Week 5 – Caudillos vs. Nation State

This week’s topic of Caudillos surprisingly brought up thoughts of Japan, as well as thoughts of current day United States for me. Caudillos, as they were described in the text, reminded me of the ancient feudal lords of Japan which were called daimyos. They were great lords and their higher-up was the emperor… but their relations with the people were similar to Caudillos in that they worked on a favor-based system with close relationships to various people in their region. Even though it seems as though Caudillos did not refer back to the central power (the king of Spain) very often if at all, (since we are speaking only of the time since independence,) I found it immensely interesting that a system aside from Liberalism was being used in a similar fashion all the way around the world, without each country contacting one another. Following this parallel, I was intrigued as to why Japan is now a cohesive, functioning, liberal and democratic country, whereas some parts of Latin America are not. Granted, Japan is a small place and is highly geographically isolated; much of what Japan was able to accomplish was thanks to the relative isolation and lack of colonial leaders that it experienced.

Aside from that, another point which caught my attention was just how little say the indigenous people continued to have. At some point, I had a preconceived notion that the indigenous had risen up in independence and somehow gained power, land, and money… so far, this has not been true in our studies, and I think that it will continue to be untrue until (arguably) the Mexican revolution, being one of the first examples of a formal revolution lead by / incorporating indigenous people (though I may be totally off on this, I am eager to learn what the actual history of this is in this class). While I was thinking of this, I realized that possibly in one hundred years people will look at all of the Americas the same way I am looking at Latin American history right now; at what point will minorities rise up and become a ruling class in any American country? By minority, I suppose I mean people of color in the United States, and the indigenous or any mix of indigenous people in Latin America. Because, so far, perhaps with the exception of Barack Obama and Evo Morales, there has not been a significant shift in power dynamics for a very long time.

In relation to the reading for this week, it makes sense that people react to feeling and comradeship rather than long term logic or ideology. I do not believe that it is my job to judge the worth of Caudillos, as it was pointed out that most other countries have not successfully achieved liberalism nonetheless. There were interesting points about humanity as well as the case study of Latin America brought up in this chapter and I am eager to hear others’ responses.