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Introduction
Introduction
BackLatinx and Latin American Studies
Professors del Moral, R. López (Chair), Schmalzbauer*, and Schroeder Rodríguez; Associate Professor Lohse; Assistant Professors Barba, and Coranez Bolton*.
Affiliated Faculty: Professors Cobham-Sander‡, Corrales*, and Stavans; Associate Professors Arboleda, and Walker*; Assistant Professors Infante, Ravikumar*, Sanchez-Naranjo, and Vicario.
Latinx and Latin American Studies (LLAS) is an interdisciplinary major program designed for students interested in critically examining the diverse histories and cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinxs. Students in the major gain breadth and depth of learning through courses in the humanities and the social sciences that situate these histories and cultures within local, national, regional, hemispheric, and global contexts over time, while practical experiences such as community projects and study abroad provide opportunities to apply this learning in transformative ways.
Major Program. Majoring in LLAS requires the completion of nine courses: seven courses as described below, plus two additional courses to be chosen in consultation with the student’s advisor.
- one required course: LLAS 200: Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies.
- one course on U.S. Latinxs in any department.
- one course on Latin America in any department.
- one course on the Caribbean in any department.
- two courses taught in one of the languages spoken in Latin America and the Caribbean, other than English. These courses may focus on the development of language skills, and/or they may be content courses on a subject relevant to the Major.
- a research or methods seminar in any department, with completion of the written project on a topic relevant to LLAS. In order to ensure that the research will be on a topic relevant to LLAS, the research or methods seminar must be approved by both the Major advisor and the professor teaching the course.
LLAS majors may credit up to three courses from another major, provided they fall into one of the categories listed above. In addition, majors must have
- a concentration with at least three courses in one of the following areas: U.S. Latinxs, Latin America, or the Caribbean.
- at least two courses in the humanities and at least two in the social sciences.
- coursework in at least three departments.
- residency requirement: at least five of the nine courses must be taken at Amherst College.
- Capstone Requirement: The capstone requirement will be met through a portfolio of work done in the Major, introduced by a reflective essay that addresses how the interdisciplinary nature of the coursework informs a question or topic of special interest to the student and his/her long-term plans. Students will publicly share these reflections during a LLAS Major Capstone Symposium.
Departmental Honors Program. Candidates for Latin Honors must complete a senior thesis. The work of the thesis may be creative or scholarly in nature. Interested candidates must apply and be accepted by the end of their third year, and must, in addition to the coursework described above, enroll in LLAS 498 and/or 499 during their senior year.
144 Contemporary Dance Technique: Salsa Performance and Culture
(Offered as THDA 144H and LLAS 144H) This class introduces students to beginner-level salsa technique. We will explore the New York Mambo style of salsa, the Caracas street style, as well as elements of the Cuban Casino style. Students will master variations of the salsa basic step, turns, connecting steps, and arm work. Although we will mostly focus on solo practice, we will learn some essential concepts of partnering work based on the principles of leading and following. Toward the end of the semester, students will be able to use the acquired salsa vocabulary as the basis for improvising and choreographing combinations.
Through the study of salsa’s history, political dimensions, lyrical content, and matrilineal legacy, students will develop an understanding of this artistic expression not only as a dance form or musical genre, but also as a unifying voice of resistance and liberation for Caribbean and Latino cultures. Students will be able to recognize the voices of some of the most iconic Salsa artists and appreciate the contributions of some of the most important female Cuban and Cuban-American performers. We will investigate the legacy of Celia Cruz, paying close attention to the design and performance elements that defined her as The Queen of Salsa. Class discussions and brief writing assignments will serve as opportunities to reflect upon readings, documentaries and other information that will expand our understanding of the form.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2021-22.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
200, 206 Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies
(Offered as LLAS 200 and AMST 206) In this course students will become familiar with the major debates that have animated Latinx and Latin American Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the Conquest to the present. Each week students will focus on specific questions such as: Does Latin America have a common culture? Is Latin America part of the Western world? Is Latinx a race or an ethnicity? Is U.S. Latinx identity rooted in Latin America or the United States? Are Latin American nations post-colonial? Was the modern concept of race invented in the Caribbean at the time of the Conquest? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course.
Limited to 15 students. Spring Semester. Professor Coranez Bolton .
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
204 Housing, Urbanization, and Development
(Offered as ARCH 204, ARHA 204, and LLAS 204) This course studies the theory, policy, and practice of low-income housing in marginalized communities worldwide. We study central concepts in housing theory, key issues regarding low-income housing, different approaches to address these issues, and political debates around housing the poor. We use a comparative focus, going back and forth between the cases of the United States and the so-called developing world. By doing this, we engage in a “theory from without” exercise: We attempt to understand the housing problem in the United States from the perspective of the developing world, and vice versa. We study our subject through illustrated lectures, seminar discussions, documentary films, visual analysis exercises, and a field trip.
Limited to 20 students. Spring Semester. Professor Arboleda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2022
205 Finding Your Bilingual Voice
(Offered as SPAN 205 and LLAS 205) Heritage learners of Spanish are students who have grown up speaking, listening, reading and/or writing Spanish with family or in their community. Because of their unique backgrounds, Spanish heritage language learners (SHLLs) are bilingual and bicultural. They function between a Hispanic and an American identity. This fluid and multiple identity can bring challenges, as SHLLs try to fit into both groups. With this in mind, through meaningful activities that focus on students’ experiences and emotions, this Spanish language course will center on bilingualism, specifically through writing, as a necessary means for identity formation. Because in narrating our stories with others, we enact our identities, this course will include an event open to the community that showcases our voices and talents.
Through this course, students will incorporate their personal experience as SHLLs into their coursework. Activities will foster critical thinking, and students will learn to analyze, read, discuss, write, and reflect on issues of language, culture, and identity. Using a student-centered approach, the course will include collaborative brainstorming, free-writing, developing topics of personal importance, and peer and group editing in order to develop students’ writing proficiency and to build community.
This course prepares Spanish heritage language students for advanced-level courses offered by the Spanish Department. Limited to 15 students per section. This course may be counted toward the Spanish Major. The class will be conducted entirely in Spanish, though some assignments can be submitted in English.
Prerequisite: SPAN201, SPAN202 or placement exam.
Consent Required (students must identify as Spanish heritage language students). Spring Semester. Professor Granda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2024
216 Frida and Diego
(Offered as HIST 216 [LA/TC/TE/TR/TS], LLAS 216 [LA, Humanities] and ARHA 216) This course examines the art, lives, and times of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, two of Mexico’s most famous artists. Through discussion, lectures, readings, and visual analysis we will consider the historical and artistic roots of their radical aesthetics as well as the ideals and struggles that shaped their lives. During their era, Kahlo was overshadowed by her husband Rivera, but in recent decades her fame has eclipsed his. To make sense of this we will address the changing meaning of their art over time, especially in relation to markets, social movements, and gender and sexual identities. By the end of the semester, students will have a strong understanding of these two artists and their work, as well as the contexts in which they lived and in which their art continues to circulate, including early twentieth-century Modernism, the Mexican Revolution, indigenismo, the Chicano Movement, and recent efforts toward ethnic and gender inclusion. No prerequisites, open to all years and majors.
Fall semester. Professor Lopez.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2022
225 Latin American Literature in Translation
A joyful introduction to modern Latin American literary classics in translation through the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolano, Clarise Lispector, and others. The discussion-driven classes will focus on aesthetic movements like Magical Realism as well as on the development of national identity, mestizaje, civil unrest, racial and gender relations, humor, translation, and the opposition between Europeanized and indigenous worldviews. Students will delve into canonical poems, stories, essays, and short novels from the seventeenth century to the present that have reshaped the international scene. Language: English.
Limited to 40 students. January term. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in January 2022, Spring 2022
248 Cuba: The Politics of Extremism
(Offered as POSC 248 and LLAS 248) The study of Cuba’s politics presents opportunities to address issues of universal concern to social scientists and humanists in general, not just Latin Americanists. When is it rational to be radical? Why has Cuban politics forced so many individuals to adopt extreme positions? What are the causes of radical revolutions? Is pre-revolutionary Cuba a case of too little development, uneven development or too rapid development? What is the role of leaders: Do they make history, are they the product of history, or are they the makers of unintended histories? Was the revolution inevitable? Was it necessary? How are new (radical) states constructed? What is the role of foreign actors, existing political institutions, ethnicity, nationalism, religion and sexuality in this process? How does a small nation manage to become influential in world affairs, even altering the behavior of superpowers? What are the conditions that account for the survival of authoritarianism? To what extent is the revolution capable of self-reform? Is the current intention of state leaders of pursuing closed politics with open economics viable? What are the most effective mechanisms to change the regime? Why does the embargo survive? Why did Cubans (at home and abroad) care about Elián González? Although the readings will be mostly from social scientists, the course also includes selections from primary sources, literary works and films (of Cuban and non-Cuban origin). As with almost everything in politics, there are more than just two sides to the issue of Cuba. One aim of the course is to expose the students to as many different sides as possible.
Limited to 30 students. Spring semester. Professor Corrales.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2015
260 Art in and out of Latin America
(Offered as ARHA 260 and LLAS 260). This course explores the movement of art both in and out of Latin America in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This includes the forging of a mural movement in Mexico, the cosmopolitan travels of artists to Europe, the export of art to the United States, and the transnational circulation of art and ideas across national contexts within Latin America. In the process, we will explore the sometimes conflicting and sometimes hybrid desires to create local aesthetics in particular places (sometimes drawing on the pre-Columbian past and Indigenous present) and to participate in international, sometimes transcontinental artistic movements and debates. We will also consider the category “Latin American art” as it developed over the course of the twentieth century and how it has both intersected with and stood apart from developments in art elsewhere. A core concern of the class will be the examination of how culture develops in relation to both political and economic shifts in the region and in the world beyond, including in relation to imperialism, the spread of capitalism, the Cold War, Communism, modernization, dictatorship, and globalization.
Limited to 25 people. Spring semester - Assistant Professor Niko Vicario.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023264, 266 Migration Across the Americas
(Offered as AMST 264, LLAS 266, and SOCI 264) This course introduces students to sociological analyses of undocumented migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the United States. An exploration of undocumented immigration demands that we engage with oft-unexamined social and economic contradictions. Namely, whereas capital and culture move freely across most international borders, many people cannot. Walls - physical, legal, and social - aim to keep certain people in and “others” out. Yet, people do cross international borders and many do so without the legal authorization to make their moves formal and secure. In this course we explore the sociological forces behind these insecure migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the US, and the reality of undocumented immigrant life in the United States. While this course has a deep theoretical rooting, we use daily life as the lens through which to explore immigration and enforcement policies, and our individual and collective relationships to them.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Schmalzbauer
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
274, 275 Gender and Slavery in Latin America
(Offered as BLST 275 [CLA], SWAG 274, HIST 275 [LA/TS/TR/ P ] and LLAS 275) Latin American slavery was one of the most brutal institutions the world has ever known, and it affected women and girls, boys and men in profoundly different ways. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of how gender and sexuality affected the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants in Latin America from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Topics will include gender roles in Western Africa and how these diverged from the expectations of Spanish and Portuguese slave masters; the sexual and reproductive as well as labor exploitation of enslaved African women and girls; how enslaved men constructed masculinity within the emasculating institution of slavery; gender relations and family structures within slave communities; childhoods under slavery; and the sometimes distinct visions of freedom imagined by enslaved women and men. Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Regions to be covered include Brazil, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, and the Andean region. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2022
277 Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Offered as BLST 277 [CLA], LLAS 277 and HIST 277 [LA/TS/TR]) The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 with a slave revolt on a single plantation and, after more than a decade of total war, destroyed slavery forever and resulted in the independence of the world's first Black republic. By the end of 1804, the white planter class had been killed or exiled and Black men ruled the island. Before it happened, white slave masters could never imagine that tens of thousands of enslaved Africans would one day break their chains and succeed in defeating French, British, and Spanish armies. For millions of enslaved people, the Haitian Revolution proved that the dream of freedom could become reality and inspired slave conspiracies and rebellions from Virginia to Brazil. At the same time, Haiti struck fear in white slave masters throughout the Americas, who did their best to strangle the new Black Republic in its cradle. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of the origins and development of the Haitian Revolution and its impact in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
278 Black History of Brazil, 1500-1888
(Offered as BLST 278 [CLA], LLAS 278 and HIST 278 [LA/TS/TR/ P ]) More people of African descent live in Brazil than in any country in the world, except Nigeria. Of the more than 12 million Africans deported as captives to the Americas, Brazil received 24 percent. In contrast, North America received less than 4 percent. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth knowledge of the experiences of Africans and their descendants, slave and free, from the time the first captives were brought to Brazil at the beginning of the sixteenth century until final abolition in 1888. Topics will include the ways in which specific regions of Western Africa contributed captives to specific regions of Brazil, the nature of Portuguese colonial institutions and their impact on the lives of Africans and their descendants, resistance and rebellion, routes to freedom, slave and free Black families, and the origins and development of vibrant Afro-Brazilian religions and cultures . Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Spring semester, Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023301 Literature and Culture of the Hispanic World
(Offered as SPAN 301 and LLAS 301) This course provides an introduction to the diverse literatures and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world over the course of six centuries, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Students will learn the tools, language, and critical vocabulary for advanced work reading the canon of Hispanic literatures from Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean Basin, identifying aesthetic trends, historical periods and diverse genres such as poetry, narrative, theater and film. The syllabus will include a wide variety of authors of different national, political, and artistic persuasions and an array of linguistic styles. This course prepares students for advanced work in Spanish and for study abroad.
Requisite SPAN 202 or Spanish Placement Exam. Proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Spanish are required. Limited to 20 students per section. Fall semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton. Spring semester: Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024
308 Contemporary Latinx Literature
(Offered as ENGL 308 and LLAS 308) In this course, we will read and discuss recent works of Latinx literature across genres – novel, poetry, memoir, essay, and YA – in engagement with the live debates surrounding language, race, migration, and global capitalism that shape our definitions of Latinx identity and culture (and of literature itself). We will also experiment with different ways of responding to these literary texts in written forms ranging from creative writing to book review to research prospectus. Possible authors may include: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Dolores Dorantes, Angie Cruz, Valeria Luiselli, Raquel Salas Rivera, Natalie Diaz, Elizabeth Acevedo, and more.
Fall semester. Limited to 20 students. Professor Mireles Christoff.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Fall 2022, Fall 2023
321 Architecture and Violence in the Americas
(Offered as SPAN-321, LLAS-321 and ARCH-321) This course explores historical connections between violence and the built environment in the Americas, from architecture to wastelands, from monuments to mass graves. The class has a twofold objective. On the one hand, we will analyze critical issues concerning the production of the built environment, such as the intersection of race and space or the relationship between state architecture and historical oblivion. On the other hand, we will explore architectures and art projects that actively unsettle colonial legacies and seek to heal historical violence. We will study cases from Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, México and the US, among others. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisites: Spanish 301 or permission of the instructor. Spring Semester. Visiting Professor Ferrari.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023330, 332, 338 Latin American Cinema
(Offered as SPAN 330, SWAG 332, LLAS 330 and FAMS 338) How have Latin Americans represented themselves on the big screen? In this course we will explore this question through close readings of representative films from each of the following major periods: silent cinema (1890s–1930s), studio cinema (1930s–1950s), Neorealism/Art Cinema (1950s), the New Latin American Cinema (1960s–1980s), and contemporary cinema (1990s to today). Throughout the course we will examine evolving representations of modernity and pay special attention to how these representations are linked to different constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. We will conclude the course with a collective screening of video essays created by students in the course. The course is conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 301 or consent of instructor. Spring Semester. Professor Schroeder Rodríguez.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019
342, 343 Comparative Borderlands: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Transnational Perspective
(Offered as SPAN 342, LLAS 343 and SWAG 343) “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out,” Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in the hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera. She was referring to, what she called, the linguistic imperialism of English in the US Southwest. And yet she also carved out a third space for those subjects at the crossroads of multiple ways of being – the queer and the abject. In this course, we will examine cultural and literary texts that speak to the ways that race, gender, and sexual identity are conditioned by the historical development of geopolitical borders. We will pay particular attention to the US-Mexico Borderlands but we will also examine other places in which “borderlands” of identity exist. Course conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Fall Semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Fall 2022
349 Latinx and Puerto Rican Diasporic Cultures in Holyoke
(Offered as SPAN This course will focus on Holyoke, MA as a case study of Latinx Studies and Puerto Rican Studies. Much of our work in the course will focus on Puerto Rico, but we will also familiarize ourselves with foundational work in the general field of Latinx Studies, taking care to place different migrant communities, cultures, and histories in conversation with one another. Students will also engage in collaborative learning projects with partners in the city of Holyoke and neighboring towns with substantial Latinx populations. The course will include students from Amherst College and Holyoke Community College. Class will be conducted in Spanish, but English may be used depending on work with community partners.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Fall Semester: Professor Schroeder Rodríguez
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Spring 2024
355 One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is the best novel ever written in Spanish in the Americas. Appearing inauspiciously in 1967, it became the flagship of the so-called "El Boom," an aesthetic movement that inscribed Latin America in the banquet of world literature. It also inaugurated the style called "lo real maravillioso," loosely translated into English as Magical Realism. The narrative tells the rise and fall of Macondo, a mythical town in Colombia's Caribbean coast. At its center is the Buendias, a family of dreamers and entrepreneurs through whom the history of the entire region is told. It is fair to say that after One Hundred Years of Solitude, which brought Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize, global literature has never been the same. Its influence on figures as diverse as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orham Pamuk, and Mo Yan is enormous and continues to reverberate. The course is structured as a Talmudic (e.g., detailed, contextual, ahistorical) reading of the novel. Other works by the author and his contemporaries will also be discussed. After decades in Spanish, this is the first time the course will be taught in English, meaning that students will engage with the material in Gregory Rabassa's masterful translation. However, native Spanish speakers who choose so will be allowed to immerse themselves in the original and write in Spanish.
