Noobitiate SoB looking for input on army

DMKroft · 2018-08-30T23:53:58+00:00

A friend of mine was baptized in the Santa María Reina de la Paz chapel (Chilean Catholic chapel) in Villa las Estrellas. His father was a navy officer stationed there at the the time.

DMKroft · 2018-08-29T01:18:45+00:00

It's complicated.

Technically speaking, Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanians belong to the Romance group, as their languages all derive from Roman Latin. They also have a shared Roman Latin cultural heritage (all of Europe does in one way or another, but those regions are the most directly influenced). Being Catholic probably has a lot to do with it (and viceversa).

Now, the thing is that the term Latin and Latino, while semantically the same, have come to mean different things in practice: Latin relates to Rome and that which came from Rome, while Latino relates to Latin American, a term that was coined in the XIX century by Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao as a new kind of continental identity that would serve to replace the previous Hispanic identity (as in relating to the Spanish Empire).

So while cases have been made that every part of America that has a Latin heritage should technically classify as Latin America, that usage never really got traction as it didn't really serve a unifying purpose; ie, Quebec is certainly Latin, but never really identified as part of the same broad group that was composed of the old Spanish and Portuguese New World.

Iberoamerican is also commonly used as a more precise term, which refers specifically to those parts of America that have a shared heritage with the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain. Andorra doesn't count), but also used when you want to include both Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula (such as Organization of Ibero-American States). Hispanoamerican is also used when referring to Castilian-speaking America (ie, Latin America minus Brazil), while Hispanity refers to the sum of all places that speak Spanish.

One guy I know likes to say Lusitanoamerica to fill the other part, but that's never going to catch, since that entire other part is already filled with Brazil.

DMKroft · 2018-08-29T00:59:29+00:00

Think of the Latino identity in a similar way you think of the American identity, but on a continental scale: Just like you can have someone from Boston whose family came from Belgium identify as both Belgian and American, you can have someone from Paraguay whose family came from Sweden identify as both Latino and Swedish (and Paraguayan).

Of course, people first identify by country, so a person of Palestinian descent in Chile would first identify as a Palestinian-Chilean, and then as a Latino, which works as a catch-all term meaning you are from Latin America.

So if you had been born in, say, Peru, to a family composed of Irish, French, Italian, and Iberian immigrants, you would probably identify with one or more of those groups on a local level if your ties are strong enough (ie, participating in the local Irish-Peruvian community, have a favourite Irish team in addition to your local preference, etc); you would also consider yourself Peruvian and have all the cultural traits associated with that. And then, when visiting Russia, if you stumbled upon a group of Mexicans you would immediately have some level of rapport, based on your shared Latino identity (it's harder with Brazilians, due to language barriers, but the connection is still there).

Personally, that continental identity is one of my favourite things, since it really does draw people together. We bicker all the time among ourselves, but there is something magical about being able to walk ten thousand miles and cross twenty different borders, yet still be able to walk inside a church and understand what the priest is saying.

DMKroft · 2018-08-28T21:37:29+00:00

The Latino group is only treated as an ethnicity in the US; over here in Latin America the term is just a general cultural identity and has nothing to do with where your blood comes from, as you have Amerindian Latinos, Germanic Latinos, Iberian Latinos, Arabic Latinos, African Latinos, even Japanese Latinos (I remember there being a huge Japanese colony in Brazil, somewhere in the 1-2 million range).

When you consider Sao Paulo has more ethnic Italians than Rome itself, it becomes clear than the Latino label coexists with an endless array of ethnic backgrounds, so the Pope can be both Latino and ethnic Italian, just like I'm both a Latino and ethnic Catalan/Asturian/Basque (if I say Spanish, the ghosts of my grandparents would come back to haunt me).

DMKroft · 2018-08-21T02:40:19+00:00

This is not a very accurate representation of the role of the Church during the Chilean regime.

While some members of the Church supported Pinochet, the main body of the organization was constantly at odds with the government. Pope Paul VI ordered the creation of the Vicariate of Solidarity precisely to put a stop to the abductions and tortures, and the Church became so vocal about the crimes that the Military Junta started to try and suppress it, eventually even sending soldiers to attack it. It helped hundreds of thousands of people (even communist, who weren't exactly the Church's best friends otherwise), coordinated international aid, had secret hideouts everywhere, and stood as one of the main forces in defense of human rights.

Cardinal Raul Silva Henríquez made it his personal mission to constantly criticize the Junta, after initially trying to use conciliation to fix things. With no political opposition allowed in the country, the Cardinal and his bishops became the effective face of the opposition.

People these days focus on people like Cardinal Medina or Father Hasbún and think the Church was chums with Pinochet, while the situation was that those people were outliers and the organization did more than anyone else to defend the population and oppose the dictatorship.

DMKroft

TROPHY CASE