Always Room For Improvement

   I really didn’t realize my research paper was completely off register, until I was done with it. I do realize now that being a research paper and not an op-ed article, o some other informal paper, my register should have been much more formal, and that I should have avoided all kinds of words that made it into a familiar register. I would agree that this is my main problem, right along with the apostrophe’s and some grammar issues. I will try my best to improve on these. Lastly, for the part of the references and the APA formatting, I did have a kind of hard time formatting those and will work on that as well with all the notes we have taken. Thank you for your feedback. J

Go For The Natives

Roberto Fernandez makes a clear and completely valid theory regarding the connection between Caliban's character form Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the “mestizo Americans”. The similarities are visibly clear since after all the natives, before the Spanish conquerors came to their land, lived a perfectly happy self sufficient life, as did Caliban in his Island before Prospero took over him and the island.

The author at the beginning of his passage poses the question of whether our culture- the Latin American Culture – is either existent or non-existent. For every Latin American I would imagine that it is, I mean if its not, what does that mean for the culture we supposedly have? But then, the author takes the question to another direction and asks, “Do you exist?” Fernandez explains how questioning our culture is completely related with questioning our own existence, he says: “…to be willing to take a stand in favor of our irremediable colonial condition, since it suggests that we would be but a distorted echo of what occurs elsewhere.” We portray a reformed culture of our colonizers; therefore our Latin American culture is indistinct to theirs, right? Wrong.

Even though our culture does not assimilate closely to the people who lived in our current living territory, we mustn’t forget about it. We should never disregard that we are not purely European, we, here in Colombia and most of Latin America, are mestizos: Natives, Europeans, Indian and Africans. Although the colonization period does in fact shape mostly everything we have become, after all they [the colonizers] where the ones to create inequality in power and bring their culture to the Americas, consequently creating a more “civilized” place, we shouldn’t believe still that we belong to them, or that our culture does.

So, I will say it once again, there is no doubt that Caliban’s character from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest is automatically another way to portray the natives when the colonizers took them over. Fernandez puts it in a very clear how the colonizers viewed this people they encountered in the New World: “The colonizer's version explains to us that owing to the Caribs' irremediable bestiality, there was no alternative to their extermination.” We can see how extremely closed-minded these people where to think, or simply to say that the only way to handle these “beasts” were by terminating them, if not, exploiting them physically. The same way history has thought us that the Spanish took over these natives, Shakespeare expresses it in his play. By creating the character of Caliban, a native to his island, a hard working man with small sense of a civilized language and form of communication. And then comes Prospero, a powerful man with great power (literally) who makes this gullible person believe he is saving him, by actually converting him in his slave. Well what a coincidence huh?

A very interesting point Fernandez poses is how even though the slave and working men in this cases are actually the natives, it is in fact, the colonialists who depend and relay more of these people, than these people of them. And with much reason, since these as they are called are the natives of the land, they know it better and know how to survive in it the right way. Fernandez points out a part in the play where Prospero is talking to his daughter, referring to Caliban: "We cannot miss him: he does make our fire, / Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices / that profit us"(1.2.311-13).” Yeah, it is obvious right? Except if this is true are the ones with the most power really the Spanish colonialists (Prospero) or the Colombian natives (Caliban)?