Week One

A couple of my favourite videos posted by previous students are The War on drugs by Michelle Nzioki and The export Boom as Modernity by Erika Clou. The War on drugs fascinated me because recently drug trafficking has been extremely glorified by big companies such as Netflix, HBO and vice for entertainment purposes. Seemingly the biggest consumer of these shows are of the ages between 16 and 25 so the shows or articles normally tend to leave out a huge amount of detail politically and focus more on the drama of the history. This video, however, explained a very different side than these shows. More so a perspective of someone accompanied by facts than a story written and edited by professionals writers to get a reaction. The Export Boom was also an interesting video, the main reason as to why I found this video so appealing is because of how ignorant I am to this subject. I found it particularly interesting how Guatemala changed over from having their main export being dye ( something very artistic) to coffee ( a completely different consumer). The fact that the Land was previously owned by indigenous people and that at that point in time it seems people could just produce Laws to take it away from them baffles me. I am not blind to how this has happened countless times during history it is just that when you hear someone talk in such detail about how these situations went down it becomes way more real. Caudillos Versus the Nation State is one of the videos that I watched that I did not really enjoy. The information I will admit was there and the partners that produced the video had obviously gone to great lengths to study and learn what they were talking about. I just feel that the video itself was not done very well, not the quality but the timing and presentation of their ideas dragged on, even though what they were speaking about to me is fascinating, with in a few minutes I began to lose interest. The Colonial experience by Ana Gheorghiu and Lindsay Chapman was another video that I did not necessarily gravitate towards. Although again the information seemed well researched and this time the video was well produced as well but to be honest I just do not find family history to be that intriguing. I find the general history of Latin American countries and culture way more interesting. Something postive though about this video is that the people who had made the video went into great depth on different tangents so that the viewer would not loose interest and would have the utmost amount of context.