Latin American Studies Blog!

The lecture video talks about political representations, independence movements and how leaders get elected.   The lecture video talked about colonial leaders of Latin America. I learnt that 1850, brings about the idea of the “letter of Jamaica” written by Bolivar- being a violation of human rights to expect land.   Bolivar wrote this letter where he was exiled after Spanish forces crashed his army- the letter was to be directed to an English correspondent. He outlines his philosophical and political ideas in this letter and what he wants Latin America to look like. He says he hopes for a “powerful liberal nation to take America under its wing for guidance” which can be said that he wanted this to be directed towards Britain.   His idea was all about having a Pan American state but realises much later that it’s pretty much impossible because of a number of factors.   I learnt that his beliefs were all centred around a free market economy and an opposition to slavery.   In this l

1492 was the fall of Granada brought to an 800 year of Muslim war. The Alhambra showed how Jews were all evicted, and how this can be described as ethnic cleansing. The new world claimed that the people were natural slaves whereas the Las casas saw them as potential Christian converts. This was by far the most interesting video I have seen to date from taking this class. It was shocking to see how the population of indigenous populations of the Americas had been halved in 1550.   This then caused importing of slaves from Africa- it was interesting to see this as in high school in Kenya, we had been taught the history of slavery from the African perspective, reading textbooks that show how Africans had been exploited and to what degree. The lectures and videos showed me an entirely different lens to what had been going on the complete other end of the world in regard to African slaves and how they had been used on sugar plantations as well as why they had been imported and this h

The video talks about how the idea of Latin America and why and how it became popular.   The mythical point of contact: 1492 October 12 th was the instant Latin America begun. Whilst watching this video, I discovered that this was the year there was a great divide between pre-colonial, pre-Hispanic and pre Latin America. And despite having several Vikings sail around the world, their settlement left little to no impact whereas Christopher Columbus had a huge impact having several places/things named after him.   At the end of the video and in class as well, we are asked to think about whether Columbus was a hero or not. Whilst in high-school, all the history I had been taught about Columbus was that of him being a hero. A hero for being enough of a risk taker to sail out into ocean.   In text books he was seen as a famous Italian explorer who discovered America, but after reading his journal and watching the videos posted online- I personally think that it is evident that he