Courses

Last offered Spring 2020

What do contemporary U.S. media discourses about Central and South America reveal about relationships of power in the Americas? How does the systematic analysis of visual, textual, and sonic media discourse enhance our comprehension of broader social dynamics? How do South and Central Americans in the diaspora actively counter dominant media narratives about their communities? And what does it mean to center the unique histories, cultures, and political contexts of diasporic Central and South Americans within Latina/o/x Studies? Drawing from a wide range of scholarly materials and media platforms, this interdisciplinary course assumes a transnational approach to these issues, with an emphasis on how to conduct effective discourse analysis of everyday media texts. Above all, we will highlight the ways in which ethno-racial identity, gender, sexuality, class, and nation intersect to inform mainstream U.S. media narratives and our understandings of past and present modes of representation. [ more ]

LATS 227 SEM Utopias and Americas

Last offered Spring 2012

The very word for "utopia," a Latin word coined by Thomas More in 1516, owes much of its initial imagination to European voyages of "discovery" and conquest. In this course, we examine the ways that the "New World," and particularly the United States of America, has been a utopian project from the early days of colonization. How have particular historical experiences in the Americas been shaped by utopian machinations, and how has the New World transformed the dreaming of utopia? In this course, we consider the theory of utopia in conversation with select historical writings from and scholarship about early Spanish and English colonization, early nation-building in the U.S., Haiti, and Mexico, the Shakers, the Oneida Community, the Canudos Massacre in Brazil, Father Divine's International Peace Mission Movement, Chicanx Aztlán, Chalatenango in El Salvador, and Oyotunji Village in South Carolina. We also examine literary and artistic selections from Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ayn Rand, Sun Ra, and Black Panther (2018). Through these different utopian moments and selections, we trace themes of time, space, environment, gender, family, class, race, colonialism, and rebellion and examine the ways in which different utopias have responded to and reproduced structural injustices. Because utopias have been so common throughout the Americas, students are encouraged to bring in comparisons with utopias not listed on the syllabus. [ more ]

LATS 228 LEC Revolt and Revelation in 20th-Century Americas

Last offered Fall 2017

Writing in 1971, Dominican priest and Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez asked "Is the Church fulfilling a purely religious role when by its silence or friendly relationships it lends legitimacy to dictatorial and oppressive government?" Such a question encapsulates the sometimes agonistic and other times deeply intertwined relationships between religious institutions, religious thought, and movements for political transformation in the 20th century Americas. This course examines those forms of "God-talk" broadly termed "liberation theologies" that responded to and challenged social relationships of class, colonization, race, culture, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, and ecology. These theologies were borne out of and in turn deeply shaped struggles against oppressive regimes and structures in the Americas, and as such we will focus on some specific theological writings--such as those of Gutierrez--and their relationship to distinct social movements and struggles over land, economy, and political power, especially in Brazil, El Salvador, Perú, and the United States of America between 1960-2000. [ more ]

LATS 231 SEM Approaches to Media Studies: Analyzing Mediated Difference

Last offered Spring 2017

Media's influence in 21st century life is pervasive, and encompasses visual, sonic, and discursive formats.This course introduces students to a variety of qualitative approaches to the study of contemporary media. Simultaneously, we will explore questions of ethno-racial identity, gender, and sexuality. Structured around a series of hand-on exercises designed to provide experience in the areas of textual analysis, in-depth interviews, virtual ethnography and participant observation, this class will provide students with interdisciplinary training that enhances their understanding of everyday media and its interaction with multiple categories of identity. This course is a comparative Ethnic Media Studies class that encourages students to employ media as a lens for theorizing the intersections between ethno-racial identity, gender, and sexuality. We review materials focusing on a wide range of minoritarian communities. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2022

This course explores the role of religion in Caribbean history and politics, with a focus on Puerto Rico and Cuba. These Caribbean islands have lived out contested colonized histories and experiences, as well as diasporic realities on the US mainland. The US government and military have played a significant role in both since the turn of the last century, forcibly shaping their economies and politics. Religion, particularly the Protestant missionary enterprise since the US invasions in 1898, has also shaped histories and politics on the islands and throughout their diasporas. We will explore the role and impact of Protestant religion in these historically indigenous, African descendent, and Roman Catholic religious spaces, as well as how these religious engagements and theologies impacted migration and the creation of diasporic communities in the US. We will analyze the role of religion in imperialist endeavors, as well as in solidarity movements. Puerto Rican and Cuban historical luminaries, such as Pedro Albizu Campos and Jose Marti, who struggled against Spanish colonialism in Puerto Rico and Cuba respectively, had not only political but religious visions for better prospects for their homelands. By understanding the intertwining of religion and politics in Puerto Rico, Cuba and their diasporic communities, we will have the tools to consider the implications for other Caribbean nations, such as the Dominican Republic, as well as other Latin American countries that have experienced US interventions and the creation of diasporic communities. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2020

