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"America" was transformed from the "unknown" to the "new" in the European imagination, positing that whatever did not exist on the European horizon did not exist at all until it was "discovered" and named. --Walter Mignolo
To more fully comprehend the various social, political, economic, cultural, and religious forces at work in the modern period, a brief understanding of the colonial period is important. Read this article on the role of the Catholic Church in the Spanish conquest of the Americas to begin. As you do, consider the reasons that the Church was able to gain immense power throughout the Spanish Americas during the colonial period. During the contests between conservative and liberal notions of republican governance (which we will study in more detail in Unit 2), the role of the Church was a source of intense--even violent--controversy.
In terms of social construction--the meanings given to ethnicity, class, and gender within the colonial political and economic systems, scholars discuss the process of transculturation in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas during the colonial period. Originally conceptualized in the 1940s by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, comparative literature professor Silvia Spitta has defined transculturation as "complex processes of adjustment and re-creation--cultural, literary, linguistic and personal--that allow for new, vital and viable configurations to arise out of the clash of cultures and the violence of colonial and neo-colonial appropriations" (p. 2). She conceptualizes the "transculturated subject" as someone who is "consciously or unconsciously situated between at least two worlds, two cultures, two languages, and two definitions of subjectivity, and who constantly mediates between them all" (p. 24). [Definition as quoted and articulated in Elliot Young's review of Spitta's book, Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America.]
An understanding of transculturation is crucial to the study of Modern Latin America because it was the process by which indigenous peoples, European colonizers, and Africans (who principally arrived in the Americas as slaves, although some actively participated in the conquest) forged new cultural, political, and social systems through alternate periods of violent conflict and accommodation over the three centuries between 1492 and 1808. As Nora Jaffary points out in her teaching, women and minorities--including indigenous, African-heritage, and mestizo peoples, used legal and extra legal avenues to contest the colonial system and carve out a their own place in society. The types of resistance that she points out provide evidence for the ways in which transculturation worked in practical, everyday terms.
[Important ideas/issues from colonial period--include Dr. Rogers' OER videos?]
Before you move on to Unit 2, take a few minutes to write in your journal, blog, or notebook (or whatever writing device you prefer) about what you've learned here. Based on what you've read in this unit, how would you define Latin America? Justify your definition with evidence from what you've learned.
Image: By Miguel Cabrera [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Next Unit: (2) Independence and the Problem of Nation Building
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