Latinx and Latin Amer Studies

2020-21

135 Race and Religion in the U.S. West/Mexico Borderlands

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2021, Spring 2025

144H Contemporary Dance Technique: Salsa Performance and Culture

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2021

186 Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Fall 2024

200 Major Debates in Latinx and Latin American Studies

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.

Professor Coráñez Bolton will be offering this course completely online via Zoom. The class will have a mix of synchronous “live” class meetings and some asynchronous components via Moodle (discussion threads, recorded lecture materials and presentations, etc). The class will also feature some live online screenings of relevant documentaries and films to encourage a community of viewership. While there will be some asynchronous work, a greater emphasis will be on synchronous class meetings and discussions. This class will require several short oral reading presentations, one longer formal oral presentation, and an analytical essay of approximately 7-10 pages. For the final projects, students will have latitude to prepare something more free-form, artistic, literary, or visual if it is desired and always in consultation with the professor.

Limited to 15 students.

Fall semester. Professor Sony Coranez Bolton.

Other years: Offered in Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025

201 Power and Resistance in the Black Atlantic

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Spring 2018, Spring 2020, Spring 2021

204 Housing, Urbanization, and Development

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025

205 Owning the Bilingual Self

Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2023, Spring 2025

208 Spain and the Pacific World, 1571-1898

2023-24: Not offered

234 The Sanctuary Movement: Religion, Activism, and Social Contestation

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2024

240 Religion on the Move: Religion and Migration in North America

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2020

248 Cuba: The Politics of Extremism

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2015, Spring 2023

250 Being Human in STEM

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, January 2021, January 2022, Spring 2022

261 History of Central America

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021

262 Latin America and the United States

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Fall 2020

263 Struggles for Democracy in Modern Latin America, 1820 to the Present

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2007, Fall 2008, Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Fall 2017, Fall 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2022

264 Introduction to Latin America: Conquest, Colonization and Rebellion

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Spring 2020, Fall 2021

301 Literature and Culture of the Hispanic World

Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025

330 Latinx Religion

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2023, Fall 2024

341 Mexican Rebels 

(Offered as LLAS 341 and HIST 341 [LA, TE, TS]) What inspires individuals to risk everything to try to change their world? Students will attempt to answer this question through cases ranging from personal acts of rebellion, to social movements and armed conflict. The course pays close attention to personal acts of rebellion against repressive racial, political, and gender structures, focusing on such figures as Hernán Córtes’s legendary consort La Malinche (Malintzin Tenepal), the seventeenth-century protofeminist Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, the transgender revolutionary general Amelia/o Robles Ávila, and the artists Gerardo Murillo, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. We also will address armed conflicts such as the Tlaxcalan war against the Aztec Empire, the Wars of Independence (1810-1821), the Maya uprising against white domination in the second half of the nineteenth century, guerrilla resistance against US and French invasions in the 1840s and 1860s, the War of Reform (1857-1860), the Cristero War (1926-1929), the Zapatista uprising of the 1990s, and, most importantly, the Mexican Revolution of (1910-1921). And we will examine social protests, such as the student movement that ended in the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968, El Barzón, #YoSoy132, MORENA, APPO, the Ayotzinapa protests, and peasant ecology initiatives.

Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor R. Lopez.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2021

342 Marxism and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Latin America

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2018, Fall 2019

343 Comparative Borderlands: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Transnational Perspective

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Fall 2022

344 The Cuban Revolution, 1959–2009

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2020

345 Gender and Sexuality in Latin America

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2016, Fall 2019, Spring 2021

346 Indigenous Histories of Latin America

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2020

362 Childhood in African and Caribbean Literature

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2007, Fall 2009, Spring 2011, Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Fall 2015, Spring 2020

375 Amherst Latinx Lives

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2020

455 One Hundred Years of Solitude

A patient, detailed, Talmudic reading of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, Cien años de soledad, known as “the Bible of Latin America.” The course sets it in biographical, historical, and aesthetic context. Conducted in Spanish.

Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Stavans. 

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2009, Spring 2013, Fall 2015, Fall 2018, Spring 2021

461 The Creole Imagination

Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2015, Spring 2018, Spring 2020, Fall 2023

485 Telenovelas

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Spring 2023

490 Special Topics

Independent reading course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023

498, 499 Senior Honors

Spring semester. The Department.

Other years: Offered in Spring 2023

Related Courses

- (Course not offered this year.)ARHA-255 Latin American Art: Strategies and Tactics (Course not offered this year.)BLST-201 Power and Resistance in the Black Atlantic (Course not offered this year.)HIST-263 Struggles for Democracy in Modern Latin America, 1820 to the Present (Course not offered this year.)HIST-345 Gender and Sexuality in Latin America (Course not offered this year.)POSC-307 States of Extraction: Nature, Women, and World Politics (Course not offered this year.)POSC-421 Indigenous World Politics (Course not offered this year.)SPAN-301 Literature and Culture of the Hispanic World (Course not offered this year.)