Victoria Miller’s blog

 Hey Brooke, I also thought it was very to learn about how the women fought in the war. It was nice to see some representation of these amazing women in the Underdogs despite how little it was. 

 This week we read The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela. I thought it was a very interesting read and gave me a new perspective on those who fought in the revolution. We are taught about a few revolutions in grade school but they normally leave out the gruesome side of the revolution. We mostly learn a sugarcoated and simpler version of what happened during these revolutions. However, Azuela writes about the “heroes” in a more realistic way with all their flaws and the cruel actions that make them less than heroes. It reminds me of some of the things about other revolutions that I learned about that are also not as pretty. I remember while I was learning about the American revolution we looked at a drawing from that time. The image showed a man covered in feathers with men around him forcing him to drink something. With this picture, we learned about how the American rebels would tar and feather soldiers as a way of protesting the taxes. To explain, when someone is being tarred and feat...

This week we watched Viva Zapata! and I found the film very interesting. The opening reminded me of all the cowboy movies I watched as a child. Zapata also reminded me of the main cowboys in those movies. He was portrayed with many of the characteristics that were given to the “honorable” cowboys. The ideal person that are portrayed in both movies, are people with strong morals and someone that will do anything to follow through those morals even if it endangers themself. They are also willing to risk their own lives to protect the lives of others. Zapata risked speaking out against president Diaz in order to help the other indigenous as well as fights against the president. He even mentions that he was not fighting in order to receive a reward and would not except it.  Similar to Zapata, The Lone Ranger spent all his time helping others and fighting for the law and never wanted even a thanks for his action.  

Hi Brooke! I really like the connection you made between the tango and Sarmiento, I hadn't consider that before. I thought it was interesting how Argentina had all these unique things like the dance and the music, but the elites seemed to not notice this or believed it wasn't significant enough to consider as a defining factor in their cultural identity and, in the case of Sarmiento, only mentioning them briefly in documents about Argentina culture.

This week we read two chapters of Sarmiento’s book and honestly it confused me. In chapter 1 he talked about how bad the gauchos were and how lazy and uncivilized they were however, in the next chapter he wanted them to define Argentina’s cultural identity. When he was talking about the gauchos in the second chapter to me it didn’t sound like they were lazy at all as they traveled around performing incredible feats like tracking a criminal from just his footprints or knowing all of the trees that are in Argentina. Also, even life Sarmiento considers this way of life wouldn’t have it as the Argentinian literature encourage the children to follow this path? Also, the conflict between what the Argentinian culture should be was something I found interesting. Sarmiento and Bello were elites that had very different ideas for what the Argentinian culture should be. However, despite their different ideas they did have a few things in common, for example, their desire to separate their culture ...

 Hi Angela! Your thought about how Bello was trying to convince himself that working as a farmer was the life he wanted was something I hadn't considered before and I thought it was an interesting interpretation.

 Ode to Tropical Agriculture has given me a new understanding of how to read poetry. After reading the poem I had an incorrect understanding of the meaning of the poem. After I learned what the poet was actually saying about the poem I realized that I put my own ideas into the meaning of the poem. While looking back on the poem the meaning seemed to be so obvious and I was thoroughly confused on how I missed it so badly the first time. After thinking about it I realized that the first time I read the poem I had put my own ideals about what the poem should mean instead of reading what was written. This might have been because I was already struggling to understand the words that were written or because I didn’t even consider the fact that the author of the poem wanted to create more agriculture by destroying nature. Either way I came to a wrong understanding of the meaning of the poem because of my own beliefs and now know that I need to read poems with a more open mind.