Latinx & Latin American Studies Minor

Director: Elaine Padilla, Ph.D.

The Latinx & Latin American Studies minor is an inclusive curriculum that looks at both classical and contemporary topics in Latinx and Latin American Studies. The minor integrates intercultural communication and community action as a way to develop opportunities for praxis, research and exploration of the multiple identities of the Latinx and Latin American diaspora.

The program connects ethnic and area studies to provide an interdisciplinary focus. Students will critically examine the relationships of Latinxs, Latin Americans, people of the Caribbean and of the Iberian Peninsula to larger social, institutional, political, technological, economic, scientific, historical, religious, and cultural processes, ecologies, epistemologies and values. Students will examine the formation and position of group and individual identities through systematic study, active learning, and research which includes:

1. Understanding Historical and Cultural Knowledge
   1.  Pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial, and decolonial socio-political histories of Latin America.
   2.  Historical and political developments of Latinx communities in the US and elsewhere.
   3.  Arts, literature, and representation as mechanisms for establishing identity and promoting social change.
   4.  The processes and implications of Latinidad as an umbrella term that both connects and obscures group and individual identities and differences.
   5.  The relationship between language and identity.
2. Analyzing Systems of Power, Oppression, Privilege, and Affordances
   1.  Social processes and stratification across race, class, gender, ethnicity, locale, language(s), generations, sexuality, religion (and so on).
   2.  Colonial and de-colonial epistemologies.
   3.  Transnational, border, diaspora, social, meta-barrio, slavery, and migration ecologies.
3. Applying the above to Community Engagement
   1.  Through critical perspectives and de-colonial theories (e.g., Asset-based understandings of community interactions) to students’ respective local and global engagements.
   2.  In students’ roles as global citizens who understand that group and/or individual actions have real life ethical ramifications.