2nd film review Fisal Alhajri PDF

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Questions are given in bold and answers right below them. Citation is chicago style. This is for the first student I did all the work for him....

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Fisal Alhajri

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2nd Film Review

1. What do we learn about the nature of ethnicities through the short videos on Hatuey and Yenga as part of the Latin American experience? Who was Hatuey and Yenga?

The video titled, “Christopher Columbus untold and the story of Hatuey” features a Taino chief called Hatuey and their encounter with the Spaniards. Hatuey was among the first freedom fighters in Latin America. Other internet sources quote that Hatuey was a guerrilla warrior who the used to attack the Spaniards and run to the mountains. The video shows how the Spaniards, who were Christians, oppressing the natives. It appears they were more concerned with gold and not living and leading a Christian life. In fact, Hatuey refuses to convert to Christianity during his execution.

The natives are instructed to accept the King and Queen of Spain and respect Christianity and the Pope in exchange for love and kindness. Despite toiling in the gold mines, they are punished and tortured thus the promise for love and kindness was ironic. Each native, 14 years old and above, is expected to pay taxes in form of gold. Those who were not able to get enough gold were punished severely, for example, by mutilating their arms. Hatuey’s attack on Spaniards was punished by burning him and his freedom fighters alive.

Yenga was captured in the west coast of central Africa by Spanish troops. He was a royal prince of Gabon. He was renamed Gasper Yenga, “Gasper” meaning treasure, since his capturers knew he was a prince. After being enslaved, Yenga was sold into a sugarcane farm as a slave. My reaction to this is that the Spaniards did not really care about the fact that they were capturing a prince which could have negatively affected the Gabon kingdom. Greed was all that mattered

Fisal Alhajri

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2nd Film Review

and as long as they earned out of it, they did not care about who they were capturing. It is ironic that they even named him “treasure.”

Yenga Managed to escape from the sugarcane farm with a few other slaves. He led the maroon colony that fought the Spaniards. Although he lost the fight, the Spaniards win was not conclusive since the maroon colony knew the terrains very well. For this reason, the Spaniards accepted to sign the treaty with Yenga even though they had refused to accept the treaty at first.

2. What do you learn about the conquest of the Americas and the role of indigenous and African origin peoples in Latin America? Respond to this question based on the readings and the two video clips included in the section.

Before the conquest, the indigenous people lived in three types of patterns namely: nonsedentary, semi-sedentary and fully sedentary. The fully sedentary groups were permanent settlers. Inca, Aztec and Maya are examples of the fully sedentary groups. The none-sedentary groups were mostly hunters and gatherers while the semi-sedentary people practiced shifting cultivation (Chasteen 2000, 25-26). The difference between the semi-sedentary and the nonsedentary groups is the fact that semi-sedentary were nomads but did not move much. Europeans and the African slaves who had initially met in Iberia made contact with the indigenous people in 1490s. The encounter was a clash of values and attitudes (Chasteen 2000, 29). Thousands of slaves had already lived and worked in Iberia before the conquest thus the Europeans preferred them over the Natives because of their knowledge of modern agricultural techniques (Chasteen 2000, 40). Many natives died of diseases because their immunities were vulnerable to diseases of the Old world (Europeans and African Slaves).

Fisal Alhajri

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2nd Film Review

From the two videos, the natives are depicted as slaves mining gold. They are tortured and mistreated. The video also shows an African prince who manages to lead the maroon colony and succeeds forcing the Spaniards into treaty. Other than the two heroes, Hatuey and Henga, the Indigenous people and African slaves played a major role working as farm and jewelry slaves respectively for the Europeans.

3. In your opinion, how does the experience of racial miscegenation in Latin America shape the nature of identity? Provide examples from the readings, lecture notes and videos in this section.

The presentation, “Brief Historical Overview: Latin America” showed the process of transculturation. For example, Africans were more celebratory in church singing. Brazil adopted the more celebratory culture and added dancing. The presentation quotes that the cities were the sites for formation of new cultures. Another experience of racial miscegenation in Latin America is the mixing of different genes which led to the birth of Mestizaje....