This week we learned through Alexander Dawson’s reading and his video about modernity. Modernity as he phrased is can be defined as “having a number of elements” such as innovation, emancipation, secularization, and universalism. We focused on modernity in Mexico where in society there were many groups of people who wanted to become modern but as Alexander Dawson states, when they meant modern, it was to look more like Western Europe.
For me what this week struck me the most was the how it was believed that what was “better” for a society, to modernize was the ideal image of Western Europe and what it took to achieve that level of modernization.
We also read through an interview between Creelman and Diaz, the president of Mexico. Creelman using positive diction when describing who Diaz is, idolizing who he is as a very hero like figure. It was portrayed with the focus being the positives of Diaz whereas there were several factors that were not mentioned that are negative that occurred during modernization. It was a interesting read, and I wonder why there is so much emphasis on Diaz’s positives, even as Creelman describes him physically.
I also noticed how modernization was implied to be a reflection of Europe. I think this is a very ignorant view with undertones of racism that is unfair to the Latin American peoples. I thought that Latin America should’ve been given freedom to develop into their own culture and nation.
I think you are right to ponder whether it was correct for the ideal image of a modern society to be so closely tied to the image of Western Europe. As Jose Marti pointed out weeks ago, things that worked well in Europe didn’t necessarily translate their success in Latin America. Since the regions are so vastly different, Marti argued that their politics and politicians are also different, and that Latin America’s leaders must understand Latin America well (and not just know about governance in Europe). I think the same idea can be applied to modernization – that modernization changes depending on where it is. Modern society in Europe may have looked one way, but Latin America is much different from Europe, so striving to be the same as Europe in terms of modern development may have been a poor goal. Latin America should have instead focussed more on developing their own variety of modernity that would better suit countries there.