We have courses in popular culture, performance studies, visual arts, literature, urban studies, ethnography, history, and more! Each semester, faculty invite speakers, performers, and artists to visit and contribute to our courses. These guests also give public presentations and meet informally with students, enriching our curriculum and students’ educational experiences. Please consult the course catalog for a full listing of courses, as the following is just a sampling:
LATS 105(F) LEC Latina/o Identities: Constructions, Contestations, and Expressions
What, or who, is a Hispanic or Latina/o/x? How have these shifting terms tried to encompass the identities and experiences of such large and diverse groups of peoples? In this course, we focus on the complex nature of "identity," as we delve into the interdisciplinary field that has emerged to give voice to groups that were too often excluded from or misrepresented in academic disciplines and discourses. Viewing identities as historically and socially constructed, we assess how racial, ethnic, class, and gendered identities take shape within specific contexts in the Hispanic Caribbean and Latin America, as well as in the United States. We examine the impact of (im)migration and the rearticulation of identities in the United States, as we consider that each group has a unique history, settlement pattern, community formation, and transnational activities. Identity is also a contested terrain. As immigrants and migrants arrive, the United States' policymakers, the media, and others seek to define the "newcomers" along with long-term Latina/o citizens. At the same time, Latinas/os rearticulate, live, assert, and express their own sense of identity. We examine these diverse expressions as they relate to questions of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and national origins. [ more ]
Taught by: Carmen Whalen, Kevin Cruz Amaya
Catalog detailsLATS 205(F) LEC Latinx Visual Arts
This course introduces students to Latinx visual arts and the histories of the communities from where this artistic production emerges. Latinx art and artists have gained significant attention and inclusion in the art world. For example, the opening of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture reignited interest in Chicana/o art and revamped pressure on peer institutions to diversify their collections, exhibitions, and programming. While this renewed interest is positive, this context runs the risk of framing Latinx art as a new and an emergent category, thus dismissing a longer history of visual arts within Latinx communities across the U.S. This course offers an historically grounded introduction to Latinx visual art by placing the artistic production for the groups included under the label "Latinx" in their social, political and historical contexts. The course provides students with the visual arts vocabulary and theoretical skills to analyze visual art forms including sculptures, murals, posters, performances, and altares, while exploring their relevance to Latinx communities and American art. In debunking the notion of Latinx art as a new phenomenon, students will understand the conditions, struggles, and modes of resistance that inspire Latinx visual arts production in the U.S. since the 19th century and into our contemporary moment. Students will deepen their visual art literacy, enrich their understanding of the histories encapsulated by the term "Latinx," and develop their appreciation for the visual arts. [ more ]
Taught by: Kevin Cruz Amaya
Catalog detailsLATS 209(F) SEM Spanish for Heritage Speakers
This course is intended for students of Latino/a heritage. It will address the unique needs of students whose knowledge of Spanish comes primarily from informal and family situations rather than a conventional classroom experience. The goal of the course is to build on and expand students' existing knowledge of Spanish while developing skills for using the language in more formal/academic contexts. Conducted in Spanish. [ more ]
Taught by: Carlos Macías Prieto
Catalog detailsLATS 210(S) SEM Introduction to Critical Latinx Indigeneities
This seminar course engages Critical Latinx Indigeneity (CLI), a new methodology inspired by Asian American studies and that engages Latinx, Native, and Indigenous studies. CLI considers the presence of Indigenous Latin American immigrants and their descendants in the U.S., with special attention to transnationality and belonging beyond the U.S.-Mexico border. We trace key terms and concepts that address the overlapping colonial structures faced by Latinx Indigenous communities throughout the U.S. Discussion topics include borders and migration, "illegality," settler colonialism and coloniality, tribal federal state recognition, identity formation, Indigenous futures, and activism through art. Students will critically analyze works from a range of genres and cultural expressions, including fiction, memoirs, zines, and film, along with recent literary and cultural theory works. The course will explore some of the major themes and issues that inform these cultural productions, from the poetry of Afro-Oaxacan poet Alan Pelaez López and a documentary made by Triqui Mexican Americans in California to a novel about Guatemalan Indigenous refugees in Los Angeles by Héctor Tobar and a film about Salvadoran-Americans in New York since the Salvadoran Civil War. This course aims to deepen students' understanding of the diversity and complexity of Indigenous experiences, highlighting that Indigenous peoples not only reside on ancestral lands but also navigate urban spaces. Students will learn to apply close reading and literary analysis across cultural texts and scholarship foundational to thinking about Indigeneity and Latinidad as two concepts that converge in the US. [ more ]
Taught by: Itzél Delgado-Gonzalez
Catalog detailsLATS 222(F) SEM Ficciones: A Course on Fiction
This seminar is focused on the study of published fiction by Latina/o, Latin American, Afro-Diasporic, and other writers of the Global South, paying close attention to how each author employs narrative elements--characterization, plotting, structure, dialogue mechanics, setting, tone, theme--as well as the values and visions expressed. [ more ]
Taught by: Nelly Rosario
Catalog detailsLATS 224 LEC U.S. Latinx Religions
Last offered Spring 2025
