Latino Studies Program (LSP)

LSP 1101 - Research Strategies in Africana and Latino Studies (1 Credit)  
Crosslisted with ASRC 1900  
The digital revolution has made an enormous amount of information available to research scholars, but discovering resources and using them effectively can be challenging. This course introduces students with research interests in Latino and Africana Studies to search strategies and methods for finding materials in various formats (e.g., digital, film, and print) using information databases such as the library catalog, print and electronic indexes, and the World Wide Web. Instructors provide equal time for lecture and hands-on learning. Topics include government documents, statistics, subject-specific online databases, social sciences, the humanities, and electronic citation management.
Exploratory Studies: (AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
LSP 1250 - Spanish for Heritage Speakers I (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SPAN 1250  
This low-intermediate course expands Heritage students' confidence and competence in Spanish by providing opportunities to build upon the conversational skills they have. Through literary texts, other readings, music, films and the visual arts students broaden their vocabulary, improve grammatical accuracy, develop writing skills and enrich their understanding of the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world. The heritage student grew up speaking Spanish and finished high school in the U.S.
Prerequisites: SPAN 1120, SPAN 1220, or LPS 45-55.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
LSP 1800 - Immigration in U.S. History (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 1800, AMST 1800  
This course examines immigration to the United States since the early national period. The course will examine the root causes of migration and its role in settler colonialism, nation-building, and empire. We will also examine popular and political responses to immigration, as reflected in legislation and policy, and film and the print media.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2015, Spring 2015, Fall 2012  
LSP 1802 - Introduction to Latinos in U.S. History (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 1802, AMST 1802, LATA 1802, SHUM 1802  
This course seeks a fuller recounting of U.S. history by remapping what we understand as America. We will examine traditional themes in the teaching of U.S. history-territorial expansion and empire, migration and nation building, industrialization and labor, war and revolution, and citizenship and transnationalism-but we will examine this American experience in a broader hemispheric context and include as actors americanos of Spanish, Mexican, Caribbean, and Central/South American ancestries.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS), (LH-IL, OCE-IL)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2020, Fall 2019  
LSP 1820 - U.S. Borders, North and South (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 1820, AMST 1820  
The borders that separate the United States from Canada and Mexico are among the longest in the world. The southern border with Mexico receives a disproportionate amount of attention from policymakers, journalists, and artists, while our northern border is largely unfamiliar to most Americans. This course offers a necessary corrective: a comparative examination of these two North American borderlands, from their 16th-to-18th century colonial antecedents to contemporary challenges related to commerce, environmentalism, indigenous rights, immigration, border fence construction, drug smuggling, and pandemic-related travel restrictions. The course demonstrates that both the US-Mexico and US-Canada border zones have been, and remain, sites of conflict and cooperation, nationalism and globalization, sovereignty and subordination.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
LSP 2020 - Spanish for Heritage Speakers (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SPAN 2000  
Designed to expand bilingual Heritage students' knowledge of Spanish by providing them with ample opportunities to develop and improve each of the basic language skills, with a particular focus on writing vocabulary. The heritage student has at least one parent of Hispanic origin and grew up speaking Spanish at home; s/he also finished high school here in the US. After this course, students may take SPAN 2095.
