Week 12: Speaking Truth to Power

Dawson describing the dirty wars and the role that women played in bringing down these oppressive regimes are the first time I’ve ever heard about them. Hearing how these brave women protested their children’s disappearance was truly remarkable. Reading that the “secret police began stalking the Madres, even kidnapping and killing a few” is really …

Week 11: The Terror

As Dawson attempts to find words apt for the period of time dubbed the “dirty war”, I can’t help but feel how relevant this is in current governments and cultures across the world. The labels like “dirty war” and “war on terror” are “unconventional forms of warfare where the enemy is within, and rarely in …

Short Research Assignment

Creelman, James. “Porfirio Diaz, Hero of the Americas”. Pearson’s Magazine (1908). 14 Nov. 2016 In the article provided by Dawson, the James Creelman interviews Porfirio Diaz, the Mexican President who oversaw modernity in his country. Diaz talks about retiring and is often hypocritical in some of the statements he gives. For example, Diaz declares that …

Week 10: Power to the People

In the beginning of the chapter, Dawson points out that “poor Brazilians had more power as consumers of popular music than they did as workers or citizens”. It is an interesting statement because it prompts me to believe that the concept of people buying beneficial products for themselves could be more democratic than “democratic governments” …

Week 9: Commerce, Coercion, and America’s Empire

At the beginning of the chapter, something that stuck out for me, was the astounding number of workers that died while working on the Panama Canal. Although yellow fever and other diseases are the main culprit, the more than twenty-seven thousand five hundred people that perished is still a tremendous number of people. To put …

Week 8: Signs of Crisis in a Gilded Age

Having never learned or heard of Porfirio Diaz before last week’s reading, I genuinely thought he was a good leader and human being. In some respects, Diaz was a good leader, he was able to “modernize” Mexico and stabilize the economy. However, his government was anything but a democracy, it was a dictatorship with its …

Week 7: The Export Boom as Modernity

The link that Dawson makes between photography and modernity is very interesting to me. Growing up in an era where cellphones and taking pictures or “selfies” is not uncommon, thinking of having your picture taken and have the many aspects about it define who you are, is very intriguing. The way you dress, the way …

Week 6: Citizenship and Rights in the New Republic

I find it very interesting how different histories of abuse towards the indigenous peoples can be so closely compared. There are always the explorers or people who have settled on native land taking advantage of their indigenous counterparts; In the case of nineteenth century Argentina, they “clear[ed] indigenous lands” to create “new territory for white …

Week 5: Caudillos vs The Nation State

It is interesting to me, how the peg leg of a former Mexican president is still held in an American museum. If this were the other way around, I wouldn’t imagine the Americans being all too pleased about it. Or do the Mexicans not want it back because it’s a reminder of the terrible national …

Week 4: Independence Narratives, Past and Present

To learn that Haiti was one of the first countries to win their independence was a surprise to me. If I was ever asked which countries in Latin America I would have thought won their independence first, I would have responded with countries like Chile, Peru or maybe even Argentina. I remember being part of …