In this course, we will engage aspects of Latina/o/x/e religious beliefs, experiences, practices, and expressions in the United States of America. Given the diversity of Latinx communities and religious lives in the U.S.A., we consider select contexts that help us understand the challenges of studying and defining the "religious" and its hybridity in Latinx contexts. We will survey certain selected religious traditions and practices in Latinidad -- such as popular devotions to La Virgen de Guadalupe, healing traditions and curanderismo, home altar traditions, Latinx Pentecostalism, crypto-Judaism, Latinx Muslims, and African-rooted spiritualities such as Santería. In addition, we will study Latinx approaches to traditional US religious expressions of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. By focusing on particular moments of religious expression as elucidated in specific historiographies, ethnographies, art, literature, film, we will seek to garner a greater understanding of how Latinx communities express and practice their religious traditions and spiritualities. [ more ]
Taught by: Efrain Agosto
Catalog detailsLATS 229(S) SEM Latinx Solidarities
The Latinx community comprises people who trace their ancestry to Latin America, an expansive territory that spans from Mexico to South America, including the islands and archipelagos of the Caribbean. As a result, the Latinx community includes a multiplicity of socio-cultural, historical, and linguistic characteristics. How does one foster solidarity across differences within and beyond this political community? What does it mean to approach Latinx studies as a coalitional space? This class examines how Latinx people have built networks of solidarity and spaces meaningful to them across the United States. We contextualize the challenges faced by Latinx communities in the United States, using geographic frameworks to understand how differences are marked on bodies and spaces, making them feel out of place. We also explore case studies of Latinx placemaking across time and space, illuminating their determination to create culturally relevant spaces for inclusion and well-being. As we move through these case studies, we will consider how different Latin American ethnic groups have transcended national origins to forge collective identity and political power through social movements and cultural expression, highlighting transformative moments of cross-cultural organizing that have shaped the urban fabric of U.S. cities. [ more ]
Taught by: Laura Rivas
Catalog detailsLATS 230 LEC Cities, Suburbs, and Rural Places
Last offered Spring 2025
Long associated with cities in the scholarly and popular imagination, transnational migrants have increasingly settled in U.S. suburbs and rural localities and have made these places home. Through the lens of new destinations for im/migrants, this course introduces spatial methods, perspectives, and concepts to understand cities, suburbs, and rural places. We ask how geographically specific forces and actors shape migrants' living conditions, as well as consider the spatially uneven outcomes of complex processes like globalization. We analyze how different actors discursively and materially demarcate who belongs and who does not, and how these boundaries shape migrants' everyday practices. This interdisciplinary course highlights the legal, economic, political, environmental, social, and cultural dimensions of how transnational migrants become part of and create homes in new destinations. Through a range of textual materials (academic, literary, popular, visual), we explore the construction of landscapes, how people shape space at local and regional scales, and where people do life's work and come together to build cultural space. Rooted in critical race geographies, case studies are comparative across different racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. West, South, Midwest, and Northeast. This course will be mostly discussion-based, grading based on participation, short writing exercises, four assignments, and a final project. [ more ]
Taught by: Edgar Sandoval
Catalog detailsLATS 232 SEM We the People in the Stacks: Democracy and Literatures of Archives
Last offered Spring 2023
"Archives have never been neutral they are the creation of human beings, who have politics in their nature. Centering the goals of liberation is at the heart of the issue" (Jarrett Drake, former digital archivist at Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University). In this generative writing and critical-practice course, students examine the concept of archives through the lens of democratic ideals. A primary focus is on how Latinidades and works of Global South literatures engage archives--their creation and deletions, their contents and omissions, their revelations and concealments. Drawing from the values explored in class, students have opportunities to contribute to existing archival collections and/or to curate their own. [ more ]
Taught by: Nelly Rosario
Catalog detailsLATS 240 SEM Latinx Language Politics: Hybrid Voices
Last offered Spring 2025
In this interdisciplinary course we focus on questions of language and identity in the contemporary cultural production and lived experience of various Latinx communities. We consider the following questions and more: In what ways does Spanish shift as it crosses over to the US from Latin America and the Caribbean? How does Latinx identity challenge traditional notions of the relationship between language, culture, and nation? How does careful attention to language elucidate the dynamics of gender and sexuality in the Latinx community? How are cultural values and material conditions expressed through Latinx linguistic practices? In what ways might Latinx literary and linguistic practices serve as tools for social change? Departing from an overview of common linguistic ideologies, we will examine code-switching or Spanglish, bilingual education, linguistic public policy, the English Only movement, and Latinx linguistic attitudes and creative responses to linguistic colonialism. In addition to a consideration of language and identity grounded in sociolinguistics, anthropolitical linguistics, Latinx studies, and cultural studies, we will survey a variety of literary genres including memoir, novel, and poetry. Both directly and/or indirectly, these texts address Latinx language politics, as well as the broader themes of power, difference, and hybridity. [ more ]
Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda
Catalog detailsLATS 253 LEC Religion and Politics in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Diaspora
Last offered Spring 2025
