Question From Teacher

Genocide: An attempt to destroy apart or whole race or certain group of people

Question…
Would you use the term genocide to describe what happen to the Native peoples of the Americas after Colombus’s arrival? Please respond on your blog.

My Response:
I believe taht it was genocide because a whole race was killed off from like disease and stuff that Columbus and his people had brung over.

The Encounter

This chapter was aboout the conquest and colonization of Latin American countries. The Latin America conquest and colonization created patterns of social domination. European logic of conquest soured the Encounter everywhere form Mexico to Argentina. Something that I found interesting in this chapter was that semisedentary societies, indigenous people of Brazilian history, organized themselves by tribes and by gender roles; not by social nor did they build empires. Another thing was that Mexico was given it's name by the rulers of the Aztec Empire. The rulers were called the Mexicas. This chapter also talked about that the name Inca actually reffered on to the emperor and his empire, not the people.

Born in Blood & Fire (Introduction)

This is the book that my class is reading for Latin American Studies. So far, what I've gotten from the Introduction are a few things. One was that besides from proverty the reason why so many Latin Americans come to the United States is because of how so few in places like Brazil, Chile, and Columbia are able to emulate the lifestyle of the U.S. middle class. They want to be able to at least live the life of a middle class person and in these country not that many are able to experience that. To them this seems like wealth; like the middle class in the United States is wealth compared to what they have in other country. Also I think that the purpose of John Charles Chasteen wrote this book because he wants to put the aspects of a confrontation between, I think, the United States and Mexico because of the NAFTA. The aspects of the confrontation can be traced back to 1492, so that's is why the author wrote this book.