- 11 months ago
Historian Alexander Avina joins WIRED to answers the internet's burning questions about the modern history of Latin America.
Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Director of Photography: Ben Dewey
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Alexander Avina
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Brandon White; Paul Guylas
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nicole Ford
Camera Operator: Caleb Weiss
Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Ryan Coppola; Shanti Cuizon-Burden
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Director of Photography: Ben Dewey
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Alexander Avina
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Brandon White; Paul Guylas
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nicole Ford
Camera Operator: Caleb Weiss
Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Ryan Coppola; Shanti Cuizon-Burden
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00I'm historian Alex Avina. Let's answer your questions from the internet. This is Latin America Support.
00:09Concerned Dad asks, how many Latinos live in the U.S.? More than 65 million Latinos live in the United States as of our last census report.
00:18It is the single largest minority group in the United States.
00:21At Paul G 9483 asks, I'm working on a timeline of Latin American history for my class.
00:28I'm going to start in 1492 with the fall of Granada. What other five events I should include?
00:33Well, I guess Paul's asking me to do some of his work for him, which I will gladly do.
00:38So let's follow Paul's plan because 1492 is important for a variety of reasons.
00:43In addition to the fall of Granada, we have October of 1492 when Christopher Columbus stumbled onto what is now Latin America.
00:52In the early 1700s, the Bourbons take over the Spanish throne, instituting gradually a series of reforms throughout the 1700s that will eventually trigger a mass uprising throughout the region.
01:03I would say the third one would be the Haitian Revolution, where a slave revolt led to the creation of a modern black state in the Americas.
01:11It was an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-slavery revolution, feared by all colonial powers around the world.
01:19So revolutionary Haiti was extremely important because it helped inspire revolutionary efforts throughout the Americas.
01:25Now this brings us to our fourth event that I would pick, Latin American independence.
01:29Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain in the early 1800s and triggered a crisis of rule in Spain's American colonies,
01:37where people on the ground did not know who they were subject to.
01:41This French installed government in Spain, or if they should start thinking about independence themselves,
01:47which is what started happening in some of the major Latin American cities.
01:50So by the mid to late 1820s, most of Latin America are independent from Spanish colonial power.
01:57Our next event is the Mexican-American War, which is really important for the country that my parents are from
02:03and the country that we're living in today.
02:04The U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846 resulted in the continental expansion of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean,
02:14because the United States took between a half to a third of Mexico's national territory.
02:19This was the first time, really, that the U.S. invaded one of its Latin American neighbors.
02:24But you had really strong resistance in the U.S., people from Frederick Douglass to Abraham Lincoln.
02:29The final event that I would pick occurred in 1910.
02:33And we're talking about the 1910 Mexican Revolution, the first great social peasant-led revolution of the 20th century,
02:40a phenomenon that would characterize the 20th century globally, from Mexico to Cuba to China to Nicaragua to Iran.
02:49And we cannot forget the Russian Revolution.
02:51And as we now know, thanks to recent research, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New Deal, in part,
02:57was largely inspired by the Mexican Revolution and its ideas of economic nationalism and social democracy.
03:04At Scrap Iron Liver asks,
03:06Next-door neighbors got all moved out yesterday, and today there are approximately 15 people with jackhammers ripping up all the tile
03:12and Mexican music at volume 11, and why does it sound exactly like polka?
03:17The reason Mexican regional music from the north, banda music, norteño music, sounds a lot like polka,
03:23is because it has a lot of polka influence.
03:26And that's because you had European immigrants in the mid to late 19th century arrive in northern Mexico.
03:32Here's an example of banda music.
03:37Now here's an example of polka music.
03:41Sounds similar, right?
03:42The flow, the sound.
03:44Latin America is the crossroads of the world.
03:47And this one very particular musical form from northern Mexico shows how European immigrants brought their sound,
03:53brought their instruments, melded with local forms, and produced something new, something popular,
03:57and in my opinion, something really enjoyable.
04:00Escape Underscore Force asks,
04:01Where is El Dorado?
04:02El Dorado, this supposed city of gold and untold riches, existed in the minds of the Spanish colonizers and conquistadors.
04:11What fundamentally drove the myth of El Dorado was how to become wealthy quickly,
04:17through the acquisition of rich mineral resources, which then would allow them to become nobles.
