This week’s reading started off by stating how countries transformed as one of the modern state in Latin America. In Mexico, modern infrastructures such as complex buildings and railroads were built and managed to eradicate the threat of Malaria. Other parts of Latin America underwent similar transformation. After abolishing slavery and caste systems, Latin America flourished through global trade especially by exporting raw materials such as copper and silver. These resources were exported to wealthy state in North such as the US and the demand was going up. Even though the economy seemed to be fine, but Milton Friedman said the export boom was increasing the economic dependency and foreign investors were attempting to monopolize Latin America’s wealth. In addition, disparity between rich and poor grew larger. I believe that this problem still exists today around the world. Various countries in the world rely heavily on export because their domestic market is not big enough. As a result, economic dependency increases, which may lead to economic crisis as the book also pointed out.

Order and Progress was also interesting to read because I could understand it was very important in modernization. Elites thought that order was necessary in order to modernize, otherwise it would become impossible. At the same time, they believed that democracy was not an ideal way to rule the country because people were not smart enough to exercise democratic rights.

As I was reading the book, I found it intriguing to read about the statement of Raul Prebisch, an economist from Argentina. He stated that export boom relied too much on foreign export and that “simply replaced one colonial master with others”. In my opinion, this problem still exists today among developing countries or countries in poverty as they have to rely on wealthy nations to run their economy.

Finally, I enjoyed reading about how photography was considered the most powerful symbol of modernization. Photographs could describe the process of modernization by capturing the photograph of buildings and construction of huge buildings. Moreover, the photographs were also used to take pictures of indigenous to fix racial identity. Benito Juarez had indigenous past, but he managed to erase it by using photographs to promote that he different from slaves and peasants. In present day, photographs are not too special for ordinary people, but back then it was used to document the signs of progress to modernity.