Changing the Perspective
American history is almost always told from east to west. The Pilgrims land on Plymouth Rock in 1620 then everything after that is gradual westward expansion. I’m exaggerating a little but pretty much that’s the gist of how a lot of it has been told in the past. When I wrote my book Borderlands and the Mexican American Story (Random House, 2024) I wanted to change this perspective.
For instance, what does U.S. history look like if you tell the story from south to north instead? Well, then the national origin narrative that every student learns in elementary school gets a new twist. The First Thanksgiving is no longer between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Natives in 1620. If you look at it along the south-north axis, then the first time European settlers sit down for a “celebratory” meal with the Natives in what is now the United States takes place at El Paso. That version of the so-called first Thanksgiving took place in 1598 between the Spanish colonizers and the Manso Indians. This encounter precedes the American origin story of the European-Native encounter by at least two decades.
But this “new origin story” goes even further back in time if you consider that the first Spanish settlers were traveling on an Indigenous road that the ancestors of Mexican Americans had used to migrate for thousands of years between what is now Mexico and the United States. The Spaniards called this route the Camino Real, or Royal Road. The kind of back-and-forth migration that took place on this ancient route was very different than what took place at Ellis Island, where people crossed an ocean in a one-way direction and left their old culture behind. So just by changing the geographical perspective, you come up with new ways of thinking about topics such as immigration and who we are as a nation. This is not just dead history. These are hugely important matters in current political debates.
Another way to change our perspective when we think about history is to change our focus. For a long time, historians focused on kings, presidents, and other “important people” as the only agents of change worth learning about. Thankfully there are more and more “people’s history books” told from the vantage point of individuals and groups that had been left out of the narrative before. But what if we told history mostly from the perspective of young people? Even some of the newer history books leave children and teenagers out of the picture. They’re neither seen nor heard. In Borderlands and the Mexican American Story, I make it a point to bring young people back into the historical narrative and show how they have often been at the forefront of social change in their communities.
My book also changes the usual perspective of how history is written by focusing on what some scholars call microhistory. Microhistorians look for clues in small slices of geography that connect what happened in these places to a larger, deeper story. Doing microhistory is like being a Sherlock Holmes type of detective. You come across clues that at first don’t seem to be very significant but those pieces of evidence, that other investigators might throw away, end up helping you solve the murder mystery, or whatever kind of case you’re trying to solve. In my book, I come across the fact that Mexican border crossers were sprayed with the same kind of toxic pesticides in the early twentieth century that were later used in German concentration camps during World War II. This little detail that had been previously overlooked by scholars helped me make global connections that hadn’t been explored in the past.
So, in the end, the history of the United States has to do with who gets to tell it and from what perspective. Both metaphorically and literally, how you tell it depends on where you stand. That’s why when I wrote my book it was important for me to tell the story of this country from a point of view that gives us a new way of thinking about things. That’s what motivated me to write Borderlands and the Mexican American Story.
Listen to a Meet-the-Author Recording for Borderlands and the Mexican American Story
Hear David Dorado Romo describe his name
Explore the Borderlands and the Mexican American Story page on TeachingBooks
Text and images are courtesy of David Dorado Romo and may not be used without express written consent.
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