Limited to 25 students. Spring Semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2024
485 Telenovelas
(Offered as SPAN 485 and LLAS 485) Arguably the most influential popular form of cultural expression in Latin America, a single episode of any prime-time telenovela is watched by more people than all the accumulated number of Spanish-language readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude over time. The course will explore the historical origin and development of telenovelas as well as various production techniques, the way scripts are shaped and actors are asked to perform, the role of music and other sounds, etc. Each country in the region has its own telenovela tradition. We will look at Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Spanish-language productions of Univisión and Telemundo in the United States, among others. But the main objective of the course will be to analyze the performative nature of emotions in telenovelas and also gender, class, and political tension on the small screen. And we will delve into the strategies various governments have used by means of telenovelas to control the population (“melodrama is the true opium of the masses,” said a prominent Mexican telenovela director), their use as educational devices, and the clash between telenovelas and fútbol in the region’s celebrity ecosystem. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to18 students. Spring Semester: Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020
490 Special Topics
Independent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
498, 499 Senior Honors
Fall semester. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
Related Courses
About Amherst College
About Amherst College
BackLatinx and Latin American Studies
Professors del Moral, R. López (Chair), Schmalzbauer*, and Schroeder Rodríguez; Associate Professor Lohse; Assistant Professors Barba, and Coranez Bolton*.
Affiliated Faculty: Professors Cobham-Sander‡, Corrales*, and Stavans; Associate Professors Arboleda, and Walker*; Assistant Professors Infante, Ravikumar*, Sanchez-Naranjo, and Vicario.
Latinx and Latin American Studies (LLAS) is an interdisciplinary major program designed for students interested in critically examining the diverse histories and cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinxs. Students in the major gain breadth and depth of learning through courses in the humanities and the social sciences that situate these histories and cultures within local, national, regional, hemispheric, and global contexts over time, while practical experiences such as community projects and study abroad provide opportunities to apply this learning in transformative ways.
Major Program. Majoring in LLAS requires the completion of nine courses: seven courses as described below, plus two additional courses to be chosen in consultation with the student’s advisor.
- one required course: LLAS 200: Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies.
- one course on U.S. Latinxs in any department.
- one course on Latin America in any department.
- one course on the Caribbean in any department.
- two courses taught in one of the languages spoken in Latin America and the Caribbean, other than English. These courses may focus on the development of language skills, and/or they may be content courses on a subject relevant to the Major.
- a research or methods seminar in any department, with completion of the written project on a topic relevant to LLAS. In order to ensure that the research will be on a topic relevant to LLAS, the research or methods seminar must be approved by both the Major advisor and the professor teaching the course.
LLAS majors may credit up to three courses from another major, provided they fall into one of the categories listed above. In addition, majors must have
- a concentration with at least three courses in one of the following areas: U.S. Latinxs, Latin America, or the Caribbean.
- at least two courses in the humanities and at least two in the social sciences.
- coursework in at least three departments.
- residency requirement: at least five of the nine courses must be taken at Amherst College.
- Capstone Requirement: The capstone requirement will be met through a portfolio of work done in the Major, introduced by a reflective essay that addresses how the interdisciplinary nature of the coursework informs a question or topic of special interest to the student and his/her long-term plans. Students will publicly share these reflections during a LLAS Major Capstone Symposium.
Departmental Honors Program. Candidates for Latin Honors must complete a senior thesis. The work of the thesis may be creative or scholarly in nature. Interested candidates must apply and be accepted by the end of their third year, and must, in addition to the coursework described above, enroll in LLAS 498 and/or 499 during their senior year.
144 Contemporary Dance Technique: Salsa Performance and Culture
(Offered as THDA 144H and LLAS 144H) This class introduces students to beginner-level salsa technique. We will explore the New York Mambo style of salsa, the Caracas street style, as well as elements of the Cuban Casino style. Students will master variations of the salsa basic step, turns, connecting steps, and arm work. Although we will mostly focus on solo practice, we will learn some essential concepts of partnering work based on the principles of leading and following. Toward the end of the semester, students will be able to use the acquired salsa vocabulary as the basis for improvising and choreographing combinations.
Through the study of salsa’s history, political dimensions, lyrical content, and matrilineal legacy, students will develop an understanding of this artistic expression not only as a dance form or musical genre, but also as a unifying voice of resistance and liberation for Caribbean and Latino cultures. Students will be able to recognize the voices of some of the most iconic Salsa artists and appreciate the contributions of some of the most important female Cuban and Cuban-American performers. We will investigate the legacy of Celia Cruz, paying close attention to the design and performance elements that defined her as The Queen of Salsa. Class discussions and brief writing assignments will serve as opportunities to reflect upon readings, documentaries and other information that will expand our understanding of the form.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2021-22.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
200, 206 Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies
(Offered as LLAS 200 and AMST 206) In this course students will become familiar with the major debates that have animated Latinx and Latin American Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the Conquest to the present. Each week students will focus on specific questions such as: Does Latin America have a common culture? Is Latin America part of the Western world? Is Latinx a race or an ethnicity? Is U.S. Latinx identity rooted in Latin America or the United States? Are Latin American nations post-colonial? Was the modern concept of race invented in the Caribbean at the time of the Conquest? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course.
Limited to 15 students. Spring Semester. Professor Coranez Bolton .
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
204 Housing, Urbanization, and Development
(Offered as ARCH 204, ARHA 204, and LLAS 204) This course studies the theory, policy, and practice of low-income housing in marginalized communities worldwide. We study central concepts in housing theory, key issues regarding low-income housing, different approaches to address these issues, and political debates around housing the poor. We use a comparative focus, going back and forth between the cases of the United States and the so-called developing world. By doing this, we engage in a “theory from without” exercise: We attempt to understand the housing problem in the United States from the perspective of the developing world, and vice versa. We study our subject through illustrated lectures, seminar discussions, documentary films, visual analysis exercises, and a field trip.
Limited to 20 students. Spring Semester. Professor Arboleda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2022
205 Finding Your Bilingual Voice
(Offered as SPAN 205 and LLAS 205) Heritage learners of Spanish are students who have grown up speaking, listening, reading and/or writing Spanish with family or in their community. Because of their unique backgrounds, Spanish heritage language learners (SHLLs) are bilingual and bicultural. They function between a Hispanic and an American identity. This fluid and multiple identity can bring challenges, as SHLLs try to fit into both groups. With this in mind, through meaningful activities that focus on students’ experiences and emotions, this Spanish language course will center on bilingualism, specifically through writing, as a necessary means for identity formation. Because in narrating our stories with others, we enact our identities, this course will include an event open to the community that showcases our voices and talents.
Through this course, students will incorporate their personal experience as SHLLs into their coursework. Activities will foster critical thinking, and students will learn to analyze, read, discuss, write, and reflect on issues of language, culture, and identity. Using a student-centered approach, the course will include collaborative brainstorming, free-writing, developing topics of personal importance, and peer and group editing in order to develop students’ writing proficiency and to build community.
This course prepares Spanish heritage language students for advanced-level courses offered by the Spanish Department. Limited to 15 students per section. This course may be counted toward the Spanish Major. The class will be conducted entirely in Spanish, though some assignments can be submitted in English.
Prerequisite: SPAN201, SPAN202 or placement exam.
Consent Required (students must identify as Spanish heritage language students). Spring Semester. Professor Granda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2024
216 Frida and Diego
(Offered as HIST 216 [LA/TC/TE/TR/TS], LLAS 216 [LA, Humanities] and ARHA 216) This course examines the art, lives, and times of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, two of Mexico’s most famous artists. Through discussion, lectures, readings, and visual analysis we will consider the historical and artistic roots of their radical aesthetics as well as the ideals and struggles that shaped their lives. During their era, Kahlo was overshadowed by her husband Rivera, but in recent decades her fame has eclipsed his. To make sense of this we will address the changing meaning of their art over time, especially in relation to markets, social movements, and gender and sexual identities. By the end of the semester, students will have a strong understanding of these two artists and their work, as well as the contexts in which they lived and in which their art continues to circulate, including early twentieth-century Modernism, the Mexican Revolution, indigenismo, the Chicano Movement, and recent efforts toward ethnic and gender inclusion. No prerequisites, open to all years and majors.
Fall semester. Professor Lopez.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2022
225 Latin American Literature in Translation
A joyful introduction to modern Latin American literary classics in translation through the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolano, Clarise Lispector, and others. The discussion-driven classes will focus on aesthetic movements like Magical Realism as well as on the development of national identity, mestizaje, civil unrest, racial and gender relations, humor, translation, and the opposition between Europeanized and indigenous worldviews. Students will delve into canonical poems, stories, essays, and short novels from the seventeenth century to the present that have reshaped the international scene. Language: English.
Limited to 40 students. January term. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in January 2022, Spring 2022
248 Cuba: The Politics of Extremism
(Offered as POSC 248 and LLAS 248) The study of Cuba’s politics presents opportunities to address issues of universal concern to social scientists and humanists in general, not just Latin Americanists. When is it rational to be radical? Why has Cuban politics forced so many individuals to adopt extreme positions? What are the causes of radical revolutions? Is pre-revolutionary Cuba a case of too little development, uneven development or too rapid development? What is the role of leaders: Do they make history, are they the product of history, or are they the makers of unintended histories? Was the revolution inevitable? Was it necessary? How are new (radical) states constructed? What is the role of foreign actors, existing political institutions, ethnicity, nationalism, religion and sexuality in this process? How does a small nation manage to become influential in world affairs, even altering the behavior of superpowers? What are the conditions that account for the survival of authoritarianism? To what extent is the revolution capable of self-reform? Is the current intention of state leaders of pursuing closed politics with open economics viable? What are the most effective mechanisms to change the regime? Why does the embargo survive? Why did Cubans (at home and abroad) care about Elián González? Although the readings will be mostly from social scientists, the course also includes selections from primary sources, literary works and films (of Cuban and non-Cuban origin). As with almost everything in politics, there are more than just two sides to the issue of Cuba. One aim of the course is to expose the students to as many different sides as possible.
Limited to 30 students. Spring semester. Professor Corrales.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2015
260 Art in and out of Latin America
(Offered as ARHA 260 and LLAS 260). This course explores the movement of art both in and out of Latin America in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This includes the forging of a mural movement in Mexico, the cosmopolitan travels of artists to Europe, the export of art to the United States, and the transnational circulation of art and ideas across national contexts within Latin America. In the process, we will explore the sometimes conflicting and sometimes hybrid desires to create local aesthetics in particular places (sometimes drawing on the pre-Columbian past and Indigenous present) and to participate in international, sometimes transcontinental artistic movements and debates. We will also consider the category “Latin American art” as it developed over the course of the twentieth century and how it has both intersected with and stood apart from developments in art elsewhere. A core concern of the class will be the examination of how culture develops in relation to both political and economic shifts in the region and in the world beyond, including in relation to imperialism, the spread of capitalism, the Cold War, Communism, modernization, dictatorship, and globalization.
Limited to 25 people. Spring semester - Assistant Professor Niko Vicario.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023264, 266 Migration Across the Americas
(Offered as AMST 264, LLAS 266, and SOCI 264) This course introduces students to sociological analyses of undocumented migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the United States. An exploration of undocumented immigration demands that we engage with oft-unexamined social and economic contradictions. Namely, whereas capital and culture move freely across most international borders, many people cannot. Walls - physical, legal, and social - aim to keep certain people in and “others” out. Yet, people do cross international borders and many do so without the legal authorization to make their moves formal and secure. In this course we explore the sociological forces behind these insecure migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the US, and the reality of undocumented immigrant life in the United States. While this course has a deep theoretical rooting, we use daily life as the lens through which to explore immigration and enforcement policies, and our individual and collective relationships to them.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Schmalzbauer
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
274, 275 Gender and Slavery in Latin America
(Offered as BLST 275 [CLA], SWAG 274, HIST 275 [LA/TS/TR/ P ] and LLAS 275) Latin American slavery was one of the most brutal institutions the world has ever known, and it affected women and girls, boys and men in profoundly different ways. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of how gender and sexuality affected the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants in Latin America from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Topics will include gender roles in Western Africa and how these diverged from the expectations of Spanish and Portuguese slave masters; the sexual and reproductive as well as labor exploitation of enslaved African women and girls; how enslaved men constructed masculinity within the emasculating institution of slavery; gender relations and family structures within slave communities; childhoods under slavery; and the sometimes distinct visions of freedom imagined by enslaved women and men. Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Regions to be covered include Brazil, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, and the Andean region. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2022
277 Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Offered as BLST 277 [CLA], LLAS 277 and HIST 277 [LA/TS/TR]) The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 with a slave revolt on a single plantation and, after more than a decade of total war, destroyed slavery forever and resulted in the independence of the world's first Black republic. By the end of 1804, the white planter class had been killed or exiled and Black men ruled the island. Before it happened, white slave masters could never imagine that tens of thousands of enslaved Africans would one day break their chains and succeed in defeating French, British, and Spanish armies. For millions of enslaved people, the Haitian Revolution proved that the dream of freedom could become reality and inspired slave conspiracies and rebellions from Virginia to Brazil. At the same time, Haiti struck fear in white slave masters throughout the Americas, who did their best to strangle the new Black Republic in its cradle. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of the origins and development of the Haitian Revolution and its impact in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
278 Black History of Brazil, 1500-1888
(Offered as BLST 278 [CLA], LLAS 278 and HIST 278 [LA/TS/TR/ P ]) More people of African descent live in Brazil than in any country in the world, except Nigeria. Of the more than 12 million Africans deported as captives to the Americas, Brazil received 24 percent. In contrast, North America received less than 4 percent. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth knowledge of the experiences of Africans and their descendants, slave and free, from the time the first captives were brought to Brazil at the beginning of the sixteenth century until final abolition in 1888. Topics will include the ways in which specific regions of Western Africa contributed captives to specific regions of Brazil, the nature of Portuguese colonial institutions and their impact on the lives of Africans and their descendants, resistance and rebellion, routes to freedom, slave and free Black families, and the origins and development of vibrant Afro-Brazilian religions and cultures . Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Spring semester, Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023301 Literature and Culture of the Hispanic World
(Offered as SPAN 301 and LLAS 301) This course provides an introduction to the diverse literatures and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world over the course of six centuries, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Students will learn the tools, language, and critical vocabulary for advanced work reading the canon of Hispanic literatures from Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean Basin, identifying aesthetic trends, historical periods and diverse genres such as poetry, narrative, theater and film. The syllabus will include a wide variety of authors of different national, political, and artistic persuasions and an array of linguistic styles. This course prepares students for advanced work in Spanish and for study abroad.
Requisite SPAN 202 or Spanish Placement Exam. Proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Spanish are required. Limited to 20 students per section. Fall semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton. Spring semester: Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024
308 Contemporary Latinx Literature
(Offered as ENGL 308 and LLAS 308) In this course, we will read and discuss recent works of Latinx literature across genres – novel, poetry, memoir, essay, and YA – in engagement with the live debates surrounding language, race, migration, and global capitalism that shape our definitions of Latinx identity and culture (and of literature itself). We will also experiment with different ways of responding to these literary texts in written forms ranging from creative writing to book review to research prospectus. Possible authors may include: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Dolores Dorantes, Angie Cruz, Valeria Luiselli, Raquel Salas Rivera, Natalie Diaz, Elizabeth Acevedo, and more.