Prerequisites: LSP 56 or higher, CASE placement.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (FLOPI-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, EULANG, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023  
LSP 2100 - Introduction to Latinx Studies (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with AMST 2106  
This course is an introduction to Latina/o Studies, an interdisciplinary field of knowledge production that focuses on historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and economic experiences of Latinx peoples in the United States-both as a nation and as a geopolitical location in a larger world. We will survey and analyze the arts, histories, cultures, politics, and sociological landscapes of Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, Central Americans, as well as other Latinx peoples who have made communities within the United States for centuries, and who are part of Latinx diasporas. Intersections of U.S. Latinx identities are also explored in this course by asking questions related to the fields housed within Latina/o Studies: How is Latina/o/x identity defined and performed? What does the use of an 'x' in Latinx mean or do? How do histories of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. impact one's Latina/o/x identity? Many of these questions will be answered by using scholarship produced by the Latina/o Studies Program faculty at Cornell, familiarizing students with the breadth of research and expertise of program.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022  
LSP 2152 - (Im)migration and (Im)migrants: Then and Now (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with GOVT 2152, AMST 2152  
How are migration dynamics produced? How do states and communities respond to and shape complex migration processes? This course will draw on the United States as a case study, focusing on Latino immigrants. Latinos are by far the largest immigrant group in the U.S., representing about 50% of all immigrants. Additionally, the U.S. has historically received the largest number of immigrants in the world. The class will examine the main debates around migration in fields such as Latino studies, migration studies, and political science. We begin with a historical and contemporary survey of global and regional migration trends. Next, we will review theories explaining why people migrate and how countries manage migration processes. We then focus on the U.S. immigration apparatus, examining past and present changes, including migration public policies. Central to this class is the exploration of multiple systems of marginalization that shape the opportunities, material conditions, and lived experiences of immigrants in the U.S. We conclude with an exploration of historical and contemporary migrant-led forms of resistance, such as the Immigrant Rights Movement, and its linkages to other transnational struggles for social justice.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (ICL-IL, OCE-IL), (SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Fall 2020  
LSP 2212 - Caribbean Worlds (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASRC 2212, ENGL 2512  
This introductory course to the study of the Caribbean will begin with examinations of what constitutes the Caribbean and an understanding of Caribbean space. We will then study its peoples, contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples, African enslavement and resistance, Indian indentureship and other forced migrations. By mid semester we will identify a cross-section of leading thinkers and ideas. We will also pay attention to issues of identity, migration and the creation of the Caribbean diaspora. Constructions of tourist paradise and other stereotypes and the development of critical Caribbean institutions and national development will be discussed as we read and listen to some representative oral and written literature of the Caribbean and view some relevant film on the Caribbean. This inter-disciplinary survey provides students with a foundation for more specialized coursework on the Caribbean offered in our department.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2020, Spring 2019, Fall 2017  
LSP 2251 - U.S. Immigration Narratives (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 2251, AMST 2251  
Americans are conflicted about immigration. We celebrate and commercialize our immigrant heritage in museums, folklife festivals, parades, pageants, and historical monuments. We also build fences and detention centers and pass more and more laws to bar access to the United States. Polls tell us that Americans are concerned about the capacity of the United States to absorb so many immigrants from around the world. How often have we heard the laments “Today’s immigrants are too different. They don’t want to assimilate” or “My grandparents learned English quickly, why can’t they?” The assumption is that the immigrant ancestors adapted quickly but that today’s immigrants do not want to assimilate. Did 19th century immigrants really migrate to the United States to “become Americans”? Did they really assimilate quickly? Are today’s immigrants really all that different from the immigrants who arrived earlier? Why do these particular narratives have such power and currency? This seminar will explore these issues and help students discern fact from fiction.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Fall 2018  
LSP 2253 - Diasporas from the Spanish Caribbean (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 2253, AMST 2253, LATA 2252  
This seminar examines the Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican diasporas in the United States. We will examine US relations with these three countries; the root causes of this Caribbean migration; their history in particular urban areas of the United States; and the political, social, and cultural issues that have attracted attention.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023  
