Day Eleven, Antigua

Volcanoes Acatenango and Fuego,
Seen from the roof of Casa Herrera 

Tuesday was a less hectic day with only morning classes without Spanish in the evening. We also only had one reading for history the night before which lessened the workload the evening before. The reading, The Conquest and the Settlement, by Wortman, was accompanied with a three question handout which we used in class to drive discussion of the reading. The reading focused on the conquest, why it happened, and what happened afterward, with regards to the search for wealth. When discussing Guatemala, the article makes it clear that the gold sought after by the conquistadors was not what was found in Guatemala, but it was agriculture and labor that became the driving force of gaining wealth in the area.
Class focused on the questions we answered for the reading. We split up into three groups, each focusing on developing a cohesive and cited answer one of the three questions. The questions are: 1) How does Wortman characterize the conquest of Guatemala in the first few pages of the essay? 2) What does Wortman mean when he argues that "Central America fell outside the "silver belt" (p6)? If this is true, what was its function in the Spanish American empire? 3) What were the "New Laws" and the "Cerrato Reforms"? What impact, if any, did they have on labor practices in the early colonial period?My group was assigned to question #1 so we began the discussion. Between each groups presentation Prof. Guridy would reemphasize our points via PowerPoint presentation.

During religion, we went over a lot of the same information, but through the lens of the religious orders at the time. We learned mostly about Bartolome de Las Casas, a Dominican Friar who wrote a book damning the treatment of the indigenous peoples called A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies which sparked the "New Laws" and "Cerrato Reforms" we discussed in the earlier class. In this class we looked at the time line of Las Casas' life and how he interacted with the people and politics of Guatemala. We also looked more closely at Antigua's history with Alvarado in particular.
At the end of class we received our course readers for History and Religion, which had not been ready do to the amount and size of the readers and the occurrence of "Guate-time". Both readers are fairly large, and I will be adding the names of the articles to my course readings list at the bottom of this blog ASAP.

After classes I took the remained of the afternoon to do studio work at the Casa. I have completed one portrait in The Boston Codex already, but I need to keep up working on it so that I don't lag behind in my timing. I decided to work on Gloria portrait, since I have gotten to know her so quickly and so well. Here is as far as I was able to get with her portrait in the two hours I was able to work in the Casa.