Fall semester. Limited to 20 students. Professor Mireles Christoff.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Fall 2022, Fall 2023
321 Architecture and Violence in the Americas
(Offered as SPAN-321, LLAS-321 and ARCH-321) This course explores historical connections between violence and the built environment in the Americas, from architecture to wastelands, from monuments to mass graves. The class has a twofold objective. On the one hand, we will analyze critical issues concerning the production of the built environment, such as the intersection of race and space or the relationship between state architecture and historical oblivion. On the other hand, we will explore architectures and art projects that actively unsettle colonial legacies and seek to heal historical violence. We will study cases from Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, México and the US, among others. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisites: Spanish 301 or permission of the instructor. Spring Semester. Visiting Professor Ferrari.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023330, 332, 338 Latin American Cinema
(Offered as SPAN 330, SWAG 332, LLAS 330 and FAMS 338) How have Latin Americans represented themselves on the big screen? In this course we will explore this question through close readings of representative films from each of the following major periods: silent cinema (1890s–1930s), studio cinema (1930s–1950s), Neorealism/Art Cinema (1950s), the New Latin American Cinema (1960s–1980s), and contemporary cinema (1990s to today). Throughout the course we will examine evolving representations of modernity and pay special attention to how these representations are linked to different constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. We will conclude the course with a collective screening of video essays created by students in the course. The course is conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 301 or consent of instructor. Spring Semester. Professor Schroeder Rodríguez.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019
342, 343 Comparative Borderlands: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Transnational Perspective
(Offered as SPAN 342, LLAS 343 and SWAG 343) “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out,” Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in the hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera. She was referring to, what she called, the linguistic imperialism of English in the US Southwest. And yet she also carved out a third space for those subjects at the crossroads of multiple ways of being – the queer and the abject. In this course, we will examine cultural and literary texts that speak to the ways that race, gender, and sexual identity are conditioned by the historical development of geopolitical borders. We will pay particular attention to the US-Mexico Borderlands but we will also examine other places in which “borderlands” of identity exist. Course conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Fall Semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Fall 2022
349 Latinx and Puerto Rican Diasporic Cultures in Holyoke
(Offered as SPAN This course will focus on Holyoke, MA as a case study of Latinx Studies and Puerto Rican Studies. Much of our work in the course will focus on Puerto Rico, but we will also familiarize ourselves with foundational work in the general field of Latinx Studies, taking care to place different migrant communities, cultures, and histories in conversation with one another. Students will also engage in collaborative learning projects with partners in the city of Holyoke and neighboring towns with substantial Latinx populations. The course will include students from Amherst College and Holyoke Community College. Class will be conducted in Spanish, but English may be used depending on work with community partners.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Fall Semester: Professor Schroeder Rodríguez
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Spring 2024
355 One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is the best novel ever written in Spanish in the Americas. Appearing inauspiciously in 1967, it became the flagship of the so-called "El Boom," an aesthetic movement that inscribed Latin America in the banquet of world literature. It also inaugurated the style called "lo real maravillioso," loosely translated into English as Magical Realism. The narrative tells the rise and fall of Macondo, a mythical town in Colombia's Caribbean coast. At its center is the Buendias, a family of dreamers and entrepreneurs through whom the history of the entire region is told. It is fair to say that after One Hundred Years of Solitude, which brought Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize, global literature has never been the same. Its influence on figures as diverse as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orham Pamuk, and Mo Yan is enormous and continues to reverberate. The course is structured as a Talmudic (e.g., detailed, contextual, ahistorical) reading of the novel. Other works by the author and his contemporaries will also be discussed. After decades in Spanish, this is the first time the course will be taught in English, meaning that students will engage with the material in Gregory Rabassa's masterful translation. However, native Spanish speakers who choose so will be allowed to immerse themselves in the original and write in Spanish.
Limited to 25 students. Spring Semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2024
485 Telenovelas
(Offered as SPAN 485 and LLAS 485) Arguably the most influential popular form of cultural expression in Latin America, a single episode of any prime-time telenovela is watched by more people than all the accumulated number of Spanish-language readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude over time. The course will explore the historical origin and development of telenovelas as well as various production techniques, the way scripts are shaped and actors are asked to perform, the role of music and other sounds, etc. Each country in the region has its own telenovela tradition. We will look at Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Spanish-language productions of Univisión and Telemundo in the United States, among others. But the main objective of the course will be to analyze the performative nature of emotions in telenovelas and also gender, class, and political tension on the small screen. And we will delve into the strategies various governments have used by means of telenovelas to control the population (“melodrama is the true opium of the masses,” said a prominent Mexican telenovela director), their use as educational devices, and the clash between telenovelas and fútbol in the region’s celebrity ecosystem. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to18 students. Spring Semester: Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020
490 Special Topics
Independent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
498, 499 Senior Honors
Fall semester. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
Related Courses
Admission & Financial Aid
Admission & Financial Aid
BackLatinx and Latin American Studies
Professors del Moral, R. López (Chair), Schmalzbauer*, and Schroeder Rodríguez; Associate Professor Lohse; Assistant Professors Barba, and Coranez Bolton*.
Affiliated Faculty: Professors Cobham-Sander‡, Corrales*, and Stavans; Associate Professors Arboleda, and Walker*; Assistant Professors Infante, Ravikumar*, Sanchez-Naranjo, and Vicario.
Latinx and Latin American Studies (LLAS) is an interdisciplinary major program designed for students interested in critically examining the diverse histories and cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinxs. Students in the major gain breadth and depth of learning through courses in the humanities and the social sciences that situate these histories and cultures within local, national, regional, hemispheric, and global contexts over time, while practical experiences such as community projects and study abroad provide opportunities to apply this learning in transformative ways.
Major Program. Majoring in LLAS requires the completion of nine courses: seven courses as described below, plus two additional courses to be chosen in consultation with the student’s advisor.
- one required course: LLAS 200: Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies.
- one course on U.S. Latinxs in any department.
- one course on Latin America in any department.
- one course on the Caribbean in any department.
- two courses taught in one of the languages spoken in Latin America and the Caribbean, other than English. These courses may focus on the development of language skills, and/or they may be content courses on a subject relevant to the Major.
- a research or methods seminar in any department, with completion of the written project on a topic relevant to LLAS. In order to ensure that the research will be on a topic relevant to LLAS, the research or methods seminar must be approved by both the Major advisor and the professor teaching the course.
LLAS majors may credit up to three courses from another major, provided they fall into one of the categories listed above. In addition, majors must have
- a concentration with at least three courses in one of the following areas: U.S. Latinxs, Latin America, or the Caribbean.
- at least two courses in the humanities and at least two in the social sciences.
- coursework in at least three departments.
- residency requirement: at least five of the nine courses must be taken at Amherst College.
- Capstone Requirement: The capstone requirement will be met through a portfolio of work done in the Major, introduced by a reflective essay that addresses how the interdisciplinary nature of the coursework informs a question or topic of special interest to the student and his/her long-term plans. Students will publicly share these reflections during a LLAS Major Capstone Symposium.
Departmental Honors Program. Candidates for Latin Honors must complete a senior thesis. The work of the thesis may be creative or scholarly in nature. Interested candidates must apply and be accepted by the end of their third year, and must, in addition to the coursework described above, enroll in LLAS 498 and/or 499 during their senior year.
144 Contemporary Dance Technique: Salsa Performance and Culture
(Offered as THDA 144H and LLAS 144H) This class introduces students to beginner-level salsa technique. We will explore the New York Mambo style of salsa, the Caracas street style, as well as elements of the Cuban Casino style. Students will master variations of the salsa basic step, turns, connecting steps, and arm work. Although we will mostly focus on solo practice, we will learn some essential concepts of partnering work based on the principles of leading and following. Toward the end of the semester, students will be able to use the acquired salsa vocabulary as the basis for improvising and choreographing combinations.
Through the study of salsa’s history, political dimensions, lyrical content, and matrilineal legacy, students will develop an understanding of this artistic expression not only as a dance form or musical genre, but also as a unifying voice of resistance and liberation for Caribbean and Latino cultures. Students will be able to recognize the voices of some of the most iconic Salsa artists and appreciate the contributions of some of the most important female Cuban and Cuban-American performers. We will investigate the legacy of Celia Cruz, paying close attention to the design and performance elements that defined her as The Queen of Salsa. Class discussions and brief writing assignments will serve as opportunities to reflect upon readings, documentaries and other information that will expand our understanding of the form.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2021-22.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
200, 206 Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies
(Offered as LLAS 200 and AMST 206) In this course students will become familiar with the major debates that have animated Latinx and Latin American Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the Conquest to the present. Each week students will focus on specific questions such as: Does Latin America have a common culture? Is Latin America part of the Western world? Is Latinx a race or an ethnicity? Is U.S. Latinx identity rooted in Latin America or the United States? Are Latin American nations post-colonial? Was the modern concept of race invented in the Caribbean at the time of the Conquest? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course.
Limited to 15 students. Spring Semester. Professor Coranez Bolton .
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
204 Housing, Urbanization, and Development
(Offered as ARCH 204, ARHA 204, and LLAS 204) This course studies the theory, policy, and practice of low-income housing in marginalized communities worldwide. We study central concepts in housing theory, key issues regarding low-income housing, different approaches to address these issues, and political debates around housing the poor. We use a comparative focus, going back and forth between the cases of the United States and the so-called developing world. By doing this, we engage in a “theory from without” exercise: We attempt to understand the housing problem in the United States from the perspective of the developing world, and vice versa. We study our subject through illustrated lectures, seminar discussions, documentary films, visual analysis exercises, and a field trip.
Limited to 20 students. Spring Semester. Professor Arboleda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2022
205 Finding Your Bilingual Voice
(Offered as SPAN 205 and LLAS 205) Heritage learners of Spanish are students who have grown up speaking, listening, reading and/or writing Spanish with family or in their community. Because of their unique backgrounds, Spanish heritage language learners (SHLLs) are bilingual and bicultural. They function between a Hispanic and an American identity. This fluid and multiple identity can bring challenges, as SHLLs try to fit into both groups. With this in mind, through meaningful activities that focus on students’ experiences and emotions, this Spanish language course will center on bilingualism, specifically through writing, as a necessary means for identity formation. Because in narrating our stories with others, we enact our identities, this course will include an event open to the community that showcases our voices and talents.
Through this course, students will incorporate their personal experience as SHLLs into their coursework. Activities will foster critical thinking, and students will learn to analyze, read, discuss, write, and reflect on issues of language, culture, and identity. Using a student-centered approach, the course will include collaborative brainstorming, free-writing, developing topics of personal importance, and peer and group editing in order to develop students’ writing proficiency and to build community.
This course prepares Spanish heritage language students for advanced-level courses offered by the Spanish Department. Limited to 15 students per section. This course may be counted toward the Spanish Major. The class will be conducted entirely in Spanish, though some assignments can be submitted in English.
Prerequisite: SPAN201, SPAN202 or placement exam.
Consent Required (students must identify as Spanish heritage language students). Spring Semester. Professor Granda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2024
216 Frida and Diego
(Offered as HIST 216 [LA/TC/TE/TR/TS], LLAS 216 [LA, Humanities] and ARHA 216) This course examines the art, lives, and times of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, two of Mexico’s most famous artists. Through discussion, lectures, readings, and visual analysis we will consider the historical and artistic roots of their radical aesthetics as well as the ideals and struggles that shaped their lives. During their era, Kahlo was overshadowed by her husband Rivera, but in recent decades her fame has eclipsed his. To make sense of this we will address the changing meaning of their art over time, especially in relation to markets, social movements, and gender and sexual identities. By the end of the semester, students will have a strong understanding of these two artists and their work, as well as the contexts in which they lived and in which their art continues to circulate, including early twentieth-century Modernism, the Mexican Revolution, indigenismo, the Chicano Movement, and recent efforts toward ethnic and gender inclusion. No prerequisites, open to all years and majors.
Fall semester. Professor Lopez.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2022
225 Latin American Literature in Translation
A joyful introduction to modern Latin American literary classics in translation through the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolano, Clarise Lispector, and others. The discussion-driven classes will focus on aesthetic movements like Magical Realism as well as on the development of national identity, mestizaje, civil unrest, racial and gender relations, humor, translation, and the opposition between Europeanized and indigenous worldviews. Students will delve into canonical poems, stories, essays, and short novels from the seventeenth century to the present that have reshaped the international scene. Language: English.
Limited to 40 students. January term. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in January 2022, Spring 2022
248 Cuba: The Politics of Extremism
(Offered as POSC 248 and LLAS 248) The study of Cuba’s politics presents opportunities to address issues of universal concern to social scientists and humanists in general, not just Latin Americanists. When is it rational to be radical? Why has Cuban politics forced so many individuals to adopt extreme positions? What are the causes of radical revolutions? Is pre-revolutionary Cuba a case of too little development, uneven development or too rapid development? What is the role of leaders: Do they make history, are they the product of history, or are they the makers of unintended histories? Was the revolution inevitable? Was it necessary? How are new (radical) states constructed? What is the role of foreign actors, existing political institutions, ethnicity, nationalism, religion and sexuality in this process? How does a small nation manage to become influential in world affairs, even altering the behavior of superpowers? What are the conditions that account for the survival of authoritarianism? To what extent is the revolution capable of self-reform? Is the current intention of state leaders of pursuing closed politics with open economics viable? What are the most effective mechanisms to change the regime? Why does the embargo survive? Why did Cubans (at home and abroad) care about Elián González? Although the readings will be mostly from social scientists, the course also includes selections from primary sources, literary works and films (of Cuban and non-Cuban origin). As with almost everything in politics, there are more than just two sides to the issue of Cuba. One aim of the course is to expose the students to as many different sides as possible.
Limited to 30 students. Spring semester. Professor Corrales.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2015
260 Art in and out of Latin America
(Offered as ARHA 260 and LLAS 260). This course explores the movement of art both in and out of Latin America in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This includes the forging of a mural movement in Mexico, the cosmopolitan travels of artists to Europe, the export of art to the United States, and the transnational circulation of art and ideas across national contexts within Latin America. In the process, we will explore the sometimes conflicting and sometimes hybrid desires to create local aesthetics in particular places (sometimes drawing on the pre-Columbian past and Indigenous present) and to participate in international, sometimes transcontinental artistic movements and debates. We will also consider the category “Latin American art” as it developed over the course of the twentieth century and how it has both intersected with and stood apart from developments in art elsewhere. A core concern of the class will be the examination of how culture develops in relation to both political and economic shifts in the region and in the world beyond, including in relation to imperialism, the spread of capitalism, the Cold War, Communism, modernization, dictatorship, and globalization.
Limited to 25 people. Spring semester - Assistant Professor Niko Vicario.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023264, 266 Migration Across the Americas
(Offered as AMST 264, LLAS 266, and SOCI 264) This course introduces students to sociological analyses of undocumented migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the United States. An exploration of undocumented immigration demands that we engage with oft-unexamined social and economic contradictions. Namely, whereas capital and culture move freely across most international borders, many people cannot. Walls - physical, legal, and social - aim to keep certain people in and “others” out. Yet, people do cross international borders and many do so without the legal authorization to make their moves formal and secure. In this course we explore the sociological forces behind these insecure migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the US, and the reality of undocumented immigrant life in the United States. While this course has a deep theoretical rooting, we use daily life as the lens through which to explore immigration and enforcement policies, and our individual and collective relationships to them.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Schmalzbauer
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
274, 275 Gender and Slavery in Latin America
(Offered as BLST 275 [CLA], SWAG 274, HIST 275 [LA/TS/TR/ P ] and LLAS 275) Latin American slavery was one of the most brutal institutions the world has ever known, and it affected women and girls, boys and men in profoundly different ways. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of how gender and sexuality affected the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants in Latin America from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Topics will include gender roles in Western Africa and how these diverged from the expectations of Spanish and Portuguese slave masters; the sexual and reproductive as well as labor exploitation of enslaved African women and girls; how enslaved men constructed masculinity within the emasculating institution of slavery; gender relations and family structures within slave communities; childhoods under slavery; and the sometimes distinct visions of freedom imagined by enslaved women and men. Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Regions to be covered include Brazil, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, and the Andean region. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2022
277 Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Offered as BLST 277 [CLA], LLAS 277 and HIST 277 [LA/TS/TR]) The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 with a slave revolt on a single plantation and, after more than a decade of total war, destroyed slavery forever and resulted in the independence of the world's first Black republic. By the end of 1804, the white planter class had been killed or exiled and Black men ruled the island. Before it happened, white slave masters could never imagine that tens of thousands of enslaved Africans would one day break their chains and succeed in defeating French, British, and Spanish armies. For millions of enslaved people, the Haitian Revolution proved that the dream of freedom could become reality and inspired slave conspiracies and rebellions from Virginia to Brazil. At the same time, Haiti struck fear in white slave masters throughout the Americas, who did their best to strangle the new Black Republic in its cradle. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of the origins and development of the Haitian Revolution and its impact in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
278 Black History of Brazil, 1500-1888
(Offered as BLST 278 [CLA], LLAS 278 and HIST 278 [LA/TS/TR/ P ]) More people of African descent live in Brazil than in any country in the world, except Nigeria. Of the more than 12 million Africans deported as captives to the Americas, Brazil received 24 percent. In contrast, North America received less than 4 percent. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth knowledge of the experiences of Africans and their descendants, slave and free, from the time the first captives were brought to Brazil at the beginning of the sixteenth century until final abolition in 1888. Topics will include the ways in which specific regions of Western Africa contributed captives to specific regions of Brazil, the nature of Portuguese colonial institutions and their impact on the lives of Africans and their descendants, resistance and rebellion, routes to freedom, slave and free Black families, and the origins and development of vibrant Afro-Brazilian religions and cultures . Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Spring semester, Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023301 Literature and Culture of the Hispanic World
(Offered as SPAN 301 and LLAS 301) This course provides an introduction to the diverse literatures and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world over the course of six centuries, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Students will learn the tools, language, and critical vocabulary for advanced work reading the canon of Hispanic literatures from Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean Basin, identifying aesthetic trends, historical periods and diverse genres such as poetry, narrative, theater and film. The syllabus will include a wide variety of authors of different national, political, and artistic persuasions and an array of linguistic styles. This course prepares students for advanced work in Spanish and for study abroad.
