I have in fact heard you utter the words "ummmm actually, that’s a social construct", Self awareness is key! You are so right about the Spanish's implemetation of social constructs to get people to buy into the dream, as you say. There were extensive sanitation and cleanliness campaigns in cuzco that disproportioanately affected women and indigenous/mestizo people, these constructs did so much harm.
"A big aspect of Spanish colonialism is getting people to buy into the dream." This phrase has given me a lot to think about, especially the forcefulness of the verb “buy.” Using a play on words, when the economically disadvantaged invest in the Empire, they are often completely stripped of their resources and become subalterns. They don't enter it like the elites do. In other words, to symbolically participate in the Empire, many Indigenous communities had to "purchase" their belonging at the cost of losing material conditions such as land, water or labor.
I liked your point about the importance of Cusco and how the Spanish used it. As a capital city there was a lot of symbolic valued tied to this place. Taking it over and making it more Spanish in design is a very obvious message from the Spanish to the Inca that the city was theirs now. It would have been part of the stripping of Inca influence and control. Out of sight is out of mind.
This is such an interesting sentence to focus on--it highlights the precedence of the ideal over the real in this case. Who decides when colonization is over? I think there is a fear at the heart of the Spanish colonial project, in Cusco especially, that though the letrados can cement the victory of the conquest in discourse, there are movements beyond this discourse that threaten to make the need for colonization very real again. "Postcolonial" is probably a similar term (though, as we've discussed, no postcolonial scholars take the term to signify that the colonial age is over).
I have in fact heard you utter the words "ummmm actually, that’s a social construct", Self awareness is key! You are so right about the Spanish's implemetation of social constructs to get people to buy into the dream, as you say. There were extensive sanitation and cleanliness campaigns in cuzco that disproportioanately affected women and indigenous/mestizo people, these constructs did so much harm.
"A big aspect of Spanish colonialism is getting people to buy into the dream." This phrase has given me a lot to think about, especially the forcefulness of the verb “buy.” Using a play on words, when the economically disadvantaged invest in the Empire, they are often completely stripped of their resources and become subalterns. They don't enter it like the elites do. In other words, to symbolically participate in the Empire, many Indigenous communities had to "purchase" their belonging at the cost of losing material conditions such as land, water or labor.
Hi Orla,
I liked your point about the importance of Cusco and how the Spanish used it. As a capital city there was a lot of symbolic valued tied to this place. Taking it over and making it more Spanish in design is a very obvious message from the Spanish to the Inca that the city was theirs now. It would have been part of the stripping of Inca influence and control. Out of sight is out of mind.
This is such an interesting sentence to focus on--it highlights the precedence of the ideal over the real in this case. Who decides when colonization is over? I think there is a fear at the heart of the Spanish colonial project, in Cusco especially, that though the letrados can cement the victory of the conquest in discourse, there are movements beyond this discourse that threaten to make the need for colonization very real again. "Postcolonial" is probably a similar term (though, as we've discussed, no postcolonial scholars take the term to signify that the colonial age is over).