If you are curious about Latin American and Latinx cultural traditions and creative writing, LALCS is for you. Join a unique, flexible, powerful, and practical graduate certificate focused on Latin America and Latinx cultural contributions before the European arrival, until the present. LALCS is happy to enrich your educational experience or your career in psychology, social services, arts, education, law, teaching, and serves as personal enrichment, to mention just a few.
With a multidisciplinary perspective and variety of lenses, LALCS offers you the creative writing and study abroad component to develop your intellectual interests and creative skills while exploring diverse cultures from the Caribbean to Southern, Central, and Northern Latinx-America. LALCS integrates anthropology, history, ethnography, literature, arts, and culture in the class materials that include novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, memoirs, essays, films, documentaries, music, painting, and more. LALCS also gives you the skills to write in different genres that range from poetry, prose, short story, flash fiction, travel writing, to novella, memoir, essay, and personal non-fiction. LALCS will encourage you to participate in its Study Abroad experience in Cuzco, Peru, a summer devoted to visiting Machu Picchu, witness parades and festivals in the main square, enjoy its cuisine, and develop writing skills as fiction and travel writer.
LALCS also offers you a faculty with degrees in comparative literature, postmodern fiction, experimental poetry, Latin American and Borderlands History, and Mexican film. Their publications and productions spans novel, short story, poetry, feature writing, screenplays, stage plays, non-fiction, history, ethnography, literary criticism, and translation. In classes, as well as at the MFA program annual conference, they are ready to engage you in conversations to think critically about creative writing, and the literature, history, and culture of the complex Latin America and LatinX regions.
LALCS is the path to be an engaged citizen in the global society we live in. Develop the critical thinking and writing skills to be in dialogue with the rest of the world, and enjoy an enriched career in which you will share expertise and concern with others at home and abroad.
Latin American & LatinX Creative Studies Certificate Courses
Below is a sample of courses students can take in the Latin American & LatinX Creative Studies Certificate program. Students must complete 15 units to receive the certificate. Please note that course offerings and course requirements are subject to change without notice. Please contact the program for more information.
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Afro Latin American and Afro Latinx Studies+-
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In this course students’ creative writing will be mixed-genre. Their writings will be a reflection of the form, writing techniques, and themes exposed in the work of Afro-Latin American and Latinx writers such as Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, Costa Rica writer Quince Duncan, American-Dominican narrator Junot Díaz, and Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré, among others. The course will include cultural-historical documentaries such as Black in Latin America. Mexico and Peru: The Grandma in the Closet, by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, as well and videos about dance and music traditions.
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Latin American and Latinx Thought+-
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In this course, students will write personal-intellectual essays, at the same time they learn about the evolution of Latin American Thought from Pre-Hispanic time to the present, including Latinx thinking flourishing in the United States. Readings will include Miguel de León Portilla´s essays about Aztec thought, The Book of Chilam Balam and The Popol Vouh about pre-hispanic knowledge and reason. Students will also read Bartolomé de Las Casas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Simón Bolívar, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Martí, José Vasconcelos, Leopoldo Zea, Octavio Paz, Augusto Salazar, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldua, and Jorge García. Philosophies, events, or topics will include the Enlightenment, The French Revolution, ideas of freedom, positivism, race, Indigenismo, religion, education, wealth and poverty, national identity, and more.
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Border Studies+-
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In this course students´ creative writing will be mixed-genre. Students will analyze a variety of materials that address the Borderlands from geographic, historical, political, cultural, social, and artistic expressions and perspectives that challenge global views about immigration, transculturation, identity, race, and cultural negotiations, to name just a few. Border writers include Texan and New Mexican poets Analicia Sotelo, JD Pluecker, and Ben Sáenz, Mexican novelists Yuri Herrera and Luis Humberto Urrea, and Chicana-travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest, among others. The course will include cultural-historical documentaries such as Harvest of Empire (based on Juan Gonález´ book) and films such as Bless Me Ultima (based on Rudolfo Anaya´s novel).
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Writing Screen-Play-Mexican Cinema+-
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This course offers an examination and discourse of the history and style of Mexican cinema, and it’s influence on Mexican and American culture. Focus will be on the Golden era, Mexplotation, and genre styles films. Course work will include weekly screenings, paper writing, presentations, and an optional film shoot in the style of a Mexican film. All films and readings will be subtitled, or in English. Reading will include Carl J. Mora. Mexican Cinema, Doyle Green. Mexplotation Cinema, R. Hernandez-Rodriguez. Splendors of Latin Cinema, among others. Films’ protagonists will include Pedro Infante, Cantinflas, Dolores del Río, María Félix, among others. The films of Mexican director, Luis Buñuel, will receive special attention.
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Latin American Chronicle+-
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In this course students will study the Latin American Chronicle, a genre that since the Conquest has included journalistic and literary elements with a narrator/observer who is emotionally involved in his/her socio-historical narratives and perceptions. Following the chroniclers’ narrative techniques and styles, students will write chronicles where they will be enunciator-narrators that expose the social tensions and conflicts they observe. Chroniclers included are Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Guaman Poma de Ayala, Carlos Monsivaís, Pedro Lembel, Alberto Salcedo Ramos, among others.
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Latin American Novella +-
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In this course students will write a novella, at the time they learn about the unique development of the genre in Latin America: since the middle of the 20th Century it has had a lively progress with the literary movement called the Boom, up to the Post-Boom. Novella’s readings will include Four Pre-Boom writers: Joao Gimares Rosa, Felisberto Hernández, Alejo Carpentier, and Juan Rulfo. Two Boom writers are Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortazar. Finally, Five Post-Boom women writers include Laura Restrepo, , Ana Lydia Vega, Antolina Ortíz, Samanta Schweblin and Gloria Susana Esquivel. Students will analyze those novellas to better understand how Latin American writers transformed this universal-literary genre according to their own realities, and at the same time they will study their form, structure, and style.
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Latinx Memoir+-
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In this course students will analyze the memoirs of Latinx authors from the last decade of the 20th Century as they write their own memoirs. Through the Latinx memoirs of Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, Esmeralda Santiago, Richard Blanco, JD Pluecker’s memoir exhibit, and Lilia Quintero Weaber’s graphic memoir, we will see works that explore themes such as immigration, assimilation, bilingualism, identity, among others, in the United States. The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature, edited by John Moran González, will complement the creative works with critical studies about the Latinx memoir writing.
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Latin American Novel+-
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This course will offer intensive study in aspects of the novel such as structure, tone, time and chronology, point of view, and use of language and style. Reading focus is Latin American novel. We will study justly famous novels from the second half of the twentieth century, analyzing their complex structure, sense of story, and portrayal of particular realities in memorable settings. Students will write five chapters, three prompted short stories, answer questions on critical readings and practice editing skills. Readings included:Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mario Vargas Llosa, Conversation in the Cathedral, Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, José María Arguedas, Deep Rivers, Laura Restreppo, Delirium, and Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz.
