Disappointing, waste of time and money!
Disappointing, and a waste of time and money. In one lecture, a slide on which countries recognised Indigenous peoples in their constitutions left out Brazil’s 1988 constitution. When a student pointed it out, the teacher said “oh really?” and moved on. When a Brazilian student argued that Brasília’s isolation from the population also served to shield the government from protests, and pointed to the poverty that still surrounds the capital, it was brushed aside rather than discussed. When another student claimed Indigenous languages no longer matter because “we have smartphones and can just translate,” the teacher accepted it without any pushback. In a Latin American Studies program, that should have been challenged. The idea that the Latin American dictatorships would have happened without US involvement was presented as plausible, and critical authors like Chomsky were missing from the reading list. Instead, students were assigned a book, written by an American in the 1980s, that portrayed a family in a Brazilian favela in the harshest light, with no mention that the author’s own country was in the middle of a crack epidemic that hit Black communities especially hard. It also ignored that Brazil’s 1988 constitution had just established universal public healthcare, something the US still doesn’t have today. Criticizing Brazil’s poverty is fair, but the context was missing. If you want critical, open-minded teaching about Latin America, look elsewhere.
Rapportera