LSP 2400 - Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literature (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 2400, AMST 2401, COML 2400  
Latina/os have always been part of U.S. history, yet the media often represents Latinx as only recent immigrants or as stereotypes that reduce rich cultures into a single, unified category or group of people. This practice hides the many unique and varied voices, stories, experiences, and ideas produced by Latinx expressive practices in forms ranging from novels and poetry to podcasts, tiktoks, films, theater, comics, memoirs, visual arts, and dance. This course will sample all of these forms while considering how artists meditate on their experiences of home, friendship, languages, love, migration, education, racialization, within the contexts of histories of colonization, discrimination, war, invasion, revolution, and ongoing activist organizing for resistance, sustainability, and thriving futures. In addition to common material, students will also have the chance to explore specific expressive practices that interest them.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2019  
LSP 2460 - Contemporary Narratives by Latina Writers (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SPAN 2460, FGSS 2460, COML 2032, AMST 2460  
This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important fictional work by US Latina writers, including short stories, novel, and film, with a particular focus on social justice, gender advocacy work, and work by Afro Latinx writers. We will begin with discussion of canonical figures like Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, to provide a basis for our focus on more recent writers like Angie Cruz, Elizabeth Acevedo, Linda Yvette Chavez, and Carmen Maria Machado.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
LSP 2720 - Introduction to Latina-o-x Performance (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with PMA 2720, AMST 2725  
This course is an introduction to Latina/o/x Performance investigating the historical and contemporary representations of Latina/o/xs in performance and media. Throughout the semester, students will critically examine central themes and issues that inform the experiences and (re) presentations of Latina/o/xs in the United States. How is latinidad performed? In situating the class around Latina/o/x, as both an umbrella term and an enacted social construction, we will then turn our attention to (re) presentations of latinidad within different genres of cultural expressions.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2019  
LSP 2721 - Introduction to the Anthropology of Latine Communities (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 2721, AMST 2721  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2018, Fall 2010  
LSP 2765 - The North American West (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 2765, AMST 2775  
In this course, we will learn about the history of the West. We will deconstruct popular myths about the West, as we engage with the major themes and significant debates that define the historical scholarship. This course will begin with Native origin stories and end with the 20th century. As a class, we will study the west from a multitude of perspectives, such as race, gender, and ethnicity, the environment, labor, politics and culture. This course is designed to increase our knowledge of the social, political and intellectual developments that have shaped our understanding of the West.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
LSP 3010 - Latinx Theatre Production (1-3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LATA 3010, COML 3010, PMA 3010  
In this course, we will develop a toolbox of performance techniques based on methods developed in the Spanish-speaking and Latinx contexts. These techniques will be used in preparing short, original, collectively-created or scripted plays for production and public presentation in the October 2024 regional microtheater festival in upstate New York and/or the annual downtown Ithaca holiday pastorela in December.
Exploratory Studies: (CU-CEL); (EUAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2019, Spring 2017  
LSP 3030 - After Immigration (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 3030  
This course will take as its point of departure writings by recent first generation Latinx immigrants to the USA, supplementing these cultural materials with points of view from immigrants in earlier times and immigrants to other geographical locations. Our goal in this discussion-based course is to develop a more historically grounded, culturally sensitive, and nuanced view of the challenges that new immigrants face when adjusting to life in a new country. We will read works by authors like Cabeza de Vaca, Héctor Tobar, Reyna Grande, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Carmelita Tropicana, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, and Zygmunt Baumann. Students will write short papers/projects for each module of the course.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA)
LSP 3061 - Modern Mexico: A Global History (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 3060, LATA 3060  
This course provides a general, critical introduction to the history of Mexico since its independence from Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century. Rather than a chronological summation of events and great leaders, emphasis will be placed upon certain themes and trends with respect to economic, social and cultural development and change. We will be particularly interested in the patterns of conflict and negotiation that shaped Mexico's history and emphasis will be given throughout the course to the ways in which everyday people participated in and influenced the political events of their times and to the important regional, class, ethnic, and gender differences that have figured prominently in Mexico's history. The course also pays attention to the history of what one could call greater Mexico and relations with the United States. Finally, we will be concerned with the historiography, not just the history, of Mexico: that is, the ways in which the history of Mexico has been written and the political dimensions of writing those histories.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2016, Fall 2013  