04:21Even though El Dorado was a myth, it did drive actual expedition and travels from Spanish conquistadors,
04:28from the Caribbean or from what is now Mexico, north into what is now North America,
04:32to Florida, to what is now New Mexico,
04:34people like Coronado, like De Soto, like Ponce de Leon,
04:38who had conquistador experience in other parts of what is now Latin America.
04:42They went on these searches for cities of gold and fountains of youth.
04:46They failed to find those things, but what they did accomplish was to extend Spanish imperial power
04:51into areas of what is now the United States that way precedes the arrival of the pilgrims
04:56and other English colonists, and this is one of the reasons why the language of Spanish
05:01has existed in the United States longer than the United States itself.
05:05The next question comes from the subreddit, Historians Answer.
05:08What are the origins of the Day of the Dead, and why did it emerge in Latin America uniquely?
05:13I would say that it didn't develop uniquely within Latin America.
05:16It developed in certain parts of Western and Southern Mexico.
05:19There's still a debate between historians and anthropologists about the sources and the roots of this holiday
05:24that is celebrated usually on November 1st and November 2nd.
05:28A lot of what we think are Day of the Dead celebrations that have been long held for centuries
05:32are actually more recent interventions.
05:35Actually, there had never been a Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico City
05:39until a James Bond movie called Spectre was filmed there in 2015,
05:44and they organized that Day of the Dead parade for the sake of the movie.
05:48Because it ended up being so popular, the city government decided to make it a yearly event that started in 2016.
05:53I'm sure we've all seen the movie Coco, the symbol of the skeleton, the symbol of the alebrijes,
05:58the spirit animals that are supposed to guide the dead into the realm of the dead.
06:02Again, all these things are facets and symbols that have been incorporated into the idea of Day of the Dead
06:07that may have not existed for centuries, but have actually been in existence only for decades.
06:12IamTaraLee asks,
06:14So Mexicans don't really celebrate Cinco de Mayo.
06:16I wonder why it's so big in America.
06:19That's a really good point.
06:20In Mexico, it's only celebrated in one really particular city, the city of Puebla,
06:24where this famous battle occurred in the 1860s between a poorly armed Mexican army
06:29that managed to defeat one of the most powerful armies in the world.
06:32The French, under Napoleon III, decided to invade Mexico,
06:35partly to get Mexico to pay back some of the debts that they owed.
06:38On the way to Mexico City, they stumbled upon this ragtag Mexican army
06:43where on Cinco de Mayo, 1862, the Mexicans managed to defeat this powerful French army.
06:48The Mexican commanders who led the resistance at the city of Puebla
06:51were loyal to then-president Benito Juarez.
06:53Mexico's first and only indigenous president.
06:56He remained the steadfast leader of Mexico in resisting
06:59both the French invasion and the puppet Habsburg prince,
07:02Napoleon III, had installed as the monarch of Mexico.
07:05In the 1860s, Cinco de Mayo becomes a way for Mexicans living in the United States
07:09to affirm their Mexican identity,
07:11to the point where some Mexicans actually travel back to Mexico to fight against the French.
07:15In the last 20 to 30 years, U.S. companies in the U.S. realized that there was a big Mexican-American market,
07:21so they started to commodify the idea of Cinco de Mayo
07:23so they could sell things like beer.
07:25This went beyond the confines of the Mexican-American community
07:27to the point where Cinco de Mayo has become really an American holiday to have a good time.
07:31At Black Captain Queeg, do you know where the term cowboy came from?
07:36Who were the original cowboys?
07:37The original cowboys were vaqueros from Spanish-ruled Mexico.
07:42Spain, or the Iberian Peninsula, was ruled by different Islamic kingdoms for at least seven centuries.
07:48So the idea of a vaquero, that encapsulated also Islamic Arabic traditions.
07:54Alongside actual Spanish conquistadors and colonizers, we had horses, we had sheep, we had pigs,
07:59we had cattle who accompanied them.
08:01And that's where you get the vaquero emerging as the prominent livestock handler in the 16th, 17th, 1800s.
08:08So by the time we get the American cowboy in the mid-19th century,
08:12they were building and learning from long-held traditions of Spanish and Mexican vaqueros
08:16who had been around for a long time,
08:18who were drawing from traditions that went all the way back to Islamic-ruled Spain.
08:22At NormandyLight7 asks,
08:23Is Brazil considered a part of Latin America?
08:26Because somebody told me it wasn't because they speak, I think, Portuguese.
