Textbooks and Teaching

La Castaña Project:
A History Field Laboratory Experience

Cecilia Aros Hunter and Leslie Gene Hunter

Our project, La Castaña, demonstrates the possibilities for teaching outside the box that emerge when an archivist and a history professor join forces to introduce survey-level students to historical research and the excitement of original and primary sources. Our team—Cecilia Aros Hunter, an archivist, and Leslie Gene Hunter, a historian—structured a laboratory experience in which students became discoverers and detectives, joining us in searching trunks, attics, garages, and other family storage areas for documents that will illuminate the history and culture of the peoples of the deep south Texas region in which our university is located.	1
Our collaboration takes place at Texas A&M University—Kingsville, about ninety miles from the Mexican border and about fifteen miles inland from the Gulf coast, between Brownsville and Corpus Christi, Texas. The university is the oldest in the area, and for seventy-five years it has served a bilingual and multicultural student body that tends to be from small towns and agricultural communities. The students have spent their lives on large ranches and small farms. Although the area is inhabited primarily by people of Mexican descent who speak Spanish, other ethnic communities exist where English is not the primary language; thus the area is both bilingual and multicultural. Recognizing this unique heritage, we named our venture La Castaña, Spanish for "the trunk." Our project has both a pedagogical objective and a specific content goal—helping preserve local history. The two come together when our students realize that history is not something remote, dealing only with people in distant places and ancient times. Rather, we seek to make history immediate and relevant by showing students the drama of the lives of men and women in their local area. By promoting a concept of the archives as a laboratory, we bring students to an understanding of how history is determined, researched, written, and preserved. Students realize that they are making history and are the results of history.	2
At first we asked our students to focus on locating information about the Mexican and Mexican American communities. We maintained that despite the growing interest in Hispanics, who were quickly becoming the largest minority group in the United States, not enough documents have been collected to report the history of the group accurately, and especially the history of Mexican immigrants into Texas. Although there is a strong community of Tejanos (people of Mexican descent who were in Texas before 1848, when they became Americans as part of the spoils of war), an even larger group of newer immigrants jealously guard their documents. They fear that those documents may be their only link with the past or that their history will not be highly regarded and cared for by archives that have traditionally been Anglo establishments. In time we came to appreciate that other communities had immigrated into the area in the early twentieth century after the discovery of artesian water and the development of irrigation made farming as important to the economy as ranching had been.	. . .