Cinco de Mayo revisited - Mexicans weigh in, and one other fellow...

As Cinco de Mayo approaches, many Americans (both of Mexican and non-Mexican extraction) will get drunk without every really knowing why.  As I mentioned in my last post, Cinco de Mayo is largely celebrated by Mexican Americans (not to be confused with Mexicans still living in Mexico).  I had made the assertion that this was ostensibly to feel a closer sort of connection to the homeland from which they find themselves separated. (The Mexican Americans, anyway; the non-Mexican Americans just want to get drunk.)  I got some feedback that made me think, however... much of it from Mexicans who were of the opinion that Americans’ celebration of Cinco de Mayo is, in many ways, a big joke.

One poster responded:

My wife is from Mexico City, she knew the historical significance, but said that maybe they do something in Puebla but it isn't celebrated by anyone she has ever known in Mexico. As an American, I wouldn't say it is celebrated here either, just an excuse for people to get drunk. People have to know what something is to celebrate it, right? and Americans know nothing about Cinco de Mayo except "Mexico" "holiday" and "drinking". In other words... nothing about what it really is. What they are really celebrating is getting drunk in the name of Mexico.

This seemed to be a common theme, a Mexican contempt for the over-the-top celebrations (and the ignorance that fueled them) of Cinco de Mayo north of the border. For some, the reasons are historical.  One offered, by way of local knowledge, a "balanced" analysis of the history involved:

Puebla es (aún hoy día) una ciudad netamente conservadora. En la época de la intervención Francesa, la sociedad Poblana (y gran parte de la de la ciudad de México) estaba a favor de que un país tan avanzado como Francia tomara el poder en México y nos gobernara. Esto era visto como necesario por parte de quienes creían que no había otra manera de pacificar el país (que llevaba 50 años enfrascado en guerras civiles). Los liberales de esa época, consideraban que esta actitud era una actitud vendepatrias y a todos los que ansiaban un gobierno Francés, traidores a la patria. Nomás hay que recordar que, mientras que la alta sociedad Poblana era pro intervención, las clases bajas apoyaban al gobierno de Juárez y murieron en gran número defendiendo la ciudad (que finalmente cayó). Así que sería más justo decir que la Alta sociedad conservadora Poblana si puede ser acusada de traición, mientras que el Pueblo poblano tuvo una actitud heróica.

Another was less equanimous:

Hay un refrán: "A perro, perico y poblano, nunca le des la mano." 

Todos por acá recuerdan que durante la invasión estadounidense los poblanos recibieron con los brazos abiertos y hasta alimentaron a los gringos, tanto así que el desgraciado del general Scott armó con poblanos la "Mexican Spy Company", para usarlos de ayuda en la guerra (gracias a su ayuda, los gringos luego atraparon a los del Batallón de San Patricio, en la batalla de Churubusco). 

Nunca olvidaremos, nunca perdonaremos.

Yet another poster addressed the article  directly, with a more mature criticism (that still stung a little bit) but a wistful, almost poetic, look at a severed population, and what s/he calls "the mythology of the expat":

Este artículo falla en desentrañar los aspectos más obscuros y profundos del aparentemente inocente "Cinco de Mayo". Es verdad que corresponde a una nostalgia por la patria abandonada de los ancestros, y que es la desconexión casi total con la cultura madre lo que lleva a los Mexicanos-Americanos a celebrar este día con el fervor del día de la Independencia. Sin embargo, esto es un análisis superficial de los móviles socio-psciológicos que crearon la fiesta en su manifestación actual. 

La masa no se moviliza sola, sino que corresponde a empresas, sobre todo en EEUU, moldear y explotar la necesidad de mitología de los expatriados. No debería llamarse Cinco de Mayo, que como bien apuntan, no es celebrado en el interior de la República, y no significa nada históricamente, sino "Corona Day", porque finalmente fue un "día festivo" planeado por ellos, para su beneficio, y que al final del día solo representa "cultura light", donde celebrar consiste en tomar Corona y tequila, y creer que por hacerlo estás honrado, recordando, etc. a una cultura que se te escapó para siempre.

Lastly, two short posts that were informative, to the point... and in English:

WE, born and raised in Mexico, know exactly what Cinco de Mayo is. The most that we would get close to celebrat[ing it], is holiday at school, meaning NO SCHOOL. I felt actually embarrassed when I moved to the US, and found out that even Mexican-American[s] celebrated in a bigger way May 5th, rather than September 16th [Mex. Declaration of Independence], and even angry, when nobody even acknowledged November 20th (Mexican Revolution). Most Mexican-Americans come from born-and-raised Mexican parents, and it's a shame that they have forgotten to teach their children about Mexican culture.

And simply:

Ahem. Mexicans know about their own history. You are confusing Mexicans with Mexican Americans.

But I reserve the place of honor for the response that actually fried my cookies.  I might well deserve snark from Mexicans, who ostensibly know a thing or two more about Cinco de Mayo than I, but when a (non-Mexican) MA TESOL-holding ESL professor who cut his teeth teaching adults in Southern California (no shortage of Mexican-Americans there, last I checked), and who has now become an expat teaching English in the Middle East, wrote the following, not on my blog page, not in reddit.com (where people will write anything – one Mexican poster wrote, in response to my blog, “[¡]Señor escritor, usted es una verga parada!”), but on the page of a members-only professional ESL discussion board, the following:

"I think it's offensive that a country that dumps its worst criminals and low lifes [sic] feels entitled to tell America how to treat them. Why don't you ask Mexicans to celebrate holidays in El Salvador? Do you know what kind of response you'll get?  Better yet, try teaching Mexicans in the slums of Long Beach or Compton. People like you are the reason America is losing sovereignty."

