Amusing anecdote

After receiving two degrees from Texas Tech, I moved to Austin to pursue my doctorate at The University of Texas at Austin. I was a teaching assistant, which at UT meant I was the instructor of a couple of Spanish classes every semester. Austin is a great city and the university proved comfortably challenging.

In one class I was using comic strips from Mafalda, a popular Argentine series that ran for 10 years, 1964 to 1973. My purpose was to practice everyday conversational Spanish and to introduce various cultural topics. In one strip, Mafalda asks her mother "Mamá, ¿tu primer novio fue éste o quien? (Mom, was Dad your first boyfriend or was it someone else?). Her mother reacts guiltily and her father emphatically sends her to bed, telling her that the hour is too late to be coming up with impertinent questions. After Mafalda goes off to bed, her father turns to her mother and asks: "¿En quién estás pensando, vos?" (Who are you thinking of?).

I was temporarily flummoxed when one of my students asked, with every evidence of surprise: "Do they let them talk about those topics down there?" I had to stop and think what he meant. Then it struck me: my student assumed that the strip meant that Mafalda's parents were not married. Moreover, it revealed that he assumed that, since in the US talking in the media about couples living together without marrying was rather new and controversial at the time, other countries had to be behind the US and therefore would not yet allow those topics in the media at all. It was another example of people of all ideologies buying in to the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

The question also revealed a lack of knowledge of cultures outside the US. In fact, Argentines have never been puritanical about relations between men and women and family situations that many Americans used to (and some of whom still do) consider irregular have always been common. But in this strip, an entirely different matter was at issue. The generation in which Mafalda's parents grew up considered engagement to be an almost unbreakable promise to marry and men or women who broke off an engagement were considered less than desirable or reliable as people. Given those values, the expectation often was that your spouse had not only never been married before but had never been engaged before. Dating as we practice it here was always done with only one person at a time and was tantamount to getting engaged.

So Mafalda's question was made in that context and embarrassed her parents because it was not a proper topic of conversation, for reasons very different than those that governed the motion picture and TV code in the US. That code, and that way of thinking about engagement in Argentina, both went by the wayside at about that time. My student, who considered himself very liberal and open-minded, had no concept at all of other cultures. His certainty that the US must be better and more advanced than all other countries put blinders on him.

In all my years living in the US, especially these last 20 teaching at TCU, I have met numerous lovely Americans. You could not ask for nicer and better people. Many of them have traveled widely and they are much more knowledgeable than my student at UT. That is encouraging, but the actions of the neocons in the GW Bush administration show that arrogant exceptionalism is still alive among us. It does not do us any good.