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.