Week 8: signs of crisis in a gilded age

It is interesting to think about Latin America in the 1900’s as a mix of progress and, sometimes, regress. As mentioned before, in the 20th century Latin America experienced many positive changes, like the modernization of the industry sector, as well as the buiding of more roads and rails across country. But at the same time, the government and politics that were in power in Latin America were not up to the “modernity” standard. Many countries went through dictatorships, imperialist tendencies etc.

One of the texts for this week that I found particularly interesting was the poem “The Roosevelt” by Rubén Darío. There`s a lot to be said about the power literature has in representing complicated topics currently happening in the world. For me, it made it easier to understand the perspective of Latin American people back then towards the United States. The whole poem is sort of like a praise to the US, how big, powerful and mighty it is etc. But at the very end of the poem the tone changes a little and the author expresses the power that lies in Latin America:

” our America,

trembling with hurricanes, trembling with Love:

O men with Saxon eyes and barbarous souls,

our America lives. And dreams. And loves.

And it is the daughter of the Sun. Be careful.

Long live Spanish America! ” (Darío)

The other text I found really engaging was “La raza cósmica” by José Vasconcelos. It tackles the idea of mixture of races, and how beneficial it would be for the human race to mix more and more until becoming completely one mixed ethnicity. he uses Mendell’s gene experiments as a scientific bases to support that the more we mix together, the more developed the human race in general will become. It is clearly the oposite ideology used by the white colonizers when they came to America, and there is something extremely powerful about that. Supporting racial couples and mixture is a very nice idea, specialy back then because it was so frowned upon, but he does go too far though, like in the passage “No contemporary race can present itself alone as the fi nished model that all the others should imitate. The mestizo, the Indian, and even the Black are superior to the White in a countless number of properly spiritual capacities” (Vansconcelos, 162) because we should never go too far as saying one race is better than another.

 

 

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