Requisite SPAN 202 or Spanish Placement Exam. Proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Spanish are required. Limited to 20 students per section. Fall semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton. Spring semester: Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024
308 Contemporary Latinx Literature
(Offered as ENGL 308 and LLAS 308) In this course, we will read and discuss recent works of Latinx literature across genres – novel, poetry, memoir, essay, and YA – in engagement with the live debates surrounding language, race, migration, and global capitalism that shape our definitions of Latinx identity and culture (and of literature itself). We will also experiment with different ways of responding to these literary texts in written forms ranging from creative writing to book review to research prospectus. Possible authors may include: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Dolores Dorantes, Angie Cruz, Valeria Luiselli, Raquel Salas Rivera, Natalie Diaz, Elizabeth Acevedo, and more.
Fall semester. Limited to 20 students. Professor Mireles Christoff.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Fall 2022, Fall 2023
321 Architecture and Violence in the Americas
(Offered as SPAN-321, LLAS-321 and ARCH-321) This course explores historical connections between violence and the built environment in the Americas, from architecture to wastelands, from monuments to mass graves. The class has a twofold objective. On the one hand, we will analyze critical issues concerning the production of the built environment, such as the intersection of race and space or the relationship between state architecture and historical oblivion. On the other hand, we will explore architectures and art projects that actively unsettle colonial legacies and seek to heal historical violence. We will study cases from Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, México and the US, among others. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisites: Spanish 301 or permission of the instructor. Spring Semester. Visiting Professor Ferrari.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023330, 332, 338 Latin American Cinema
(Offered as SPAN 330, SWAG 332, LLAS 330 and FAMS 338) How have Latin Americans represented themselves on the big screen? In this course we will explore this question through close readings of representative films from each of the following major periods: silent cinema (1890s–1930s), studio cinema (1930s–1950s), Neorealism/Art Cinema (1950s), the New Latin American Cinema (1960s–1980s), and contemporary cinema (1990s to today). Throughout the course we will examine evolving representations of modernity and pay special attention to how these representations are linked to different constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. We will conclude the course with a collective screening of video essays created by students in the course. The course is conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 301 or consent of instructor. Spring Semester. Professor Schroeder Rodríguez.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019
342, 343 Comparative Borderlands: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Transnational Perspective
(Offered as SPAN 342, LLAS 343 and SWAG 343) “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out,” Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in the hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera. She was referring to, what she called, the linguistic imperialism of English in the US Southwest. And yet she also carved out a third space for those subjects at the crossroads of multiple ways of being – the queer and the abject. In this course, we will examine cultural and literary texts that speak to the ways that race, gender, and sexual identity are conditioned by the historical development of geopolitical borders. We will pay particular attention to the US-Mexico Borderlands but we will also examine other places in which “borderlands” of identity exist. Course conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Fall Semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Fall 2022
349 Latinx and Puerto Rican Diasporic Cultures in Holyoke
(Offered as SPAN This course will focus on Holyoke, MA as a case study of Latinx Studies and Puerto Rican Studies. Much of our work in the course will focus on Puerto Rico, but we will also familiarize ourselves with foundational work in the general field of Latinx Studies, taking care to place different migrant communities, cultures, and histories in conversation with one another. Students will also engage in collaborative learning projects with partners in the city of Holyoke and neighboring towns with substantial Latinx populations. The course will include students from Amherst College and Holyoke Community College. Class will be conducted in Spanish, but English may be used depending on work with community partners.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Fall Semester: Professor Schroeder Rodríguez
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Spring 2024
355 One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is the best novel ever written in Spanish in the Americas. Appearing inauspiciously in 1967, it became the flagship of the so-called "El Boom," an aesthetic movement that inscribed Latin America in the banquet of world literature. It also inaugurated the style called "lo real maravillioso," loosely translated into English as Magical Realism. The narrative tells the rise and fall of Macondo, a mythical town in Colombia's Caribbean coast. At its center is the Buendias, a family of dreamers and entrepreneurs through whom the history of the entire region is told. It is fair to say that after One Hundred Years of Solitude, which brought Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize, global literature has never been the same. Its influence on figures as diverse as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orham Pamuk, and Mo Yan is enormous and continues to reverberate. The course is structured as a Talmudic (e.g., detailed, contextual, ahistorical) reading of the novel. Other works by the author and his contemporaries will also be discussed. After decades in Spanish, this is the first time the course will be taught in English, meaning that students will engage with the material in Gregory Rabassa's masterful translation. However, native Spanish speakers who choose so will be allowed to immerse themselves in the original and write in Spanish.
Limited to 25 students. Spring Semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2024
485 Telenovelas
(Offered as SPAN 485 and LLAS 485) Arguably the most influential popular form of cultural expression in Latin America, a single episode of any prime-time telenovela is watched by more people than all the accumulated number of Spanish-language readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude over time. The course will explore the historical origin and development of telenovelas as well as various production techniques, the way scripts are shaped and actors are asked to perform, the role of music and other sounds, etc. Each country in the region has its own telenovela tradition. We will look at Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Spanish-language productions of Univisión and Telemundo in the United States, among others. But the main objective of the course will be to analyze the performative nature of emotions in telenovelas and also gender, class, and political tension on the small screen. And we will delve into the strategies various governments have used by means of telenovelas to control the population (“melodrama is the true opium of the masses,” said a prominent Mexican telenovela director), their use as educational devices, and the clash between telenovelas and fútbol in the region’s celebrity ecosystem. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to18 students. Spring Semester: Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020
490 Special Topics
Independent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
498, 499 Senior Honors
Fall semester. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
Related Courses
Regulations & Requirements
Regulations & Requirements
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- The Liberal Studies Curriculum
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- Degree with Honors
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Latinx and Latin American Studies
Professors del Moral, R. López (Chair), Schmalzbauer*, and Schroeder Rodríguez; Associate Professor Lohse; Assistant Professors Barba, and Coranez Bolton*.
Affiliated Faculty: Professors Cobham-Sander‡, Corrales*, and Stavans; Associate Professors Arboleda, and Walker*; Assistant Professors Infante, Ravikumar*, Sanchez-Naranjo, and Vicario.
Latinx and Latin American Studies (LLAS) is an interdisciplinary major program designed for students interested in critically examining the diverse histories and cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinxs. Students in the major gain breadth and depth of learning through courses in the humanities and the social sciences that situate these histories and cultures within local, national, regional, hemispheric, and global contexts over time, while practical experiences such as community projects and study abroad provide opportunities to apply this learning in transformative ways.
Major Program. Majoring in LLAS requires the completion of nine courses: seven courses as described below, plus two additional courses to be chosen in consultation with the student’s advisor.
- one required course: LLAS 200: Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies.
- one course on U.S. Latinxs in any department.
- one course on Latin America in any department.
- one course on the Caribbean in any department.
- two courses taught in one of the languages spoken in Latin America and the Caribbean, other than English. These courses may focus on the development of language skills, and/or they may be content courses on a subject relevant to the Major.
- a research or methods seminar in any department, with completion of the written project on a topic relevant to LLAS. In order to ensure that the research will be on a topic relevant to LLAS, the research or methods seminar must be approved by both the Major advisor and the professor teaching the course.
LLAS majors may credit up to three courses from another major, provided they fall into one of the categories listed above. In addition, majors must have
- a concentration with at least three courses in one of the following areas: U.S. Latinxs, Latin America, or the Caribbean.
- at least two courses in the humanities and at least two in the social sciences.
- coursework in at least three departments.
- residency requirement: at least five of the nine courses must be taken at Amherst College.
- Capstone Requirement: The capstone requirement will be met through a portfolio of work done in the Major, introduced by a reflective essay that addresses how the interdisciplinary nature of the coursework informs a question or topic of special interest to the student and his/her long-term plans. Students will publicly share these reflections during a LLAS Major Capstone Symposium.
Departmental Honors Program. Candidates for Latin Honors must complete a senior thesis. The work of the thesis may be creative or scholarly in nature. Interested candidates must apply and be accepted by the end of their third year, and must, in addition to the coursework described above, enroll in LLAS 498 and/or 499 during their senior year.
144 Contemporary Dance Technique: Salsa Performance and Culture
(Offered as THDA 144H and LLAS 144H) This class introduces students to beginner-level salsa technique. We will explore the New York Mambo style of salsa, the Caracas street style, as well as elements of the Cuban Casino style. Students will master variations of the salsa basic step, turns, connecting steps, and arm work. Although we will mostly focus on solo practice, we will learn some essential concepts of partnering work based on the principles of leading and following. Toward the end of the semester, students will be able to use the acquired salsa vocabulary as the basis for improvising and choreographing combinations.
Through the study of salsa’s history, political dimensions, lyrical content, and matrilineal legacy, students will develop an understanding of this artistic expression not only as a dance form or musical genre, but also as a unifying voice of resistance and liberation for Caribbean and Latino cultures. Students will be able to recognize the voices of some of the most iconic Salsa artists and appreciate the contributions of some of the most important female Cuban and Cuban-American performers. We will investigate the legacy of Celia Cruz, paying close attention to the design and performance elements that defined her as The Queen of Salsa. Class discussions and brief writing assignments will serve as opportunities to reflect upon readings, documentaries and other information that will expand our understanding of the form.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2021-22.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
200, 206 Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies
(Offered as LLAS 200 and AMST 206) In this course students will become familiar with the major debates that have animated Latinx and Latin American Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the Conquest to the present. Each week students will focus on specific questions such as: Does Latin America have a common culture? Is Latin America part of the Western world? Is Latinx a race or an ethnicity? Is U.S. Latinx identity rooted in Latin America or the United States? Are Latin American nations post-colonial? Was the modern concept of race invented in the Caribbean at the time of the Conquest? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course.
Limited to 15 students. Spring Semester. Professor Coranez Bolton .
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
204 Housing, Urbanization, and Development
(Offered as ARCH 204, ARHA 204, and LLAS 204) This course studies the theory, policy, and practice of low-income housing in marginalized communities worldwide. We study central concepts in housing theory, key issues regarding low-income housing, different approaches to address these issues, and political debates around housing the poor. We use a comparative focus, going back and forth between the cases of the United States and the so-called developing world. By doing this, we engage in a “theory from without” exercise: We attempt to understand the housing problem in the United States from the perspective of the developing world, and vice versa. We study our subject through illustrated lectures, seminar discussions, documentary films, visual analysis exercises, and a field trip.
Limited to 20 students. Spring Semester. Professor Arboleda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2022
205 Finding Your Bilingual Voice
(Offered as SPAN 205 and LLAS 205) Heritage learners of Spanish are students who have grown up speaking, listening, reading and/or writing Spanish with family or in their community. Because of their unique backgrounds, Spanish heritage language learners (SHLLs) are bilingual and bicultural. They function between a Hispanic and an American identity. This fluid and multiple identity can bring challenges, as SHLLs try to fit into both groups. With this in mind, through meaningful activities that focus on students’ experiences and emotions, this Spanish language course will center on bilingualism, specifically through writing, as a necessary means for identity formation. Because in narrating our stories with others, we enact our identities, this course will include an event open to the community that showcases our voices and talents.
Through this course, students will incorporate their personal experience as SHLLs into their coursework. Activities will foster critical thinking, and students will learn to analyze, read, discuss, write, and reflect on issues of language, culture, and identity. Using a student-centered approach, the course will include collaborative brainstorming, free-writing, developing topics of personal importance, and peer and group editing in order to develop students’ writing proficiency and to build community.
This course prepares Spanish heritage language students for advanced-level courses offered by the Spanish Department. Limited to 15 students per section. This course may be counted toward the Spanish Major. The class will be conducted entirely in Spanish, though some assignments can be submitted in English.
Prerequisite: SPAN201, SPAN202 or placement exam.
Consent Required (students must identify as Spanish heritage language students). Spring Semester. Professor Granda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2024
216 Frida and Diego
(Offered as HIST 216 [LA/TC/TE/TR/TS], LLAS 216 [LA, Humanities] and ARHA 216) This course examines the art, lives, and times of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, two of Mexico’s most famous artists. Through discussion, lectures, readings, and visual analysis we will consider the historical and artistic roots of their radical aesthetics as well as the ideals and struggles that shaped their lives. During their era, Kahlo was overshadowed by her husband Rivera, but in recent decades her fame has eclipsed his. To make sense of this we will address the changing meaning of their art over time, especially in relation to markets, social movements, and gender and sexual identities. By the end of the semester, students will have a strong understanding of these two artists and their work, as well as the contexts in which they lived and in which their art continues to circulate, including early twentieth-century Modernism, the Mexican Revolution, indigenismo, the Chicano Movement, and recent efforts toward ethnic and gender inclusion. No prerequisites, open to all years and majors.
Fall semester. Professor Lopez.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2022
225 Latin American Literature in Translation
A joyful introduction to modern Latin American literary classics in translation through the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolano, Clarise Lispector, and others. The discussion-driven classes will focus on aesthetic movements like Magical Realism as well as on the development of national identity, mestizaje, civil unrest, racial and gender relations, humor, translation, and the opposition between Europeanized and indigenous worldviews. Students will delve into canonical poems, stories, essays, and short novels from the seventeenth century to the present that have reshaped the international scene. Language: English.
Limited to 40 students. January term. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in January 2022, Spring 2022
248 Cuba: The Politics of Extremism
(Offered as POSC 248 and LLAS 248) The study of Cuba’s politics presents opportunities to address issues of universal concern to social scientists and humanists in general, not just Latin Americanists. When is it rational to be radical? Why has Cuban politics forced so many individuals to adopt extreme positions? What are the causes of radical revolutions? Is pre-revolutionary Cuba a case of too little development, uneven development or too rapid development? What is the role of leaders: Do they make history, are they the product of history, or are they the makers of unintended histories? Was the revolution inevitable? Was it necessary? How are new (radical) states constructed? What is the role of foreign actors, existing political institutions, ethnicity, nationalism, religion and sexuality in this process? How does a small nation manage to become influential in world affairs, even altering the behavior of superpowers? What are the conditions that account for the survival of authoritarianism? To what extent is the revolution capable of self-reform? Is the current intention of state leaders of pursuing closed politics with open economics viable? What are the most effective mechanisms to change the regime? Why does the embargo survive? Why did Cubans (at home and abroad) care about Elián González? Although the readings will be mostly from social scientists, the course also includes selections from primary sources, literary works and films (of Cuban and non-Cuban origin). As with almost everything in politics, there are more than just two sides to the issue of Cuba. One aim of the course is to expose the students to as many different sides as possible.
Limited to 30 students. Spring semester. Professor Corrales.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2015
260 Art in and out of Latin America
(Offered as ARHA 260 and LLAS 260). This course explores the movement of art both in and out of Latin America in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This includes the forging of a mural movement in Mexico, the cosmopolitan travels of artists to Europe, the export of art to the United States, and the transnational circulation of art and ideas across national contexts within Latin America. In the process, we will explore the sometimes conflicting and sometimes hybrid desires to create local aesthetics in particular places (sometimes drawing on the pre-Columbian past and Indigenous present) and to participate in international, sometimes transcontinental artistic movements and debates. We will also consider the category “Latin American art” as it developed over the course of the twentieth century and how it has both intersected with and stood apart from developments in art elsewhere. A core concern of the class will be the examination of how culture develops in relation to both political and economic shifts in the region and in the world beyond, including in relation to imperialism, the spread of capitalism, the Cold War, Communism, modernization, dictatorship, and globalization.