I just had to respond in kind.  Call it a pathological weakness.

"People like you are the reason America is losing sovereignty" ????  You and I, sir, are going to have a problem.

I taught Mexicans in the slums of the San Francisco Bay Area - Oakland, San Jose, East Palo Alto, Hayward... for 15 years. I know that of which I speak. "People like you," sir, to use your ignorant turn of phrase (did you even look at my profile to see my experience before you called me out for what I have and have not experienced in my professional career?) are the reason why "people like me" blog. If you are so concerned about America's sovereignty and the state of its national integrity, why don't you come back from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia [Note: poster has spent 2 of the last 3 years teaching English in S.A. and Kuwait] and be part of the solution, instead of hurling firebrands at the stonework from a distance?

Further, with regard to your opening salvo ("I think it's offensive that a country that dumps its worst criminals and low lifes [sic] feels entitled to tell America how to treat them..."), your ability to compound logical fallacies is truly staggering. "A country that dumps its worst criminals..." implies volition which is unfounded, is a grotesque straw man hyperbole of Mexico itself as a nation, and an utter non sequitur in that it is completely irrelevant to my thesis. In fact, if you actually read my blog (which I'm pretty sure you did not, since your retort is so completely off-topic and irrelevant) you would have read the part where I acknowledged, "the Mexico of the 20th and 21st centuries did/does not appear to have held up the glorious promise of its inspiring foundational period..." but why ruin a perfectly good rant with inconsequential irrelevancies like detail, precision, clarity, accuracy, and nuance?

Your follow-up ("Why don't you ask Mexicans to celebrate holidays in El Salvador?") is equally silly and irrelevant. First of all, Mexicans would not celebrate a holiday *in* El Salvador. Perhaps you meant to ask "Why don't you ask Mexicans to celebrate Salvadorean holidays?" Ahhh, now that's a relevant question, to which I have two answers: 1.) If the E.S. holidays are relevant/germane to the historical legacy of Mexico, then sure; 2.) Again, further proof that you did not actually read my post, you missed the part (right at the end, in a paragraph all by itself) that read "Is it appropriate to recognize a non-U.S. holiday in the U.S.? Does it set us down a slippery slope? I dunno, I’m just [asking]"

So you see, the very purpose of the blog was to stimulate discussion. You sir, are clearly not interested in discussion; you prefer the name-calling approach. That's fine, I have thick skin. I see that you have a few years of ESL experience, mostly with older learners, in California, so I won't accuse you of not knowing anything (despite evidence to the contrary) but I will merely say that my 15 years teaching English and Spanish and ESL in largely Chicano areas in California, plus my Spanish, English and ESL teaching at the college and university level, plus my experiences as an adviser for Latinos Unidos and MEChA, plus my work as a Department Chair in Spanish and ESL, plus my curriculum work in developing Spanish for Native Speakers programs, plus my research in the sociolinguistics of Hispanic speech communities, plus my extensive community outreach during my secondary teaching years, plus my MA TESOL and Linguistics degree, plus my three teaching credentials in English, ESL and Spanish, plus my postbac studies in Mexican and Latin American History, plus my social and professional relationships in the Chicano community, plus a couple of other things, all add up to something you should consider not dismissing so cavalierly, and in spectacularly embarrassing fashion, if I do say so myself.

Stay in the Middle East. I'm sure you won't have to deal with any Mexicans there; they are obviously anathema to you. Good luck in your career. I hope you are able to find a corner of the world for your intolerance to relax comfortably unchallenged. 

How dare you.

I’m actually (surprisingly) very conservative when it comes to immigration issues, certainly more conservative than most ESL professors, I’d wager.  But I also don’t think that my initial post had anything to do with immigration reform, nor did it have anything to do with ceding anything to a Mexico that this fellow seems to think “dumps its worst criminals and low lifes [sic] [and] feels entitled to tell America how to treat them.”  I simply pointed out that, at its roots, the Mexican Constitution of 1857 (the beginning of their first truly long-term stable period as an independent nation), and the Declaration of Independence share a lot more than most people would ever guess, and that the heroics of the Battle of Puebla should remind us of our own selves.  We are so used to seeing difference in others (refer to my blog post on just this very issue); when we have an opportunity to see affinity, we should seize on it.

So did I overreact?  (I do tend to do that.)  Was my response too much?  I dunno, I’m just A.S.K.ing…

Cinco de Mayo – A uniquely American holiday, courtesy of… México!

Outside of areas with large Mexican populations, Cinco de Mayo as a holiday is largely ignored.  Allow me to suggest that this perhaps is a mistake.  In schools, certainly, the history of this critically important day provides a valuable historical lesson, not just about our neighbor to the south, but about the intangibles that once defined us as a nation.

When asked what Cinco de Mayo is, most people – even, I learned after many years of teaching in California schools, many people of Mexican extraction – automatically report, erroneously, that it is Mexican Independence Day.  (That would be September 16, sorry.)  It is always sad when a people is disconnected from its heritage to such an extent that no one can even recall the significant formative moments in the formation of that culture’s psyche; can you imagine an American calling him- or her-self a “patriot,” but not knowing why there were 13 stripes on the flag, or not knowing why we recognize certain presidents’ birthdays, or what “the shot heard ‘round the world” was? 

In Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is acknowledged, but not celebrated as a national day with any real fervor on a national scale; official recognition of the day varies regionally, with individual states (yes, Mexico has states) deciding how the day is to be commemorated, if at all.  The occasion is celebrated with much more vehemence, pomp, circumstance and ornamentation in parts of the United States – those with a significant Mexican population, understandably – than in Mexico itself.  This makes intuitive sense, perhaps; people separated from their cultural center, if they have any desire to commemorate or celebrate their heritage and cultural identity, or any drive to maintain the same, will strive wherever possible to forge connections through ritual.  Islands of Mexicanity within the borders of the United States can therefore engage in these celebrations and feel a closer connection to their homeland, their distance, like absence, having ostensibly made the heart grow fonder. 

However, many American celebrations of Cinco de Mayo have degenerated into generic and heavily commercialized cultural celebrations; Cinco de Mayo is, in many American communities in the West and Southwest, merely an undifferentiated outpouring of nostalgia for a missed fatherland, a contrived concatenation of music, color, dance and food, with little – if any – acknowledgment (or even understanding) of the historical occasion which the day is meant to commemorate.  I recall that once a Mexican-American administrator in a school at which I spent an early part of my full-time teaching career, in an attempt to voice an elegant encomium to Mexico over the loudspeaker for Cinco de Mayo, informed the student body, perhaps a quarter of whom were Chicanos, that “today [was] the day we celebrate the Mexican declaration of independence.”  ¡Carajo, hombre!

That is a shame, because despite the occasional flare-ups of grotesque and arbitrary anti-Mexican sentiment extant in many sectors of the current American political landscape, Cinco de Mayo is, above all things, very much a holiday in the American spirit, and a significant movement in a critical historical period in our hemisphere worth getting to know.

The period between the 1760s and the 1860s was a momentous era in Western history. Thanks in no small part to Schoolhouse Rock, everybody knows the phrase “taxation without representation,” and has a vague idea that the American colonists were spurred on by outrage to fight for independence.  Anybody who cares to dig a little deeper quickly gets past the easy potential misconception that the outrage the colonists felt was simply petty, petulant and trite, (a la Occupy Wall Street – don’t get me started on that; it’s off-topic, just move along… ), like a child protesting his “unfair” bedtime and throwing a fit; in fact, the Revolution and subsequent Declaration of Independence (I’ll pause for a moment while you go look it up – yes, the war started before the Declaration was penned) were the inevitable end product of a principled line of thinking that had its seeds in the Enlightenment.  But the story does not end with the surrender of Cornwallis.

Proper historians may cringe at the truncated treatment I am about to give a rather complex series of political upheavals, but this plays better from 30,000 feet, so broad strokes only for a while.
 
The French Revolution, which lasted from 1789 to 1791, was directly influenced by the American Revolution, and the French National Constituent Assembly’s The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen paid generous homage to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  One wonders if the last thing that went through Louis XVI’s head in 1793, besides a guillotine blade, was the idea that maybe signing the Treaty of Alliance with the American colonies in 1778 wasn’t such a hot idea after all.  The French Revolution stimulated the people of Haiti, then a French colony, to revolt, and for thirteen years, war raged in that tiny country.
  
Then, a few short years later, nearby Mexico caught the revolution bug but good, as Napoleonic War-era France distracted Spain for long enough to disrupt their attentiveness to their own colonies, giving Mexico an opening to follow Haiti’s lead, which they did.  This chain reaction of wars of independence cascaded down the spine of Mesoamerica into the South American continent, and by mid-century, 1849, to be precise, almost all of the modern-day Spanish-speaking nations had declared, fought for, and won their independence from Spain. 

Mexico, as a newly independent nation, had what one might understatedly call growing pains.  An almost constant state of civil war existed over the three-and-a-half decades between 1821 and 1857, with a shocking series of revolving-door presidencies (Santa Anna alone was named President some ten or eleven separate times) while that nation saw not one but three separate, distinct national constitutions implemented.  The anti-theocracy capitalist reformer Benito Juárez played an important role in the creation of Mexico’s 1857 Constitution, a document which set forth guidelines that included freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, a reaffirmation of the ban on slavery [Note/edit: Thanks to the poster at /r/mexico in reddit who alerted me to the fact that Mexico had banned slavery actually in 1829], the right to bear arms, and the familiar notion of “the consent of the governed,” captured in the Constitution’s Article 39:

Article 39, The Mexican Constitution of 1857:

La soberanía nacional reside esencial y originariamente en el pueblo. … El pueblo tiene en todo tiempo el inalienable derecho de alterar[o] modificar la forma de su gobierno. 

“[Our] national sovereignty resides in and originates with the People. … The People at all times have the inviolable right to alter or modify the form of their government.”   

Compare to the American Declaration of Independence:

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”

Juárez became Mexico’s next president, in 1858.  He borrowed funds heavily from European powers – England, France, Spain (yes, Spain) – to rebuild his war-torn country, but after a short few years, his creditors came calling, led by an extraordinarily zealous Napoleon III of France, who in response to Juárez’s non-repayment, invaded Mexico in 1861, driving Juárez into exile, and succeeded in installing Hapsburg stooge and eventual fall guy Maximilian I as the puppet Emperor of Mexico in 1864.

