The Danger of a Single Story

By reading five novels, a work of nonfiction, and numerous poems and essays in this class, I hope you are well on your way to recognizing that there are many stories that can be told under the umbrella of Latino literature. On your blog, Nate, you critiqued the notion that a writer can speak for "the" Latino experience, as well you should have, because there are as many Latino experiences as there are Latinos. (Although I think Esmeralda Santiago's syntax gets her off the hook, since she calls Quinonez's "a" voice "of" the urban Latino experience, as Tillie suggests in her response.) You also referred, in your response to Tille, to Chimananda Adichie's talk on TED about "The Danger of a Single Story." This essay is taught in World Lit, which some of you have taken, but to make the talk, which is excellent, accessible to all, I will post it here.

Yet the human mind is designed to categorize. We sort and group things into categories--the categories for things we are unfamiliar with tend to be cruder and less defined. Thus our knowledge of a group of people we don't know well can be severely limited until we decide to broaden our knowledge and take the time required to study and interact with that group of people.

Adichie's main point in "the danger of a single story" is that when minority literature is published in a dominant culture, readers from the dominant culture often only have enough room in their minds for "one" story about that group. For instance, the idea that a Mexican escapes across the border, finds work in America, and can send his or her children to school and they can thrive follows an immigrant narrative of American success that is quite familiar to us. But what if the immigrants are wealthy Mexicans? What if they are not undocumented? What if their children decide to return to Mexico? Leaving open the possibility that a particular group has a large variety of humans in it who will respond in a variety of ways to any given situation is part of becoming a mature reader and culturally sensitive person.

At Goshen College, we've had a slogan in the past: "every student, a story." I've been quite vocal about the need to celebrate the diversity in those stories. While recognizing that an education at Goshen College will affect each student's story, it is important that we preserve the distinctive qualities our each story. This is how we grow and learn, by being open to the great variety of stories we have to tell each other.

I have been impressed with the stories you have all been telling on your blogs as you grow to be more and more discerning readers of the varieties of Latino literature.