Latinx Studies Initiative

The Latinx Studies Initiative at Emory is an effort to create, support, and encourage a multidisciplinary community of scholars who study issues relevant to Hispanic and Latina/o/x people living in the United States. Supported by the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, the Initiative takes as a proximate goal the creation of an undergraduate Minor in Latinx Studies. To advance this goal, Prof. Bernard L. Fraga (Political Science) was named faculty coordinator of the Latinx Studies Initiative in 2023. In 2024, Emory University Provost Ravi V. Bellamkonda approved the addition of Latinx Studies into the expanded Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies (LALCS) program.

Latinx Studies may be viewed as an expansion of earlier Chicano (Mexican-American) and Puerto Rican Studies programs to include other U.S. Latinx populations. At Emory, we take a broad definition of Latinx Studies to include scholarship on “long-established communities in the U.S. of Latin American origin as well as more recent arrivals.”¹ Efforts towards the building of the Latinx Studies Initiative have been fostered by Emory students, staff, and faculty over multiple generations. Notable faculty making such efforts include Prof. Maria Carrión (Religion and Comparative Literature) and Prof. José Quiroga (Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature). In the spring of 2018, Emory students in the “Latinx Civil Rights Movements” wrote a letter to then Emory President Sterk demanding a Department of Latinx Studies and a Ph.D. program in African American Studies. This is termed the “Consciousness is Power” movement. The outgrowth of this movement was the 2020 cluster hire of three Latinx faculty, funding for academic programming, and new undergraduate courses that, together, serve as foundational components of the Latinx Studies Initiative.

1https://latinxstudiesassociation.org/about/

Undergraduate courses with a focus in Latinx studies-related content span a variety of disciplines and subjects. Past offerings include topics such as U.S, Mexico Border Spaces, the Politics of Spanish and Immigration in the U.S., and Stories of Latinx Resistance, to name a few. With a variety of courses in American Studies, English, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, Political Science, and Spanish, course offerings vary from semester to semester. For students seeking to explore Latinx studies, the following courses are offered with frequency: 
 

LACS 102: Introduction to Latinx Studies: As an introduction to the field of Latinx Studies, this course explores the diversity of Latinx experiences and lifeways in the US through an interdisciplinary lens. The course will focus on the historical and political contexts that impact Latinx racialization, class formation, and ideologies of gender and sexuality. Beginning with an interrogation of the term Latinx and the history of Latinx Studies as a discipline, topics to be explored include, race, indigeneity, racism and colorism, colonialism and imperialism, Latinx feminisms, queer Latinidades, migration, diaspora, language, citizenship and social movements. The course will be attentive to regional differences (Latinidad in LA, NYC, Atlanta, or rural Arkansas) and differences in communities of origin (Latinidad as experienced by Hondureños, Puerto Ricans, Tejanos, Cubans, Mexicans, Dominicans, etc.) Offered Spring 2025

LACS 200: Mapping Latine Inequalities: This course explores relationship between race, gender and sexuality. How do communities come together to live dignified lives? What strategies of placemaking and world making do communities use to create home? Central to our exploration of spatial inequalities we will focus on understanding the colonial role of private property and anti-colonial movements fighting for alternative futures. We will dive into topics like gentrification, housing justice, and other histories of dispossession. We will also turn to different cities throughout the U.S. including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco to understand how communities work towards resisting violent neighborhood changes. Other topics we will touch on include racially biased practices in housing access, crime and police brutality, activism, gayborhoods, queer nightlife, and pleasure politics. Collectively, our “mapping” will trace the way communities of color create spaces to live, party, and play.  Offered Spring 2025

AMST 285/HIST 285: Historical Analysis: The Migrant South 
Since the late twentieth century, scholars have noted how migrations from Latin America, Asia, and Africa have diversified the demographic make-up of urban, suburban, and rural places in the US South. Local, regional, national, and transnational migrations, however, have long played a role in shaping the region. This seminar centers on the histories and experiences of migrants' people who engage in diverse practices of mobility as they move to/through the South. Following a chronological timeline between the mid nineteenth through early twenty-first centuries, we will consider how forced, coerced, and voluntary migrations have (re)shaped the region at various historical moments. Course materials will cover issues of migration, race, ethnicity, labor, class, and legal status. Throughout the semester we will pay particular attention to the lived experiences of marginalized/minoritized southerners as they have intersected with themes of migration, (im)mobility, and place-making. 

