Latin American & Caribbean Studies Winter 2026 Courses

LACS 10600 (HIST 10600; RDIN 10600; DEMS 10600)
Mary Hicks
TR 9:30 – 10:50AM

Beginning with the arrival of European explorers on the West African coast in the fifteenth century and culminating with the stunning success of radical abolitionist movements across the Americas in the nineteenth century, the formation of the Black Atlantic irrevocably reshaped the modern world. This class will examine large-scale historical processes, including the transatlantic slave trade, the development of plantation economies, and the birth of liberal democracy. Next, we will explore the lives of individual Africans and their American descendants, the communities they built, and the cultures they created. We will consider the diversity of the Black Atlantic by examining the lives of a broad array of individuals, including black intellectuals, statesmen, soldiers, religious leaders, healers, and rebels. We will examine African diasporic subjects as creative rather than reactive historical agents and their unique contributions to Atlantic cultures, societies, and ideas. Within this geographically and temporally expansive history students will explore a key set of animating questions: What is the Black Atlantic? How can we understand both the commonalities and diversity of the experiences of Africans in the Diaspora? What kinds of communities, affinities, and identities did Africans create after being uprooted by the slave trade? What methods do scholars use to understand this history? And finally, what is the historical and political legacy of the Black Atlantic?

LACS 12201 (KREY 12201)
Staff
MWF 11:30 – 12:20PM

This course is intended for speakers of other Romance Languages to quickly develop competence in spoken and written Kreyol (Kreyòl Ayisyen). In this introductory course, students learn ways to apply their skills in another Romance language to master Kreyol by concentrating on the similarities and differences between the two languages. Although familiarity with a Romance language is strongly recommended, students with no prior knowledge of a Romance Languages, and heritage learners, are also welcome.

LACS 12301 (KREY 12301)
Staff
MWF 10:30 – 11:20AM

This course is intended for speakers of other Romance Languages, to quickly develop competence in spoken and written Kreyol (Kreyòl Ayisyen). In this intermediate-level course, students learn ways to apply their skills in another Romance language to master Kreyol by concentrating on the similarities and differences between the two languages. This course offers a rapid review of the basic patterns of the language and expands on the material presented in KREY 12201. Although familiarity with a Romance language is strongly recommended, students with no prior knowledge of a Romance language, and heritage learners, are also welcome.

LACS 14100 (PORT 14100)
Juliano Saccomani
MWF 12:30 – 1:20PM

This course helps students quickly gain skills in spoken and written Portuguese by building on their prior working knowledge of another Romance language (Spanish, French, Catalan or Italian). By relying on the many similarities with other Romance languages, students can focus on mastering the different aspects of Portuguese, allowing them to develop their abilities for further study. This class covers content from PORT 10100 and 10200.

LACS 16200 (ANTH 23102; SOSC 26200; HIST 16102; RDIN 16200)

Section 1: TR 11:00 – 12:20PM with Nicholas Scott

Section 2: TR 2:00 – 3:20PM with Nicholas Scott

Section 3: MW 1:30 – 2:50PM with Diana Schwartz Francisco

Section 4: TR 12:30 – 1:50PM with Mary Hicks

Winter Quarter addresses the evolution of colonial societies, the wars of independence, and the emergence of Latin American nation-states in the changing international context of the nineteenth century.

LACS 20100/40305 (ANTH 20100/40100)
Alan Kolata
TTR 9:30 – 10:50AM

This course is an intensive examination of the origins, structure, and meaning of two native states of the ancient Americas: the Inca and the Aztec. Lectures and discussions are framed around an examination of theories of state genesis, function, and transformation, with special reference to the economic, institutional, symbolic, and religious bases of indigenous state development. This course is broadly comparative in perspective and considers the structural significance of institutional features that are either common to or unique expressions of these two Native American states. Finally, we consider the causes and consequences of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and the continuing impact of the European colonial order that was imposed on and to which the Native populations adapted with different degrees of success over the course of the 16th century.

LACS 20206 (ANTH 20205)
Christopher Bloechl
MWF 10:30 – 11:20AM

This course explores historical and ethnographic studies of the lowland Maya region in southeastern Mexico. Through classic and contemporary accounts, students examine how colonial encounters, political change, and global forces have shaped Maya culture, language, and social life. Topics include colonial legacies, rebellion and resistance, tourism, cultural preservation, and the politics of Indigenous identity. The course offers a nuanced understanding of continuity and transformation in Maya worlds, past and present.

