Fall 2024
This course introduces students to methods of American Studies, Asian American Studies and Latino Studies through discussion of some of the signature ideas, events, and debates in and about America's past and present. It presents students various scholarly approaches to historical and mythic manifestations of America from local, national, and global perspectives and considers the historical and cognitive processes associated with the delineation of America. The course examines a wide range of material and media from the point of view of multiple fields of study.
The 1970s are one of the most fascinating periods in recent American history, marking a turn from the countercultural turmoil of the 1960s to the rising conservatism of the 1980s. Often overlooked, these years nonetheless encompass tremendous social, political, and cultural change. In this seminar, we'll examine the 1970s through 10 intriguing objects--some famous, some obscure---that shaped and reflected the decade's art, politics, economics, technology, and culture. We'll use each object as an occasion for looking deeper at the issues it encapsulates or represents, how those issues reverberate across the decade, and their legacy for today.
This interdisciplinary course examines the cultural and political significance of Puerto Rican mega star Bad Bunny who has transcended musical genres to become a global phenomenon. Through an interdisciplinary lens, students will engage in a critical analysis of his music, lyrics, aesthetics, activism, gender non-conforming performances, and savvy business strategies. We will examine how Bad Bunny/Benito uses his platform and artistry to negotiate the complexities of being both a global Latinx icon and a child of Puerto Rico's colonial context.
This course explores the construction, imaging, and experience of the racialized Latinx body while considering modern regimes of power. It examines legacies of White supremacy and Coloniality in relation to cultural production and the Latinx body. This course's pedagogical approach is rooted in Chicana/o Studies and will examine power in relation to Latinx and other communities of color--it does not focus on Mexican/Latinx communities exclusively. When analyzing power, it recognizes the importance of contextualizing visual, audio, and embodied performative representations of culture to understand how the body constantly speaks back to power.
This course examines Hurricane Maria's impact on Puerto Rico and the push for a resilient, equitable future. We will explore the disaster's effects on infrastructure, economy, and communities, and the role of colonialism and environmental injustice in setting the stage. Through research projects, students will have the opportunity to investigate specific aspects of Puerto Rico's post-Maria recovery and to propose innovative solutions that prioritize equity, sustainability, and community empowerment.
By taking a comparative approach, this course examines the role of social, economic, and political factors in the emergence and transformation of modern cities in the United States and selected areas of Latin America. We consider the city in its dual image: both as a center of progress and as a redoubt of social problems, especially poverty. Attention is given to spatial processes that have resulted in the aggregation and desegregation of populations differentiated by social class and race.
This course offers an introduction to modern Latin American literature and culture. It focuses on the complex ways in which cultural and intellectual production anticipates, participates in, and responds to political, social, and economic transformations in the 20th and 21st centuries. Through a wide spectrum of sources (essays, fiction, poetry, film, and art), students will study and discuss some of the most relevant issues in Latin American modern history, such as modernity, democracy, identity, gender, memory, and social justice.
How are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Spain, Latin America, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the United States? Who is "Latin American," "Latinx," "Boricua," "Chino," "Moor," "Indian," etc.? Who constructs these terms and why? Who do they include/exclude? Why do we need these identity markers in the first place? Our course will engage these questions by surveying and analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions from the time of the foundation of the Spanish empire to the present time in the Spanish-speaking world.
This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of oral history. Students will learn the principles and applications of oral history. The class will collaborate with the Historical Society of Princeton and the Princeton Public Library to continue developing the "Voces de la Diáspora" Oral History project, a project partner of "Voices of Princeton". Discussion on readings will be combined with hands-on activities to prepare students for conducting oral history interviews in Spanish.
Spring 2024
This seminar examines Black Latinidad as an epistemology; as a way of knowing that allows us to better understand the historical relationship between race, colonialism and diaspora. Through the analysis of cultural texts: including novels, music, film, and visual art, we will engage in a genealogical examination of Black Latinidad beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century and through the present. Expanding the conceptual, geographical and temporal limitations that continue to produce Latinx Studies as a contemporary, U.S. based field of knowledge, our course will engage a historical approach to Latinx thought that centers blackness.
This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of oral history. Students will learn the principles and applications of oral history. The class will collaborate with the Historical Society of Princeton and the Princeton Public Library to develop the first stage of the "Voces de la Diáspora" Oral History project, a project partner of "Voices of Princeton". Discussion on readings will be combined with hands-on activities to prepare students for conducting oral history interviews in Spanish.
This course explores how Latina sexualities and sexual economies are integrated with U.S. development and expansion of capital in Latin American countries. We trace the history of capitalism and its reliance on the construction of racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects. We will explore how, similar to Asian and Black women, Latina's sexualities are integral to the accumulation of wealth in the United States. We focus on the sex trades, such as sex tourism in Cuba, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic, the booming online sex work industries in Colombia, and independent pornography industries like OnlyFans in the U.S.
This course examines the paradoxical position of Spanish in the United States. The course aims to place the issues and controversies related to linguistic subordination and the maintenance of Spanish in the broader context of Latino communities and their social and historical position in the United States. In addition, it tries to equip students with critical resources to address topics such as the relationship between language and identity, political debates around Spanish and English, and bilingualism and the processes of racialization of linguistic minorities.