LSP 3215 - Performance and Immigration:Staging the Migrant, Alien, and Refugee in and outside the US (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with PMA 3215  
In this course, we interrogate how immigration debates are staged and experiences of belonging are redefined through performance. The categories of undocumented, illegal, displaced, and exile collide on international and national stages when governmental bodies decide who gets to be a migrant and under what terms. We assess how bodies marked culturally and legally as aliens use performance to navigate complex migration laws and dangerous social terrains that appear to be shifting and solidifying at the same time. We consider performances on stage, as well as performance in a broader understanding. We examine visual, linguistic, and performative representations of migrant experiences. We analyze and write about performances that deal with issues of migration beyond economic and security models.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG), (GLC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024  
LSP 3250 - Vamos Pa'l Norte: U.S. Migration and Communication (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COMM 3250  
Migrants are a heterogeneous group of people (the term migrants is used to encompass different immigrant communities). The reasons for relocating to the United States, or another country, the conditions under which they relocate, whether they are authorized to remain in a country, their cultural backgrounds, their ethnic/racial identities, their education level, their gender identity and sexual orientation, and their socio-economic status are merely a few factors that contribute to immigrants' diverse experiences. Thus, this course will introduce us to different frameworks, research, and practices that can help us understand the important role of communication in different, U.S., migration experiences. On the one hand, communication can help mitigate some of the social and structural barriers that migrants face in the United States and elsewhere. On the other hand, communication can also exacerbate or lead to educational, economic, and health inequities among migrants. We will consider both ways in which communication can function for migrant communities. Overall, migration: (1) is a diverse area of research that can incorporate intrapersonal, interpersonal, community, organizational, institutional, cultural, and policy levels of analysis; (2) is studied using a wide range of methodologies; and (3) is affected by a variety of communication channels. The readings and content of this course primarily focus on the experiences of Latina/o/x immigrant communities in the U.S.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023  
Learning Outcomes:
  • Evaluate the unique position, contributions, and challenges of U.S. immigrants.
  • Compare and contrast the frameworks that can help us understand how inequities are created for immigrants and how immigrants use various communication strategies to mitigate the barriers they experience.
  • Appraise why challenging stereotypical depictions of immigrants in the media is important for an equitable and socially-just society.
  • Assess how different communication messages (e.g., anti-immigrant rhetoric) contributes to the construction of a stigmatizing immigration system.
  • Dissect the strengths and limitations of different scholarly articles, frameworks, research, and practices.
  • Apply key findings and observations from scholarly articles into discourses around migrants' experiences.
  • Determine how migration and communication research and practices can enhance our understanding of immigrants' experiences.
  
LSP 3336 - Border Environments (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 3336, SPAN 3335, LATA 3336  
This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
LSP 3405 - Multicultural Issues in Education (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3405, EDUC 3405, AMST 3405  
This course explores research on race, ethnicity and language in American education. It examines historical and current patterns of school achievement for minoritized youths. It also examines the cultural and social premises undergirding educational practices in diverse communities and schools. Policies, programs and pedagogy, including multicultural and bilingual education, are explored.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
LSP 3551 - Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ARTH 3550, LATA 3680  
This course concerns a selection of influential artistic movements in Latin American from the early twentieth century to the present. Attention is given to issues such as the effects of colonialism and imperialism on Latin America's visual arts, the creation of national art, the relation of Latin American art and artists to cultural centers in Europe, The United States and other regions of the globe, the interaction of high art and popular culture, and the role of gender and race in various aspects of artistic practice. Students will also become acquainted with Latin American and Latinx artists working with new technologies.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2013, Fall 2008  
LSP 3566 - Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas (3 Credits)  
