Week 3

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 had been due to a huge drop in the number of slaves that were already living in America at the time.

I previously had no knowledge that countries like Brazil had some of the highest numbers of slaves, this was a country that I would have previously never associated with the notion of slavery.  It was because of this that the “Casta paintings” evolved. This was a hierarchy drawn out into dived boxes or grinds. Each grind representing or assigning racial combinations to names and a series of attributes such as clothing, occupation, land and housing. Casta painting were always almost always multiple and are a series of 16 scenes of racial mixture represented in a family group. It showed groups of:  

Mestizo: white and indigenous
Mulato: White and black
Chino: indigenous and black

Brazil at the time had significant black populations of: 35% Ameridian and 28% Mestizo. Again, this had been new to me, I had no idea Brazil had African’s in their country at the time.


It makes me question however, who classified all these images and where did the names for the racial ethnicities like “Mestizo” come from?

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