This course proposes a counter-narrative of the myths and fantasies that have been created about the Caribbean and of the historical and cultural realities surrounding them. Through a close reading of literary, artistic, critical, and historical texts we will examine race, ethnic, and gender identity constructions; the rise of the plantation economy; and the emergence of modern nations. The relationship between coloniality and the emergence of diasporic Caribbean voices of dissidence will be a guiding tone for our conversations throughout the semester as we unpack the links between colonialism and diaspora in the Caribbean.
Previous Semesters
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Spring 2023
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LAO 265 / COM 255 / LAS 265 / AAS 266
This course examines what it means to be Caribbean, or of Caribbean descent, in the diaspora- either the United States, England, and France due to their stake in colonizing the Caribbean in the quest for imperial power and modernity, and how Caribbean culture has been defined in historical and contemporary contexts through a survey of Caribbean diasporic literature. In this course students will learn how legacies of colonialism and modernity affect Caribbean populations and how they negotiate empire, identity, language, culture, and notions of home.
Instructors: Keishla Rivera-Lopez
LAO 347 / ENG 247
In this course students will be reading works from the Latinx literary canon as a survey of diverse Latinx voices. Through the course theme, students will examine how select Latinx authors write about community, identity, race, gender, resistance, and culture in a manner that captures The Latinx Experience. Selected texts will showcase how home is contested as their characters navigate their lives 'here' and 'there' via notions of diaspora, migration, and belonging, languages, and borders. This course analyzes Latinx literary works, including the course novels, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Sabrina & Corina, and The House on Mango Street.
Instructors: Keishla Rivera-Lopez
AAS 322 / LAS 301 / LAO 322 / AMS 323
This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. We will explore how Black activists have partnered to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings.
Instructors: Reena N. Goldthree
HIS 304 / LAS 304 / LAO 303
This course explores Latin America's history from independence to the present. We examine the contentious process of building national polities and economies in a world of expansionist foreign powers. The region's move towards greater legal equality in the 19th century coexisted with social hierarchies related to class, race, gender, and place of origin. We explore how this tension generated stronger, even revolutionary demands for change in the 20th century, while considering how growing U.S. power shaped possibilities for regional transformation. Primary sources foreground the perspectives of elites, subalterns, artists and intellectuals.
Instructors: Corinna Zeltsman
HIS 306 / LAO 306 / LAS 326
History 306 studies all Latinos in the US, from those who have (im)migrated from across Latin America to those who lived in what became US lands. The course covers the historical origins of debates over land ownership, the border, assimilation expectations, discrimination, immigration regulation, intergroup differences, civil rights activism, and labor disputes. History 306 looks transnationally at Latin America's history by exploring shifts in US public opinion and domestic policies. By the end of the course, students will have a greater understanding and appreciation of how Latinos became an identifiable group in the US.
Instructors: Rosina A. Lozano
LAS 308 / THR 370 / AMS 298 / LAO 308
This class will look at the works of Latin American and Latinx women playwrights who have created works that are either adaptations of mythical Greek heroines or reinterpretations of the historical Latin American and Caribbean record. These works challenge our visions of history: they use the power of the canon to make us think about the weight of tradition, and use that weight to shatter our preconceptions of gender, race, and identity. The course will include dialogues/workshops with contemporary artists and scholars, and will include performance, creative writing, and digital work as part of our class assignments and/or final project.
Instructors: Lilianne Lugo Herrera
LAS 313 / AAS 334 / ANT 313 / LAO 313
This course explores transnational and diasporic formations of race in the Americas. Drawing on Ethnic Studies, Latin American Studies, and anthropological and historical approaches, we explore racial formations in Latin America and its transnational communities. A central goal for this course is to understand race and racial formations as culturally contextualized and situated within the politics of difference. How are U.S. racial-ethnic categories embraced, contested, or reconfigured across the Americas, and vice versa? Topics include multiculturalism, mestizaje, border thinking, transnationalism, and racial democracy among others.
Instructors: Alberto E. Morales
SPA 222 / LAS 222 / LAO 222
An introduction to Latin American cultures and artistic and literary traditions through a wide spectrum of materials. We will discuss relevant issues in Latin American cultural, political, and social history, including the legacy of colonialism and indigenous resistance, the African diaspora, national fictions, popular and mass culture, gender and racial politics. Materials: essays by Ángel Rama, short stories by Julio Cortázar and Samanta Schweblin, poems by Nicolás Guillén and Cuban son music; paintings by Mexican muralists, films by Patricio Guzmán and Jayro Bustamante, writings by indigenous activist Ailton Krenak.
Instructors: Rachel L. Price
SPA 304 / LAO 304
This course examines the paradoxical position of Spanish in the United States. The course aims to place the issues and controversies related to linguistic subordination and the maintenance of Spanish in the broader context of Latino communities and their social and historical position in the United States. In addition, it tries to equip students with critical resources to address topics such as the relationship between language and identity, political debates around Spanish and English, and bilingualism and the processes of racialization of linguistic minorities.
Instructors: Alberto Bruzos Moro
SPA 372 / LAS 374 / LAO 372 / GSS 421
The figure of the drag king has been practically absent from Latinx American critical analysis. Taking what we call "spectacular masculinity" as our starting point, a hyperbolic masculinity that without warning usurps the space of privilege granted to the masculinity of men, this course revises the staging of spectacular masculinities as a possibility of generating a crisis in heterosexism. We will highlight notable antecedents of the contemporary DK show, and study the hegemonic masculinity and its exceptional models through a critical technology that turns up the volume on its dramatization and its prosthetic/cosmetic conditions.
