GSWS3200 - Making Latinidades: Culture, Community, and Consciousness

What does it mean to be Latinx in the United States? This introductory course examines how Latinx communities have developed critical consciousness about their histories, identities, and experiences from the sixteenth century to the present, with particular attention to the often-erased perspectives and knowledge production of Afro-Latinx peoples. Students will explore how communities, including Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, Mexican Americans, Central Americans, and others have theorized their experiences of colonialism, migration, racialization, and belonging in the US context.
Grounded in a scholar-practitioner approach that bridges academic research with community-based cultural work, this course centers the ways Latinx communities have generated their own frameworks for understanding their realities. We will examine how Afro-Latinx communities have developed consciousness about anti-Black racism within Latinidad while articulating solidarities across difference and how this critical awareness has shaped both scholarly inquiry and grassroots organizing. The course investigates how consciousness emerges through cultural practices—from spiritual traditions that encode historical memory and resistance, to contemporary music, literature, and digital media that articulate new political possibilities.
Key themes include the development of racial consciousness and the theorization of Blackness within latinidad, feminist and queer consciousness, language as a site of critical awareness, transnational political consciousness, and the role of cultural spaces in cultivating collective understanding. We will explore how Latinx communities have created knowledge about themselves through testimonios, cultural production, and community practice, and how this consciousness has fueled movements for labor rights, citizenship, reproductive justice, and educational access.
Students will engage diverse materials, including historical documents, ethnographic research, testimonios, film, and creative expressions, to develop their own critical frameworks for analyzing the heterogeneity of Latinx experiences and the ongoing work of building liberatory consciousness.