This course analyzes 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 in several key US communities, such as New York City and Miami. Since 1898, the US government and military have played a significant role in both Islands, forcibly shaping their economies and politics. Religion, particularly the Protestant missionary enterprise after the US invasions in 1898, has also shaped histories and politics on the islands and throughout their diasporas. We will analyze 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. Both the role of religion in the imperialist endeavor and in the solidarity movements that responded will occupy our time in this course, with special attention to key figures in both sides of such efforts. With some enhanced understanding of the intertwining of religion and politics in Puerto Rico, Cuba and their diasporic communities, participants in this class will also consider implications for other Caribbean nations, such as the Dominican Republic, as well as, selectively, Latin American countries that have experienced US interventions and the creation of diasporic communities. [ more ]
Taught by: Efrain Agosto
Catalog detailsLATS 254 SEM Embodied Knowledges: Latinx, Asian American, and Black American Writing on Invisible Disability
Last offered Fall 2023
This interdisciplinary course assumes an expansive approach towards disability, defining it not exclusively as a legible identity that one can lay claim to, but rather as an identity grounded in one's relationship to power (Kim and Schalk, 2020). This course centers on the critical role of lived experience as a key site of everyday theorization for the multiply marginalized, and specifically on the ways in which invisibly disabled Latinx, Asian American, and Black American individuals write the self. As scholars in disability studies argue, self-representations of disabled individuals carry the potential for us as a society to move beyond the binary narratives of "tragedy or inspiration" so often associated with disability. Rather, the self-produced narratives of US disabled writers of color offer a much more nuanced portrayal of everyday life with disability/ies for the multiply marginalized. Much like invisible disability itself, these self-representations ultimately refute traditional depictions of disability, and underscore the ways in which the bodymind serves as a rich, albeit often overlooked, site of knowledge. Embodied Knowledges draws on the insights of disability studies, crip studies, anthropology, literary studies, medicine, psychology, education, cultural studies, ethnic studies, American studies, gender and sexuality studies, sociology, and trauma studies. We will examine the works of Latinx, Asian American, and Black American writers and scholars others in relationship to one another, and as points of departure for examining issues such as the relationship between immigration and disability; intergenerational trauma; the impacts of paradigms such as the Model Minority Myth and notions of cultural deficit; passing; the politics of disability disclosure, the paradoxes of invisible disability; invisible disability in academic spaces; the role of culture and categories of difference such as race, gender, class and immigration status in societal approaches to and understandings of invisible disability; and future visions in the realm of disability justice and care work. [ more ]
Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda
Catalog detailsLATS 286(F) SEM Latina/o History, 1848 to the Present
Latinx peoples and communities have a long history in the United States, histories that are too often erased or denigrated in contemporary, dominant discourses and in high school curricula. This course analyzes these histories, asking how and why such diverse groups of Latinx's have become part of the United States over such a long period of time. We uncover the origins of these communities in US conquest and imperialism, labor recruitment and globalizing economies, and human rights violations, as well as in US immigration, labor recruitment, and refugee policies. We consider the underlying tensions in US policies that often recruit Latinas and Latinos as low-wage workers, while nativist sentiments call for their exclusion. Within these contexts, Latinas/os/x's have developed survival and family reunification strategies for themselves, their families, and their communities. We begin in 1848, when the United States conquered half of Mexico's territory and moved the border, creating Mexican-American communities and the border region. At the end of the Cuban-Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States annexed Puerto Rico and has retained sovereignty to this day, declaring all Puerto Ricans to be U.S. citizens in 1917. We examine how these early conquests, continuing migrations, and early communities shaped the dominant US receptions of and varying contexts for Cuban, Dominican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan and other Latinx migrations to and communities in the US. US 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, often creating marginalization and undocumented people in their wake. [ more ]
Taught by: Carmen Whalen
Catalog detailsLATS 312(F) SEM Transnational Cartographies
Latinx geographies extend beyond national borders, as Latinx people in the U.S. retain connections with the Latin American communities to which they trace their roots. These ties sustain important flows that are both material (such as goods, people, resources) and immaterial (such as ideas, longing, nostalgia, identity). This course maps how transnational migrations affect political imaginaries and landscapes "back home." We also consider how the experience of migration shapes political imaginaries and landscapes in the context of Latinx communities in the US. Maps are more than technical representations of specific locations; they also reflect social and cultural forces that have been instrumental for the construction of imperial and state projects. The study of transnational cartographies illustrates how dynamics of in-betweenness challenge conventional mappings and the ideologies they uphold. Focusing on U.S.-Caribbean migration, we will explore three key themes shaping the region's geography: (1) the spread of political ideas centered on emancipatory politics and radical nationalisms; (2) imperial actions and state power that go beyond national borders; and (3) how transnational Latinx scholars rethink the relationship between people and place, particularly in relation to national discourse. [ more ]
Taught by: Laura Rivas
