“He studied those sharp Indian faces and in their eyes recognized thousands of years of history....That September day in 1907, the children of Simons began their American education” (1).

Another day in American education, 1998. A test is announced. Students “read” the assigned pages from the text and prepare for the exam. The test questions are distributed to the frantic looks of the students who suddenly realize that their attempts to study have resulted in a total blank when it comes to defining a historical event or process. “I don’t know what happens. I read the history book. But when I put it down I have no pictures in my head.” We hear this complaint repeatedly from many students in our schools. In response to this concern I have found literature to have tremendous impact on the development of historical understanding, as it helps create the strong images so often missing in students’ responses to non-fiction materials.

This lack of strong iconic images is especially prevalent among students who are recent arrivals to the United States. Montebello High School, where I teach, is a large urban high school of about 2,700 students on the east side of Los Angeles. The majority of my students were not born in the United States, and fewer than half are American citizens. Some are here legally, and many are not. Students enter our school district speaking fifty-two different languages. They enter my classroom with an amazing collection of stories of how they got to America, what they thought they would find here, and what their lives are like now. Listening to my students’ stories is a daily redefinition of the American Dream, as they struggle to make sense of their lives, and I have always found it time well spent to have them share the rich repertoire they have gathered and treasured from cultures around the world. Added to their teenage angst are the burdens of a new language, new customs, and new roles. Many of my students are strongly visual learners who rely primarily on what they see to help them process information, but they often lack the “standard collection” of American images (accurate or inaccurate) gleaned from posters, Hollywood movies, children’s books, and other sources to match the historical events described in their textbooks.

The task of helping students develop a sense of historical understanding has become a team effort at our school. Five years ago, in response to Goals 2000 and the federal School-to-Work legislation, a group of teachers in a variety of disciplines began working together to create an integrated education for our students—one in which our efforts complement each other’s and help students make more sense of their academic experiences. A key part of this effort has been the development of central themes at each grade level to be explored in a variety of ways. In tenth and eleventh grades, six main themes are covered each year, followed by a more extensive study of three themes at the twelfth-grade level. These themes reflect the state framework for the social studies curriculum, but have been broadened to include experiences in mathematics, vocational education, and science.

One of the most important parts of this group effort is the use of literature related to each theme. The History-Social Studies Framework for California Public Schools describes history as “a story well-told” (2). Anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff notes that the ability to tell and understand the world in terms of stories appears to be universal. “Homo narrans, humankind as storyteller, is a human constant” (3). Stories have a plot, setting, characters, theme, and style. Set in that context, history takes on the elements of a story. For history, too, has a plot, characters, and setting; it involves a sequence of events in which people interact within a specific time and place.

Historical fiction can help create richer pictures of these times and places, as creative writers use strong sensory language to describe the sights, sounds, and smells of the past, while an interesting or empathetic fictional character can arouse students’ curiosity about a time period or event. For example, given what other sources tell us about the South in the early years of this century, does the character of the boy in William H. Armstrong’s Sounder seem plausible? Where could one look to learn what it would have been like to serve as a sharecropper during that period (4)?

Students too often see history as an impersonal list of dates, places, events, and “dead people.” Seldom do they see history thematically as a creative or interpretive activity. What do historical events reveal about human nature? What importance do the events play in anyone’s life? By moving students from the literal to the interpretive, the use of historical literature offers the possibility for other important insights.

Students need to discover that history is something “done” rather than read. History is created when facts are connected to prior knowledge in order to interpret the cause or significance of an event. These skills which may come more easily in literature (perhaps because they are more consistently practiced), can also lead to a more meaningful interaction with historical materials. Just as students understand there may be multiple interpretations of a literary work, they learn there are also multiple interpretations of historical events that are consistent with a variety of primary and secondary sources. Historical interpretation thus becomes a dynamic process, rather than the memorization of a set body of facts.

Historian Warren Susman noted the importance of this process in the introduction to his book, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. “The good historian is not done when he has presented the facts. He must be able to take words seriously but not always literally....The historian searches not only for truth but for meaning....Each must finally be judged by how much he does in fact enable us to understand the world he is analyzing”(5). When we utilize the experiences of our students as both readers of history and literature and as historians and storytellers, we empower them to engage in the interpretive process that is much more likely to create both memorable images and true depth of understanding.

