HIST-LIT 90 GU: The Making of Race across Latin America

Instructor: Jorge Sanchez Cruz
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3:00-5:00 pm

How is race constructed in the history, literature, and visual culture of Latin America? This course explores the intricate and problematizing dynamics in which race emerged as a category of subordination, differentiation, and empire-building. The course will introduce narratives and decrees of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that began processes of colonization and enslavement in the Caribbean and in New Spain (Mexico and Perú, for instance). In our study of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, we will pay attention to how racial science, positivism, eugenics, and Enlightenment ideals contributed to the formation of homogenous nation-states. In our study of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the course will follow how racial ideals of previous centuries shaped motifs of mestizaje, forced assimilation, and violent erasures of ethnic minorities. The seminar’s focus will be on close textual and visual analyses of primary sources, such as chronicles, reports, legal treatises, and visual representations of racial otherness. We will read authors from Mexico, Perú, Argentina, and the Caribbean, such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Juan Ginés de Sepulveda, Hernán Cortez, Cristobal Colón, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Vasconcelos, Francisco Pizarro, Sylvia Wynter, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.