The first Latinx communities were formed in 1848 when the United States conquered half of Mexico's territory. In 1898 the United States annexed Puerto Rico and has retained sovereignty to this day. These early conquests and continuing im/migrations created Mexican and Puerto Rican communities in the United States. U.S. imperialism continued to shape the im/migrations that created Cuban, Dominican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan and other Latinx communities in the United States. This course explores U.S. military, political, and economic interventions and their impact on im/migrations and the making of Latinx communities. We also explore the impact of U.S. employers' and the U.S. government's recruitment of low wage workers in shaping im/migrations, destinations, and the formation of Latinx working-class communities. Im/migration and refugee policies have long defined who is eligible to enter and how, as well as who is deemed eligible for citizenship and belonging. Within this context, Latinas and Latinos have developed survival and family reunification strategies for themselves, their families, and their communities. [ more ]

LATS 309 TUT Scriptures and Race

Last offered Spring 2018

This course focuses on the relationships between constructions of race in the post-1492 American world and "Christian scriptures." The big questions of the course examine the ways that contestations of power are intertwined with the making of, interpretation, and transformation of sacred texts. Both scriptures and race are conceptual constellations of human social imagination, and yet their conceptualization has often been embroiled in the hopes and traumas of everyday life in the Americas. How and why did these two terms come to have any relationship to each other? How and why do peoples engage "scriptures"? In what ways have "scriptures" informed how people imagine themselves, their communities, and their relationship to religious and racial "others"? How did "scriptures" and "race" inform each other in modern colonialisms and imperialisms? In this course, we will examine the ways that scriptures have been employed in order to understand and develop notions of race, and we will examine how ideas about and lived experiences of race have informed the concept of scriptures as well as practices of scriptural interpretation. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2019

"[I]n a media-saturated world in which a huge preponderance of the world's news images are controlled and diffused by a handful of men' a stream of comic book images and words, assertively etched' can provide a remarkable antidote." --Edward Said, Introduction to Palestine by Joe Sacco. This course examines graphic narratives (and related texts and film) rooted in the "Global South," with particular emphasis on Latina/o and Latin American experiences. We will focus on how each author/artist deploys visual and narrative elements to express social, political, economic, and cultural realities. Regular assignments will offer students opportunities to create their own graphic narratives. [ more ]

LATS 318 SEM California: Myths, Peoples, Places

Last offered Fall 2016

Crosslisting Between Paradise and Hell, between environmental disaster and agricultural wonderland, between Reagan and Berkeley, between a land of all nations and a land of multiracial enmity, a diversity of myths have been inscribed onto and pursued within the space we call California. How did certain narratives of California come to be, who has imagined California in certain ways, and why? What is the relationship between certain myths, the peoples who have imagined them, and the other peoples who have shared California dreams? In this course, we will examine some of the myths that surround California by looking at a few specific moments of interaction between the peoples who have come to make California home and the specific places in which they have interacted with each other. Of special interest will be imaginations of the Spanish missions, the Gold Rush, agricultural California, wilderness California, California as "sprawling multicultural dystopia," and California as "west of the west." [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2020

The very term "mixture" implies that two or more distinct substances have been brought together. Distinctions of race and religion are social fictions; yet, the lived ramifications of these social fictions involve tense struggles over the boundaries of racial and religious communities. These boundaries are not just ideas but also practices. In the history of the Americas, mixed racial and religious identities and experiences have more often been the result of violent clashes than romantic encounters. Still, the romanticization of the New World as a geography that makes such mixtures possible reaches back to the earliest days of Spanish conquest in the Americas. This course critically reconsiders varying ways that racial and religious mixtures have been imagined, defined, challenged, negotiated, and survived under imaginative and legal rubrics of mestizaje, creolization, transculturation, passing, syncretism, religious hybridity, and mixed race studies. [ more ]