Catalog detailsLATS 313 SEM Gender, Race, and the Power of Personal Aesthetics
Last offered Fall 2024
This media/cultural studies course focuses on the politics of personal style amongst women of color in the US and around the globe in the digital era. We undertake a comparative, transnational exploration of the ways in which categories of difference such as gender, disability, sexuality, class, and ethno-racial identity inform normative beauty standards and ideas about the body. The class pays particular attention to the ways in which neoliberal capitalism shapes contemporary understandings of gendered bodies and the self. We examine an array of materials from across the disciplines including commercial websites, music videos, photography, histories, film, television, personal narratives, ethnographies, and sociological case studies. Departing from the assumption that personal aesthetics are intimately tied to issues of power and privilege, we engage the following questions, among others: What are some of the everyday functions of personal style among women of color in the US and globally? How do Latina/x, Black, Arab American, and Asian American personal aesthetics reflect the specific circumstances of their creation, and the unique histories of these racialized communities? What role do transnational media and popular culture play in the development and circulation of gendered, raced, and sexualized aesthetic forms? How might the belief in personal style as an activist strategy complicate traditional understandings of feminist political activity? And what do the combined insights of ethnic studies, feminist studies, cultural studies, media studies, queer studies and disability studies contribute to our comprehension of gendered Asian American, Arab American, Black, and Latina/x bodies? [ more ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsLATS 314 SEM Social Geographies: Bridging Theory and Praxis in New England
Last offered Fall 2024
How do we define a community? How do people create community spaces? What tools do we use to explain and understand what a community is? Building on the praxis of Black sociologist Patricia Hill Collin's notion of the "Insider/Outsider," this course focuses on the social life of community spaces. It analyzes the construction of community by individuals, groups, and societies, and how these various actors participate in the production of space. In doing so, comparisons will be made with case studies across space and time, and we will apply these theories and research methods to understand our lives in New England. This seminar asks students to take on the role of a researcher, one that must navigate the line between being part of a group and maintaining a methodological distance. Students in this course will become familiar with how people come together to create and contest community, community-based approaches to understand social problems, and structural conditions that produce social inequities. We will consider issues of difference, identification, and access via race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability and examine relational ways to understand poverty, family dynamics, and fear. Readings and course materials will be highly interdisciplinary drawing from disciplines such as ethnic studies, sociology, and geography; course readings will be supplemented by films and an experiential learning component. As part of this component students will meet outside class hours to work with a local community-based organization over the semester and write a 10-page final paper that connects course readings with their fieldwork experience. [ more ]
Taught by: Edgar Sandoval
Catalog detailsLATS 315 SEM Research Design in Geography: Social Science Perspectives
Last offered Spring 2024
How do you design a research project? Which methods of data collection and analysis are appropriate for research questions in Latinx Studies? This course provides an introduction to the process of designing and carrying out a research project, including related to Latinidades, or a plurality of Latinx identities. It introduces students to how social science knowledge is produced to understand the research process, how research emerges, and how we affect research. Course objectives for students are: 1) to design social science research effectively; 2) to critically evaluate the research design of others; 3) to strengthen their academic research and writing skills; and 4) to develop an appreciation for how knowledge is acquired, organized, and communicated. Students will iteratively develop an original research proposal involving several pieces of synthesis. Through applying different research methods to case studies in Latinx Studies, students will understand that the complexity of the issues affecting Latinx communities requires thoughtful research. Students will receive practical training in research protocols, organization methods, project management, and analytical approaches. [ more ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsLATS 316 SEM The Graphic Narrative: A "Global South" Perspective
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 322(S) SEM Tertulia: A Fiction Writing Workshop
This workshop is focused on the art and practice of writing fiction and geared toward students interested in working on creative honors theses. Readings include published fiction by primarily Latine and other writers who center Global South experiences, with attention paid to how each author employs narrative elements--characterization, plotting, structure, dialogue mechanics, setting, tone, theme--as well as the values and visions expressed. Students will present short fiction or novel excerpts for peer critique and the editorial advice of the instructor. Regular in-class exercises and take-home assignments will help students expand their narrative skills. [ more ]
Taught by: Nelly Rosario
Catalog detailsLATS 330 SEM DNA + Latinx: Decoding the "Cosmic Race"
Last offered Spring 2025
Scientists working to assemble maps of the human genome have found a goldmine in the DNA of Latinx, Latin American, and other populations that derive ancestry from multiple continents. This interdisciplinary course explores Latinidades through a genealogical lens: What culture-specific issues emerge around history, identity, ethics, forensics, immigration, commerce, surveillance, art, science, and medicine? Through discussion, materials, and activities that engage personal, historical, and scientific perspectives, this course offers students the opportunity to explore the many codes embedded in the double-helix. Readings include scholarship out of Stanford University's Bustamante Lab, The Cosmic Race by José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina by Raquel Cepeda, and The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome by Alondra Nelson. [ more ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsLATS 332 SEM Latinx Biography & Memoir
