I’ve taught a variety of courses, from cozy graduate seminars to lectures with hundreds of undergraduate students. I’ve worked with diverse groups of students, including first-generation college students, non-native speakers of English, and international students. I’m privileged and proud to have taught at one of Europe’s oldest universities and two Research 1 universities that are also Hispanic-Serving Institutions. I also helped build and launch the world’s first doctoral program in Latin American and Latinx studies and I’m now training, mentoring, and advocating for a new generation of scholars. In 2010, my students and colleagues at UC Santa Cruz honored me with the Excellence in Teaching Award.
In addition to building on and advancing my own research, my courses hone my students’ reading, writing, and critical thinking skills by highlighting the connections between past and present; between the local and the global; between social forces and human agency; and among text, idea, theory, and society. Whether I’m teaching graduate students or undergraduates, a large lecture or an intimate seminar, or online or in person, my courses explore the uneven distribution of power in our world and the myriad ways people have responded and continue to respond to that unevenness.
Introduction to Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS 1)
The gateway to the LALS major, this course introduces students to interdisciplinary approaches to topics and issues covering the Américas. Our focus is hemispheric and we examine the intertwined social, political, and economic, and cultural histories of Latin America, the United States, Latin Americans, and Latina/o/x/e peoples. We deploy a transnational approach that highlights the deep yet insufficiently understood interconnectedness of peoples and regions of the Américas. Syllabus forthcoming in Winter 2025.
Citizens, Denizens, Aliens (LALS 32)
This course explores theories and practices of citizenship in the United States. Working with broad definitions of citizenship and mobility, we examine formal and informal belonging, citizens and non-citizens, and the roles these social actors play in and for the nation, state, civil society, and market. We pay close attention to the ways institutions, particularly the immigration apparatus, school, and prison, produce and shape inclusion, marginalization, and exclusion. Finally, we look at how various social actors envision and enact home, community, and mobility. See my syllabus.
Cultural Theory in the Americas (LALS 100B)
Focusing on key terms and approaches in the humanities, this course analyzes some of the cultural processes and products that shape social life, institutions, discourses, and identities in Latinx America. It covers a broad range of texts, including poetry, journalism, photography, art, and film, paying attention to the conditions of their production. Above all, it highlights the ways cultural practices and products not only reflect, but generate and contest meaning and power. Course objectives include (1) introducing LALS majors to salient concepts, approaches, debates, and questions in Latinx and Latin American cultural studies; (2) showing them how discourse shapes and is shaped by our readings of cultural processes and products; and (3) tracing the boundaries of Latin American and Latinx studies. View the syllabus here.
Immigration and Assimilation (LALS 112)
Organized around three ports of entry, Ellis Island, Angel Island, and the US-Mexico border, this comparative ethnic studies course studies the movement of people to and from the United States. We examine the relationships between immigration and assimilation and between assimilation and citizenship, formal and informal alike, and we study the ways social structures and relationships have presented different groups of people with different opportunities, challenges, and barriers for entering into and participating in US society. While this course taps cultural and social history, it does not take a chronological approach. Nor is its scope comprehensive; it does not aim to teach the entire history of all peoples who have migrated to or found themselves within the United States. Instead, its focus on three sites allows us to study histories of mobility and confinement from multiple vantages; to compare and contrast ideas, images, narratives, institutions, and social relationships at particular moments and in particular places; and to rethink assimilation and the United States as “a nation of immigrants.”
Latinx Literature: Assimilation (LALS 131)
This course uses literary works by and about Latinxs to explore the theme of Latinx assimilation in the United States. Focusing on key concepts in Latinx studies and contemporary English-language writings, we cover a range of forms and genres as we study the ways Latinx writers have articulated mainstream, margin, sameness, difference, and resistance. Of particular concern is the impact of education, labor, and citizenship status on incorporation, stratification, exclusion, and personal and social transformation. Ultimately, we explore what’s at stake in conversations about assimilation and why assimilation matters to Latinxs. See my syllabus.
