Beware the Visigoths.

Look to you left. Look to your right. Chances are that at least one of those people sitting next to you is a descendant of the Visigoths.

But can you tell which one?

When I was thirteen years old, I won a spelling bee at my school. No big deal, I was just the best speller in my age-range within fifty miles of home. The cool part wasn’t the title, the certificate or the little trophy that my mom still has on the mantle above the fireplace. The cool part was the trip. I got a free trip to Europe.

Europe, in this instance, meant a one-month stay with a local family in not just any European country, but in Spain, which to me, my family and much of our community was the ultimate European destination. It’s the mother country, where we trace our roots back to. As Mexican-Americans, Europe to us didn’t mean France or England or Italy, but Spain—the home of the language, the monarchy and literally the blood flowing through our veins. I was thrilled.

What I didn’t realize before my trip was how much Spain really is like the rest of Europe and unlike everything I knew. The nations of Europe are, in many ways, far more similar to each other than they are to the places I was familiar with in the Western Hemisphere.

I could give you a thousand examples, but I’ll stick to one: the Visigoths.

The Visigoths really did exist. It’s historical fact. But to me it’s short-hand for a larger issue.

Here in Europe, your average citizen knows more about history—that of his or her home country as well as of the wider world—than a lot of history teachers back in my part of the world. Your average Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch garbage-collector can explain the birth, rise and fall of any of their respective former empires better than most experts on my side of the planet.

The way that this first manifested itself to me in Spain was by reference to the Visigoths. We would be in a museum, at a castle or simply out for a walk and I would get a speech about this ancient civilization, the Visigoths. The Visigoths themselves may be as extinct as the dinosaurs, but every Spaniard who was a child during Franco’s rule had to memorize all 51 Visigoth kings. No kidding.

For the record—not that it matters for your purposes—here’s what we’re talking about: the Visigoths were a people originating, perhaps as far back as 291 AD, in parts of Central and Eastern Europe who over time migrated through present-day Greece, Italy, France and Spain in the 4^th and 5^th centuries AD. There was later a Visigothic Kingdom stretching from most of present-day Spain through most of present-day France during the 5^th through 7^th centuries AD. During that time, the capital of the kingdom shifted from Toulouse to Barcelona to Toledo.

The important part is this: to people in the know, of whom there are roughly 40 million in Spain and 60 million in France and countless millions more elsewhere throughout Europe, these Visigoths paved the way for multiple civilizations still in existence today. They are literally in the blood of modern-day Spanish and French citizens, just as those Spaniards are somehow indirectly in my own.

This was all pretty heavy to a thirteen year-old Mexican girl from California.

I got very confused about exactly what lessons to take away from the experience. There are certainly at least two, although I must be missing something: first, Visigoths, who lived a millennium and a half ago, somehow laid the foundations for everything I see in France and Spain today, and second, Europeans are far more up on their history than we are.

The problem with the first of those lessons is that it’s virtually meaningless without a proper understanding of a good many things that came before and after the Visigoths and their ill-fated kingdom. Do you know, for example, whether the Hunnic invasions, Charlemagne, the Byzantines and the Roman Empire came before or after the Visigoths? Neither do I.

So let’s focus on the second lesson. Most importantly, how should we relatively ignorant inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere take all of this in and play along in a culture that takes its cues from millennia-old history? When purportedly educated people like myself are thrown into situations in which purportedly uneducated bus drivers know more about Western Civ than we do, what should we do?

It’s as simple as this: smile and nod. Don’t comment. Don’t pontificate. Don’t opine. Just smile and nod.