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.
Courses
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:
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.