This course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The term pre-Columbian refers to the span of time during which indigenous cultures flourished before Christopher Columbus’ voyage of 1492. This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile). Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards. This course also explores the legacies of pre-Columbian cultures among contemporary Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x artists in the United States.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2018, Fall 2016, Fall 2013  
LSP 3635 - Loving Latinx L.A.: Music, Literature, Art, and Stage (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 3635, AMST 3637, FGSS 3635, SHUM 3637  
This course will explore the kaleidoscopic experiences of Latinx writers, musicians, and filmmakers who have made Los Angeles their home and the subject of their artistry. Featuring the work of renowned writers such as Helena Maria Viramontes and film makers such as Luis Valdez, the course will explore how Latinx creative thinkers tangle with the city's history, propel significant resistance movements, and bring new visions of creative possibilities to the world. Students will have the chance to research any aspect of LA artistry that they find compelling as part of this course.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
LSP 3678 - Diasporas, Disasters, and Dissent: Re-Thinking Puerto Rican Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 3678, SPAN 3675, AMST 3679  
Foreign in a domestic sense is the perplexing way that the Supreme Court of the United States chose to define Puerto Rico's status in the so-called Insular Cases of the early 20th century. Written over 100 years ago, this contradictory ruling looms large over Puerto Rico's precarious legal standing, despite the fact that there are now more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland than in the island itself. Seeking to counter the obfuscation of Puerto Rico in the US imaginary, in this course students will analyze how key historical, political, and social moments connected to diasporas, disasters, and dissent have galvanized Puerto Rican cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG), (GLC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
LSP 3680 - The Art of Telling: Chicanx, Latinx, and AfroLatinx Testimonios (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 3680, LATA 3681, AMST 3680, FGSS 3681  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2017, Fall 2013  
LSP 3745 - Medicine, Biomedicine, and Latine-x Communities (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3745  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023  
LSP 3754 - Spoken Word, Hip-Hop Theater, and the Politics of Performance (4 Credits)  
In this course, we will critically examine the production and performance of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender through literature and contemporary performance genres such as spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theatre.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2017  
LSP 3770 - Latinos and the United States, 1492-1880 (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 3770, AMST 3775  
In this course, we will answer two major questions: What is Latino history? And how should we write Latino History? We will explore these questions without attempting to cover all of Latino history before 1800. We will focus on a variety of experiences to better understand how differences in race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and class have shaped Latino communities over time. We will read academic journal articles and books (secondary sources) and documents from the past, such as diaries, letters, court records, and maps (primary sources). Throughout the semester we will be working in groups toward creating a final project: a Latino history website.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
LSP 3801 - War and Revolution in 20th Century Latino History (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 3801, AMST 3831, LATA 3801  
This course examines war and revolution as drivers of migration from Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean to the United States and Canada. From the War of 1898 to the wars in Central America, war and revolution have displaced millions of people, prompting internal and cross-border migration. This history underscores how migration is multicausal-that is, produced by a wide and complex range of intersecting drivers. War and revolution disrupt livelihoods, produce scarcity, and create the insecurity that makes it impossible to exercise a basic human right to stay home. The course also examines how Latinos have become actors in U.S. wars and interventions in their countries of ancestry.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
LSP 3810 - Migration: Histories, Controversies, and Perspectives (3 Credits)  
This introductory course introduces students to issues and debates related to international migration and will provide an interdisciplinary foundation to understanding the factors that shape migration flows and migrant experiences. We will start by reviewing theories of the state and historical examples of immigrant racialization and exclusion in the United States and beyond. We will critically examine the notions of borders, citizenship/non-citizenship, and the creation of diasporas. Students will also hear a range of perspectives by exposing them to Cornell guest faculty who do research and teach on migration across different disciplines and methodologies and in different world areas. Examples include demographic researchers concerned with immigrant inequality and family formation, geographic perspectives on the changing landscapes of immigrant metropolises, legal scholarship on the rights of immigrant workers, and the study of immigrant culture from a feminist studies lens. Offered each fall semester.
Enrollment Information: Open to: undergraduate students.  
