Monthly Archives: September 2019

Week Four: “Our America” by Jose Marti

5 Replies

After reading Our America, I can understand how it has been interpreted so many ways, and how both supporters of Castro and opponents of his might believe that the piece reflects their views. I think the confusion comes from how Marti talked more about what not to do than what to do. He was very clear on the need for a new government system tailored to the needs of Latin America and not based on the governments of Europe or North America, but he never stated what that might be. He stressed how the differences between Latin America and other places meant that Latin America had unique needs, but he didn’t elaborate on what those differences were and why they mattered to forming a government.

I’ve so far been using the term Latin America, even though he never used it in his piece; he only said “our” America, which caused further ambiguity. He never defined what “our” America was, he only said what it was not. He differentiated “his” America from North America, yet when he was talking about revolutions to be inspired by, he mentioned Mexico and Central America. I assume that “North America” was referring specifically to the parts of North America that weren’t under Spanish rule. He was Cuban, which is also technically part of North America, although he clearly would not have seen himself as North American. I believe that the term Latin America would have been coined by the time that Marti wrote this piece. I wonder why he didn’t use it. It could be that it hadn’t become widespread or commonly used yet, so he wasn’t familiar with it. Maybe he knew the term, but didn’t approve of it because it had been invented by a European royal. Or maybe he said “our” America instead of Latin America so it would feel more personal and important to its intended audience.

Thinking about his intended audience also creates some confusion. As noted in the lecture video, his writing style is excessively flowery and metaphorical. Part of his message was that everyone needed to unite, and uplift the low and oppressed. Yet, in a time in which it was likely difficult for everyone to get a proper education, it seems that writing in such a complicated way would exclude many of the people that he was trying to inspire. While I think I understood the majority of the piece, there were a few paragraphs and allegories that completely lost me. At parts, it seemed as if he was intentionally trying to be vague and confusing. He valued new ideas and creativity, so writing an ambiguous piece that could be interpreted many ways might have been his way of trying to create many new opinions. If he had been very clear and straightforward, the piece would have produced fewer ideas and debates. He was clear enough about his main points, such as uniting across nations and races and doing away with European influence, but he left much of the rest of his essay open to interpretation.

Week Three: The Casta Paintings and Lieutenant Nun

1 Reply

Learning about the Casta Paintings was interesting and surprising to me, because of the drastic difference it shows in the European colonization of Latin America compared to that of North America. In Latin America, intermarriage between races was so common that they came up with a complex system to classify all the different combinations of ethnicities. In North America, they never had to come up with such a system because intermarriage was so rare. I wonder if this difference in marriage practices between North and South America was caused by differing cultures between the colonists. North America was primarily settled by the French and British, while South America was settled by the Spanish and Portuguese. It would seem most likely that a difference in ideologies would be the reason that intermarriage was seen as so acceptable to some colonists and so unacceptable to others. Yet, based on the point earlier in the lecture about how the Spanish crown was seeking racial and religious homogeneity, it seems strange that intermarriage would have been common, rather than being discouraged as it was in the North.

Lieutenant Nun’s story was remarkable in how much like a made up story it seemed. It was so full of convenient coincidences and unlikely dramatic moments that at times it felt almost like I was reading a novel. The only thing that made it seem less like a novel was how unsympathetic and unlikable the main character was. I felt for her at first, being left in a nunnery by her family, and being treated so badly by some of the people there, and I was happy for her when she escaped, but after that she started showing a bad side. She always seemed so unrepentant of her horrible own actions, especially once she got to South America. She apparently saw nothing wrong with sleeping with her own brother’s liver. Killing countless enemy soldiers appeared to take nothing out of her. She killed a man just for yelling at her over cards, then killed another man who tried to stop her, and she didn’t appear particularly sorry about either murder. She didn’t even seem to feel much besides surprise when she learned that she had killed her brother by accident. Her matter-of-fact way of sharing her awful story reminded me of Columbus’ diary. In both, you read from the perspective of a cruel person who doesn’t seem to see their own cruelty at all. Columbus may have tried to write off some of his crimes by saying that he was trying to Christianize his prisoners, but she didn’t try to give any explanation at all for her actions. After reading the whole thing, I was very surprised to remember that both the Spanish king and the pope had approved of her actions so much that they forgave the cross-dressing and sleeping with other women, both of which were so looked down upon at that time. Killing her own brother without much remorse seems especially likely to be punished by the church, but apparently no punishment was given on the condition that she never sleep with a man. I would have guessed that, at the time, having sex with other women would have been seen as worse than pre-marital sex with a man. I wonder if the memoirs that she presented to the king and pope had edited out any mention of her sex life, because their forgiveness seems unlikely otherwise.

