The Spanish American Reader
As an educational commissioner from Argentina to the Panama Pacific International Exposition, Ernesto Nelson noticed how eagerly American high schools and colleges were taking up Spanish, yet how little their textbooks said about Spanish America itself. This reader answers that gap. It gathers readings that exercise the student's Spanish while introducing the geography, commerce, agriculture, industry, customs, and political ideals of the Southern republics, drawing on the words of their most noted statesmen and writers.
Beyond language drill, the book pursues a Pan-American purpose: using the study of Spanish as an "entering wedge" toward genuine understanding between the Americas. Nelson argues that the New World's republics share the United States' vast spaces, open opportunity, and common problems of immigration, education, and self-government. By revealing these kinships, the reader aims to break down old barriers and foster the sympathetic friendship that, he believed, the hemisphere's future required.
How it begins
As an educational commissioner from the Argentine Republic to the Panama Pacific International Exposition, I was very much gratified to note the constantly increasing interest on the part of the High Schools and Colleges of this country in the study of the Spanish language. At the same time, realizing from personal investigation that most of those who study Spanish are prompted to do so by the present widespread interest in Spanish America as a legitimate and profitable field for American enterprise, I could not help wondering whether the reading matter used in connection with the study of this language should not be enlarged so as to include some discussion of the subjects directly connected with the work for which these students were preparing themselves. One of the most amazing things in this country to the visiting Latin American is the almost absolute lack of anything like adequate information as to what the Spanish American countries are doing in the present, or what they have achieved in the past. This lack of information is particularly noticeable in the high-school texts upon History and Geography—not to mention those on the less common subjects of social and political economy—and is most lamentable of all in the text-books in Spanish used by the students of that language.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.