briliant idea, rise taxe while having 15% unemployment

De momento es un rumor

The Valley of the Ebro refers to the real world location of the Ebro Valley, located in modern day Spain. The valley features long rolling hills of white stone, and although beautiful, hints at a less pleasant theme: infertility.

We would often picture living, lush landscapes as covered in greenery, farmland, or some other semblance of life. Plain, white hills, seemingly devoid of any other features or flora not only establishes the setting of our short story, but instead allows the author to allude to a feeling of emptiness. "Long and white" serve to corroborate this idea of desolation; a place simply colored white and stretching for a great distance feels very empty. With the subject of this short story revolving around a couple's abortion, emptiness is a core aspect to the setting of this story.

Interesting

Madrid is really dry normally

Don Quixote is from a village called La Mancha of Spain. This village is where the story begins and plays a large part in who Don Quixote is. From this village Don Quixote was quipped, by himself, as Don Quixote de La Mancha.

This is an image I found on the internet of the five classes of people in New Spain.

Mundy, B. "Spain and the Imperial Ideology of Mapping" in The Mapping of New Spain. Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1996

While Mundy’s approach to the production of maps in the Spanish empire centers on the figure of the king and his connection to territories near and far from him, she does so in order to exemplify the way man in 16th-century Europe positioned himself within the world. Through this view, for example, the maps serve as a way for Phillip II to legitimate his rule over the empire, especially in the New World territories.

Mundy's research questions explore why different/varied methods of representation were important in the 16th-century European context (i.e. choreographic vs. geographic maps), and how these translated into understanding space in New World from an Old World perspective.

In order to answer her main questions, she examines two mapping commissions ordered by Phillip II and carried out by Anton van den Wyngaerde and Pedro de Esquivel. She identifies the distinct methods of representation used by the artists taking into account the broader historical and geographical context that would eventually influence the way the territories in the New Spain would be represented, as happened with the creation of the Relaciones Geograficas in New Spain.

Mundy effectively help us understand the significance of mapping (along with the different methodologies of doing so) from a conceptual as well as a methodological point of view. Her analysis, as well as contextualization of the van den Wyngaerde and Esquivel maps offers a glimpse onto the conceptual frame that informed Europe’s initial understanding of the New World as part of the greater whole that was the Spanish empire. However, as she stresses the importance of the tangible nature of the lands (at least through maps), her visual examples become limited as she only provides an example of Esquivel’s work. It would have been very useful to compare it to the work of van den Wyngaerde (the distinction between choreographic and geographic maps remained unclear without a visual aid).

Mundy's contribution lies in prompting us to think about different ways of engaging with space, and what that engagement signifies within a given context (i.e. for Phillip II, engaging his New World possessions through visual representations of the maps legitimized his status as king given that he could not physically rule overseas, thus he still has control over this space).

“In both kinds of maps [van den Wyngaerde’s and Esquivel’s], man defines his relation to the world through his ability to measure it” (Mundy, 4)

This is a really interesting article about many Latin American intellectuals' opinions on the possibility of Catalonian independence from Spain. Many are urging Cataluña to stay a part of Spain because Barcelona has historically been a city that Latin American intellectuals have lived and worked in and they don't want to lose those cultural ties if Cataluña severs its ties with Spain thus abandoning castellano. The other portion of this article that stood out for me was the quote by Abad which argued that Europe has been doing the right thing by not yielding to every nationalistgroup because that only leads to violence and probelems (I assume he's referring to the case of Latin America here).

This article discusses the recent wave of immigrants from Venezuela to Spain. Some interesting points are that Venezuelans do not need tourist visas to visit Spain and the paragraph on the emerging political party Podemos and its connections to the Venezuelan government.

Chinkunguya in Spain

The Spaniards completely took control.

Would God be happy with this statement?

This seems like a much more reasonable ruling than the one in the Deutsche Bahn case.