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Playing the Pivot: Teaching Latina/o History in Good Times and Bad
Pablo Mitchell
| I will begin with a confession. As I see it, the first time I taught Latina/o history was a disaster. It was fall 2000, and I was a newly hired assistant professor at Oberlin College. I had just finished my dissertation over the summer and had almost zero teaching experience—I had been a teaching assistant for several courses in graduate school. I also did not like the idea of standing in front of dozens of twenty-year-olds and lecturing them on history-related topics, or on anything else for that matter. I had been fairly content squirreled away in the Pittsburgh hills, and the thought of several rows of skeptical students leaning back in their chairs, arms crossed, as I lectured did not thrill me. It did not help that I had gone to a small liberal arts college and had been precisely that kind of student—capable and engaged, but also skeptical and even a little suspicious of my professors. |
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At the same time, I was thrilled to be able to teach a course in Latina/o history. My colleagues placed no restrictions on me, no hints to stay away from this topic or nudges to include that event. I thought, and still do, that there are enough similarities between the histories of Chicanas/os and Puerto Ricans and Cuban Americans, not to mention immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Central America and elsewhere in Latin America, to justify treating their diverse experiences in the United States within a single, semester-long course. |
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As I saw it, I could go in two directions. I could treat the history of each group as a relatively discrete unit—a section on Chicana/o history followed by one on Puerto Ricans, and so on, with transition days between topics to highlight similarities and differences. Alternatively, I could move chronologically from the sixteenth century to the near present, ending more or less with the Mariel boatlift in the 1980s. Along the way, I would shuttle around in space rather than in time, from the Mexican North and the American Southwest to the Spanish Caribbean and Miami and New York, describing what life was like in Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, how nuevomexicanas/os in 1898 reacted to the Spanish American War, or how Puerto Ricans viewed the Peter Pan flights from Cuba in the 1960s. |
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I chose the latter approach. I chose poorly. Without an adequate textbook, I spent the semester feverishly writing lectures, a man on the run trying to unite disparate histories into coherent narratives. I compared slavery in the nineteenth-century Caribbean with slavery in the Southwest; honor and shame in New Mexico and Puerto Rico; Desi Arnaz and Rita Moreno. Some lectures worked well; others were failures. I limped to the end of the semester and vowed, never again. Since then I have stuck, even clung, to the first option, organizing the course around individual groups. I still do not use a textbook, though I experimented one term with Ilan Stavans and Lalo Alcaraz's Latino U.S.A.: A Cartoon History and was fairly happy with the thematic coverage, if not the obviously thin content (it is a cartoon history, right?). I use transition classes at the end of each section to reemphasize broader themes in Latina/o history. Sometimes I even compare slavery systems and talk about honor and shame.1 |
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