LFU:online

Introducing students to key primary and secondary texts on the evolution of the U.S./Mexico border region from the Spanish conquest (1519) to the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), to the erection of a border wall (2006) in Spanish colonial texts (in English translation), to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and historical novels of the "Wild West",  to contemporary Chicana/o literature in Spanglish.

This course offers a long survey of cultural representations of the multiethnic geographical region understood now as the U.S./Mexico borderlands, spanning from signal episodes of Spanish and U.S. conquests to the Mexican Revolution, and from the Bracero Program and the Chicana/o Civil Rights movement to the banning of La Raza Studies in Arizona in 2010. Our course strives to focus on these historical contexts to better inform contemporary debates about immigration, ethnicity, and economic interdependence in a globalizing world. Some of the questions that will guide our inquiry include: How did the modern apparatus of the U.S./Mexico border come to be?  What are the cultural practices, social understandings, and forms of economic and human traffic that contribute to its enactment of national division and difference and are in turn regulated by its legal enforcement of political inclusion and exclusion? How might we fashion a critical dialogue that best negotiates enduring problems of democracy and difference, freedom and security, and questions of political sovereignty vis-à-vis regional autonomy within a transnational and multiethnic space that yet belongs to an increasingly integrated and borderless world?  Guiding and informing these questions will be the development of a repertoire of critical methods through close engagement with theoretical texts from literary and cultural studies as well as close readings of epic poetry, (historical) novels, short fiction, oral storytelling and testimonios, legal texts, government treaties, travel narratives, corridos, autobiography, visual art, and film. 

Short lectures, group discussions

Active participation, required readings, short essays and final research paper  

Course materials (selected primary and secondary texts) will be made available on OLAT by March 1, 2016; selected books will be available in the STUDIA by April 2016.

Selected primary sources:

Gaspar Perez de Villagrá, from The History of New Mexico (1610)

Susan Shelby Magoffin, Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico (comp. 1846)

John Russell Bartlett, from Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, Connected with the United States and Mexican Boundary Commission During the Years 1850, ’51, ’52, and ’53 (1854)

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1881)

The Corrido of Gregorio Cortez (ca. 1905)

Mariano Azuela, from The Underdogs (1915)

Jovita Gonzalez, from Dew on the Thorn (1930s/1996)

Americo Paredes, from With A Pistol in His Hand (1958)

Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands-La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1986)

Sandra Cisneros, from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991)

Manuel Muñoz, Zigzagger (2003)

Selected films:

Sleep Dealer (Mexico, 2008), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

for the Bachelor Program (612): positive completion of compulsory module 14
for Bachelor Program Lehramt: positive completion of compulsory module 16
for the Teacher Training Program (Lehramtsstudium: 344): VO2: Introduction to American Literary Studies

For the Teacher Training Program (Lehramtsstudium: 344): PS2: American Culture.

Due to substantial differences in the allocation of ECTS-Credits in various curricula (teacher training program - BA/MA English and American Studies), the requirements for this course vary. Information will be provided by the instructor at the beginning of the course.