08:29Brazil is considered part of Latin America, regardless of the linguistic differences.
08:33Now, Brazil does follow a very unique historical trajectory.
08:36It gains independence in a way different from Spain's colonies in the Americas.
08:41It will have a monarchy up until the late 19th century.
08:45It will be the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in the late 1880s.
08:49It's also useful to remember that at different moments,
08:51the Portuguese throne and the Spanish throne were one.
08:54That's just one more reason to think about why Brazil is fundamentally part of Latin America.
08:59At AdamGrub15 asks,
09:01What do you say to Mexicans who say, quote,
09:04We didn't cross the border. The border crossed us.
09:07Historically, they're right.
09:08In 1826, this is what Mexico looked like.
09:12It included a huge portion of what is now the Western United States.
09:16So to really push through this point,
09:17I'll draw the old border on this current map of the United States and Mexico.
09:22The old border used to start contemporary Oregon,
09:25work its way down all the way to the border between Texas and Louisiana.
09:32This used to be Mexico after it achieved independence from Spain.
09:36In 1835, we have the outbreak of a rebellion in Texas against the central government in Mexico.
09:42This will lead to the Battle of the Alamo.
09:45This will lead to Texan independence from 1836 up until 1845.
09:50What we now recognize as the U.S.-Mexico border emerges as a consequence of the U.S.-Mexico War from 1846 to 1848.
09:59The United States sent a force marching through Texas.
10:03That force eventually becomes bogged down in a lot of fighting in what is now the north of Mexico.
10:08Part of the reason why they get bogged down is because hundreds of mostly immigrants who are fighting for the U.S. Army decided to defect over to the Mexican side.
10:16They formed something called the St. Patrick's Battalion, Los San Patricios,
10:20and they formed the light artillery unit of the Mexican army,
10:23and they fought against the Americans and put up pretty stiff resistance.
10:26The United States sent a different force from New Orleans,
10:30and they eventually make it to Mexico City after a series of really important battles.
10:33By September, October of 1847, the American flag will be flying over the Zócalo of Mexico City.
10:39Here's a question from the Ask Latin America subreddit.
10:43How would you group Latin American countries together into regional cultural groupings?
10:48Latin America is an extremely diverse place.
10:50It includes more than 650 million people, more than 30 countries, more than 100 languages,
10:56including European-based languages and indigenous languages.
11:00We can think about Spanish-speaking countries, Portuguese being spoken in Brazil.
11:05We can talk about French and English being spoken in some Caribbean-based nations.
11:09Historically, we can think about Latin America before 1492.
11:12We have power centers in particularly in what is now Central Mexico with the Mexica,
11:17or more commonly known as the Aztecs.
11:19We still have groups in Oaxaca, the Zapotecs, or the Mixtecs.
11:23We have the famous Mayans that lived in Southern Mexico and Central America.
11:27Mesoamerica was a rich, diverse area.
11:29There were certain cultural traits that shared spiritual and religious deities.
11:34One interesting thing to think about is the ballgame played by two indigenous teams.
11:38That ballgame stretched all the way from what is now Florida to Central America.
11:42If we work our way down to South America, we have different Andean civilizations
11:46that had been there for thousands of years.
11:48Before 1492, we have the powerful Inca Empire.
11:51In the Caribbean region, we have the Taino peoples as well,
11:54who spread throughout different Caribbean islands.
11:56The Amazon Basin was also a powerful indigenous center of cultural and economic practices.
12:02Another way to group this area is to think about the type of imperial influences
12:07in the 19th and early 20th century,
12:09and how that imperial influence manifested itself culturally.
12:13So for instance, in South America, soccer is a big national pastime.
12:17In a place like Argentina, it's basically their religion.
12:20Diego Armando Maradona has his own church.
12:21A lot of these soccer teams in Argentina have English names.
12:25Why?
12:25Because it was the British who took soccer there in the 19th century,
12:28when Britain was really the commercial imperial power over South America.
12:32But we work our way north to the Caribbean, to northern Mexico.
12:36There, the most popular sport is baseball.
12:38Wherever baseball is the most popular national sport,
12:42that reflects a past history of U.S. influence and intervention in that place,
12:46including Cuba, where Fidel Castro was an avid baseball player and fan.
12:52At Blair Waldorfian asks,
12:54Can someone explain to me why Frida Kahlo is treated as such a legend
12:56when she was emotionally a slave to an ugly man?
