our own class-based society, where there is no racial overclass and where clear gender divisions marks labor relations.³⁵

A career like mine, in the hardcore of the humanities, makes political positions inevitable, and if I arouse honest debates in the classroom, my apparent lack of neutrality should then be welcome. But I am concerned with the boundaries of the discussions. Relativism needs to have some limits lest we indulge in what Eric Silverman calls "the crude deconstructionist assumption that nothing exists outside the text."³⁶ Even worse than that, the dialogic reading that allows all of us to signify the texts assigned in class, could result in "a redemptive or totalizing perspective, " an abusive reading La Capra warns against.³⁷ Discussions in my classroom have never been marred by specifically racist or sexist offenses. However, not too long ago I felt forced to stop two women students who had openly spoken out about what I understood to be an overblown nationalist slur against Peninsulares. Because I was confused when I first heard their comments, I asked some kind of either-or question that would clarify the situation honorably, like "Do you feel resentment because they may take your jobs or are you 'racially' biased?" They simply said "both." I found their comments offensive, particularly for the two or three students from the Mainland who were present in the classroom at that time; and I changed the subject, as assertively but diplomatically as I could. Initially one is jabbed with self-doubt about curtailing freedom of speech in the classroom. But I decided there was nothing to regret.

Whether studied synchronically or diachronically, culture is both a site and a construction of consecutive struggles for pursuing social recognition, and such was the case with those students who voiced such nationalist sentiments. Yet some kind of narrative framework in which to tell the struggle is necessary—and more so, in the case of students like mine who are not majoring in history. No matter how de-centered the historical model is, some narratives, structures, and clashes need to prevail over others. It is up to us, the teachers, to provide some "Great Story," an impermanent "container for social antagonism"³⁸ to validate our insights. It may be an unstable construction, eventually replaced by other stories that better explain "social orders as yet unimagined."³⁹ The various narratives of a story, however, do not disappear simultaneously. To decide which will remain longer is part of our scholarly privilege and of our "Great" responsibility as teachers.

Taking into account these two premises—the dialectic character of culture and the political accountability of the humanities scholar—I privilege perspectives and topics in U.S. history that denationalize and allow for a comparison or contrast with parallel situations in Spain. This is a suitable way to turn exceptionalism on its head.⁴⁰ This tactic is most fruitful with issues that involved Canary peoples in the development of the United States. No matter how non-canonical I would like my syllabi to be, headings like "Early Republic" or "Progressivism" or "the New Left" will be read and understood by our students, as in almost any course anywhere. After a few class sessions, students gradually understand that when I say, "Listen carefully, I do not think you will find this in a textbook" that I am going native, and will provide them with information pertaining to our own land. I sense their surprise when they learn about the trade between the Canaries and the late Colonies, especially the envoys of wine to Boston. Wine exports controlled by British merchants had received an almost mortal blow after they were severely affected by the Navigation and Staple acts imposed by England in the seventeenth century. This notwithstanding, bootlegged wine from the Canaries, especially Tenerife, arrived in the British colonies in America. Later, the nascent United States became a new market for that languishing economic sector when the blockade on Britain during the Napoleonic Wars diverted exports to the Americas. In exchange, the islands received timber and cereal. Since my students are more familiar with intellectual and cultural history, they find it quite interesting to discover that aside from those legal imports, the Canary Islands received subversive literature printed in the United States, smuggled here in ship cargoes, and finally distributed within the local bourgeois elite. Allegedly, an Enlightened priest and member of the local oligarchy, Antonio José Ruiz de Padrón, wrote an Indictment of the Spanish Inquisition, to be passed at the liberal convention in Cádiz that gathered in 1812. This might have been an incidental fact not worth mentioning in class, had it not been for the fact that Ruiz de Padrón had spent four years in Philadelphia, 1785 through 1789. Other examples of American connections with Canary liberals abound. They are most evident in the descendants of British merchants settled in the Islands for generations, and who openly discussed (and sometimes celebrated) Republicanism, religious freedom, and economic initiative as practiced in the United States.⁴¹

Such central social issues like the enslavement, deportation and assimilation of Canary aborigines early in European settlement affects the students' understanding of the Indian Removal Act, the legal implementation of slavery in the U.S., and the rise of a subaltern culture among the oppressed that enabled those groups to pass their practices down to the following generations. Vestiges of the Berber-related languages of the aborigines that can be traced in the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands, local food, percussion instruments, and sports like Canary wrestling (lucha canaria) can provide subject matter for a discussion of the capacity of cultures to resist obliteration from the culture of the master. Whenever possible, I extend the discussion into a comparison between some characteristics of slavery and race relations in the New South, and social structures in the Canary countryside as late as the 1950s. The latter resulted from overlapping overseeing, lien, and peonage systems; it goes without saying that political suppression, sexual harassment, and the paternalist attitude of local landlords, caciques, were logical consequences of the persistence of those structures, in the Canaries as well as in most backward areas of Spain.

