One of my friends, who is in a small group I go to and is a fellow Lost fan, studies history at UNLP. I've never particularly enjoyed history, but talking to her has made me think more about it. Since college, studying the history of Latinamerica, it was interesting to consider why the Spanish colonies share many similarities to the English colonies in the way they broke away from the monarchy, but the USA emerged as a "first world country," while many others of the same hemisphere are struggling to develop.
It is particularly interesting to hear her perspective about the way people report history. Her area of emphasis is on the African race. It's next to impossible to find a black Argentine. Like most colonies, slaves were used widely, mostly from Africa. Argentina was no different. Many Africans came two hundred or more years ago to work in sugar cane fields. Yet today, you don't see them. What happened? Where did they go? Similarly, it's hard to find Native American descendants in Argentina. Most of them were wiped out in different ways by the Spanish (disease, war). No one likes to talk about it. History kind of leaves out that part.
Culture shapes us. In Argentina you see influences of other countries in the food, in the architecture, language. As I compare the Argentina to my own culture, I wonder about the idiosyncrasies and how they came to be. Yerba Mate, for instance, shares something with coffee as the beverage of choice for getting together and chatting among friends and family. Why is coffee more important than tea in the US though? I mean we have English roots and tea time is a big deal over the Atlantic ocean. How is it that some traditions of theirs carry over (measurement system) and others don't?
1 comment:
coffee is important to us because it wasn't important to England, and we wanted nothing to do with England once we broke away from them. The Boston Tea party might have had something to do with that too.
But interesting about Argentina's history.
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