Immigrants fleeing El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala frequently fill the headlines. Central Americans are one of the largest immigrant communities in the U.S. An estimated 2 million Salvadorans, 1.3 million Guatemalans and nearly 800,000 Hondurans were living in the U.S. as of 2013, according to demographic information compiled by the Pew Research Center. This number has likely grown in recent years. From October 2018 to July 2019, more than 560,000 people from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were apprehended at the U.S. border. But the history of Central America, where the U.S. staged or supported dozens of coups and military interventions in the 20th century, rarely makes it into history textbooks, leaving students to graduate without a basic knowledge of a region inextricably linked to the U.S.
“There’s definitely a gap in knowledge and understanding how we got here and in understanding the situation in each of the three countries,” says Daniella Burgi-Palomino, a senior associate at Latin American Working Group, who also advises an initiative called Teaching Central America that focuses on including these topics in U.S. classrooms. That gap includes “the U.S. role in supporting right-wing dictatorships and military in those countries in the 1980s and fueling internal conflict,” Burgi-Palomino says. “That was a precursor to some of the conditions that we are seeing now.”
Designing a Curriculum
Teachers at Boston Latin School are rethinking their history classes, figuring out ways to incorporate Central America into their lesson plans for the first time. They are doing so in part because of Doerre-Torres’ efforts to bring this gap in the history curriculum to the school’s attention. When she returned to Boston Latin School for her senior year in fall 2017, Doerre-Torres was inspired by her experience with Carlos and her own experience as the daughter of an immigrant from Colombia, another Latin American country whose history is often overlooked in Eurocentric curriculums. As her senior capstone project, she designed a six-part curriculum about U.S. intervention in Latin America, with a particular focus on Central America and the Cold War.
“How are we going to have comprehensive discussions on immigration when the only facts we’re armed with are about the Maya, the Inca, and Pitbull?” Doerre-Torres says to an auditorium full of her classmates and teachers during her capstone project presentation. “What are the real reasons for people coming here? What are the real reasons for people leaving there? What is the historical context for this influx in migration? Lastly, do we as the U.S. have a role in all this?”