Instructors: Javier E. Guerrero
URB 202 / JRN 202 / LAO 232
In this hands-on seminar in non-fiction film, we work at the intersection of investigation and portraiture to explore how Central American migration has shaped two small cities: Trenton NJ and Salcajá, Guatemala. Our tool of inquiry is documentary film, which brings students in direct contact with intimate stories of real lives. Readings, screenings, and discussions focus on the topics of migration, reverse migration, remittances, and immigration policy, as well as the ethics and craft of film. Students will collaborate--with each other, subjects, and filmmakers in Guatemala--to produce and edit stories told from both sides of the border.
Instructors: Purcell Carson
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Fall 2022
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Introduction to Latino/a/x Studies
LAO 201 / AMS 211 / LAS 201
This introductory course examines what it means to be Latino/a in the United States and how Latino/a culture has been defined in historical and contemporary contexts. In this course students will learn how legacies of colonialism and modernity affect Latino/as and how they negotiate empire, identity, language, culture, and notions of home. Students will learn how certain Latino/a cultures and communities were formed in the United States, as well as how gender, class, race, and sexuality inform these ideas of identity in a given space and place.
Instructors: Keishla Rivera-Lopez
Latinx Autobiography
LAO 218 / ENG 258 / AMS 218
This course begins from the disjoint and relation between the narrated autobiography and the lived life. In reading works by authors including Myriam Gurba, Wendy C. Ortiz, Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Rodriguez, and Junot Diaz, we will explore not only how writers experiment with the project of narrating a life that contends with the structures and strictures of racial matrices, gender binaries, and traumatic abuse - but also how writers test the boundaries of what autobiographies more generally are and are for.
Instructors: Monica Huerta
Borderlands, Border Lives
HIS 484 / LAS 484 / LAO 484 / AMS 484
The international border looms large over current national and international political debates. While this course will consider borders across the world, it will focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, and then on the Guatemala-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border. This course examines the history of the formation of the U.S. border from the colonial period to the present. Borders represent much more than just political boundaries between nation states. The borderlands represents the people who live between two cultures and two nations. This course will also study those individuals who have lived in areas surrounding borders or crossed them.
Instructors: Rosina A. Lozano
Central Americans and Asylum in the United States
LAS 362 / ANT 362 / LAO 362
This course offers an introduction to the theory, ethics, and history of the idea of international protection, while looking specifically at how Central Americans have engaged with the US asylum system over time. We will study the origins of the ideas of refugee protection, who is understood to qualify and why, how that has changed over time, and what this means for a broader understanding of human rights across borders. In collaboration with local asylum attorneys, students will get hands on experience conducting research and putting together reports to assist in real cases and, if conditions permit, we will attend immigration court.
Instructors: Amelia Frank-Vitale
Urban Sociology: The City and Social Change in the Americas
SOC 210 / LAS 210 / URB 210 / LAO 210
By taking a comparative approach, this course examines the role of social, economic, and political factors in the emergence and transformation of modern cities in the United States and selected areas of Latin America. We consider the city in its dual image: both as a center of progress and as a redoubt of social problems, especially poverty. Attention is given to spatial processes that have resulted in the aggregation and desegregation of populations differentiated by social class and race.
Instructors: Patricia Fernández-Kelly
Identity in the Spanish-Speaking World
SPA 250 / LAS 250 / HUM 251 / LAO 250
How are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Spain, Latin America, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the United States? Who is "Latin American," "Latinx," "Chino," "Moor," "Guatemalan," "Indian," etc.? Who constructs these terms and why? Who do they include/exclude? Why do we need these identity markers in the first place? Our course will engage these questions by surveying and analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions from the time of the foundation of the Spanish empire to the present time in the Spanish speaking world.
Instructors: Mariana Bono
Spanish in the Community
SPA 304 / LAO 304
This course examines the paradoxical position of Spanish in the United States. The course aims to place the issues and controversies related to linguistic subordination and the maintenance of Spanish in the broader context of Latino communities and their social and historical position in the United States. In addition, it tries to equip students with critical resources to address topics such as the relationship between language and identity, political debates around Spanish and English, and bilingualism and the processes of racialization of linguistic minorities.
Instructors: Alberto Bruzos Moro
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Spring 2022
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Latino/a/x Identity in Politics
LAO 305 / POL 429
In this seminar, you will read, discuss, and write about published and unpublished research from political science, psychology, and media studies to examine Latino/a/x identity in the U.S., and the ways in which electoral politics affects and is affected by this social identity. The class will situate Latino/a/x identity and its political targeting and mobilization in U.S. elections in comparison to that of other ethno-racial and religious identity groups. Similarities and differences between groups and their effects on politics will be considered to better understand the broader landscape of identity politics in U.S. elections and campaigns.
Instructors: Ali A. Valenzuela
Latino Urban History
HIS 465 / LAO 465 / AMS 465
Using cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Miami as case studies, this course seeks to understand the history of Latinos in urban places. Casting a geographically broad net and focusing largely on the 20th century, this course will comparatively analyze Latinos of different national origins (e.g. Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans). In addition, the course will look at a broad cross-section of the Latino community to get at changing understandings of gender, class, race, and immigration status. This course will include readings from traditional historical monographs and autobiographies.
