Latin American Studies Blog!

Summary of Mey-Yen Moriuchi’s; The Art of Conversation: Eighteenth-Century Mexican Casta Paintings My source for our group presentation is based off Week 3 topic of Colonial Latin America focusing on the hierarchical system of race and classification during the eighteenth century.   These hierarchical systems were portrayed in forms of vivid illustrations called “casta paintings”. The article by Moriuchi explores and examines the art form and the ways that had been used represent Spanish, Black and the Indian population of Latin America at the time. It also gives an interesting view on the other side of the world when it compares these paintings to what had been going on in eighteenth century England, much like the casta paintings, English conversation pictures had been used to express social beliefs about the place of an individual in a society.   In this summary, I explore the main abstractions and ideas discussed in the article with regard to the casta paintings. ...

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 th...