The Mexican people did not go gentle into that good night, however.  While the elite French forces generally made short work of whatever Mexican resistance stood in its way, there was one battle, at the village of Puebla on May 5, 1862, that, while not a key or decisive battle in the larger conflict, came to become the best known (at least by name) battle on Mexican soil – the Battle of the Alamo was technically fought in the Republic of Texas – in that nation’s history. Reports vary on the precise troop strength of the opposing armies: on the Mexican side, estimates run as low as 1,500 and as high as 4,500; on the French side, estimates are fairly consistent at around 6,000, though I have read some as high as 8,000.  What is certain is that the Mexican fighting force was perhaps one step up from rabble, while the French forces were arguably among the most formidable, well-trained, and well-outfitted in the world.  David, however, defeated Goliath, sending the French temporarily into retreat, the number of their casualties three to four times that of the stalwart Mexican defenders.

True, the French did come back, this time with an army several times larger, and they completed their national conquest by 1864. But it did not take.  By 1867, Napoleon III had withdrawn both his interest in Mexican involvement and his troops, leaving Maximilian without a lifeline.  Maximilian was overthrown and captured in 1867, where a repatriated Benito Juárez sentenced him to death by firing squad. 

In commemoration of the Battle of Puebla, which despite its ultimate futility showed the rest of the world a nation of unexpected guts and grit, and provided an emotional flashpoint – like the Alamo, the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the defeat of the Gunpowder Treason – to kindle a resurgent sense of national pride, Juárez declared May 5th a day of national celebration.  It never, however, really became an official federal holiday in Mexico:

“Battle of Puebla is not a general public holiday, as per the "artículo 74 de la Ley Federal del Trabajo", but is included as a public sector holiday (Las dependencias y entidades de la Administración Pública Federal, cuyas relaciones de trabajo se rijan por el Apartado B del artículo 123 Constitucional) in the separate "Decreto por el que se reforma el Artículo Segundo del Decreto por el que se establece el Calendario Oficial"

However, the symbolism of the strength showed by an isolated and outnumbered band of ragtag underdogs surrounded by adverse hostility became a go-to font of patriotic pride for displaced Mexicans within U.S. borders.  Non-Mexican Americans would do well to acknowledge this day as of equal significance to America’s own Declaration of Independence, for while the Mexico of the 20th and 21st centuries did/does not appear to have held up the glorious promise of its inspiring foundational period (for that matter, The U.S. seems to have betrayed its legacy in a number of ways as well, but that too is a topic for another day, another time, another blog), the day itself, and the battle it commemorates, are sterling examples of the spirit that once made America great. This is something that students – all Americans – need to understand.  Let Cinco de Mayo be celebrated in our classrooms nationwide.

Pride is not a sin.

Is it appropriate to recognize a non-U.S. holiday in the U.S.?  Does it set us down a slippery slope?  I dunno, I’m just A.S.K.ing… 

                      [Note: Read the follow up to this post here.]

Do we place those who are "different" in a mental museum case?

[Updated August, 2017:  Potlatches of Northwest Coast Tribes: A Peabody Online Exhibit, referenced here and in this article, is no longer viewable.)

One of the things we tend to forget, living in contemporary America, is that cultural analogues exist for most, if not all, of our institutions, in other parts of the world.  We seem almost genetically programmed to divide the world into “us” and “them” (it may well be that, epistemologically, the most salient conceptual observation we have intuitive access to is that of contrast or difference) and to see cultural disparity where none actually exists, or where the differences are no more than superficial.  We see this perhaps the clearest in our tendency to present ethnographic exhibits as art.

By highlighting the rituals and ceremonies and artifacts of other cultures by removing arbitrarily selected elements thereof and placing them in museum cases, we somehow (de-)elevate them to the status of curiosity pieces.  People in our society are taught from early on that museums are repositories of knowledge, wisdom, history; they are special mystical places where the young can go and be transported, educated, entertained by the ancient, the strange, the alien.  Similar to the fashion in which the modern tele-addict may give automatic credence to anything on an infomercial or talk show, or online news junkies automatically accept anything published by their echo chamber of choice, we would-be educated individuals typically do the same with museums; we are open, receptive.  The problem, then, is simply this:  when a culture’s artifacts are presented in a museum, regardless of the historical information that is given along with them, there is the automatic tendency to see them as Different.  Specifically because they are in a museum, we choose not to see the fact that what is being presented to us is a mirror of our own culture, with substitutions made for available technology, resources, and so on. We are in many ways the same, but our ability to place them in a museum creates an artificial separation that somehow makes us feel better about our way of life, enables us to sleep more easily at night, whatever.

So, which came first?  Was it our need to characterize the world as “us” and “them” what led us to start housing displays of other cultures’ lifestyles in museums, safely on the other side of red velvet rope-barrier fences, in climate-controlled halls with gift shops and cafeterias that serve watered-down coffee and seven-dollar grilled-cheese sandwiches?  Or was it such museums that acclimated us to seeing other cultures as so completely disparate from our own that we are no longer unable to see the similarities?  What possible justification, for example, is there for going into a museum and seeing, as an ethnographic exhibit, a plain wooden spoon?  An ordinary wooden spoon?  Is that something that is so radically outside of our culture’s experience that it warrants display?

The answer is yes.  And no.

