Day Thirteen, Antigua

Mural Remnants,
San Francisco Church Museum 

This morning it was tough to get up and out here in Antigua. Yesterday was a hot day and I even managed to get a sunburn, but this morning was cold  and my blankets were comfortable. There is a lot of information that I am trying to digest during this trip; history, religion, and language in classes, and culture, geography, and language just out in the city. It is overwhelming to be in another country let alone take several classes in that country. The stress managed to catch up with me this morning, particularly because breakfast is so early in the morning but we can't go to the Casa until an hour after breakfast is over. So this morning I took some time off to nap after breakfast and get recharged. I am finding it very important to be aware of your physical and mental health while abroad, and it is essential to take time out to take care of yourself. My half hour nap has given me a much better base of energy to get through my busy day.

In class this morning we went over the readings from last night and one of the readings from the night before. We had another list of questions about the readings: 1) What were the factors that gave rise to the town of Santiago de los Caballeros, as presented by Herrera? What was the role of enslaved Africans in that process? 2) Why were enslaved Africans brought to colonial Guatemala? Where were they forced to work? 3) Who were the "Ladinos" in 17th century Guatemala, according to Lokken? Does Lokken's argument revise our understanding of the category?
Our teacher changed things up today by having three pairs of students and each pair got one of the three questions. These pairs led the discussions about the questions for the whole class. I took question two with another student named Isaac and we discussed our answers out of the classroom to plan how we would open the discussion. I ended up opening the discussion by reading the question aloud and giving our answer to the first part of the question. Isaac supported the discussion by giving our answer to the second part and rounding out the over-arching answer to the the question.
Class continued with further discussion and ended with a return to yesterdays lecture wrapping it up with a look at Racialization.

Before religion class started we looked at the presidential commercials created for the campaigns. The election is this Sunday, September 11th. We have been looking at the candidates since our arrival and yesterday several of the Casa students went to a rally hosted in Antigua Central Plaza for Otto Perez Molina, the leading candidate in the race. As it turns out, Guatemala has a policy of not allowing candidates to spend over one million dollars on propaganda to promote their candidacy, and Perez has spent quite a lot more than that, and so the rally in Antigua was actually an illegal rally which led to Perez being ordered to do nothing further to promote himself. All of the candidates here in Guatemala have currently spent over the million dollar limit already.
In religion we discussed the general chronology of the 17th and 18th century, Baroque Catholicism and its place in Guatemala in the early colonial eras, we briefly reiterated the points about education we touched on during our tour yesterday, and the cloister and convent boom. We also went over some of the information we learned about in earlier classes.