Americans are quite insular so not really knowledgeable about the "outside" world. Maybe because the country is so big and important, maybe because arrogance or

Americans are quite insular so not really knowledgeable about the "outside" world. Maybe because the country is so big and important, maybe because arrogance or intellectual laziness. I would never forget this fragment from a class on El Quijote at Yale. "So what is spoken in the Bronx, Mexico City and Madrid? Castilian, which is Spanish, is what’s spoken, it’s spoken in those places. So you can erase that American prejudice from your mind if you ever had it. It is true — I mean, I had a colleague at Cornell, a very distinguished American medievalist who would ask me, “In what language do you write your scholarship, Roberto?” I said, “What do you mean? In English and Spanish.” He was worried that if I didn’t write in English being in Latin America, I didn’t have a language of culture in which I could write, because he didn’t think that in Latin America we had a language of culture. It is an American prejudice." https://oyc.yale.edu/spanish-and-portuguese/span-300/lecture-1 https://oyc.yale.edu/spanish-and-portuguese/span-300/lecture...