Limited to 25 people. Spring semester - Assistant Professor Niko Vicario.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023264, 266 Migration Across the Americas
(Offered as AMST 264, LLAS 266, and SOCI 264) This course introduces students to sociological analyses of undocumented migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the United States. An exploration of undocumented immigration demands that we engage with oft-unexamined social and economic contradictions. Namely, whereas capital and culture move freely across most international borders, many people cannot. Walls - physical, legal, and social - aim to keep certain people in and “others” out. Yet, people do cross international borders and many do so without the legal authorization to make their moves formal and secure. In this course we explore the sociological forces behind these insecure migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the US, and the reality of undocumented immigrant life in the United States. While this course has a deep theoretical rooting, we use daily life as the lens through which to explore immigration and enforcement policies, and our individual and collective relationships to them.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Schmalzbauer
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
274, 275 Gender and Slavery in Latin America
(Offered as BLST 275 [CLA], SWAG 274, HIST 275 [LA/TS/TR/ P ] and LLAS 275) Latin American slavery was one of the most brutal institutions the world has ever known, and it affected women and girls, boys and men in profoundly different ways. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of how gender and sexuality affected the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants in Latin America from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Topics will include gender roles in Western Africa and how these diverged from the expectations of Spanish and Portuguese slave masters; the sexual and reproductive as well as labor exploitation of enslaved African women and girls; how enslaved men constructed masculinity within the emasculating institution of slavery; gender relations and family structures within slave communities; childhoods under slavery; and the sometimes distinct visions of freedom imagined by enslaved women and men. Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Regions to be covered include Brazil, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, and the Andean region. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2022
277 Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Offered as BLST 277 [CLA], LLAS 277 and HIST 277 [LA/TS/TR]) The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 with a slave revolt on a single plantation and, after more than a decade of total war, destroyed slavery forever and resulted in the independence of the world's first Black republic. By the end of 1804, the white planter class had been killed or exiled and Black men ruled the island. Before it happened, white slave masters could never imagine that tens of thousands of enslaved Africans would one day break their chains and succeed in defeating French, British, and Spanish armies. For millions of enslaved people, the Haitian Revolution proved that the dream of freedom could become reality and inspired slave conspiracies and rebellions from Virginia to Brazil. At the same time, Haiti struck fear in white slave masters throughout the Americas, who did their best to strangle the new Black Republic in its cradle. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of the origins and development of the Haitian Revolution and its impact in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
278 Black History of Brazil, 1500-1888
(Offered as BLST 278 [CLA], LLAS 278 and HIST 278 [LA/TS/TR/ P ]) More people of African descent live in Brazil than in any country in the world, except Nigeria. Of the more than 12 million Africans deported as captives to the Americas, Brazil received 24 percent. In contrast, North America received less than 4 percent. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth knowledge of the experiences of Africans and their descendants, slave and free, from the time the first captives were brought to Brazil at the beginning of the sixteenth century until final abolition in 1888. Topics will include the ways in which specific regions of Western Africa contributed captives to specific regions of Brazil, the nature of Portuguese colonial institutions and their impact on the lives of Africans and their descendants, resistance and rebellion, routes to freedom, slave and free Black families, and the origins and development of vibrant Afro-Brazilian religions and cultures . Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Spring semester, Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023301 Literature and Culture of the Hispanic World
(Offered as SPAN 301 and LLAS 301) This course provides an introduction to the diverse literatures and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world over the course of six centuries, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Students will learn the tools, language, and critical vocabulary for advanced work reading the canon of Hispanic literatures from Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean Basin, identifying aesthetic trends, historical periods and diverse genres such as poetry, narrative, theater and film. The syllabus will include a wide variety of authors of different national, political, and artistic persuasions and an array of linguistic styles. This course prepares students for advanced work in Spanish and for study abroad.
Requisite SPAN 202 or Spanish Placement Exam. Proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Spanish are required. Limited to 20 students per section. Fall semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton. Spring semester: Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024
308 Contemporary Latinx Literature
(Offered as ENGL 308 and LLAS 308) In this course, we will read and discuss recent works of Latinx literature across genres – novel, poetry, memoir, essay, and YA – in engagement with the live debates surrounding language, race, migration, and global capitalism that shape our definitions of Latinx identity and culture (and of literature itself). We will also experiment with different ways of responding to these literary texts in written forms ranging from creative writing to book review to research prospectus. Possible authors may include: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Dolores Dorantes, Angie Cruz, Valeria Luiselli, Raquel Salas Rivera, Natalie Diaz, Elizabeth Acevedo, and more.
Fall semester. Limited to 20 students. Professor Mireles Christoff.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Fall 2022, Fall 2023
321 Architecture and Violence in the Americas
(Offered as SPAN-321, LLAS-321 and ARCH-321) This course explores historical connections between violence and the built environment in the Americas, from architecture to wastelands, from monuments to mass graves. The class has a twofold objective. On the one hand, we will analyze critical issues concerning the production of the built environment, such as the intersection of race and space or the relationship between state architecture and historical oblivion. On the other hand, we will explore architectures and art projects that actively unsettle colonial legacies and seek to heal historical violence. We will study cases from Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, México and the US, among others. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisites: Spanish 301 or permission of the instructor. Spring Semester. Visiting Professor Ferrari.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023330, 332, 338 Latin American Cinema
(Offered as SPAN 330, SWAG 332, LLAS 330 and FAMS 338) How have Latin Americans represented themselves on the big screen? In this course we will explore this question through close readings of representative films from each of the following major periods: silent cinema (1890s–1930s), studio cinema (1930s–1950s), Neorealism/Art Cinema (1950s), the New Latin American Cinema (1960s–1980s), and contemporary cinema (1990s to today). Throughout the course we will examine evolving representations of modernity and pay special attention to how these representations are linked to different constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. We will conclude the course with a collective screening of video essays created by students in the course. The course is conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 301 or consent of instructor. Spring Semester. Professor Schroeder Rodríguez.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019
342, 343 Comparative Borderlands: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Transnational Perspective
(Offered as SPAN 342, LLAS 343 and SWAG 343) “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out,” Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in the hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera. She was referring to, what she called, the linguistic imperialism of English in the US Southwest. And yet she also carved out a third space for those subjects at the crossroads of multiple ways of being – the queer and the abject. In this course, we will examine cultural and literary texts that speak to the ways that race, gender, and sexual identity are conditioned by the historical development of geopolitical borders. We will pay particular attention to the US-Mexico Borderlands but we will also examine other places in which “borderlands” of identity exist. Course conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Fall Semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Fall 2022
349 Latinx and Puerto Rican Diasporic Cultures in Holyoke
(Offered as SPAN This course will focus on Holyoke, MA as a case study of Latinx Studies and Puerto Rican Studies. Much of our work in the course will focus on Puerto Rico, but we will also familiarize ourselves with foundational work in the general field of Latinx Studies, taking care to place different migrant communities, cultures, and histories in conversation with one another. Students will also engage in collaborative learning projects with partners in the city of Holyoke and neighboring towns with substantial Latinx populations. The course will include students from Amherst College and Holyoke Community College. Class will be conducted in Spanish, but English may be used depending on work with community partners.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Fall Semester: Professor Schroeder Rodríguez
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Spring 2024
355 One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is the best novel ever written in Spanish in the Americas. Appearing inauspiciously in 1967, it became the flagship of the so-called "El Boom," an aesthetic movement that inscribed Latin America in the banquet of world literature. It also inaugurated the style called "lo real maravillioso," loosely translated into English as Magical Realism. The narrative tells the rise and fall of Macondo, a mythical town in Colombia's Caribbean coast. At its center is the Buendias, a family of dreamers and entrepreneurs through whom the history of the entire region is told. It is fair to say that after One Hundred Years of Solitude, which brought Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize, global literature has never been the same. Its influence on figures as diverse as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orham Pamuk, and Mo Yan is enormous and continues to reverberate. The course is structured as a Talmudic (e.g., detailed, contextual, ahistorical) reading of the novel. Other works by the author and his contemporaries will also be discussed. After decades in Spanish, this is the first time the course will be taught in English, meaning that students will engage with the material in Gregory Rabassa's masterful translation. However, native Spanish speakers who choose so will be allowed to immerse themselves in the original and write in Spanish.
Limited to 25 students. Spring Semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2024
485 Telenovelas
(Offered as SPAN 485 and LLAS 485) Arguably the most influential popular form of cultural expression in Latin America, a single episode of any prime-time telenovela is watched by more people than all the accumulated number of Spanish-language readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude over time. The course will explore the historical origin and development of telenovelas as well as various production techniques, the way scripts are shaped and actors are asked to perform, the role of music and other sounds, etc. Each country in the region has its own telenovela tradition. We will look at Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Spanish-language productions of Univisión and Telemundo in the United States, among others. But the main objective of the course will be to analyze the performative nature of emotions in telenovelas and also gender, class, and political tension on the small screen. And we will delve into the strategies various governments have used by means of telenovelas to control the population (“melodrama is the true opium of the masses,” said a prominent Mexican telenovela director), their use as educational devices, and the clash between telenovelas and fútbol in the region’s celebrity ecosystem. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to18 students. Spring Semester: Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020
490 Special Topics
Independent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
498, 499 Senior Honors
Fall semester. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
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Latinx and Latin American Studies
Professors del Moral, R. López (Chair), Schmalzbauer*, and Schroeder Rodríguez; Associate Professor Lohse; Assistant Professors Barba, and Coranez Bolton*.
Affiliated Faculty: Professors Cobham-Sander‡, Corrales*, and Stavans; Associate Professors Arboleda, and Walker*; Assistant Professors Infante, Ravikumar*, Sanchez-Naranjo, and Vicario.
Latinx and Latin American Studies (LLAS) is an interdisciplinary major program designed for students interested in critically examining the diverse histories and cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinxs. Students in the major gain breadth and depth of learning through courses in the humanities and the social sciences that situate these histories and cultures within local, national, regional, hemispheric, and global contexts over time, while practical experiences such as community projects and study abroad provide opportunities to apply this learning in transformative ways.
Major Program. Majoring in LLAS requires the completion of nine courses: seven courses as described below, plus two additional courses to be chosen in consultation with the student’s advisor.
- one required course: LLAS 200: Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies.
- one course on U.S. Latinxs in any department.
- one course on Latin America in any department.
- one course on the Caribbean in any department.
- two courses taught in one of the languages spoken in Latin America and the Caribbean, other than English. These courses may focus on the development of language skills, and/or they may be content courses on a subject relevant to the Major.
- a research or methods seminar in any department, with completion of the written project on a topic relevant to LLAS. In order to ensure that the research will be on a topic relevant to LLAS, the research or methods seminar must be approved by both the Major advisor and the professor teaching the course.
LLAS majors may credit up to three courses from another major, provided they fall into one of the categories listed above. In addition, majors must have
- a concentration with at least three courses in one of the following areas: U.S. Latinxs, Latin America, or the Caribbean.
- at least two courses in the humanities and at least two in the social sciences.
- coursework in at least three departments.
- residency requirement: at least five of the nine courses must be taken at Amherst College.
- Capstone Requirement: The capstone requirement will be met through a portfolio of work done in the Major, introduced by a reflective essay that addresses how the interdisciplinary nature of the coursework informs a question or topic of special interest to the student and his/her long-term plans. Students will publicly share these reflections during a LLAS Major Capstone Symposium.
Departmental Honors Program. Candidates for Latin Honors must complete a senior thesis. The work of the thesis may be creative or scholarly in nature. Interested candidates must apply and be accepted by the end of their third year, and must, in addition to the coursework described above, enroll in LLAS 498 and/or 499 during their senior year.
144 Contemporary Dance Technique: Salsa Performance and Culture
(Offered as THDA 144H and LLAS 144H) This class introduces students to beginner-level salsa technique. We will explore the New York Mambo style of salsa, the Caracas street style, as well as elements of the Cuban Casino style. Students will master variations of the salsa basic step, turns, connecting steps, and arm work. Although we will mostly focus on solo practice, we will learn some essential concepts of partnering work based on the principles of leading and following. Toward the end of the semester, students will be able to use the acquired salsa vocabulary as the basis for improvising and choreographing combinations.
Through the study of salsa’s history, political dimensions, lyrical content, and matrilineal legacy, students will develop an understanding of this artistic expression not only as a dance form or musical genre, but also as a unifying voice of resistance and liberation for Caribbean and Latino cultures. Students will be able to recognize the voices of some of the most iconic Salsa artists and appreciate the contributions of some of the most important female Cuban and Cuban-American performers. We will investigate the legacy of Celia Cruz, paying close attention to the design and performance elements that defined her as The Queen of Salsa. Class discussions and brief writing assignments will serve as opportunities to reflect upon readings, documentaries and other information that will expand our understanding of the form.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2021-22.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
200, 206 Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies
(Offered as LLAS 200 and AMST 206) In this course students will become familiar with the major debates that have animated Latinx and Latin American Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the Conquest to the present. Each week students will focus on specific questions such as: Does Latin America have a common culture? Is Latin America part of the Western world? Is Latinx a race or an ethnicity? Is U.S. Latinx identity rooted in Latin America or the United States? Are Latin American nations post-colonial? Was the modern concept of race invented in the Caribbean at the time of the Conquest? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course.
Limited to 15 students. Spring Semester. Professor Coranez Bolton .
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
204 Housing, Urbanization, and Development
(Offered as ARCH 204, ARHA 204, and LLAS 204) This course studies the theory, policy, and practice of low-income housing in marginalized communities worldwide. We study central concepts in housing theory, key issues regarding low-income housing, different approaches to address these issues, and political debates around housing the poor. We use a comparative focus, going back and forth between the cases of the United States and the so-called developing world. By doing this, we engage in a “theory from without” exercise: We attempt to understand the housing problem in the United States from the perspective of the developing world, and vice versa. We study our subject through illustrated lectures, seminar discussions, documentary films, visual analysis exercises, and a field trip.
Limited to 20 students. Spring Semester. Professor Arboleda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2022
205 Finding Your Bilingual Voice
(Offered as SPAN 205 and LLAS 205) Heritage learners of Spanish are students who have grown up speaking, listening, reading and/or writing Spanish with family or in their community. Because of their unique backgrounds, Spanish heritage language learners (SHLLs) are bilingual and bicultural. They function between a Hispanic and an American identity. This fluid and multiple identity can bring challenges, as SHLLs try to fit into both groups. With this in mind, through meaningful activities that focus on students’ experiences and emotions, this Spanish language course will center on bilingualism, specifically through writing, as a necessary means for identity formation. Because in narrating our stories with others, we enact our identities, this course will include an event open to the community that showcases our voices and talents.
Through this course, students will incorporate their personal experience as SHLLs into their coursework. Activities will foster critical thinking, and students will learn to analyze, read, discuss, write, and reflect on issues of language, culture, and identity. Using a student-centered approach, the course will include collaborative brainstorming, free-writing, developing topics of personal importance, and peer and group editing in order to develop students’ writing proficiency and to build community.
This course prepares Spanish heritage language students for advanced-level courses offered by the Spanish Department. Limited to 15 students per section. This course may be counted toward the Spanish Major. The class will be conducted entirely in Spanish, though some assignments can be submitted in English.
Prerequisite: SPAN201, SPAN202 or placement exam.
Consent Required (students must identify as Spanish heritage language students). Spring Semester. Professor Granda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2024
216 Frida and Diego
(Offered as HIST 216 [LA/TC/TE/TR/TS], LLAS 216 [LA, Humanities] and ARHA 216) This course examines the art, lives, and times of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, two of Mexico’s most famous artists. Through discussion, lectures, readings, and visual analysis we will consider the historical and artistic roots of their radical aesthetics as well as the ideals and struggles that shaped their lives. During their era, Kahlo was overshadowed by her husband Rivera, but in recent decades her fame has eclipsed his. To make sense of this we will address the changing meaning of their art over time, especially in relation to markets, social movements, and gender and sexual identities. By the end of the semester, students will have a strong understanding of these two artists and their work, as well as the contexts in which they lived and in which their art continues to circulate, including early twentieth-century Modernism, the Mexican Revolution, indigenismo, the Chicano Movement, and recent efforts toward ethnic and gender inclusion. No prerequisites, open to all years and majors.
