The topic of this week was centred around the 19th century debate of how gender and ethnicity affected human rights such as political rights, nationality and citizenship.

As we discussed in class, indigenous people in Latin America have had a different concept of nation and state than creoles. Indigenous people are divided and recognize themselves as part of different communities which have their own language, cultural practices and historical views. However, during the 19th century under the propositions of the European scientific views on race, physical appearance was the most important factor in order to classify humanity and allow the exercise of rights according to the social status provided by racial categorization. Therefore, indigenous people and Africa descendants who helped achieving independence passed from being slaves of the Spanish colonies to become slaves of the industrial revolution and their governments. As we can see the governments of the Independent Nations in Latin America used a system similar to the Spanish “encomienda”. Their native disposition towards their territory was not considered as a right because of their “race” and it was not uncommon to see indigenous people being enslaved by the companies which exploited their lands. Furthermore, it is important to analyze the South American society differently than most nations in Central America. For example Peru had strongly divided social classes by using the caste system even after their independence, not everyone was considered citizen and those noncitizen were Conformed by a large variety of ethnicities . While in Some countries of the Caribbean most of the populations were children from black slaves who lived in a territory that was mostly clean of Indians making the social dynamics different.

Gender dynamics of the 19th century are also important to analyze in order to understand nowadays Latin American rates of feminicide, adolescent pregnancy and gender violence. Maria Eugenia Echenique anti feminist position could sound retrograde from a 21st century perspective however her fundamentalist conviction of the role of the Christian woman is similar to nowadays Latin American sexist perspective of gender dynamics. I believe other Latin Americans would agree with me when I say that it is not estrange to witness society justifying rape and feminicide. It is not rare to watch our parlaments debating the morality of women right over their own bodies based on catholic views which are the same than centuries ago Echenique shared.