Anti-hero-worship is first performed in the classroom as students find out that the same Jacksonian democracy that extended the franchise to white males deported and "detribalized" masses of Native Americans in what was known as Indian Territory. Further examples will include Lincoln's ambivalence towards race relations, and Theodore Roosevelt's vocal imperialism (supported by reformers like Jacob Riis) combined with ecological concerns. A final blow arrives as they come to terms with FDR's wide coalition, a coalition that included white supremacists, bosses, and advocates for eugenics—not to mention those who supported the confinement of Nisei during the war.

Jacksonian democracy is interesting, too, because it provides a point of contrast with the relationship between the Islands and Spain in that period. By the time of Jackson's presidency, the Islands received wheat from the United States, which was far more competitive than the grain raised in the Spanish Mainland. Outdated agricultural technologies, backward social structures, and poor means of transportation had restricted the markets for Peninsular wheat; instead, American cereal, which had to cross the Ocean, reached its destination in the Canaries in a shorter period of time than grain from the Mainland. In 1831, the Spanish administration levied foreign products in order to bolster Spanish exports, an act which further strained the chronically frail economy of the Islands, with its corollaries of social inequality and emigration to the Americas.⁴²

Emigration is the real epic of the Canary Islands. As a whole, the Canary diasporas have been a social response to exhausted economic cycles. It was in the middle of one of those critical episodes in the 1730s that the Spanish crown allowed a group of Canary immigrants to settle in the presidio de San Antonio as a means to prevent other European powers from claiming the area, as well as to christen the natives. Later, a few more islanders reached the borderlands of Spanish Louisiana and English Florida. "That," I say to the students, "is our contribution to the making of the United States." Initially they seem to share sympathy with the myth. But then I pose questions dealing with race politics. I ask students to reflect on the presumably political position of the third- or fourth-generation Canary-Tejanos who decided to first welcome American immigrants, and later assimilated into the dominant Anglo elite. I ask students to ponder the use of Manifest Destiny; how those assimilated Canaries must have contributed to re-construct Mexicans as "Others" in their own land, and how they took social advantage of the slave system. I can also extend this episode to another stage. By 1850, Cuba made half of its economic exchange with the United States. Diplomatic maneuvers like the Ostende Manifesto intended to incorporate the island into the United States. Cuba was also thought to be a future hinterland for the Confederacy. What should have been the role of white, self-reliant, Canary-Cuban yeomen in those pivotal times?

Whatever position our forbearers had adopted in the United States, every single year my students sympathize with the "Others," in a kind of communal anti-Frontier thesis. Their views on the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, and the ravages of Reconstruction against African Americans are predictable. But their interest in the birth of Chicano culture is doubly interesting. On the one hand, there is an interest in learning about the background of Chicano literature and of borderlands critical theory. On the other hand, we discuss the cultural models received from the U.S. which, until recently, minimized or outlined and ridiculed Latinas/os. Nativist features used to be underscored—be it the "eroticized underdevelopment"⁴³ of the US-Mexico border or the dysfunctional Puerto Rican underclass in the Northern cities. I do enjoy pointing out the rise of a Chicano subversive culture that appeared as soon as the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty was signed, in the ways that oral literature transformed banditry into social revolution. Thus students find connections between the epics of Juan Cortina or Joaquín Murrieta and the achievements of Pancho Villa, far better known in our culture—second only to U.S.-made El Zorro! Students seem painfully aware of the debasement of Mexican women into the role of Juanitas, and paradoxically, of the eventual rise of Spanish-speaking women as centers of Chicano society. They rightly acknowledge the differences of and similarities to Chicano/a experiences with the extended family in African American communities. This topic lends itself to an examination of how the roles of working women of all races west of the Mississippi have been hushed in opposition to the articulateness of middle class white women in the East—several of whom, by the way, became celebrated novelists.

