At the end of the spring 2018 semester a student asked me why there were no courses at Stony Brook University specifically focused on Latinas. I thought for a second, but I didn’t have an answer. I knew that the university has declined on several occasions to fund a cluster hire in Latino/a Studies. I knew that we have one scholar, historian Lori Flores, who focuses specifically on Latina and Latino labor, migration, and the Farmworker Movement. I knew that she had taught the history of Latinos in the US. I also knew that other colleagues had taught on issues of immigration and incarceration, transnational feminisms, and Queer of Color critique. But to my knowledge there has never been a course at SBU specifically dedicated to studying the culture, artistic expression, and literature of Latinas and Latinxs in the US. So, I’m taking this as a challenge. I want to design a course that centers Latina and Latinx writers, artists, musicians, and activists, and I want it to also be responsive to the current moment in which pressing issues of intersectionality, immigration, DACA, incarceration, deportation, and ongoing racist structures of coloniality provide a framework for revising curricular offerings. It is an activist intervention, a corrective, but one that has come from student demand, rather than faculty. And that is the cool part, really. I’ll post the syllabus when I have it ready, but for now, here is a flyer I made to advertise the course. Fall 2018.
