In 2006, the massive nation-wide May Day protests and marches, were not only emblematic of immigrantworker resistance, but a turning point in evolving Latina/o/x pan-ethnoracial identities. Through the rallying cry of “Day Without an Immigrant,” across cities from Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago to Atlanta, diverse peoples of the United States became exposed to the fundamental ways Latin@/x populations are embedded within the very fabric of the nation through their endless labor, contributions, innovations, and community-building. In this introductory course, students study the field of Mexican American and Latina/o/x Studies as an interdisciplinary and intersectional arena of academic inquiry, which centers on challenging and dismantling the inherent inequalities and multiple oppressions foundational to the making of the United States through the eyes of the Mexican American, Chican@/x, Latin@/x experience. We survey the historical, political, socioeconomic, and cultural fabric, which shapes this heterogenous populace and examine the formation of Latin@/xs as an ethnoracial group(s) in the United States. We explore the multifaceted histories of colonialism in the Americas and U.S. imperialism through an investigation of transnational, transborder contexts of corporate, military, and political interventions that have (re)defined national boundaries and human migrations in the Americas. Last, students use an intersectional approach to unravel how race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, language, migration, indigeneity, and citizenship are integral to the multiplicity identities forming Latinidad.

This course introduces students to a variety of theoretical and substantive issues covered under the interdisciplinary rubric of Cultural Studies. Focusing primarily on the Mexican American historical, cultural, literary, and social experience, students will read and discuss a wide range of materials that explore and represent the general framework of Cultural Studies. A partial listing of this framework includes literary production, cultural critique, historical analysis, media studies and ways of knowing. This course focuses on distinct ways of “thinking” within cultural criticism, and their utility in the study of Mexican America and LatinX experience. A particular focus of this class is the relationship between representation and the production of difference: racial, gender, class, and other forms of social cleavage.

Among the many catalysts that centralized the narratives of Chicanas into the discourse the U.S. Southwest/Mexican Borderlands, the 1971 La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza in Houston inspired how Chicanas/Xicanas, xicanindias, mestizas, indigenous, Mexican American, and brown women defined themselves, asserted their roles and identities, and shared their stories. This course privileges the stories, struggles, contestations, imaginations, writings, and accomplishments of Chicanas in the United States in the mid-twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries. Through a close examination of literature, and attention to historical and theoretical materials, we will create a growing understanding of the significance of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, language, spirituality, and citizenship in affecting the daily lives and social worlds of Chicanas. By end of the semester, we will also gain a complex insight into the importance of how Chicana feminism, Xicanisma, intersectionality, migration, borders, and community are formative in the Chicana experience(s).

Among the many catalysts that centralized the narratives of Chicanas into the discourse the U.S. Southwest/Mexican Borderlands, the 1971 La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza in Houston inspired how Chicanas/Xicanas, xicanindias, mestizas, indigenous, Mexican American, and brown women defined themselves, asserted their roles and identities, and shared their stories. This course privileges the stories, struggles, contestations, imaginations, writings, and accomplishments of Chicanas in the United States in the mid-twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries. Through a close examination of literature, and attention to historical and theoretical materials, we will create a growing understanding of the significance of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, language, spirituality, and citizenship in affecting the daily lives and social worlds of Chicanas. By end of the semester, we will also gain a complex insight into the importance of how Chicana feminism, Xicanisma, intersectionality, migration, borders, and community are formative in the Chicana experience(s).

E 314V  l  3-Mexican American Literature and Culture

Instructor:  Cdebaca, L

Unique #:  35920

Semester:  Fall 2021

Cross-lists:  MAS 314, 40830

Prerequisites:  One of the following: E 303C (or 603A), RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 303C (or 603A).

