ETHN 110 Latinx Communities and U.S. Institutions

Course Description

This course examines how the multiple and diverse communities currently understood as “Latinx” have interacted with U.S. institutions (legal, economic, social and cultural) and have, in the process, participated in shaping U.S. history and public culture. Special attention is paid to California, a state that was formatively shaped by Latinx histories that unfolded prior to the U.S. takeover of the region and was subsequently influenced by multiple layers of Latinx immigration. Course materials explore the crucial role of Latinx labor throughout California’s economic history; trace some of the ways in which the cultural milieu of 19th- and 20th-century California was inflected by the Latinx presence; and explore the impactful participation of California-based Latinx communities in local, regional, and national social movements from the 1960s to the present. The framing of the course highlights the internal diversity of the category “Latinx,” and attends to the complex ways in which various Latinx communities have intersected and engaged with each other, with other racialized/ethnicized groups, and with the U.S. settler state.