Courses

Last offered Fall 2018

This course explores how aesthetics can serve as an organizing principle for the critique, analysis, and theorizing of racial and diasporic formations across the 20th century, with a specific focus on Caribbean diasporic populations and their cultural production. We will think about aesthetics as literary, visual, and sonic representations authored by and about communities of color in response to the uneven processes of racialization, migration, colonization, and nation-state formation that inflect how identity is shaped and experienced across time and space. Engaging the work of artists like Hew Locke, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Kara Walker, and Miguel Luciano in conversation with Stuart Hall, José Quiroga, Krista Thompson, and Michelle Ann Stephens among others will illuminate these inquiries. The circuits of culture, goods, ideas, labor, and peoples that flow between the archipelagos of the Caribbean and the metropoles such as Miami, New York, and London will serve as critical sites to map our interventions. [ more ]

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 208Introduction to Latina/o Literatures

Last offered Fall 2015

This discussion course serves as an introduction; the reading list is not meant to be exhaustive or comprehensive, but will rather provide a sampling or range of texts for students to engage. We will explore a number of readings across different genres (the novel, play, poem, short story, graphic novel). Students will endeavor to understand how each author defines Latinidad. What characterizes Latina/os for each of these writers and how do their works articulate the historical conditions out of which they emerge? How is Latina/o literature marked by notions of language, nationality, gender, sexuality, class, race, politics, form, and genre? The readings will provide both a survey of general ideas in the study of Latina/o literatures as well as specific case studies and historical examples from which we will extrapolate about the larger field. Readings include works by Tómas Rivera, Cristina García, Cristy C. Road, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Junot Díaz, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, and more. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2017

Generally, cities have been described either as vibrant commercial and cultural centers or as violent and decaying urban slums. In an effort to begin to think more critically about cities, this course introduces important topics in the interdisciplinary field of Urban Studies. Specifically, we will discuss concepts and theories used to examine the peoples and structures that make up cities: In what ways do socio-cultural, economic, and political factors affect urban life and development? How are cities planned and used by various stakeholders (politicians, developers, businesses, and residents)? How do people make meaning of the places they inhabit? We will pay particular attention to the roles of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in understanding and interpreting urban communities. Texts include works by anthropologists, historians, sociologists, cultural critics, cultural geographers, and literary writers. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2020

This course is focused on the art and practice of writing fiction. Sessions are divided into workshop and seminar. Workshop: Students will present short fiction or novel excerpts for peer critique and the editorial advice of the instructor. Seminar: We will study published fiction by Latina/o, Latin American, Afro-Diasporic, and other writers, 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. Regular assignments and in-class exercises will help students further strengthen their narrative skills. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2018

In this course, we will engage aspects of Latinx religious experiences, practices, and expressions in the United States of America. Given the plurality of Latinx communities and religious lives in the U.S.A., we can only consider select contexts that help us understand the challenges of studying and defining the "religious" and "hybridity" in Latinx contexts. We will survey certain selected religious traditions and practices --such as popular Catholic devotions to Guadalupe, crypto-Judaism, curanderismo, Latinx Muslims, and Santería--by focusing on particular moments of religious expression as elucidated in specific historiographies, ethnographies, art, literature, and film. [ more ]

LATS 227Utopias 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 ]

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 231Approaches 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 2018

"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 This literature and writing course will examine the concept of archives through the lens of democratic ideals. A primary focus will be on how works of literature engage archives--their creation and deletions, their contents and omissions, their revelations and concealments. We will also look at the lives of archivists like Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Readings include: "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges; Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton; and All the Names by José Saramago. Drawing from the values explored in class, students will have opportunities to contribute to existing archives and to curate their own. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2019

In this course we will focus on issues of language and identity in the contemporary cultural production and lived experience of various Latina/o/x communities. As such, how are cultural values and material conditions expressed through Latina/o/x language and literature? How does Latina/o/x identity challenge traditional notions of the relationship between language, culture, and nation? In what ways might Latina/o/x literary and linguistic practices serve as tools for social change? Departing from an overview of common linguistic ideologies, we will examine code-switching, bilingual education, recent linguistic legislation, and the English Only movement. Throughout the course we will survey texts culled from a variety of literary genres as well, including autobiography, novels, and poetry. Both directly and/or indirectly, these texts address Latina/o/x language politics, as well as the broader themes of power, community, ethno-racial identity, gender, sexuality, class, and hybridity. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2018