Distribution Requirements: (AWI-IL, ICE-IL), (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
LSP 3980 - Latinx Popular Culture Matters (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 3980, AMST 3981, SHUM 3980  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2019, Fall 2016, Spring 2014  
LSP 4000 - Contemporary Issues in Latin - Latino America (1 Credit)  
Crosslisted with LATA 4000  
Interested in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies? This course will explore topics in Anthropology, Art, Economics, History, Literature, Government, Sociology, etc., of US Latino and Latin American contexts. Course features guest speakers from Cornell and other institutions.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
LSP 4210 - Undergraduate Independent Study (2-4 Credits)  
Guided independent study.
Exploratory Studies: (CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
LSP 4283 - Latino Politics as Racial Politics (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with GOVT 4283, AMST 4283  
What are the social, policy, and political needs of the diverse Latino community? This seminar delves into the politics of resistance and solidarity of Latinxs/Hispanics in North America, with a primary focus on the U.S. political system. We commence by examining conceptual categorizations and definitions of the Latina/o/x population, pondering whether Latin@s should be regarded as a racial or ethnic group. Then, we follow with a historical survey of Latino migration to the U.S. and analyze how interlocking systems of oppression shape the material conditions and lived experiences of Latin@/x people. Ultimately, we conclude by analyzing Latino collective action to understand how they organize at the local, national, and transnational levels to confront systems of inequality. The class takes a relational approach, focusing on political and ethnoracial relations and their effects on U.S. political institutions and public policy. Themes we will explore encompass (im)migration, interethnic/racial relations, neoliberalism, mass incarceration and settler colonialism, and social movement's effects on policy outcomes.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2019  
LSP 4434 - Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology, Language, and Law (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4434, AMST 4434  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021  
LSP 4556 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas (3 Credits)  
Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022, Spring 2020  
LSP 4577 - Desbordando: Reading Caribbean Waters in Latinx Studies (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 4577, SPAN 4577, AMST 4577  
As Latinx studies continues to expand beyond its nationalistic origins and re-examines its geographical bounds, nuancing the role of borders within the field becomes urgent. This course probes at the primacy of the border in Latinx studies by centering Caribbean waters. As a liquid that refuses to succumb to the violence of fragmentation and instead embodies iterations of radical wholeness, water has an innate capacity to undo borders, a quality epitomized by the Spanish verb desbordar (to overflow). Through discussion and analysis of key Latinx cultural products we will gain an appreciation for the multiple ways in which water sustains provocative contradictions across borders regarding representations of historical memory, gender and sexuality, migration, race, and religion and spirituality, among others.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG), (GLC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
LSP 4668 - Afro-Diasporic Afterlives: The Archive, Refusal, and the Disappeared (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 4668, ASRC 4668, FGSS 4668  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
LSP 4690 - Latin American and Latinx Environmentalisms (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SPAN 4690, LATA 4690  
This course provides an introductory overview to environmental thought in Latin America and the Latinx diaspora. We will discuss pre-Columbian approaches to the nonhuman and colonialism's transformative impact on ecosystems in the hemispheric America's. We will then turn to contemporary debates about whether nature should be treated as a resource or as a commons, with special attention paid to Indigenous philosophers like Ailton Krenak, Latinx scholars like Laura Pulido, and visual artists like Laura Aguilar and Carolina Caycdo.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
LSP 4701 - Nightlife (4 Credits)  
This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as after hours in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
LSP 4790 - Latinx Education Across the Americas (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4790, EDUC 4790, AMST 4792  
This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022  
LSP 4851 - Refugees (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 4851, AMST 4851  
Since World War II, over 4 million people have migrated to the United States as refugees. In this seminar we will examine some of these refugee migrations and the ways these migrations challenged our understanding of the United States as a haven for the oppressed. We will examine the crafting of refugee/asylum policy, the role of nongovernmental actors in influencing policy, and the ways policy reflected foreign-policy interests and security concerns. The last weeks of the course will pay particular attention to climate refugees and asylum-seekers, and our changing definitions of who 'merits' protection in the United States.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS), (OCE-IL)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2019  
LSP 6000 - Contemporary Issues in Latin-Latino America (1 Credit)  
Crosslisted with LATA 6000  
Interested in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies? This course will explore topics in Anthropology, Art, Economics, History, Literature, Government, Sociology, etc., of US Latino and Latin American contexts. Course features guest speakers from Cornell and other institutions.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
LSP 6020 - Latinx Theatre Production (1-3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LATA 6020, COML 6021, PMA 6010  
In this course, we will develop a toolbox of performance techniques based on methods developed in the Spanish-speaking and Latinx contexts. These techniques will be used in preparing short, original, collectively-created or scripted plays for production and public presentation in the October 2024 regional microtheater festival in upstate New York and/or the annual downtown Ithaca holiday pastorela in December.