I invite them to think about granting suffrage to women in Wyoming, ostensibly a milestone of active democracy. Was it a political ploy to provide bodies to the frontier and in passing, give two votes to the man? I then note that woman suffrage in Spain was passed for the first time in the 1930s, during the Second Republic, and with the strong opposition of the left. Also, I point out how the stereotypes have been negotiated in popular culture. I do not remember any cultural production focusing on Exoduster women; Mexican Juanitas (or more sexually passive Lupitas) are secondary but influential stereotypes in reinforcing the virtues of WASP women. I then ask students, "What were the blonde saloon 'girls' supposed to be doing?" Every year, a few students discover how effective Hollywood had been at disguising sexual commerce in the American national epic. Students then may better understand why a conservative judge in Texas ruled out the use of Spanish in public interactions, dismissing it as "chambermaids' speech." Eventually, they understand, too, the rationale for a majority of Californian voters supporting Proposition 187. I stress that these nativist traits do not respond to any extremist conspiracy or the legacy of Reaganian nationalism. If we roll back in time, we find previous examples in the deportation of one million Mexicans during the Eisenhower administration, the Zoot riots of 1943, the invasion of Veracruz, and other events. These examples lead to George Lipsitz's affirmation that "contempt for Mexican culture, the Spanish language, and the rights guaranteed to people of Mexican origin in the United States by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo are deeply ingrained in the history and culture of the United States."⁴⁴

When radical labor movements are discussed, students discover the American origins of holidays like Labor Day (May 1) or Woman's Day (March 8). The efforts of the American Federation of Labor to substitute an organic, nationalist identity for class solidarity stand in comparison to Spain. Particularly in Catalonia, by far the most industrialized area of this country, the Socialist-inspired Unión General de Trabajadores became a tacit temporary stand for the authoritarian regime of Primo de Rivera in the 1920s; in exchange, the revolutionary syndicate Confederación Nacional de los Trabajadores was banned and persecuted. In that historical timeline, populism becomes another episode that directly involved Canary Islanders in the United States.

Canary immigrants in Cuba arrived in South Florida as part of the labor force transferred from the Caribbean to work in tobacco manufacturing. In the mid-1890s, Canary-Cuban workers in places like Key West, Ybor City, or Tampa were at a crossroads of counter-Establishmentarian ideas. Anarchist immigrants from Spain had brought into Cuba subversive literature, which circulated among artisans and cigar workers; Martí had secured wide multiracial support for his Partido Revolucionario Cubano in Florida, which combined social issues with the plea for independence. A third layer in this environment is provided by the implosion of the Populist movement in the United States. The ideological confusion is apparent in the way ideas circulated from one faction into another. In July 1894, El Esclavo, a Spanish-language newspaper published in Tampa, informed readers of the Pullman strike in terms like the following:

What happened in Chicago has been a battle between capitalism on the one side and the laboring classes on the other. What strikes one's attention the most—and what workers should take into account more carefully—is that many of those who most vehemently denounced and fought black slavery in the Southern States are now the staunchest supporters of the current system of exploitation here, which keeps white workers in a far more humiliating situation than the one African slaves endured.⁴⁵

The editor of El Esclavo, Tenerife-born Secundino Delgado, would become the best known propagandist for the independence of the Canary Islands, and today is considered the padre of Canary nationalism. A sensitive issue like this one provokes a special interest in American populism among students. This topic prompts me then to cite the contradictory forces that later fissioned in the Progressive Era. Once I mention the Spanish-speaking communities in Florida, New York City, and the West, we then tend to expand José Martí's Nuestra América to the United States. Students actively participate in discussions on the Puerto Rican diaspora, and the meanings conflated in both the island as a "democracy's colony" (including sterilization campaigns and the disenfranchisement of the population but the eligibility of males for the military draft) and New York City's El Barrio.

Puerto Rican immigration, on the other hand, expands on the crucial topic of the migration waves of the time, their function in the development of the fordist model of production, and, in chain-reaction, how this production system fostered continuing progressive legislation to secure mass consumption for mass-produced goods. I am keen on pointing out that the American welfare state required segmentation in terms of class, gender and race. Nativism was a natural method to secure Americanism; it did not prove to be effective, however, in stemming the spread of jazz, blues and ragtime, which accompanied the migration of blacks into the cities of the North. Hopefully, this cultural narrative widens the students' perspectives on, say, DuBois, the naturalist writers trained in Muckraking journalism, and the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance and the Greenwich intellectuals of the time. This cultural narrative also provides references for those interested in the racial politics of rock and roll, "more important than the Emancipation Proclamation which was an edict handed down from above." ⁴⁶

Normalcy in the 1920s provides a good opportunity for teachers to make comparisons with Reaganism; I invite students to reread "the business of America is business" in the light of more contemporary events with which they would be more familiar. The core course ends with the New Deal and its legacy. Although the term "New Deal" is not new to students, they have most likely seen it as the historical background of the Lost Generation. I try to turn the situation on its head, so that these literary writings become negotiations of the social and political struggles that took place in that decade. FDR's efforts in securing the Second New Deal through breaching the Judiciary, the unlikely coalition that sustained his administration, and the inner tensions within the cabinet are topics worth mentioning to Spanish students who, by the way, get to learn a bit more about the Spanish Republic at the same time. At least on one occasion, a class discussion on the New Deal led students to comment on the lights and shades of Felipe González's Socialist administration in the 1980s. It is important to point out that the New Deal was criticized from both the left and the right. I pay particular attention to the rise of CIO and the class- and race-based support of the CPUSA, and contrast these events with the more dramatic context in which Spanish Frente Popular rose. The power of demagogues over a portion of the American population, too, lends further comparison with pre-Civil War Spain.