New York City has long served as a nexus of Latina/o migration and settlement since the late nineteenth century. From the New York sound of Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican salsa to the poetics of slam poetry forged in the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, New York's Latinas/os have defined and developed numerous forms of Latina/o popular expression. This course examines the aesthetic foundations of Latina/o New York, remaining attentive to the numerous diasporas that have migrated to and made the city their home. Student will engage with a multiplicity of popular cultural genres including memoirs, literature, poetry, sound, visual art, and photography in the context of the history of the city while focusing on key themes of racial formation, the politics of space and place, and the labor of culture. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2019

On September 20, 2018, Maria---a category four hurricane made landfall on Puerto Rico. The most powerful storm to hit the island since 1932, Maria caused widespread catastrophic damage on a land already suffering from the devastating effects of a decades-long economic recession. Three months after the hurricane, half the island remained without power, water service yet to be reestablished in many areas, and aid distribution inadequate and inconsistent. The hurricane and its aftermath brought mainstream U.S. attention to Puerto Rico and its diaspora, while simultaneously calling attention to the island's status and relationship to the United States. This hybrid onsite-Skype-travel course is for students interested in learning about the historical, social, and political relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. We will examine, for example, the political status of Puerto Rico, migration, race, social movements, and expressive cultural forms that have emerged as a result of this asymmetrical relationship. Through the study of the impact and legacy of U.S. policies on the island, we will also consider how the fiscal and humanitarian crisis and proposed solutions affect the daily collective lives of the people in the U.S. territory and the diaspora. This course is a unique collaboration between Vassar, Williams, and the UPR. To enroll in this course, students must commit to participating in an alternative spring break/community engagement project in Puerto Rico and flexible with possible changes in class time when Skyping with students from the University of Puerto Rico. We will gather in Puerto Rico to meet with peers from UPR and for an alternative spring break collaboration, interfacing with various community organizations that have taken up vital social, medical, and economic roles vacated by the United States. Taller Salud, PECES, and Casa Pueblo are among the organizations in Puerto Rico that students may work with as a part of the course's community engagement component. [ more ]

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 Spring 2018

"The city of big shoulders has plenty of room for diversity," reads the official visitor's website for the City of Chicago. Focusing on this claim, this course asks students to think critically about what kind room has been made for diversity--social, spatial, and ideological. Additionally we examine the ways in which diverse social actors have shouldered their way into the imagined and physical landscape of the city. Working with ethnography, history, literature, critical essays, and popular culture, we will explore the material and discursive constructions of Chi-Town and urban life among its residents. Appreciating these constructions we also consider how Chicago has served as a key site for understandings of urbanity within a broader national and global context. [ 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 318California: 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 AIDS crisis is not over. The protease inhibitors made HIV/AIDS a treatable, chronic disease since 1996, but we must ask who has access to the health care system and the cocktail. The official story only showcased the experience of urban privileged white middle-class gay men. Minorities and women were marginalized and ignored. Puerto Rico and the Mexican Borderlands must be included in the AIDS archive since Latino/a bodies continually inhabited transnational spaces and circuits of migration that propagated the transmission of the virus since the beginning of the AIDS crisis. For many, addressing AIDS four decades into the epidemic, its effects on the Latina/o communities and familias is nothing but an anachronism. In this course students will visit alternative archives in order to recover the silenced history of the Latino/a AIDS crisis toward a revisioning of the hegemonic cultural narrative and rhetorical representation of the epidemic. Given that the Latino/a AIDS crisis remains untold, students will piece together the fragmentary narratives and images, reconsider critical moments, and collect the relegated voices of those who died and are still unaccounted for---los/as desaparecidos/as. Can the SIDA cultural production, material conditions, and lived experiences be recovered, touched, and felt to honor the dead? From an interdisciplinary perspective, this course will critically analyze film, documentaries, video, theater, solo performances, artwork, testimonials, interviews, poems, novels, memorials, the AIDS Quilt, and obituaries that document the Latino/a AIDS everyday experiences, survival practices, and artistic expressions. Among the topics to be covered are: the temporality of illness, mourning, memorialization, activism, and aesthetic intervention. The students will be introduced to the notions of "AmnesiAIDS" and "NostalgiAIDS" to theoretically understand a wide spectrum of conceptual issues such as memory, canonization, temporality, and historicism. [ 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 ]

