The Making of Latin America: Contemporary Thoughts

Hey Becky! I think you are totally justified in thinking that the role of women was important and should be included in the narrative of the Mexican Revolution. I mean, they cared for and fed the men, along with fighting alongside them. The problem is, we as students who are learning about the Mexican Revolution don't really know how much women were really a part of it. It makes me wonder - were Rosa Bobadilla and Amelia Robles the only women who help positions of power, or are they just really good examples of women who did? It's hard for me to answer without doing extra research (which I may actually do because this is a really interesting topic). I'm not sure how many soldaderas there were that partook in the revolution. A good question to ask is how many of these soldaderas there were in comparison to men? If they were pretty evenly matched then I would say for sure that they played a huge role in the revolution. And even if women weren't present in large quantiti...

          I found the discussion of indigenismo in our lecture today to be very interesting. We were presented with an intriguing quote by Guillermo Bonfil Batalla: "redeeming the Indian by making him disappear." This quote suggests that the only way to make better the "faults" or "bad aspects" of the indigenous people is to completely get rid of them all together - whether Batalla meant through killing them or just by eradicating their culture, I don't know. Both are terrible outcomes, and it is also a terrible way to think about indigenous people and their culture.           There are many aspects of this class where it is especially difficult to take myself out of my 21st century perspective on life - and this is one of them. It's just hard for me to think about disrespecting a group of people and a culture like the indigenous people have always been disrespected and disregarded. Just because they are not as "modern" (whatever the de...

Hey Becky, You posted about the perception and portrayal of women, so you know I have to respond! I agree with what you're saying in this blog. The way that the revolutionaries treated women is pretty frustrating. I'm going to even refer to something here that I read in Carrie's blog and that stuck with me: how we're supposed to get ourselves out of the 21st century mindset when thinking about these things, but how now we're dealing with events that occurred around 100 years ago. I never really put those two things together, but now that I have, it's even more crazy how that not so long ago, women were treated as objects. In some ways though, this hasn't changed. I think it really needs to be pointed out that not only were women treated as objects and merely as sexual beings, but also, the men seemed to be incapable of finding somebody who could stand up to them attractive. I guess it didn't fit their needs, because who wants to put up with a woman...

          I've been thinking about Porfirio  Díaz's presidency as we have been talking in class, and I've been thinking about his characteristics. Professor Stark said he was a super charismatic guy who never forgot a name or face, and therefore could forge personal relations with people. These skills or characteristics are really beneficial when it comes down to it. I never realized the pull that those attributes can give a politician or a candidate. Since he remembered people's names and faces, I'm assuming the people of Mexico originally thought that he would be a great president. That probably gave him a big edge over any competitor (even though the elections were not necessarily free from fraud).            This has made me think a lot about how charisma affects politicians today, and it still does seem to have a lot of pull on people's opinions. I can't speak in facts about this because I haven't seen any stats on it or ...

        AJ, you're very right when you say that throughout our education, we have been taught that the United States' ideals are liberty and equality, and we do things at whatever cost it may be to stick up for those. We were taught that the US is selfless; that we enter wars to defend those ideals and those ideals alone. And I guess it makes sense why they teach us this way, because they want to promote a sense of civic nationalism - and what better way than making us turn a blind-eye to the parts of history which we don't have a huge sense of pride in (I'm sure there are better ways)! They most likely put the "fuzzy gaps" that you're talking about in place and hope that people don't question it - which, in the same education system, we aren't really taught to question the information given to us. How were we supposed to question information when we had no resources to inform us that maybe there was something missing or wrong?           Now...

          The political cartoons that we have been looking at for Professor Serrata's part of the class really have me thinking. I keep thinking about Cuba being portrayed as the "damsel in distress" and what that signified and continues to signify today. In the context of the time period (the late 19th century to beginning 20th century), we can understand a bit that yes, women were considered to be inferior to men, and yes, this accurately portrays what the illustrator was trying to say about Cuba. But what is sad is that even in our 21st century mindset, we can still see that - that Cuba is portrayed as a woman because, in a lot of cases, women are considered to be inferior to men. This is not how it should be!           This even relates back to way in the beginning of the year when we talked about the difference between sex and gender, and how gender is really just a construct that we as people of the society have dictated. But it i...

Emma, thank you for saying all of this, because I too am quite fired up. To think that Europeans would consistently come into a new land, claim it as their own, and claim its original people to be backwards just grinds my gears. News flash - just because people don't live the exact same life as you do not mean that they are inferior! That's something that people have always needed to understand, and an issue that still persists today. People consistently have a hard time believing that a person being different than them does not mean inferiority, it just simply means that they are different - no more and no less.  I was especially getting frustrated in class on Wednesday listening to Stark's lecture. When he started talking about James K Polk is when I started to get heated. This man's main interests were undoubtedly centered solely around white men - but I guess that isn't necessarily different than a lot of people of the time right? He was a believer in Manifest D...