Last offered Fall 2024
This course reads widely and deeply in the art and practice of biography and memoir by Latinx authors and historical figures. We shall learn and revisit important historical moments and cultural experiences through the lens of well-known and lesser known figures in Latinx history, art, culture, and religiosity. Our readings will include memoirs by such key figures as Piri Thomas, Esmeralda Santiago, Julia Alvarez, Reyna Grande, Octavio Solis and recent critical biographies about Sor Juana Ines de La Cruz, Jose Marti, and Roberto Clemente. The goal in these and/or other selected readings will be to understand Latinx culture, the search for identity and self-actualization, and spiritual/religious dimensions of individual growth and development in US Latinx communities, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries. [ more ]
Taught by: Efrain Agosto
Catalog detailsLATS 335 SEM Contemporary Immigration Landscapes
Last offered Spring 2025
What is the relationship between racial formations, transnational migrations, and power in the United States? How do geometries of power shape our relationship to place? How do people navigate and resist the exercise of unequal power relations? This course examines geographies of transnational migration, bringing together insights from critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonial theories to enrich our understanding of human geography. Theories on belonging, identity, and power will serve as a bridge between the state's role in structuring the lives of transnational migrants and the politics of conceiving futures as alternatives to current political geographic imaginations in the U.S. immigration landscape. Through an interdisciplinary exploration of 'migration,' we will examine the depth and range of migrants' experiences (such as through Javier Zamora's Solito: A Memoir) and how these communities' lives are structured through various axes of difference, such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and documentation status. We will give attention to the variegated landscape of immigration enforcement and its relationship to issues of labor, political economy, and incarceration, among others. Through materials that embrace both social science and humanities approaches, this course will help students develop a critical understanding of how space matters when considering transnational processes of migration as well as migrant communities' political practices throughout the US. This course asks students to compare and contrast the intellectual genealogies covered and apply these theories of identity and power to case studies that focus on political interventions for social justice (such as UndocuQueers in the immigrant justice movement). [ more ]
Taught by: Edgar Sandoval
Catalog detailsLATS 338(S) SEM Latinx Musical Cultures: Sounding Out Gender, Race, and Sexuality
In this class we will investigate a wide variety of Latinx 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 Latinx popular music and the identities of its producers, performers, and audiences. We will focus on the following questions, among others: How are hybrid Latinx identities expressed through popular music and dance? In what ways do gender, sexuality, and ethno-racial identity inform the performance and interpretation of particular Latinx musical forms? What unique role does sound play in our understanding of popular music and identity? [ more ]
Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda
Catalog detailsLATS 341(S) SEM Performing Masculinity in Global Popular Culture
This course examines popular cultural contexts, asking what it means to be a man in contemporary societies. We focus on the manufacture and marketing of masculinity in advertising, fashion, TV/film, theater, popular music, and the shifting contours of masculinity in everyday life, asking: how does political economy change the ideal shape, appearance, and performance of men? How have products - ranging from beer to deodorant to cigarettes -- had their use value articulated in gendered ways? Why must masculinity be the purview of "males" at all; how can we change discourses to better include performances of female masculinities, butch-identified women, and trans men? We will pay particular attention to racialized, queer, and subaltern masculinities. Some of our case studies include: the short half-life of the boy band in the US, hip hop masculinities, and the curious blend of chastity and homoeroticism that constitutes masculinity in the contemporary vampire genre. Through these and other examples, we learn to recognize masculinity as a performance shaped by the political economy of a given culture. [ more ]
Taught by: Gregory Mitchell
Catalog detailsLATS 344 SEM Marking Presence: Reading (Dis)ability in/to Latinx Media
Last offered Spring 2024
This course explores the intersection of (dis)ability and Latinx identity in the contemporary US context. Employing Angharad Valdivia's (2020) notion of "marking presence" to describe the intentional ways in which Latinx subjects gain and hold on to mainstream media space, the class places the fields of Disability Studies, Latinx Studies, Gender Studies and Media Studies into conversation. We address the following questions and others: What does media reveal to us about the place of (dis)ability and Latinidad in contemporary US life, particularly as these categories intersect with questions of gender, sexuality, national identity and citizenship? How might we read Latinidad and (dis)ability into media texts in which they are not otherwise centered? What are the advantages of deploying mainstream media presence as a claim to power for disabled Latinx individuals, particularly those who are multiply marginalized? What are the limitations of such an approach? We will focus on these questions, as well as deploy various media examples (podcasts, social media, film, television and music) alongside scholarly texts to explore topics impacting the Latinx communities such as the relationship between the relationship between immigration and (dis)ability, intergenerational trauma and migration, the gendered archetype of the Latina "Loca," (dis)ability in academia, the politics of self-care amongst Latinxs in the neoliberal context, and the very legal, cultural, and social category of "(dis)abled" itself within dominant society as well as in Latinx communities. [ more ]
Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda
Catalog detailsLATS 345(S) SEM Borders, Solidarities, and Diaspora: Contested Representations of U.S. Central Americans
This course explores who U.S.-Central Americans are through their visual cultural production, as well as how US-Central Americans have been portrayed by others. Recently, Central Americans have gained visibility in the U.S. public sphere as mainstream media coverage of the "crisis at the border" has sensationalized the arrival of migrant caravans. The images and visuals resulting from mainstream coverage has led to monolithic representations of Central Americans framing them as "illegal aliens," violent gang members, or agentless victims. By engaging with visual culture ranging from social media, films, and zines, we challenge these monolithic perceptions and representations of Central Americans by pursuing the following set of questions: How have others visualized Central Americans and what has been the effect on lived experiences of U.S. Central Americans? How do U.S.-Central American communities visualize their identity formation in the U.S.? What is the role of visual culture in their resistance to racism, classism, sexism, and other structures of marginalization in the U.S.? As part of this course, we explore the range of social, political, economic, and historical forces that have pushed migration from each of the countries in the isthmus and the formation of their respective diasporas in the U.S. [ more ]
Taught by: Kevin Cruz Amaya
Catalog detailsLATS 346 SEM Latinas/os and the Media: From Production to Consumption
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 ]
LATS 348 SEM Drawing Democracy: Graphic Narratives as Democratic Ideals
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 355 From Globalization to Fast Fashion: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Issues
Last offered NA
This course examines the historical origins of globalization and fast fashion in the US garment industry, asking how we got here and what the implications are of fast fashion as a contemporary issue. Historically, New York City was the center of the US garment industry, home to the designing, merchandising, and the making of clothing. Yet as US garment manufacturers sought to increase profits by lowering their labor costs, they separated "fashion" from "production," with New York City remaining a fashion center and with sewing relocated to other locations via globalization. Having long relied on women and immigrant workers, the US garment industry turned extensively and repeatedly to Latinas as workers in the U.S. and in their countries of origin, with lasting impacts on Latina workers and their communities. The course begins with a foundation in the history and structure of the garment industry, focusing on New York City and early globalization to Puerto Rico, as well as other Caribbean countries. Continuing to consider both "clothing capitalists" and Latina workers, we then turn to Los Angeles and to maquiladoras along the US-Mexico border, as well as in Central American countries. The emergence of "fast fashion" built on the historical structure and trends in the garment industry, arguably accelerating and intensifying the impacts on workers and their communities, as well as on the environment and wages globally. These are some of the contemporary issues we will explore, along with the various local and transnational responses to globalization and fast fashion, historically and in the contemporary era. [ more ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsLATS 360(S) SEM Latinx Sculpture Art: From Altares to Sonic Monuments
What constitutes Latinx sculpture? While the study of Latinx art has revolved around two dimensional art forms, this course tackles the question of three-dimensional art and examines the development of Latinx sculpture, its socio-political impact, and its aesthetic complexity. This interdisciplinary and hybrid course consists of studying Latinx sculpture art and how Latinx artists have engaged and rearticulated popular cultural traditions like altares, lowriders, and santería in their sculptural works by engaging varying disciplines. This course also includes a studio component. We will dissect the ways Latinx communities conceive of their identity, politics, and manifest resistance and belonging in the U.S. differently through the art form of sculpture, as we study artists like Amalia Mesa-Bains, Gilbert "Magu" Luján, Beatriz Cortez, Pepón Osorio, and Guadalupe Maravilla. Sculpture offers a new lens to expand our study of Latinx identity, politics, and aesthetics, via historical and contemporary theoretical frameworks in the disciplines of Latinx Studies, Chicana/o and Central American Studies, art history, museum studies, and urban studies. As a hybrid course with a studio component, students will also complete a term-long sculpture project, which will be accompanied by a research-based artist statement. In their research based artist statements, students will situate and contextualize their sculpture projects in relation to topics and aesthetic frameworks covered in the class. [ more ]
Taught by: Kevin Cruz Amaya
Catalog detailsLATS 385 SEM Latinx Activism: From the Local to the Transnational
Last offered Fall 2022
Latinas/os/x's have long sought inclusion in the U.S. polity and society, while the meanings of inclusion and the means to achieve it have shifted historically. For Latinxs, activism is often shaped by the specific dynamics of each group's migration to the United States and by their arrival into a particular context. Home country politics and transnational connections can remain important. Yet local activism to meet immediate needs and to address critical issues becomes important as well. Working within existing structures, Latinx communities have at times questioned and challenged those existing structures, as activists have addressed a wide variety of often intersecting issues. This course roots itself in the historical progression of Puerto Rican and Mexican-American activism, before turning to the social and political movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, as shaped by Puerto Ricans, Chicanos/as, Cubans, and Dominicans. The 1980s witnessed increased immigration from several Central and South American countries, arriving in the context of reactions to those political and social movements, as well as increased U.S. intervention in their countries of origin--a context that again shaped both local and transnational activism. Students' final projects will be anchored within this historical framing and within the lens of local and transnational activism, while moving forward in time to consider more contemporary dimensions of Latinx activism. [ more ]
