After reading Lieutenant Nun, for the first time in my life I found myself almost rooting for a colonialist. I could not help but be utterly impressed by the success of her transformation into a\u00a0soldier and conquistador and must admit that as I read this story \u00a0my mind was tempted to see Catalina de Erauso\u00a0as a hero. I think that the almost fictional way in which the story is written makes it easy to get lost in how surreal the events were. Her bravery is undeniable, and the unlikely encounters with family make for a fascinating tale. Ultimately however, as Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto point out , she too was “a\u00a0perfect colonialist, manipulative, grasping, and at moments out and out bigoted.”<\/p>\n
Reflecting a bit on\u00a0how I reacted to this memoir and how at times I wanted to see de Erauso as a hero has made me further understand something I could never quite come to grips with; Why in our society do we ever glorify colonialists? You see, having grown up in a household in which colonial figures were almost exclusively vilified and certainly\u00a0not presented to me in a positive light through adventure, I could never understand how or why one could possibly see a colonialist as an outright hero. Now\u00a0after having read this excerpt, I can start to see how if one was\u00a0being taught that these figures were\u00a0indeed good, and were then presented with such a seemingly compelling story one could learn to love these characters. While I am not justifying this rational and still disagree with the notion that any of the colonialists could be “heroes”, I think this realization will help me further understand why there are such disparate views on Latin America and colonialism.<\/p>\n
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After reading Lieutenant Nun, for the first time in my life I found myself almost rooting for a colonialist. I could not help but be utterly impressed by the success of her transformation into a\u00a0soldier and conquistador and must admit that as I read this story \u00a0my mind was tempted to see Catalina de Erauso\u00a0as …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44638,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44638"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}