Latina/o Studies

More than 50 million Latinos live in the United States of America, which makes the U.S the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. In this course, students analyze the cultural, historical, political and social experiences of U. S. Latinos, or "Latinx America." This course understands the place of Latinx communities in the rising U.S. nation as a political and economic agent that shaped the history of the world in the 19th and 20th century. First, the course examines the roots of the US Hispanic populations, and also how colonization imposed Hispanic cultures and languages in North, Central and South America. Second, the course analyzes the experiences of the Latinx communities in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries through various topics: Latino immigration, practices of racism and colonization, strategies of resistance, political and social movements, U.S. policies regarding Latino communities, and Latinx gender practices, among others.

Latina/o literature explores the heterogeneity of Latina/o experiences in the U.S. While the course is not a survey of Latino literary history, it introduces students to contemporary expressions of Latina/o literature. Plays, short stories, novels, testimonies, poems, essays, and film help students to study the complex and often-silenced histories of the Latina/o communities. The course understands literature and cultural productions as a platform for social, historical, and political histories. Literature becomes a place where ideologies are contested, debated and articulated. In this course, students will explore questions related to community, diaspora, immigration, racism, transnational politics, discourses of privilege, and intersections of sexuality, gender, and class. This course is taught in English, with some readings in Spanglish, a language that resulted from interaction between Spanish and English.

In this course, students develop an understanding of the main topics for Queer Latinx Studies, including current aesthetic, political, and theoretical frameworks to analyze Latinx art, cinema, literature, and performance. This course gives students the opportunity to study how queer Latinx artists are contesting civil and governmental oppression against non-heterosexual communities. Students understand the significance of dwelling and sexual embodiment for dissident artists and their political intervention in the public sphere. In this class, students will engage with questions of disability, immigration, legality, race, and sexuality in America. This course is taught in English, with some readings in Spanglish, a hybrid language that resulted from interaction between Spanish and English.

This course analyzes how artists articulated the idea of mestizaje (racial and ethnic mixing) in Mexico and the U.S from the 16th to the 21th century. This course is divided into three sections: in the first section, students will study the genesis and evolution of racial taxonomies in the viceroyalty of New Spain. This section will teach the students the conceptual history of the idea of mestizaje and its political implications. In the second section, students will examine how diverse artists and political institutions portray the idea of mestizaje creating the genre of Casta paintings. Casta paintings are one of the most important artistic expressions of the Spanish Catholic Empire. In the third section, the students will analyze how governmental and nongovernmental corporations developed the Mexican muralism artistic movement, and also how U.S Latinx artists reinterpreted the muralist conceptualization of mestizaje in the 20th and 21st Century. Particularly, the course will emphasize the artworks of Diego Rivera in Mexico City and Detroit, and the artworks of Sandra de la Loza, and Emilio Aguayo.

This special topics course is conducted as a seminar and varies in focus each time. The course offers students the opportunity to further examine, problematize, and research particular issues and forms of cultural productions as they relate to Latina/o Studies and communities in the United States. To this purpose, class sessions require students to explore the discursive specificities of assigned works as well as to consider and interrogate the critical and theoretical issues they raise. Students’ thoughtful engagement with the material and ability to participate in productive dialogue bear directly on the quality of the knowledge produced throughout the semester.