Author of many books and scholarly work, Doris is Ira Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She has been for some years Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Seminar of Latino Cultures at Harvard University. She is also director of the Cultural Agents Initiative, a Harvard-based agency that brings together artists, educators, and community leaders in innovative collaborations that revitalize civic life both locally and internationally.
The Hispanic Heritage month bears an important significance for some, but not for others. What is your take on what it means for mainstream American Culture?
I wrote a book that considers the Hispanic heritage, as well as others. The book is about bilingualism, as a benefit to one’s personal intellectual, psychological, and political development. There is also a benefit to the public because although the U.S. educational system has principles that in practice confer monolingualism the attributes to achieve clarity and consensus, in fact monolingualism is a limitation on one’s capacity for thinking in different perspectives, from different structures, and multiplying one’s capacities to understand the world and to deliberate with others. As any mono, monolingualism is a disease. With only one box of grammar, of allusions, of references, it’s very difficult to become a true active democratic citizen.
Some people say that the percentage of people in the U.S. that are able to speak more than one language has diminished since early 1970s…
That has serious consequences for our international political agenda. Very few Latinos of first generation or more assume they understand everything around them or think that they should. Knowing already two languages means you can appreciate the difference between one language and another, and you can imagine those differences and many others. I know I don’t understand Russian, or Chinese, or Korean. That means I don’t understand everything. If I only knew English it wouldn’t occur to me that I don’t understand these other languages, I would just assume that everything should be translated to me in a clear way. So the modesty, the humility that accompanies more learning is a quality of our education that we should recover. So I think that one of the great contributions that Latinos make to North America is just being here. Being here, sounding different, getting jokes that monolinguals don’t get, reminding fellow citizens that the world is not only about us, getting more points of view, more interesting differences than one can understand. That’s why keeping an open mind is important to any citizen. How can you keep an open mind if you don’t hear and live multiple languages?
For some other people the influence of Hispanics in the U.S. is a hindrance, an obstacle to the historical ties laid out many years back. What do you see as negative aspects of the Latino presence and influence?
The negative aspect of Latino lives in the U.S. is that they sometimes buy into that illusion of coherence. The only negative thing is not to be Latino enough. That illusion of cozy coherence and homogeneity is certainly not a democratic dream, you know. It’s tribal and it can be fascistic if it assumes that differences are dangerous, it crushes creativity when projecting coherence as a single project. To the extent that Latinos allow themselves to buy into that dream, to purposely forget Spanish, to not celebrate holidays and family gatherings, and a tradition that is alternative to mainstream America, that’s the only real problem.
Let’s talk now about the Cultural Agents Initiative
You know how passionate and excited I am about developing education in the United States and that my most valuable lessons and models, for some reason —maybe because I study Latin America— are all Latin American. In Cultural Agents we work with forms of theater developed by Augusto Boal in Brazil, we’ve learned lessons in civic culture from Antanas Mokus who converted Bogota from a war zone into a civic paradise —I’m exaggerating a little bit, but not very much— and from young students and artists who developed publication businesses from youth cardboard and their alliance with great writers: the Cartonera Project (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cultagen/). If it weren’t for those Latin American experiences I would have less to teach in the United States and a lot less potential to improve education for everybody. So I personally and as a teacher, with other colleagues and students, am incredibly grateful for the heritage and learning we get from Latin America in creativity, resilience, and love of life.