LACS 20500 (PORT 20500)
Ana Maria Lima
MWF 11:30-12:20 AM

In this course students will explore the culture of the Lusophone world through the study of a wide variety of contemporary literary and journalistic texts from Brazil, Portugal, Angola and Mozambique, and unscripted recordings. This advanced language course targets the development of writing skills and oral proficiency in Portuguese. Students will review problematic grammatical structures, write a number of essays, and participate in multiple class debates, using authentic readings and listening segments as linguistic models on which to base their own production.

LACS 21101 (KREY 21100)
Staff
MWF 12:30-1:20 PM

This advanced-level course will focus on speaking and writing skills through the study of a wide variety of contemporary texts and audiovisual materials. It will provide students with a better understanding of contemporary Haitian society. Students will review problematic grammatical structures, write a number of essays, and participate in multiple class debates.

LACS 21150 (SPAN 21150)
Begoña Arechabaleta Regulez
MW 1:30-2:50 PM

This sociolinguistic course expands understanding of both the historical and the contemporary development of Spanish in parts of the United States, and awareness of the great sociocultural diversity within the Spanish-speaking communities in the United States and its impact on the Spanish language. This course emphasizes the interrelationship between language and culture as well as ethno-historical transformations within the different regions of the United States. Special consideration is given to identifying lexical variations and regional expressions exemplifying diverse sociocultural aspects of the Spanish language, and to recognizing phonological differences between dialects. We also examine the impact of English on dialectical aspects. The course includes sociolinguistic texts, audio-visual materials, and visits by native speakers of a variety of Spanish-speaking regions in the United States.

LACS 21302/31302 (ARTH 21302/31302)
Megan Sullivan
TR 11:00-12:20 PM

LACS 21650/31650 (MAPS 21650/31650; GNSE 21523/31523; HIST 29920/39920; RDIN 21650/31650)
Deirdre Lyons
R 2:00-4:50 PM

Scholars have long been interested in the question of how to reconstruct the lived historical experiences of "ordinary," marginalized, or otherwise "unknown" people. Doing "history from below" marked an important turn in social history that generated new questions about and approaches to reconstructing the lives, histories, and cultures of people who were consigned to the peripheries of (or absent altogether from) historical records. While radical, this approach over-emphasized binary relations of power. Thinking about "histories from the margins," however, opens up new questions about how power, oppression, and marginalization cut across intersecting categories-such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and colonialism. This course will adopt a thematic and broadly comparative approach from scholarship on the Americas (including Latin American and the Caribbean) and western Europe to explore how scholars have conceptualized the social worlds of everyday people-including microhistory, capitalism, slavery, colonialism, race, class, gender and sexuality, and inequality.

LACS 21900 (SPAN 21905; RDIN 21905)
Larissa Brewer-Garcia
TR 12:30-1:50 PM

This course introduces students to the writing produced in Hispanic and Portuguese America during the period marked by the early processes of European colonization in the sixteenth century through the revolutionary movements that, in the nineteenth century, led to the establishment of independent nation-states across the continent. The assigned texts relate to the first encounters between Indigenous, Black, and European populations in the region, to the emergence of distinct ("New World") notions of cultural identity (along with the invention of new racial categories), and to the disputes over the meaning of nationhood that characterized the anti-colonial struggles for independence. Issues covered in this survey include the idea of texts as spaces of cultural and political conflict; the relationships between Christianization, secularization, and practices of racialization; the transatlantic slave trade; the uses of the colonial past in early nationalist projects; and the aesthetic languages through which this production was partly articulated (such as the Barroco de Indias, or "New World baroque," Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Modernismo, among others). In addition to enhancing your knowledge of Latin American cultural history and improving your close reading and critical thinking skills, this course is designed to continue building on your linguistic competence in Spanish.

LACS 22005 (SPAN 22205; RDIN 22205)
Danielle Roper
MW 3:00-4:20 PM

This course will survey some of the main literary and cultural tendencies in Latin America from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. We will pay special attention to their aesthetic dimensions, as well as the socio-historical and political conditions that made them possible, and in which they simultaneously intervened. Questions to be studied might include the innovations of the Modernist and avant-garde movements, fantastic literature, the novel of the so-called "Boom," cultural production associated with revolutionary movements, military dictatorships, and the Cold War, as well as new currents in literary and theatrical practices. Likewise, the course will foreground some of the following concepts relevant to the study of this production: modernity and modernization; development and neoliberalism; neo-colonialism and empire; cultural autonomy and ideas of poetic and cultural renewal; the epic vs. the novel; realism and non-verisimilitude; and performativity, among others. In addition to enhancing your knowledge of Latin American cultural history and improving your close reading and critical thinking skills, this course is designed to continue building on your linguistic competence in Spanish.