Description:  The stories Chicanas/os tell about Mexico reveal the manifold ways in which we imagine Chicanidad, or Chicana/o identities.  By examining how Mexican American authors construct “Mexico” as a political force, a spiritual homeland, and an imagined nation, this course explores the place of Mexico in twentieth and twenty-first century Chicana/o narrative.  Examining questions of indigenism, spirituality, mestizaje, gender, class, migration, and popular culture, the course will survey how Mexican Americans define Mexicanidad (Mexicanness) and how Mexican identity and nationalism affect Chicana/o identity and questions of borders, cultural nationalisms, and transnationalisms.  Complicating a neat dialectic, we’ll also examine the works of Mexican authors and artists who look to Chicana/o cultural productions to complement their own understanding of Mexicanidad.  Pairing short stories, novels, autobiography, live performance, and film with histories and criticism, we will discuss the various ways in which narratives shape material realities, allowing us to envision nations and cultures as shared, contested, mediated, and imagined spaces of story

Texts:  Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories; Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father; Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter; Nina Marie Martínez, ¡Caramba!: A Tale Told in Turns of the Card.

Course Packet with Selections from:  Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude; Guillermo Gómez-Peña, New World Border; Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza; Miguel León-Portilla, In the Language of Kings; Josefina Niggli, Selected plays.

Requirements & Grading:  Attendance/Participation (10%); Weekly Reading Journals (30%); 2 Critical Analysis Essays (30%; Cultural Readership Research Project (30%).

While this course’s title suggest that the span of the class material covered will begin with a visual cultural analysis of Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa, and will end with Selena, the Queen of Tejano, these two figures only conceptually bookend the ideas that will be explored during the semester. This class will begin by sampling a number of performances of Latinas in popular cultural texts to get lay the ground for the analytical and conceptual frameworks that we will be exploring during the semester. First of all, in a workshop format, we will learn to analyze cultural texts that are visual and movement-based. We will, for example, learn to write performance and visual analysis by collectively learning and putting into practice vocabulary connected to the body in movement, space(s), and visual references (from color to specific ethnic tropes). Second, we will begin to explore the ways in which Latinas have been hypervisible and invisible at the same time, both in culture and in society at large. The class asks the following: how can we reconcile that the notion of Queen, as signaled by these two figures, or, in general, the notion of Diva, used to signal a performance of virtuosity and excellence, which merited adoration, can co-exist in a society where Latinas are devalued?

By combining methods from Latinx Studies and Performance Studies, where embodied practices and representations of race and ethnicity are conjoined in our analysis, we will have a wider understanding of Latinas in popular culture in the United States beginning in the early 20th Century. To that end, this class will examine figures in US 20th and 21st centuries popular culture that have enriched some cultural industries, specifically Hollywood and the music industry, yet have been exceedingly exoticized, discriminated because of race and gender, and marginalized or rendered invisible. By being attendant to the conventions that have manufactured certain representations, that is, by learning to analyze performance texts in popular culture, the students will come to understand not only questions of gender and race and ethnicity as important analytics, but will also become conversant in the theories and practices of performance. Some of the figures that we will study include: Carmen Miranda, Lupe Vélez, Dolores del Río, María Montez, Rita Moreno, Celia Cruz, La Lupe, La India, Jennifer López, Selena, Shakira, Cardi B.

The reading and lecture course examines the historical development of the Mexican community in the United States since 1848, with an emphasis on the period between 1900 and the present.  The primary purpose of the course is to address time and place specific variations in the incorporation of the Mexican community as a national minority and bottom segment of the U.S. working class.  One of my central concerns is to explain two inter-related historical trends in this incorporation, steady upward mobility and unrelenting social marginalization.  I emphasize work experiences, race thinking, social relations, trans-border relations, social causes and larger themes in U.S. history such as wars, sectional differences, industrialization, reform, labor and civil rights struggles, and the development of a modern urbanized society. Also, I incorporate relevant aspects of the history of Latinos, African Americans, and Mexico.

Description:  Widely considered a wellspring for U.S. greatness, immigration has also been an abiding site of our deepest conflicts.  The republican foundations of the United States with its promises of democracy and equality for all seem to strain against ever increasing numbers of immigrants from parts of the world barely conceived of by the Founding Fathers, much less as sources of new citizens.  What is the breaking point for the assimilating powers of U.S. democracy and how much does national vitality rely upon continued influxes of a diversity of immigrants with their strenuous ambitions and resourcefulness?  Today we remain embattled by such competing beliefs about how immigration shapes our nation’s well-being and to what ends we should constrain whom we admit and in what numbers.  

