A Rural History of Uruguay by Katie

During our study here in Uruguay each day a student teaches the class a lesson about a particular reading we did the night before.  Today I taught the class about the rural history of Uruguay.  This topic is so central to our study of sense of place because it is important to note that countries are not defined only by big cities.  Big cities are only a small part of countries and here in Uruguay it is the countryside that dominates most of the land mass.  In the lesson that I taught, we discussed the rural history of Uruguay and how that history set the country apart from other Latin American nations.  In Uruguay, even though the world market was dictating the economy, the cycles of products in the country were unique.  In Uruguay, the cycles were about the incorporation of new products and not the replacement of the old.  Due to this, Uruguay's main export/commodity, livestock, was always in demand.  As a result, large land owners consistently dominated Uruguay's political history throughout the eighteen hundreds.  This meant that the country was resistant to change and clung fast to conservative values.  I found it also very interesting to see how the factors of tradition and modernity played out in rural history.  We learned that as history progressed tradition embedded itself in modernity.  We see this today as people drink mate and celebrate gaucho culture.  As we drove into the northern countryside, to Salto, today we also witnessed for ourselves elements of Uruguay's rural history.  We saw gaucho culture embodied, sheep and cattle farmers, flat landscape, fenced off land, and the modernization projects of  multinational companies.  Reading about a subject and then actually witnessing the effects for ourselves deepened our understanding and enriched our learning experience. 

Katie Johnson