Interdisciplinary introduction presenting the elements for studying Latin American politics and economics, culture, and society as well as the dynamics of Latino communities in the U.S. Special attention paid to issues of colonialism, human rights, U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, racism, capitalist globalization, migration, to emerging political and economic shifts in the Americas, and to new local and transnational efforts for social change on the part of Latin America's peoples and Latinos in the U.S.
General Education Code
ER
Introduces human rights as a way to study social justice. Students gain an understanding of interdisciplinary approaches to human rights as a theory, legally, and as a basis for global social movements.
General Education Code
PE-H
Introduces students to the interdisciplinary fields of Chicanx and Latinx studies through the frameworks of social justice and anti-racism. Examines the histories, current issues, and unique lived experiences in order to understand the intersectional complexities. Delves into questions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, citizenship, and belonging and illuminates the historical development by contextualizing major concepts, debates, and approaches while underscoring how these fields transform historical narratives of inequality, contextualize current realities, and can inform political change. Students engage in lively discussions to develop critical thinking skills, and to hone reading and writing skills.
General Education Code
ER
Provides statistical methodological training and skills through the examination of social and cultural manifestations of truth as a tool to serve social justice efforts for Latinx and other minoritized students in the education setting.
General Education Code
SR
Offers a domestic (U.S.) and transnational approach to Latino politics, focusing on the five largest Latino groups: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans. Issues addressed include Latino electoral participation, Latino public opinion, migrant political incorporation, and transnationalism among others.
General Education Code
ER
Examines contemporary social movements in Latin America, especially those that arose from popular response to different forms of social exclusion and to authoritarian political systems. Explores a variety of popular movements, their successes and setbacks, including rural and urban uprisings, native nations and their descendants, women, labor, human rights, and transnational movements.
General Education Code
CC
Examines gender and feminist theories emerging from Latinx communities in the U.S. and Latin America. Provides a transnational and transborder overview of how Latinx feminisms have contributed to movements at large such as: national liberation, reproductive justice, migrant justice, indigenous movements, and the anti-violence movement. Course emphasizes a connection and relationality to how feminist movements in Latin America are informed by U.S.-Latin American politics and how feminist resistance and mobilization transcends and circulates across borders.
General Education Code
ER
Explores theories and practices of citizenship with a focus on how institutions, such as the immigration apparatus, school, and prison, produce and shape inclusion, marginalization, exclusion, and mobility and how social actors envision and enact home and belonging.
General Education Code
PR-E
Introduces students to the topic of Central American migration through a critical and interdisciplinary lens. Explores the forces that contextualized migration to, through, and from this region during different historical moments. Students learn about key aspects of Central American history that have and continue to drive migration from the isthmus, with special attention to U.S.-bound migration from the 1970s onward. Students also learn about some of the challenges Central American migrants continue to face in their places of birth, while in transit, and once they arrive at their destinations.
General Education Code
CC
Introduces critical themes on queer Indigenous issues, guided by queer Indigenous history and cultural manifestations of queerness in Indigenous communities in the Americas. Drawing from colonial accounts, course focuses on exploring historical themes related to queer Indigenous relationship with their bodies and sexualities, queer Indigenous people navigating violence within colonial institutions, and the mechanisms to assimilate Indigenous gender and sexualities into the gender binary and heteronormativity. Second half of the course analyzes mechanisms of resistance to colonial violence, and the ways Indigenous communities and other communities of color understand queerness in the contemporary era in the Americas. Students develop critical thinking skills to analyze colonization and the imposition of heteronormativity on Indigenous genders and sexualities.
General Education Code
CC
Explores the historical, social, economic, and political dynamics of inequality, stratification, and segmentation that shape the occupational pathways and workplace conditions of Latinos in the United States. Students learn about the structures, policies, and ideologies that influence Latinos' working lives as well as how individuals experience their work in a variety of sectors.
General Education Code
ER
Introduces theories of race, class, and gender which shape understandings about racial/ethnic issues in the United States. With particular attention to the experiences of U.S. racial/ethnic groups, including Latinas/os, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, this course draws from interdisciplinary research to address how race, class, and gender are also crosscutting dynamics.
General Education Code
ER
Explores key aspects of transnational feminist organizing in the Americas, including transnational feminist theories and feminist activism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Discusses how women from throughout the Americas region organize politically and socially across gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality.
