The the title of this blog post suggests, the future of Latin America is uncertain.  The term ‘Latin America’ itself encompasses a large region of culture, history, struggle, and ambiguity that has no real pattern as it attempts to figure out its role within itself and in the grander scheme of the world.  As Max Cameron proposes in the video, Latin America’s future appears to be more promising than its past, as its society becomes increasingly egalitarian with more liberal and progressive political leaders.  Even with what we perceive as progress within Latin America, there are still many aspects of its society that arguably can be bettered though we obviously cannot hold it to the same standards as those of developed nations.  Throughout these past 13 weeks, we have learned about the conflicts that have characterized Latin America’s past, conflicts that I believe will likely have influence on their future to some extent as well.  However, even with the often ‘depressing’ topics we have covered, I believe that it is important that this is not all that we associate Latin America with.  In one of the very first lectures, we were assigned an activity to write down vocabulary words that came to mind when we thought of Latin America.  Many common words that were shared were positive, including things like “culture”, “music”, “dance”, etc.  When given the same activity in one of our last lectures, terms like “conflict”, “struggle”, and “corrupt” were more frequent answers.  And while I believe that all of these terms are valid given the material that we have learned, its vital that that is not all that we think of when we think of Latin America.  For myself personally, it seems as though we have come a full circle in terms of what we’ve learned about Latin America.  During the class activity I mentioned previously, one of my classmates answered “potential” when asked what came to mind at the mention of Latin America.  I think that ‘potential’ is a great way to describe the uncertain future of Latin America.  While the only thing we really know for sure about Latin America’s uncertain future is that it is ambiguous (coming back to one of the major themes we discussed during the first week), it is a future that holds potential.

To finish off my last blog post, I’d like to pose the question to everyone (since I only heard a handful of answers in class), what are the words that come to mind now when Latin America is mentioned?

As always, thank you for reading!