Reading integration

I started observing Native American Heritage Month 2010. At the time I would include one book that focused more on Latin America, because there are indigenous people there too. Some of the reading selections did not seem to fit right. I dropped that practice a while ago, and then I discovered there was a month for Hispanic Heritage too.

I don't know if it is a coincidence that the two months come so close together (September and November). Given their proximity, though, and my issues with mission creep, it was almost inevitable that they would start overlapping each other.

There were other factors. The source that I was using to find relevant children's books for September ended up having a lot of books, including a lot of YA. There was a book with November content that was available online for free for two weeks in October. It was not one I was likely to find in the library, so I had to start that reading early. Obviously, all of the books and how they went for their specific months will be covered eventually in different posts. Today is more about how they went together.

There is overlap between reading about indigenous people with a legacy of Spanish colonization and English colonization. There are differences too, but there are a lot of things that end up correlating and giving added depth. It is good to have these particular reading lists running into each other.

It is also notable, though, how much Black history coincides with these other two.

That is probably more so because so much of my reading focused on Cuba this year. Many slaves were brought to the Caribbean, but it went beyond that. Jews at different times fled to Cuba, and were invited to the Dominican Republic. Many people from Asia settled in Cuba. The Castro sisters who formed the band Anacaona had Chinese as well as indigenous ancestry.

It works other ways too. Russia had an exchange program with Cuba. The Russians mostly left when the Soviet Union fell, but there were Cubans in Russia who stayed. My most amazing transplant story is still that Japanese Samurai guarded silver shipments in Mexico, but there is a lot of really cool mixing that was happening all the time.

I still strongly believe in the value of focusing on specific experiences, but together they inform a broader picture. That picture is more complex and more beautiful, but it is also one that many people refuse to see, believing hard in a world much more segregated and monochromatic.

Looking back, I think one reason I stopped looking at Latin American history in November is that I understood the point of the different heritage months as a means of remembering that the history of the United States goes far beyond the white men that tend to get mentioned in the history books. Therefore, Hispanic Heritage Month would be about the Braceros program and the histories of Texas and New Mexico, and Asian Pacific American Heritage Month would be about Hawaii and Chinese immigrants building the railroad; that basically those months were for me to better understand the role of people of color in the United States.

Without having given up on that, it feels much broader now, but also more integrated. And yes, that integration is a scheduling issue, but it is also an issue of seeing more now that I have been at this for a while. Ah yes, a similar thing happened there.

And I love that. One reason I never wanted to do any post-graduate work in history is that generally that involves more and more specialization. It was always the big picture of history that was most interesting to me. I wanted to know about people and their ways. They keep making the same mistakes, but then they do these really beautiful things too. That never gets old for me.

I have read arguments against "diversity" because often that word ends up meaning looking for one person of color who is the best fit to throw in with a bunch of white people (or one woman to throw in with a bunch of men), and pay lip service to representation. Then, when that person voices any difference of opinion they face recrimination and it can get really ugly. I have seen it happen. There were usually good intentions, but not a realistic examination of what actual inclusion would mean.

If we will really look at each other, and listen, we can do better than that. That definitely involves talking to people and paying attention to their experiences now, but also, there are much worse things to do than reading books.