Last offered Spring 2020

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. In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore Latinidades through a genealogical lens: What culture-specific issues emerge around history, identity, ethics, forensics, immigration, commerce, surveillance, art, science, and medicine? Readings will include 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 ]

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 2019

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the history, lived experiences, and cultural productions of Afro-Latinx in the United States. Discussions in the course will center on three related questions: What is Afro-Latinidad? How does Blackness in Latin America differ from its articulation among Afro-Latinx in the United States? And, how have migration and sociopolitical processes impacted the lives of U.S. Afro-Latinx and our collective understanding of Afro-Latinidad? Throughout the course, we will draw on literature in the social sciences and humanities to examine the transnational nature of race and Blackness across the Americas, as well as the intersection between these identities and gender, sexuality, and class. We will also examine several media and cultural productions of U.S. Afro-Latinx (poems, novels, documentary films, blogs, and social media sites) and critically analyze their articulation of the Afro-Latinx experience. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2017

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. The primary focus will be on texts that explore themes of democracy and Latinidades. We will also discuss the "graphic activism" of artists like Sharon Lee De La Cruz of Digital Citizens Lab, a design collective with a focus on civic technology. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to create their own graphic narratives, either digitally or in print. Possible guest speaker: comic book artist Ivan Vélez (Planet Bronx, 2015 Creative Capital Award in Visual Arts). [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2020

This course will explore the various forms of installation and site-specific artworks created by Latinx artists for both museums and public space. We will examine the ways in which Latinx artists have used space as a material in the production of artworks and how this impacts the works' meanings and the viewer's experience. Within the context of U.S. Latinx culture and history, we will connect notions of space with ideas about cultural citizenship, civil rights, and social justice. A variety of art forms will be studied, from traditional to experimental, including murals, sculpture, performance, video, and several multimedia, interactive, or participatory projects. While establishing a historical lineage and theoretical frameworks for analyzing this growing genre, we will pay particular attention to how these works engage urban space and often challenge the institutional assumptions of museums and curatorial practice. Likewise, we will examine the important debates associated with various public art and museum installation controversies. [ more ]

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 2020

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 2018

What is the relationship between real life in urban communities and the multiple ways in which they are imagined? What does it mean to be "urban," to live in an "urban community," or to be the product of an "urban environment"? Who do we think the people are who populate these spaces? This course takes a critical look at specific populations, periods, and problems that have come to dominate and characterize our conceptions of the quality, form, and function of U.S. urban life. A few of the topics we may cover include historical accounts of the varied ways in which poverty and "urban culture" have been studied; race, class, and housing; the spatial practices of urban youth and the urban elderly; and gendered perspectives on social mobility and community activism. Finally, this course will explore how diverse social actors negotiate responses to their socio-spatial and economic circumstances, and, in the process, help envision and create different dimensions of the urban experience. [ 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 TQueer 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 2019

This seminar examines connections between Latinx and Latin American art through a series of recent exhibitions organized as part of a Getty initiative entitled Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA that opened in 2017. While the chronological span for the overall project reaches from Pre-Colombian art to present, we will focus on modern and contemporary art after the 1960s and consider key themes of art and activism, borders and diaspora, globalism and modernism, and popular culture and science fiction in the visual arts. Diverse in scope, these shows explored important developments in the arts of the Americas from the late-20th and 21st centuries, including, abstraction, Chicano muralism, Conceptual art, craft, feminist art, Kinetic art, Modernist design and architecture, social practice, and queer activism. Students will pursue individual research projects directly related to the art exhibitions we study, and examine photography, performance, painting, sculpture (including installation and participatory art), 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 ]

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 ]

Last offered Fall 2019

Latina/o Studies independent study. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2020

Independent Study:Latina/o Studies [ more ]