There are two basic ways to present cultural realia in a museum context.  Firstly, they can be presented as artistic specimens.  Secondly, they can be presented as anthropological specimens.  And of course the two can be combined in varying shades of grey.  Presented as artistic specimens, the responsibility of the “curator” is to discuss their form, color, design, material, medium, texture, process.  Merging art and the anthropological realm, the curator can discuss the role of the artist in the community,  the history of the artistic tradition(s) displayed, the cultural significance of any symbolism and iconography and so on..  In a purely anthropological sense, the curator can discuss the purpose(s) of the objects in everyday life, and/or their role in ritual traditions, as well as the role of the production of the art object in the marketplace, both local and worldwide, if applicable.

In deciding how to present an exhibit, one needs to ask the question “To what degree can, or should, these elements be taken out of context?”  Is it feasible, is it even appropriate or accurate, to display them in a museum?  Or does the problematic nature of museum display more than offset any potential value?  Do we present the anthropology and not the art?  (All function and no form?)  Do we present the art, and not the anthropology?  (All form and no function?)  What magical alchemy is required to balance them?

The troubling online exhibit on “potlatches” presented by Harvard University’s Peabody Museum was a perfect example of what not to do.

Museums invite people in, ask them to look upon what they have the power, wealth and resources to present, have them partake in their activities, and bid them peruse the gift shop for a trinket to commemorate the experience.  Then the patrons can walk back out the front doors and return to their home gaming systems, smartphones and iPods, breathing a collective sigh of relief that they live in a country where there are ATMs, detergents with color-safe bleach, and pornographic websites.  And museums ask us patrons to pay for the privilege!  Which, to return briefly to the topic of the degree to which we open ourselves up with wonder and awe reflexively at anything that appears in a museum, brings up another issue:  we also tend to respond the same way to anything we have to pay for.  This hyper-openness and ultra-receptiveness sets us up for the kind of cultural programming that exhibits like the Peabody’s potlatch exhibit suffer us to endure.

The exhibit begins with an introductory page reading “What is a potlatch?”  The Peabody online curator describes the potlatch as a social event given by an individual or a family “to uphold their place in society” and to “highlight [their own] status by displaying wealth.”  He (I’m using the masculine because all three named professors that contributed to the exhibit were male) goes on to comment that in the gift-giving rituals of the Northwestern clans’ potlatches, the attendance at such events and the acceptance of the hosts’ gifts confers validity and tacit acceptance of the social status that they proclaim.  A potlatch is defined as a social gathering celebrating a significant event in the family, including “speeches, singing, feasting, dancing, and gift-giving.”  (All direct quotes came from the text of the website.) This is what you and I would call a “party,” a relatively common cultural phenomenon for us, to be sure, but throughout the cyber-exhibit, the curator fails utterly to draw any connections to the common experience of the modern museum-going mainstream American, creating the illusion that the rituals presented are somehow significantly different, a process I have referred to in other recent blog posts as exoticization.  In fact, that there is virtually no element of these “potlatches” that is in any way alien to our own experience.  In failing to draw these connections, to make these links, to show the common elements of world cultures instead of focusing on the superficial differences, this exhibit contributes to divisiveness and ethnocentrism.

The display is presented in sort of a slideshow format, an internet analogue to individual wall- or floor-mounted display cases.  A single photograph or small group of photographs provides the visual, and a paragraph or two of explanatory text replaces the index card of ethnographic data familiar to most museum-goers.  The exhibit is easy to “stroll” through; every attempt has been made to recreate the feel of walking through a museum, and I believe that they have succeeded – all triumphs and shortcomings intact.

The first sub-heading of the exhibit is entitled “foods and feasting.” It goes on to describe customs and traditions associated pre-20th century potlatches: how guests were seated, and the nature of the feast(s).  Among other things, it informs us that guests were often seated on the basis of status, a tradition not at all far removed from the concept of the “head-of-the-table” common to traditional American dining rooms, or that of the special table reserved for the members of the wedding party at a reception (the “head table”), or even the differentiated-price seating that is commonplace in all theaters, concert halls, sporting events, and political fund-raising and charity dinners – the closer you are to the action (i.e. the more prestige) the more you have to pay (i.e. the greater your socioeconomic class, or status).

Further, it offers us the revelation, “Foods served at potlatches varied seasonally.”  Duh.  In an agrarian society (remember, we’re still talking about pre-20th century, here) of course the food offerings will have varied seasonally.  You can’t even get strawberry pie at Baker’s Square twelve months a year in San Leandro, California... is this supposed to be a significant piece of cultural information?

The illustrations provided are of “traditional feasting artifacts.”  I should laugh myself sick; can you see some 23rd century anthropologist referring to a picnic as a “common American leisure-time familial celebratory feasting ritual” and paper plates and plastic flatware as “traditional feasting artifacts?”  This is a common practice, the phrasing of a concept in a more haughty or esoteric fashion to give it a more scholarly bent.  Lunch hour at school could be called a “diurnal communal feasting ritual” but it’s not, because there is no driving need to make school lunch seem like more than what it is.  However, with museum exhibits, this need abounds; hence, silly and inflated phrasings of things that would probably be better understood (and more honest) if they were presented into laypersons’ terms, unless there is a pressing need not to. (This would also render them more accessibly, and would demystify and de-exoticize, allowing for more appreciation and understanding, which is ostensibly the point all along.)