This survey emphasizes the following themes:  the changing population of the United States from colonial times; ethnic cultures, communities, and cuisines; ideologies concerning eligibility for citizenship and for restricting immigration; the development of immigration law as an aspect of sovereign authority; the entwining of immigration policy with international relations; and the evolution of institutions for immigration enforcement.   

This course may be used to fulfill three hours of the U.S. history component of the university core curriculum and addresses the following four core objectives established by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board: communication skills, critical thinking skills, personal responsibility, and social responsibility.  

This course also carries the flag for Cultural Diversity in the United States. Cultural Diversity courses are designed to increase your familiarity with the variety and richness of American cultural experiences. A substantial portion of your grade stems from assignments concerning the practices, beliefs, and histories of at least one U.S. cultural group that has experienced persistent marginalization.  


Texts/Readings: *main texts are on 2-hour reserve at PCL
*Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (Harper Perennial, 2002 edition)
Supplemental readings are available on Canvas


Grade Distribution: Final grades will be allocated as follows: A 93-100; A- 90-92; B+ 88-89; B 83-87; B- 80-82; C+ 78-79; C 73-77; C- 70-72 and so forth  
    Family Immigration Narrative:  10%; 2-page essay
    Midterm: 20% bluebook exam; short essay IDs
Final: 30% bluebook exam; short essay IDs and long essay
    Attendance and class participation: 15%
    Primary document analysis: 25% research and 4-5 page essay

Over the last decade, new social media platforms and digital tools have enabled a resurgence of identitarian, anti-racist, feminist, and queer mobilizations online that have transformed digital space into deeply contested public square.  This course explores how Latinx communities—traditionally figured as on the wrong side of the “digital divide”—have embraced, mobilized, and sometimes usurped these digital tools and spaces to forge community and create new forms of culture, memory, and activism. Over the course of the semester, we will examine a wide array of digital modalities from social media to digital art, memory, and activism, with an aim to better understand how Latinx publics are forged online. We will pay particular attention to the different ways in which the Latinx diaspora (across and within the U.S. Mexico and Latin America) have used digital tools to build community across transnational borders, claim belonging, and decolonize digital culture.

This course examines Mexican American history from the point of view of three distinct places: Los Angeles, the mountains of northern New Mexico, and the far southern tip of Texas. These locales, one urban, another remote and isolated, and another rural but connected to larger networks of trade, are not representative of Mexican American history as a whole. That is a story too vast and complicated to cover in a single semester except as an introductory survey. This course is not a survey. Instead, it is meant to introduce students to the geographic and cultural diversity of Mexican America by doing a deep dive into three separate histories. 

Course Description, Expectations, and Objectives: This course focuses on the basic history of Texas after 1900.  While major events such as the Great Depression, World War II, and the oil price bust of the 1980s will be covered, emphasis will be given on how and why Texas, its culture, and its groups of people changed and did not change over time.  Among the goals and objectives are for all students to understand how and why Texas was and was not like the regions and countries on its borders, what caused change or the absence of change, and what influenced the particular path to the 21st century of all Texans.    
   I expect you to attend and participate in class, do the readings, and move beyond a simple mastery of factual information.  It is my hope that by the end of the semester you will think and act like an historian by engaging in the debate about the past and by using primary source material, the ideas and insights of trained professional historians, and your own critical thinking skills to place your understanding of the Texas past on a firm foundation.  The readings and assignments in this course are designed to help you achieve these objectives by building skills as well as knowledge, and you will be graded not only on your mastery of basic factual information but on your ability to effectively organize and utilize that information.   

Main skills and attitudes to be developed:
    1.  Critical Thinking (to include creative thinking, innovation, inquiry, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of information).
    2.  Communication (to include effective development, interpretation and expression of ideas through written, oral, and visual communication).
    3.  Social Responsibility (to include intercultural competence, knowledge of civic responsibility, and the ability to engage effectively in regional, national, and global communities).
    4.  Personal Responsibility (to include the ability to connect choices, actions, and consequences to ethical decision-making).

Student Learning Outcomes:   During the semester, students will:
    1.  enhance their ability to ask questions of, accurately evaluate, and effectively synthesize primary and secondary historical writings.
    2.  develop the ability to effectively express their own ideas in written and oral form.
    3.  expand their knowledge of the historical and social contexts that created diversity in past and present human cultures.
    4.  apply knowledge about the human condition—in the past and present—to their personal lives and studies.