Taught by: Carmen Whalen
Catalog detailsLATS 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 ]
LATS 397 IND Independent Study: Latina/o Studies
Last offered Fall 2024
Latina/o Studies independent study. [ more ]
Taught by: Nelly Rosario
Catalog detailsLATS 398 IND Independent Study: Latina/o Studies
Last offered Spring 2022
Latina/o Studies independent study. [ more ]
LATS 403 SEM New Asian American, African American, Native American, and Latina/o Writing
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 ]
LATS 409 SEM Transnationalism and Difference: Comparative Perspectives
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 ]
LATS 410 SEM Arquivistas: An Archival Storytelling Course
Last offered Spring 2025
Archival storytelling: the "creative practice of resurfacing hidden, untapped, and untold historical treasures and reimagining that content in various storytelling presentations that speak to modern-day audiences" (Arbo Radiko). In this generative writing and critical practice course, students inhabit the roles of writers and storytellers as preservers of history and culture. With a focus on documenting and/or reimagining Latinidades, the course invites students to address the unique narrative forms archives can take beyond collections of artifacts. How can archives inform the creation and definition of literary work? What is the relationship between archives and power? What information might the archivist/storyteller choose to include or omit, reveal or conceal? How might they practice "radical empathy," taking into account the various affective roles and responsibilities of the archivist, the records creator, the records subject, the records user, and community members? Creative-writing and research assignments help students build toward final archival storytelling projects. Throughout the process, students learn to: research, compile, and analyze materials from various repositories; identify and write emergent stories from collected material; and present these stories to the public using narrative elements and digital tools. [ more ]
Taught by: Nelly Rosario
Catalog detailsLATS 415(F) SEM Narrative Medicine: A Latinx Studies Perspective
This generative writing and critical practice course explores how storytelling and other narrative forms shape health experiences and medical practice within Latinx communities. Arising as a discipline in 2001 and rooted in the medical humanities, narrative medicine integrates storytelling, literary analysis, and reflective practice into healthcare to improve patient care, provider empathy, and medical communication. This approach emphasizes the importance of listening to and interpreting the stories patients tell of their lived experiences as essential to diagnosis, treatment, and healing. How do issues of culture, language, identity, migration, transnationalism, and systemic inequities influence medical encounters and conceptions of wellness in Latinx communities? What narrative approaches do writers and artists use to tell these stories? How do clinicians use narrative medicine to deliver equitable and effective treatment? Students will engage with literary and medical humanities scholarship as well as film, visual art, and music to critically analyze these questions. Assignments draw from methodologies common to both narrative medicine and Latinx studies, including testimonio, embodiment, and community-based participatory research. In this interdisciplinary senior seminar, students will generate original writing while developing skills to apply narrative medicine across diverse fields. [ more ]
Taught by: Nelly Rosario
Catalog detailsLATS 420 SEM Latinx Ecologies
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 421 SEM Latinx Geographies
Last offered Fall 2024
This research seminar examines the history, framework, and scholarship of the growing field of Latinx Geographies within the context of interdisciplinary Latine Studies. This course explores the perspectives, experiences, spatial politics, and place-making practices of Latines to consider their relationship to the built environment. We will examine recent theories regarding space, place, and race; explore them through various Latinx positionalities, such as gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship status; and apply them to literary and media representations of Latine spaces and places, such as the US-Mexico borderlands, barrios, and rural fields. We will consider how undocumented queer and trans migrants have become prominent political actors in social movements, how migration, race, and the environment interact in pollution and activism, how undocumented women negotiate motherhood, how non-profit organizations market Latinidad for infrastructural development, and more. In this interdisciplinary and comparative course, students will be exposed to the genealogy of Latinx Geography, which finds its genesis embedded in Black Geography, Queer (Women) of Color Critique, Latinx Studies, and Ethnic Studies. Students will learn a geographical vernacular to think and articulate spatially in the social sciences and humanities, as they develop their own research projects. Collectively, we will interrogate case studies of Latines in the built environment to make visible how race and space are fundamental tenets of a Latinx geographical analysis. Students will select a research topic and develop their own research project independently and through coursework. Evaluation will be based on class participation, leading discussion, presentations, research proposal, annotated bibliography, short writing assignments, writing workshop participation, and a final 20-page research paper. [ more ]
Taught by: Edgar Sandoval
Catalog detailsLATS 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 ]
LATS 469 Comparative Histories: From Latin American to Latina/o/x Experiences
Last offered NA
