Readings / Schedule
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Ideas of Latin America: Where and What is Latin America
Chasteen, John Charles. 2016. “Welcome to Latin America” in Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, 4th edition, 1-16. (password-protected PDF)
Tom Holloway, “Latin America: What’s in a Name?” in A Companion to Latin American History (Waltham, MA: Wiley/Blackwell, 2008), 3-8.
Mapping – Explore Indigenous Map of Mexico and Central America
1492: An Ongoing Voyage (Library of Congress)
Week 3: History, Memory, and Entanglements of 1492
Columbus, Christopher. “A Letter Concerning Recently Discovered Islands” (National Humanities Center)
Requerimiento (National Humanities Center)
In class debate: The People vs Columbus
Week 4 Shifting Narratives of “Discovery” and “Conquest”
“Tenochtitlan: A Retelling of the Conquest.” Throughline. NPR, 7 Oct. 2021, www.npr.org/transcripts/1043792004.
Mundy, B. E. (1998). Mapping the Aztec Capital: The 1524 Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, Its Sources and Meanings. Imago Mundi, 50, 11–33. https://www-jstor-org.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/stable/1151388
Documentary (24 mins.) Columbus Didn’t Discover Us, 1985. Concord Media. YouTube Part 1, YouTube Part 2.
Week 5 Founding National Narratives of Colonialism and Mixture: Malinche and Paragacu
Tate, J. (2017), La Malinche: The Shifting Legacy of a Transcultural Icon. The Latin Americanist, 61: 81-92. https://doi-org.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/10.1111/tla.12102
Amado, J., & Jackson, E. (2000). Mythic Origins: Caramuru and the Founding of Brazil. Hispanic American Historical Review 80(4), 783-811. https://muse-jhu-edu.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/pub/4/article/12468
Week 6: Concepts of Race and Nation
“Casta Paintings – Not Even Past.” Not Even Past, 9 Nov. 2011, notevenpast.org/casta-paintings/.
Wade, P. (2008). Race in Latin America. In A Companion to Latin American Anthropology, D. Poole (Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 177-192.
Marisol de la Cadena, “Reconstructing Race: Racism, Culture and Mestizaje in Latin America” in NACLA Volume 34:6 (2001).
Week 7 Memory and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Activities using slavevoyages.org; read the overview
Assunção, Matthias Röhrig. “Street Capoeira and the Memorialization of Slavery in Rio de Janeiro.” Luso-Brazilian Review 59, no. 1 (2022): 143-180. (password-protected PDF)
Video Excerpts from Escrava Isaura and Lado a Lado
Week 8 Imagining raza in Cuba
Loughridge, Rachel. “Jose Marti’s ‘My Race’: A Translation.” Phylon (1940-1956), vol. 6, no. 2, 1945, pp. 126–28. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/271406.
Arrizón, Alicia. “Race-ing performativity through transculturation, taste and the mulata body.” Theatre Research International 27, no. 2 (2002): 136-152.
“Black in Latin America E01, Cuba: The next Revolution.” YouTube, 6 Dec. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=maMY194ivCQ.
Week 9 Racial Democracy and Brazil
Freyre, Gilberto. “Brazilian Melting Pot: The Meeting of Races in Portuguese America.” The Atlantic, theatlantic, Feb. 1956, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1956/02/brazilian-melting-pot-the-meeting-of-races-in-portuguese-america/640382/.
Video: Brazil: A Racial Paradise? From Blackness in Latin America (has been removed by YouTube)
Week 10 Beauty
Jarrín, Alvaro. “Towards a biopolitics of beauty: Eugenics, aesthetic hierarchies and plastic surgery in Brazil.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 24, no. 4 (2015): 535-552. (password-protected PDF)
Rahier, J.M. (2014). Blackness, the Racial-Spatial Order at Work, and Beauty Contest Politics: Señoras, Mujeres, Blanqueamiento, and the Negra Permitida. In: Blackness in the Andes: Ethnographic Vignettes of Cultural Politics in the Time of Multiculturalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 121-146.
Tonic. “Manufacturing the Most Beautiful Women in Venezuela | Beauty Factory (Full Documentary).” YouTube, 2 Apr. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu-_xqO7WkU.
Week 11 Labor, Gender, and Race
- Santana Pinho, P. D. (2015). The Dirty Body that Cleans: Representations of Domestic Workers in Brazilian Common Sense. Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 13(1), 103+.
- Gillam, Reighan. “The help, unscripted: constructing the black revolutionary domestic in Afro-Brazilian media.” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 6 (2016): 1043-1056. (password-protected PDF)
Week 12 Telenovelas and Identity
Read: Porto, Mauro. “Telenovelas and representations of national identity in Brazil.” Media, Culture & Society 33, no. 1 (2011): 53-69.
Read: Guaraná, Bruno. “Taís Araújo: The black Helena against Brazil’s whitening television.” Black Camera 10, no. 1 (2018): 42-66.
Watch: Selections of telenovelas
Week 13 Sports
Archetti, Eduardo. 1999. “Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives” in Masculinities: Football, Polo, and Tango in Argentina. New York: Berg Publishers. (password-protected PDF)
“Why Doesn’t Argentina Have More Black Players in the World Cup?” The Washington Post. (paywall)
Cleuci Oliveira, “Is Neymar Black? Brazil and the Painful Relativity of Race.” New York Times, June 30, 2018. (paywall)
“Brazil’s iconic soccer shirt was a symbol of Bolsonaro” NPR.
Week 14 Social Movements and Politics
Milanez, Felipe and Roberto Araújo Santos. “Indigenous Defenders in the Crosshairs.” NACLA. July 10 2023. nacla.org/indigenous-defenders-crosshairs.
Figueiredo, Angela and Naiara Leite. “Black Feminist Tide.” NACLA. June 27 2022. nacla.org/black-feminist-tide.
Paley, Dawn Marie with Alicia Hopkins and Lirba Cano. “How Mexican Feminists Became Enemies of the State.” NACLA. April 11 2023. nacla.org/mexican-feminists-enemies-state.