Instructors: Rosina A. Lozano
Race Across the Americas
LAS 313 / ANT 313 / LAO 313 / AMS 305
This course explores transnational and diasporic formations of race in the Americas. Drawing on Ethnic Studies, Latin American Studies, and anthropological and historical approaches, we explore racial formations in Latin America and its transnational communities. A central goal for this course is to understand race and racial formations as culturally contextualized and situated within the politics of difference. How are U.S. racial-ethnic categories embraced, contested, or reconfigured across the Americas, and vice versa? Topics include multiculturalism, mestizaje, border thinking, transnationalism, and racial democracy among others.
Instructors: Alberto E. Morales
Introduction to Latin American Cultures
SPA 222 / LAS 222 / LAO 222
An introduction to Latin American cultures and artistic and literary traditions through a wide spectrum of materials. We will discuss relevant issues in Latin American cultural, political, and social history, including the legacy of colonialism and indigenous resistance, the African diaspora, national fictions, popular and mass culture, gender and racial politics. Materials: essays by Ángel Rama, short stories by Julio Cortázar and Samanta Schweblin, poems by Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and period Cuban son music; paintings by Mexican muralists, films by Patricio Guzmán and Jayro Bustamante, writings by indigenous activist Ailton Krenak.
Instructors: Rachel L. Price
Spanish in the Community
SPA 304 / LAO 304
This course examines the paradoxical position of Spanish in the United States. The course aims to place the issues and controversies related to linguistic subordination and the maintenance of Spanish and in the broader context of Latino communities and their social and historical position in the United States. In addition, it tries to equip students with critical resources to address topics such as the relationship between language and identity, political debates around Spanish and English, and bilingualism and the processes of racialization of linguistic minorities.
Instructors: Alberto Bruzos Moro
Autobiographical Storytelling
THR 340 / CWR 340 / GSS 446 / LAO 355
Every life delivers a story (or three) worth telling well. This workshop rehearses the writing and performance skills necessary to remake the raw material drawn from lived experience into compelling autobiographical storytelling. As we engage the thematic focus of "Princeton, History and Me," we will explore autobiographical storytelling as both a practice and a process as we also evince (and confront) the personal, moral, ethical and artistic dimensions of the stories we choose to tell about ourselves, about Princeton, and the stories that remain to be told about both.
Instructors: Brian E. Herrera
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Fall 2021
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Immigration Politics and Policymaking in the U.S.
Founded and built by immigrants, the U.S. has a complicated relationship with newcomers. How have politics shaped U.S. immigration policy and the policymaking process? Do members of Congress follow their constituents‘ preferences? How are immigration messages used by campaigns; with what effects? Why do changing demographics affect immigration policy views? Do immigrants integrate or conform to nativist fears? In thinking about immigrants, why do most Americans think about Latino immigrants and how does this affect U.S. Latinos? We will tackle these and other questions by examining published research and applying it to recent campaigns and debates.
Instructors: Ali Adam Valenzuela
Latinx Stories
We will read published literary short stories by contemporary Latinx writers and explore the vast range of Latinx experience in the United States as well as the vast range of fictional techniques employed by these writers. In discussing these published works, we will analyze how the formal elements of story — structure, plot, character, point of view, etc. — function in these pieces, so that students can apply these principles of craft to their own work. Students will write two complete short stories, which will be discussed in a traditional workshop format, and then submit a revision of one of those stories.
Instructors: Kirstin Valdez Quade
HIS 484 / LAS 484 / LAO 484 / AMS 484
Borderlands, Border Lives
The international border looms large over current national and international political debates. While this course will consider borders across the world, it will focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, and then on the Guatemala-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border. This course examines the history of the formation of the U.S. border from the colonial period to the present. Borders represent much more than just political boundaries between nation states. The borderlands represents the people who live between two cultures and two nations. This course will also study those individuals who have lived in areas surrounding borders or crossed them.
Instructors: Rosina Amelia Lozano
Spanish in the Community
This course explores the complexities of Spanish language and Latinx identity in the United States. Through a variety of readings, videos, and documents in Spanish and English, we will address a range of issues including the past and present of Spanish language in the U.S., the relationship between language and identity, and processes of racialization of language and linguistic minorities. The course also aims at situating the tensions and hopes around the maintenance of Spanish in immigrant communities in the broader context of struggles for social justice.
Instructors: Alberto Bruzos Moro
THR 332 / AAS 389 / GSS 342 / LAO 332
Movements for Diversity in American Theater
Theater artists routinely bend, twist and break all kinds of rules to create the imaginary worlds they bring to life on stage. Why, then, has the American theater so struggled to meaningfully address questions of equity, diversity and inclusion? In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical overview of agitation and advocacy by theater artist-activists aiming to transform American theatre-making as both industry and creative practice, as we connect those histories with the practices, structures and events determining the ways diversity is (and is not) a guiding principle of contemporary American theater.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
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Spring 2021
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Introduction to Latino/a/x Studies
This is an introductory survey of critical topics, themes, and approaches to the interdisciplinary field of Latin@x Studies. Drawing from anthropology, sociology, history, literature, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, this course will analyze the role and position of Latin@x in the United States alongside the policies and practices of the United States in the Caribbean and Latin America. The course will explore questions of citizenship, immigration, imperialism, settler/colonialism, border crossing/borderlands, mass incarceration, policing, globalization, and other emerging formations of latinidad from a transnational perspective.