LACS 23025/33025 (SPAN 23025/33025; GNSE 23025/33025)
Miguel Martinez
TR 11:00-12:20 PM

En este curso leeremos y discutiremos las vidas de varias mujeres y hombres comunes perseguidos por la Inquisición hispánica entre 1500 y 1800, aproximadamente, tanto en Europa y el Mediterráneo como en las Américas. La mayoría de estas vidas fueron dichas por los mismos acusados frente a un tribunal eclesiástico. Estas autobiografías orales, producidas en condiciones de máxima dureza y precariedad, revelan la forma en que la vida cotidiana es moldeada e interrumpida por el poder. Leeremos las historias de hombres transgénero, mujeres criptojudías, campesinos moriscos, renegados, profetas y monjas acusadas de sodomía, entre otras; y discutiremos temas como la relación entre poder y subjetividad, heterodoxia y cultura popular, las formas narrativas del yo o la articulación biográfica de la clase, la raza y el género en la primera modernidad. Estas 'vidas ínfimas', a pesar de su concreta individualidad, permiten ofrecer un amplio panorama de la historia cultural y social de España y América en la era de la Inquisición.

LACS 24550/34550 (SPAN 24550/34550; RDIN 24550/34550; TAPS 25805/35805)
Danielle Roper
MW 1:30-2:50 PM

The course examines how blackness has been both constructed and reimagined across Latin America and the Caribbean through an exploration of the performance and cultural practices of Afro-Latin communities. We treat popular and performance traditions as a crucial terrain for discerning how Black people across the region navigate discourses of racial democracy, mestizaje, multiculturalism, and racial fraternity even as they faced the realities of racism in individual nations. The course examines imaginations of blackness in hip hop, reggaetón, rumba, folklore, carnivals, and visual art in varied sites such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. Grounded in Black and Diaspora Studies, the writings of Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Gilroy and others will serve as theoretical touchstones for placing these forms and lived realities in diasporic context. We will also engage the work of noted and upcoming Black artists from the region.

LACS 24709 (CHDV 24709/34709; ANTH 24709)
Lorna Hadlock
MW 1:30-2:50 PM

Have you ever wondered about the real lives and perspectives behind sensationalized accounts of the Amazon? This course explores Amazonian encounters from an anthropological perspective, equipping you to critically analyze and contextualize representations of radical otherness in the Amazon (and beyond). Drawing on ethnographic, fictional, historical, literary, and multimedia materials, we will examine Amazonian encounters - across cultures and between humans and non-humans. Our approach will be to focus on specific objects, events, or stories, considering them from different perspectives, For example, we will centers on the real-life story behind Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo, examining viewpoints of the filmmaker and Indigenous Peruvians (Awajún and Ashéninka). As we compare these perspectives, we will explore the cultural and historical contexts that shape them, tracing histories of both the Amazon and anthropological theory. We will look at the foundations of anthropological methods and theory, particularly structuralism and perspectivism - two important frameworks emerging from or shaped by Amazonian fieldwork. We will also address the moral responsibilities of researchers working with Indigenous communities, and challenge our assumptions about cultural and human/nonhuman boundaries. Ultimately, this course invites reflection on how popular and academic representations shape encounters with difference and the transformative potential of those encounters.

LACS 25003 (SSAD 25003; PBPL 25003; HMRT 25003; SOCI 28079; RDIN 25003)
Angela Garcia
TR 2:00-3:20 PM

Law is everywhere within the social world. It shapes our everyday lives in countless ways by permitting, prohibiting, protecting and prosecuting native-born citizens and immigrants alike. This course reviews the major theoretical perspectives and sociological research on the relationship between law and society, with an empirical focus on immigrants in the United States, primarily from Mexico and Central America. To begin, we explore the permeation of law in everyday life, legal consciousness, and gap between "law on the books" and "law on the ground." The topic of immigration is introduced with readings on the socio-legal construction of immigration status, theories of international migration, and U.S. immigration law at the national and subnational levels. We continue to study the social impact of law on immigrants through the topics of liminal legality; children, families, and romantic partnerships; policing, profiling, and raids; detention and deportation; and immigrants' rights. This course adopts a "law in action" approach centered on the social, political, and cultural contexts of law as it relates to immigration and social change. It is designed to expose you to how social scientists study and think about law, and to give you the analytical skills to examine law, immigration, and social change relationally.

