As an avid book reader and a lover for storytelling, I found the Lieutenant Nun to be extremely fascinating. The extract discussed how Catalina de Erauso defied the social norms and decided to serve as a soldier in Peru and Chile, albeit being a woman. Although I do not support efforts made by Spain to colonize and exploit South America against the will of those native to it, I enjoyed reading about the measures Catalina took to disguise herself as a man, fight for a cause she believed in, and defy the expectation set on her by society. Some may argue that she did nothing special, in reality the Lieutenant Nun was an extract I read with sympathy, after which I realized that it was an accomplishment in itself to be a female soldier back in the 1600’s.

As for the Casta Paintings, I was particularly amused by the evident effort put in to define the races of mixed race children. What I learnt this week was that race was something concrete for a large portion of the early European settlement into Latin America. Race was a means of defining social status dependent on the race dominating the world at the time. Given that the global hegemons were the European empires, European settlers into Latin America were seen as the dominant race, while the African and Indigenous American populations were victims of slavery therefore depressing their social status. I was intrigued by how these paintings attempted so hard to depict the undepictable- the perfect social structure in which every race lived in. These paintings tried to show the difference in lives lived by people of different races and ethnicities, something I could compare to the current situation in my homeland.