Thalia's LAST adventure

man, I was so pumped from last week and how there were so few problems, and now we get the bloodiest time since independence. Yet another problem for Latin America. People tend to become angels or demons when looked upon with a modern eye gazing into the past. Their actions are boiled down to what they did once, how they acted in political power and the role they played, rather than becoming the sum of all of their parts. I don't think it's entirely possible to take a historical figure and not try to categorize them as good or evil, because that's how we deal with the past. the past is evil, the past is not who we are today because we have learned from the past and we will (try to) not be those people again. We are inclined to sort people into good or evil boxes in our minds and I think that's okay. Binaries are how we are generally taught to see the world and this is something that we can unlearn as we grow away from these ideals, but they stick with us. Good and evi

            In Matthijs Rooduijn's 2013 article called "The Nucleus of Populism: In Search of the Lowest Common Denominator", he identifies a criticism of the elite by the leader. This is a hallmark of populism, often colloquially called an "us versus them" mentality. Rooduijn argues that this is one of the most common techniques that populist leaders use, what he calls "the lowest common denominator". For the purpose of relevancy, I am only looking at Rooduijn's analysis of Perón.              Of course, another staple in being a populist leader is charisma, and Perón had plenty of charisma, but Rooduijn mentions that his language was very important. Rather than using flowery language that would alienate his working-class followers, he used language that they would understand with metaphors that made it interesting for the well-educated. Rooduijn argues that Perón most emphasized the gap between the "good" (the people) and the "

I feel like this week could be summed up with "ahhh, for once, not  another problem for Latin America!" This week's reading was very refreshing: there was no political turmoil or big wars to talk about, but an attempt to establish trust between the government and its people. I don't often think about how lucky I am to have a government that I trust, even if I'm not one hundred percent satisfied. I can trust that my government, on all three levels, will never put me through the same things as Latin American leaders have done in previous weeks. I really appreciate this week's material for not being so violent. I loved the part about the radios! Radios were a big thing in my house growing up (though not as big as here) and they were always tuned to cfox. I still have a clock radio as well, rather than using my phone as my alarm, just because I like waking up to music or talk-shows or what have you. My grandma always talks about radios when she was young, too, a

The whole revolution talk in this chapter really took me back to the days that every musical theatre kid goes through: the Les Miserables phase, specifically the reference to the revolution eating its young and young men most often being the victims of revolution. I really liked the point made in the video that these men are heroes because they did not live long enough to disappoint. Eventually, these young men with nothing, fighting for something, would become old men with money and power and all the disgusting traits that come with it. But how can we be sure they would have disappointed? They were part of the revolution, after all, so it's possible that the values necessary for someone to take up arms in a revolution would have stuck around into adulthood. I really enjoyed the part about a revolution on the internet, where it can't be silenced, and it made me think of the current political upheaval one might see on the internet these days in regards to Donald Trump or Harve

I don't know if it's my education up until now, my upbringing, or Mexican representation in the media, but I somehow always thought of Mexico as a big old desert with lots of cacti and sand and ponchos. I believe this is in part due to the media's representation of foreign countries, especially those in crises, as backwards and needing our help so donate now! It's probably also in part due to cartoons always depicting Mexico and other Latin American countries in this way, as deserts without any buildings, just vast expanses of desert, while New York is a bustling metropolis. It goes without saying that cartoons are built off of stereotypes, but to what extent are these stereotypes damaging, or even racist? I found all the hard, concrete information a little difficult to digest. I guess that's why I'm not an economics major. I also found all the novelties of the products discussed a little difficult to understand, probably because I have electricity and have had

I love the question about race being a social construct. It always makes me think of Rachel Dolezal, who claimed to be black (but was really a white woman doing some form of complicated blackface) and then the hordes of (mostly) white people rushing in to ask "well, if race is a social construct, and gender is a social construct, then why is trans-racial not a real identity in the same way transgender is?" And the answer lies in the stain of racial violence, especially the one that carried on today. It is in the fact that NFL players who kneel during the anthem are "sons of bitches" and white supremacists are "some very fine people". I think the history of slavery in the Americas shapes it in a negative light. People of colour are routinely oppressed in the Americas, especially the United States, but there are also disturbing and saddening examples of colourism in Latin America. It's always hard for me to compare slavery in the Americas with other cou