Race Issues in Latin America

The unit that we have just recently finished in class was about the Latin American Revolutions, and was based off of the questions, Why is it essential to acknowledge human value regardless of race?, and how are the events in the Latin American Revolutions evidence of this social imperative? These questions are important to think about when learning about the Latin American Revolutions because they help us look at how race affected and played a role in each of the  revolutions. To begin learning about the Latin American revolutions so that we could answer our essential question we split into groups and each group had one of the three revolutions, either Brazil, Gran Colombia, or Mexico. We then color coded a pie chart to look at the race populations, and then created a timeline of the revolution that our group was assigned.

This is the pie chart that we color coded as part of our lesson,

My group was assigned Brazil, and looking at a summary of the events that happened in the time period of the revolution we compiled a timeline of some of the important events. This is my timeline for Brazil,

Two similarities that we found between Brazil and the other revolutions was that they all revolted against the country that controlled them, and the leaders of the revolts created strong armies that help them to succeed. One difference that we found was, Brazil had help from other countries which were Spain and Portugal and the others did not. Another difference between the revolution was that Gran Colombia conquered many other cities of Latin America, and the other two revolution in Brazil and mexico only conquered the country that they were revolting against. All three of these revolutions had their differences, however race was an issue to all three. For mexico the leader of the revolution was openly saying that he was fighting racial equality, and they had the lower class people fighting in their revolution. For Brazil, their new king was discriminating against who could keep government positions and who could not, and that is why they revolted.  lastly, for Gran Colombia, the leader, Bolivar who was a creole, was advocating discrimination based on birthplace, and the people were interested in dumping the social status structure. People who were of low social class were fighting to get rid of the Castas system.  

Today judgments are still made all the time about races in our society. People create stereotypes for specific races, and believe that any  person of that race has a quality based on that stereotype, for example, someone may think someone is very smart or very poor just based on their race. One specific example of a race issue in society today is when a cop shot a boy who was dark skinned, because he thought he was suspicious looking, and made conclusions based on his race. I believe that it is important that we address the race issues in society today because everyone should be treated fairly and equally no matter what race they may be.