Spanish 345 - Latina Stories

(Offered as SPAN 345 [RC] and SWAG 245.)  When political movements advocating for civil and human rights took full force in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, women from different Latin American and Caribbean origins discovered they could enter the national imagination through their writing and thereby defy historical erasure. In the last 50 years, the political literary production of Latina women has been vertiginous, important, and consistently understudied within the academy. Within a socio-historical context, we will study the making of Latina identities, the myths of unity in this label, and the distinctive nature of Latina stories from different countries and from different economic backgrounds. What is the role of Latina voices in the arduous and slow processes of nation building, democracy, and diversity formation? How have Latina lives and stories re-shaped concepts of community, introduced activism for LGBT rights, changed the parameters by which motherhood, race, and ethnicity are understood?  How have Latinas tackled issues of domestic violence and rape? How has their work transformed national and transnational meta-narratives of citizenship? We will read manifestos, poetry, and fiction to understand this complex and critical condition. Conducted in Spanish.  Readings will be in both Spanish and English, and all writing is due in Spanish.

Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or with permission of the instructor.  Limited to 15 students.  Spring semester.  Professor Suárez.