Prerequisites:   None


How to be successful in this course:
      READINGS:  Complete each assignment before the next one begins and do not get behind.
     WRITTEN WORK: Good writing requires rewriting.  Complete the first draft of your written assignment well before the due date and then let it sit for 24 hours.  After that go back and edit it for clarity, style, and meaning.  Ask yourself if it is well written and understandable.
     DISCUSSION POSTS: Be thoughtful and base what you post on evidence and information from your readings, research, and lectures.  Quality is more important than quantity.
     FINAL EXAM: Make sure that you have completed all the readings and edited and gone over your notes before the last class day.  Think of the final exam as a combination and culmination of all we have done in the course.  Take the lessons you have learned about critical thinking, analyzing evidence, and making decisions about the past and use them to prepare for the final.  Remember that I expect you to think, communicate, and act like an historian by May 14.


Required Readings:
Rebecca Sharpless, Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940
Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas
Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show
Brian D. Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas



Grading Assessment:
Discussion/Posts and Questions    18%
Reflection Papers             36%Research Note            24%            
Final Exam                22%    
        
Grading Scale:
A    93-100    A-     90-92
B+    87-89        B    83-86        B-    80-82
C+    77-79        C    73-76        C-    70-72
D+    67-69        D    63-66        D    60-62
F    59 and below

This course is designed to introduce students to key theories, trends and perspectives within the contemporary field of study loosely categorized as “queer migration,” with a primary (though not sole) focus on the context of the United States. This course will consider both historical and contemporary examples that reveal the complex relationships between and among race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, belonging, and borders within the contexts of global capitalism, settler colonialism, and transnational relationships among nation-states.

Emerging out of the social protest movements of the 1960’s, Chicana Feminists offered an alternative mapping of feminist literary and political thought with the issues of gender, race, and sexuality as their primary concerns. In this course, we will examine what constitutes Chicana Feminism in its multiple incarnations, both historically and epistemologically. Tracing Chicana feminist theory as it broke off from Chicano nationalist politics of the 1960’s, to a politics that is concerned with practices of communal feminism that encompasses men and women of the working classes, we will examine how it has shifted and changed over time. We will also look at how Chicana feminist thought breaks with and intersects with Euro-American or European models of feminism. In addition, we will examine the ways in which Chicana Feminists have moved towards a more third-world and/or transnational model of feminism that takes into account the inequities that exist between first and third world subjects. Through the study of essays, history, archives, performance, and literatures that engage feminism, we will discuss how material conditions, spirituality, gender inequality, class inequality, racial inequality, and questions of sexuality allow Chicana women to engage in activities that we might understand as feminist.

This course examines the intersection between Latinx feminism and health justice activism. The course begins with an overview of Latinx feminisms, emphasizing how questions of wellbeing, care and healing have been central to the development of Latinx feminist theory and activism, and continues with an analysis of Latinx expressive culture (film, music, visual art and literature) that contain feminist engagements with the idea of health. Topics addressed throughout the semester are likely to include many of the following: mental health, diabetes, sexuality, intimate partner violence, body love and fat activism, reproductive justice, environmental justice, safety at work, and transgender health.

With the publication of Entre Guadalupe y Malinche, editors Inés Hernández-Ávila and Norma Elia Cantú solidify their mandate to legitimize Tejan@/x Studies as an arena worthy of ongoing research, study, and comprehension. Furthermore, they center the narratives of Tejanas as a necessary part of the conversation to understand this emergent field of inquiry and integral to Chicana Studies. In this course, we investigate the history of Tejanas to reaffirm and reclaim their place and role in the histories of Native Americans, woman, Chican@/xs, Greater Mexico, and the United States. We will further explore how transfronterizismo and transregionalism complicate this history. Last, we will contemplate how their stories are fundamental to illuminating the struggles, resistance, and liberation of Chicanas, xicanindias, mestizas, and afromexicanas from precontact to decolonization.

E 348C  l  Julia Alvarez and Sandra Cisneros

Instructor:  García, P

Unique #:  36508

Semester:  Fall 2021

Cross-lists:  MAS 345C, xxxxx; WGS 340.86, xxxxx

Prerequisites:  Upper-division standing.

