Revolutions About Race (Exhibit A: Latin America)

The essential question for this lesson was “Why is it essential to acknowledge human value regardless of race? How are the events in the Latin American Revolutions evidence of this social imperative?” This is an important question because the idea of recognizing someone’s humanity regardless of their race is an idea that has not entirely sunk in today. We studied the impact of race in the Latin American Revolutions through three countries: Mexico, Brazil, and Gran Colombia. In the time period, there was an entire social structure based on a person’s heritage and where they were born, stretching from peninsulares (native Spanish people) to the African slaves. Each group of the class got a revolution to create a timeline of events for and then shared with the other groups. By examining these revolutions and comparing them, we answered the essential question.

A commonality among all three of these revolutions was that they all gained independence for

Our group did our timeline on the events surrounding Gran
Colombia, a short-lived republic that included modern-day
Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador.

themselves from European rule: Brazil from Portugal, and Gran Colombia and Mexico from Spain. They all also had more than one leader to guide them, like how Gran Colombia had both Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre. However, these three countries took different paths to independence. Gran Colombia became a republic, but Brazil became a constitutional monarchy, while Mexico became a constitutional monarchy that eventually got overthrown and replaced with a republic. Additionally, they had different types of leaders. Gran Colombia and Mexico had Creole leaders for the most part, while Brazil had a peninsular to lead them. Race was a major player in these three revolutions. In Mexico, the majority of the army was made of people who had been suppressed by the relatively small number of peninsulares, feeling that they had just as much rights as the Spanish. After its revolution, Brazil, being ruled by a peninsular who filled the government with other peninsulares, opposed the ruler that had been put on the throne and had him abdicate, since they still weren’t getting the fair representation they wanted. Gran Colombia referred to Simón Bolívar as “the Liberator,” which would indicate that under the oppressive social structure imposed on them by Spain, they didn’t feel free, and so rebelled for their freedom.

Latin America was not the only region of the world where race became a major issue, and race is still a significant issue in our lives today. There is no caste system in America like there was in the Latin American countries before they rebelled, but the issue of race manifests itself in other ways. Just take for example the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, a hotly contested and polarizing topic at the moment. Problems like this are signs that we still have a lot to learn about how we deal with race. We don’t necessarily need a revolution to change, but a change right now would be revolutionary.