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?

Posted in Blogs, Week 3 | Tagged with africa, Brazil, casta paintings, chino, christian, clothing, granada, import, land, mestizo, mulato, muslim war, racial, slavery

Week 3 – The Colonial Experience

This week’s video and readings discussed the issues pertaining to ethnic representation and self-identification during the European colonization of what is now Latin America. The video lecture touches on some interesting aspects that I hadn’t considered before, especially in the way it frames the identity crisis Spanish people were going through, and the ethnic homogeneity […]

Posted in Blogs, Week 3 | Tagged with casta paintings, Catalina de Erauso, ethnic representation, identity crisis

Week 3-The Colonial Experience

I found the lecture video, The Colonial Experience, incredibly interesting as it touched on many aspects of the latin american identity, and how certain events contributed to how it came to be. 1492 was a significant, and complicated year with numerous forms of interaction between the europeans and the indigenous people’s. Not only was 1492 […]

Posted in Blogs, Week 3 | Tagged with 1492, casta

Week Three

One of the great ways to learn about the history is to observe the art pieces during that era. Casta Paintings are therefore could be used as handy tools to better understand the situation in South America following colonization. As I understood through the videos, racial difference was a huge matter during that period and […]

Posted in Blogs, Week 3 | Tagged with art, colonization, history, racism, South_America

Week 3: The Colonial Experience

In the video, it is said that labeling anyone with African descent as “black” is a very North American way of categorizing race. My question would be, what led to the differences between racial categorization in North and South America? As we saw from the Casta paintings, there was a different system of categorization, with […]

Posted in Blogs, Week 3 | Tagged with casta paintings, Catalina de Erauso, colonialism, gender, race, slave trade, The Colonial Experience

Week 3: The Colonial Experience

Posted in Blogs, Week 3 | Tagged with casta paintings, Catalina de Erauso, colonialism, gender, race, slave trade, The Colonial Experience

WEEK 3: THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE

The topics covered in this week’s lesson were exiting to me because of the examination of complicated gender and racial issues occurring in the Colonial world. Learning more details on the origins and details of Casta paintings makes clear some of the identity issues society was experiencing with a more diverse influx of people than it … Continue reading WEEK 3: THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE →

Posted in Blogs, Week 3 | Tagged with casta paintings, Catalina de Erauso

WEEK 3: THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE

Posted in Blogs, Week 3 | Tagged with casta paintings, Catalina de Erauso

Week Three

When I saw the Casta paintings I initially found them to be quite offensive and racist, as their only purpose…

Posted in Blogs, Week 3 | Tagged with afro-latina, casta, colonial experience, colorism, crisis of representation, identity, latinx, otherness, racism, representations, stereotypes

Week 3- The Colonial Experience

It is interesting and ironic that Columbus’s journey as not considered so important in the 1492, and the events that were considered important then are not considered important now. How did the Spaniards retain the black slaves from Africa and force them to come to Latin America? Did they simply capture them? Or did they … Continue reading Week 3- The Colonial Experience

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Week 3