AMST 385/HIST 385: Special Topics: American Studies: Race/Ethnicity in US South 
This course explores how migrants, the construction of borders, and the formation of transnational communities have animated the history and making of the US nation-state. Weekly readings will move us chronologically from the late-nineteenth through early twenty-first century, and will highlight how race, ethnicity, legal status, gender, and class intersect with the class themes. Together we will learn how migrants have been constructed as subjects historically, discuss borders as projects of nation-building, and engage questions about transnational communities as everyday lived realities and responses to a bordered world. Importantly, the course takes a migrant-centered approach to the study of human mobility and the structures that have aimed to limit, control, and place it under surveillance. Scholarly readings will be paired with diverse primary materials - including films, testimonios, music, art - that depict migrant narratives to help us collectively conceptualize migration to the US historically and in our current moment. 

PHIL 114: Latin America, Latinx Thought  
This course explores key topics in Latin American and Latinx thought. A number of themes will be touched on, including identity, liberation, coloniality and decoloniality, and border feminisms. We will trace the development of the theoretical debates concerning "life" as a concept across Latin America. In this course we will examine theorists and texts that are wildly disparate yet share a concern over the significance of life and its development. As we move out of the 19th and into the 20th century, what will become clear is that questions regarding biology and race are intimately bound to concerns over the direction or goal of "culture", and that all of these concerns have a stake in the question concerning the meaning of "life" and its relation to the human being. Hence, evolutionary theory spills over into discourses concerned with freedom and revolution, and vice versa. The goal of the class is to illuminate the imbrication of the mechanistic/determinist perspectives, and those that are more concerned with "spiritual" values like creativity and freedom. The central meeting point shared by these two approaches is a radical rethinking of life itself: in a word, "revolution". Ending in the 21st century, we will examine some contemporary thinkers who were motivated by radical theory of various persuasions, for example Marxism, decolonial theory and Chicana feminism, and psychoanalysis. 

POLS 347: Latino Politics in the US 
This course examines the past, present, and future of Hispanic and Latino politics in the United States. Topics include the history of conquest, colonization, and immigration that gave rise to the Latina/o/x population in the United States, cultural and institutional forces that generate and sustain Latina/o/x identities, differences and similarities in the experiences of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American, and other national origin groups, the historical and contemporary political preferences, behaviors, and representation of Latina/o/x potential voters, and how the growing Latina/o/x population will shape American politics going forward. Throughout the course, special emphasis will be placed on how Latinas/os/xs are incorporated into an American racial hierarchy historically defined by the Black-White binary, the intersection of Latina/o/x identity with gender, sexuality, national origin, citizenship status, and age, and the role Latinas/os/xs play in the politics of the South in general and Georgia in particular. 

SPAN 305: Language and Culture for Heritage Speakers 
This course is designed specifically for heritage speakers: students who already speak Spanish and come from a Spanish-speaking family (typically their parents or grandparents speak this language); they have however never been schooled in Spanish or have received limited education in Spanish. The course introduces students to the study of the Spanish language and cultures in an academic context, and it is divided in three parts: 1) a sociohistorical background on the presence of the Spanish language in the United States, 2) a study on language variation and language ideologies, with a specific focus on the dialectal characteristics of US Spanish and how they differ and connect to other Spanish dialects, 3) a methodology for the critical analysis of cultural production in Spanish, such as films, literary works, music, etc. 
PRE-REQUISITES: Heritage speakers of Spanish who have an official placement for foundational courses, or have completed Span 212, or with permission from instructor. 

Spring 2025 Course Offerings:  

LACS 270: Topics: Latin American Issues: Racial and Gender Formation: This course introduces students to the historical and philosophical study of anti-Black racism and racial-gender formation in Latin America and the Caribbean. This course follows a racial capitalist, decolonial and Black feminist analysis regarding the emergence of racial and gender norms, practices, and beliefs in Latin America and the Caribbean. Building from texts of various disciplines such as history, anthropology, philosophy, literature, and sociology, students will learn not only about the origins of anti-Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also the history of resistance from Black and Afro-descendant communities. By the end of the course, students will learn to distinguish the differences between U.S., Latin American and Caribbean racialized-gendered systems. 

LACS270W: Topics in Latin American Issues: Major Authors: Sandra Cisneros: In this course, we will explore Literature as a mode of inquiry and cultural expression that gives rise to reader-text-author relationships and to other forms of communication and exchanges (e.g. interviews, blogs, marketing techniques, literary criticism). To accomplish this endeavor, we will conduct a sustained engagement with the work of Sandra Cisneros, a major Latinx author, performer, and artist best known for her novel-in-vignettes, The House on Mango Street. Cisneros' contributions to the formation of Latinx, U.S., and world literature will guide us as we seek to understand what makes a (great) writer? What constitutes "classic" literature? How do geo-political spaces re-define the stakes of a particular work of art? And, how does reading an author's work within her oeuvre rather than by her most popular texts shift the conversations over the features and function of her writing?