LATS 338 SEM Latina/o/x Musical Cultures: Sounding Out Gender, Race, and Sexuality

Last offered Spring 2019

In this class we will investigate a wide variety of Latina/o/x popular musical forms, with particular attention to issues of gender, sexuality, and ethno-racial identity. Employing interdisciplinary materials and approaches, this course focuses on the sonic and visual analysis of contemporary Latina/o/x popular music and the identities of its producers, performers, and audiences. We will focus on the following questions, among others: How are hybrid Latina/o/x identities expressed through popular music and dance? In what ways do gender, sexuality, and ethno-racial identity inform the performance and interpretation of particular Latina/o musical forms? What unique role does sound play in our understanding of popular music and identity? [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2020

This interdisciplinary course focuses on the areas of Latina/o media production, policy, content, and consumption in an attempt to answer the following questions, among others: How do Latinas/os construct identity (and have their identities constructed for them) through the media? How can we best understand the complex relationship between consumer, producer, and media text? How are Latina/o stereotypes constructed and circulated in mass media? Where do issues of Latina/o consumer agency come into play? In what ways does popular media impact our understanding of ethno-racial identities, gender, sexuality, class, language, and nation? [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2022

When we consider going to the movies to be pure entertainment and escapism, we may be wrong. This course will introduce students to Latinx films through a critical practice showcasing the experience of feeling, especially when matters of Latinidades, identity formation, and transculturation are at stake. If watching a film constitutes an affective and ideological transaction for spectators in the domain of the national cultural imaginary, how does the actual viewing materialize a lived and felt experience through interpellation and reception? Students will embark on a film festival to examine the history of Latinx representation and structures of feeling on the silver screen from the silent era to In the Heights and Spielberg's West Side Story. Each film will be approached and tackled from specific points of entry and theoretical frames, such as border crossing and migration, education and assimilation, hegemonic stereotyping and cultural citizenship, fiction and history, race and ethnicity, the geo-politics of emplacement in the barrio and gentrification, feminist and queer subjectivity, and fame and the American Dream. Among the films to be analyzed in class are: El Norte, Coco, Sleep Dealer, La Ofrenda, La Mission, Popi, Chicago Boricua, Selena, Nothing Like the Holidays, and Vivo. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2022

This course examines the graphic narrative in terms of how each author/illustrator employs narrative elements (plotting, structure, characterization, text, and visuals) to express social realities within the context of democratic ideals. Regular assignments and in-class exercises throughout the course offer students the opportunity to create their own graphic narratives. [ more ]

LATS 386 SEM Latinas in the Global Economy: Work, Migration, and Households

Last offered Spring 2019

An increasingly global economy, from 1945 to the present, has affected Latinas in their home countries and in the United States. The garment industry, one of the first industries to go global, has relied extensively on Latina workers in their home countries and in the United States. Domestic work, a traditional field of women's work, also crosses borders. Challenging the myth that labor migration is a male phenomenon and that women simply follow the men, this course explores how the global economy makes Latinas labor migrants. What impact has the global economy and economic development had on Latinas' work and their households in their home countries? How have economic changes and government policies shaped Latinas' migrations and their incorporation in the changing U.S. economy? How have Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, Dominican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan women confronted the challenges created by a globalizing economy and balanced demands to meet their households' needs? [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2022

Latina/o Studies independent study. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2020

The most exciting and forward-thinking writing in the English language today is being done by formally experimental writers of color. Their texts push the boundaries of aesthetic form while simultaneously engaging questions of culture, politics, and history. This course argues not only for the centrality of minority experimental work to English literature but a fundamental rethinking of English literary studies so as to confront the field's imbedded assumptions about race, a legacy of British colonialism, and to make the idea of the aesthetic more open to ideas generated in critical race studies, diaspora studies, American studies, and those fields that grapple more directly with history and politics. In the critical realms of English, work by minority writers is often relegated to its own segregated spaces, categorized by ethnic identity, or tokenized as "add-ons" to more "central" or "fundamental" categories of literature (such as Modernism, poetics, the avant-garde). Recent work by Asian American, African American, Native American and Latino/a writers challenges our assumptions and preconceptions about ethnic literature, American literature, English literature, formal experimentation, genre categorization, and so on. This writing forces us to examine our received notions about literature, literary methodologies, and race. Close reading need not be opposed to critical analyses of ideologies. Formal experimentation need not be opposed to racial identity nor should it be divorced from history and politics, even, or especially, a radical politics. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2021

