Week 13: Towards an Uncertain Future; Our Pasts Repeated

And just like that, it’s the end of term! It’s been a fast paced and jam packed thirteen weeks in this course, but it’s been a pleasure. Before getting started on my last blog post, I want to thank everyone in our Thursday class for such enlightening and challenging discussions. Furthermore, I’d like to thank

Week 7: The Export Boom alongside Antidemocratic Enlightenment

Modernization by definition means the transformation from a traditional, rural, agrarian society to a secular, urban, industrial society. Although the starting and end positions may be definite, how different countries attain modernity are drastically different. Due to a variety of influential factors such as social, cultural, political and economical histories, modernization can be executed successfully

Week 3: Identity Anxiety

Like many of the mestizaje from Latin America, I am of mixed ethnicity; I am a Japanese-Irish-Danish-Czech Canadian. Born and raised in Canada, but with ancestors from different countries around the world, I heavily relate to the identity anxiety Latin America people hold within their history, culture and society.  Watching this week’s lecture was very

Week 1: Latin America’s Essence

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” Beautiful, succinct and to-the-point; Gabriel Garcia Marquez opens his acclaimed autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, with a simple sentence, that I believe, captures the essence of Latin America; Storytelling. All of Marquez’s books celebrate