Fall semester. Professor Lopez.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2022
225 Latin American Literature in Translation
A joyful introduction to modern Latin American literary classics in translation through the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolano, Clarise Lispector, and others. The discussion-driven classes will focus on aesthetic movements like Magical Realism as well as on the development of national identity, mestizaje, civil unrest, racial and gender relations, humor, translation, and the opposition between Europeanized and indigenous worldviews. Students will delve into canonical poems, stories, essays, and short novels from the seventeenth century to the present that have reshaped the international scene. Language: English.
Limited to 40 students. January term. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in January 2022, Spring 2022
248 Cuba: The Politics of Extremism
(Offered as POSC 248 and LLAS 248) The study of Cuba’s politics presents opportunities to address issues of universal concern to social scientists and humanists in general, not just Latin Americanists. When is it rational to be radical? Why has Cuban politics forced so many individuals to adopt extreme positions? What are the causes of radical revolutions? Is pre-revolutionary Cuba a case of too little development, uneven development or too rapid development? What is the role of leaders: Do they make history, are they the product of history, or are they the makers of unintended histories? Was the revolution inevitable? Was it necessary? How are new (radical) states constructed? What is the role of foreign actors, existing political institutions, ethnicity, nationalism, religion and sexuality in this process? How does a small nation manage to become influential in world affairs, even altering the behavior of superpowers? What are the conditions that account for the survival of authoritarianism? To what extent is the revolution capable of self-reform? Is the current intention of state leaders of pursuing closed politics with open economics viable? What are the most effective mechanisms to change the regime? Why does the embargo survive? Why did Cubans (at home and abroad) care about Elián González? Although the readings will be mostly from social scientists, the course also includes selections from primary sources, literary works and films (of Cuban and non-Cuban origin). As with almost everything in politics, there are more than just two sides to the issue of Cuba. One aim of the course is to expose the students to as many different sides as possible.
Limited to 30 students. Spring semester. Professor Corrales.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2015
260 Art in and out of Latin America
(Offered as ARHA 260 and LLAS 260). This course explores the movement of art both in and out of Latin America in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This includes the forging of a mural movement in Mexico, the cosmopolitan travels of artists to Europe, the export of art to the United States, and the transnational circulation of art and ideas across national contexts within Latin America. In the process, we will explore the sometimes conflicting and sometimes hybrid desires to create local aesthetics in particular places (sometimes drawing on the pre-Columbian past and Indigenous present) and to participate in international, sometimes transcontinental artistic movements and debates. We will also consider the category “Latin American art” as it developed over the course of the twentieth century and how it has both intersected with and stood apart from developments in art elsewhere. A core concern of the class will be the examination of how culture develops in relation to both political and economic shifts in the region and in the world beyond, including in relation to imperialism, the spread of capitalism, the Cold War, Communism, modernization, dictatorship, and globalization.
Limited to 25 people. Spring semester - Assistant Professor Niko Vicario.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023264, 266 Migration Across the Americas
(Offered as AMST 264, LLAS 266, and SOCI 264) This course introduces students to sociological analyses of undocumented migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the United States. An exploration of undocumented immigration demands that we engage with oft-unexamined social and economic contradictions. Namely, whereas capital and culture move freely across most international borders, many people cannot. Walls - physical, legal, and social - aim to keep certain people in and “others” out. Yet, people do cross international borders and many do so without the legal authorization to make their moves formal and secure. In this course we explore the sociological forces behind these insecure migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the US, and the reality of undocumented immigrant life in the United States. While this course has a deep theoretical rooting, we use daily life as the lens through which to explore immigration and enforcement policies, and our individual and collective relationships to them.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Schmalzbauer
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
274, 275 Gender and Slavery in Latin America
(Offered as BLST 275 [CLA], SWAG 274, HIST 275 [LA/TS/TR/ P ] and LLAS 275) Latin American slavery was one of the most brutal institutions the world has ever known, and it affected women and girls, boys and men in profoundly different ways. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of how gender and sexuality affected the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants in Latin America from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Topics will include gender roles in Western Africa and how these diverged from the expectations of Spanish and Portuguese slave masters; the sexual and reproductive as well as labor exploitation of enslaved African women and girls; how enslaved men constructed masculinity within the emasculating institution of slavery; gender relations and family structures within slave communities; childhoods under slavery; and the sometimes distinct visions of freedom imagined by enslaved women and men. Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Regions to be covered include Brazil, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, and the Andean region. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2022
277 Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Offered as BLST 277 [CLA], LLAS 277 and HIST 277 [LA/TS/TR]) The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 with a slave revolt on a single plantation and, after more than a decade of total war, destroyed slavery forever and resulted in the independence of the world's first Black republic. By the end of 1804, the white planter class had been killed or exiled and Black men ruled the island. Before it happened, white slave masters could never imagine that tens of thousands of enslaved Africans would one day break their chains and succeed in defeating French, British, and Spanish armies. For millions of enslaved people, the Haitian Revolution proved that the dream of freedom could become reality and inspired slave conspiracies and rebellions from Virginia to Brazil. At the same time, Haiti struck fear in white slave masters throughout the Americas, who did their best to strangle the new Black Republic in its cradle. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of the origins and development of the Haitian Revolution and its impact in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
278 Black History of Brazil, 1500-1888
(Offered as BLST 278 [CLA], LLAS 278 and HIST 278 [LA/TS/TR/ P ]) More people of African descent live in Brazil than in any country in the world, except Nigeria. Of the more than 12 million Africans deported as captives to the Americas, Brazil received 24 percent. In contrast, North America received less than 4 percent. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth knowledge of the experiences of Africans and their descendants, slave and free, from the time the first captives were brought to Brazil at the beginning of the sixteenth century until final abolition in 1888. Topics will include the ways in which specific regions of Western Africa contributed captives to specific regions of Brazil, the nature of Portuguese colonial institutions and their impact on the lives of Africans and their descendants, resistance and rebellion, routes to freedom, slave and free Black families, and the origins and development of vibrant Afro-Brazilian religions and cultures . Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Spring semester, Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023301 Literature and Culture of the Hispanic World
(Offered as SPAN 301 and LLAS 301) This course provides an introduction to the diverse literatures and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world over the course of six centuries, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Students will learn the tools, language, and critical vocabulary for advanced work reading the canon of Hispanic literatures from Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean Basin, identifying aesthetic trends, historical periods and diverse genres such as poetry, narrative, theater and film. The syllabus will include a wide variety of authors of different national, political, and artistic persuasions and an array of linguistic styles. This course prepares students for advanced work in Spanish and for study abroad.
Requisite SPAN 202 or Spanish Placement Exam. Proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Spanish are required. Limited to 20 students per section. Fall semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton. Spring semester: Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024
308 Contemporary Latinx Literature
(Offered as ENGL 308 and LLAS 308) In this course, we will read and discuss recent works of Latinx literature across genres – novel, poetry, memoir, essay, and YA – in engagement with the live debates surrounding language, race, migration, and global capitalism that shape our definitions of Latinx identity and culture (and of literature itself). We will also experiment with different ways of responding to these literary texts in written forms ranging from creative writing to book review to research prospectus. Possible authors may include: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Dolores Dorantes, Angie Cruz, Valeria Luiselli, Raquel Salas Rivera, Natalie Diaz, Elizabeth Acevedo, and more.
Fall semester. Limited to 20 students. Professor Mireles Christoff.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Fall 2022, Fall 2023
321 Architecture and Violence in the Americas
(Offered as SPAN-321, LLAS-321 and ARCH-321) This course explores historical connections between violence and the built environment in the Americas, from architecture to wastelands, from monuments to mass graves. The class has a twofold objective. On the one hand, we will analyze critical issues concerning the production of the built environment, such as the intersection of race and space or the relationship between state architecture and historical oblivion. On the other hand, we will explore architectures and art projects that actively unsettle colonial legacies and seek to heal historical violence. We will study cases from Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, México and the US, among others. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisites: Spanish 301 or permission of the instructor. Spring Semester. Visiting Professor Ferrari.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023330, 332, 338 Latin American Cinema
(Offered as SPAN 330, SWAG 332, LLAS 330 and FAMS 338) How have Latin Americans represented themselves on the big screen? In this course we will explore this question through close readings of representative films from each of the following major periods: silent cinema (1890s–1930s), studio cinema (1930s–1950s), Neorealism/Art Cinema (1950s), the New Latin American Cinema (1960s–1980s), and contemporary cinema (1990s to today). Throughout the course we will examine evolving representations of modernity and pay special attention to how these representations are linked to different constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. We will conclude the course with a collective screening of video essays created by students in the course. The course is conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 301 or consent of instructor. Spring Semester. Professor Schroeder Rodríguez.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019
342, 343 Comparative Borderlands: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Transnational Perspective
(Offered as SPAN 342, LLAS 343 and SWAG 343) “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out,” Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in the hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera. She was referring to, what she called, the linguistic imperialism of English in the US Southwest. And yet she also carved out a third space for those subjects at the crossroads of multiple ways of being – the queer and the abject. In this course, we will examine cultural and literary texts that speak to the ways that race, gender, and sexual identity are conditioned by the historical development of geopolitical borders. We will pay particular attention to the US-Mexico Borderlands but we will also examine other places in which “borderlands” of identity exist. Course conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Fall Semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Fall 2022
349 Latinx and Puerto Rican Diasporic Cultures in Holyoke
(Offered as SPAN This course will focus on Holyoke, MA as a case study of Latinx Studies and Puerto Rican Studies. Much of our work in the course will focus on Puerto Rico, but we will also familiarize ourselves with foundational work in the general field of Latinx Studies, taking care to place different migrant communities, cultures, and histories in conversation with one another. Students will also engage in collaborative learning projects with partners in the city of Holyoke and neighboring towns with substantial Latinx populations. The course will include students from Amherst College and Holyoke Community College. Class will be conducted in Spanish, but English may be used depending on work with community partners.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Fall Semester: Professor Schroeder Rodríguez
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Spring 2024
355 One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is the best novel ever written in Spanish in the Americas. Appearing inauspiciously in 1967, it became the flagship of the so-called "El Boom," an aesthetic movement that inscribed Latin America in the banquet of world literature. It also inaugurated the style called "lo real maravillioso," loosely translated into English as Magical Realism. The narrative tells the rise and fall of Macondo, a mythical town in Colombia's Caribbean coast. At its center is the Buendias, a family of dreamers and entrepreneurs through whom the history of the entire region is told. It is fair to say that after One Hundred Years of Solitude, which brought Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize, global literature has never been the same. Its influence on figures as diverse as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orham Pamuk, and Mo Yan is enormous and continues to reverberate. The course is structured as a Talmudic (e.g., detailed, contextual, ahistorical) reading of the novel. Other works by the author and his contemporaries will also be discussed. After decades in Spanish, this is the first time the course will be taught in English, meaning that students will engage with the material in Gregory Rabassa's masterful translation. However, native Spanish speakers who choose so will be allowed to immerse themselves in the original and write in Spanish.
Limited to 25 students. Spring Semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2024
485 Telenovelas
(Offered as SPAN 485 and LLAS 485) Arguably the most influential popular form of cultural expression in Latin America, a single episode of any prime-time telenovela is watched by more people than all the accumulated number of Spanish-language readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude over time. The course will explore the historical origin and development of telenovelas as well as various production techniques, the way scripts are shaped and actors are asked to perform, the role of music and other sounds, etc. Each country in the region has its own telenovela tradition. We will look at Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Spanish-language productions of Univisión and Telemundo in the United States, among others. But the main objective of the course will be to analyze the performative nature of emotions in telenovelas and also gender, class, and political tension on the small screen. And we will delve into the strategies various governments have used by means of telenovelas to control the population (“melodrama is the true opium of the masses,” said a prominent Mexican telenovela director), their use as educational devices, and the clash between telenovelas and fútbol in the region’s celebrity ecosystem. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to18 students. Spring Semester: Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020
490 Special Topics
Independent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
498, 499 Senior Honors
Fall semester. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
Related Courses
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Latinx and Latin American Studies
Professors del Moral, R. López (Chair), Schmalzbauer*, and Schroeder Rodríguez; Associate Professor Lohse; Assistant Professors Barba, and Coranez Bolton*.
Affiliated Faculty: Professors Cobham-Sander‡, Corrales*, and Stavans; Associate Professors Arboleda, and Walker*; Assistant Professors Infante, Ravikumar*, Sanchez-Naranjo, and Vicario.
Latinx and Latin American Studies (LLAS) is an interdisciplinary major program designed for students interested in critically examining the diverse histories and cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinxs. Students in the major gain breadth and depth of learning through courses in the humanities and the social sciences that situate these histories and cultures within local, national, regional, hemispheric, and global contexts over time, while practical experiences such as community projects and study abroad provide opportunities to apply this learning in transformative ways.
Major Program. Majoring in LLAS requires the completion of nine courses: seven courses as described below, plus two additional courses to be chosen in consultation with the student’s advisor.
- one required course: LLAS 200: Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies.
- one course on U.S. Latinxs in any department.
- one course on Latin America in any department.
- one course on the Caribbean in any department.
- two courses taught in one of the languages spoken in Latin America and the Caribbean, other than English. These courses may focus on the development of language skills, and/or they may be content courses on a subject relevant to the Major.
- a research or methods seminar in any department, with completion of the written project on a topic relevant to LLAS. In order to ensure that the research will be on a topic relevant to LLAS, the research or methods seminar must be approved by both the Major advisor and the professor teaching the course.
LLAS majors may credit up to three courses from another major, provided they fall into one of the categories listed above. In addition, majors must have
- a concentration with at least three courses in one of the following areas: U.S. Latinxs, Latin America, or the Caribbean.
- at least two courses in the humanities and at least two in the social sciences.
- coursework in at least three departments.
- residency requirement: at least five of the nine courses must be taken at Amherst College.
- Capstone Requirement: The capstone requirement will be met through a portfolio of work done in the Major, introduced by a reflective essay that addresses how the interdisciplinary nature of the coursework informs a question or topic of special interest to the student and his/her long-term plans. Students will publicly share these reflections during a LLAS Major Capstone Symposium.
Departmental Honors Program. Candidates for Latin Honors must complete a senior thesis. The work of the thesis may be creative or scholarly in nature. Interested candidates must apply and be accepted by the end of their third year, and must, in addition to the coursework described above, enroll in LLAS 498 and/or 499 during their senior year.
144 Contemporary Dance Technique: Salsa Performance and Culture
(Offered as THDA 144H and LLAS 144H) This class introduces students to beginner-level salsa technique. We will explore the New York Mambo style of salsa, the Caracas street style, as well as elements of the Cuban Casino style. Students will master variations of the salsa basic step, turns, connecting steps, and arm work. Although we will mostly focus on solo practice, we will learn some essential concepts of partnering work based on the principles of leading and following. Toward the end of the semester, students will be able to use the acquired salsa vocabulary as the basis for improvising and choreographing combinations.
Through the study of salsa’s history, political dimensions, lyrical content, and matrilineal legacy, students will develop an understanding of this artistic expression not only as a dance form or musical genre, but also as a unifying voice of resistance and liberation for Caribbean and Latino cultures. Students will be able to recognize the voices of some of the most iconic Salsa artists and appreciate the contributions of some of the most important female Cuban and Cuban-American performers. We will investigate the legacy of Celia Cruz, paying close attention to the design and performance elements that defined her as The Queen of Salsa. Class discussions and brief writing assignments will serve as opportunities to reflect upon readings, documentaries and other information that will expand our understanding of the form.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2021-22.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
200, 206 Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies
(Offered as LLAS 200 and AMST 206) In this course students will become familiar with the major debates that have animated Latinx and Latin American Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the Conquest to the present. Each week students will focus on specific questions such as: Does Latin America have a common culture? Is Latin America part of the Western world? Is Latinx a race or an ethnicity? Is U.S. Latinx identity rooted in Latin America or the United States? Are Latin American nations post-colonial? Was the modern concept of race invented in the Caribbean at the time of the Conquest? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course.
Limited to 15 students. Spring Semester. Professor Coranez Bolton .
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
204 Housing, Urbanization, and Development
(Offered as ARCH 204, ARHA 204, and LLAS 204) This course studies the theory, policy, and practice of low-income housing in marginalized communities worldwide. We study central concepts in housing theory, key issues regarding low-income housing, different approaches to address these issues, and political debates around housing the poor. We use a comparative focus, going back and forth between the cases of the United States and the so-called developing world. By doing this, we engage in a “theory from without” exercise: We attempt to understand the housing problem in the United States from the perspective of the developing world, and vice versa. We study our subject through illustrated lectures, seminar discussions, documentary films, visual analysis exercises, and a field trip.
