SPN314-Border Cultures: Mexico and the United States (Fall 2008)

This is an upper level course for Spanish majors and qualified minors. This semester the course includes a service-learning component. This is the first course ever offered in the FLLD with a service-learning project.

The course will be taught in Spanish, utilizing a website that includes a blog, through which students will be able to interact with other students on campus and/or worldwide. The blog will foster students’ further reflection upon their interactions with the migrant community, in light of their readings, thinking, and discussions in class.

Students will also produce small video documentaries and will carry on interviews while working with the migrant workers community in the greater Rochester area; these productions will be posted in the course website, as well. In this form, the border between Mexico and the USA becomes a tangible, concrete experience, closer to home.

The course will explore the important relation of the USA and Mexico through theoretical essays, literary writings, urban chronicles, newspapers online, films, music, political caricatures, blogs, and Internet sites produced by Mexican and Mexican-American authors on the subject. In fact, in the border between USA and Mexico the first and the third world share a conflicting frontier where citizens in both sides manage to come to terms with their deep cultural differences, in a vivid example of what Homi H. Bhabha calls the negotiation of “cultural terms” in his book The Location of Culture (1995).

In spite of the heated debates in the US Congress about the necessity to “keep off” the southernmost neighbors, Mexico remains as one of the most important commercial partners of the USA, as Carlos Fuentes states in A New Time for Mexico (1997); furthermore, a good percentage of the USA agribusiness depends entirely on the migrant workers that comes from Mexico –which is the case for the state of New York.

The materials studied in the course and the interaction with the migrant workers community, will allow students to think on the controversial debate about “la frontera” (the border) from a scholarly point of view –without losing sight of its impact on the local community. Through the experiences provided by the course, “la frontera” will seem a rather mobile, porous, and at times fictional separation between two nations that share a common continent and a common history.

The course strives to generate a better understanding of the relation between the USA and Mexico, helping students to immerse knowledgeably in current discussions about immigration policy and economics. In addition, the course will foster an interest in students about the history shared by Latin American countries and the USA.

NOTE: The original blog for this course was created via Mobileme, which is not available anymore. This blog only includes students' video documentaries produced during the course.

Students' Video Documentaries:

Click on the links