General Education Code
CC
Examines histories and contemporary manifestations of systemic racism, colonialism, and carcerality in the development and practice of science and medicine in the Western world, with an emphasis on how this has impacted Latinx and Latin American communities. Course draws on texts from a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including history of science and medicine, medical anthropology, ethnic studies, and science and technology studies. Students explore the impact of racialized bias and a lack of diversity in science and ways in which to address these deficiencies. Students also learn about efforts to integrate social justice, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and abolitionist principles and practices into the fields of science and medicine.
General Education Code
SI
Compares the response to AIDS in the United States and Latin America, with special attention to
migration, human rights, activism, stigma, gender, and sexuality. Students develop a conceptual
foundation to conduct a people-centered approach and cultural analysis of AIDS.
General Education Code
CC
Over the 20th century, Latin American countries experimented with the challenge of ensuring the right to health. Many of their approaches were inspired by Latin American Social Medicine, a social scientific field whose contributions remain, to this day, under-recognized in traditional public health. This course introduces the field of Latin American Social Medicine and its struggles to affirm health as a fundamental human right. Through a range of case studies, students examine how unequal social contexts and power relations shape collective health, the politics of care, and everyday experiences of illness and well-being.
General Education Code
CC
Course moved beyond behaviorist and neurobiological examinations of drug use, addiction, and recovery to explore the social, cultural, political, and embodied contours and contexts of these phenomena among Latinx and Latin American communities. The history and consequences of punitive approaches to drug use, drug markets, addiction, and recovery in both the U.S. and Latin America and their impacts on Latinx communities are explored. Alternative approaches to punitive drug policies such as harm reduction also discussed.
General Education Code
PE-H
Introduces research on childhood in contemporary Latin America. Explores discourses about Latin American children, the regional institutions shaping children's lives, and how children experience and negotiate these larger social forces.
General Education Code
CC
This interdisciplinary course focuses on the resilience of Chicanx students by emphasizing barriers like segregation and the resistance put forward by students, families, and communities in the courts and the streets. Students are introduced to the tactics and past actions of Chicanx to confront racism and discrimination in California public schools. Also focuses on the contemporary discourse around segregation and its impact on Latinx and Chicanx educational outcomes.
Instructor
Jennifer Figueroa
General Education Code
ER
Examines the religious beliefs and practices surrounding the revolutionary movements for social change in Latin America with a particular focus on liberation theology.
General Education Code
CC
Explores the works of Diego Rivera, other Mexican muralists, and the Latin American cultural movements that developed to address relevant social and political issues.
General Education Code
IM
Exploration of the medium of dance through key themes in Latin American and Latino studies. Focusing on dancing bodies as bearers of socio-cultural knowledge, this class engages with and challenges notions of what dance is. Course content is divided into weekly modules that move thematically through topics including cultural encounter, colonial systems of oppression, and anti-colonial theorization of dance. Presenting critical perspectives on the role dance has played throughout the colonial period to the present, this course encourages different ways of considering the Americas as a sociological concept not bound by geography, but mobilized through dancing bodies. (Formerly offered as Anti-Colonial Dancing of the Americas.)
General Education Code
IM
Exploration of key themes in Latin American history through the medium of hip hop. Students analyze prevalent historical patterns that speak to shared experiences across the Americas. Course content is divided into weekly modules that move thematically through topics including struggles for social and political citizenship, structural mechanisms of exclusion, and anti-imperialist activisms. Also includes reading primary historical documents and engaging in textual analysis of both archival and contemporary texts. Readings equip students to critically interpret elements of hip-hop culture from contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean including MCing, graffiti, and hip hop as the production of knowledge.
General Education Code
TA
Taught in Spanish. Exploration of key themes in Latin American history through the medium of hip hop. Students analyze prevalent historical patterns that speak to shared experiences across the Americas. Course content is divided into weekly modules that move thematically through topics including struggles for social and political citizenship, structural mechanisms of exclusion, and anti-imperialist activisms. Also includes reading primary historical documents and engaging in textual analysis of both archival and contemporary texts. Readings equip students to critically interpret elements of hip-hop culture from contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean including MCing, graffiti, and hip hop as the production of knowledge.