Limited to 20 students. Spring Semester. Professor Arboleda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2022
205 Finding Your Bilingual Voice
(Offered as SPAN 205 and LLAS 205) Heritage learners of Spanish are students who have grown up speaking, listening, reading and/or writing Spanish with family or in their community. Because of their unique backgrounds, Spanish heritage language learners (SHLLs) are bilingual and bicultural. They function between a Hispanic and an American identity. This fluid and multiple identity can bring challenges, as SHLLs try to fit into both groups. With this in mind, through meaningful activities that focus on students’ experiences and emotions, this Spanish language course will center on bilingualism, specifically through writing, as a necessary means for identity formation. Because in narrating our stories with others, we enact our identities, this course will include an event open to the community that showcases our voices and talents.
Through this course, students will incorporate their personal experience as SHLLs into their coursework. Activities will foster critical thinking, and students will learn to analyze, read, discuss, write, and reflect on issues of language, culture, and identity. Using a student-centered approach, the course will include collaborative brainstorming, free-writing, developing topics of personal importance, and peer and group editing in order to develop students’ writing proficiency and to build community.
This course prepares Spanish heritage language students for advanced-level courses offered by the Spanish Department. Limited to 15 students per section. This course may be counted toward the Spanish Major. The class will be conducted entirely in Spanish, though some assignments can be submitted in English.
Prerequisite: SPAN201, SPAN202 or placement exam.
Consent Required (students must identify as Spanish heritage language students). Spring Semester. Professor Granda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2024
216 Frida and Diego
(Offered as HIST 216 [LA/TC/TE/TR/TS], LLAS 216 [LA, Humanities] and ARHA 216) This course examines the art, lives, and times of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, two of Mexico’s most famous artists. Through discussion, lectures, readings, and visual analysis we will consider the historical and artistic roots of their radical aesthetics as well as the ideals and struggles that shaped their lives. During their era, Kahlo was overshadowed by her husband Rivera, but in recent decades her fame has eclipsed his. To make sense of this we will address the changing meaning of their art over time, especially in relation to markets, social movements, and gender and sexual identities. By the end of the semester, students will have a strong understanding of these two artists and their work, as well as the contexts in which they lived and in which their art continues to circulate, including early twentieth-century Modernism, the Mexican Revolution, indigenismo, the Chicano Movement, and recent efforts toward ethnic and gender inclusion. No prerequisites, open to all years and majors.
Fall semester. Professor Lopez.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2022
225 Latin American Literature in Translation
A joyful introduction to modern Latin American literary classics in translation through the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolano, Clarise Lispector, and others. The discussion-driven classes will focus on aesthetic movements like Magical Realism as well as on the development of national identity, mestizaje, civil unrest, racial and gender relations, humor, translation, and the opposition between Europeanized and indigenous worldviews. Students will delve into canonical poems, stories, essays, and short novels from the seventeenth century to the present that have reshaped the international scene. Language: English.
Limited to 40 students. January term. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in January 2022, Spring 2022
248 Cuba: The Politics of Extremism
(Offered as POSC 248 and LLAS 248) The study of Cuba’s politics presents opportunities to address issues of universal concern to social scientists and humanists in general, not just Latin Americanists. When is it rational to be radical? Why has Cuban politics forced so many individuals to adopt extreme positions? What are the causes of radical revolutions? Is pre-revolutionary Cuba a case of too little development, uneven development or too rapid development? What is the role of leaders: Do they make history, are they the product of history, or are they the makers of unintended histories? Was the revolution inevitable? Was it necessary? How are new (radical) states constructed? What is the role of foreign actors, existing political institutions, ethnicity, nationalism, religion and sexuality in this process? How does a small nation manage to become influential in world affairs, even altering the behavior of superpowers? What are the conditions that account for the survival of authoritarianism? To what extent is the revolution capable of self-reform? Is the current intention of state leaders of pursuing closed politics with open economics viable? What are the most effective mechanisms to change the regime? Why does the embargo survive? Why did Cubans (at home and abroad) care about Elián González? Although the readings will be mostly from social scientists, the course also includes selections from primary sources, literary works and films (of Cuban and non-Cuban origin). As with almost everything in politics, there are more than just two sides to the issue of Cuba. One aim of the course is to expose the students to as many different sides as possible.
Limited to 30 students. Spring semester. Professor Corrales.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2015
260 Art in and out of Latin America
(Offered as ARHA 260 and LLAS 260). This course explores the movement of art both in and out of Latin America in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This includes the forging of a mural movement in Mexico, the cosmopolitan travels of artists to Europe, the export of art to the United States, and the transnational circulation of art and ideas across national contexts within Latin America. In the process, we will explore the sometimes conflicting and sometimes hybrid desires to create local aesthetics in particular places (sometimes drawing on the pre-Columbian past and Indigenous present) and to participate in international, sometimes transcontinental artistic movements and debates. We will also consider the category “Latin American art” as it developed over the course of the twentieth century and how it has both intersected with and stood apart from developments in art elsewhere. A core concern of the class will be the examination of how culture develops in relation to both political and economic shifts in the region and in the world beyond, including in relation to imperialism, the spread of capitalism, the Cold War, Communism, modernization, dictatorship, and globalization.
Limited to 25 people. Spring semester - Assistant Professor Niko Vicario.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023264, 266 Migration Across the Americas
(Offered as AMST 264, LLAS 266, and SOCI 264) This course introduces students to sociological analyses of undocumented migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the United States. An exploration of undocumented immigration demands that we engage with oft-unexamined social and economic contradictions. Namely, whereas capital and culture move freely across most international borders, many people cannot. Walls - physical, legal, and social - aim to keep certain people in and “others” out. Yet, people do cross international borders and many do so without the legal authorization to make their moves formal and secure. In this course we explore the sociological forces behind these insecure migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the US, and the reality of undocumented immigrant life in the United States. While this course has a deep theoretical rooting, we use daily life as the lens through which to explore immigration and enforcement policies, and our individual and collective relationships to them.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Schmalzbauer
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
274, 275 Gender and Slavery in Latin America
(Offered as BLST 275 [CLA], SWAG 274, HIST 275 [LA/TS/TR/ P ] and LLAS 275) Latin American slavery was one of the most brutal institutions the world has ever known, and it affected women and girls, boys and men in profoundly different ways. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of how gender and sexuality affected the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants in Latin America from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Topics will include gender roles in Western Africa and how these diverged from the expectations of Spanish and Portuguese slave masters; the sexual and reproductive as well as labor exploitation of enslaved African women and girls; how enslaved men constructed masculinity within the emasculating institution of slavery; gender relations and family structures within slave communities; childhoods under slavery; and the sometimes distinct visions of freedom imagined by enslaved women and men. Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Regions to be covered include Brazil, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, and the Andean region. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2022
277 Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Offered as BLST 277 [CLA], LLAS 277 and HIST 277 [LA/TS/TR]) The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 with a slave revolt on a single plantation and, after more than a decade of total war, destroyed slavery forever and resulted in the independence of the world's first Black republic. By the end of 1804, the white planter class had been killed or exiled and Black men ruled the island. Before it happened, white slave masters could never imagine that tens of thousands of enslaved Africans would one day break their chains and succeed in defeating French, British, and Spanish armies. For millions of enslaved people, the Haitian Revolution proved that the dream of freedom could become reality and inspired slave conspiracies and rebellions from Virginia to Brazil. At the same time, Haiti struck fear in white slave masters throughout the Americas, who did their best to strangle the new Black Republic in its cradle. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of the origins and development of the Haitian Revolution and its impact in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
278 Black History of Brazil, 1500-1888
(Offered as BLST 278 [CLA], LLAS 278 and HIST 278 [LA/TS/TR/ P ]) More people of African descent live in Brazil than in any country in the world, except Nigeria. Of the more than 12 million Africans deported as captives to the Americas, Brazil received 24 percent. In contrast, North America received less than 4 percent. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth knowledge of the experiences of Africans and their descendants, slave and free, from the time the first captives were brought to Brazil at the beginning of the sixteenth century until final abolition in 1888. Topics will include the ways in which specific regions of Western Africa contributed captives to specific regions of Brazil, the nature of Portuguese colonial institutions and their impact on the lives of Africans and their descendants, resistance and rebellion, routes to freedom, slave and free Black families, and the origins and development of vibrant Afro-Brazilian religions and cultures . Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Spring semester, Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023301 Literature and Culture of the Hispanic World
(Offered as SPAN 301 and LLAS 301) This course provides an introduction to the diverse literatures and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world over the course of six centuries, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Students will learn the tools, language, and critical vocabulary for advanced work reading the canon of Hispanic literatures from Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean Basin, identifying aesthetic trends, historical periods and diverse genres such as poetry, narrative, theater and film. The syllabus will include a wide variety of authors of different national, political, and artistic persuasions and an array of linguistic styles. This course prepares students for advanced work in Spanish and for study abroad.
Requisite SPAN 202 or Spanish Placement Exam. Proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Spanish are required. Limited to 20 students per section. Fall semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton. Spring semester: Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024
308 Contemporary Latinx Literature
(Offered as ENGL 308 and LLAS 308) In this course, we will read and discuss recent works of Latinx literature across genres – novel, poetry, memoir, essay, and YA – in engagement with the live debates surrounding language, race, migration, and global capitalism that shape our definitions of Latinx identity and culture (and of literature itself). We will also experiment with different ways of responding to these literary texts in written forms ranging from creative writing to book review to research prospectus. Possible authors may include: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Dolores Dorantes, Angie Cruz, Valeria Luiselli, Raquel Salas Rivera, Natalie Diaz, Elizabeth Acevedo, and more.
Fall semester. Limited to 20 students. Professor Mireles Christoff.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Fall 2022, Fall 2023
321 Architecture and Violence in the Americas
(Offered as SPAN-321, LLAS-321 and ARCH-321) This course explores historical connections between violence and the built environment in the Americas, from architecture to wastelands, from monuments to mass graves. The class has a twofold objective. On the one hand, we will analyze critical issues concerning the production of the built environment, such as the intersection of race and space or the relationship between state architecture and historical oblivion. On the other hand, we will explore architectures and art projects that actively unsettle colonial legacies and seek to heal historical violence. We will study cases from Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, México and the US, among others. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisites: Spanish 301 or permission of the instructor. Spring Semester. Visiting Professor Ferrari.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023330, 332, 338 Latin American Cinema
(Offered as SPAN 330, SWAG 332, LLAS 330 and FAMS 338) How have Latin Americans represented themselves on the big screen? In this course we will explore this question through close readings of representative films from each of the following major periods: silent cinema (1890s–1930s), studio cinema (1930s–1950s), Neorealism/Art Cinema (1950s), the New Latin American Cinema (1960s–1980s), and contemporary cinema (1990s to today). Throughout the course we will examine evolving representations of modernity and pay special attention to how these representations are linked to different constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. We will conclude the course with a collective screening of video essays created by students in the course. The course is conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 301 or consent of instructor. Spring Semester. Professor Schroeder Rodríguez.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019
342, 343 Comparative Borderlands: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Transnational Perspective
(Offered as SPAN 342, LLAS 343 and SWAG 343) “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out,” Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in the hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera. She was referring to, what she called, the linguistic imperialism of English in the US Southwest. And yet she also carved out a third space for those subjects at the crossroads of multiple ways of being – the queer and the abject. In this course, we will examine cultural and literary texts that speak to the ways that race, gender, and sexual identity are conditioned by the historical development of geopolitical borders. We will pay particular attention to the US-Mexico Borderlands but we will also examine other places in which “borderlands” of identity exist. Course conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Fall Semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Fall 2022
349 Latinx and Puerto Rican Diasporic Cultures in Holyoke
(Offered as SPAN This course will focus on Holyoke, MA as a case study of Latinx Studies and Puerto Rican Studies. Much of our work in the course will focus on Puerto Rico, but we will also familiarize ourselves with foundational work in the general field of Latinx Studies, taking care to place different migrant communities, cultures, and histories in conversation with one another. Students will also engage in collaborative learning projects with partners in the city of Holyoke and neighboring towns with substantial Latinx populations. The course will include students from Amherst College and Holyoke Community College. Class will be conducted in Spanish, but English may be used depending on work with community partners.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Fall Semester: Professor Schroeder Rodríguez
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Spring 2024
355 One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is the best novel ever written in Spanish in the Americas. Appearing inauspiciously in 1967, it became the flagship of the so-called "El Boom," an aesthetic movement that inscribed Latin America in the banquet of world literature. It also inaugurated the style called "lo real maravillioso," loosely translated into English as Magical Realism. The narrative tells the rise and fall of Macondo, a mythical town in Colombia's Caribbean coast. At its center is the Buendias, a family of dreamers and entrepreneurs through whom the history of the entire region is told. It is fair to say that after One Hundred Years of Solitude, which brought Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize, global literature has never been the same. Its influence on figures as diverse as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orham Pamuk, and Mo Yan is enormous and continues to reverberate. The course is structured as a Talmudic (e.g., detailed, contextual, ahistorical) reading of the novel. Other works by the author and his contemporaries will also be discussed. After decades in Spanish, this is the first time the course will be taught in English, meaning that students will engage with the material in Gregory Rabassa's masterful translation. However, native Spanish speakers who choose so will be allowed to immerse themselves in the original and write in Spanish.
Limited to 25 students. Spring Semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2024
485 Telenovelas
(Offered as SPAN 485 and LLAS 485) Arguably the most influential popular form of cultural expression in Latin America, a single episode of any prime-time telenovela is watched by more people than all the accumulated number of Spanish-language readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude over time. The course will explore the historical origin and development of telenovelas as well as various production techniques, the way scripts are shaped and actors are asked to perform, the role of music and other sounds, etc. Each country in the region has its own telenovela tradition. We will look at Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Spanish-language productions of Univisión and Telemundo in the United States, among others. But the main objective of the course will be to analyze the performative nature of emotions in telenovelas and also gender, class, and political tension on the small screen. And we will delve into the strategies various governments have used by means of telenovelas to control the population (“melodrama is the true opium of the masses,” said a prominent Mexican telenovela director), their use as educational devices, and the clash between telenovelas and fútbol in the region’s celebrity ecosystem. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to18 students. Spring Semester: Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020
490 Special Topics
Independent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
498, 499 Senior Honors
Fall semester. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
Related Courses
Honors & Fellowships
Honors & Fellowships
BackLatinx and Latin American Studies
Professors del Moral, R. López (Chair), Schmalzbauer*, and Schroeder Rodríguez; Associate Professor Lohse; Assistant Professors Barba, and Coranez Bolton*.
Affiliated Faculty: Professors Cobham-Sander‡, Corrales*, and Stavans; Associate Professors Arboleda, and Walker*; Assistant Professors Infante, Ravikumar*, Sanchez-Naranjo, and Vicario.
Latinx and Latin American Studies (LLAS) is an interdisciplinary major program designed for students interested in critically examining the diverse histories and cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinxs. Students in the major gain breadth and depth of learning through courses in the humanities and the social sciences that situate these histories and cultures within local, national, regional, hemispheric, and global contexts over time, while practical experiences such as community projects and study abroad provide opportunities to apply this learning in transformative ways.
Major Program. Majoring in LLAS requires the completion of nine courses: seven courses as described below, plus two additional courses to be chosen in consultation with the student’s advisor.
- one required course: LLAS 200: Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies.
- one course on U.S. Latinxs in any department.
- one course on Latin America in any department.
- one course on the Caribbean in any department.
- two courses taught in one of the languages spoken in Latin America and the Caribbean, other than English. These courses may focus on the development of language skills, and/or they may be content courses on a subject relevant to the Major.
- a research or methods seminar in any department, with completion of the written project on a topic relevant to LLAS. In order to ensure that the research will be on a topic relevant to LLAS, the research or methods seminar must be approved by both the Major advisor and the professor teaching the course.
LLAS majors may credit up to three courses from another major, provided they fall into one of the categories listed above. In addition, majors must have
- a concentration with at least three courses in one of the following areas: U.S. Latinxs, Latin America, or the Caribbean.
- at least two courses in the humanities and at least two in the social sciences.
- coursework in at least three departments.
- residency requirement: at least five of the nine courses must be taken at Amherst College.
- Capstone Requirement: The capstone requirement will be met through a portfolio of work done in the Major, introduced by a reflective essay that addresses how the interdisciplinary nature of the coursework informs a question or topic of special interest to the student and his/her long-term plans. Students will publicly share these reflections during a LLAS Major Capstone Symposium.
Departmental Honors Program. Candidates for Latin Honors must complete a senior thesis. The work of the thesis may be creative or scholarly in nature. Interested candidates must apply and be accepted by the end of their third year, and must, in addition to the coursework described above, enroll in LLAS 498 and/or 499 during their senior year.
