Animals & Shapeshifters: Crash Course Latin American Literature #10

birds with 10 and a half foot wingspands, fish with terrifying teeth, 500 lb anacondas, and tiny little pink armadillos. Latin America is filled with all sorts of strange and wondrous creatures. So, it makes sense that animals have figured big in Latin American culture from the beginning.

Like, the Mayan saw animals as messengers to the gods and the Aztecs worshiped Gats Kuat, a god who took the form of a feathered serpent. All of that cultural connection laid the groundwork for centuries of literature and centuries of exploring the parallels between animals and human animals. Hi, I'm Kurly Velasquez and this is Crash Course Latin American literature.

Humans and other animals have had relationships for millennia. We've got man's best friend and cat ladies. We've got chupacabas terrorizing people's livestock. And in literature, we've got animals as metaphors. Let's go back to the 17th century when one writer turned to the animal kingdom to talk about a very human subject, slavery.

See, European settlers from Spain and Portugal had a record of subjugating and enslaving indigenous populations, and

they weren't exactly open to constructive criticism, which meant critiques had to be subtle or masked by symbolism. Enter the Jesuit missionary Antonio Vieira. He knew the Portuguese settlers who had taken control of what's now Brazil wouldn't listen to his radical take that maybe they shouldn't be enslaving human beings. So instead of addressing them directly, he picked a different audience. Fish said Mau Desanto Antonio Alpas, the sermon of St. Anthony to the fish is one of Vieta's most famous literary works.

And if you're thinking curly, since when is a sermon a work of literature,

may I point you to the Gospel of Beyonce's Renaissance? Anyway, Vieta wasn't actually talking to fish. Of course, they don't speak Portuguese. In his sermon, he compares human behavior to fish behavior, describing how the big ones eat the little ones, and men with their evil and perverse desires become like fish that eat each other. See how the big fish stand in for the colonizers and the concept of devouring the smaller fish represents the enslavement of the indigenous communities.

But critically to Vieta's point, even the big fish