This week we discussed the arrival of the Spanish in the 1700s to the present-day Bay Area. The Spanish mission system irrevocably changed the local landscape and its legacy lives on today in our neighborhood, whether that be in the name of our city (“San Francisco” for the Italian Catholic friar Francis of Assisi) or landmarks such as Mission Street, Mission Dolores Park, and Mission High School.
In the classroom, we watched a news clip from the summer of 2020 about protestors pulling down a statue in Golden Gate Park of the Spanish priest Junipero Serra, who also has a San Francisco public elementary school named after him. Some students thought the protestors should have found a more peaceful way of making their voices heard; others expressed positive feelings that the statue was torn down; others worried what would happen if we no longer remembered the past.
The Spanish brought with them livestock production and agricultural systems that highlighted their fundamentally different relationship to the land. In the kitchen, we made a salad featuring many of the ingredients the Europeans introduced, many of which California is now famous for producing (a nice tie-in with our second grade unit last year focusing on our state’s commodities and the farmworkers movement!). We cooked the wheatberries before class because they take longer than we have time for when we’re together, but the third graders did all the other components of the salad themselves - slicing olives, peeling and slicing Valencia oranges, mincing parsley, snipping green onions, and making a simple dressing of lemon juice, sherry vinegar, and extra-virgin olive oil. I’m proud of all the chefs who tried a bite, even if the flavors weren’t ultimately their favorite, and was delighted so many students asked for seconds.
