Good evening, y’all. My name is Joseph Bouchard; I am a 3rd year student at the University of British Columbia, currently studying International Relations and minoring in Latin American Studies. These series of blog posts will be related to my LAST 100 class, which I am taking out of my interest for Mexican and Latin American politics, as well as for my desire to enhance political and diplomatic relations between Canada and Latin America.
This blog post will comment on two videos produced by students.
For the first video, I picked the one entitled “The Meeting of Two Worlds: Aztec Edition”, produced by Sophie Chevalier, Michelle Marin, Elena Munk, and Christiana Tse.
The most prominent reason why I picked this video in particular was for its artistic design, which was not only simple and straightforward but also positively attention-grabbing. The humour dispersed in the video also helped make the difficult subject matter much more tolerable to learn about. As far as the content goes, its unequivocal and unapologetic format makes it as simple as can be. Nonetheless, as I will elaborate on further below, this can also harm the reach of the content presented. In fact, one element that could have been worked on in further detail, was the amount of attention paid to the complexity of the situation at play, as well as the true extent to which the colonial practices of the Spanish against the Aztecs impacted not only ancient Aztec life in an enduring and severe manner, but also contemporary life in modern Latin America. For instance, no mention is made of the fact that the Spanish, both through government and private entreprise, has continually engaged in a new form of colonialism in sparse regions of Africa, exploiting its natural resources and labour potential in almost as harsh a manner as was done in Cortés’ time.
As for the second video, I have chosen to comment on the video entitled “Citizens and Rights”, made by Leobardo Elizando, Aaliya Kochra, Tamara Malhas, and Roy Saito.
This video discusses equal gender rights in Latin America, a topic that is still highly discussed today in Latin American politics and society. In fact, as is the global trend for developing countries and non-liberal democracies, machismo culture and an economic and societal advantage provided to men is still commonplace in Latin American societies. It was made clear that this video touches on this sensible and challenging subject with intelligence and accuracy, as few important elements are left out of the conversation. However, very sparse time was granted to the progress that has been made in recent years to achieve such a social and economic gender equality in Latin America. Namely, many political and ideological movements, such as that of the Mexican Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional and the Bolivian Movimiento al Socialismo, have made great strides to not only include women among their ranks, but also promote them as leaders of the movement, even making women into elected members of Congress of Parliament. Thus, although this video does a great job at portraying the issue that is still currently at play, it could have better integrated the recent progress that has been made to alleviate such an issue.
Joseph