History I Never Learned In School: Hispanic Heritage Month

We revisit the extreme whitewashing of history taught in schools. 

To preface, I understand that a class labeled “American History” focuses on the history of America, but there’s no excuse for the World History classes to exclude the history of every country south of Mexico. I also know that it could be argued that excluding all of this history because most of my schools were underfunded and on the East Coast, but to that, I will mention that my college history classes were in white schools with money, so money can’t be the issue here.

It is absolutely unfair that the history of America is told without the mention of the relationship with Latin American countries. I remember seeing memes on Tumblr about remembering the Alamo, but what is the Alamo? I could’ve Googled it, but that’s the issue. Why was this not something mentioned in history class? Why was our talk about westward expansion in history class only about the gold rush and not about the fact that the West Coast was established on Mexican land?

I remember in high school, I got into an argument with someone about Cinco de Mayo. She said it was Mexico’s Independence Day, I said she was wrong. The argument progressed to involve Googling about Cinco de Mayo, reading the Wikipedia page, and bringing in a nearby Spanish teacher just for the girl to go on to continue to believe that Cinco de Mayo was Mexico’s Independence Day.

I grew up in New Jersey, and there’s a massive Hispanic population in the Tri-State Area. The schools I went to were predominately Black and Brown so maybe half of my classmates were Hispanic. My little sisters are Puerto Rican and the Puerto Rican Day Parade was always a day of great pride for the community. My question here is, why did none of our classes ever talk about Puerto Rico? Not once did a class ever mention how Puerto Rico became an American colony territory. Or even that it was a colony territory and not a state. I don’t even remember any class going into detail about the Spanish-American War, which is how Puerto Rico became an American colony territory.

 It is wild to me how history can be taught by excluding so much history. We had to take multiple American and World History classes, how was this much history something that never made the cut? How is there no mention of Hispanic history when so many of your students Hispanic? I’m not blaming the teachers for this though. I know that it is on the school board to pick the curriculum for these classes, but again, how can you say you’re teaching history while excluding so much of it from so much of the world? It has to be acknowledged that Hispanic countries have a great amount of history that should be taught in pre-college schooling, these histories are what inspire the future. It is frankly disrespectful to say that history can be taught while leaving out half of the world.