Translated from the American

In 1999, when I returned to Canada from London, England, to teach Spanish at the University of Guelph, I was handed an intro­duc­tory Spanish text­book and told that two-thirds of my teach­ing load was basic lan­guage instruc­tion. The text­book was American. This fact, which seemed unim­por­tant at first, became an irri­ta­tion and an impediment.

I wasn’t sur­prised by the map of North America that ended at the forty-ninth par­al­lel, the two Mexicans con­vers­ing in Mexico City who spoke of the tem­per­a­ture in degrees Fahrenheit, or the line draw­ings show­ing eager stu­dents salut­ing the stars and stripes. But other exam­ples of American insu­lar­ity dis­patched class dis­cus­sion into time-consuming detours. Dialogues in which char­ac­ters debated pay­ing in-state ver­sus out-of-state fees neces­si­tated mini-lectures on how U.S. uni­ver­si­ties worked. The text­book taught stu­dents Spanish expres­sions to describe the weather — “It’s hot,” “It’s cold,” “It’s raining” — then pro­vided prompts to elicit the desired response. My stu­dents knew how to respond to “You are in Alaska in January,” but what was the answer to “You are in Indiana in May”? Dates, pre­sented in a sim­i­lar fash­ion, pro­voked equiv­a­lent prob­lems. The stu­dent was asked to say in Spanish the date of George Washington’s birth­day. Canadian stu­dents, I dis­cov­ered, do not know George Washington’s birth­day. I began to won­der whether I was impart­ing Hispanic cul­ture, or that of the United States.

The textbook’s pro­ce­dures were based on the premise that stu­dents had no expe­ri­ence in study­ing other lan­guages. In Canada the major­ity of stu­dents who enrol in intro­duc­tory Spanish bring with them the cargo of high school French classes. The assump­tions they make as a result of this expe­ri­ence raise a tan­gle of ped­a­gog­i­cal and cul­tural issues that U.S. text­books fail to address. And then there was pol­i­tics. The Spanish-speaking coun­tries fea­tured in our text­book var­ied with the whims of U.S. for­eign pol­icy. Cuba may be one of our two clos­est Spanish-speaking neigh­bours, vis­ited by 500,000 Canadians in 2004, but not even the word Cuba is allowed to appear in most U.S. text­books. When Venezuela elected a social­ist pres­i­dent, one of the most pop­u­lar U.S. texts replaced the chap­ter set in Venezuela with a chap­ter in which stu­dents savoured the cul­ture of Texas. The North American Free Trade Agreement, a sub­ject on which Canadian stu­dents have diverse and often well-informed opin­ions, is not acknowl­edged as a source of con­tro­versy. One U.S. text­book dis­misses NAFTA with a pho­to­graph of a harried-looking Mexican woman lean­ing over a sewing machine, accom­pa­nied by the cap­tion: “This woman is happy because she owes her job to NAFTA.”

One day a man I didn’t rec­og­nize appeared at my office, pointed to the book on my desk and said, “What do you think of that text­book?” I lashed out with a dia­tribe about how humil­i­ated the book made me feel. “You’ve writ­ten a few books,” he said. “How’d you like to write one for us?”

I had blown up at the rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the pub­lisher Thomson Nelson. My out­burst led to inten­sive dis­cus­sions. I invited my friend Professor Antonio Velásquez of McMaster University to join these dis­cus­sions. Thomson Nelson’s copi­ous mar­ket research indi­cated that Spanish pro­fes­sors across Canada shared my exas­per­a­tion; but the Canadian mar­ket wasn’t large enough to off­set the high cost of pro­duc­ing a com­plete Canadian text­book “pack­age,” includ­ing a video, dvd and inter­ac­tive CD-ROM. Chris Carson, then acqui­si­tions edi­tor at Thomson Nelson, sug­gested an inge­nious solu­tion: Tony Velásquez and I would trans­late a pop­u­lar U.S. text­book into “Canadian.”

