Objectives
Somos americanos: teaching civic values for the minority majority generation
At current population trends, my students will live out middle agefor most, the years of highest earning and greatest voter participationin a "majority minority" United States.1 Spanish is an integral part of the studies that prepare students for citizenship. The story of Mexican Americans' struggle to negotiate a place as citizens across the first half of the twentieth century is an integral part of the United States' continuing renegotiation of its own sense of national identity.
At the start of the twentieth century, the United States was a white man's republic; the Supreme Court had only just granted birthright citizenship to nonwhites in 1898.2 The country was waging a war to annex Spanish lands even as vast stretches of territory wrested from Mexico in 1848 still awaited colonization by English speakers. Slavery was a living memory, and a vivid one. By the middle of the 1950s, the American self conception had changed so greatly that subsequent generations looking back would scarcely recognize as America the America that lay beyond the veil of the Second World Warthat is, if they dared to lift the veil at all. By viewing American history from the precarious vantage point afforded Spanish speakers in the United States as nonwhite white peoplethat is, legally white by treaty, socially nonwhite by customstudents will profit from a deeper understanding, not only of their Latino neighbors, but of their nation.
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