Latin American Revolutions and how race is apart of it all

Hello readers,

Our essential question for the unit Latin American Revolutions was why is it essential to acknowledge human value regardless of race and how are the Latin American revolutions evidence of the social imperative. I believe that this is important to think about because it talks about racism in the past and in the present. We also learn and think more about what the human values are and why we need them. To answer the question in class we split off into groups that were assigned different Latin American countries. The countries were Mexico, Grand Colombia, and Brazil. Each group read an article about the country they were assigned. We then learned about the Latin American social statuses and created a chart including peninsulares, creoles, mestizos, mulattoes, Indians, and African American slaves. After that each group created a timeline about the revolutions that took place in their country. We then split into groups and shared our timelines and answered the essential question for each country. Here is the timeline my group created for Mexico.

When we met into groups we discussed the commonalities and differences between each group’s revolution. They were very obvious commonalities and differences. Our commonalities were that each Latin American country wanted independent from another country and they were fighting against European countries, Spain and Portugal. Mexico, Grand Colombia, and Brazil were fighting respectively against Spain and Portugal. Our differences were not each new country in the end had a constitution, Mexico and Brazil did but Grand Colombia did not, and not each revolution was lead by the same social rank group. Brazil was lead by peninsulares and Mexico and Grand Columbia were lead by creoles. Each revolution was similar because race was involved with each. They all were frustrated with the fact that the lower classes were being repressed by the higher ones.

Race still has a very large impact on decisions in the world and the world in general today. Everyday people are still thinking about race with each decision they make. A very good example of this is the Ferguson case in Missouri. This is a very controversial case because it was a black man and a white cop. We still need to work on not being racist in society and in the law. Everyone should still be educated on how racism is a bad thing and how we need to prevent it.

Thanks for reading,

Julianna O