Latin America

This is an exploration and celebration of Latin America, the richly diverse and fascinating area of the world that includes Mesoamerica, South America and the Caribbean. We will use multiple perspectives that focus on race, gender, and class to understand the experiences and processes that have shaped the region. Students will reflect on identity, revolutions, social movements, nation-state formation, and modernization based on analysis of primary sources within cinema, music, literature, and historical documents along with many rich secondary sources. This class is a gateway into the study of Latin America at SUA and fulfills an enrollment prerequisite for several other courses. It is also highly recommended for students interested in traveling to Latin America for study abroad.

This class begins when the Spanish colonies were much richer and more powerful than the British or Portuguese. Considering American ascendancy after independence, students will explore the reasons for uneven hemispheric development in institutions, governance, and patterns of colonialism. Students will look closely at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the US often pursued its interests at the expense of its southern neighbors. Case studies of overt and covert operations include Mexico (1848), Nicaragua (1856), Cuba (1898), Guatemala (1956), Chile (1973), and Panama (1989). Despite the fact that the United States has also supplied billions of dollars in humanitarian aid to the region and remains its largest trading partner and important ally, Latin Americans retain a highly ambivalent attitude toward its northern neighbor. Many are attracted to American popular culture and goods, but are deeply distrustful of American political intent and economic power. Students who have completed Introduction to International Relations are encouraged to enroll.

This class begins with a question: What do the two largest and, arguably, most powerful nations in Latin America have in common? Brazil and Mexico are postcolonial societies of fallen Iberian empires. They are also regionally commanding, exceedingly diverse, devoutly Catholic, socially unequal and traditionally exploitative of their poor and weak (especially the indigenous peoples of Mexico or descendants of African slaves of Brazil). These countries also attract thousands of foreign visitors who marvel at their natural beauty and celebrate their rich multicultural traditions. Through history, politics, culture and current events, this class will compare and contrast these two diverse nations. Text, film, music and images will be used in a classroom environment that stresses multiple pedagogical styles. This class may be of special interest to students who wish to study abroad in Latin America.

This course is about the way that Latin American immigration to the US, and often their return back to Latin America, affects the communities, families, racial identities, and even sex lives of both immigrants and the people they leave behind. The course will draw on readings primarily from Anthropologists and Sociologists who see immigration, not as a linear process of arrival and eventual integration, but as a transnational process of the movement of people, money, culture, and politics back and forth across borders in complex ways that affect both the US and Latin America. Thus, while the course will cover the overall historical trends of Latino immigration to the US, changing demographics, the effects of US immigration laws on immigrants and their families, and the overall economic and political trends in Latin America that explain why people migrate, the real focus of the course is on the effects of these overall trends on communities and families in both the US and Latin America as illustrated through ethnographically rich case studies based on participant observation with migrants, return migrants, and members of the sending communities.

How does equitable growth occur, especially in a region where sustained growth and equality have long been elusive goals? In the last two decades, millions of Latin Americans have risen out of dire poverty, much of the region has democratized, and Latin American commodities have expanded into vast new markets, such as China. Nonetheless, poverty and inequality in the region (and its violent effects) remain pervasive and nearly intractable problems. Besides poverty and inequality, other course themes include liberalism, neoliberalism, structuralism, institutions and norms, civil society, foreign investment, globalization, and regional integration. The imposition of policies and “structural adjustment” by outsiders will be considered, as is the capacity of this region to generate new political and economic paradigms or policies, such as dependency theory and conditional cash transfers. Since “development” is a particular kind of utopia, cultural studies and anthropology are not excluded, but most material comes from economics and political science.

Central America is often known as a region of rich cultural heritage but also a legacy of vast inequalities and forms of violent repression and rebellion. The purpose of this course is to understand the cultural, political, and economic factors that have led to this particular situation. We begin by looking at the process of conquest and colonization in shaping new societies and social structures, then explore the socio-economic processes that set the stage for many of the conflicts and problems that Central America faces today, and finally we explore the current situation in Central America as it relates to changing ideas about gender and the role of women, racism and race mixing, immigration and exile, and forms of violence caused by over 30 years of civil war and economic upheaval. 

This course introduces students to the basic histories, social structures, cultures, and current issues facing indigenous peoples in Central and South America. It explores how indigenous communities and identities have been formed, from the conquest and through today, examining a range of processes and events, such as colonialism, integration into the global economy, racism and racial hierarchies, civil wars, indigenous social movements, and migration and exile. It also examines the responses of indigenous peoples to these processes and events, looking specifically at topics such as retreat, revolution, and political activism. The goal of the course is to understand indigenous peoples as products of complex processes through which communities, identities and inequalities are produced, not as social isolates. 

The goal of this class is to understand the particular forms of violence that exist in Latin America, the causes of these forms of violence, and how they are connected to particular local and national histories, cultural ideologies, and social structures. It is also the goal of this class to understand the meaning of violence: that is, how do people in Latin America make sense of the violence around them? How do they justify and/or condemn it? How is violence sometimes used as a way to make meaning, to protest inequality and impunity, and to assert subjectivity? The course will be based primarily on ethnographic case studies of different forms of violence (structural, institutional, state-sponsored, intra-familial, vigilante, armed resistance, etc.) that look at its socio-economic-political context but also its cultural meaning to the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. The rationale of the course is that it is by understanding the meaning of violence, the context within which it is carried out, and its cultural logic, that we are best equipped to begin to address it.