LACS 25526 (SPAN 25526; PORT 25526)
Thomaz Amancio
TR 4:30-5:50 PM

Hunger has long been a social issue in Latin America. Famines, chronic malnutrition, and the bodily experience of an empty stomach have challenged, since colonial times, notions of social order and aspirations of social justice. Such constant presence led to hunger being a major subject in Latin American artistic and intellectual production. Moreover, hunger has been used as a concept to articulate notions of sovereignty, citizenship, social hygiene, cultural autonomy, and even metaphysics. Thus, this course will offer an overview of hunger as a subject and metaphor in Latin American cultural and intellectual production, with a special focus on the twentieth century. We will engage literary texts, films, philosophical essays, music, and visual art from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Peru. Artists may include Virgilio Piñera, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Blanca Varela, Glauber Rocha, and Agustina Bazterrica, among others.

LACS 26106/36106 (HIST 26106/36106; CEGU 26106/36106)
Brodwyn Fischer
MW 1:30-2:50 PM

This colloquium explores selected aspects of the social, economic, environmental, and cultural history of tropical export commodities from Latin America-- e.g., coffee, bananas, sugar, tobacco, henequen, rubber, vanilla, and cocaine. Topics include land, labor, capital, markets, transport, geopolitics, power, taste, and consumption.

LACS 26049/36049 (HIST 26409/36409; DEMS 26409; HMRT 26409)
Brodwyn Fischer
MW 12:30-1:20 PM

This course will examine the role played by Marxist revolutions, revolutionary movements, and the right-wing dictatorships that have opposed them in shaping Latin American societies and political cultures since the end of World War II. Themes examined will include the relationship among Marxism, revolution, and nation building; the importance of charismatic leaders and icons; the popular authenticity and social content of Latin American revolutions; the role of foreign influences and interventions; the links between revolution and dictatorship; and the lasting legacies of political violence and military rule. Countries examined will include Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Mexico. Assignments: Weekly reading, a midterm exam or paper, a final paper, participation in discussion, and weekly responses or quizzes.

LACS 26500/36500 (HIST 26500/36500; DEMS 26500)
Emilio Kouri
W 3:30-6:20 PM

From the Porfiriato and the Revolution to the present, this course is a survey of Mexican society and politics, with emphasis on the connections between economic developments, social justice, and political organization. Topics include fin de siècle modernization and the agrarian problem; causes and consequences of the Revolution of 1910; the making of the modern Mexican state; relations with the United States; industrialism and land reform; urbanization and migration; ethnicity, culture, and nationalism; economic crises, neoliberalism, and social inequality; political reforms and electoral democracy; violence and narco-trafficking; the end of PRI rule; and AMLO's new government.

LACS 28400/38400 (ANTH 28400/38400; BIOS 23247)
Maria Lozada Cerna
T 2:00-3:20 PM

This course is intended to provide students with a thorough understanding of bioanthropological, osteological and forensic methods used in the interpretation of past and present behavior by introducing osteological methods and anthropological theory. In particular, lab instruction stresses hands-on experience in analyzing human remains, whereas seminar classes integrate bioanthropological theory and its application to specific archaeological and forensic cases throughout the world. At the end of this course, students will be able to identify, document, and interpret human remains from archaeological and forensic contexts. Lab and seminar-format classes each meet weekly.

LACS 28900/38900 (CEGU 28900/38900; GLST 28900; HIST 26310/ 36310)
Diana Schwartz Francisco
TR 11:00-12:20 PM

This course examines the US-Mexico Borderlands from a time before political borders to the contemporary moment. As a vast geographical and conceptual space of cooperation and antagonism, the borderlands that include what is today the southwestern United States and northern Mexico comprise a crucial site to interrogate the formation and limits of colonial imposition, national identity, state power, racial segregation, environmental transformation, and capitalist expansion. In this course, we will map the history of the Mexico-US borderlands by drawing from testimony, fiction, images, cartography, music as well as scholarship that centers the experiences of those who have lived in and moved through this territory. This course is open to all.