More to the point, the illustrations are photographs of some spoons and some dishes or serving trays.  The exhibit does differentiate, with the spoons display at least, between an item designed for daily use, and an item designed for feasting use.  The difference is quite clear:  the regular spoon is carved wood, whereas the celebratory utensils are horn and copper.  This suggests a relationship between the preciousness of the material and the importance of the event, although it could be a number of other factors:  perhaps it is the luster of the material?  Or the difficulty of the workmanship?  Or the scarcity of the material?  Or the superior smoother feel of metal or bone as compared to the roughness of wood?  We are left to draw our own conclusions to a very important issue.  Further still, no discussion is given to the form and style of the spoons; they are presented as functional objects, which, unfortunately is anticlimactic and uninteresting, the function of spoons being by-and-large blissfully uncomplicated.

The next section of the exhibit is entitled “gifting.” “Excessive gifting developed during the 19th century as a means of negotiating status within and between groups.”  First of all, what is implied by “excessive”?  It is never explained.  Secondly, how is this any different from the concept of a bridal dowry, a phenomenon common to many cultures?  How is this appreciably different than the common anxiety that we often feel, that we will be judged on the quality of our gifts, or that we do not want to be outdone by someone else’s gift. During courtship, do we not typically lavish our loved one with fine gifts?  Why does a man buy his fiancée a $5,000 engagement ring instead of a $1000 one when 99 and 44/100 out of 100 people do not even possess the specialized knowledge of gemology to differentiate quality-wise between the two identically-sized diamonds? It’s the same social force.  Why were these connections and explanations not provided, or even alluded to, by the Peabody?  Did they not think it valuable to highlight social constants and universals?

“Available resources determined the kinds of gifts distributed.” Is this earth-shattering wisdom? Is it the role of educational institutions to state the obvious?  Would anyone be so foolish as to say, “The car that I shall buy will depend on the money I have available to buy it?” (Credit and such notwithstanding, though if the curator’s comment were designed as a lead-in to a lament of the Northwestern clans’ lack of access to Visa and Mastercard it would be at least forgivable.)

This faux pas was partially redeemed by a brief but useful follow-up discussion on the effects of European contact on these traditions:  In particular I found it interesting that, over time, the nature of gifts shifted from items such as lambskins to include such things as sewing machines.  But in the rare cases (such as this) where the curator did provide some valuable historical contextual discussion, it was shallow, and brief.

The display ended with a brief encapsulation of contemporary potlatches, stating that they “continue to be important events in the cultural lives of native peoples on the Northwestern coast” and that “the patterns of gifting would be recognizable to the coastal tribes of earlier periods.”  Again, the over-inflated talk of simple matters.  Why the concerted effort to make anthropological inquiry so inaccessible to a normal person?  Why the calculated neglect and failure to link other cultures’ behavioral patterns with our own?

The answer:  To heighten the sensation of “us” and “them.” If “they” become too much like “us” then we can no longer justify putting “them” in a museum.  

You wouldn’t cage your cousin, would you?

In concluding its remarks on contemporary potlatches, the curator begins a paragraph with “‘Parties,’ as they are now sometimes called, commemorate a significant event...”   This is the pinnacle of ludicrousness. Has “party” become a new piece of inner-circle anthropological jargon?  Last I knew, it was a term in fairly wide use, and reasonably well-understood at that.  (For that matter, even the lexical similarity between “potlatch” and “potluck” is ignored; whether or not there is any true etymological significance is irrelevant - the fact that it is something that would naturally occur to the average person viewing this exhibit makes it automatically worthy of mention and clarification.)

I believe I know what the curator meant to say, that being that the Northwestern peoples have begun to adopt the word “party” to refer to what they formerly referred to as “potlatches,” a statement that, phrased properly, goes a long way toward illustrating an effect of the dominant-culture paradigm on language, culture, and tradition.  But the Peabody failed to do this.

It states in hushed awe (well, it’s a silent exhibit, but if there were aurally discernible awe, I’m quite sure it would be hushed.  After all, it is a museum…) how the planning for these “parties” – and of course, “parties” must be in quotes! – could last weeks, and reach costs of over $10,000.  Which is all well and good, except nowhere is there any discussion of what sort of planning used to go into the potlatches of the 18th and 19th centuries, and nowhere is there an analysis of the relative value of $10,000 to an elite clansman now, compared to a sewing machine to an elite clansman 50 years ago, compared to a couple of lambskins to an elite clansman 150 years ago.  Without that context, the figure of $10,000 for a party is relatively meaningless.  Have you priced weddings, bar mitzvahs, quinceañeras, funerals, proms, or honeymoons lately?

Regretfully, what we as modern American life-long learners would expect from this distinguished institution falls far short of what we need.  This extra-contextual means of presenting cultures diminishes their value in multiple ways:  the arbitrariness of the means used to select the artifacts used as visual cues, the enhancement of the subconscious “them” versus “us” mentality, the emphasis on dichotomy presented luridly under the guise of “exoticism” without being balanced by a bit of world-context grounding, the relegation of the most mundane objects of a culture’s daily life to curio status... we are collectively Ariel, The Little Mermaid, oohing and aahing at forks and tobacco pipes.