Instructors: Heidy Sarabia
Latinx Autobiography
This course begins from the disjoint and relation between the narrated autobiography and the lived life. In reading works by authors including Myriam Gurba, Wendy C. Ortiz, Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Rodriguez, and Junot Diaz, we will explore not only how writers experiment with the project of narrating a life that contends with the structures and strictures of racial matrices, gender binaries, and traumatic abuse — but also how writers test the boundaries of what autobiographies more generally are and are for.
Instructors: Monica Huerta
Immigration Politics and Policymaking in the U.S.
Founded and built by immigrants, the United States has a complicated relationship with newcomers. How have politics shaped U.S. immigration policy and the policymaking process? Do members of Congress follow their constituents’ preferences? How are immigration messages used by campaigns; with what effects? Why do changing demographics affect immigration policy views? Do immigrants integrate or conform to nativist fears? In thinking about immigrants, why do most Americans think about Latino immigrants and how does this affect U.S. Latinos? We will tackle these and other questions by examining published research and applying it to recent campaigns and debates.
Instructors: Ali Adam Valenzuela
AAS 322 / LAS 301 / LAO 322 / AMS 323
Afro-Diasporic Dialogues: Black Activism in Latin America and the United States
This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. We will explore how Black activists and artists from the United States have partnered with people of color in Latin America and the Caribbean to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings.
Instructors: Reena N. Goldthree
ENG 318 / LAO 318 / LAS 306 / AMS 318
Topics in Latinx Literature and Culture: Latinx Literary Worlds
This course will look to the many narratives and histories that comprise the multiple worlds of Latinx literatures. How does the term Latinx respond to questions of gender and language? What does the history of naming this pan-ethnic group tell us about U.S. racial-ethnic categories? How do borders become an occasion to rethink space and psyche, as well as entangled crisis? Taking a hemispheric approach, this course will examine how Latinx texts lend imagination and poetic vision to the experience of migration, the movements of diaspora, and the lasting effects of colonization.
Instructors: Christina León
SOC 210 / LAS 210 / URB 210 / LAO 210
Urban Sociology: The City and Social Change in the Americas
By taking a comparative approach, this course examines the role of social, economic, and political factors in the emergence and transformation of modern cities in the United States and selected areas of Latin America. We consider the city in its dual image: both as a center of progress and as a redoubt of social problems, especially poverty. Attention is given to spatial processes that have resulted in the aggregation and desegregation of populations differentiated by social class and race.
Instructors: Patricia Fernández-Kelly
Introduction to Latin American Cultures
An introduction to Latin American cultures and artistic and literary traditions through a wide spectrum of materials and short texts. We will discuss relevant issues in Latin American cultural, political, and social history, including the legacy of colonialism and indigenous resistance, national fictions, popular and mass culture, and gender and racial politics. Among others, we will consider short stories by Julio Cortazar and Samanta Schweblin, poems by Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Gillén, paintings by Frida Kahlo, films by Ciro Guerra and Alfonso Cuarón, and Juan Rulfo’s short masterpiece Pedro Paramo.
Instructors: Gabriela Nouzeilles
THR 385 / AMS 385 / GSS 385 / LAO 385
Theater and Society Now
As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of “real” life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States — as both industry and creative practice — does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
Documentary Film and the City
How can character-driven documentary film effectively shed light on complex social issues? How do the methods we use to observe the world shape the stories we tell? In this seminar in non-fiction film, we focus together on the Latinx/migrant communities in Trenton, working at the intersection of journalism and portraiture. We will bend to match the conditions — and compelling stories — of pandemic, building skills in research, production, and editing to make finished documentaries. Class includes readings, screenings, and discussion. We pay close attention to strategies of working with film subjects and the ethics of those relationships.
Instructors: Purcell Cars
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Fall 2020
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Latinx Autobiography
This course begins from the disjoint and relation between the narrated autobiography and the lived life. In reading works by authors including Myriam Gurba, Wendy C. Ortiz, Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Rodriguez, and Junot Diaz, we will explore not only how writers experiment with the project of narrating a life that contends with the structures and strictures of racial matrices, gender binaries, and traumatic abuse — but also how writers test the boundaries of what autobiographies more generally are and are for.
Instructors: Monica Huerta
CWR 316 / AAS 336 / LAO 316 / ASA 316
Special Topics in Poetry: Race, Identity and Innovation
This workshop explores the link between racial identity and poetic innovation in work by contemporary poets of color. Experimental or avant-garde poetry in the American literary tradition has often defined itself as “impersonal,” “against expression” or “post-identity.” Unfortunately, this mindset has tended to exclude or downplay poems that engage issues of racial identity. This course explores works where poets of color have treated racial identity as a means to destabilize literary ideals of beauty, mastery and the autonomy of the text while at the same time engaging in poetic practices that subvert conceptions of identity or authenticity.
Instructors: Monica Youngna Youn
MTD 333 / GSS 228 / LAO 321 / THR 333
Latinx Musicals on Stage and Screen
This course offers an intensive survey of how Latina/o/x performers, characters, cultures, narratives and musical styles have always been a constitutive feature of the “American musical” — as performance genre, practice and tradition — on both stage and screen. The course’s study of notable Latinx musicals (in terms of form, content and context) will examine the history of U.S. popular performance alongside Latina/o/x cultural histories.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
Spanish in the Community
This course explores the complexities of Spanish language in the United States. Through a variety of readings, videos, and documents in Spanish and English, we will address a range of issues including the past and present of Spanish language in the United States, the relationship between language and identity, and the tensions and hopes around the maintenance of Spanish in immigrant communities.
