Latin America: A Part of the American Continent but Different

The experiences that are worth having are equally worth reflecting on. In revisiting Puerto Rico, 2 years after my backpacking trip and only one year after hurricane Maria, I can feel the shift in the Island's energy. I find myself often thinking about the structural similarities between Ecuador and the Island, laughing at the idea that they can be compared with one being a third world country. In its current condition, the island is facing visible distinctions of resource distributions. The closure of public schools on American soil should be unheard of, but the reality is that the closures happened before mother nature even considered Maria. The people of Puerto Rico, an American community faces the blunders of an underrepresented, poor, majority minority-based community such as my own, on steroids.

I consider the concept of cultural competence, a medical term that I feel translates to the pollical repression in the Island's politics. In traveling around Ecuador and studying Colombia’s ideological clashes (FARC 1960-2017), there are variables that bar my southern brother from fully adopting the Washington consensus, one I think draws on their need for a strong community (Southern American tribalism).

Heres an example applicable today. Consider the new wave of markets that house organic foods, communities surrounding the healthy eating and the demographics of these populations. In the United States, the financially able have fostered this new demands  away from corporate giants such as Walmart and fast food chains like McDonald. But in South America there is a growing governmental push to adopt these household names along with other American based corperations, countering our already existing markets of organic food that inhertitely shift away from a positive aspects of the culture. The aim, as a superpower is to make its southern neighbors more structurally similar than different. As a security measure sameness means allieship and allieship means (military) strength. In considering leftist movement in South American, we can see a long history of alternative efforts, where America has influenced counter movement to rule out any diversion from capitalist open markets and governmental structures. My time in Puerto Rico has reopened  my conflicting feeling on these efforts as a Hispanic American growing up between with both communities.