Category: Overview

Hello classmates and professor,
I hope you had a little chuckle after reading my “hilarious” pun/title. But it’s true, last tuesday was our last LAST 201 class and it’s sorta hard to imagine that already its over. I am super happy/excited that MY first year at university is OVER!!!… almost.( I still have exams and a paper to write. ) But it was not like the year was not exciting nor happy, I just enjoy how time keeps moving forward. (means more adventures to take on!)
Anyways, I would like to list some of the things I enjoyed most/ what I will take away with me and suggestions. First I would say that I liked writing blogs. It added a new medium to the class that was new for me. It would have been nice to include a little more of the blogs into the classroom discussions though. I would have liked to each week perhaps to read one of the blogs out loud in class and then discuss about it for a bit. But i know that some people are shy and don’t want people to read their blogs out loud..
Another thing I enjoyed was the second part of the semester in our class. I am super appreciative Jon, that you took the time to listen to our criticisms and tried to incorporate some of our suggestions in the class. The beginning was a bit repetitive in terms of style, but later we had videos and learnt about your trip to Haiti that added a new dynamic to the class. I liked how you incorporated youtube into academia! But one suggestion I have is to have in class presentations instead of writing a review paper. Or we could present our review paper in any form of a presentation because I think that it would be interesting to hear about everybody’s experiences. After all sharing experiences is part of the fabric of culture right? One of the reasons why I wanted to take latin american studies was to meet latinos haha.. but also to meet other people who have travelled to south america or are just interested in the different cultures. So if we could have organized some social event/ field trip that would have been fun!
What I will take away from this class is a broader knowledge on the topic of mixing theories and culture. I didn’t know there was so much debate in the cultural literary world. Doing the final paper was a really good way to tie everything together.

Thanks everybody and hope to see you around!

Have you choose your fruit yet?? I think I earned a couple extra marks there… I made you and the whole class laugh… hahaha

Well well well…
We have reached the end! Hard to believe in a few weeks Summer will be here, long days at wreck beach and enjoying the Sun finally after 8 long months. All in all, this class was not entirely what I expected. It was harder, more theoretical and more academic than I had imagined it would be. I must admit, after reading many of the essays, I would put that packet down and have not much of an idea of anything I had just read. However, what I found interesting about this class, is even though I found the material challenging and confusing, after leaving the lectures, I felt that I really had come to many new understandings. I guess many of the readings just needed a bit of an explanation and once I caught on, my perspectives on many previously. For example, I was truly angry after reading that article about the Coral Reef, because I really couldn’t understand what the author was getting at. However, once it was explained to me in a way that made sense, this perspective has become really useful in understand culture in new ways. Things that should have been easy, like defining what culture even is (I am an anthropology student) proved to be difficult, but it was in overcoming that difficulty that I felt that I really learned a lot. I enjoyed learning about Murals in Mexico, and the U.S. Mexico border as a contested space that both brings cultures together, and also divides them. I enjoyed discussing things like Soap Operas and Futbol that seemed trivial at first, but came to represent much more about Latin American culture and society upon closer inspection. I really enjoyed discussing the element of performance in the case of the Zapatistas…but I must admit, I’m still a bit unsure about how I feel having discussed J-Lo’s butt in depth in class, never thought I would see that day. I like the idea that cultures do not merely come to exist out of a slow and natural process, but rather there is intension, power struggles, and strong social forces that have always and will continue to shape culture, as culture is fluid and easily maliable. Certain elements of this class pushed my comfort levels a bit, such as having a blog (never thought I would be the blogging type) and being called on randomly in class by Jon (that always freaks me out a bit).

All in all, its been real. Have a good summer everyone!

I truly did enjoy this class this term. It isnt entirely what I expected, but none the less I am leaving having learned quite a lot. i thought there was good variety in the readings from history to contemporary while covering many regions throughout Latin America. As I have said in blogs before, my experience with Latin America is quite limited besides several months of travel.  I am sure that my experience in the course was quite different from the many people who were from Latin America or had experience in arts courses. I really enjoyed the different learning format and learned a lot from everyone. The themes from each week built on each other quite effectively and having to blog about them really kept us all on top of the readings (well.. for the most part). Although there was some objection before, I thought it was really effective using a more controversial piece of “The Cosmic Race” to grasp global perceptions of what the products of “mixture” were. Following that up with another article and then two more rounds of “theories of mixture” was an interesting way of learning about the history of Latin America in a round about way. With everything we did learn, I thought it was interesting to have such a diverse group of learners contributing to class discussions.

As a Latino I was very curios about this course. I wanted to take it to see how other cultures look at us and what they think. I have to admit that at first it was a little boring, we covered a lot of history about where our culture comes from, but I guess we need to know where we come from to see where we are going, so even if I didn’t like it I assume that we need it to hear it, maybe it was boring for me because I’ve already hear it quite a few times. After a while we started getting into more interesting subjects, like futbol and J.Lo, and honestly that was more what I expected from the course, to discuss more contemporary things. The first couple of classes were interesting too, because I learn things about Canadian culture. I think is always nice to see how people look at your culture from different perspectives, as we saw with both Peron’s readings, and how even if its “popular” culture it may vary with the class level you are in, so its not really popular at the end. Also things differ a lot from the eyes that are seeing it, we saw it I think more explicitly in the Pongo’s Dream where we saw how the little indian guy was abused by the “powerful” spanish guy. We also learned about the theories of mixture and how they have already helped to shape our culture, and finally we saw that our culture is endind. I don’t really think is ending, but at the end over a really long period of time what might happen due to globalization is that al cultures will fuze into one, but so far I feel that the differences are still there, and even if our culture is becoming “more globalize” is still latin and has very strong characteristics.