Mexico Neglected in the Classroom, Task Force Says

Kirk Ankeney starts his American history course each year by comparing the times of Thomas Jefferson and Father Junipero Serra, who set up the mission system in Spanish California.

“The 15 years that Father Serra was in California were at the same time that Jefferson first rose up in prominence in the (Virginia) House of Burgesses,” explained Ankeney, a social studies teacher at Muirlands Middle School in La Jolla.

“And on July 3, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence is about to be signed, I show the students a letter from a Spanish viceroy to the commandant of the presidio in San Diego ordering him to have his men stay away from the Indian women.”

Just that little bit of historical juxtaposition spurs his junior high students to begin thinking about differences in Mexican and American history, and of how all of California once belonged to a country that many in the United States now view negatively as a source of illegal immigration and nothing else, he said.

“There is a lot of opportunity to teach about Mexico beyond just the same old fluff of fiestas and Cinco de Mayo,” Ankeney said.

But in too many schools around California and the nation, Mexico remains an intellectual “black hole” for students--with the efforts of teachers like Ankeney few and far between--despite Mexico’s growing importance to the United States, a new education report concludes.

“The primary public image of Mexico in the United States remains that of an exotic, inexpensive tourist haven,” said Elsie Begler, a San Diego State University professor who chaired the national Task Force on Mexico in the K-12 curriculum. “And the image of Mexico as a country gets transfered over to the image of Mexican-Americans in this country. . . . In addition, people in California tend to react to Mexico in terms of immigration issues.”

The task force said ignorance and misperception regarding Mexico result in large part from the “conspicuous neglect of accurate, substantive and ongoing study . . . at the elementary and secondary school levels.”

Begler pointed out that the lack of emphasis on Mexico is symptomatic of a general shortcoming, often cited in educational journals, in international education for American students.

“But we say that Mexico has a special importance to us that needs to be taught, and not just in terms of understanding recent bilateral issues but also in terms of understanding that Mexico is an independent, autonomous nation in its own right,” she said. Not only is a controversial free-trade pact pending between the two countries, but San Diego is attempting to design a workable joint airport arrangement with Mexico.

The task force included professors from UC San Diego as well as from other major American universities. It was sponsored by the Ford Foundation, and was an outgrowth of an earlier and larger Ford Foundation task force that looked at the future status of U.S.-Mexico relations.

“At the very least, we need to have students understand the art, music, social interactions and multiethnicity of Mexico and not reduce everything to stereotypes,” said Peter Smith, director of the UCSD Center of Iberian and Latin American Studies.

Given the dominant negative images of Mexico the task force found among American students and textbooks, Begler said teachers need a lot of training in how to present a more complex view “without lapsing into boosterism.”

“The task force had a hard time with this,” Begler said, “given the illegal immigration, poverty, corruption, drugs and other bits of knowledge that students in a classroom may already have.”

As Eric Vanyoung, professor of Latin-American history at UCSD said: “People go down to Tijuana and see the sewage and the colonias (slums) and find it had to reconcile with the two-century struggle of Mexico toward democratic reform. There are real contradictions.”

Said Begler: “Instructionally, you have to acknowledge the problems--they are there--but not in a way to reinforce a totally negative conclusion. And that’s not easy.”

Laura Kuhlken includes Mexico in her social studies lessons for second- and third-grade students at Northmont School in the La Mesa-Spring Valley Elementary School District. She is a graduate of Begler’s International Studies Education Project at SDSU, which runs seminars for teachers on how to improve their social studies and history curricula.

“We even talk about the border sewage problem,” said Kuhlken, who emphasizes current events and has her students categorize issues about a country on a “culture wheel” according to political, social, religious or cultural significance.

“One day, I talked about sewage from the viewpoint of Mexico being totally in the wrong, and the next day, I took the other side completely, and then asked the students to come up with their own solutions,” she said.

“Even on illegal immigration, I present different perspectives and ask the students what they think ought to be done.”

Kuhlken shies away from teaching about another country through festivals or food because “it can stereotype so easily.

“I remember that as a student, I thought that all of Africa had lions and zebras. I had no idea that there were other regions, many cultures,” Kuhlken said, attributing her misconceptions to the way Africa was taught.

“Six or seven years ago, I even had a student teacher who talked about Africa as one large country,” she said.

To get her students thinking, Kuhlken shows them pictures of middle-class homes in Mexico City and barrio dwellings in East Los Angeles, asking the students to select which is Mexico and which is the United States.

“I just blow their minds in terms of stereotypes because they always see East L.A. as Mexico and Mexico City as the United States,” she said. “The point is that even at their age, I can get them thinking that there are two or more sides to every issue. . . . So much of improving their ability to think is in building their awareness.”

Simone Arias, in her world history classes at Morse High School in Paradise Hills, tries to show how attitudes in Mexico and Latin America toward the United States have clear roots back to the Age of Exploration.

The way European attitudes developed toward their Latin colonies--in terms of superior/inferior relationships--affects the way Mexico and other countries view America today, she said.

“We also talk about why Mexicans then want to come here, about jobs, about corruption in their country, about previous efforts to control immigration, and were they good or bad, and would they work now or not?

“I don’t have the solutions--in fact, my own lack of knowledge about Mexico and Latin America is symptomatic of how Western civilization has been emphasized traditionally in schools.”

Ankeney, in his junior high classes, gives students comparisons between America’s democratic traditions, growing out of English common-law developments from the 15th Century on, and those of Mexico, where there was no self-government, no town meetings, no Mayflower filled with eager colonists, and hundreds of years of neglect from the mother country--Spain.

“The students begin to see the difference between our revolution and that of Mexico, where all the heroes are later killed or excommunicated, where none survive compared to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who go on to become Presidents,” he said.

Ankeney also pricks his students’ interest by telling how Abraham Lincoln was among those who argued against the War of 1848, when America took control of much of the southwest and California from Mexico.

In doing so, he said the students can more easily see why Mexicans do not consider that war “a glorious affirmation of Manifest Destiny,” and that such attitudes color the country’s approach to contemporary issues with America.

But in order to teach more deeply about Mexico, Ankeney said teachers need to be exposed both to meatier historical material as well as to more creative ways of using the material with students. He has participated in several summer workshops at UCSD designed to boost teacher self-confidence and knowledge.

“One problem is that the material (textbooks) is not readily available for teachers,” he said, adding that elementary school teachers in particular need greater assistance “because they are not trained to be history teachers.”

Another problem for teachers is in handling criticism from parents or community people who might see in a multiperspective approach a failure to emphasize the moral superiority of America’s actions historically.

“A lot of the (willingness) of teachers to experiment depends on the support they will get from their administrators,” said Carol Guerrero, a history and economics teacher at Bonita Vista High School in Chula Vista.

Begler said that a more complex approach “doesn’t mean that history is taught without values or that everything has to be equivalent.

“But I think a major goal should be to have children understand that there are a multiplicity of perspectives, that they are out there, that a Mexican may come at an historical event from a different point of view.”