This course explores comparative histories as a tool for thinking comparatively and thematically, as well as for uncovering a wide range of sources, methodologies, and approaches. More specifically, how do scholars use comparative approaches to grapple with the complex variety of national origins and historical experiences that constitute Latina/o/x communities in the United States? "Hispanic" and "Latino" are umbrella terms that can mask national histories and widely varying histories and experiences of coming to and living within the United States, especially when dominant discourses tend towards homogenizing and stereotyping all Latinos as recent immigrants, as "illegals," and as "criminals." In contrast, Latina/o/x history and the interdisciplinary field of Latinx Studies have emerged as comparative fields of study, exploring rather than erasing differences that include: countries of origin; ways of becoming part of the U.S. through conquest, labor recruitment, and migration seeking survival or a better life; regions of settlement; reception and experiences in the US; among many others. At the same time, comparative approaches and analyses can highlight major themes and questions that unearth underlying dynamics that shape what might appear as disparate experiences. In this writing intensive seminar, we explore comparative histories and approaches, as students define topics that are informed by the comparative approaches and major themes identified throughout the course, even as their own research papers may or may not be comparative, considering the shortness of a semester! [ more ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsLATS 470 SEM Latinx Migrations: Stories and Histories
Last offered Spring 2024
Latinx migration histories are often told with sweeping data and within broad historical contexts. While these are important, the voices of the people leaving their home countries and coming to the United States can be lost or buried. During the 1970s, the emerging subfield of social history asserted the need to craft histories that took into consideration the everyday lives of everyday people. Oral history emerged a key tool in capturing the personal stories too often missed in historical archives. At the same time, Puerto Rican Studies, Chicano Studies, and later, Latinx Studies emerged to tell the histories of groups too often omitted from or misrepresented in the scholarship. These fields relied on traditions of testimonios or storytelling. This course focuses on Latinx oral histories, autobiographies, memoirs, testimonios, and other first-person narratives to explore how people are impacted by and experience those broad historical contexts, as well as how the decisions they make and the actions they take shape those broad historical contexts. As Latinx Studies is a field that has been at the forefront of exploring intersectionality, we also analyze how attention to first person narratives and lived experiences reveal the complexities of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class, as well as other visible and invisible markers of difference. Examining first person narratives in the context of specific Latinx groups in particular historical, geographical, and social contexts, we interrogate the methodological and interpretive challenges of working with oral histories and other first-person primary sources. Course topics include the gendered dimensions of migration, geopolitics and stories of exile, and the connections between lived experiences and political activism, particularly the feminist activism of the late 1960s and 1970s-- all while students develop and share their own research topics. [ more ]
Taught by: Carmen Whalen
Catalog detailsLATS 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 ]
LATS 475(S) SEM Dreaming Latina/x Feminist Disability Studies
In this course we defy the notion that disabled and queer people of color have no right to future dreams, as we collectively imagine how the emergent and contestatory field of Latina/x feminist disability studies might take shape. Feminist, queer, and crip-of-color scholars have recently called for a more meaningful engagement with race in feminist disability studies. Simultaneously, we have also witnessed a small but steady growth in the amount of Latinx studies scholarship that thoughtfully integrates questions of disability not solely as an identity category, but rather more expansively, and ultimately as more reflective of societal power relations. This interdisciplinary course responds to these important shifts in its focus on a series of topics bridging Latinx studies, gender studies, queer studies, crip studies, and critical disability studies. Via themes such as the body, the environment, temporality, labor, citizenship, dependency, visibility/invisibility and others, we explore the ways in which the different approaches to these specific issues across Latinx, critical disability, crip, ethnic, queer and gender studies are in fruitful conversation with one another -- and sometimes even at odds -- as we actively interrogate the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability within the everyday. What are the sites of focus, methods, and political commitments of Latina/x feminist disability studies? Where is the power in meaningfully uniting an analysis of disability to one of sexuality and gendered Latinidad? How does a Latina/x-centric approach productively inform our understanding of disability? What is the political potential of Latina/x feminist disability studies -- not exclusively as a set of theories, but also as a mindset and an everyday call to action? If we were to collectively compose a manifesto for Latina/x feminist disability studies, what might it contain? How might we cultivate a community of care in institutional spaces, even in the face of the ongoing pressure to produce? Just what might Latina/x feminist disability justice dreams look like? How might Latina/x feminist disability justice dreams feel? [ more ]
Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda
Catalog detailsLATS 493(F) HON Senior Honors Thesis: Latina/o Studies
Students beginning their thesis work in the fall must register for this course and subsequentially for LATS 31 during Winter Study. [ more ]
Taught by: Nelly Rosario
Catalog detailsLATS 494(S) HON Senior Honors Thesis: Latina/o Studies
Students beginning their thesis work in Winter Study must register for this course. [ more ]
Taught by: Nelly Rosario
Catalog detailsLATS 497(F) IND Independent Study: Latina/o Studies
Latina/o Studies independent study. [ more ]
Taught by: Nelly Rosario
Catalog detailsLATS 498(S) IND Independent Study: Latina/o Studies
Independent Study:Latina/o Studies [ more ]
Taught by: Nelly Rosario
Catalog details