Instructors: Alberto Bruzos Moro
THR 385 / AMS 385 / GSS 385 / LAO 385
Theater and Society Now
As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of “real” life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States — as both industry and creative practice — does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
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Spring 2020
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Introduction to Latino/a/x Studies
This is an introductory survey of critical topics, themes, and approaches to the interdisciplinary field of Latin@x Studies. Drawing from anthropology, sociology, history, literature, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, this course will analyze the role and position of Latin@x in the United States alongside the policies and practices of the United States in the Caribbean and Latin America. The course will explore questions of citizenship, immigration, imperialism, settler/colonialism, border crossing/borderlands, mass incarceration, policing, globalization, and other emerging formations of latinidad from a transnational perspective.
Instructors: Heidy Sarabia
Latinx Autobiography
This course begins from the disjoint and relation between the narrated autobiography and the lived life. In reading works by authors including Myriam Gurba, Wendy C. Ortiz, Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Rodriguez, and Junot Diaz, we will explore not only how writers experiment with the project of narrating a life that contends with the structures and strictures of racial matrices, gender binaries, and traumatic abuse — but also how writers test the boundaries of what autobiographies more generally are and are for.
Instructors: Monica Huerta
Immigration Politics and Policymaking in the U.S.
Founded and built by immigrants, the United States has a complicated relationship with newcomers. How have politics shaped U.S. immigration policy and the policymaking process? Do members of Congress follow their constituents’ preferences? How are immigration messages used by campaigns; with what effects? Why do changing demographics affect immigration policy views? Do immigrants integrate or conform to nativist fears? In thinking about immigrants, why do most Americans think about Latino immigrants and how does this affect U.S. Latinos? We will tackle these and other questions by examining published research and applying it to recent campaigns and debates.
Instructors: Ali Adam Valenzuela
AAS 322 / LAS 301 / LAO 322 / AMS 323
Afro-Diasporic Dialogues: Black Activism in Latin America and the United States
This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. We will explore how Black activists and artists from the United States have partnered with people of color in Latin America and the Caribbean to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings.
Instructors: Reena N. Goldthree
ENG 318 / LAO 318 / LAS 306 / AMS 318
Topics in Latinx Literature and Culture: Latinx Literary Worlds
This course will look to the many narratives and histories that comprise the multiple worlds of Latinx literatures. How does the term Latinx respond to questions of gender and language? What does the history of naming this pan-ethnic group tell us about U.S. racial-ethnic categories? How do borders become an occasion to rethink space and psyche, as well as entangled crisis? Taking a hemispheric approach, this course will examine how Latinx texts lend imagination and poetic vision to the experience of migration, the movements of diaspora, and the lasting effects of colonization.
Instructors: Christina León
SOC 210 / LAS 210 / URB 210 / LAO 210
Urban Sociology: The City and Social Change in the Americas
By taking a comparative approach, this course examines the role of social, economic, and political factors in the emergence and transformation of modern cities in the United States and selected areas of Latin America. We consider the city in its dual image: both as a center of progress and as a redoubt of social problems, especially poverty. Attention is given to spatial processes that have resulted in the aggregation and desegregation of populations differentiated by social class and race.
Instructors: Patricia Fernández-Kelly
Introduction to Latin American Cultures
An introduction to Latin American cultures and artistic and literary traditions through a wide spectrum of materials and short texts. We will discuss relevant issues in Latin American cultural, political, and social history, including the legacy of colonialism and indigenous resistance, national fictions, popular and mass culture, and gender and racial politics. Among others, we will consider short stories by Julio Cortazar and Samanta Schweblin, poems by Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Gillén, paintings by Frida Kahlo, films by Ciro Guerra and Alfonso Cuarón, and Juan Rulfo’s short masterpiece Pedro Paramo.
Instructors: Gabriela Nouzeilles
THR 385 / AMS 385 / GSS 385 / LAO 385
Theater and Society Now
As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of “real” life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States — as both industry and creative practice — does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
Documentary Film and the City
How can character-driven documentary film effectively shed light on complex social issues? How do the methods we use to observe the world shape the stories we tell? In this seminar in non-fiction film, we focus together on the Latinx/migrant communities in Trenton, working at the intersection of journalism and portraiture. We will bend to match the conditions — and compelling stories — of pandemic, building skills in research, production, and editing to make finished documentaries. Class includes readings, screenings, and discussion. We pay close attention to strategies of working with film subjects and the ethics of those relationships.
Instructors: Purcell Carson
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Fall 2019
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Identity in the Hispanic World
How are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Spain, Latin America, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the United States? Who is “Latin American,” “Latinx,” “Chino,” “Argentine,” “Guatemalan,” “Indian,” etc.? Who constructs these terms and why? Who do they include/exclude? Why do we need these identity markers in the first place? Our course will engage these questions by surveying and analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions from the time of the foundation of the Spanish empire to the present time in the Spanish speaking world.