12:59Some might find Diego Rivera handsome, some might not.
13:02Frida did develop a very strong emotional relationship
13:06that they maintained throughout the duration of her life until she died in the 1950s.
13:10that kept them together despite Diego Rivera's inability to remain a monogamous partner.
13:16Frida also maintained her own liaisons and relationships with people.
13:21One of the alleged liaisons was with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky,
13:26who arrived in Mexico in the 1930s seeking safe haven from the Soviet Union.
13:31I think she's fundamentally a legend because of her talent as an artist,
13:35because of her honesty and her rawness as an artist,
13:38who was able to convey the emotional and physical pain
13:41that she experienced on a daily basis.
13:43Frida Kahlo suffered an accident when she was a young woman in a streetcar
13:47in which essentially a pole broke and pierced her body.
13:50She had to go through multiple medical treatments.
13:52She was in constant pain beyond her amazing paintings and her artwork.
13:56She was also an ardent, committed political activist in 1920s, 1930s Mexico.
14:01She was a committed Marxist who supported communist causes around the world.
14:04Diego Rivera, also an impressively talented, influential Mexican muralist.
14:09So they also shared a very strong political connection.
14:12If you've looked at Diego Rivera's murals,
14:14the common theme is that it's the everyday people of Mexico,
14:17the workers and the peasants,
14:18who have made that country and made that country's history.
14:21Sometimes when Frida comes up in more mainstream popular conversations,
14:26she's deprived or drained of the really radical political commitments
14:29that she believed in and she practiced when she was alive.
14:32I think about how during her funeral, there was a flag placed on top of her coffin,
14:37the flag of the hammer and sickle.
14:38So Frida remained a radical left-wing activist and painter until the moment she died.
14:43So here's a question from Quora.
14:45Who is the coolest historical figure you never learned about in school?
14:48So many, so, so many.
14:50Micaela Bastidas, who was a military indigenous leader
14:55during the Tupac Amaru rebellion in the Andes in the late 1700s.
14:59She was married to Tupac Amaru II, which was a very important figure in that movement
15:03that almost managed to overthrow Spanish colonial rule in what is now Peru and Bolivia.
15:08The coolest figure that folks may have heard about is Simón Bolívar of South America.
15:14At Livy Once asks,
15:17Who the f*** is Simón Bolívar?
15:19He's the independence hero of Latin America, kind of like the George Washington.
15:23He helped liberate South America from Spain in the 1820s.
15:27He did an interesting pincer movement where he liberated the North and moved his way South.
15:32His compatriot and revolutionary partner, José de San Martín, based in Argentina,
15:37liberated the South of South America and moved their way North.
15:41He's a complicated figure.
15:42He had a grand vision of uniting at least the North of South America
15:46into one big entity called La Gran Colombia,
15:49which would include the current day Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.
15:53It lasted for a few years after independence in the 1820s.
15:56One of the tragedies of Simón Bolívar is that he dies in 1830, embittered, very authoritarian.
16:02You know, one way that he thought that he could keep the Gran Colombia together
16:05was by demanding that he be made president for life,
16:08which was rejected by people in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.
16:13Gabriel García Márquez, a great Colombian novelist,
16:16has a great novel that captures the end of Bolívar's life
16:19called The General in His Labyrinth that I highly recommend.
16:23You have countries named after him.
16:24So when we think about Bolivia,
16:25this is a testament to the lasting impact of someone like Simón Bolívar.
16:30I get this question a lot from my students.
16:37It's undeniable that there was a lot of drugs coming into the United States
16:42in the 1970s, in the 1980s.
16:44Cocaine changed the dynamic of the global drug trade
16:47in a variety of different ways.
16:49One of the things that's problematic about the Colombian Narcos series
16:52is that the only perspective we get is that from DEA agents
16:55who were sent in to Colombia to fight the Medellín cartel
16:59led by Pablo Escobar.
17:01And that leads to a lot of historical distortions
17:03in terms of Colombian history,
17:05in terms of Colombian political systems.
17:07The Mexico one is more interesting
17:08because the producers and the directors
17:10do try to provide other perspectives.
17:12Now, in the Mexican Narcos,
17:14when the ruling PRI party was on the brink
17:16of losing power over the president
17:18for the first time in seven decades,
17:21they were facing the challenge of Coctemo Cárdenas,
17:24the son of Mexico's most beloved president of the 20th century.
