Into the Classroom

My class on "The Literature of the West in the United States" began this afternoon at the Valenciana campus of the Universidad de Guanajuato. I loved walking up the concrete stairs of the former convent, across the courtyard, through the tall double wooden doors, and into the narrow classroom with a high brick boveda ceiling. (The photo above is the view from the classroom door to the courtyard.) And it was such a pleasure to meet the students and begin a conversation.

It was a bit like beginning a class on a snowday in Idaho, though. Because of the torrential rains, some classes had been canceled and things seemed a bit discombobulated in general. I was told some more students will likely join the class at the next meeting. I am going with the flow.

But we began today with a small and eager group of students who are finishing their licenciatura (bachelor's) program. They come from towns in the surrounding area - Celaya, San Miguel de Allende, Leon. During the semester, they rent a room or an apartment in Guanajuato for the weekdays, and they go home on the weekends. There are no dorms here. University life seems integrated into the general community.

Because we are focusing our study of United States literature regionally, on the West, I asked the students if they had any images or associations with the U.S. West. They responded that they thought of stereotypes and movie images, and they giggled a bit as they listed:

the Wild West
cowboys
Indians
horses
cattle
sheriffs vs. bad guys
gunfights
the Grand Canyon
desert

I am fascinated by how pervasive these western images are, and I wonder what kind of common ground they will offer as we proceed with our discussions of novels such as Willa Cather's The Professor's House and Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. As I gave a brief background of 19th century western expansion today, I kept catching myself at various assumptions of cultural knowledge - remembering to identify who Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and Thomas Jefferson are; wondering how to quickly explain the Civil War.

Perhaps one of the most valuable aspects of this experience so far is that sense of having my viewpoint de-centered, of having the taken-for-granted called into question, challenging my cultural as well as my linguistic vocabulary.