Check out some of our popular courses below and view all courses in our course catalog.
Intro Latina/Latino Studies
LLS 100
Interdisciplinary introduction to the basis for a Latina/Latino ethnicity in the United States. Topics include immigration and acculturation experiences and their commonalities and differences, comparison of Latina/Latino experiences to those of other racial, ethnic and immigrant groups, and the potential for a pan-ethnic identity.
Gen Eds: Cultural Studies - US Minority, Social & Beh Sci - Soc Sci
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Latina/o Anthropology
LLS 259
Examine the contemporary cultures and communities of Latinas and Latinos in the United States. Topics to be discussed include: ethnic and racial identity, language, sexuality, power, class hierarchies, cultural citizenship, racialization, gender inequality, cultural citizenship, legal citizenship, immigration, and popular culture—all from an anthropological perspective. In the process, we will critically examine the imagined, the lived, and the invented communities constituting the Latina/o population of this country in the West, Southwest, East Coast, and the Midwest. In particular, we will explore the experiences of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, and Cubans in the United States.
Gen Eds: Social & Behavioral Sciences-Social Sciences; Cultural Studies-US Minority
Advanced Topics Latina/Latino Studies
Section: Visualizing Borderlands
LLS 396
Over the past two decades, more than seventy border walls have been constructed worldwide in the name of sovereignty and security. These physical barriers are accompanied by legal regimes that restrict mobility, intensify surveillance, and reinforce “us versus them” nationalisms. This course examines how borders are built, enforced, inhabited, and contested, with particular attention to Latin American and U.S. Latino contexts. We will analyze how borders are represented, visualized, maintained, and contested in media, art, and literature. We will investigate not only geopolitical borders, but also linguistic, racial, gendered, and embodied boundaries that shape Latinidad and diaspora. Drawing from scholarship, literature, film, photography, and sound, students will explore how artists, activists, and communities represent, navigate, and reimagine borderlands as sites of struggle, creativity, and belonging.
Advanced Topics Latina/Latino Studies
Section: Empiring Central America: Migration and Belonging
LLS 396
Why do Central Americans leave home and risk their lives to cross borders? This course examines the root causes of migration. Using history, culture, lived experience, political struggle, forms of resistance, diaspora, and transnational life as analytical frameworks, students will examine migration from Central America. The course explores how U.S. foreign policy, security regimes, and economic policies shape migration, deportation, resource extraction, gang violence, inequality, and gender violence in the region. We will consider the conditions that force youth, women, mestizos, campesinos, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendant communities to leave, and how migrants maintain transnational ties and create new forms of belonging across borders. Course materials include academic books, scholarly articles, memoirs, and film.