Sidney Gonzalez, KSL.com (https://www.ksl.com/article/50550227/latino-hispanic-or-latinx-which-term-should-you-use-and-how-do-utahns-feel-about-them
This course will focus on heterogeneous communities living in what 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. We will also 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.
The concept of the Borderlands as a way to rethink the static understandings of the frontier and the border has become foundational in Latinx Studies. One question organizing our course is what constitutes the borderlands. One of our aims is to detach the concept of borderlands from its most common geopolitical referent, the US-Mexico zone, to investigate other nodes of encounter and struggle. Another aim is to expand the concept of borderlands beyond formal political arenas and territorial boundaries to examine the clash and mesh between different peoples’ mores, values, languages, and racial, gendered, and sexual formations, among others.
For this purpose, we begin our journey with a brief exploration of Indigenous communities in North America and their lives through the early moments of Spanish conquest and colonization. We will examine US imperial formations in the nineteenth century as the US forged expansive and tight webs of economic and political interests beyond its juridical borders. 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, have been 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 shift 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 the most well-known nodes of Latinx sociality in the United States, such as New York City, Miami, Chicago, El Paso, Los Angeles, and others that emerged 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 will be evaluated based on weekly reading reflection exercises, in-class work, short writing assignments, a midterm research exercise, and a final project.