We can also borrow the concept of “style” from the study of literature. Students know not all authors write in the same style and not all stories are equally appealing to everyone. However, few of my students can name the author of any historical text, and for a good reason. The texts most often available to students are written in a generic “encyclopedia article” style, and few students are likely to have favorites (unless swayed by considerations of size, heft, and the number of pages per chapter). Historical writing is too often seen as something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Students can understand, however, that the writer of fiction makes conscious choices regarding style and genre, and that stories can be told in the form of poetry, drama or prose, with details expanded or omitted. Students can also translate these lessons into a study of historical materials if presented with a variety of primary documents and related fictional texts. What choices has the author made in the inclusion of certain facts or topics and the omission of others? What conclusions can we draw from a study of these choices, and what do they reveal about the values of the people who created them?

Literature is critical in our efforts to help students expand their understanding of American history, and my colleagues and I use a wide range of short stories, plays, novels, and poems to connect the themes of our eleventh-grade U.S. history and American literature classes. (This effort has recently been expanded to also connect our senior English and government classes.) Many of these are texts traditionally taught in the canon of secondary schools, such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. However, we also make a conscious attempt to expand the canon through the inclusion of texts not so often found at the secondary level (6).

Especially useful in this process is The Brick People, a historical novel by Alejandro Morales. The Brick People chronicles the history of Simons, California, a company town created by the Walter Simons family in the southern section of the city of Montebello. Although we use texts by authors of various ethnicities in the class, The Brick People is unique in its portrayal of the people of our community, as it deals with the themes of race, immigration, and the rise of organized labor which are central to the larger issues covered in our course. Using this book allows our students to draw from both the fictional experiences of the novel’s characters and the stories of their own families to create a new understanding of our nation’s history.

In 1905 Walter Simons, a wealthy industrialist from Iowa, chose the largely undeveloped area of East Los Angeles for the construction of a brickyard. It was his extreme good fortune that the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 occurred shortly thereafter, necessitating the purchase of millions of bricks for the reconstruction of the city. Simons saw Mexican workers as the perfect solution to a shortage of laborers for his brickyard. However, in the political climate of the time, he also understood that the influx of Mexican workers would not be popular among many of the city’s residents. Therefore, he created “Simons,” a classic company town.

Workers anxious to leave the instability of the Mexican Revolution were encouraged to move to Simons. There they were segregated from Los Angeles society, with an elementary school, hospital, church, and store all within the confines of the brickyard. Law enforcement was also supplied by the company rather than by the Montebello Police. The company provided simple wooden frame houses with no indoor plumbing within the brickyard at a cost of $4.00 per week rent. By the 1920s Simons was producing 600,000 bricks per day, claiming to be the largest brickyard in the world. Throughout the Great Depression and World War II the brickyard continued production. However, brick eventually lost much of its popularity as a building material after the Long Beach Earthquake of 1933.

In May 1952 the Health Department condemned the homes of Simons as unfit for human habitation. Bulldozers entered the town in August of that year, and the city of Simons was burned to the ground. The town which had provided an identity for workers for fifty years was gone within a few hours, and the property was eventually cemented over to become an industrial area split by the new Santa Ana Freeway. The remaining 167 families of Simons blended into the larger city of Montebello, losing some of their sense of identity. Only in recent years has a valiant effort been made to collect the stories and artifacts of Simons. The Montebello Historical Society and historian Ray Ramirez are responsible for much of this work.

Within this story are connections to many other peoples who have immigrated to the United States to escape political turmoil at home or to fill a particular need for inexpensive laborers. Alejandro Morales, a professor of literature at the University of California, Irvine, has fictionalized the history of Simons in order to describe the immigrant experience through the eyes of a series of interconnected families. He also depicts various racial and political views in his telling of the workers’ unsuccessful attempts to move out of the brickyard in the 1920s and to form a labor union in the 1930s.