In the 1982 animated feature The Last Unicorn, the screenplay of which was written by the author of the excellent novel of the same name upon which the film is based, Peter S. Beagle, there is a potent scene where Mommy Fortuna, an illusionist witch, has captured a real unicorn for display to her carnival-goers.  Mommy Fortuna’s magic has no true transformative power; she can only create illusions for willing and gullible viewers.  But the world is in a sad state of affairs, and because man no longer believes in unicorns, that they even exist or ever have existed, most people cannot see them, perceiving them instead as simple white mares.  In recognition of her audience’s deficiencies, Mommy Fortuna casts a spell to put an illusory horn on the unicorn’s head, one that the common folk can see.  Mommy Fortuna’s assistant, a hedge wizard named Schmendrick, a man of faith and good heart who recognizes the poor trapped creature for what she really is as soon as he sees her, and understands that her place is not in a museum, consoles her in her cage as he schemes to rescue her (transcription is mine):

SCHMENDRICK:  (hurriedly but calmly, looking over his shoulder to not get caught) Tell me what you see here, don’t be afraid... look at Your fellow Legends and tell me what You see…

UNICORN:  (amusement, turning to anger)  What [she] calls a Manticore looks to me nothing more than a shabby, toothless lion... and she has them believing that that poor old ape with the twisted foot is a Satyr!  Illusions, deceptions, mirages!  (with a hint of superiority)  Your Mommy Fortuna cannot truly change things!

SCHMENDRICK:  (with great sorrow) That’s true, she can only disguise, and only then for those eager to believe whatever comes easiest .... No, she can’t turn cream into butter, but she can make a lion look like a Manticore for eyes that want to see a Manticore, just as she put a false horn on a real Unicorn to make them see the Unicorn.  (profound reverence now)  I know You.  If I were blind, I would know what You are.

The question is, then, how blind are we?

I wonder, when we are dealing with students from different populations, different backgrounds, different races, religions, cultures and traditions, how often do we inadvertently cross the line between respecting the individual, and condescendingly exoticizing the individual? 

Personal Statement of Educational Philosophy

[Updated August, 2017]

In 1974, philosopher and author Ayn Rand addressed the graduating class of West Point and said the following: “Nothing is given to man automatically, neither knowledge, nor self-confidence, nor inner serenity, nor the right way to use his mind. Every value he needs or wants has to be discovered, learned and acquired – even the proper posture of his body. … Well, philosophical training gives man the proper intellectual posture – a proud, disciplined control of his mind.”

Ready to stop reading at the mention of Ayn Rand's name? Not so fast. Read on. I won't be commenting on economics or politics today.

I love the field of education, because I love the capacity of the human mind to reach out to, grapple with, and ultimately tame, the abstract. More and more in contemporary education there is an emphasis on what I call the Gestalt of education: getting students to see the interdisciplinary relationships between and among the subjects they study, that they are not courses taken in a vacuum, but that they all interact and interrelate. I believe in education for its own sake, as an end in and of itself, and that the training of the rational mind, critical thinking, and exposure to new ideas that all come with a rigorous quality education is the single greatest asset any young adult can take into the world. This is true for students of ALL colors, creeds and backgrounds.

By the same token, I also believe that for that education to have any real value, objective standards and a certain level of rigor must apply. I have read that the group that struggles the most with the transition to college is the effortless “A” student, the child who coasts through his high school’s relatively unchallenging curriculum, earns good grades and the accolades of the staff, and then hits college like a brick wall. The student has never been challenged, so he never develops the capacity to do hard work. The student has never been truly tested, so he quails under the pressure of a truly high-stakes college midterm exam. The student has never been trained in organization and time management, so the increased autonomy required of a successful college student is not in his character make-up. His self-esteem has been so padded by the illusion of his academic success, that his crash, when he realizes that his 99th percentile work last year is only 25th percentile this year, is cataclysmic. According to the “data,” however, the collection of which is typically discontinued upon high school graduation, this child has been a meteoric success.

This is the thesis of the succinct and on point, albeit provocatively named and just a skosh hyperbolic, op-ed “Modern EducationKills,” by Edwin A. Locke. Many students who now struggle at the college level experienced success at the high school level, and it can be disorienting to the student in trouble, who is used to academic success, or at least to being told that he or she is a successful student. In 1987, when I graduated from a California public high school at the age of 16 and entered Cornell University, I was that student. The reconstruction process was long and painful. I would not wish that upon any student.

We do the same thing when we inflate the grades of the mediocre student or socially promote the failing student. When effusive praise becomes ubiquitous, it ceases to truly be praise. I believe in acknowledging, thanking and congratulating students for work well done. I speak to them in terms on honor, integrity, investment. If a student performs poorly, I will let him or her gently know that the work was unsatisfactory; I create no illusions that “just getting the work done” is even remotely good enough. The work will get re-done, if need be. Over time, there is real, measurable improvement, and what’s more, trust in the teacher who dares to be honest in this way (students are more perceptive than we often give them credit for being). Students eventually believe that they can do the things that they themselves have been holding back from doing, and with honesty and reliable constructive feedback, students will meet or exceed high expectations, instead of a teacher’s having to lower expectations in order to be able to say the same. This is true for students of ALL colors, creeds and backgrounds.

Teachers need to do everything in their power to empower students to be successful, to seek to help students understand that frustrating or unsuccessful formative educational experiences in no way need to translate to or preordain for them a frustrated or failed summative experience. It takes a sense of ego integrity to accept a setback or a failure and still move on productively; teachers must help students appreciate the value of hard work, a good work ethic, and the willingness to accept the occasional setback as a natural part of academic and professional development and evolution.

