Find your path in Latina/Latino Studies
- As a unit committed to social justice and deeply invested in a rich tradition of social critique, the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois condemns the offensive comments about Latinos, Black Americans, and Jewish Americans, as well as the misogyny, exhibited at a recent campaign event for Donald Trump. From reproducing tropes of Latina hyper-sexuality rife with anti-immigrant subtext, to maligning Puerto Rico, ... Read full story Statement on Hate Speech
- What can literature tell us about how people experience the law and how is the law like literature? Professor José A. de la Garza Valenzuela has been writing a book, "Queer in a Legal Sense: Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions," that centers these questions to understand what books tell us about the world we legally occupy, and how legal texts, and their interpreters, use storytelling to enforce and create laws. Read full story Narratives of law: Professor José A. de la Garza Valenzuela explores queer Chicano citizenship through the law and literature
- The Department of Latina/Latino Studies is proud to announce that professor Gilberto Rosas’s book Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border has received an honorable mention for the 2024 American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize. The prize recognizes work that is deeply ethnographic and speaks to contemporary social... Read full story Professor Gilberto Rosas’ book "Unsettling" receives honorable mention for 2024 American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize
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Why Study Latina/Latino Studies?
Professor Mirelsie Velázquez shares the value of the major, favorite spots in Champaign-Urbana, and why the Latina/Latino studies department is the best kept secret on campus in an interview with the College of LAS.
Intro Latina/Latino Studies
Interdisciplinary introduction to the basis for a Latina/Latino ethnicity in the United States.
Race, Medicine, and Society
The idea of race has historically been central to how Western cultures conceptualize and think about human difference. This course examines the historical significance of race through one domain of knowledge: medicine.
Latina/o Migration
Topics discussed include the history of international migration to the United States, the relationship between history and the contemporary context, the development of U.S. immigration policy, the incorporation of Latino immigrants in U.S. society, and immigrant and community responses to migration.
Mexican-American History
Examination of the history of Mexican Americans living within the United States from the Spanish Conquest to the twentieth century. Explores the process of migration, settlement, assimilation, and discrimination with emphasis on continuity and change in Mexican cultural development.
Latina/o Popular Culture
Provides an introduction to Latina/o popular culture in the United States. Specific modes of popular culture might include mass media, music, film, video, performance, and other expressive forms.
Chicana/Latina Autobiography, Memoir, Testimonio
Focuses on how Chicanas/Latinas describe their own experiences and how they both understand and negotiate their sense of self, and centers on the new crop of memoir and autobiography, as represented in the most recent texts by well-established Chicana writers, such as Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa and Ana Castillo.
Upcoming events
Alumni spotlight: Samantha M. Contreras, ’19 – Associate, Michael Best & Friedrich LLP
Samantha M. Contreras is an Illinois native, having grown up in Kankakee, Illinois, about an hour north of Urbana-Champaign. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts & Sciences in the department of Latina/Latino Studies with high distinction and Communications. For her Senior Honor’s Thesis, she explored the effects of an ICE Detention Center in her hometown in a paper titled, “So Many Arms of the State”: Presence of an ICE Detention Center in a Midwestern Town and Latina/o Sense of Well-being. After completing her bachelor’s degree, she went on to earn her Juris Doctorate at...
Faculty spotlight: Mirelsie Velázquez
Mirelsie Velázquez is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work centers history of education, women's history, Puerto Rican studies, gender and sexuality, and teacher education.