Course Details

In this seminar we will become familiar with the genre of Mestiza/o/x literature and engage in informed conversation about this body of literature in the United States. We will look globally at critical mixed race and border identities and consider epistemological questions, power, and privilege. Relatedly, a key goal of this seminar is to practice public writing through a variety of creative expressions and through collaborative work with peers for community building and activism (praxis).  

We will write to articulate understanding of texts and engage in the complexities of identity and its construction (individual, family, community, nation, etc.). Students will write weekly and be authors and editors in a collaborative active learning environment with sensitivity to different learning and communication styles.  Students will also have the opportunity to learn about digital storytelling and create a multimedia digital story of their own.

Readings and viewings may include:

• Borderlands/La Frontera: the new Mestiza and Light in the Dark/La Luz Obscura (Gloria Anzaldúa)
• The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity (Kwame Appiah)
• Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma and The Mixquiahuala Letters (Ana Castillo)
• Signs Preceding the End of the World (Yuri Herrera)
• “What is Your Race: the Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify America. Podcast, 2019 (Pruitt, Kenneth)
• The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Debra Thompson)
• “American Mixed Race: the United States 2000 Census and Related Issues” (Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects-Naomi Zack)
• Vida​ (TV Series, Season 1, episodes 1 & 2)

Juliana Villegas is associate director of the Interdisciplinary Honors Program and affiliate assistant professor in the department of English.  Her research and writing continue to focus on critical mixed race and border studies.  A creative writer at heart, she integrates academic research and writing with creative expression. Dr. Villegas regularly teaches abroad and also facilitates writing and digital storytelling workshops, most recently at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Juliana  is an alum of Hedgebrook’s International Writers’ Retreat, Women Authoring Change, a Fulbright International Education Scholar, and holds her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington (The Racial Shadow in American Literature).