¿Sabes por qué?

I don’t think we were Pleasantville on purpose. I don’t think any of the teachers I had, as I grew up in Anne Arundel County public schools, or the administrators, planned, as part of a calculated agenda, to pretend the continent south of us didn’t exist.

I guess, at the time, it was commonly assumed that European history was more, I don’t know..., relevant for a bunch of kids who were all descended from European immigrants. (You mean we weren’t all? Well, yes, there were a few darker complexions, and some funky last names ending in vowels--but that didn’t count, did it?)

I guess we talked about England because maybe they seemed the most like us, and then there was that whole business with Johnny Tremain, minutemen, and wet tea, so it was hard to exclude England. It was ok to talk about Greece and Rome too, because they did stuff like invent the architecture we used for our big buildings, and think up the Olympics.

But I can scarcely think of a reference to Central or South America prior to A.P.U.S. History and the Panama Canal.

Obviously, now, in the 21st C., Pleasantville’s plastic picket fence has been cracked in a few places. And I’ve stopped and looked around, and found--to my pleasure--that it’s really not unpleasant at all. There are lots of people around here who speak Spanish. That’s a big reason I’m trying to learn it. And though we don’t seem to be able to give more than a cursory glance to cultural issues in my clase de Español, I enjoy the textbook--primarily because of the snippets of insight into Latin American culture which were completely invisible in my childhood education, despite the relative geographic proximity of those cultures.