September 15 is a day of celebration for many nations of Hispano América. On this day, we extend our congratulations and our best wishes to all those who celebrate the independence of their nations, their histories, and their peoples.
For me, however, September 15 also raises another question:
What does it mean for a young person to inherit a culture, but not fully recognize it as their own?
I have the privilege of teaching high school history in an urban setting, at a school where the Hispano and Mestizo presence is unmistakable. As a Chicanx man teaching history to young people whose families come from many of the cultures I teach about, I have a particularly close relationship with this question.
I see culture in the names of my students, in their families, in their food, in their music, in the languages spoken in their homes, and in the expressions they sometimes use without even realizing how much history those expressions carry.
And yet, something has concerned me.
At the beginning of this school year, approximately 150 of my students responded to a survey asking them to share aspects of their lives. One question asked about languages other than English spoken at home and which language they preferred to speak.
Many students indicated that Spanish was spoken in their homes.
But only one student indicated a preference for speaking Spanish.
That response has stayed with me.
Is this the school’s fault?
I don’t know.
Perhaps it is not fair to place the responsibility on schools. Language choices are shaped by families, communities, economics, immigration experiences, popular culture, media, peer groups, and generations of social pressures.
But perhaps schools play a role.
Schools are powerful institutions. What we choose to teach—and what we choose not to teach—communicates something to young people about what matters.
If a student comes to school speaking Spanish, but encounters a curriculum in which Spanish-language literature, history, music, philosophy, science, and cultural contributions are largely absent, what message might that student receive?
If the only language that seems necessary for academic success is English, what happens to the language of the home?
And if the culture of the home rarely appears in the classroom as something worthy of serious study, does a young person eventually begin to believe that it is less important?
I don’t know that the answer is simply “the schools are responsible.”
I suspect it is much larger than that.
Perhaps schools sometimes reinforce messages that already exist throughout society.
Why I use “Hispano”
There is another question that has become increasingly important to me as a teacher: What words do we use to describe ourselves?
I have increasingly moved away from using the term Latino when referring to my community.
This is not because I believe the word is inherently wrong, nor because I don’t recognize that many people proudly use it to describe themselves.
It is because, for the historical work I am trying to do with my students, I find Hispano to be more useful.
The term Latino emphasizes a connection to an enormous range of peoples and histories, including Spanish-, Portuguese-, and French-speaking societies in the Americas.
But when I am trying to help students understand our particular historical inheritance, I want to make room for something that can too easily disappear inside that broader term: the Indigenous peoples and cultures that profoundly shaped the societies of the Americas.
I use Indo-Hispano and, in appropriate contexts, Mestizo, because these terms help me emphasize the coming together of Indigenous and Hispano histories.
For me, this is not an argument about which label is “correct.”
It is an argument about what history we want the label to help us remember.
When I say Hispano, I am trying to open a door into the history of the Spanish-speaking world.
When I say Indo-Hispano or Mestizo, I am trying to keep open another door—the one that recognizes the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and their enormous contributions to the cultures that emerged here.
Those histories are not competing histories.
They are intertwined.
What have we lost when we turn away from Spanish?
I find myself wondering how we arrived at a place where young people can grow up surrounded by Spanish and yet feel more comfortable distancing themselves from it.
How do we move from the beauty of Cervantes, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Gabriel García Márquez to a situation in which Spanish can sometimes be treated as something that belongs only in the home—or worse, as something that a young person should leave behind in order to succeed?
The Spanish-speaking world has produced extraordinary literature, music, art, architecture, philosophy, political movements, scientific achievements, and social traditions.
These are not simply the accomplishments of “other people.”
They are part of the inheritance of millions of young people in the United States.
And that inheritance matters.
History becomes different when students see their ancestors in it
One of the things I enjoy most about teaching World History is helping students make connections that they may never have been given the opportunity to make before.
When we study the fall of Rome, for example, we encounter the Visigoths.
I tell my students that these are not simply people from a textbook who lived nearly two thousand years ago.
