Ryan Manley's 1102 Blog

 There has been a discussion among our class and readings of whether of not the term Latinx is acceptable to describe those of Hispanic/Latin American decent. Its a tough question and in my opinion, there is not one solid answer. Over the past several years, we have seen a large shift in American culture on how we view gender/sexuality and have tried being more inclusive. We have seen an increase in people become more accepting of calling people by preferred pronouns and a lot of people also be more open about their gender. Changing the term Latino to Latinx I feel is an attempt to become more diverse and inclusive at the same time. It was intended to allow Americans to shift our focus from not just being gender accepting in our country, but also among people from other countries. I truly feel that those who came up with the term Latinx had the best intentions in mind. They developed the term with the purpose of being more inclusive while talking about people from Hispanic origin...

     This week is an interesting week for me because I finally wrapped up the research process. I found it to be such a great experience to delve deeper into learning more about the Latinx community and the way their experiences can be seen through their art.       The readings this week discussed how secondary sources can speak to each other and I find that to be a great concept. As time goes by, secondary sources can reference and learn from other sources to help expand or show conflicting arguments against other sources. It really speaks to the research process as a whole and makes me think of how this concept could have affected my research process. As a researcher for this project, I wanted to find as much detail as possible about the Latinx community, and as I delved deeper into Contrapunto it was much easier to find primary sources of individual artists. Contrapunto Art Group Jorge Arcos- a local Latinx artist Cataline Gomez-Beuth- another local...

       The readings this week really emphasized the concept of culture and assimilation for me. It summed up some of the observations I have made so far in this course and really solidified them by reading first-person perspectives from Latin Americans themselves. While Spilling the Beans emphasized the way cultures are developed, Wild Tongue demonstrated how many view America as a melting pot for immigrants. Even though the story of Spilling the Beans may seem simple, the purpose of reading this passage is to show that people from different families/countries each have a unique culture. It embraces the fact that the Latinx community, for example, has a different food culture than Americans, but also that within Latinx community, there are smaller cultures as well.       What reading Wild Tongue did for me, however, was emphasize the way immigrants are treated in America. One thing I have noted throughout several blog entries so far is this common...