Courses
Below is a selection of courses offered by Latina/o Studies faculty. For details regarding minor requirements and advising information, please contact Ben Whitesell, undergraduate advisor.
T/Th, 1 to 2:15

Spring 2008 MWF, 1:15 to 2:05

Counts for LTNST minor and fulfills general humanities, U.S. cultures, and international cultures requirements
Dr. John Ochoa

T/Th 11:15 to 12:30

Fall 2019 W 6:00-9:00
This seminar will be administered through the History Department but will count for 3 credits toward the Latinx Studies graduate minor.
“Latino urbanism” is a term used to describe a culturally specific set of spatial forms and practices created by people of Hispanic origin. It includes many different aspects, including town planning; domestic, religious, and civic architecture; the adaptation of existing residential, commercial, and other structures; and the everyday use of spaces such as yards, sidewalks, storefronts, streets, and parks.
Latino urbanism has developed over both time and space. It is the evolving product of half a millennium of colonization, settlement, international and domestic migration, and globalization. It has incorporated a wide geographic range, beginning in the southern half of North America and gradually expanding to include connections with much of the hemisphere.
There have been many variations on Latino urbanism, but most include certain key features: shared central places where people manifest their sense of community, a walking culture that encourages face-to-face interaction with neighbors, and a sense that sociability should take place as much in the public realm as in the privacy of the home. More recently, planners and architects have increasingly realized that Latino urbanism offers solutions to problems such as sprawl, social isolation, and environmental unsustainability.
The term “urbanism” connotes city spaces, and Latino urbanism is most concentrated and most apparent at the center of metropolitan areas. At the same time, it has also been manifested in a wide variety of places and at different scales. These range from small religious altars in private homes; to Spanish-dominant commercial streetscapes in Latino neighborhoods; and ultimately to settlement patterns that reach from the densely-packed centers of cities to the diversifying suburbs that surround them, out to the agricultural hinterlands at their far peripheries—and across borders to big cities and small pueblos elsewhere in the Americas.
Key themes in the course will include the origins and significance of barrios in U.S. cities, the way that Latina/o migrants create and respond to globaliztion, the elements that comprise Latinx place identity, the influence of migration on the landscape in both the U.S. and Latin America, and literary representations of Latinx life in urban America from the “Latino Boom” literature of the 1980s and 1990s to recent works.