All the text in this chapter convey in one way or another the complexity of the American presence in Latin America. The first text, a manifesto composed by the guerrilla leader Augusto Santino in 1927 as he confronted the Marines, the most visible sign of United States hegemony. Moreover the second document, a film called Silent War, suggest that the US can use its position on the cutting edge of all things modern to help Latin America. The document shifts our attention away from the anti-imperial project and towards a more benevolent version of the United States – Latin America relations. While on the other hand, the second film available in this chapter Journey to Banana Land, is a propagandistic film. The United Fruit Company used this film to demonstrate North Americans the positive impact the company had in Guatemala (note that the company was under a lot of pressure because of its vast landholdings). In the film the audience is shown Guatemala´s relative modernity and how banana production benefited everyone there, workers and consumers alike. As Dawson says, the film also represents a powerful source for interrogating a series of other assumptions about class, gender, and ethnicity in both the United States and Guatemala. And finally, the last document From the Noble Savage to the Third World, the author Ariel Dorfman critiques the US imperialism during the 1960s, by arguing how one must comprehend the set of assumptions about the primitive and the modern in order to understand understand American imperial practices. The text describes a nakedly imperialist United States.

All the documents in this chapter were penned during the export boom. Each documents attempts to make sense of said boom in such way that it draws moral conclusions about the sort of political and economical transformations taking place in Latin America during that period of time. Even though all documents tackled the same issue, they all offer a different account, or different point of view of what happened.

The poem “To Roosevelt” by Ruben Dario is a reaction to the involvement of the United States during the separation of Panama from Colombia. The title refers to Theodore Roosevelt an ‘American’ president who represented the US incursions into Latin America that outraged in this case, even a nonpolitical nicaraguan poet such as Ruben Dario. Roosevelt supported a 1903 revolution in Panama, which resulted in the annexation by the U.S. of territory for the Panama Canal. Latin America came to fear the bullying of the northern neighbor. Dario uses the poem to ‘tip’ USA assumptions of their own superiority. The poem is a criticism and rejection towards the actions of the ‘all-powerful’ United States. What I liked the most about the poem is that in it, it is Latin America who as Dawson says “posses virtue, spirit, and a glorious civilization”, which is rare when comparing to North America. The second document, EL Plan de Ayala was a documented by the revolutionary leader Emilia Zapata during the mexican revolution. It was a political proclamation in which he criticizes the government of Francisco I. Madero, whom he accuses and denounces for betraying the “causas campesinas” the revolutionary ideals. Though El Plan de Ayala was much more practical than Dario’s poem, it’s larger insight was no less profound. The penultimate document was ‘The Cosmic Race’ an essay written by the mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos, written in the aftermath of the previous document, in which he expresses his ideology of a future whit a “fifth race” in the Americas. He describes it as an agglomeration of all races in the world with no respect to colour or number to erect a new civilization, he calls its Universópolis. Vasconcelos tackles the issue of colonization by addressing the race problem. From this document what called the most my attention was Vasconcelos drive, his desire to reconstitute and celebrate a country torn apart by years of fratricidal violence. And finally, the last document was by Mariategui a Peruvian journalist, political philosopher and activist; and also considered one of the most influential Latin American socialist of the 20th century. We focus on an excerpt of his most famous work Siete Ensayos de Interpretacion de la Realidad Peruana, and the representation of Marxism, which curiously instead of focusing on emerging working class, he looks to Peru’s indigenous people as the “source of an organic Peruvian form of communism” as Dawson explains. He believed that it wasn’t the modern proletariat that would defeat capitalism in Peru, but rather the communist Indian.

The readings this week all have to do with the limitation of citizenship, and emancipation (focusing on race and gender). With the 19^th century liberalism at force, societies start to discard ideas such as scientific racism, and inferiority and inequality of the sexes. However, with the world changing, there’s bound to be people with very strong opinions from both sides of the issue. This can be seen in all the documents in this chapter. To start off, the first excerpt, The Fetishist Animism of the Bahian Blacks by Nina Rodrigues, who is considered the first Brazilian anthropologist, and whose work is also famous for being slightly racist, and often having a “darkly negative view of blacks” as Dawson puts it, is a book, divided in four chapter, in which Rodrigues described the rich universe of the “candomblé baiano”. Personally, I found this excerpt remarkable and curious. In Brasil we tend to pride ourselves in being a non-racist nation, as Brasil has the world’s second biggest black population after Nigeria, the largest number of people of Japanese ancestry outside Japan, and more people of Lebanese or Syrian extraction than the combined populations of Lebanon and Syria, just to state a few. So reading about the research of Rodrigues, the whole text to me in the end sounded a bit hypocrite, the way he dismisses the candomblé religion, mulattos and black people as inferior, even though he says he has an unbiased view. On the other hand, the second text Partido Independiente de Color, shines a different light in the issues regarding emancipation of races, and the limitations regarding the citizenship of said individuals. I was rapt by the fact that even though the document was written in 1908, the points it makes are very “modern” and open-minded, I personally enjoyed reading it, I liked the phrase “… so that the republic can be represented in all its hues”. Furthermore, this chapter also discusses feminism, and the fight for social, political and economical equality of sexes. It does so by providing two texts, with opposing views, and in which the second one is directed to the prior. The first one, Brushstrokes by Maria Eugenia Echenique, deals with the issue that women lack political rights and access to education, the two things women need in order to be self-sufficient. While the second one, Women: Dedicated to Miss Maria Eugenia Echenique by Josefina Pelliza de Sagasta counterattacks by stating her beliefs about women’s natural subservience to men… while reading it, at the beginning I seriously thought she was being sarcastic. While there isn’t anything wrong with a women aspiring to be a mother and/or a housewife, what bothered me about this text was how she made it seem that the ONLY role a women could possibly play in society is the role of a mother and/or housewife. Women shouldn’t be deprived of choices, as I believe there is no right or wrong way “to be a woman”. She goes on to describe the emancipation of women, which by definition means ‘the process of being set free from legal, social, or political restrictions’ harmful. It was an interesting (and honestly a bit angering) read, especially coming from a woman.