17:27The day that their votes were being counted,
17:28the computers that were used to tally the votes mysteriously crashed.
17:33This led to one of the most infamous quotes
17:34in recent Mexican history
17:36where one of the government ministers came out and said,
17:38el sistema se cayó.
17:40The system broke down.
17:41At that point, we think, I think we're pretty sure,
17:44that Coctemo Cárdenas, the opposition candidate,
17:46was winning, was ahead in the vote count.
17:48When they restarted the computers,
17:49miraculously, the PRI candidate,
17:51Carlos Salinas de Gortari,
17:52wins the election, wins,
17:55and wins the presidency.
17:57At Water Closet,
17:58how did the United States come to be in possession of Guantanamo Bay?
18:02Cuba had fought for its independence against Spain
18:04numerous times over the course of the 19th century.
18:06The last effort began in 1895.
18:09And in 1898, when it seemed to be heading closer
18:11to gaining its independence from Spain,
18:13the U.S. intervened militarily
18:15when the battleship Maine sailed into Havana Harbor
18:19and mysteriously blew up.
18:21The United States used that as an excuse
18:23to intervene in the Cuban War of Independence,
18:26at which point it became the Spanish-American War,
18:28a war between the United States and Spain.
18:30It was a very short war.
18:32One American government official
18:33referred to it as a splendid little war.
18:35The United States, after signing a peace treaty with Spain,
18:38obtained Puerto Rico as a colony,
18:40the Philippine Islands as a colony, Guam as a colony.
18:44In that same peace treaty,
18:45Cuba was to be granted independence.
18:48But the United States remained.
18:49Part of that negotiation also involved
18:52the perpetual leasing of Guantanamo
18:54for the purposes of creating a U.S. naval station.
18:58Every year, to this day,
19:00the U.S. deposits money into an account
19:02that is supposed to be paying for the lease of Guantanamo.
19:05Since at least the early 1960s,
19:07the Cubans refused to cash the American check.
19:10For Guantanamo.
19:11UlteriorKid324 asks,
19:14Why did Cuba become a pain in the ass
19:16to the United States for more than half a century?
19:18Now, obviously, this guy is the representation
19:21of Cuba being a pain in the ass in the United States.
19:24Fidel Castro,
19:24who outlived a series of different U.S. presidents.
19:27But we really have to go back,
19:29all the way back to the 1898 Spanish-American War,
19:31in which Cuba was granted independence from Spain.
19:35The reason why I put up air quotes
19:36is because Cuba essentially became a sugar colony
19:39for the United States well into the 1930s.
19:42This created all sorts of political
19:44and socioeconomic consequences in Cuba.
19:46It led to the rise of a dictator,
19:48Fulgencio Batista, in the early 1950s.
19:50A motley crew of rebels, of students,
19:53of campesinos, of activists,
19:55and one Argentine medic by the name of Che Guevara,
19:58they launched a rebellion against Batista in 1956.
20:02And after a few years of combat,
20:03they managed to oust Batista on January 1st, 1959.
20:07From the very beginning,
20:08there was tensions with the United States.
20:10By the middle to end of 1959,
20:12we have USD classified documents that are talking about,
20:14you know, we don't like
20:15what this Fidel Castro guy's doing in Cuba.
20:17We should think about removing him from power.
20:19This leads to an attempt to invade Cuba,
20:23organized by the United States,
20:24but carried out by Cuban exiles
20:26who were opposition to the M26 movement.
20:29This is called the Bay of Pigs.
20:30This occurs in 1961.
20:32The revolutionary Cuban government
20:34manages to stave off the invasion.
20:35And in a Cold War era, Cuba is looking for allies.
20:39So they looked for that other big power
20:40in the world at that time, which was the Soviet Union.
20:43That's really the moment when Cuba becomes
20:46a big pain in the ass to the United States.
20:48Fundamentally, it has represented a big middle finger
20:51to what the US tries to do in the region.
20:53And this is one of the reasons why this blockade embargo
20:57that the US has instituted against the island
20:59since the early 1960s continues in place
21:01and actually has been intensified and worsened
21:04in the last 10 years.
21:05Mexican Soda asks,
21:06I was told that the Mexican Revolution of 1910
21:09was a unique one in that,
21:10as opposed to most other revolutions,
21:12it was actually led by the poor masses.