Speculative Fiction and Chicanafuturism (LALS 137)
Focusing primarily on Mesoamerica and Mexican America, this online course explores the nexus of race, gender, science, technology, the environment, and the future in Chicanafuturist works from the 1960s through the twenty-first century. Course objectives include (1) introducing students to alternative futurisms, such as Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, and Chicanafuturism; (2) exposing students to a spectrum of Chicanafuturist literary and visual works; (3) familiarizing students with concepts and theoretical frameworks in and relevant to Chicanx and Latinx studies, such as modernity, coloniality, humanism, diaspora, double consciousness, mestizaje, nepantla, rasquachismo, futurity, borderlands, carcerality, indigeneity, and survivance; and (4) honing students’ textual analysis skills. Access my syllabus.
Global Internship (LALS 190G)
With the support of UC Santa Cruz’s Global Learning program, students in this course work as interns in Buenos Aires, Argentina, over eight weeks in the summer. Combined with the internships, LALS 190G provides students with opportunities for professional development, international travel, cross-cultural exchange, and critical thinking. Students also hone their communication skills, particularly their abilities to read, write, and speak Spanish. Check out my syllabus.
Immigrant Storytelling (LALS 194A)
The twenty-first century has witnessed a boom in first-person narratives by and about immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants—so much so that storytelling has emerged as a strategy for fomenting cultural, social, and political change. Yet why and for whom has storytelling become a tool for bringing about social change? What and whose stories are told? How are they told—for example, in what form (memoir, personal essay, self-portrait, photo essay, documentary film), and via what platform (newspaper, social media, mainstream press)? By and for whom are these stories told? And who benefits or loses from the storytelling turn? Put another way, what social relationships, social structures, and historical legacies are challenged or maintained by storytelling? To address these questions, we study twenty-first-century accounts by and about immigrants in a variety of genres and media in this senior seminar for LALS majors. See my syllabus.
Latinx Science Fiction (LALS 194R+L)
This senior seminar, exclusively for LALS majors, is all about Latinx science fiction. Syllabus forthcoming in Spring 2025.
Democracy, Pluralism, Culture (University of California-Lund University Joint Summer School, Lunds Universitet, Lund, Sweden)
The United States and heterogeneous, migrant-receiving nations in Western Europe have been upheld as models and proponents of liberal democracies. Yet as migrants, particularly those from the Global South, enter those countries, calls for restricting or halting migration grow louder and more persistent. Taking a comparative approach, this course asks: How do pluralism and cosmopolitanism, as engendered by migration, challenge democracies? And how do democratic nations foster, protect, or threaten pluralism and cosmopolitanism? To address these questions, we’ll draw from a multidisciplinary array of texts as we explore the role culture plays in (dis)articulating difference and democracy. View my syllabus.
Research in Practice: Epistemology, Ontology, and Ethics (LALS 201)
As the final course of the LALS Department’s core graduate requirements, LALS 201 aims to connect the conceptual discussions of other LALS courses to the design of individual research proposals. During the quarter, we read works by LALS faculty to identify and to understand the research approaches that define the multi- and interdisciplinary field of Latin American and Latinx studies. We pay special attention to connections between the construction of research questions, the genesis or choice of theory or conceptual framework, and the implementation of research strategies evident in these works. Meanwhile, we work step-by-step to develop compelling and feasible proposals for our own research projects. This will include discussions on how to identify a problem worth investigating; how to formulate a research question; how to situate that question within a conceptual framework; how to derive a conceptual framework from a question; how to determine the appropriate research strategies (namely, methods and sources); and how to garner support for our research. We also examine the relationship between research and societal power relations, connections between scholarship and social intervention, and the ways in which meanings change according to context. Click here for the syllabus.
Comparison as Method (LALS 205)
This seminar is both an articulation and a study of comparison as theory and method in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. Focusing on how scholars compare race, migration, nation, and empire, we ask, What happens when peoples, places, periods, concepts, and categories are compared? How and why do scholars compare? What methods and sources are available to us? And what are the promises and challenges of a comparative, relational, or transnational approach? This course is designed for graduate students developing comparative research projects in the humanities and social sciences. View my syllabus here.
- Read an interview in which I discuss my hopes for and concerns about the pandemic-era virtual classroom at the Hispanic-Serving Institution.