Chapter 6:

I thought a major issue that this week's reading and film touched on was stereotypes in both a negative and positive sense. Both films seemed very propaganda-like. They displayed cooperation between the Americas as a whole: the first in fighting against disease, and second in agricultural production.
In the first film, "Silent War" I was surprised to see how the focus was on giving the vaccination to the locals. It painted the United State's involvement to seem heroic, and displayed the jungle as a death trap. I thought it was positive how the vaccine was coined the "genius of the Americas" though because it gave North and South America a combined success and it seems at least from this film that people had equal access. But then they finish the film by saying the real disease is fascism.
"Journey to Banana Land" was a fun film to watch. It was kind of over the top, and the whole thing (made by the United Fruit Company) turned into an advertisement for bananas, but I thought there was a lot of interesting, colorful footage. It made Latin America seem exotic and fascinating, but tried to make it relatable as the narrator would say, "just like our clothes" or "they go to church too," and tried to teach viewers a couple of Spanish words as well. It was interesting how it made the divide between the city people and the highland people. The highland people were described as "ancient" and by using "primitive" methods. It was interesting to jump straight from stereotypical Latin America to stereotypical United States America within the same film as we follow the journey of the banana. The ending showed a smiling, classic American family with Mom cooking bananas and healthy kids benefiting from the whole process.
Something that stuck with me from the last article by Dorfman and Mattelart was how Disney did not invent the inhabitants, but forced them into a "proper mold." I think that's a lot of what the United State's media did with outside cultures: tried to group them into one character so that they would be easier to display and target either negatively or positively.
In the first article I thought it was very powerful that Sandino finds pride in having emerged from an oppressed group, and he explores the bonds of nationality in a new sense, saying that one can destroy their rights to nationality when they become to greedy or selfish such as Adolfo Diaz or Emiliano Chamorro.