As a double major in both History and Portuguese, my experience with both subjects have greatly influenced the way in which I think about the other, and I have found that oftentimes the two are directly related. Since I arrived at UMass, I’ve become particularly interested in the history of Latin America and its relationship with imperialism, modern capitalist economics and the ways in which my country, the United States, has influenced and been influenced by the Portuguese and Spanish speaking world. Last semester, I took a course on the history surrounding American foreign policy and intervention in Latin America affairs, in which I learned about the means by which the United States has worked to secure Latin America as a region which is subservient to its economic and political interests. In this course, I learned a lot about the unequal economic and social relationships which the United States has foisted upon Latin America by means of military conquest and political coups. When considering this unequal and exploitative relationship between Latin America and the United States, I often wondered how such a condition of power imbalance was created in the first place, and how it was that the United States, despite also being a society which can trace its roots to European imperialism, held such a dominant position over other Latin countries, who seemingly lacked many of the advantages which allowed the United States to flourish as a global superpower. Was America uniquely rich in resources? Were its people uniquely hardy and well suited to diligent labor? These are myths that often go repeated without question, given the collective understanding of such ideas as the Protestant work ethic or how, as Otto von Bismarck famously put it, America is bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors and to the east and west by fish. These simplistic explanations never sat right with me as explanations for why this country, and not, for instance, Mexico or Brazil, has grown into a global power which is capable of exerting its influence upon the wider world.

During this semester, this question has been at least in part answered as I have gone on to study Brazilian history. What was made clear to me in my studies of the development of Brazilian society is that, while the territories which would go on to form the United States were settled with the goal of crafting a new society which better served the interests of European settlers, Brazil and other Latin American nations were not crafted from such idealism. Rather, Latin America was colonized with a different goal in mind, that being the extraction of wealth from these regions into Portugal and Spain through exploitative measures taken against the peoples and natural environments of the region. While the Thirteen Colonies were crafted as a safe haven for those English settlers who sought to live in a society which was marginally less hierarchical and which was relatively out of reach of the British crown’s authority, Brazil and other Latin American nations were settled relatively sparsely by Europeans who sought not but material gain from their efforts. In a sense, Latin American colonies were viewed almost entirely as an economic investment by the European colonizers, rather than as new societies which should be invested in and built up to self-sufficiency. As a result of this difference in ethos, the societies created in Latin America developed in ways which saw a higher degree of corruption relative to the United States, which, having been viewed as an extension of English society in a new and less bureaucratic form, maintained a standard of legalism in the tradition of the parent society. At the time of their independence in the early 1800’s, Brazil and other Latin American nations had indigenous and black populations which made up a majority of the people and who served as an enslaved underclass to a European minority. Compared to the United States, where the exploited black and indigenous underclass made up only about a quarter of the population, the difference in the relationship between these two regions and their respective European colonial oppressors becomes clear. In the United States, society was crafted to serve the interests of a majority who considered themselves to be in line with a European cultural and legal tradition, and therefore the legal systems of the time served to protect the rights of Europeans. In Latin America, no such guarantee existed, as that same guiding ethos of importing European legal customs and maintaining power for Europeans worked against the majority of the population and created legal systems based on inequality which in many cases still continue to this day.

Having made this connection in both an economic history course and a Portuguese course has made it much more clear as to why Latin America suffers from unique social issues which seem absent or at least less apparent than in the United States. Having taken this knowledge into account, it is now much easier for me to understand the conditions under which the nations of the hispanophone and lusophone world have developed, and therefore it is easier for me to understand the nuances of cultures which have had to develop under such different conditions to my own. I think that furthering my understanding of the ways in which the current global economic order works for and against different places and creates systems of global inequality has informed the way in which I will continue to engage with the work in my field, and has led me to what I would consider to be advice that I would have liked to hear earlier, namely that anything you want to pursue can be an engine of positive social change, even if the impact is small. I believe that having historians and linguists and photographers and writers and mathematicians and physicists and biologists and all kinds of people attacking the woes of society in their own small way is necessary to the creation of a better society in the future. Your pursuit, even if it is niche, cannot be useless if it is targeted towards addressing that which you dislike about the way people on earth treat each other. Simply put, we were not given the tremendous gift of education and the intelligence to wield it in order to be passive observers led only by material self interest towards that which is the most personally profitable for us. As responsible members of the human race, we should strive to leave a society behind us which is better, freer, and with more opportunity for all to succeed than the society which we were born into, as people have strived to do in large part for time immemorial. In my case, the battle for good may be waged in terms of understanding harmful systems as they relate to the historical development of our society and potentially using that knowledge to endorse solutions, as well as helping others learn about the Portuguese language and lusophonic culture. For others, it may appear as teaching someone math or literature, addressing legal inequalities in public policy, or improving the community through art. In my own way, I am striving to make a positive difference in my community and in our shared global community, as are millions of other people in a variety of fields. So long as you are using your skills to make this positive change in the world, to break down barriers between different groups of people and to work towards creating a world which is more united, then you cannot go wrong in whatever course you choose.