JE#2 Historical Amnesia

“El pueblo que pierde su memoria, pierde su destino.”

I completely agree with this quote. From what I remember, my teachers in elementary and middle school didn't apply much emphasis on any sort of Mexican history, including the US-Mexico War. It wasn't until I got to college that I began to learn about the Aztecs and Mexican/Latino history in my introductory Chicana/o Studies classes. I feel like when we are kept from learning these things, we are robbed of our culture and that in itself affects our own personal growth and identity. And not only that, but whatever information we were taught about our history was extremely biased and somewhat skewed. The Anglos were always portrayed in a positive light, teaching us that they had the best intentions when coming to America with the notion of Manifest Destiny. The Mexicans, on the other hand, were not portrayed the same way so that obviously affected the way we learned this history. For some reason I always think of when we were taught about the Pilgrims and the Indians and how everything was supposedly all rainbows and smiles with the first Thanksgiving. The real ending to this story was never told for the purpose of keeping the image of whites as pure as possible. On a scale of 1-10, I feel like my historical amnesia is at 6 but that was before I started taking courses that shed light on the history we deserve to learn.