Description:  The careers of two of the most important Latina writers of the last 30 years, Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez, cover multiple genres:  short fiction, novels, poetry, children’s and young adult literature, and non-fiction.  Moreover, the construction of ethnic and gendered identity within their works creates a Latino/a aesthetics, especially in considering the merging of author and speaker, fiction and history, and, stylistically, poetic and prose voices.  Through our readings and discussions, we will also compare their different ethnic experiences in the United States as Mexican American and Caribbean/Dominican American writers.  In addition to writing analytical essays, students will also construct and present a bibliography of secondary resources and literary criticism on the author of his/her choice.

Texts: 

Cisneros:  “Woman Hollering Creek” and Other Stories; Caramelo; The House on Mango Street; Loose Woman.

Alvarez:  How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; ¡Yo!; In the Time of the Butterflies; How Tia Lola Came to Visit Stay; The Woman I Keep to Myself.

Requirements & Grading:  Class participation and attendance (10%); Peer Response Workshops (10%); Essays (2 total; Essay 1 will undergo a substantial revision after peer workshop and instructor feedback (60%); Bibliography and Presentation (20%)

E 342M  l  Life and Literature of the US-Mexico Borderlands

Instructor:  Cuevas, T

Unique #:  36464

Semester:  Fall 2021

Cross-listings:  MAS 345D, xxxxx

HYBRID/BLENDED:  This course will include a mix of in-person and online sessions designated by the instructor over the course of the semester.

Prerequisite:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  Through collective study, we will examine how Chicanx, Latinx, and other writers narrate, imagine, theorize, and reshape the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands as a geographic region and discursive construction.  Through class discussions and close readings of short stories, novels, plays, poetry, and films, we will consider how the texts contend with questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, geopolitics, genre, and other concerns.  We will consider various critical approaches—such as regional, transnational, and decolonial—in an effort to deepen our understanding of the texts and the sociohistorical conditions that characterize this liminal, dynamic region.

Tentative Reading List:  Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus; Arturo Islas, The Rain God; Oscar Casares, Brownsville; Virginia Grise, Blu; Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem; Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World; additional readings posted in Canvas. Films TBD.

Requirements & Grading (subject to change upon notice):  Discussion participation, weekly reading annotations, 2 critical response papers (4-5 pages each), final research project.

This course examines the interconnectedness of Mexican American history and environmental studies. It is not designed to be an exhaustive survey of either. Rather, we will orient our discussions around two crucial historical-ecological contexts: the desert and commercial agriculture.

A bilingual is defined as an individual who functions in more than one language on a regular basis. This course will provide an introduction to classic and recent work on bilingualism from psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. After reviewing basic concepts and methods in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics the course will address empirical studies and theoretical frameworks related to such topics as stages of bilingual language acquisition and the role of age of acquisition, how bilinguals perceive and segment speech sounds, how word meanings are accessed and stored, how sentences are understood and planned, how characteristics of written language affect reading, how mixed language utterances are processed, how bilingualism  is perceived  in the United States, the historical contexts of bilingualism, and bilingual education. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the topic we will draw on research from cognitive psychology, (socio)linguistics, computer science, education, and neuroscience. Students will have the opportunity to apply course concepts by making their own bilingualism related internet memes and Spotify playlists. This course will consist of lectures, discussion, as well as in-class discussion of readings led by students.

The course provides an introduction Latinx psychology regarding historical, cultural, economic, psychological, and political factors about the experiences and value orientations of U.S. Latinxs The purpose of this course is to examine the psychological research and literature related to the experiences of Latinxs in the U.S. through readings, media, and class discussions. As this course is interdisciplinary, we will draw on methodologies from different disciplines (e.g., racial/ethnic studies, women & gender studies, linguistics, literature, psychology, sociology, and popular culture) to arrive at understanding of how Latinx psychology is both theoretically and intellectually important in relation to the Latinx experience in the U.S.