These are our ancestors.
I use the word our deliberately.
I am not claiming that every student in my classroom can produce a genealogical record proving a direct line to a particular Visigoth, Roman, Jewish community, or Muslim family in medieval Iberia.
Human ancestry is far more complicated than that.
But ancestry is more than a genealogy.
There is biological inheritance, certainly. Over centuries of migration, settlement, intermarriage, conquest, and cultural exchange, populations that lived in Iberia contributed to the genetic inheritance of later peoples.
But there is also something I would call cultural DNA.
Cultures remember.
They remember through language, food, music, religion, literature, architecture, names, traditions, stories, and ways of understanding the world.
The peoples who shaped Hispania became part of the cultural inheritance of the Spanish-speaking peoples who came after them.
Roman Hispania became part of medieval Hispania.
The Visigoths became part of the history of Spain.
Jewish communities became part of that history.
Muslim communities became part of that history.
And later generations carried portions of that complicated inheritance across the Atlantic.
So when I tell my students, “These are our ancestors,” I am inviting them to understand history as something closer than a textbook.
I want them to see that the decisions made by people over a thousand of years ago contributed to the world they inhabit today.
Their ancestors were not merely people who watched history happen.
They participated in making history happen.
From Greece to Rome—and from Rome to Hispania
Even the word barbarian gives us an opportunity to see how interconnected history really is.
The Greeks used barbaros to describe people whose speech sounded foreign or unintelligible to them. The term carried the idea of people whose language sounded like something other than the language of Greek civilization.
Then came Rome.
The Romans conquered the Greek world, but they did not simply erase Greek civilization. Quite the opposite. Rome adopted and adapted enormous portions of Greek literature, philosophy, art, architecture, mythology, education, and intellectual culture.
So even when Roman writers spoke about “barbarians,” they were doing so within a civilization that had itself absorbed tremendous amounts of Greek culture.
That is history.
Cultures conquer.
Cultures are conquered.
Cultures borrow.
Cultures adapt.
And cultures become something new.
The same process would eventually transform Hispania.
The Visigoths come to Hispania
In 410 CE, the Visigoths entered Rome and sacked the city.
For students, that can sound like the end of a story.
It wasn’t.
The Visigoths continued their movement westward and eventually established themselves in Hispania. Over the following decades, their political power expanded, and the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo became a major political force in the Iberian Peninsula.
The people whom the Romans had viewed as barbarians were now governing much of the land that had once been Roman Hispania.
And that history did not disappear when the Visigothic kingdom eventually fell.
It became another layer.
Roman Hispania had already been transformed by centuries of Roman rule. The Visigoths who had embraced Roman ways, and the new Roman Catholic Church added another layer to that history. Jewish communities contributed another. Centuries of Muslim rule added another enormous layer.
Then came the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula who took nearly seven hundred years to effect the Reconquest of the peninsula, the expansion of Castile and other Spanish kingdoms, and eventually the creation of a Spanish empire whose ships crossed the Atlantic.
The people who crossed that ocean did not leave their history behind.
They carried it with them.
The history that crossed the Atlantic
When Spain extended its reach into the Americas, it was not sending a culturally blank population across the ocean.
The people who arrived carried centuries of Iberian history with them.
Within those populations were descendants and cultural inheritors of the many peoples who had shaped Iberia.
They carried languages.
They carried religious traditions.
They carried foods.
They carried music.
They carried architectural traditions.
They carried stories.
They carried memories.
And once they arrived in the Americas, those traditions encountered the civilizations and peoples already living here.
Indigenous peoples were not passive participants in this process. They profoundly transformed the cultures that emerged.
African peoples and their descendants also became essential participants in the formation of the societies of the Americas.
What emerged was not simply “Spain transported to the New World.”
It was something new.
It was Hispano América.
And its people inherited layers of history from many different peoples.
This is what I mean by cultural DNA.
The history of the Roman world, the Visigoths, Jewish communities, Muslims, Christian Iberia, Indigenous America, and Africa did not remain neatly separated.
