I believe that anyone that has lived or visited Latin American could identify with the example used at the begging of the chapter regarding Ecatepec and Polanco. It’s an issue that’s present in almost any big metropolis in Latin America, and it’s a perfect way to introduce to topic that even though someone can identify themselves as Latin American, within this region, there is an immense diversity of language, culture, customs, beliefs, economical stance, political view etc. Which reminded me of one the discussions in our first class, in which a group when trying to use two words to describe Latin America agreed on “Diverse” and “Unified” (or something along those words). Dawson mentions how “the idea of Latin America offered a vision of strength through unity”, yet Latin America is a region whose multiple histories are not easily reducible to a single narrative, since deep divisions can be found here, division that are rooted in centuries of experience and history. So many times it happens that people generalize our culture and customs, and it comes from the very ‘project’ as the author describes it, of trying to tell the story of Latin American past as a common history, when in reality the “efforts to keep this vast region in the frame requires a series of intellectual risk”. Though the author mentions how “stories we tell are invariably limited by the incompleteness of the historical record, and its tendency to reflect the views of those (in) power”, I enjoyed how he gives us “fragments” of history, in order to better understand the actual occurrence of events, and so he is able to offer some insight into the complexity of what is and what was the story of Latin America. Schoolhouse Rock – something that really called my attention, was the passage which he mentions the children’s show Schoolhouse Rock, and the way they portrayed history. Which was something that I personally experience when I moved to the USA. I had lived in Latin America and gone to ‘non-american’ schools until the age of 13 when I moved to the USA for a year, and the class that confused me the most was history, because even though, it wasn’t a very intensive or detailed class, the way they taught history was completely different from the way I had learnt beforehand, which only emphasizes how history isn’t really “what happened, but is what is said about what happened” (Michel-Rolph Trouillot).