Exploration and analysis of the Hispanic experience in the United States. Examines the sociohistorical background and economic, psychological, and political factors that converge to shape a Latino group identity in the United States. Perspectives are suggested and developed for understanding Hispanic migrations, the plight of Latinos in urban and rural areas, and the unique problems faced by the diverse Latino groups. Groups studied include Mexican Americans, Dominicans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans.

Catalog Distribution: (SBA-AS, SCD-AS, SSC-AS)

Full details for LSP 2010 - Latinos in the United States

Americans are conflicted about immigration. We honor and celebrate (and commercialize) our immigrant heritage in museums, folklife festivals, parades, pageants, and historical monuments. We also build fences and detention centers, and pass more and more laws to bar access to the United States. Polls tell us that Americans are concerned about the capacity of the United States to absorb so many immigrants from around the world. How often have we heard the laments "Today's immigrants are too different. They don't want to assimilate" or "My grandparents learned English quickly, why can't they?" The assumption is that older generations 'Americanized' quickly but that today's immigrants do not want to assimilate. Did 19th century immigrants really migrate to the United States to "become Americans"? Did they really assimilate quickly? Are today's immigrants really all that different from the immigrants who arrived earlier? Why do these particular narratives have such power and currency? This seminar will explore these issues and help students discern fact from fiction. 

Catalog Distribution: (HA-AS, HST-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for LSP 2251 - U.S. Immigration Narratives

This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important fictional work by US Latina writers, including short stories, novel, and film, with a particular focus on social justice, gender advocacy work, and work by Afro Latinx writers.  We will begin with discussion of canonical figures like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, to provide a basis for our focus on more recent writers like Angie Cruz, Elizabeth Acevedo, Linda Yvette Chávez, and Carmen Maria Machado.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for LSP 2460 - Contemporary Narratives by Latina Writers

This course is an introduction to Latina/o/x Performance investigating the historical and contemporary representations of Latina/o/xs in performance and media. Throughout the semester, students will critically examine central themes and issues that inform the experiences and (re) presentations of Latina/o/xs in the United States. How is latinidad performed? In situating the class around "Latina/o/x," as both an umbrella term and an enacted social construction, we will then turn our attention to (re) presentations of latinidad within different genres of cultural expressions.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for LSP 2720 - Introduction to Latina/o/x Performance

This introductory course introduces students to issues and debates related to international migration and will provide an interdisciplinary foundation to understanding the factors that shape migration flows and migrant experiences.  We will start by reviewing theories of the state and historical examples of immigrant racialization and exclusion in the United States and beyond.  We will critically examine the notions of borders, citizenship/non-citizenship, and the creation of diasporas.  Students will also hear a range of perspectives by exposing them to Cornell guest faculty who do research and teach on migration across different disciplines and methodologies and in different world areas. Examples include demographic researchers concerned with immigrant inequality and family formation, geographic perspectives on the changing landscapes of immigrant metropolises, legal scholarship on the rights of immigrant workers, and the study of immigrant culture from a feminist studies lens.  Offered each fall semester.

Catalog Distribution: (SBA-AS, SSC-AS)

Full details for LSP 2810 - Migration: Histories, Controversies, and Perspectives

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Full details for LSP 3336 - Border Environments

This course explores research on race, ethnicity and language in American education. It examines historical and current patterns of school achievement for minoritized youths. It also examines the cultural and social premises undergirding educational practices in diverse communities and schools. Policies, programs and pedagogy, including multicultural and bilingual education, are explored.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, SCD-AS, SSC-AS)

Full details for LSP 3405 - Multicultural Issues in Education

In this course, we examine the role that law and language, as mutually constitutive mediating systems, occupy in constructing ethnoracial identity in the United States. We will approach law from a critical anthropological perspective, as a signifying and significant sociocultural system, rather than as an objective structure of rational rules and processes, to consider how legal norms, procedures, and discourses inform other processes of sociocultural production and reproduction, thus contributing to the creation and maintenance of differential power relations. We will draw on anthropological, linguistic, and critical race theory as well as ethnographic and legal material to guide and document our analyses.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS)

Full details for LSP 3475 - Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology, Language, and Law

This course examines several areas of Latinx popular culture that influence U.S. politics and society, artistic productions, and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as popular and civic cultures. Mapping a historical trajectory of Chicanidad and Latinidad in art, music, film, and popular media in the twentieth century, the course also engages contemporary art practices that are rooted in 1960s and 1970s civil rights and community art movements. Topics include Latinx people in film and TV, muralism and street art, music, spoken word as well as close examinations of representations of Latinx people in American mainstream culture.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS, GLC-AS)

Full details for LSP 3980 - Latinx Popular Culture Matters

Interested in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies? This course will explore topics in Anthropology, Art, Economics, History, Literature, Government, Sociology, etc., of US Latino and Latin American contexts. Course features guest speakers from Cornell and other institutions.

Full details for LSP 4000 - Contemporary Issues in Latin - Latino America

Guided independent study.

Full details for LSP 4210 - Undergraduate Independent Study

How has the fiction and art of queers of color transformed the worlds we know? How have their theoretical interventions created new queer freedoms and new understandings of race and sexualities?  In this course we will focus on the struggles against subjugation led by Black and Latinx artists and writers including Audre Lorde, Gabby Rivera, Marlon Riggs, Félix, González-Torres, Essex Hemphill, Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Cherríe Moraga. Building on their work, will turn to queer of color theory, a conceptual field that interrogates the ways race, gender, sexuality, regimes of embodiment, and class reinforce racializing technologies, in order to learn what queer of color thinkers can teach us about globalization, incarceration, immigration as well as joy, pleasure, intoxication, the unruly and the opaque.

Full details for LSP 4505 - Queer Proximities

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks.  Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens.  Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for LSP 4701 - Nightlife

Interested in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies? This course will explore topics in Anthropology, Art, Economics, History, Literature, Government, Sociology, etc., of US Latino and Latin American contexts. Course features guest speakers from Cornell and other institutions.

Full details for LSP 6000 - Contemporary Issues in Latin-Latino America

Guided independent study.

Full details for LSP 6210 - Graduate Student Independent Study

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Full details for LSP 6336 - Border Environments

In this course, we examine the role that law and language, as mutually constitutive mediating systems, occupy in constructing ethnoracial identity in the United States. We will approach law from a critical anthropological perspective, as a signifying and significant sociocultural system, rather than as an objective structure of rational rules and processes, to consider how legal norms, procedures, and discourses inform other processes of sociocultural production and reproduction, thus contributing to the creation and maintenance of differential power relations. We will draw on anthropological, linguistic, and critical race theory as well as ethnographic and legal material to guide and document our analyses.

Full details for LSP 6424 - Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology, Language, and Law

How has the fiction and art of queers of color transformed the worlds we know? How have their theoretical interventions created new queer freedoms and new understandings of race and sexualities?  In this course we will focus on the struggles against subjugation led by Black and Latinx artists and writers including Audre Lorde, Gabby Rivera, Marlon Riggs, Félix, González-Torres, Essex Hemphill, Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Cherríe Moraga. Building on their work, will turn to queer of color theory, a conceptual field that interrogates the ways race, gender, sexuality, regimes of embodiment, and class reinforce racializing technologies, in order to learn what queer of color thinkers can teach us about globalization, incarceration, immigration as well as joy, pleasure, intoxication, the unruly and the opaque.

Full details for LSP 6505 - Queer Proximities

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks.  Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens.  Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Full details for LSP 6701 - Nightlife