First-Year Seminar: Race, Ethnicity, & Nation in Latin America and the Caribbean

3 units

This course examines the historical formation of racial and ethnic discourses, identities, and communities in Latin America and the Caribbean from the colonial period to the present. The course focuses on how race relations have shaped Latin American and Caribbean society over time, as well as how race and racial identities have been central to the construction of Latin American national identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics to be covered include: slavery and blackness; creole and creolization; new categories of people such as Indians, mestizos, and mulatos; nation-building and racial discourse, including racial democracy, cosmic race, racelessness, gender and honor, and mestizaje; immigration to Latin America; and U.S. and Latin American race relations in comparative perspective.