#11 The Rum Diary

As I finished watching The Rum Diary I could’ve mentioned a couple of things that caught my attention. From these things I can choose the one that captivated more my attention and it’s the compare and contrast given to Puerto Rico by the tourist/traveler perspective portrayed in the movie. A couple of weeks before, we were assigned to study the perspective a person gets from the Internet about Puerto Rico in the current year, 2014. Of all the perspectives I heard from my classmates the ones that I could relate most to the movie were the idea researchers get from the news articles that talk about the island and the fact that they’re all related to either corruption in politics or high criminality. Now a days, it is clearly not as dangerous, as it is seen in the movie, to go outside the tourist areas if you don’t know the island well enough but there could still be a chance that, even in the tourist areas, you may even get robbed in a street or even followed by strangers with the intent of hijacking your car, like our Professor told us happened to her. In the current years we have been also exposed to the types of corruption that is seen in the movie, but they may have a twist on what happened in the movie with the land that was wanted by the investors. Also the fact that the in the movie the media was manipulated to publish another version of the story is seen nowadays in the political campaigns the major parties or Puerto Rico have.

There are many more examples on how, I may also call it othering, affects the tourist, since an American is treated differently by the locals when they are visiting the island. This may be because of the history between Puerto Rico and the United States, which is in part portrayed throughout the entire movie, The Rum Diary. A part related to the tourist/traveler perspective the movie portrays is when we are exposed to a married couple of Americans that are interviewed at a bowling alley and all they have to say about the good things in the Island are the Duty Free shopping or the casinos they go to spend more money. In another question they are asked about what happens outside the areas they normally visit, they respond in such a way that they seem to display a scary attitude since their response is that outside from where they go it is unsafe, due to the criminality of the native Puerto Ricans. This is still something that is not only seen in the movie but it is also seen today, as in the article posted below in which the investor wanted to make an image of Puerto Rico that wasn't the real one, since the real one was not as good as what they needed it to be. 

In the following link, titled A Ritz Ups the Ante in Puerto Rico, there is a clear example of how the Media or the business sector wants to change the image that Puerto Rico has on the world as it says: “It is in a corner of the Caribbean that for decades has been more associated with grit than glamour.”

Link to article

#10 Jim Cooper's Down on the Island

As I read through the two chapters, Teaching and Helping, from Down on the Island by Jim Cooper my attention was mainly caught by the fact that it was a professor who didn’t understand Spanish and is moving to a place in which he will mainly teach native people in times in when as he mentions, neither the teachers in 1954 nor 20 percent of the Puerto Ricans on 1993 could speak English. We see through the chapters that Cooper shows us his internal and external journeys, since he mainly explains his adventures while teaching in a place full of students he most certainly wasn’t used to and also narrates about the things that happened to him while helping across the island. An internal journey Cooper goes through is the fact that he has to deal with a new perspective of seeing things since he is not only living in a new place, but also he doesn’t know how to communicate in the language spoken by the natives of his new adventure. If we go ahead and look for an external journey that is directly related to the change of location Cooper has, we can take the part I which not only is he exposed to a gift given by his students as the year ended, surprisingly after he passed even the worst student with a C, but Cooper is also exposed to having the different teachers have a sort of rivalry feeling as they compared the gifts given to them by the students, Coopers says that he noted this in his diary as a “mercenary note”.

While teaching in Mayaguez, Cooper gives us an example of othering as he talks about his impressions upon seeing the departmental tests given to the students the year before and his comparison of the test, which consisted of relatively easy questions to a test, since he says he would have expected these questions in a freshman English class in the United States. Through the helping phase, Cooper narrates in such a way in which we can see a clear example of othering when he uses, once again, the United States vs. Puerto Rico factor to emphasize on the ways in which a Puerto Rican or American student would behave during a test. He mentions that a Puerto Rican student would most probably let his neighbor look at his test since he wants to help him get a good grade and Cooper mentions that, on the opposite side, an American student would hide his paper since for him he is the only one interested in getting a good grade without lending a hand since he thinks of the neighbor as a rival, not a as person in need of help, as a Puerto Rican thinks of him.

#9 Journey Journal - First Thoughts

As the first week went by, my mind wasn’t really used to writing for 10 minutes nonstop, but as the days passed I got used to doing the exercise. It wasn’t until the 6^th or 7^th entry that my mind stopped thinking and just poured all that came to me in those ten minutes of, I may say, relaxation. Never before had I done any sort of activity similar to this one, in which I took ten minutes from my day to just sit down and write about what was going through my mind, which is most certainly what’s going on in my life.

It was a bit strange for me to write personal things in a place in which I had to hand in to my professor when I finished my 40 entries. Once I got over the fact that my professor wasn’t going to read it (I hoped so), I even included this crazy thought I had in some of the entries, I got more comfortable with the idea of the exercise, which was based on first thoughts.

The objectives of the activity were set since the first entry:

·    Keep your hands moving

·    Don’t cross out

·    Don’t worry about spelling, grammar or punctuation

·    Don’t think. Don’t get logical.

·    Go for the jugular

From the objectives mentioned above I can say that I followed each and every one, especially the one that incites us to go for the jugular. Once I got over the fact that nobody would read my entries my mind made sure to use the ten minutes to pour out the things that were causing me some troubles and sort of resolved them for me through the course of the minutes left once I wrote them in the journal. I am pretty sure once I get my Journey Journal back I will finish the few pages left of it and continue the exercise, at least a couple of times a week. This is because once I finished writing I felt as if the things I wrote might one day help me or even make me remember what was going on in my life that exact day, and probably help me if I were going through the same problems as those days.  The Life Compasses had a similar effect because if I look back at them I can see how I felt those days in various factors: spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically, and the causes of why I felt that way. In conclusion, this activity served as an effective way of permanently recording my internal journey, full of thoughts, problems and solutions, for future consideration.