General Education Code
TA
Reviews broad trends in contemporary Mexican politics against the backdrop of long-term historical, social, and economic change throughout the 20th century, analyzing how power is both wielded from above and created from below. The course covers national politics, grassroots movements for social change and democratization, environmental challenges, indigenous movements, the media, and the politics of immigration and North American integration.
Cross Listed Courses
OAKS 80D
General Education Code
CC
Analyzes the Latino experience in the U.S. with a special focus on strategies for economic and social empowerment. Stresses the multiplicity of the U.S. Latino community, drawing comparative lessons from Cuban-American, Puerto Rican, Chicano/Mexicano, and Central American patterns of economic participation and political mobilization.
General Education Code
ER
Designed to survey recent works in the field of Latina and Latino histories, with particular emphasis on historiographical approaches and topics in the field. Readings are chosen to expose a selection of the varied histories and cultures of Latina/os in the U.S., and focus primarily on Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans.
General Education Code
CC
Evaluates the relationship between processes of racial formation, war, and nationalism in Latin America. Case studies range from the wars of independence to more recent forms of transnational violence. Students engage historical and anthropological perspectives and critiques of modernity.
General Education Code
ER
Examines the implications of environmental degradation and resource extraction for economic growth and social inequality in Latin America. Course focuses on the connections between race, ethnicity, power, poverty, and environmental problems.
General Education Code
PE-E
Introduction to issues and themes surrounding sexualities and genders within Latin American and Latina/o studies. Provides background in the basic theoretical and historical frameworks of gender and its relationship to sexuality. In addition to cross-border perspectives, course also examines how gender and sexuality are structured and experienced through other social categories.
General Education Code
CC
Examines contemporary societies and peoples of Central America considering how, in recent decades, media, history, war, cultural production, and migration have shaped Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica both as individual nations and as a region.
General Education Code
CC
Introduces issues affecting contemporary Brazilian society and culture, such as the legacy of slavery and persisting social, racial, and gender inequities. Analyses of how different representations of Brazil sustain distinctive national projects, which, in turn, attribute specific meanings to blackness, whiteness, masculinity, femininity, and upper- and lower-class identities.
General Education Code
ER
With a focus on the Americas, this course introduces students into the debates about the causes and solutions to the twinned crisis of global climate change and rising inequality.
General Education Code
PE-E
Seminar for undergraduates participating in the Cultivamos Excelencia program supporting the development of students as researchers and active participants in academic communities; including lectures on disciplinary methods by participating faculty, work-in-progress sessions for mentors and student researchers, and workshops on formulating research questions, developing a research plan, writing a research paper, and professional development. Enrollment is by instructor permission.
Cross-listed Courses
Is there a general school of philosophy endemic to Latin America? Would it have to appeal to quintessential Western philosophical questions regarding knowledge, values, and reality? If not, why not, and would it then still count as philosophy? What difference do ethnic and national diversity, as well as strong political and social inequality, make to the development of philosophical questions and frameworks? Course explores a variety of historically situated Latin American thinkers who investigate ethnic identity, gender, and socio-political inequality and liberation, and historical memory, and who have also made important contributions to mainstream analytical and continental philosophy.
Cross Listed Courses
LALS 80E
Introduces the comparative method in social science. Trains students in the use of this method by examining how scholars have used it to compare across national governments, subnational units, public policies, organizations, social movements, and transnational collective action.
Cross Listed Courses
LALS 243
Covers the rise of Teatro Chicano as a cultural-political force within the 1960's Chicano Power Movement starting with founding playwriter Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino and covering Chicana/o playwrights inspired by the movement, e.g. Cherrie Moraga, Luis Alfaro, and Josefina Lopez.
Cross Listed Courses
LALS 161P
General Education Code
ER
Course uses theory and practice to explore Theater of the Oppressed (T.O.), a humanist theatrical form with its roots in social justice that breaks the boundary between audience and stage. Through audience participation as "spect-actors" everyone is invited to move from passive to active to imagine and embody social change. Led by jokers, who "difficultate" rather than "facilitate," T.O. has been used by groups around the world to explore, understand, and fight back against a wide range of oppressions. Students practice the games, techniques, methodology, and practical application of this activist theater form, explore the oxymoron of a T.O. class at UCSC, and discover what is possible when we become active creators of knowledge through theater. (Formerly Theater of American Cultures.)
Cross Listed Courses
LALS 161R