Instructors: Christina H. Lee
Spanish in the Community
This course explores the complexities of Spanish language in the United States. Through a variety of readings, videos, and documents in Spanish and English, we will address a range of issues including the past and present of Spanish language in the United States, the relationship between language and identity, and the tensions and hopes around the maintenance of Spanish in immigrant communities.
Instructors: Alberto Bruzos Moro
SPA 366 / AMS 326 / LAO 366 / GSS 364
Witchcraft, Rituals and Colonialism
This course will explore witchcraft and rituality in the Americas through accusations and identity claims. We will look at how witchcraft has been used in colonial and imperial contexts to control, sanction, and extract power from women and marginalized groups in different periods, as well as how people make claims to witchcraft and rituals as a way to thwart domination. Topics include: shamanism in Latin America, the Mexican Inquisition, Afro-Latinx and Caribbean diasporic religious systems, and the contemporary social media ritual activism of “bruja feminisms.” Students will be introduced to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.
Instructors: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
THR 332 / AMS 346 / GSS 342 / LAO 332
Movements for Diversity in American Theater
Theater artists routinely bend, twist and break all kinds of rules to create the imaginary worlds they bring to life on stage. Why, then, has the American theater so struggled to meaningfully address questions of equity, diversity and inclusion? In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical overview of agitation and advocacy by theater artist-activists aiming to transform American theatre-making as both industry and creative practice, as we connect those histories with the practices, structures and events determining the ways diversity is (and is not) a guiding principle of contemporary American theater.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
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Spring 2019
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The Politics of Hip-Hop Dance
Hip-Hop is one of the most important cultural movements of the last half-century. But although hip-hop culture comprises a wide range of artistic practices — including music, dance, theater and graphic arts — its cultural politics are almost always analyzed through the lens of rap music. This seminar, by contrast, will explore the social and historical implications of hip-hop culture through its dance forms.
Instructors: Joseph Schloss
Latino History
Covering the history of Latinos in the United States, this course explains the historical origins of debates over land ownership, assimilation expectations, discrimination, immigration regulation, intergroup differences, civil rights, and labor disputes. It ends by explaining how Latinos became an identifiable group. History 306 looks transnationally at Latin America’s history to explore shifts in public opinion and domestic policies in the United States. This course talks about all Latinos who have (im)migrated from across Latin America, but focuses most heavily on Mexican Americans, and then on Puerto Ricans and Cubans.
Instructors: Rosina Amelia Lozano
Locked Up in the Americas: A History of Prisons and Detainment
This course explores the history of incarceration, detention centers, and internment camps in the Americas from the 1800s to the present. It addresses a range of issues, including political suppression, inmate labor, immigration, and the architectures of confinement, to show how penal colonies, convict transport, exile, and international policing have been evolving endeavors of state and social control since independence. We will look at a series of case studies, from detainment on the U.S.-Mexico border and a panopticon in Cuba to the famed escapes at Devil’s Island and the Chilean penal island that inspired the story of Robinson Crusoe.
Instructors: Ryan C. Edwards
Immigration Politics and Policymaking in the U.S.
Founded and built by immigrants, the United States has a complicated relationship with newcomers. How have politics shaped U.S. immigration policy and the policymaking process? How and why do changing demographics affect the public’s views about immigrants? What role do cultural concerns play? Do immigrants conform to nativist fears? How do members of Congress vote on immigration policy, and do they follow their constituents’ preferences? How is immigration used in elections; with what consequences? We will tackle these and other questions about immigration by examining published research and applying it to on-going policy debates.
Instructors: Ali Adam Valenzuela
Immigrant America
This course seeks to expose students to the recent social science literature on contemporary immigration to the United States, its origins, adaptation patterns, and long-term effects on American society. The course will consist of lectures by the instructor combined with class discussion of assigned texts.
Instructors: Tod G. Hamilton
Spanish in the Community
This course explores the complexities of Spanish language in the United States. Through a variety of readings, videos, and documents in Spanish and English, we will address a range of issues including the past and present of Spanish language in the United States, the relationship between language and identity, and the tensions and hopes around the maintenance of Spanish in immigrant communities.
Instructors: Alberto Bruzos Moro
Rapping in Spanish: Urban Poetry in Latino Global Cities
This course studies contemporary urban poetry composed in Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic in cities such as New York, Madrid, Los Angeles, Mexico D.F., Barcelona and Buenos Aires. It focuses on lyrical practices that combine sound and language in a wide range of literary expressions. Contemporary hip-hop poetry and rap lyrics are at the center of the course.
Instructors: Germán Labrador Méndez
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Fall 2018
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AAS 322 / LAS 301 / LAO 322 / AMS 323 / LAO 322 / AMS 323
Afro-Diasporic Dialogues: Black Activism in Latin America and the United States
This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. We will explore how Black activists and artists from the United States have partnered with people of color in Latin America and the Caribbean to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings.
Instructors: Reena N. Goldthree
AMS 404 / ASA 404 / LAO 404 / THR 404 / THR 404
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: Race and Ethnicity in 20th-Century Popular Performance
This course offers an intensive introduction to the particular tools, methods and interpretations employed in developing original historical research and writing about race and ethnicity in 20th-century popular performance (film, television, theater). Through collaborative, in-depth excavations of several genre-straddling cultural works, course participants will rehearse relevant methods and theories (of cultural history, of race and ethnicity, of popular culture/performance) and will undertake an independent research project elaborating the course’s guiding premise and principles of practice.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
Introduction to Latin American Cultures
This course offers an introduction to modern Latin American literature and culture. It focuses on the complex ways in which cultural and intellectual production anticipates, participates in, and responds to political, social, and economic transformations in the 20th and 21st centuries. Through a wide spectrum of sources (essays, fiction, poetry, film, and art), students will study and discuss some of the most relevant issues in Latin American modern history, such as modernity, democracy, identity, gender, memory, and social justice.
