Just a few days before I had to do this essay, my mom shared a story with me. In the middle of a Spanish lesson, one of her students asked her a completely unrelated question: Why do Mexican children always wear frilly dresses and slippers to the supermarket, and why do the men always crowd in the back of pick-up trucks to go to work? Although some of the students thought it was funny, my mother, of course, couldn’t pass up this opportunity to respond and teach a more important lesson, interestingly enough, about stereotypes. She reminded me of our trip to Mexico some time ago and related those experiences to her students. I was very young when I first visited a very large, cultural, and modern city. The streets were wide, and the buildings hustled and bustled with life and technology. There were huge malls with the latest fashions and subway stations with centuries of history carved around them. Paris, you say? No, Mexico City! A far cry from the dusty roads and grungy men with poor English accents we often see in the media. This is, in fact, a stereotype. From my childhood recollections of having visited Mexico and seen it for myself, none of these stereotypes are further from the truth. When we speak of the “typical Mexican” we might first want to ask ourselves: What is a typical Mexican? Did you know that there are Mexicans of Chinese descent and African descent, for example? There is a region of Mexico called Veracruz which is inhabited by a large population of Black Mexicans (when we visited Mexico, my mother videotaped these people and places). We were pleasantly surprised, to say the least. Many Mexicans also speak very clear English, their official Spanish language, and the traditional Aztec language that they use regularly. They are not all ignorant or uneducated based on the fact that they don’t all speak English. Most Americans don’t speak any Spanish or any other second language for that ma...