 

The Voyage of Columbus and the Meeting of Two Worlds

4 Replies

While tedious at times, Columbus’ personal journal did offer a lot of interesting things to think about, and showed much about the kind of person that he was. I was confused throughout much of it. First, by the fact that he constantly lied to his crew about the distance they’d traveled, then by the way that he acted when he reached land. All my life, I was taught that Columbus wished to go to India for its riches, so I was confused when his introduction stated his purpose as that of a missionary. Once he reached the land, he seemed to refocus on material goods, constantly expressing how many resources the land contained, rather than talking much about reaching the Great Khan. On first reading, I interpreted this as meaning that his true purpose had been riches all along, and Christianizing the Great Khan was just an extra excuse to go to India. After watching the video, I realized that he was talking so much about the goods in an attempt to distract and make up for the fact that he had failed in his mission to find the Great Khan. He kept talking about how easy it would be to Christianize the locals to make it seem that his missionary journey had succeeded despite not reaching the Great Khan. His very repetitive and excessive praises of the beauty and lushness of his surroundings also made more sense after the video explained his need to justify his journey.

While Columbus was usually painted simply as the hero who discovered the Americas when I was in elementary school, later teachings of him in high school made him out to be more of a monster. What he wrote in his journals seemed to confirm the more monstrous depiction of him. He came off as cruel and extremely manipulative. He lied to his own men every day, and had to qualms over taking multiple prisoners for months on end so he could present them to his monarchs. He complimented the locals on their intelligence only when he wanted to stress how easy it would be to Christianize them, and otherwise looked down on them. He knew that some of the islanders were attacked frequently, which would explain why so many were fearful of him at first, but he still scorned them as pathetic cowards every time they ran away from him. He took them prisoner, and when they tried to escape he lamented that he could no longer trust them, as if they were the ones in the wrong. I did further understand his distrust after watching the video and realizing that he kept calling them liars because they weren’t taking him to the Great Khan. After reading all of his condescending comments of the locals that he thought beneath him, watching the video portray him as a bit of an idiot who was desperately trying to convince his rulers that he hadn’t just wasted their time and money was very amusing.

Discussion question: Do you think Columbus ever questioned if he really was in Asia?

Thoughts on previous student’s videos

Leave a reply

I watched five videos total: Citizenship and Rights in the New Republic I, II, and III, “The Meeting of Two Worlds”, and The Meeting of Two Worlds: Aztec Edition. The two that I liked the most were Citizenship and Rights in the New Republic II and Meeting of Two Worlds: Aztec Edition. The two that I liked least were Citizenship and Rights in the New Republic and “The Meeting of Two Worlds”.

Part of the reason that I liked Citizenship II was because I was comparing it to its predecessor. Citizenship I was formatted in a distracting way, with long blocks of text that didn’t quite match what the narrators were saying. If I tried to pay attention to the text, it was harder to pay attention to the narration, and vice versa. There was also loud background music, as well as surprisingly audible background noises as the narrators moved things around, both of which further distracted from the information being given. On top of all that, the narrators sounded bored, making the whole video seem more boring. I watched the whole thing, trying to pay attention to what was being taught, but by the end I had retained nothing.

Citizenship II was much better by contrast. I found the narrators slightly more engaging, and the slides were designed better; the text was much shorter and was better incorporated with the narration. Without the various distractions that had bothered me about its predecessor, I was able to learn much more from the lecture.

Meeting: Aztec Edition was my favorite of the five videos that I watched. While the others felt like they had dragged on a bit, this video was much more concise. I liked that most of the video was comprised of the maker’s own animation, with pictures only occasionally used. It made the video stand out from all of the others, which had primarily used a series of pictures. The animation made it seem as if the makers had put more effort into the video, and was more interesting to watch than a series of motionless old art. The video also had the best narrators of the five groups; they sounded like they were telling a story that they were interested in. Many of the other groups were clearly just reading off of a page, and some of the narrators sounded as if they’d never read their pages before recording. Despite being the shortest video by far, it was the video that I learned the most from.

“Meeting” seemed to have the least amount of effort put into it. Much of the video was shots of the two narrators themselves as they talked, which was even less interesting than the slideshow of pictures and art that most other videos used. The narrators also didn’t seem very prepared for the video, and their lectures weren’t very engaging.