Of course, I remind them of Warren Susman's assertion about the centrality of Mickey Mouse to understand this period.⁴⁷ To the contrary with Susman's audience, my students do not snicker at this comment; rather, they ask me to repeat it, as if they misunderstood. Obviously, these kinds of comments deliver us back to the literary history with which students are more familiar, and then they can relate their literary fluency to the myth of "the People," so powerful and pervasive in the 1930s. Acknowledging Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston helps to disassemble the commercial hype that occluded the cultural contributions of folk in the 1960s.

There is another topic, yet, that I am keen on mentioning in the classroom: the self-destruction of the American intellectual left. My interest is twofold. First, I encourage them to trace the origins of the Partisan Review, a publication they have heard about in their studies. Second, the fight between Stalinists and Trotskyites in the United States gives a wider, international perspective to the war-within-the-war that was taking place on the Loyalist side in Spain (some knew about this event thanks to George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia; most, however, ignored it completely). The ideological suicide of the American left helps students to come to terms with the conservative conversion of some writers, as well as the emergence of left intellectual splinter factions that became so prevalent in the Cold War. With these premises in mind, I dare students who take my elective to explore the 1960s as a period less of hope and achievement, and more one of frustration and exhaustion. This angst was to be experienced in Spain two decades later.

I am confident that the lessons of American history can make us foreigners alert to the perils of a sacralized past. The self-censorship of the Enola Gay exhibition, for instance, does not have an exact correspondence in the Canary Islands. But if students have come to demystify the children of Canary-Texans who may have turned into slave-holders and white supremacists, they can also question the selective celebration of our heritage. If we agree that the flux of ideas making the "Canary Mind" for five centuries includes American republicanism and populism, anti-Americanism must be qualified and transformed into a well-informed revision of our civilization.

Otherwise, uncritical, marketed-oriented multiculturalism masks global Brazilianization.⁴⁸ As bell hooks states, cultural diversity includes "a place where difference could be acknowledged, where we would finally all understand, accept, and affirm that our ways of knowing are forged in history and relations of power."⁴⁹I dare my students to find multiculturalism in the glossy, colorful blowups of the United Colors of Benetton. Like our American counterparts, we are in the process of confronting the prospect of an "hourglass society"—a new technological and financial aristocracy on top, while the bottom is filled up by more and more individuals who struggle just to survive. Whereas few among the affluent need to hold a diploma in the humanities, a majority of my students of English anxiously seek their degree. And they are stuck for too long in unsteady, part-time jobs that defer their legitimate ambition to transcend their class—not to mention those middle-class students threatened by downward mobility. Indeed, they are learning the hard way the downside of the new economic order. There is nothing I can do about either their lack of financial security or professional prestige. Instead, I try to convince them they can hold the hindsight to articulate their present—that is to say, their children's past.

Notes

¹ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, p. 42.

² The curriculum at the English Department, remodeled in 1994, includes two core subjects of five credits each, "Historia y cultura de los países de habla inglesa, I" and "II." Another professor teaches "I", covering Tudor and Stuart England and colonial America. Two electives "Textos culturales en lengua inglesa I" and "II" are meant to be monographs for senior students. To the best of my knowledge, the only other alternative available for those interested in the field lies in the Department of History. Aside from the required core surveys (i.e., modern and contemporary Western history, history of the Americas), only one elective six-credit course ("Historia de América del Norte") deals almost entirely with the United States. However, since no knowledge of English is required for this course, secondary sources and bibliography are considerably limited for someone engaged in the history and culture of the United States. Although this situation means an improvement in comparison with the previous curriculum of humanities at La Laguna, it can give a token of the marginalization of historical studies concerning the United States inside and outside the department of English. Although I lack information from all Spanish universities, the data I possess so far suggest circumstances are similar throughout the country.

³ Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn, History on Trial, p. 7.

⁴ Anti-Americanism in Spain displays some distinctive features on account of the erratic role the United States had played in the last hundred years or so of Spanish political history, but it certainly responds to a common Western European pattern. See David Ellwood et al, "Questions of cultural exchange." Cfr. Paul Hollander, Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad, 1965-1990. Oxford: University Press, 1991.

⁵ Nash et al. called my attention to the parallel situation that could be established between former totalitarian states on either side of Europe. See History on Trial, esp. pp. 128 ff.

