5 Days Until Hispanic Heritage Month Begins

I posted earlier this week that we were beginning to make plans for Hispanic Heritage Month (HHM), and they are well underway. I really feel as if what we are doing, no matter how little it skims the surface, will be immediately valuable to my children, my community, and myself.

I am setting some big goals considering how busy we are already, but I think they are attainable. If we only get around to a few things, that is okay too. We'll be better off for it either way.

What are we doing and why are we doing it?

As a family, we have celebrated Black History Month every year for the last decade through the study of individuals, movements, art, museums, culture, and geography. This has been such an enriching experience for our family, that in the last couple of years we have begun to recognize other preset months and the already existing opportunities that these months provide. Attaching your studies to an already recognized month (or week, or day) means that a greater variety of materials is likely to be readily available for use during the time period you are looking for them.

2008 is the first year that we as a family are formally recognizing Hispanic Heritage Month. We are making plans to broaden our understanding of the term Hispanic, its uses and limitations, the people that the term Hispanic may or may not apply to, the geographic regions associated with the term Hispanic, including Latin America and other regions, literature written about or by the peoples of these regions, and the cultural, political, and societal practices associated with them.

The simple goal is to get my family talking about Hispanic Heritage while broadening our understanding of ourselves and all people. We hope to inspire questions and deeper thinking about the world in which we live, why things happen the way they do, what works, or what may need to be changed.

I approach this as primarily my interest, not my children's, and challenge myself to learn as much as or more about the subject matter than my children do. I primarily believe that role modeling an interest in world affairs and history will do more to benefit them than any lesson I may teach or activity I may create for them. I do however extend some organized activities to them and encourage them to generate some ideas for how to approach the study. I have an eleven year old and a preschooler, and obviously the approaches I use for each of them will be very different.

What have we done already?

Most of what we have done so far concerning HHM involves the simple reading of books, basic geography reviews, very basic Spanish language skills, and discussions concerning Latin America, Spanish colonialism, and contemporary political issues associated with Latin America.

I recently came across a Florida Department of Education website while doing a search for reading lists for Hispanic Heritage Month. I copied this paragraph from the web page and read it together with my eleven year old last night:

Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated nationwide and begins on September 15, 2008, the anniversary of independence for five Latin American countries – Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Mexico achieved independence on September 16^th and Chile on September 18^th. Hispanic Heritage Month has been celebrated in the United States since 1974, when President Gerald Ford issued a Presidential Proclamation extending Hispanic Heritage Week into a month-long observation.

The first thing my eleven year old asked after hearing this was why would it say September 16th was the day Mexico celebrated it's independence when we celebrate the day Cinco de Mayo (May 5th) as a Mexican Independence day? I loved that he asked questions about it, and hope we can discover the answer together.

It isn't about the facts we learn, but more about the questions we are inspired to ask.

Together we traced the countries listed in the paragraph, plus a few more, and discussed some of the implications or possibilities about what independence means. Independence from what? from who? I mentioned that I read in a book that Brazilians are typically not counted as U.S. Hispanics, but people from most of the rest of South America are considered Hispanic in the U.S. Why could that be?

From there, a family discussion about many other world affairs took place, connecting an isolated subject, Hispanic Heritage Month, to all of the world around us.

This all took place in less than ten or so minutes.

Tonight, I am hoping we will just have a little fun with some simple Spanish, playing the game Uno using Spanish language for numbers and colors. Simple, but sure to inspire some thinking.