The Meeting of The Two Worlds

I was never really taught in depth about Columbus and his trips to the Latin America, probably because I went to school in Finland. Maybe it was not considered as relevant for our worldview, since we are quite far from where this all took place. Anyway, I was practically told that there was this dude called Columbus, who was an explorer. He thought he went to India but in fact he sailed to South America. End of story. Later on in Argentina, I discovered that people disliked him and his trips to the Americas. My classmates would even ask my opinion about him, and I didn't know what to answer since I didn't even know that someone could have an opinion about him. 

However, after watching the video and reading the journal, some of my preconceptions strengthened and others weakened. Firstly, even if Columbus doesn't appear as an evil person in his journals, his mindset and the way they treats the locals speaks for his actions. It strikes me how they clearly thought that the land was theirs, despite the fact that there were people who lived there. From the beginning they thought that those people were for their personal pursuits. For the entire time I was reading this, I was reminding myself that I am reading this in a completely different time with a completely different set of thoughts and values, but I still struggled to find understanding or justification for their cruelty and arrogance. 

This video left me with lot of insight, but also with a confused feeling. I was intrigued about the idea that the story of Columbus is a myth with both positive and negative spinnings, neither being more accurate than the other. However, I didn't really understand how Columbus and his inability to describe his experiences relate to the problem of representation and to the essence of Latin America. 


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