Latinx and Latin Amer Studies 341 - Mexican Rebels

What inspires individuals to risk everything to try to change their world? We will attempt to answer this question through Mexican cases ranging from personal acts of rebellion, to social movements and armed conflict. 
We will study PERSONAL ACTS OF REBELLION against repressive racial, political, economic, and gender structures, focusing on such figures as Hernán Córtes’s legendary consort La Malinche (Malintzin Tenepal), the seventeenth-century protofeminist Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, the transgender revolutionary general Amelia/o Robles Ávila, and the artists Gerardo Murillo, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. We also will address ARMED CONFLICTS such as the Tlaxcalan war against the Aztec Empire, colonial-era rebellions, the Wars of Independence (1810-1821), the Maya uprising against white domination in the second half of the nineteenth century, guerrilla resistance against US and French invasions in the 1840s and 1860s, the Wars of Reform (1857-1860), the Cristero War (1926-1929), the Zapatista uprising of the 1990s, and, most importantly, the Mexican Revolution (1910-1921). And we will examine SOCIAL PROTESTS, such as the student movement that ended in the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968, El Barzón, #YoSoy132, MORENA, APPO, the Ayotzinapa protests, and peasant ecology initiatives. Meets twice weekly.

Fall semester. Professor Lopez.

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Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Close analysis of historical evidence, which may include written documents, images, music, films, or statistics from the historical period under study. Exploration of scholarly, methodological, and theoretical debates about historical topics. Extensive reading, varying forms of written work, and intensive in-class discussions.