Ever since I began my journey of the Spanish major at the start of my junior year in college, fellow students and faculty alike have been insisting that spending a semester abroad is the be-all-and-end-all of the major and will essentially make or break one’s experience in the program. I have inwardly challenged this idea from the start, not only because I am inherently adverse to rules and what may be considered “the norm”, but also because I had a strong desire to learn Spanish and had heard from too many people that their respective study abroad programs were essentially a college in the US replicated artificially in a Spanish-speaking country.  Of course, I am aware that many decisions made during time spent abroad greatly influence people’s experience with the language (housing choice, language spoken by friends, the amount of conversations started for practice, etc.) and am intent on spending at least a year in a Spanish-speaking country after I graduate.  Because I was lucky enough to attend the summer language school at Middlebury College in Vermont, I had all the Spanish immersion I could ask for without the stress of travel and being in a foreign country alone, which is significant for me because I’m a naturally anxious person.

When I reflect on my experience studying Spanish at UMass Amherst, as we have been asked to do many times over the course of our IE requirements, I’m able to see an integrated process of personal growth and maturation, a greater understanding of the world plus a greater and more nuanced sense of empathy for the billions of people that live here, and an academic interest that felt completely new to me.  One of the most jarring realizations when studying Latin American history is the extremely limited historical context presented in U.S. public school classes.  The narrative that I most often received as a young student was basically, “the Pilgrims discovered America, the ‘founding fathers’ were brilliant, innovative thinkers who established a fool-proof democracy and constitution, and all U.S. leadership has done its absolute best in the face of unfortunate incidents such as genocide and slavery.”  Never once was it acknowledged that these brilliant ‘founding fathers’ and our benevolent leadership played a direct role in the horrific events and conditions that cloud our country’s past, nor was any viewpoint ever considered other than that of the rich white man (“white” being a fluid term over years of immigration and assimilation). When I learned about the genocide and desaparecidos that plague the much more recent histories of countries in Central and Latin America, I felt almost panicked that not once in my education had any of it been mentioned.  When I think back, it took until AP World History in grade 10 to study the Holocaust, and I went to private school at that time.  I don’t know if my educational experience parallels that of most U.S. students, but I find it both puzzling and alarming that in history class, we would rather spew quasi-propaganda than tell students the truth about the world they live in.