⁶ Lowenthal, "Identity, Heritage, and History," p. 45. I don't believe that these cultural manifestations reveal a necessarily alienated community that constructs its national identity based on foreign models. It strikes me, however, that socially responsible institutions (mass media, academic authorities, body politic) do not assume that a more complete study of the United States is needed in order to understand those sociocultural relations. I believe (much like Pablo Pozzi suggested in his case study of US history in Argentina) that a more thorough teaching and researching on America will enable a much larger number of people to promote critical thinking about the relation between the United States and the cultures that receive their practices, including historical revisions of events that may involve us. See Pozzi, "Huck Finn, Don Quixote, and Mother Jones," p. 1110.

⁷ In his study of American Studies in Scandinavia, David Nye led me to conclude the situation he describes is fairly similar to that of Spain. The case of the Canary Islands is more dramatic, due to their distance from the Continent, and the lack of well-equipped local resource centers to conduct research in, beyond the basic services of two university humanities libraries. See Nye "American Studies in Stereo," p. 11.

⁸ Statistics released about freshmen in English in the 1998-1999 year reveal information about the level of instruction in their family units. These data can then help us infer income levels. When asked about level of education of parents, respondents pointed out that 50.2% of fathers and 54.7% of mothers had a degree below high school or none at all; 29% of fathers and 28% of mothers held a high school degree; 10.3% of fathers and 11.4% of mothers had received a diploma from a community college (i.e. nursery, elementary teacher), and 10.5% of fathers and 6.1% of mothers held a university degree.

⁹ David Harlan, "Intellectual History," p. 603. Cfr. Bjørnar Olsen's (and Barthes') prompt denunciation of the author as sole proprietor of a text: "to desacralize the image of the author [...] becomes a necessary operation to a new epistemology of reading [...] We translate into the text the intervening history of theoretical and sociocultural development, we read into it things the author did not know about, and transform it into a product in the present." Olsen, "Barthes," p. 181. Cfr. John Storey, Cultural Studies, p. 2 ff.

¹⁰ Fortunately, eight semester courses in American literature may compensate for so narrow a schedule in US history. Although these hardly provide students with in-depth historical content, fundamental guidelines can be advanced to them—i.e., the pre-Civil War tensions around the writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin or the achievements of the Civil Rights movement and the Second Wave of feminists, as shown in the work of African American women writers.

¹¹ Lawrence Levine, The Unpredictable Past, pp. 295 passim. Quotation on 304; cfr. Jim Cullen, Born in the USA, p. 104. Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" has been a very illustrative case of discussions on "the way things should be." Students who had only paid attention to the chorus unheeded (or did not understand) the lines that comment racism, unemployment, and social immobility.

¹² Reading about the complaints of college teachers of American history in the United States, one is tempted to conclude that the resistance of students to question the visual culture is a worldwide phenomenon. See Kornblith and Lasser: "Teaching the American History Survey," esp. p. 1419.

¹³ Cfr. Laurence Veysey "The Autonomy of American History Reconsidered." I acknowledge Veysey's insight in the late 1970s to consider "transnational similarities" in the "post-industrial world" (p. 473). Published a decade before the Cold War ended, Veysey's piece was considered in its time a touchstone for discrediting the exceptionalist paradigm, especially as interpreted by the consensus school. I feel a current reading of Veysey's position for the internationalization of American history would require an element he was not alert enough to point out: the latest internationalization of the United States was carried out less by means of an intellectual effort than by the globalization of capitalism. The "new international order" amplifies Veysey's (as well as Bell's, on the other side of the debate) "post-industrial world" in a way that affects my students' approach to American history and culture—including the use of rap music to observe the legacy of Canary aborigines.

¹⁴ Or, as Pablo Pozzi explains in his article on the teaching of American history in Buenos Aires, "we cannot engage US history as if we were in the US." See Pozzi, "Huck Finn, Don Quixote, and Mother Jones," p. 1110.

¹⁵ Actually the content of my compulsory course is guided by a number of traditional segments. Alternative A: Colonial and Early Republic; The first industrial revolution in the United States; Slavery; The U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction; The Gilded Age and Progressive Era; The New Deal. Alternative B: Backgrounds of 19th-century America; The Second Industrial Revolution; Socio-cultural trends in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; Conservatism: World War I and the 1920s; The New Deal; World War II and the grounds of the Cold War. The Elective on the 1960s is organized around the following sections: Eisenhower's second term; Kennedy's New Frontier; Lyndon Johnson's Great Society; Civil Rights; The Rise and Fall of the New Left; Feminism; Black Power, La Raza, American Indian Movement; Counterculture; Vietnam; Coda: Nixon to Reagan.