Instructors: Javier Enrique Guerrero
Spanish in the Community
This course explores the complexities of Spanish language in the United States. Through a variety of readings, videos, and documents in Spanish and English, we will address a range of issues including the past and present of Spanish language in the US, the relationship between language and identity, and the tensions and hopes around the maintenance of Spanish in immigrant communities.
Instructors: Alberto Bruzos Moro
SPA 366 / AMS 326 / GSS 364 / LAO 366
Witchcraft, Rituals and Colonialism
This course will explore witchcraft and rituality in the Americas through accusations and identity claims. We will look at how witchcraft has been used in colonial and imperial contexts to control, sanction, and extract power from women and marginalized groups in different periods, as well as how people make claims to witchcraft and rituals as a way to thwart domination. Topics include: shamanism in Latin America, the Mexican Inquisition, Afro-Latinx and Caribbean diasporic religious systems, and the contemporary social media ritual activism of “bruja feminisms.” Students will be introduced to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.
Instructors: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
THR 385 / AMS 350 / GSS 385 / LAO 385
Theater and Society Now
As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of “real” life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States — as both industry and creative practice — does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
Documentary Film and the City
Non-fiction film workshop through lens of Trenton’s Latinx population, particularly Central American immigrants. Through films, readings, guest lectures, and hands-on filmmaking, students will study history and strategies of migrant populations, culture of remittance between global north and south, and immigration policy. Student collaboration with community partners to research, produce and edit short films. Specific journalistic, ethical, and cinematic challenges of non-fiction filmmaking. Exploring documentary balances between sociological study, mimetic art form, and engaged voice in public media. Two public screenings of student films.
Instructors: Purcell Carson
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Fall 2023
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Introduction to Latino/a/x Studies
SUBJECT ASSOCIATIONS
LAO 201 / AMS 211 / LAS 201
This introductory course examines what it means to be Latino/a in the United States and how Latino/a culture has been defined in historical and contemporary contexts. In this course students will learn how legacies of colonialism and modernity affect Latino/as and how they negotiate empire, identity, language, culture, and notions of home. Students will learn how certain Latino/a cultures and communities were formed in the United States, as well as how gender, class, race, and sexuality inform these ideas of identity in a given space and place.
INSTRUCTORS
Keishla Rivera-Lopez
Afro-Diasporic Dialogues: Black Activism in Latin America and the United States
SUBJECT ASSOCIATIONS
AAS 322 / LAS 301 / LAO 322 / AMS 323
This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. We will explore how Black activists have partnered to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings.
INSTRUCTORS
Reena N. Goldthree
Law and Natural Resources in the Spanish Borderlands of North America
SUBJECT ASSOCIATIONS
LAS 363 / LAO 363 / AMS 356
This course examines the transnational intersection of law and natural resources in the Spanish Borderlands of North America. We will study how the Spanish empire (and later an independent Mexico and the emerging United States) defined natural resources as property rights and allocated such resources to Europeans and Indigenous peoples who lived in the arid landscapes of the far northern frontier (what became present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, & California). The course also explores the conflict that developed in the U.S. over natural resources after 1848 between the Hispanic civil law and Anglo-American common law.
INSTRUCTORS
Michael M. Brescia
Introduction to Latin American Cultures
SUBJECT ASSOCIATIONS
SPA 222 / LAS 222 / LAO 222
An introduction to modern Latin American cultures and artistic and literary traditions through a wide spectrum of materials. We will discuss relevant issues in Latin American cultural, political, and social history, including the legacies of colonialism, the African diaspora, national fictions, gender and racial politics. Materials include short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Samanta Schweblin; poems by Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and Mexican poet Sara Uribe; paintings by Mexican muralists; films by Santiago Mitre and Claudia Llosa; writings by Indigenous activist Ailton Krenak.
INSTRUCTORS
Gabriela Nouzeilles
Identity in the Spanish-Speaking World
SUBJECT ASSOCIATIONS
SPA 250 / LAS 250 / HUM 251 / LAO 250
How are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Spain, Latin America, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the United States? Who is “Latin American,” “Latinx,” “Boricua,” “Chino,” “Moor,” “Indian,” etc.? Who constructs these terms and why? Who do they include/exclude? Why do we need these identity markers in the first place? Our course will engage these questions by surveying and analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions from the time of the foundation of the Spanish empire to the present time in the Spanish-speaking world.
INSTRUCTORS
Mariana Bono
SUBJECT ASSOCIATIONS
SPA 304 / LAO 304
This course examines the paradoxical position of Spanish in the United States. The course aims to place the issues and controversies related to linguistic subordination and the maintenance of Spanish in the broader context of Latino communities and their social and historical position in the United States. In addition, it tries to equip students with critical resources to address topics such as the relationship between language and identity, political debates around Spanish and English, and bilingualism and the processes of racialization of linguistic minorities.
INSTRUCTORS
Alberto Bruzos Moro