Commentary : Important Part of History Languishes in Our Own Back Yard

When the members of my family were students in the San Diego city schools, United States history was taught to us as anything that happened anywhere but here.

We graduated knowing that history happened in Massachusetts at the Boston Tea Party, in Pennsylvania where Ben Franklin flew a kite, and in Virginia at Mt. Vernon, Monticello and Williamsburg. We knew, too, that history happened along the banks of the Washita, the Niobrara, the Red River and the Rio Grande; on the Santa Fe and the Oregon trails; along the Natchez Trace; at a Godforsaken spot known as the Humboldt Sink, and in the Sierra Nevada, where gold was discovered and the Donner party came to grief.

But we left school knowing nothing at all about the Mexican history of San Diego County.

In elementary school, we were taught about America’s breadbasket (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas) and about the cradles of democracy (Pennsylvania and Virginia), but never that the land we lived on had once belonged to the Republic of Mexico.

In junior high school, there was time to teach us about the War of Jenkin’s Ear (Georgia) and in high school, time to teach us about the Battle of New Orleans. But there never seemed to be any time left to spend on the Mexican War, the war where the U.S. Army fought and lost the Battle of San Pasqual in North San Diego County.

Yes, we were taught some local history. My mother, my children, and I were all told of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese, who touched the tip of Point Loma in 1542. We were told, too, of Father Junipero Serra, a Spaniard, who founded Mission San Diego Mission de Alcala in 1769. Each of us was assigned to write a report on Alonzo Horton, a North American, who bought bayfront property in 1867 for 26 cents an acre. And we were, at one time or another, taken to visit Old Town on class field trips.

But neither I nor anyone else in my family learned anything at all about our Mexican history from these class trips. If we were not distracted by the souvenir shops or sighing over the sad fate of Ramona, then we were grouped around our teacher to listen to her read the words from the plaque on the boulder in the Old Town Plaza:

“On this date the United States flag was first raised in Southern California by Lt. Stephen D. Rowan, U.S.N., commanding sailors and Marines, July 29, 1846.”

Our teachers did not ignore Mexico completely. In elementary school, my mother recalls, she was taught to do the Mexican hat dance, and her class made butcher-paper serapes and sombreros to wear when they performed it.

In a junior high history class, from a film starring Donald Duck, I first heard of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. (Donald wore a serape and a sombrero, too.)

When my son was graduated from high school in 1985, all he knew of U.S. and Mexican history was that it happened in one state, Texas; involved two people, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, and could be summed up in three words: Remember the Alamo.

San Diego city schools’ students are still taught little of the cultural, political and economic history we share with Mexico. In 1988, the study of “our community” is a third-grade lesson plan.

For the most part, San Diegans are taught, as I was, that history happened, not in places named Nuevo or Puerto, but in New Bedford, Mass., or in Portland, Me. So we are ignorant of the history we share with the country 15 minutes from our front doors. And nothing shows our ignorance more than the directions we gave to an out-of-state visitor on the third of July.

Charley asked, “Where do I go to see the early, historic San Diego?”

Like too many other longtime San Diegans would do--and they, too, should know better--we sent him no further back in time than to the Gaslamp Quarter downtown.