Open Iberia/América

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/13658

Anyone who has taught panoramic survey courses of literature knows the frustration of working with published textbooks. No one textbook can serve the curricular and pedagogical needs of any one instructor in any given class. Bound printed textbooks are shaped by market considerations and tend toward highly canonical selections from Castilian authors that no longer reflect the literary history practiced by most scholars of Iberian literatures. Curricular aims and times schedules vary considerably by institution and by instructor. It is extremely difficult to find a textbook of Iberian culture that satisfies the pedagogical interests of the instructor and the economic interests of the student.

Print textbooks in general are becoming more expensive, outpacing inflation and adding increased financial burden to university students who are bearing ever-increasing debt loads. In addition to their cost, traditional print textbooks are inflexible, forcing instructors —many of whom are already time impoverished, with high teaching loads and increasing service burdens— to subordinate their own pedagogical interests and strengths to the materials and approaches offered by traditional print textbooks. This state of affairs is one in which market forces are distorting the way in which we represent Iberian cultures to our students.

Open Iberia/América offers maximum flexibility to instructors, minimal costs to students. Open Iberia/América will bring together short selections of Iberian texts in pedagogical editions. Editors will write short introductions, study questions, and a basic bibliography for further reading. This format will allow instructors to include any combination of the texts for inclusion in their course packets. The Creative Commons License under which Open Iberia/América units will be distributed allows for re-editing, re-combining, and re-distribution of the licensed texts, so that instructors and students may freely edit, annotate, and redistribute the texts for non-commercial purposes, provided they attribute the text’s original editor, date, and URL in the collection. Editors of commercial textbooks, however, may not reuse Open Iberia/América texts under any circumstances.

For more information, please contact David Wacks, Professor of Spanish, 346-4029.

Vist the Open Iberia/América website here: Open Iberia/América

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Browsing Open Iberia/América by Subject "Alta California"

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    Pablo Tac, Conversion of the Saluiseños of Alta California (Conversión de los Saluiseños de la Alta California) (Rome, c. 1840)
    (University of Oregon Libraries, 2020) Bacich, Damian; Miguel-Prendes, Sol; Wacks, David A.
    Conversión de los Saluiseños de la Alta California (Conversion of the Saluiseños of Alta California) (c. 1840) by Pablo Tac is the only published document written by an indigenous Californian during the Spanish-Mexican period. Born at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, north of San Diego, California in 1820, Tac wrote the manuscript while studying to be a Catholic priest at a seminary in Rome. Conversión de los Saluiseños is Tac’s attempt to present the history and customs of his people, the Quechnajuichom, (Luiseños) to a readership unfamiliar with Native American life. While part of the work deals with the encounter of the Tac's ancestors with Spanish missionaries and soldiers that ultimately led to the founding of Mission San Luis Rey, the bulk of Conversión de los Saluiseños paints a portrait of life at the mission through the eyes of a native person. Tac portrays the mission as a native community under Spanish dominion, which strives to preserve its traditional ways while adapting to a new political and cultural order. As an indigenous ethnographer addressing a European audience, Tac is perhaps the final representative of a group that includes personalities such as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Huaman Poma de Ayala and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. This is a pedagogical edition of a selection of the "Conversion of the Saluiseños of Alta California" with a short general introduction, notes, and brief bibliography. The edition and translation are by Damian Bacich (2020).