144 Contemporary Dance Technique: Salsa Performance and Culture
(Offered as THDA 144H and LLAS 144H) This class introduces students to beginner-level salsa technique. We will explore the New York Mambo style of salsa, the Caracas street style, as well as elements of the Cuban Casino style. Students will master variations of the salsa basic step, turns, connecting steps, and arm work. Although we will mostly focus on solo practice, we will learn some essential concepts of partnering work based on the principles of leading and following. Toward the end of the semester, students will be able to use the acquired salsa vocabulary as the basis for improvising and choreographing combinations.
Through the study of salsa’s history, political dimensions, lyrical content, and matrilineal legacy, students will develop an understanding of this artistic expression not only as a dance form or musical genre, but also as a unifying voice of resistance and liberation for Caribbean and Latino cultures. Students will be able to recognize the voices of some of the most iconic Salsa artists and appreciate the contributions of some of the most important female Cuban and Cuban-American performers. We will investigate the legacy of Celia Cruz, paying close attention to the design and performance elements that defined her as The Queen of Salsa. Class discussions and brief writing assignments will serve as opportunities to reflect upon readings, documentaries and other information that will expand our understanding of the form.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2021-22.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
200, 206 Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies
(Offered as LLAS 200 and AMST 206) In this course students will become familiar with the major debates that have animated Latinx and Latin American Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the Conquest to the present. Each week students will focus on specific questions such as: Does Latin America have a common culture? Is Latin America part of the Western world? Is Latinx a race or an ethnicity? Is U.S. Latinx identity rooted in Latin America or the United States? Are Latin American nations post-colonial? Was the modern concept of race invented in the Caribbean at the time of the Conquest? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course.
Limited to 15 students. Spring Semester. Professor Coranez Bolton .
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
204 Housing, Urbanization, and Development
(Offered as ARCH 204, ARHA 204, and LLAS 204) This course studies the theory, policy, and practice of low-income housing in marginalized communities worldwide. We study central concepts in housing theory, key issues regarding low-income housing, different approaches to address these issues, and political debates around housing the poor. We use a comparative focus, going back and forth between the cases of the United States and the so-called developing world. By doing this, we engage in a “theory from without” exercise: We attempt to understand the housing problem in the United States from the perspective of the developing world, and vice versa. We study our subject through illustrated lectures, seminar discussions, documentary films, visual analysis exercises, and a field trip.
Limited to 20 students. Spring Semester. Professor Arboleda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2022
205 Finding Your Bilingual Voice
(Offered as SPAN 205 and LLAS 205) Heritage learners of Spanish are students who have grown up speaking, listening, reading and/or writing Spanish with family or in their community. Because of their unique backgrounds, Spanish heritage language learners (SHLLs) are bilingual and bicultural. They function between a Hispanic and an American identity. This fluid and multiple identity can bring challenges, as SHLLs try to fit into both groups. With this in mind, through meaningful activities that focus on students’ experiences and emotions, this Spanish language course will center on bilingualism, specifically through writing, as a necessary means for identity formation. Because in narrating our stories with others, we enact our identities, this course will include an event open to the community that showcases our voices and talents.
Through this course, students will incorporate their personal experience as SHLLs into their coursework. Activities will foster critical thinking, and students will learn to analyze, read, discuss, write, and reflect on issues of language, culture, and identity. Using a student-centered approach, the course will include collaborative brainstorming, free-writing, developing topics of personal importance, and peer and group editing in order to develop students’ writing proficiency and to build community.
This course prepares Spanish heritage language students for advanced-level courses offered by the Spanish Department. Limited to 15 students per section. This course may be counted toward the Spanish Major. The class will be conducted entirely in Spanish, though some assignments can be submitted in English.
Prerequisite: SPAN201, SPAN202 or placement exam.
Consent Required (students must identify as Spanish heritage language students). Spring Semester. Professor Granda.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2024
216 Frida and Diego
(Offered as HIST 216 [LA/TC/TE/TR/TS], LLAS 216 [LA, Humanities] and ARHA 216) This course examines the art, lives, and times of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, two of Mexico’s most famous artists. Through discussion, lectures, readings, and visual analysis we will consider the historical and artistic roots of their radical aesthetics as well as the ideals and struggles that shaped their lives. During their era, Kahlo was overshadowed by her husband Rivera, but in recent decades her fame has eclipsed his. To make sense of this we will address the changing meaning of their art over time, especially in relation to markets, social movements, and gender and sexual identities. By the end of the semester, students will have a strong understanding of these two artists and their work, as well as the contexts in which they lived and in which their art continues to circulate, including early twentieth-century Modernism, the Mexican Revolution, indigenismo, the Chicano Movement, and recent efforts toward ethnic and gender inclusion. No prerequisites, open to all years and majors.
Fall semester. Professor Lopez.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2022
225 Latin American Literature in Translation
A joyful introduction to modern Latin American literary classics in translation through the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolano, Clarise Lispector, and others. The discussion-driven classes will focus on aesthetic movements like Magical Realism as well as on the development of national identity, mestizaje, civil unrest, racial and gender relations, humor, translation, and the opposition between Europeanized and indigenous worldviews. Students will delve into canonical poems, stories, essays, and short novels from the seventeenth century to the present that have reshaped the international scene. Language: English.
Limited to 40 students. January term. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in January 2022, Spring 2022
248 Cuba: The Politics of Extremism
(Offered as POSC 248 and LLAS 248) The study of Cuba’s politics presents opportunities to address issues of universal concern to social scientists and humanists in general, not just Latin Americanists. When is it rational to be radical? Why has Cuban politics forced so many individuals to adopt extreme positions? What are the causes of radical revolutions? Is pre-revolutionary Cuba a case of too little development, uneven development or too rapid development? What is the role of leaders: Do they make history, are they the product of history, or are they the makers of unintended histories? Was the revolution inevitable? Was it necessary? How are new (radical) states constructed? What is the role of foreign actors, existing political institutions, ethnicity, nationalism, religion and sexuality in this process? How does a small nation manage to become influential in world affairs, even altering the behavior of superpowers? What are the conditions that account for the survival of authoritarianism? To what extent is the revolution capable of self-reform? Is the current intention of state leaders of pursuing closed politics with open economics viable? What are the most effective mechanisms to change the regime? Why does the embargo survive? Why did Cubans (at home and abroad) care about Elián González? Although the readings will be mostly from social scientists, the course also includes selections from primary sources, literary works and films (of Cuban and non-Cuban origin). As with almost everything in politics, there are more than just two sides to the issue of Cuba. One aim of the course is to expose the students to as many different sides as possible.
Limited to 30 students. Spring semester. Professor Corrales.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2015
260 Art in and out of Latin America
(Offered as ARHA 260 and LLAS 260). This course explores the movement of art both in and out of Latin America in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This includes the forging of a mural movement in Mexico, the cosmopolitan travels of artists to Europe, the export of art to the United States, and the transnational circulation of art and ideas across national contexts within Latin America. In the process, we will explore the sometimes conflicting and sometimes hybrid desires to create local aesthetics in particular places (sometimes drawing on the pre-Columbian past and Indigenous present) and to participate in international, sometimes transcontinental artistic movements and debates. We will also consider the category “Latin American art” as it developed over the course of the twentieth century and how it has both intersected with and stood apart from developments in art elsewhere. A core concern of the class will be the examination of how culture develops in relation to both political and economic shifts in the region and in the world beyond, including in relation to imperialism, the spread of capitalism, the Cold War, Communism, modernization, dictatorship, and globalization.
Limited to 25 people. Spring semester - Assistant Professor Niko Vicario.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023264, 266 Migration Across the Americas
(Offered as AMST 264, LLAS 266, and SOCI 264) This course introduces students to sociological analyses of undocumented migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the United States. An exploration of undocumented immigration demands that we engage with oft-unexamined social and economic contradictions. Namely, whereas capital and culture move freely across most international borders, many people cannot. Walls - physical, legal, and social - aim to keep certain people in and “others” out. Yet, people do cross international borders and many do so without the legal authorization to make their moves formal and secure. In this course we explore the sociological forces behind these insecure migrations between Central America, Mexico, and the US, and the reality of undocumented immigrant life in the United States. While this course has a deep theoretical rooting, we use daily life as the lens through which to explore immigration and enforcement policies, and our individual and collective relationships to them.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Schmalzbauer
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
274, 275 Gender and Slavery in Latin America
(Offered as BLST 275 [CLA], SWAG 274, HIST 275 [LA/TS/TR/ P ] and LLAS 275) Latin American slavery was one of the most brutal institutions the world has ever known, and it affected women and girls, boys and men in profoundly different ways. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of how gender and sexuality affected the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants in Latin America from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Topics will include gender roles in Western Africa and how these diverged from the expectations of Spanish and Portuguese slave masters; the sexual and reproductive as well as labor exploitation of enslaved African women and girls; how enslaved men constructed masculinity within the emasculating institution of slavery; gender relations and family structures within slave communities; childhoods under slavery; and the sometimes distinct visions of freedom imagined by enslaved women and men. Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Regions to be covered include Brazil, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, and the Andean region. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2022
277 Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Offered as BLST 277 [CLA], LLAS 277 and HIST 277 [LA/TS/TR]) The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 with a slave revolt on a single plantation and, after more than a decade of total war, destroyed slavery forever and resulted in the independence of the world's first Black republic. By the end of 1804, the white planter class had been killed or exiled and Black men ruled the island. Before it happened, white slave masters could never imagine that tens of thousands of enslaved Africans would one day break their chains and succeed in defeating French, British, and Spanish armies. For millions of enslaved people, the Haitian Revolution proved that the dream of freedom could become reality and inspired slave conspiracies and rebellions from Virginia to Brazil. At the same time, Haiti struck fear in white slave masters throughout the Americas, who did their best to strangle the new Black Republic in its cradle. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth understanding of the origins and development of the Haitian Revolution and its impact in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Fall semester. Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
278 Black History of Brazil, 1500-1888
(Offered as BLST 278 [CLA], LLAS 278 and HIST 278 [LA/TS/TR/ P ]) More people of African descent live in Brazil than in any country in the world, except Nigeria. Of the more than 12 million Africans deported as captives to the Americas, Brazil received 24 percent. In contrast, North America received less than 4 percent. This readings-based course features both secondary and primary sources. Students will gain in-depth knowledge of the experiences of Africans and their descendants, slave and free, from the time the first captives were brought to Brazil at the beginning of the sixteenth century until final abolition in 1888. Topics will include the ways in which specific regions of Western Africa contributed captives to specific regions of Brazil, the nature of Portuguese colonial institutions and their impact on the lives of Africans and their descendants, resistance and rebellion, routes to freedom, slave and free Black families, and the origins and development of vibrant Afro-Brazilian religions and cultures . Select primary documents will acquaint students with the sources historians use to reconstruct these aspects of the histories of largely non-literate African-descended peoples. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a series of weekly reading notes, and two short papers.
Spring semester, Professor Lohse.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023301 Literature and Culture of the Hispanic World
(Offered as SPAN 301 and LLAS 301) This course provides an introduction to the diverse literatures and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world over the course of six centuries, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Students will learn the tools, language, and critical vocabulary for advanced work reading the canon of Hispanic literatures from Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean Basin, identifying aesthetic trends, historical periods and diverse genres such as poetry, narrative, theater and film. The syllabus will include a wide variety of authors of different national, political, and artistic persuasions and an array of linguistic styles. This course prepares students for advanced work in Spanish and for study abroad.
Requisite SPAN 202 or Spanish Placement Exam. Proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Spanish are required. Limited to 20 students per section. Fall semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton. Spring semester: Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024
308 Contemporary Latinx Literature
(Offered as ENGL 308 and LLAS 308) In this course, we will read and discuss recent works of Latinx literature across genres – novel, poetry, memoir, essay, and YA – in engagement with the live debates surrounding language, race, migration, and global capitalism that shape our definitions of Latinx identity and culture (and of literature itself). We will also experiment with different ways of responding to these literary texts in written forms ranging from creative writing to book review to research prospectus. Possible authors may include: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Dolores Dorantes, Angie Cruz, Valeria Luiselli, Raquel Salas Rivera, Natalie Diaz, Elizabeth Acevedo, and more.
Fall semester. Limited to 20 students. Professor Mireles Christoff.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Fall 2022, Fall 2023
321 Architecture and Violence in the Americas
(Offered as SPAN-321, LLAS-321 and ARCH-321) This course explores historical connections between violence and the built environment in the Americas, from architecture to wastelands, from monuments to mass graves. The class has a twofold objective. On the one hand, we will analyze critical issues concerning the production of the built environment, such as the intersection of race and space or the relationship between state architecture and historical oblivion. On the other hand, we will explore architectures and art projects that actively unsettle colonial legacies and seek to heal historical violence. We will study cases from Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, México and the US, among others. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisites: Spanish 301 or permission of the instructor. Spring Semester. Visiting Professor Ferrari.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023330, 332, 338 Latin American Cinema
(Offered as SPAN 330, SWAG 332, LLAS 330 and FAMS 338) How have Latin Americans represented themselves on the big screen? In this course we will explore this question through close readings of representative films from each of the following major periods: silent cinema (1890s–1930s), studio cinema (1930s–1950s), Neorealism/Art Cinema (1950s), the New Latin American Cinema (1960s–1980s), and contemporary cinema (1990s to today). Throughout the course we will examine evolving representations of modernity and pay special attention to how these representations are linked to different constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. We will conclude the course with a collective screening of video essays created by students in the course. The course is conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 301 or consent of instructor. Spring Semester. Professor Schroeder Rodríguez.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2019
342, 343 Comparative Borderlands: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Transnational Perspective
(Offered as SPAN 342, LLAS 343 and SWAG 343) “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out,” Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in the hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera. She was referring to, what she called, the linguistic imperialism of English in the US Southwest. And yet she also carved out a third space for those subjects at the crossroads of multiple ways of being – the queer and the abject. In this course, we will examine cultural and literary texts that speak to the ways that race, gender, and sexual identity are conditioned by the historical development of geopolitical borders. We will pay particular attention to the US-Mexico Borderlands but we will also examine other places in which “borderlands” of identity exist. Course conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Fall Semester: Professor Coráñez Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Fall 2022
349 Latinx and Puerto Rican Diasporic Cultures in Holyoke
(Offered as SPAN This course will focus on Holyoke, MA as a case study of Latinx Studies and Puerto Rican Studies. Much of our work in the course will focus on Puerto Rico, but we will also familiarize ourselves with foundational work in the general field of Latinx Studies, taking care to place different migrant communities, cultures, and histories in conversation with one another. Students will also engage in collaborative learning projects with partners in the city of Holyoke and neighboring towns with substantial Latinx populations. The course will include students from Amherst College and Holyoke Community College. Class will be conducted in Spanish, but English may be used depending on work with community partners.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Fall Semester: Professor Schroeder Rodríguez
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Spring 2024
355 One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is the best novel ever written in Spanish in the Americas. Appearing inauspiciously in 1967, it became the flagship of the so-called "El Boom," an aesthetic movement that inscribed Latin America in the banquet of world literature. It also inaugurated the style called "lo real maravillioso," loosely translated into English as Magical Realism. The narrative tells the rise and fall of Macondo, a mythical town in Colombia's Caribbean coast. At its center is the Buendias, a family of dreamers and entrepreneurs through whom the history of the entire region is told. It is fair to say that after One Hundred Years of Solitude, which brought Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize, global literature has never been the same. Its influence on figures as diverse as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orham Pamuk, and Mo Yan is enormous and continues to reverberate. The course is structured as a Talmudic (e.g., detailed, contextual, ahistorical) reading of the novel. Other works by the author and his contemporaries will also be discussed. After decades in Spanish, this is the first time the course will be taught in English, meaning that students will engage with the material in Gregory Rabassa's masterful translation. However, native Spanish speakers who choose so will be allowed to immerse themselves in the original and write in Spanish.
Limited to 25 students. Spring Semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2024
485 Telenovelas
(Offered as SPAN 485 and LLAS 485) Arguably the most influential popular form of cultural expression in Latin America, a single episode of any prime-time telenovela is watched by more people than all the accumulated number of Spanish-language readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude over time. The course will explore the historical origin and development of telenovelas as well as various production techniques, the way scripts are shaped and actors are asked to perform, the role of music and other sounds, etc. Each country in the region has its own telenovela tradition. We will look at Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Spanish-language productions of Univisión and Telemundo in the United States, among others. But the main objective of the course will be to analyze the performative nature of emotions in telenovelas and also gender, class, and political tension on the small screen. And we will delve into the strategies various governments have used by means of telenovelas to control the population (“melodrama is the true opium of the masses,” said a prominent Mexican telenovela director), their use as educational devices, and the clash between telenovelas and fútbol in the region’s celebrity ecosystem. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to18 students. Spring Semester: Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2020
490 Special Topics
Independent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Fall 2022
498, 499 Senior Honors
Fall semester. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023