Debating Cultures: Extraordinary Lives

SPANISH 3203

This course studies Latin America through the lives of its people. We will take biographies as sites where individual dreams and struggles intersect with global, national, and local structures of power and cultural flows. Through various cultural objects and media (film, literature, music, and social media), we will approach the extraordinary yet everyday luchas of Latin Americans in cities and rural areas. We will contextualize each life within the region's political, economic, racial, and gender historicities. The biographies we will discuss may include but are not limited to domestic workers, taxi drivers, street vendors, wrestlers, musicians, folklore dancers, college students, rural teachers, political and ecological activists, influencers, indigneous YouTubers and filmmakers, LGBTQIA+ communities, and transnational immigrants. This course will have a strong, mandatory and graded oral communications component and is taught in Spanish. Prereq: Spanish 303 or 308D. Students who have taken more than two Spanish culture or literature classes are not allowed in this course and must proceed to a Researching Cultures class.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU IS; AS HUM; AS LCD; AS LS; FA HUM; AR HUM; AS SC