In the age of digital communications and mobile applications such as WhatsApp and Skype, transnational living has rapidly emerged as the norm as opposed to the exception. However, what does it really mean to "be transnational"? How are the lived experiences of transnational individuals and communities shaped by categories of difference such as gender, ethno-racial identity, sexuality, and class? What impacts do the growing number of transnational citizens and residents in the U.S. have on our understanding of "American" identity in the local, national, and global contexts? In this interdisciplinary seminar we will analyze recent theories regarding the origins and impacts of transnationalism. Particular attention will be paid throughout the semester to the intersections of gender, ethno-racial identity, sexuality, and class in connection with everyday transnational dynamics. The broad range of case studies examined includes Central American, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Indonesia, Jamaica, Mexico, the Middle East, and Peru. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2020

An August 2015 Latino Decisions poll found that Latinxs, more than other ethnic groups in the U.S.A., are deeply concerned about climate change and the "environment". How and why might some Latinxs be disproportionately impacted by climate change? How have a few distinct Latinx theorists and activists imagined and constructed ecology? How are struggles for environmental justice related to broader Latinx concerns with and constructions of place? This seminar will examine a few moments in distinct Latinx histories and geographies such as California migrant farmworkers and the struggle over pesticides, urban movements over waste management such as the Young Lords' garbage offensive, food justice movements and urban gardening, as well as literary and theological representations of affective and sacred ecologies such as Helena María Viramontes' Their Dogs Came With Them and Ecuadoran-U.S. ecofeminist Jeanette Rodríguez's theological texts. Evaluation will be based on class participation, presentations, annotated bibliography, short writing assignments, writing workshop participation, and a final 20-page research paper. [ more ]

LATS 426 TUT Queer Temporalities

Last offered Spring 2017

Birth, childhood, adolescence, college, adulthood, career, marriage, family, mid-life, old age, death, afterlife. How are all these facets of being human imagined as stages in time, as axes on certain progressive lines that delineate human social relations? How do we experience and represent time, and what factors might account for both our experiences and our representations? What are some of the ways that people experience and mark the passing of time? What are some of the different ways that people have made sense of time and themselves in time? How have our conceptions of time and our demarcations of lifecycles shifted historically? How do people whose experiences do not align with dominant cultural social stages negotiate ideas of lifecycle and timing? Especially for individuals and peoples who have been denied self-representation and narratives of place, how do competing notions of time, history, space, and location get negotiated? In this course, drawing from within the broad corpus of queer theory (including theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Elizabeth Freeman, J. Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz) we will examine some non-linear, non-normative, and interruptive approaches to making sense of time, space-time, and self within time. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2020

In this course, we will study the visual arts and culture of California after 1960 and consider the region's place in modern art history. We will focus on a series of recent exhibitions organized as part of a Getty initiative entitled Pacific Standard Time. Diverse in scope, these shows explored important developments in postwar art in California, including feminist art, African American assemblage, Chicano collectives, Modernist architecture, craft, and queer activism. In this seminar, we will pursue research projects directly related to the art exhibitions we study, and examine southern California conceptualism, photography, performance, painting, sculpture (including assemblage and installation), and video by artists both canonical and lesser known. Student projects will analyze the critical responses to the exhibitions, while also exploring the roles of archives, art criticism, and curatorial practice in contemporary art history. [ more ]

LATS 471 SEM Comparative Latina/o Migrations

Last offered Spring 2019

Since the 1970s, policymakers, scholars, the media, and popular discourses have used the umbrella terms "Hispanic" and "Latina/o" to refer to Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and more recent immigrants from Central and South American countries. As a form of racial/ethnic categorization, however, these umbrella terms can mask widely divergent migration histories and experiences in the United States. In this course, we develop theoretical perspectives and comparative analyses to untangle a complicated web of similarities and differences among Latino groups. How important were their time of arrival and region of settlement? How do we explain differences in socioeconomic status? How fruitful and appropriate are comparative analyses with other racial/ethnic groups, such as African Americans or European immigrants? Along the way, we explore the emergence of Latina/o Studies as an interdisciplinary and comparative field of study, as well as methods used in Latino and Latina history, specifically oral histories, government documents, newspapers, and interdisciplinary approaches. [ more ]