Those histories collided, blended, resisted one another, influenced one another, and produced new cultures.
The result is the world my students inherited.
And that is why I want them to see themselves in history.
Not because history should be rewritten to make them feel good.
But because they are already in the story.
“¡Qué bárbaro!”
Sometimes the best history lessons happen unexpectedly.
While discussing the Visigoths, I asked my students a question:
“Does anybody’s parent ever say, ‘¡Qué bárbaro!’”?
Several hands immediately went up.
Of course they did.
Then I asked, “What does it mean?”
One student suggested that it meant something like ¡Qué descarado!
I had to admit that I didn’t know that meant! But I soon asked around and found out.
Another student offered a simpler explanation:
“It’s basically like saying, ‘Oh no!’”
And there it was.
History had suddenly walked into the classroom wearing the clothes of everyday family language.
The word barbarian had traveled from the Greeks to the Romans and through the history of Europe. The Visigoths were among the peoples whom the Romans regarded as barbarians—people outside the boundaries of Roman civilization.
And yet the story did not end there.
The Visigoths became part of the history of Hispania.
The Latin spoken in Hispania developed into Spanish.
Spanish crossed oceans.
Spanish encountered Indigenous languages and cultures.
African peoples and traditions became part of the developing cultures of the Americas.
New peoples and identities emerged.
And centuries later, a student sitting in my classroom can hear a parent say:
“¡Qué bárbaro!”
That is history.
It is imperfect.
It is complicated.
It is sometimes painful.
But it is also incredibly beautiful.
And yes, there is a little more fun to this story.
The Spanish word for beard is barba.
Now, I should be clear: barbaro and barba do not actually share the same linguistic origin. The resemblance is a coincidence.
But the coincidence makes for a great classroom moment.
The Romans looked upon peoples they considered outside their civilization and called them barbarians. Germanic peoples such as the Visigoths were often represented by Roman writers as rougher, less civilized outsiders—sometimes imagined with long hair and beards.
So when I tell my students about the word barbarian, and then point to the Spanish word barba, I can see the history becoming something they can remember.
The linguistic connection isn’t real.
The cultural connection is.
And that distinction is itself a lesson in history.
Our students are part of the story
For me, teaching students from an Indo-Hispano, or Mestizo, cultural background is not about telling them that they should identify with a particular history.
It is about giving them the opportunity to discover the history that is already connected to their lives.
The names they carry.
The language they hear at home.
The food they eat.
The music they listen to.
The celebrations their families observe.
The religious traditions they may practice.
The stories their grandparents tell.
These things did not simply appear.
They are markers of a long human journey.
And that journey includes their ancestors.
As a Chicanx teacher standing in an urban high school classroom, I feel a responsibility to make those connections whenever I can.
I want my students to know that the history of the Hispano world is not a footnote to World History.
It is World History.
I want them to see that the peoples who lived in Rome, Hispania, North Africa, the Middle East, Indigenous America, and Africa were not living in isolated worlds.
Their decisions affected one another.
Their migrations affected one another.
Their cultures affected one another.
And eventually, those histories became part of the world my students inherited.
Their ancestors helped shape this world.
And if their ancestors helped shape the world we live in today, then my students should understand something else:
They are in a position to shape the world of tomorrow.
That is why language matters.
That is why history matters.
That is why representation in our classrooms matters.
And that is why I believe education should not require students to leave the culture of their homes at the classroom door.
Instead, perhaps we should open the door and invite that culture inside.
On this September 15, as we celebrate the independence of the nations of Hispano América, let us also celebrate the languages, cultures, histories, and people who continue to carry those stories forward.
Let us remind young people that the history they are studying is not necessarily somebody else’s history.
Sometimes, it is their history.
Sometimes, it is our history.
There is still so much history to discover.
And sometimes, it begins with something as simple as:
“¡Qué bárbaro!”
That is why it is so much fun to teach history.
Exchanging ideas makes us stronger. Thank you.