LATINX: A HEMISPHERIC AMERICAS HISTORY
This course will focus on the multiple journeys of the heterogenous communities living in what it has become known today as the United States but whose ancestry and living experiences connect them to those Latin American countries previously under Portuguese and Spanish colonial control. We will primarily investigate the struggles, negotiations, and forms of resistance unleashed by colonial rule and continuing structures of coloniality that have led many to cross into, and sometimes out of, US political borders. Undoubtedly, we will consider how and why such borders have been drawn, shifted, made porous, and/or hardened at different historical moments. And, we will uncover how hierarchies of difference such as ethno-race, gender, sexuality, language, and religion have affected the experiences of displacement, migration, resettlement, community building, remittances, and return.
Our journey will begin in the nineteenth century, but we will spend most of our time in the twentieth century as we uncover how broader community designations such as Spanish, Hispanic, Latino/a, and Latinx have emerged, were deployed for different reasons, and what are their limits. We will probe the authoritarian regimes, civil wars, climate-related disasters, and economic shifts in the Americas that have prompted political boundaries to be drawn and shifted as well as pushed peoples to move. We will examine the various cycles of agricultural labor, manufacture, and service work that have made Latinx bodies, labor, and affect constitutive of life in this political jurisdiction we know today as the United States. The course also aims to explore different nodes of Latinx sociality in the United States, such as New York City, Miami, Chicago, El Paso, Los Angeles, and others that emerge at different times. Ultimately, this course argues that the factors prompting movement are not isolated events on one side or another of an always-shifting political border but that these are symbiotic, hemispheric and global dynamics occasioned by distinct modalities of colonialism, imperial formations, and capitalism.
Students' assessment is based on weekly reading reflections, short research and writing assignments, quizzes, and discussion boards.