21:14How true is this?
21:15Well, it's complicated.
21:16It was a unique, authentic social revolution
21:21in that the peasant masses of Mexico
21:23did force it initially
21:25against the three decade long dictatorial rule
21:29of someone named Porfirio Diaz.
21:30He allied himself with landed elites,
21:33foreign interests who collectively work
21:36to take away the communal lands
21:38of different Mexican peasant communities
21:40over the course of two decades.
21:42That's what really triggers
21:43the Mexican Revolution of 1910.
21:44Led by Francisco Madero,
21:46a wealthy landowner who had been left out
21:48of the Mexican political system,
21:50who helps launch a revolution in 1910.
21:52They overthrow Porfirio Diaz relatively quickly.
21:54And by 1911, Madero is president of Mexico.
21:57He will then soon come into conflict
21:59with radical peasant leaders like Emiliano Zapata,
22:02the leader of the most radical peasant movement of the South.
22:05And this is Pancho Villa of the North.
22:07They would take the defeat of radical peasant leaders
22:09like Zapata and Villa on the battlefield
22:11before middle-class revolutionaries
22:13could then incorporate some of these demands
22:15into the 1917 constitution,
22:17which remains to this day,
22:18with some modifications,
22:20the constitution of Mexico.
22:21So by the way,
22:22the figure of Pancho Villa
22:24ends up becoming extremely important,
22:25not just within Mexico, but outside of it.
22:28Pancho Villa was a darling of U.S. media and film.
22:31He had U.S. film crews accompanying him
22:33on his battles, 1914, 1915.
22:36But then he became the ultimate villain
22:37because in 1916,
22:38after having lost militarily on the battleground,
22:41he's left with only a few hundred fighters.
22:43So Pancho Villa came up with this idea.
22:44Why don't I invade the United States?
22:47And he did.
22:48He invaded Columbus, New Mexico in 1916.
22:51From Moonspector,
22:52why did Pancho Villa attack Columbus, New Mexico?
22:54He wanted to trigger a U.S. invasion of Mexico
22:58to create a quagmire on the one hand
23:00for the United States,
23:01but on the other hand,
23:02to make the current revolutionary leaders of Mexico,
23:05led by a man named Benustiano Carranza,
23:07look like they were selling out the country
23:09and thereby allowing him the opportunity
23:11to capture his military and political stature.
23:14Pancho Villa led la División del Norte,
23:16the Division of the North.
23:17It was a peasant army of more than 40,000 troops.
23:21They had hundreds of railways and trains.
23:23They even had their own air force
23:24with mercenary foreign pilots.
23:26All that ended after his defeats in 1915.
23:29The invasion of Columbus, New Mexico,
23:31he thought would be his opportunity
23:33to reclaim the mantle of anti-imperialist,
23:36anti-U.S. leader.
23:38And it almost worked
23:39because the U.S. did invade Mexico in return.
23:42This led to the punitive expedition
23:43led by General Jack Pershing,
23:45where for months he traveled around,
23:47him and his American troops,
23:48including troops from the Buffalo Soldier Regiment,
23:51included indigenous scouts.
23:52For months, they scoured
23:54the northern Mexican countryside
23:55trying to locate Pancho Villa.
23:57They could never capture him.
23:58Pancho Villa used to put the shoes
23:59on his horses in the wrong way,
24:01so it looked like he was going in one direction
24:03when he was actually going
24:04in the opposite direction.
24:05There's an anecdote
24:06where supposedly Pancho Villa is up on a hill
24:08watching the Americans withdraw from Mexico,
24:11and he's purported to have said
24:12they came like eagles
24:14and they left like wet hens.
24:16AtQueenRoyce15 asks,
24:18why telenovelas got to be so damn dramatic?
24:21It's like one disastrous decision event after another.
24:24Y'all be really salado AF in life.
24:26Go to a spiritualist para que te limpien.
24:28I love this question.
24:29Telenovelas are Latin American soap operas.
24:32In the late 19th century, early 20th century,
24:35their version of the telenovela
24:37was a novel form that always followed
24:39the same kind of plot and guidelines.
24:41That poor, racialized, working-class woman
24:44strikes it rich because she managed to fall in love
24:46with a wider, upper-class, wealthier man,
24:49and in them coming together and having kids,
24:51that representing some form of national unity
24:54within these Latin American countries.
