Thought 33: Grito de PLP 🇲🇽
Welcome back to my “informative” and “insightful” blog. Today, we are talking about nationalism. We just finished a project on nationalism. Specifically, my project was on Mexican Nationalism. I am not actually Mexican, I am Iranian, but I found out that the only nationalist events in Iran during the time period we focused on was a series of failed wars. I decided to go with Mexican Nationalism because it just seemed really interesting. I worked on our final project with Mateo (who is Mexican). But before we worked on our final product, an Instagram post, we had to find out, what is nationalism?
We learned that Nationalism is the belief that one nation is superior to another. Now, you may be thinking “What is a nation?” A nation is a group of people who believe they are united by factors such as ethnicity, geography, religion or culture. A country is the entity that the people of a nation live in. It is possible for a nation to not have a nation-state. We began this project by making a short video using the “Canadian check” Tiktok sound. We made a short video exhibiting various nationalist Canadian symbols and objects.
The next thing we needed to understand before we could begin working on the post was historical perspective. We learned about historical perspective through a confederation simulation. We were put into small groups that would each represent a random Canadian province from the time of confederation. We would research the needs of our colony, express it to the other provinces and a treaty would be made that we would choose wether or not to sign. I was put in a group with Dylan and Cole. We represented Nova Scotia. After a few rounds of negotiation and debate, we decided to not sign the treaty. Now that we understood historical perspective and how to form an opinion, we could begin to work on the post.
First thing was to choose our topics and get into our groups. As previously mentioned, I chose Mexican Nationalism with Mateo. We spent a few days working on our research. We decided to focus mostly on the Mexican War of Independence, from 1810-1821. After our research, we made our first draft of the images for our post. We made a picture that was a drawing over a photo, an image that involved a quote, and a free choice image. For the free choice image, I made a collage. In the end, we ended up choosing Mateo’s drawing and quote images, and my collage.
After our images, we began to work on a caption. Mateo and I had both created individual captions, so we just combined the two to create a caption that tells a story of Mexican nationalism. The last piece of the project was to create an opinion piece. My opinion piece argued that Mexico was not one nation, but a nation of nations. Finally, our posts were complete. This project helped me understand nationalism and I was able to identify nations and communities that I am a part of.
In this project, I used the Communicate Compellingly competency to express my own opinions and I used the Take Historical Perspective competency to justify my arguments. I definitely used these competencies in my Opinion Piece, which I spent hours researching, analyzing, and coming to conclusions on hundreds of years of history.
The driving question for this project was “How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today”. I can now say that I have an answer. Understanding the nationalist movements of the past provide context for the nationalist events of today. Understanding Russian nationalism in the 1990s provides context to the modern Russo-Ukrainian War.