¹⁶ Depending on year, I use the following texts for discussion:

Alternate A: Sidney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson; Karl Marx's "Genesis of Industrial Capitalism"; Herman Melville's "The Tartarus of Maids"; The Seneca Falls Declaration; PBS's documentary on The New York Negro Burial Ground/Excepts from Ken Burn's The Civil War; Excerpts from D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation; Real Cédula by the King of Spain on the settlement of San Antonio de Bexar; Henry D. Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government"; Walt Whitman's "I am of Old and Young," and "Now I Tell what I Knew in Texas"; Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn; Statement of the Patrons of Husbandry; Excerpts from Andrew Carnegie's "Triumphant Democracy" and Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull House.

Alternate B: Frederick J. Turner's "The Frontier in American History"; Excerpts from Andrew Carnegie's "Triumphant Democracy" and Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives; Excerpt from the autobiographies of Emma Goldman and Jane Addams; Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie; Charles Chaplin's The Kid/Uli Edel's Last Exit to Brooklyn; samples from The Crisis articles/Excerpts from W.E.B. DuBois's Soul of Black Folk; Sherwood Anderson's "The Egg"; Excerpts from the foundational statement of the Indiana KKK; Orson Welles' Citizen Kane; FDR's "Four Freedoms" Address/Excerpts from Henry Hampton's The Great Depression; John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and "interchapters" from the novel by Steinbeck; Excerpts from Walt Disney's Fantasia/World War II propaganda cartoons.

Elective on the 1960s: Excerpts from Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center; Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Address; JFK's Inaugural Address; Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove; Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"; Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet"; Excerpts from Henry Hampton's Eyes on the Prize; Luis Valdez' "The Tale of The Raza"; National Indian Youth Council's "Watts and Little Big Horn;"; Excerpts from Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Kate Millet's Sexual Politics; Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde; Ralph Nelson's Soldier Blue; Emile de Antonio's The Year of the Pig.

¹⁷ I would add this may certainly be the case of other European countries, as I have found out in the performance of foreign students at ULL involved in the Erasmus exchange.

¹⁸ Michael Frisch: "The Presentation of Urban History in Big-City Museums," p. 51.

¹⁹ For example, before I came across Who Built America? I made some complementary use of Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963). An abstracted list would also feature Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Jules R. Benjamin's The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution: An Empire of Liberty in an Age of National Liberation (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1990); some of the essays collected by Barton Bernstein in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (1968; London: Chatto & Windus, 1970); and Walter LaFeber's Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York: Norton, 1993).

²⁰ Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); American Social History Project, [ vol 1: Bruce Levine at al.; vol 2: Nelson Lichtenstein et al.], Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, 2 vols. (New York: Worth, 1989, 2000); Paul S. Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People. 2 vols. (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1996); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: University Press, 1977); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

²¹ James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: American Social Protest, from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987); David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: The SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Alexander Kendrick, The Wound Within: America in the Vietnam Years, 1945-1974 (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1974). For a more complete list of bibliographical sources in this course, I refer the reader to my department's webpage at www.ull.es/users/filina; otherwise, further questions and constructive comments are very welcome at jcruz@ull.es.

²² Cfr. The overlapping of national coherence and internal complexity in Richard Handler, "Is 'Identity' A Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?" p. 29; John Bodnar, "Public Memory in an American City," p. 76. I borrowed the concept of "post-patriotic" societies in Western Europe, from Michael Lind, Next American Nation, p. 7. Cfr. David Lowenthal's suggestion that some (I would say European) nations have diluted their nationalist constructions. Our saturation of "shameful episodes, disabling tragedies, conflicting loyalties" has led many Spaniards too to learn to qualify national epics. See Lowenthal, "Identity, heritage, and History;" quotation on p. 50.

²³ Quotation in Richard Buell, Jr, "The Committee Movement of 1779," p. 153. Cfr. Ian Tyrrell's dismissal of The United States as a case "outside" Western civilization, in "American Exceptionalism," p. 1031.

²⁴ Wilson, quoted in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 71.

²⁵ James Lowen, Lies Across America, p. 21.

²⁶ Quotation from Novick, That Noble Dream, pp. 332-333. Cfr. John P. Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics, pp. 344 ff.; Dorothy Ross, "Grand Narrative in Historical Writing," p. 659; Lewis, Culture of Inequality, p. 15. On Rockefeller's Colonial Williamsburg and Disneyland, cfr. Nash et al., History on Trial, p. 57, 162-165; Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History, p. 13 ff.

²⁷ Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955); David Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character ([1954]; Chicago: University Press, 1968); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom ([1949]; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society ([1950]; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957). The reader should notice, however, that in my classes I cite Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vantage, 1965), especially for his insights in the culture of imperialism.

²⁸ Veysey, "The Autonomy of American History Reconsidered," p. 470.

²⁹ Cfr. Tom Zaniello, Working Stiffs, Introduction; Steven Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, pp. 4-9.

