LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES (LTAM)

The Cuban Revolution, Latin America, and the United States will explore multiple facets of the Cuban Revolution and its impact in Latin America and the United States. The Cuban Revolution was received throughout much of the region as a model through which to address historic conditions of inequality, injustice and indigence. This seminar examines this historic moment.

Special topics course. Content will vary each semester.

This course offers a broad introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American Studies, drawing on the social sciences, history, literature, visual arts, film, music, and other performing arts. Students will analyze the origins of historical structures of power and inequality, including those based on class, race, religion, gender, sexuality, region, and other legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism. Students will also consider how scholars based both in and outside of the region have developed and contributed to the field of Latin American Studies.

This course offers an introduction to the exciting interdisciplinary field of Caribbean Studies. Our geographic frame will focus not only on the larger islands of the Greater Antilles (home today to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica), but also the smaller islands of the eastern, northern, and southern Caribbean. Taking our cue from Caribbean societies themselves, this course will emphasize connections across borders and empires, not to mention connections across scholarly fields. Topics vary by semester but will include such themes as indigeneity, creolization, colonialism, slavery and emancipation, revolution, literature, religion, music, tourism, and the environment.

This Interdisciplinary course introduces tools and methods for learning about the "Latina/o American Experience." Using film, cultural products and technologies, it engages Latino/a and Latin American Studies, geography, and women's and gender studies to learn about, analyze, and reflect on the experience of peoples of Latin American ancestry across the Americas. Students may not receive credit for both LTAM 117I and IDST 117I.

This Interdisciplinary course introduces tools and methods for learning about the "Latina/o American Experience." Using film, cultural products and technologies, it engages Latino/a and Latin American Studies, geography, and women's and gender studies to learn about, analyze, and reflect on the experience of peoples of Latin American ancestry across the Americas. Students may not receive credit for both LTAM 117I and IDST 117I.

Peoples, Cultures, and Landscapes of Latin America explores the peopling of the Americas by Amerindian, African and Afro descendant peoples, and Europeans. It will consider the inequalities of power, wealth, and autonomy across gender, ethnicity, and class in Latin America to understand more fully their deep historical roots and their persistence into our own time. We will learn how Latin America takes on greater meaning, when we consider this subcontinent in different phases of globalization.

A comparative examination of the historical experiences of Latinos in the United States, from the 19th century to the present, drawing on experiences of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Central Americans. Special emphasis on the events, people, and ideas that have made distinctive contributions.

This class will guide students to explore how body techniques produce social meaning, have political effects, and travel over time and space. The course material is grounded in the dance repertoires transmitted by enslaved Africans and their descendants in Cuba. Concepts are conveyed through readings and movement practice.

This is a reading and discussion seminar that will introduce students to topics in the history of Latinos in the United States from the 19th century to the present.

This course considers how a wide variety of groups in Latin America including indigenous people, Afro-descendant communities, women and religious minorities used the law to shape and challenge larger structures of imperial rule.

A thematic examination of US-Latin America relations spanning the 19th century to the present through multi-disciplinary perspectives and inter-disciplinary methodologies, including popular culture, film, original documents, and social science scholarship. To explore the evolving US-Latin America "relationship," the ways in which North Americans and Latin Americans came to know each other, through frequent encounters and close engagement, not only as a matter of government-to-government and state-to-state relations but also as people-to-people contacts and culture-to-culture exchanges.

This course surveys Black women's experiences living with and confronting state oppression in Latin America and the Caribbean. Black women experience similar patterns of political, social, and economic inequality in the region. Transnationally, racism, sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, and classism affect the quality of life of Black women, particularly within nation-states with legacies of slavery and colonialism. This course takes a historical, social, and theoretical look at the roots of this inequality.

How do struggles by Afro-Latin American populations expand our understanding of liberation? This course addresses this question from various disciplinary perspectives. This interdisciplinary course focuses on tactics and strategies ranging from the anthropology of everyday forms of resistance and infra-politics, Black feminists' understandings of how the personal becomes political, historical rebellions and guerrilla warfare, the sociologies of social movements, to the more ''unnoticed'' place-based resistance through the lenses of Black geographies and the creation of Black senses of place in Latin America.

This course presents an introduction to research methods in the social sciences and humanities. It addresses the theoretical, ethical, and practical aspects of conducting research in Latin American and Caribbean contexts. Students will learn how to collect and analyze empirical information from multiple sources such as formal and informal observation, oral histories, documentary records, interviews, archives, and focus groups. They will learn the basics of conducting surveys, program evaluations, and content analysis. Students will design and develop their own research plan for a capstone project, honors thesis, or other research study as part of the course.

Independent project to be arranged with an instructor.

This course uses experiential education to explore how Mexicans are building opportunities in migratory communities in the transnational city of Guanajuato. This one-credit course is open to students participating in the UNC Study Abroad Program at the University of Guanajuato, Mexico. Students submit a final paper.

This course combines field research, oral history, and service learning to understand the immigration and settlement of Mexican and Latin American heritage communities in North Carolina. The course will address the ethical and practical aspects of the ethnographic method including the preparation, transaction and transcription of oral history interviews. Students will participate in a digital archive initiative and complete independent original research. Open to juniors and seniors and graduate students.

This course focuses on human migration in Central America and the Caribbean and includes the environment and climate change as key themes. Students will learn about the history and dynamics of migration connecting Central America and the Caribbean and the United States, exploring the factors that shape people's decisions to leave a homeland.

A three-part intensive introduction to spoken and written modern Yucatec Maya, including classroom instruction; culture, history, and linguistics workshops; and a four-week field study in Yucatán, Mexico.

This course explores the contradictions of Indigenous people's views on land and the environment and the existing legal frameworks addressing Indigenous peoples land rights across Latin America, focusing on how these contradictions are often shaped by global economic interests. The course highlights the ways in which Indigenous groups resist and adapt to environmental challenges exacerbated by stated sponsored extractive industries usually operating within the framework of legal apparatuses to which indigenous peoples respond to employing a range of strategies from legal battles to grassroots activism and quotidian practices.

Continuing instruction in spoken and written Yucatec Maya. Classroom instruction; culture, history, and linguistics workshops; and field study. Taught in Yucatán, Mexico.

Special topics course. Content will vary each semester.

Directed independent research leading to the preparation of an honors thesis.

Completion of the honors thesis and an oral examination of the thesis.

Interdisciplinary core seminar required of Latin American studies majors and open to other students. Topics vary by semester.

Exploration of racial/ethnic differences in educational achievement and persistence in school including language and schooling and the interplay of race, gender, and class.