The minor in Latinx and Latin American Studies offers students interdisciplinary knowledge
and cross-cultural skills that can be applied in a range of fields including but not
limited to community advocacy, business, education, public policy, health sciences,
and the arts. The minor integrates theories of decolonization and liberation with
the exploration of historic geopolitical, economic, and sociocultural conditions of
Latin American development and how they have shaped contemporary U.S. Latinx identities.
The program explores the emergence of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial and postcolonial
relations in the new world, including the encounter of the indigenous/native Americans
and the Europeans, which subsequently shaped Latin American societies and cultures,
and the emergence of Latinx identities in the U.S. It also covers the initial encounters
between indigenous peoples and the Europeans in the new world and the subsequent ethnicity,
racial relations, religious conversions, and migrations of peoples from Latin America
to the U.S. Core courses provide a theoretical framework to analyze issues such as
immigration, transnational social movements, and restructuring under global capitalism,
as well as hands-on experience in community-based research methods and activism.
The minor requires a total of 21 credits distributed as outlined below. At least 12
credits should not be duplicated with coursework taken towards the student’s major
and other minor(s). At least 12 of the credits must be upper-division and at least
six of those must be completed in residency.
Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024
Hispanic Heritage Month Kickoff
4-6 p.m.
Argyros Forum, 3rd Floor Patio
April 2024
March 2024
Dr. Renee Hudson
Latinx Revolutionary Horizons: Form and Futurity in the Americas argues that Latinx revolutionary horizons are a hemispheric project in which contemporary
Latinx authors return to earlier moments of revolution to theorize the limits of liberation
in the present and point toward more liberatory futures. I pair nineteenth-century
authors, who reflect the Latin American revolutions of the nineteen-century, with
contemporary Latinx authors to historicize contemporary Latinx literature and resistance.
In doing so, I illuminate how the confluence of Spanish colonization and U.S. occupation
led to the creation of unique genres capable of apprehending the unique historical
circumstances of the Americas: the captivity narrative, the guerrilla conversion narrative,
the Latinx dictator novel, testimonio, and magical realism. By focusing on colonization over continent, I trace transnational
connections that defy literary studies models and illuminate networks of affiliation.
In thinking transhistorically, I uncover similar preoccupations about revolution and
liberation that manifest on the level of genre and write against genre studies’ tendency
toward deracination and reorient literary analyses of revolution towards a consideration
of aesthetic form.