³⁰ Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States ([1913]; New York: Free Press, 1986).

³¹ Cfr. Ian Tyrrell, The Absent Marx, p. 243; Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History, p. xii; Ross, "Grand Narrative in Historical Writing," p. 663. William Leach, Country of Exiles, p. 154.

³² Leon Fink, In Search of the Working Class, p. 238.

³³ James Green, Taking History to Heart, p. 2. Cfr. Lawrence Levine, The Opening of the American Mind, p. 97-99.

³⁴ Cfr. Janet Zandy, "The Job, the Job," p. 295.

³⁵ Cfr. Constance Coiner, "U.S. Working-Class Women's Fiction," esp. p. 257; Laura Hapke, "Telling Toil," p. 81.

³⁶ Eric Kline Silverman, "Geertz: Towards a More 'Thick' Understanding?", p. 153.

³⁷ LaCapra, "History, Language, and Reading," p. 824.

³⁸ See Robert Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, p. 44.

³⁹ Henry Glassie, "The Practice and Purpose of History," p. 962. Cfr. Nash et al, History on Trial, p. 272.

⁴⁰ Even some kind of meeting point can be found in the ideologies that celebrated America as an "exceptional" classless and limitless society on the one hand, and the way the Franco regime used to promote itself in the 1960s with a slogan, "Spain is Different," ostensibly addressed to the booming tourist market. Akira Iriye's advocacy to "denationalize history in order to internationalize it" led me to this and other comparisons that to the best of my knowledge, have escaped the literature written in Spanish. See Iriye, "The Internationalization of American History," quotation on p. 4; cfr. Veysey, "The Autonomy of American History," p. 455; Herbert Gutman, Power & Culture, p. 343; Tyrell, The Absent Marx, p. 231; Michael Kammen, In the Past Lane, p. 190.

⁴¹ See Manuel González, La Ilustración en Canarias y su proyección en América, pp. 45 ff; Ídem, "Masonería norteamericana," pp. 11, 18.

⁴² Cfr. Antonio M. Macias ad José A. Rodríguez, "La economía contemporánea," esp. p. 379.

⁴³ Rosa Linda Fragoso , "Recycling Colonialist Fantasies on the Texas Borderland," p. 178.

⁴⁴ George Lipsitz, "'Home is Where the Hatred Is:' Work, Music, and the Transnational Economy," p. 193.

⁴⁵ "Lo ocurrido en Chicago ha sido una batalla entre el capitalismo de un lado y las clases productoras del otro. Lo que llama más la atención y en lo que deben los obreros fijarse con más detenimiento es, que muchos de los que más denunciaron y combatieron la esclavitud de los negros de los Estados del Sur, son ahora los más obcecados sostenedores del presente sistema de explotación que aquí existe, el cual mantiene á los trabajadores blancos en una situación mucho más vejaminosa que la que sufrían los esclavos africanos." J. Cerraí, "Vamos caminando." El Esclavo, July 24, 1894.

⁴⁶ Cfr. Beverly Moss, "Intersections of Race and Class in the Academy," p. 163; Quotation in Campbell and Kean, American Cultural Studies, p. 153.

⁴⁷ Warren Susman, Culture as History, p. 103.

⁴⁸ Cfr. Alain Lipietz, "Post-Fordism and Democracy," passim; quotation on "hourglass society" on p. 344. Cfr. Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past, p. 38. See also Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, p. 178.

⁴⁹ Teaching to Transgress, p. 30.

References

Berkhofer, Robert: Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Bodnar, John: "Public Memory in an American City: Commemoration in Cleveland." In John Gillis, (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1994.

Buell, Jr., Richard: "The Committee Movement of 1779 and the Formation of Public Authority in Revolutionary America." In James Henretta et al. (eds.), The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority and Ideology. New York: Knopf, 1991.

Campbell, Neil, and Alasdair Kean: American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture. London: Routledge, 1997.

Coiner, Constance: A "U.S. Working-Class Women's Fiction: Notes toward an Overview." Women Studies Quarterly, 1-2, 1995.

Cullen, Jim: Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition. Westview, CO: Harper Perennial, 1997.

Davis, Mike: Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class. London: Verso, 1986.

Diggins, John Patrick: The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Ellwood, David, and Mel van Elteren, Mick Gidley, Rob Kroes, David E. Nye, Robert Rydell: "Questions of Cultural Exchange: The NIAS Statement on the European Reception of American Mass Culture." Odense American Studies International Series, n1 13, December 1994.

Fink, Leon: In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Fregoso, Rosa Linda: "Recycling Colonialist Fantasies on the Texas Borderland." In Hamid Nafici (ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Frisch, Michael: "The Presentation of Urban History in Big-City Museums." In Warren Leon- Roy Rosenzweig, History Museums in the US: A Critical Assessment. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Glassie, Henry: "The Practice and Purpose of History." Journal of American History, 81:3, December 1994.

