Debating Cultures: Media, Materiality and Cultural Production in Greater Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico

This course is an invitation to explore the complex mediatic landscape of Greater Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. What did an early Spanish-language press look like in the United States? What are the connections it holds with the United Farm Workers publications later in the twentieth century? How did these publications interact with other platforms, such as Spanish-language radio? What are the political and cultural implications of hearing or seeing in the present-day militarized border zone? These are just some of the questions that we will collectively attempt to answer as we approach the cultural and artistic practices of the region. The course will deal with print, visual and aural culture, and you will have the chance to explore material such as Spanish-language newspapers, border ballads, radio, performance art, digital art and activism, among many others. We will discuss issues like ethnic identity, language, race, citizenship and gender, as they intersect with cultural production and its mediality. Moreover, you will become familiar with transnational frameworks for the study of culture, critically engaging with the work of border studies exponents such as Gloria Anzaldu´a and Ame´rico Paredes. This overarching approximation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is meant to encourage a comprehensive understanding of the cultural processes of the borderlands: its fluctuations, as well as the continuities it maintains with present-day border culture.
Course Attributes: BU IS; AS HUM; AS LCD; AS SC

Debating Cultures: Media, Materiality and Cultural Production in Greater Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico

SPANISH 3221

Section 01