The Colonial Experience

As always, the ignorance of those long dead, who were raised in a different time with very different ideals, does not fail to irritate me. Of course it's impossible to enslave all the Indigenous Americans because more than half the population has been slaughtered. It's horrifying that their next thought was to import more slaves from another continent. But how much can we blame these people when they thought that their actions were completely justified? Is it possible to blame them for modern-day problems like the mass incarceration of black men?
It also horrifies me that Spain ordered a form of ethnic cleansing. Antisemitism has deep roots and I wonder, if they had known then about what the future would entail with the Holocaust, would they still have done it? In typing that, I answered my own question: absolutely.
I haven't organized my thoughts on Casta paintings yet. Are they racist or are they a reflection on an identity crisis? They're definitely colourist, something that I know Latin America still struggles with to this day. The contrast is startling in the images with lighter-skinned white Europeans depicted in silk coats and ornate dresses and their body language just screams regal, put-together. The black or darker-skinned people are all in simple clothing, sitting on the floor. Some of them are even in rags. It's hard to know if this was a deliberate choice on the artist's part or whether it was one of those things that just happens without knowing that it's suggesting something really racist. At least the Casta paintings are categorizing and allowing interracial couples to exist, even if they are depicting them as poor, unlike the States. I like the idea of them being used to categorize, to sort of be able to give a name to the feeling of being a mixed-race child, but it definitely begins to get messy after a point.
I really enjoyed the story of Catalina de Erauso. It read more like a fantasy novel and it was often hard to keep track of the plot (due, partly, I guess, to the fact that it was written autobiographically, translated, and we only read a snippet) but to think of it as true history was fairly baffling to me. I'm not sure what pronouns to use, or name, because Catalina used so many during their lifetime and it feels like misgendering to refer to him with she pronouns so I'll stick with he. I really enjoyed his story and all the parts where he almost got discovered, by his brother, his mother, the nuns, his father. It's also interesting to see a distinctly trans person in a time when it's hard to think of a trans person existing at all without being killed for it or hiding their true identity. I like that he was allowed to continue to live his life the way he wanted, which I guess is due to his being a good soldier and a virgin. I like the nickname "Lieutenant Nun". But it's hard to ignore the fact that he was "the perfect colonialist" even if he was a trans person in a time that didn't accept trans people.