Green, James: Taking History to the Heart: The Power of the Past to Shape Social Movements. Amherst: University of Massachusetts 2000.

Gutman, Herbert (Iran Berlin, ed.): Power & Culture: Essays on the American Working Class. New York: Pantheon, 1987

Handler, Richard: "Is 'Identity' A Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?" In John Gillis, (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1994.

Hapke, Laura: "Telling Toil: Issues in Teaching Labor Literature." In Shery Linkon (ed.), Teaching Working Class. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Harlan, David: "Intellectual History and the Return of Literature." American Historical Review, 94:3, June 1989.

Hernández González, Manuel: "Masonería norteamericana y emancipación en Hispanoamérica: La obra del canario Eduardo Barry." Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos. Madrid-Las Palmas, 37, 1991. Pp. 337-360.

Hernández González, Manuel: La Ilustración en Canarias y su proyección en América. Las Palmas: Ediciones del Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, 1993.

hooks, bell: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Iriye, Akira: "The Internationalization of History." American Historical Review, 94:1, February 1989.

Kammen, Michael: In The Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Kornblith, Gary, and Carol Lasser: "Teaching the American History Survey at the Opening of the Twentieth-First Century: A Round Table Discussion." Journal of American History, 87:4; March 2001.

LaCapra, Dominick: "History, Language, and Reading: Waiting for Crillon." American Historical Review. 100:3, June 1995.

Leach, William: Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life. New York: Pantheon, 1999.

Leff, Mark H.: "Revisioning U.S. Political History." American Historical Review, 100:3, June 1995.

Levine, Lawrence: The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History. Boston: Beacon, 1996.

Levine, Lawrence: The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History. NY: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Lewis, Michael: Culture of Inequality. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.

Lind, Michael: The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution. New York: Free Press, 1995.

Lipietz, Alain: "Post-Fordism and Democracy." In Ash Amin (ed.), Post-Fordism: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

Lipsitz, George: "'Home is Where the Hatred Is:' Work, Music, and the Transnational Economy." In Hamid Nafici, (ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Loewen, James W.: Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. New York: New Press, 1999.

Lowenthal, David: "Identity, Heritage, and History." In John Gillis, (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1994.

Macías Hernández, Antonio M., and José A. Rodríguez Martín: "La economía contemporánea." In Antonio de Béthencourt Massieu (ed.), Historia de Canarias. Las Palmas: Ediciones del Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, 1995.

Moss, Beverly: "Intersections of Race and Class in the Academy." In Alan Shepard et al. (eds.), Coming to Class: Pedagogy and the Social Class of Teachers. Portsmouth, NH: CrossCurrents, 1998.

Nash, Gary, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross E. Dunn: History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past. New York, Knopf, 1997.

Novick, Peter: That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: University Press, 1988.

Nye, David E.: "American Studies in Stereo: Nordic Perspectives." Odense American Studies International Series, n1 35, August 1998.

Olsen, Bjørnar: "Barthes: From Sign to text." In Christopher Tilley (ed.), Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics, and Post-Structuralism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Pozzi, Pablo: "Huck Finn, Don Quixote, and Mother Jones: On the Practice of US History in Argentina." Journal of American History, 81:3, December 1994.

Rosenzweig, Roy, and David Thelen: The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Ross, Dorothy: "Grand Narrative in Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty." American Historical Review, 100:3, June 1995.

Ross, Steven J.: Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Working Class. Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1998.

Silverman, Eric Kline: "Geertz: Towards a More 'Thick' Understanding?" In Christopher Tilley (ed.), Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics, and Post-Structuralism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Storey, John: Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture: Theories and Methods. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Susman, Warren: Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

Tyrrell, Ian: "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History." American Historical Review, 91:4, October 1991.

Tyrrell, Ian: Absent Marx: Class Analysis and Liberal History in Twentieth-Century America. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986.

Veysey, Laurence: "The Autonomy of American History Reconsidered." American Quarterly, 31:4, Fall 1979.

Wallace, Mike: Mickey Mouse History, and Other Essays on American History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.

Zandy, Janet: "The Job, the Job: The Risks of Work and the Uses of Texts." In Alan Shepard et al. (eds.), Coming to Class: Pedagogy and the Social Class of Teachers. Portsmouth, NH: CrossCurrents, 1998.

Zaniello, Tom: Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraffs: An Organized Guide to Films about Labor. Ithaca: IRL/Cornell University Press, 1996.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.

"You Can't Go Home, Yankee:"Teaching U.S. History to Canary Islands Students

Juan José Cruz University of La Laguna, Spain

Notes

References

Juan José Cruz
University of La Laguna, Spain