Week 2- The duality of a being

I would say that the way i picture Colombus has always changed. During my primary school teachers always tried to make us love him, after all, he was the one who «discovered» us and brought civilization. We used to have «big events» at school where we would do representations of his discovery. In this phase of my life, i dare to call him a heroe. Why? Because we were kids and we couldnt picture a world without civilization (represented by entertainments such as television, movies, games, etc).

However, during secondary school, a new perspective was introduced; one that showed how natives were threated. In this phase the topic of the Spanish colonist was brought to fill out our mental lagoons of how we passed from «indians» to these «civilized men», it is true that Colombus was not the one who «took our lands, killed our people and forced their culture» but he was the one that started it all. During this period of time, on vacation, there was this big representation (a thetre representation) of how the Spanish people got into America, when the colonist appeared everyone started booing them, and as the new information of the Spanish atrocities came to my mind, i joined the people. It felt great. At this phase of my live i would definetly call him a villain.

Final thoughts; right now my position of Colombus is more imparcial, i DO believe that he brought civilization to Latin America as we would probably still be behind in topics such as science and technology without them. Also, I believe his journey was not only of great impact to what is now Latin America but for the country of Spain itself, a new land with more species in both flora and fauna, advanced knowledge in navigation and astrology, etc. However, I dont approve his methods. Colombus was brought to Latin America by luck and ended up taking advantage of the natives, this can be seen from his very own text during the first contact with islanders, where he took all he needed in exchange of objects that were not of the same value for them. I think that schools (in Latin America) are now more concious of this duality of Colombus and display both perspectives to their students.

As about the information presented in the video, I learned of how Colombus was lying to his crew so they would not riot on him, thus, expanding my personal knowledge and being able to recognize he was some kind of genius as it was pictured during primary school.