LATS 421
Latinx Geographies Fall 2024
Division II Writing Skills

This research seminar examines the history, framework, and scholarship of the growing field of Latinx Geographies within the context of interdisciplinary Latine Studies. This course explores the perspectives, experiences, spatial politics, and place-making practices of Latines to consider their relationship to the built environment. We will examine recent theories regarding space, place, and race; explore them through various Latinx positionalities, such as gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship status; and apply them to literary and media representations of Latine spaces and places, such as the US-Mexico borderlands, barrios, and rural fields. We will consider how undocumented queer and trans migrants have become prominent political actors in social movements, how migration, race, and the environment interact in pollution and activism, how undocumented women negotiate motherhood, how non-profit organizations market Latinidad for infrastructural development, and more. In this interdisciplinary and comparative course, students will be exposed to the genealogy of Latinx Geography, which finds its genesis embedded in Black Geography, Queer (Women) of Color Critique, Latinx Studies, and Ethnic Studies. Students will learn a geographical vernacular to think and articulate spatially in the social sciences and humanities, as they develop their own research projects. Collectively, we will interrogate case studies of Latines in the built environment to make visible how race and space are fundamental tenets of a Latinx geographical analysis. Students will select a research topic and develop their own research project independently and through coursework. Evaluation will be based on class participation, leading discussion, presentations, research proposal, annotated bibliography, short writing assignments, writing workshop participation, and a final 20-page research paper.