24:56This plot is a fantastical one.
24:58In a place like Mexico,
24:59where you still have racial and class considerations
25:02to take into account
25:03when we think about class mobility.
25:05In the Mexican soap operas
25:06that I was forced to watch growing up,
25:08there was a phenomenon
25:09of mostly white Mexican actors and actresses
25:14essentially playing brown face, Mexican face,
25:16when they play the role
25:17of the poor working-class woman.
25:19So obviously there's a fantasy
25:20and then there's a reality in Mexico
25:22where poverty still looks,
25:24let's say, darker skinned
25:25than some of the displays of this in telenovelas.
25:29Yellow Lemon Bikini asks,
25:31favorite films to represent Latin American culture?
25:34One notable film would be
25:36in a classic three-part documentary series
25:38by Patricio Guzman about Chile
25:40called La Batalla del Chile,
25:42The Battle for Chile,
25:43a documentary that captures
25:44the Chilean attempt to wage
25:46a peaceful revolution in the early 1970s
25:49led by President Salvador Allende.
25:51Patricio Guzman filmed this documentary series
25:53during the overthrow of Allende
25:55led by Chilean general Augusto Pinochet.
25:57This was the one attempt in Latin America
26:00to achieve socialism
26:02through peaceful, legalistic, constitutional methods.
26:05Salvador Allende,
26:06a self-declared Marxist doctor,
26:08was elected to be president of Chile.
26:10This unleashed a ferocious reaction
26:12from the Chilean right wing
26:13that culminated in the coup d'etat
26:15on September 11th, 1973.
26:18The U.S. didn't play a direct role.
26:20It did play an indirect role
26:22in helping foment the conditions
26:24for a civil war in Chile
26:25by essentially launching an economic blockade
26:28of this country for three years.
26:30President Richard Nixon said that he wanted to make
26:32the Chilean economy scream.
26:34And we have an infamous quote from Henry Kissinger,
26:36then national security advisor,
26:38in which he said something to the extent of,
26:40why should we let a country go communist
26:41due to the irresponsibility of its own people?
26:45And that quote captures so much of the relationship
26:48between Latin America and the United States
26:50during the Cold War.
26:51The next question is from Quora.
26:53How did the Che Guevara t-shirt become popular?
26:56Che Guevara had a significant historical role
26:58in Latin America, particularly during the Cold War era.
27:01Che Guevara came from Argentina.
27:03He studied to be a medical doctor.
27:05He traveled throughout Latin America
27:06in the 1940s and 50s,
27:08where he discovered and encountered
27:09for the first time, really,
27:11social, economic, and racial inequality in the region
27:14that started to radicalize him politically.
27:16That process eventually took him to Mexico,
27:18where he met Juan Fidel Castro,
27:20and he joined the M26 movement's attempt
27:23to overthrow a dictator in Cuba,
27:25and this leads us to the Cuban Revolution,
27:26where Che Guevara becomes an international symbol
27:29of revolution, of Marxism, of rebellion.
27:32Che Guevara was an internationalist.
27:33He believed in spreading revolution
27:36throughout what we now refer to as the Global South.
27:38He attempted to wage revolution in Africa.
27:41After that episode,
27:42he went and tried to start a revolution in South America.
27:45His idea was to spread a revolution from Bolivia
27:48to the rest of South America,
27:49including his own home country of Argentina.
27:51In Bolivia is where he met his end in October of 1967.
27:55The next question is from the Ask Latin America subreddit.
27:58How do you feel about people calling Miami
28:00the capital of Latin America?
28:02Miami is a really interesting case.
28:04It has a very recent Cold War history
28:06that witnesses generation after generation
28:10of Latin American migration to the city
28:12as a consequence of different revolutionary processes
28:15that happened in Latin America during the Cold War.
28:18Populations who saw themselves as losers
28:20of a particular political or revolutionary process
28:23would then go to Miami.
28:25So we have Cubans.
28:26We have Nicaraguans who fled the 1979 Sandinista revolution.
28:30We had Venezuelans who left during the presidencies
28:33of Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro.
28:36You have different Colombian generations
28:38and Brazilian generations as well.
28:40This history of constant migrant and refugee flows
28:42to Miami allow us to think about Miami
28:45as not the capital of Latin America
28:48but as one capital of Latin America.
28:50So those are all the questions for today.
28:52Thanks for watching.
28:53Latin America support.
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