RACIAL FORMATION AND WHITENESS

CHICLA/HISTORY 153

Examines the historical, social, and legal experiences of Latinas/Latinos/Latinxs in the US since the mid-1800s with emphasis on Mexican migrations. Latinxs became an important part of the US population through western expansion, conquest, and immigration. We will learn about the 3 main Latinx groups in the US: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans, but will also learn about other Latinx communities. We begin with an examination of conquest by studying the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that annexed roughly half of former Mexican territory and the Spanish-American War that resulted in the possession of Puerto Rico. Then, we examine the history of Latinx immigration to understand the experiences of Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americans, and people from the Caribbean who have immigrated to the US in search of economic opportunities and political asylum. This course serves as an introduction to the varied experiences of Latinxs in the US in order to understand their unique histories.

CHICLA/GEN&WS 332

Explores the multiracial and multicultural reality of Latina societies by becoming familiar with the history and cultures of Chicana, Cuban-American, and Puerto Rican women. Interdisciplinary readings in law, journalism, public policy, history, and self-reflective literature.

CHICLA/SPANISH 222

Offers an introduction to the culture and history of the Mexican and Latin American origin people in the United States. Emphasis on diversity, emergence of new imagined communities, and cultural hybridity. Focusing on key issues such as U.S. imperial expansion, colonialism, nation and community formations, migration, urban spaces, and the dynamics of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, study a range of socio-political, historical, literary, and artistic expressions that inform the whole process of culture and reveal the way Latinos and Latinas negotiate their presence, cultural difference, and creativity in the U.S.

CHICLA/ENGL 460

Chicanxs and Latinxs are frequently imagined in ways that erase the history, presence, and influence of African-descended peoples within these groups. However, this anti-Blackness does not go unanswered in Chicanx and Latinx cultural production. Covers literature, life-writing/autoethnography, visual culture, philosophy/theory, and history that takes up Black Latinx experience and/or that comparatively explores the African American and Latinx convergences, exploring a rich vein of thought and representation in U.S. literatures that is often more transamerican than American and that offers new definitions of both Latinx and Black. Readings on racial paradigms in the Americas, paying attention to the differences between US and Latin American contexts, as well readings on decoloniality, intersectional feminisms, borderlands, and diaspora.

CHICLA 301

Examines the history of the making of a people from pre-hispanic time to the present. Examines how people of Mexican and Latin American descent in the United States have come to think of themselves as constituting a collectivity by examining the social, cultural, and political worlds of Chicana/os and Latina/os.