This seminar offers students with some knowledge of the history of civil rights movements in the U.S. the opportunity to more deeply explore African American and Mexican American struggles for justice and liberation from the 1950s to 1970s. Its comparative approach encourages insights into movements that had distinct historical roots and yet, in many places, did not occur in isolation from each other. In Austin, for example, African American and Mexican American civil rights organizations filed suit against school segregation on the same day. From this vantage point, we consider the relationship between racial justice and such themes as gender and sexuality, education and media, antiwar and antipoverty movements, power and liberation. Students have opportunities to explore such issues in the context of Austin and/or Texas.

Writing Component and Projects
This writing component for this course will be fulfilled through reading responses, short essays, and the final project, a public digital presentation on some component of civil rights movements on the UT campus and/or in the Austin community. A central goal is to help students learn how to articulate their own historical arguments based on their research, and to present them to others. Presentations will bring written historical analysis together with selected historical documents, photos, oral histories, radio clips, and/or film segments. We will have the opportunity to collaborate with another civil rights class.

Activities
Class sessions include discussion seminars; workshops on research, writing, and digital presentation; and guest presentations by activists from the Austin community and individuals who will present information for the projects. Course materials combine scholarly texts (book chapters and articles by historians) with historical documents, oral histories, and films. Near the end of the semester, there will be a final public event at which students will present their projects.


Possible Books (in addition to other readings):
Goldstone, Dwonna. Integrating the 40 Acres
Oropeza, Lorena. ¡Raza Si! ¡Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era
Montejano, David. Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981  
Orleck, Annelise and Lisa Hazirjian, eds. The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980
Theoharis, Jeanne. A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History


Evaluation
Reading responses (8 total, submission grade)    15%
Review                        10%
Oral History Essay                15%
Final Project    – Short submissions and drafts    10%
– Writing components        20%
        – Digital Project as a whole    20%
        – Presentation              5%
Reflections                     5%
Attendance (points subtracted if over 3 unexcused absences)

In this undergraduate seminar, we will critically examine the contemporary politics, geographies, and practices of Latina/o migration and asylum in the United States. We will begin our discussion with an assessment of the current migration crisis at the international level. This includes an overview of increased border enforcement and militarization as well as the varied challenges confronting migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers from the mid-twentieth century through the contemporary period. Secondly, we will situate processes of Latino/a migration within the larger historical trajectory of U.S. economic and military conquests in the Americas, focusing on the region of Central America in particular. Causes and consequences of Latino/a migration with respect to Honduras and El Salvador will serve as important case studies in this regard. Lastly, we will examine U.S. asylum policy and practices in concert with the expansion of immigration detention and deportation and the racialization and criminalization of Latinos/as. 

The 1967 publication of El Grito: Journal of Contemporary Mexican American Thought and Aztlan: Chicano Journal of the Social Sciences and the Arts in 1970 marked the emergence of a distinct Mexican American intellectual formation in academia. At the one hand, this discourse demonstrated a continuity of oppositional  consciousness as reflected in writings by preceding generations of intellectuals. At the same time, early writings contextualized experiences  of inequality confronting Mexican American communities as a condition of colonialism and anti-colonialism. The purpose of this undergraduate seminar is to collaboratively and critically explore the multiple complementary and contradictory counter-hegemonic intellectual variations that have contributed to Mexican American political thought, and, in turn, Mexican American Studies. In addition to analyzing first works from the discipline, students will engage in writings by earlier generations of intellectuals and their contemporaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as more recent reconfigurations in Latina/o Studies.

Please check back for updates.

Legend tripping is the process by which individuals and groups visit and/or recreate legendary contexts, with the hopes of facilitating an encounter with the strange. This course will focus on narrative folklore and practice from diverse traditions across the U.S. based Latinx diaspora.  Legends, or folk narratives told as true share interpretations of the strange in everyday social life of tellers and audiences alike. Shared amongst peers and across generations, legends within Latinx communities have been used to influence the behaviors and beliefs of young women. Through reading, collecting, and analyzing legend texts such as La Llorona, Dancing with the Devil, La Lechuza among other stories of supernatural encounters as well as interrogating key figures, such as brujas, curanderas, hechiceras, students will engage with these texts the instrumentalization of a community logic of supernatural belief that impact the development of gender and sexuality identities across US Latinx communities. We will draw on materials from the fields of Folklore, Anthropology, Latina/o Studies, History and American Studies.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

Immigration patterns have significantly affected the development of U.S. society. No country accepts more immigrants than the United States; yet, the history of US immigration is dotted with policies to restrict immigration. In the 1990s, the United States experienced a record number of new legal immigrants, primarily from Asia and Latin America (Mexico), breaking the 1900 – 1909 record, and in 2000 – 2009 the number of immigrants admitted again set a new record. But at the same time, the United States deported record numbers of migrants. This course uses a sociological perspective to gain an understanding the social forces that drive migration to the United States, how migrants organize their migration, how immigration affects US society, and US policies towards immigration patterns. II.

