Victoria Miller’s blog

     There are many things in today's society and culture that are creations made from bits and pieces of past culture and practices . No culture is exempt from this. Every language that exists today is made up of a mixture of words and formulas from another language. But it doesn’t just stop at language, even religion integrates other religious ideas. For example, many of the Christian holidays are set on Pagan holidays, such as Christmas. As time goes on and cultures meet other cultures, ideas and inventions are shared. This week we discussed how the African slaves kept their culture alive. They would dance, sing, dress, cook, and even communicate in ways that kept their culture alive. As time went on, the bits and pieces of their African culture, along with Spanish and indigenous culture, meshed together to create the Latin American culture of today. This small hold on our ancestors' culture and history, even if we are unaware of its presents, is an important part of...

     This week we discussed the autobiography of a slave and the slave trade. I found the question of resistance and assimilation the hardest thing to answer. We were asked if we thought people in a certain situation were resisting or assimilating. I believe that this question is impossible for us to answer simply because we have no idea what intentions and meaning the individual had by their actions. On top of that some actions could have been assimilation as well as resistance, for instance Manzanos action of spending a lot of time learning household tasks like sewing and cooking. This could be argued as assimilation because he is bettering his skills to help his master, or it could be argued as resistance because he is mastering this that will help him after he gets out of slavers. We can go back and forth on this matter all day but the reality of it is that we can never answer whether it was assimilation or resistance because we don’t know what Manzano was thinking wh...

 Hi Ella! You brought up some really good points that I completely agree with. All of the horrible things that happened and are still happening to people based of race are things that we can't simply never happened. There is far to much history tied in these experiences and thing we need to understand that was can't and should never pretend that it didn't happen.

This week’s discussion about race was very enlightening. As a Caucasian in America, I can note sympathies with experiences involving race but that does not mean I don’t empathize. Racism is a huge problem in society and it needs to be fixed. However, with all the discussions and Prof. Serrata’s story, I began to think about what would happen if everyone just stopped talking about race and pointing out how people look different? If we stopped talking about it would the divide between the races disappear? Would the new generations never question it? Or would they still question it? These are all hypothetical questions that probably won’t ever be answered because of how involved race is with culture and society. Also, by no means do I think we should just stop talking and learning about things like the slave trade. Slaves are a pertinent part of history that needs to be learned about in order to understand the dark side of the part.             ...