The novel raises several questions relevant to historical interpretation and the relationship of style to subject matter. Why was the attempt to organize the workers unsuccessful? Does this failure match the pattern of other labor movements we have studied? Does this attempt have any connection with the efforts to organize farm workers in the 1960s? With regards to style, Morales blends seemingly factual accounts with the legends and mythology of Mexico, a technique known as Magical Realism. Why did he choose to write in such a style? Would this style be equally appropriate for a historian? What research would one have to do in order to write such a novel?

As students become more aware of the choices made by the author, they learn that historical writing involves a series of conscious decisions and that not every piece of information is of equal value. How much information is enough? At what point does the historian quit searching and use what is available to create a reasonable interpretation? As in the discussion of themes, the purpose of these investigations is to help students discover the possibilities available, rather than seeing historical writing as an inevitable and tedious recitation of facts.

The use of this novel in my course creates new interest in the study of history. Every year there are several students in my class who are descendants of the brick people. Students often recognize people in the photographs they uncover through library and Internet research, while the maps they retrieve encourage shared stories of their homelands. Students interview recent immigrants (often their relatives) using the tools of oral history and compare the experiences of people who have arrived from other parts of the world such as Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. I ask them to consider whether there are common threads in these various experiences and how they relate to the description of the Ellis Island immigrants provided in their history textbook (7).

The Brick People also opens up a world of possibilities for the study of history beyond the classroom. It stimulates students’ interest in the local community and helps them to see those around them as a valuable resource in academic study. It enables students to see events of local interest as part of a larger pattern that validates the roles their cultures have played in the making of American history. Some of our students have taken evening classes on local history and have been certified as weekend docents at the Juan Mattias Sanchez Adobe, the oldest building in the area. Other students have worked with the members of the Montebello Historical Society to provide a bilingual “Living Museum” program for fourth graders in our district.

If we are going to take seriously the description of history as “a story well told,” then we must search for more interesting primary sources and relevant fiction, as we share with our students some of the best writing available. The payoff is a richer historical understanding and the modeling of the kind of writing and thinking we would like our students to develop. Such efforts mean we can provide our students with a deeper sense of their role in constructing the past, while we help them create memorable pictures in their heads—strong images of the past that can lead to stronger visions of their own futures as stories well told.

Endnotes

1. Alejandro Morales, The Brick People (Houston: Arte Publico, 1988), 70-71.

2. The History-Social Studies Framework for California Public Schools (Sacramento: California Department of Education, 1987), 4.

3. Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 272.

4. William Armstrong, Sounder (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).

5. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), xii-xiii.

6. Both The English Journal of the National Council of Teachers of English and Social Education of the National Council for the Social Studies often feature new works of historical fiction appropriate for high school students. For suggestions on a variety of topics, see “Young Adult Literature,” The English Journal (January 1998): 102-108; or “Notable Children’s Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies,” Social Education (April/May 1998): special insert.

7. The textbook for the course is Winthrop Jordan, et al., The Americans (Evanston, Ill.: McDougal, Littell, and Company, 1991). For other books related to the immigrant experience, see Dennis Banks, “The Debate Over Immigration Has a Human Face—A Literary Approach,” Social Education (April/May 1997): 196-202.

Marsha Gilpin Ehlers teaches American literature and U.S. history at Montebello High School, in Montebello, California. She is also a professional consultant for the Los Angeles County Department of Education. The author is indebted to the many people who have encouraged her and her students by sharing their time, artifacts, and stories. Chief among them are the members of the Montebello Historical Society. Mr. Ray Ramirez, whose parents worked in the brickyard, has collected hundreds of photographs, maps, and oral histories and kindly granted permission to use his photographs for this article. Mr. Joseph Blackstock has been very helpful as archivist of the Trent Steel Collection, one of the most extensive photograph collections of the East Los Angeles area. Those interested in the Trent Collection should contact Marsha Ehlers, Montebello High School, 2100 West Cleveland Street, Montebello, CA 90640. The Montebello Historical Society is located at Sanchez Adobe Park, 946 Adobe Avenue, Montebello, CA 90640.