Course Aims and Objectives
Aims

This course is designed to provide a sociological understanding concerning the nature of immigration in U.S. society, including an understanding of how immigration affects large (macro) and small (micro) social units in the society, and contributes to social diversity in our country. The course also provides an understanding of the social – structural nature of international migration (migration in the world system). 

Specific Learning Objectives

• Gain background information on the development of immigration patterns in U.S. society and discuss the social forces that affect these patterns from the perspective of historical and recent immigration trends. 
• Review and discuss different perceptions about immigration patterns, and how these perceptions vary as the immigrant groups come from different cultural backgrounds. 
• Review and use government online sources concerning annual immigration numbers and characteristics. 
• Develop an awareness of the significance of immigration for the development of U.S. society, including impacts on social and cultural diversity. 
• Review major laws affecting migration patterns to U.S. society 

Cultural Diversity Objective Flag:
“This course carries the flag for Cultural Diversity in the United States. Cultural Diversity courses are designed to increase your familiarity with the variety and richness of the American cultural experience. You should therefore expect a substantial portion of your grade to come from assignments covering the practices, beliefs, and histories of at least one U.S. cultural group that has experienced persistent marginalization.” 

Format and Procedures
The course is designed with the expectation that it will follow an intertwined format of lectures and class discussions. A key expectation is that students will come to class prepared to discuss issues covered in the class, or at least come to class with a curious and critical predisposition to become intellectually engaged in the class. All students are expected to contribute to class discussion, with a high regard for an open academic dialogue, which values respect for the ideas, opinions, and views of others. Class attendance is required (but not graded) and highly encouraged.

Please check back for updates.

Queer-Of-Color Critique

The term queer-of-color critique, used to name a body of theory that addresses the intersections between race and sex/uality, first appeared in Roderick Ferguson’s 2003 landmark study Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. However, the antecedents of queer-of-color critique in Black and U.S. Third World Feminisms predate Ferguson’s book by several decades, and its impact can be seen in fields like disability studies (where, for instance, Jina B. Kim has proposed a crip-of-color critique). This course will trace the emergence and influence of queer-of-color critique in the work of theorists like Audre Lorde, Chela Sandoval, Cathy Cohen, Roderick Ferguson, José Esteban Muñoz, Juana María Rodríguez, Kandice Chuh, Jasbir Puar, and Jina B. Kim (among others).

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

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The Trans-American Latina/o/x 19^th Century    

Latinx textuality during the long nineteenth century emerged from conflicted intersection of major European settler colonial projects in the Americas, namely those of the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Spain. This course will trace the development of Latinx literature as first expressed as a trans-American dream of sister republics as they threw off colonial rule. But as the United States initiated its own imperialist Manifest Destiny to dominate the Americas, Latinx writers turned to critiquing U.S. domination even while cultivating trans-American cultural ties from San Francisco to Buenos Aires. By the end of the century, Latinx literature would conceptualize the racialized experience of Latinx people (variously Afro-descendant, Euro-descendant, and indigenous-descendant) within the United States as neither political exile nor solely socioeconomic displacement, but as a transnationally located, bilingual migrant phenomenon expressed in Spanish and English through multiple literary genres.

Current Course Schedule Information (registrar.utexas.edu)

Current Course Schedule Information (registrar.utexas.edu)

Current Course Schedule Information (registrar.utexas.edu)

Current Course Schedule Information (registrar.utexas.edu)

Current Course Schedule Information (registrar.utexas.edu)

Current Course Schedule Information (registrar.utexas.edu)

Current Course Schedule Information (registrar.utexas.edu)

Current Course Schedule Information (registrar.utexas.edu)