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Date Posted: 16:48:43 02/09/08 Sat
Author: Betsy Peters
Subject: Controling violence in Puerto Rico

In Oral Spanish on Friday, we spent much of the class period discussing the time-honored Puerto Rican tradition of cock-fighting. The discussion skirted around the topic of a community's desire to express its tensions in non-violent circumstances or in circumstances of controlled violence. We started comparing the difference between two men fighting to the death, or two communities fighting to the death and cocks fighting to the death. When the animals enter the ring, the rivalry between the men is controlled. In an interview we watched of Puerto Rican cock fighters, one man announced, "This is the only place where a man keeps his word." Why are the prohibitions so strong? Because if the violence in the ring was not allocated merely to the cocks fighting, the whole arena would become one big bloody fight. These cock fighters cannot fathom breaking a cock fighting bet. We wondered about our American culture's facination with professional football. Again, the rivalries run high, but the field of violence is very limited. In fact, injury on the field is accidental. Is it fair to call the calm that settles after a big game, this same sort of reconcilation achieved by a ritualized violence that expresses itself only in a small and concentrated way so that the community doesn't have to deal with real violence?

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