This seminar examines Black Latinidad as an epistemology; as a way of knowing that allows us to better understand the historical relationship between race, colonialism and diaspora. Through the analysis of cultural texts: including novels, music, film, and visual art, we will engage in a genealogical examination of Black Latinidad beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century and through the present. Expanding the conceptual, geographical and temporal limitations that continue to produce Latinx Studies as a contemporary, U.S. based field of knowledge, our course will engage a historical approach to Latinx thought that centers blackness.

In this course students will be reading works from the Latinx literary canon as a survey of diverse Latinx voices. Through the course theme, students will examine how select Latinx authors write about community, identity, race, gender, resistance, and culture in a manner that captures The Latinx Experience. Selected texts will showcase how home is contested as their characters navigate their lives 'here' and 'there' via notions of diaspora, migration, and belonging, languages, and borders. This course analyzes Latinx literary works, including the course novels, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Sabrina & Corina, and The House on Mango Street.

This course proposes a counter-narrative of the myths and fantasies that have been created about the Caribbean and of the historical and cultural realities surrounding them. Through a close reading of literary, artistic, critical, and historical texts we will examine race, ethnic, and gender identity constructions; the rise of the plantation economy; and the emergence of modern nations. The relationship between coloniality and the emergence of diasporic Caribbean voices of dissidence will be a guiding tone for our conversations throughout the semester as we unpack the links between colonialism and diaspora in the Caribbean.

This course explores how Latina sexualities and sexual economies are integrated with U.S. development and expansion of capital in Latin American countries. We trace the history of capitalism and its reliance on the construction of racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects. We will explore how, similar to Asian and Black women, Latina's sexualities are integral to the accumulation of wealth in the United States. We focus on the sex trades, such as sex tourism in Cuba, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic, the booming online sex work industries in Colombia, and independent pornography industries like OnlyFans in the U.S.

This course examines the paradoxical position of Spanish in the United States. The course aims to place the issues and controversies related to linguistic subordination and the maintenance of Spanish in the broader context of Latino communities and their social and historical position in the United States. In addition, it tries to equip students with critical resources to address topics such as the relationship between language and identity, political debates around Spanish and English, and bilingualism and the processes of racialization of linguistic minorities.

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of oral history. Students will learn the principles and applications of oral history. The class will collaborate with the Historical Society of Princeton and the Princeton Public Library to develop the first stage of the "Voces de la Diáspora" Oral History project, a project partner of "Voices of Princeton". Discussion on readings will be combined with hands-on activities to prepare students for conducting oral history interviews in Spanish.