It must have looked so sim­ple. “This will be a light Canadianization,” a com­pany memo stated. The illu­sion col­lapsed as soon as Tony and I started tear­ing apart the American text­book to which Thomson Nelson had acquired Canadian rights. Our efforts dis­abused us of the pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tion that swap­ping names around is enough to trans­form one cul­ture into another. It was easy to change “Hi, I’m from New Jersey,” to “Hi, I’m from Saskatchewan,” but any­thing more seri­ous required a thor­ough over­haul. The dia­logues in the U.S. text­book fol­lowed a stu­dent from Wisconsin in her trav­els through the Hispanic world. American stu­dents, whether Boston lib­er­als or Dallas con­ser­v­a­tives, could iden­tify with a Midwesterner. Canada has no neu­tral Midwest. Whichever region I chose as my protagonist’s home, other Canadians would feel alien­ated. After wrack­ing my brains, I decided that the best com­pro­mise was to weave new dia­logues around three cen­tral char­ac­ters of dif­fer­ent eth­nic back­grounds, one each from Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Tony wrote ground­break­ing spots on Hispanic cul­ture in Canada. Again, new mate­r­ial was required: the most influ­en­tial Hispanics in U.S. soci­ety are the ultra-conservative Miami Cubans; the founders of the Hispanic com­mu­nity in Canada were lib­eral Chileans and Argentines who fled mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ships dur­ing the 1970s. 

The American text­book was drenched in the ide­ol­ogy of empire. Each exam­ple of a Spanish say­ing was off­set by a line inform­ing stu­dents that all cul­tures had the same “uni­ver­sal” (i.e., U.S.) val­ues. A cul­ture spot explain­ing the Mexican uni­ver­sity sys­tem extolled Mexico’s new pri­vate uni­ver­si­ties but did not men­tion the state uni­ver­si­ties attended by at least two-thirds of Mexican stu­dents. A note on the nov­el­ist Carlos Fuentes declared that the only theme in his work was “free­dom of speech,” an asser­tion that might make Fuentes blink. The cap­sule his­tory of how Teddy Roosevelt brought the Panama Canal into being was an unspeak­able white­wash. A chap­ter set in Arizona even boasted about the supe­ri­or­ity of the U.S. health sys­tem! We took par­tic­u­lar plea­sure in replac­ing this chap­ter with one set in Cuba, which enjoys a lower infant mor­tal­ity rate than the U.S. and pro­vided an apt back­ground for the intro­duc­tion of med­ical vocabulary.

We amended many other asser­tions to pro­vide a more bal­anced view of cul­tural dif­fer­ence, Mexican uni­ver­si­ties, Fuentes’ explo­rations of cul­tural his­tory, the cre­ation of Panama, nafta and other top­ics. And that was before we began revis­ing the gram­mar lessons to bet­ter fit Canadian uni­ver­sity curricula.

The most obvi­ous les­son I learned from my two years of work on Intercambios: Spanish for Global Communication, First Canadian Edition is the depth of the ide­o­log­i­cal debt we incur by inflict­ing U.S. text­books on our stu­dents. But another les­son may be more impor­tant: to avoid analo­gies when imag­in­ing Canada. Analogy is our national dis­ease (“The Liberals are Canada’s Democrats,” “Vancouver is Canada’s Seattle”); it is the rot­ten heart of our sloppy intel­lec­tual cul­ture. In trans­lat­ing our text­book, Antonio Velásquez and I learned to resist facile equiv­a­len­cies and seek out pre­cise infor­ma­tion. Like other trans­la­tors, we had to accept that trans­la­tion was impos­si­ble, that the U.S. and Canadian cul­tures are as dif­fer­ent as sep­a­rate lan­guages, before we could con­vert an expres­sion of American dom­i­nance into a Canadian intro­duc­tion to the Hispanic world.