Exploratory Studies: (CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
LSP 6210 - Graduate Student Independent Study (2-4 Credits)  
Guided independent study.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
LSP 6336 - Border Environments (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 6336, SPAN 6335, LATA 6336  
This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
LSP 6424 - Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology, Language, and Law (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 6424, AMST 6424, LAW 7231  
Exploratory Studies: (AFAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2017, Spring 2015  
LSP 6505 - Queer Proximities (4 Credits)  
How has the fiction and art of queers of color transformed the worlds we know? How have their theoretical interventions created new queer freedoms and new understandings of race and sexualities? In this course we will focus on the struggles against subjugation led by Black and Latinx artists and writers including Audre Lorde, Gabby Rivera, Marlon Riggs, Felix, Gonzalez-Torres, Essex Hemphill, Gloria Anzaldua, James Baldwin, Cherrie Moraga. Building on their work, will turn to queer of color theory, a conceptual field that interrogates the ways race, gender, sexuality, regimes of embodiment, and class reinforce racializing technologies, in order to learn what queer of color thinkers can teach us about globalization, incarceration, immigration as well as joy, pleasure, intoxication, the unruly and the opaque.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021  
LSP 6565 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ARTH 6556, ENGL 6565, VISST 6556  
Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022, Spring 2020, Spring 2017  
LSP 6611 - Minoritarian Aesthetics In-And Performance (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with PMA 6611, AMST 6612, AAS 6611  
What are minoritarian aesthetics? How do these inform the production and reception of performance, broadly defined? How does attending to the aesthetics involved in the production of artistic and cultural productions open up new ways of critically understanding the world around us? In seeking to answer these questions, and others, this seminar will introduce graduate students to theories and critiques that attend to the aesthetic dimensions of visual culture, scripted staged performances, performance art, and contemporary media created by Black, queer, Asian, Caribbean, and Latinx/Latin people. Drawing on the work of theorists Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Leticia Alvarado, and Sandra Ruiz amongst others, students will interrogate the dialectical relationship between the artist’s subject position and their resultant creative and critical work.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020  
LSP 6668 - Afro-Diasporic Afterlives: The Archive, Refusal, and the Disappeared (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 6668, ASRC 6668, FGSS 6668  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
LSP 6701 - Nightlife (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with PMA 6701  
This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as after hours in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
LSP 6851 - Refugees (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 6851  
Since World War II, over 4 million people have migrated to the United States as refugees. In this seminar we will examine some of these refugee migrations and the ways these migrations challenged our understanding of the United States as a haven for the oppressed. We will examine the crafting of refugee/asylum policy, the role of nongovernmental actors in influencing policy, and the ways policy reflected foreign-policy interests and security concerns. The last weeks of the course will pay particular attention to climate refugees and asylum-seekers, and our changing definitions of who 'merits' protection in the United States.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2019  
LSP 7790 - Latinx Education Across the Americas (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 7790, EDUC 7790, AMST 7792  
This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.
Exploratory Studies: (CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022