Popular myth and the standardized-test culture of American public education would have one think that education is about the massive and rapid accumulation of content, the purpose of which is to succeed on a state test; the error of this thinking is that it relegates the education process itself to a secondary status, making the test score the “prize” of education. Nothing could be more removed from the truth. We have become a nation of pure data, of test scores and dropout rates, ciphers which are at best simplified abstractions of critically important ideas – but raw numbers do not tell the whole story. Any educational process or notion that has at its heart the notion that it is the data that needs to be treated, and not the students, is fundamentally flawed. In a rush to engage the 21st century learner – modern, multicultural, multilingual and multiethnic, technologically savvy members of the Twitterati – we have forgotten the extent to which we are all in fact the same, and the extent to which we share the same basic human needs: I refer to the needs of young people to be engaged, challenged, given a sense of deliberate purpose, and to feel pride and a sense of value. This is true for students of ALL colors, creeds and backgrounds.

Back when people used to refer fondly to what was once called the “American Dream,” it was never the case that the Dream was different for different demographic groups – whether it was English separatists in the 1600s, freed African slaves, Italian or Irish immigrants to the East Coast, Chinese immigrants to the West Coast, Jews fleeing the Holocaust, Cubans fleeing Castro, or the Lost Boys of Africa, the American Dream has until recently been all about what your hard work could earn you, not about what the sense of entitlement you believed you had would coerce someone into giving you. The need for hard work as a means to earn one’s status has always been universal, that is, until perhaps the most recent of times. A sense of entitlement, one that borders upon a demand, has crept into American public schools. I have watched it happen over my 20+ years of teaching. There is now a sense that students must be given considerations and concessions as a precursor to being expected to achieve, almost like bribes, instead of as earned rewards. There is now more and more a sense that students have not an equal right to educational opportunity (students still have to do the work and earn their way by demonstrating achievement, mastery and understanding), but an equal right to the tangible fruits of an education (a diploma, certificate or degree, by hook or by crook, the ends justifying the means, otherwise the system is somehow depriving them of their prize). This has led in many cases to a gross relaxing of standards and many well-intentioned but ill-executed attempts to put pragmatics before principle.

But I believe this: We can be progressive, inclusive, cosmopolitan, and modern without sacrificing core principles of integrity, honor, rigor, and merit.

Carlos Fuentes wrote the following: Todo, las comunicaciones, la economía,… las revoluciones en la ciencia y la tecnología, nos indica que la variedad y no la monotonía, la diversidad más que la unidad, definirán la cultura del siglo venidero. (Everything, communication, the economy,… revolutions in science and technology, suggest that variety, not monotony – diversity, not homogeneity – will define culture in the century to come.) He called this El Encuentro con el Otro, “Encounter with the Other,” and it is one of the notions that made America great.

That notion, however, is being turned on its ear, by well-wishing ideologues who believe that one’s antecedents entitle one to unearned rewards, and that to level the playing field, we must hobble some while selectively enabling others, instead of making all comers go through the same juggernaut, and facilitation or providing support as needed to allow students to achieve. The trick – and the true test of the educator – is to enable all, through a combination of differentiated/individualized instruction; support systems, programs and aides; constant, consistent, honest communication with students and communities. This combination must then be set against a backdrop of consistently rigorous and objective standards, high expectations, and a commitment to educate all students. (And it is possible to do all this in an environment that is enjoyable, at least more often than not, for students!) That’s what is required of the educator.

For my part, I have worked for twenty-plus years in urban and diverse schools, teaching English, ESL and Spanish. I am a sociolinguist by avocation and training, and my Masters is in English/TESOL. I have taught multi-level, differentiated-instruction classes; I have taught “Inclusion” classes and participated in many CSE and IEP meetings; I have taught ESL at the college level, and worked with countless international students of a variety of backgrounds and statuses. My understanding and appreciation of the diversity of student and community populations informs everything I do professionally. I came from a school district recently where, instead of training ESL students to be successful on tests, students were forced to take standardized tests that they were not prepared for (and in some cases, were not even officially eligible to take), often a year earlier than the state required, in order to get them to fail the test enough times to be able to take an easier test, so they could “graduate.” This, to enhance the school's “numbers,” which were, and I suppose still are, published in the city papers and online. This is a perfect example of the kind of data-driven cravenness that is exactly what I am NOT about. There is no honor in manipulating students (who rely upon us) in order to satisfy the arbitrary requirements of a bureaucracy – be it state, country, district or site. Teachers should do their best, with integrity, at all times. I believe students can tell the difference, and I believe they will thank us.

On the part of the student, education is the ultimate test of character; in no other pursuit, save perhaps parenthood, is one asked to suffer the willingness to accept such an extreme delay of gratification. In third grade, you received a colorful sticker on your spelling test when you got a one-hundred. Maybe your seventh-grade teacher used to reward you with candy in class when you got a right answer. It is the educator’s job, however, to ensure that this kind of Pavlovian reward-response does not become a habit; habits become expectations, expectations become entitlements, and entitlements become an excuse later in life to avoid the rigors of honest hard work. The true rewards of education are long-term, hard-won, and rely heavily upon a deep faith in the human spirit and the rational mind. Hard work will be rewarded. Self-esteem does not always require external and explicit reward; in the proud and honorable student, self-esteem can sometimes be its own reward. Ayn Rand, in her address to the 1974 graduates of West Point, said, “Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.” It is our job, teachers’ job, to raise students who are honorable, who have the “proper intellectual posture,” and who will go forth into the world, proud of the education that they have worked for, and rightly earned. This is true for students of ALL colors, creeds and backgrounds.