LACS 270W: Topics in Latin American Issues: Literatures, Genres, Media: Early Modern Imperial Phantasies:  In this course, we will examine the representations and misrepresentations of coloniality and imperial projects in the Portuguese and Spanish territories from the late 15th century to the early 17th century, as they bear on the political narratives of our world. By exploring materials produced across the Atlantic, we will pay attention to discrepancies and contradictions within European narratives of dominion and situate them in relation to the psychoanalytic notion of phantasy¿where events, desires, and stories cannot be narrated in clear, open, and coherent ways. By tracking the liminal figures of doctors, eunuchs, heretics, monsters, plants, and blood, among others, we will identify and distinguish the multi-modal and multi-medium expressions of imperial and colonial violence and genocide as we discover techniques to resist them. Can we find within these early colonial and imperial projects lives and experiences that challenge them? How can we think about early anti-colonial and anti-imperial practices in relation to contemporary structures of imperial and colonial violence? Materials may include works by Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, El Greco, and Icíar Bollaín. 

LACS 336: Migrants & Borders in the US: This course considers how migrants, the construction of borders, and the formation of transnational communities have shaped the making of the United States. Central themes include class, gender, (il)legality, labor, politics and race/ethnicity. 

LACS 385: Special Topics in Latin American and Caribbean Studies: Re-Imagining Latinx Diasporas: This course will explore the social, political, and cultural contours of diasporic Puerto Rican communities in the US.  Beginning with theories of diaspora from across the globe, the course will then explore the history of Puerto Rican migrations (with emphasis on circular migration).  We will then look at how Diasporicans express, explore, and navigate being ¿ni de aqui, ni de alla¿ through political movements (the Young Lords and Vieques Solidarity Network) and various cultural productions (salsa & the Fania All-Stars, poetry of Roque Salas-Rivera, and murals of ATL-based Lisette Correa - @arrrtaddict).  Guest lectures will feature Puerto Rican poets, historians of the Young Lords, and a trip to visit murals in ATL.  Readings will include work by: Stuart Hall, Rámon Grosfoguel, Yomaira Figueroa, Jorge Duany, Juan Flores, Hilda LLórens, Jaquira Díaz, Johanna Fernandez, Sherina Feliciano Santos and others. Course assignments will include reading responses, class presentations, and a final project that best suits individual students' learning styles (e.g. paper, podcast, or zine). 

LACS 409R: Advanced Seminar in Latin and Caribbean Studies: Disability in Latin America: This course studies Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx literatures and cultures from the perspective of disability. Unlike most disability studies that have been produced in North America and the US, this course explores the local formations and shifting understandings of disability and ability in the specific Latin(x) American historical and linguistic contexts. Therefore, it concentrates on the social production of disability and social differences in Latin America and its inherent confluences with questions of race, gender, sexuality, imperialism, and coloniality. However, the focus is to inspire and motivate students to explore the creative and theoretical power of critical disability cultures. These cultures have the potential to transform our notions of selfhood, agency, justice, freedom, and collective body politics. We will study topics such as the use of disability as a metaphor in narrative vs. disability aesthetics and performance, disability justice activisms and social movements, diasporic and border disability cultures, HIV/AIDS activism, "diabetic latinidades" (Avril Minich) and care networks and communities, among other topics. The course will be taught in Spanish. 

LACS 490R: Advanced Seminar in Latin and Caribbean Studies: US Frontera and Other Border: In this class we ask: what exactly are "borders," "borderlands," and "border spaces"? How do they function? How can we understand the Mexico-U.S. frontera/border within both historical and contemporary contexts? How does that border inflect other "border spaces" far away from its geography, including spaces in Atlanta? The course looks at how the stories of these borders are shaped and then re-told, in written and visual texts. The course is taught primarily in Spanish while also integrating the multi-lingual nature of border stories. 

We will partner with the Latin American Association, whose building on Buford Highway can be described as a border space, and we will engage with a visiting artist, Yehimi Cambrón. You will complete a collaborative project that supports the Latin American Association's work and provides a framework for you to actively reflect on the integration of the humanistic inquiry (like this course) in your own future work. 

PREREQUISITES: At least one Foundational Course (SPAN 300 - 318W), or one 400-level Spanish course, or permission from the instructor.