The Making of Latin America: Contemporary Thoughts

Holly, I think that it's really cool that you made a connection between the Incan coca bags from last semester and the murals we have been looking at this semester. I also really like that you expanded your consideration of art beyond just visual art, and considered art to also be literature. You could even probably expand it further to music, dance, singing, and acting as well. It really is interesting how art of all forms is able to communicate so many different things to so many different people. No matter a person's background, skin color, upbringing, culture; everybody can find some sort of meaning in art. That's something that I also find beautiful about art, that it is really open up interpretation. Authors, artists, poets, etc. usually have an intended message that they are trying to portray, but in reality people are allowed to take from it what they want. It is also interesting that even art, particularly visual art, goes along with the whole concept of the signif...

          During Professor Stark's lecture on Monday, there was something that really caught my attention, and it was the concept of Liberation Theology. Professor Stark defined it as "using religion to empower people to change the world" (my notes), which I think is an interesting concept. I further researched it, and the definition further expanded. Liberation Theology calls for the "true" followers of Jesus to work towards a just and fair society by bringing about social and political change. It is actually a combination of Christian theology and Marxist beliefs that strives to relieve political and social oppression from the oppressed of society.           The reason that this caught my attention so much was that, to me, it finally seemed like the Catholic Church was acting in how I view it should. Throughout history the Catholic Church has been a business, seemingly only interested in their own gain. They even functioned as the ban...

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...