ENGL 230 - ¿Latinidad=Debt+Hustle?

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as ANAS 230 and LALS 230) Students and instructor collaborate to identify and dialogue with the growing but still disputed archive of Latine/Latinx/Latina/o Literature. The categories “Latine,”
“Latinx,” and “Latina/o” present us then with our first challenge: exactly what demographic do these categories isolate (or create)? How are these categories different from “Hispanic,” “Chicanx,” “Raza,” “Mestizo,” “Boricua,” or “Brown,” to name only a few? Rather than solidify a universal definition for “Latinidad,” our conversations will seek to unsettle (or reframe) conventional understandings of racial and ethnic identities as immutable. Our destabilization of “Latinidad” is productive; in other words, it treats “Latinidad” as dynamic, complex, robust with possibility. Our approach to the question of “Latinidad,” in turn, serves to re-orient the critical dispositions we bring to the category “literature.” How have notions of literariness, canon, belles-lettres, and disciplinarity obscured or marginalized the polyvocal richness of Latine/Latinx cultural production? How do forms like corrido, choteo, spoken word, and testimonio disrupt and enrich our study of “literature.”

Miguel Algarín, founder of the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, once proposed that debt and hustle constitute prototypical experiences of survival for the Nuyorican. Algarín concluded that “newness” presented the only viable alternative to “eternal debt” and “living by hustle”: “The poet has to invent a new language, a new tradition of communication.” “Nuyorican” exceeds state taxonomies and cannot be reduced to data recorded by the census or on “papers.” Algarín offers “hustle” and “debt” as metaphysical conceits that imbue Nuyorican “ethnicity” (if we can call it that still) with mutability, aliveness. In similar spirit, this class invites students to seek aliveness in “Latinidad.” How might the metaphor of “eternal debt” help us identify legacies of colonialism that live and breathe in the present, manifested in ways both collective and brutally uneven? How does that same metaphor qualify experiences of independence, freedom, sovereignty, and fugitivity that more conventional understandings of ethnicity flatten or obscure? What does it mean to think of identity as a form of indebtedness or a hustle?

Algarín helps initiate our inquiry but does not limit its course. The breadth of the materials and representations covered demands that we also situate “Latinidad” within contexts of hot and cold wars; US foreign and economic policies; seasonal migrant labor; shadow economies; the global feminization of labor; and the commercialization of land and natural resources. These factors contribute to massive displacements of people rarely acknowledged by politicians or corporate media. Much of the literature and cultural production we review contests prevailing narratives about “immigration” (an inadequate catchall that obscures more complex stories). Major frameworks and themes helping us to complicate the story of “Latinidad” include: borderlands; criminalization, carcerality, and deportation; legal vs. cultural citizenships; code-switching; Indigeneity; Afro-Latinidad; contested or shifting racial formations; anxious hybridities; diaspora; queerness; gender politics; intergenerational conflict and silences; and an ambivalent sense of loss (differently articulated as trauma, nostalgia, forgetting, mourning, nationalism, or assimilation). Assigned texts may include work by Elizabeth Acevedo, Gloria Anzaldúa, Bad Bunny, Sandra Cisneros, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jenine Capó Crucet, Jaime Cortez, Jacquira Díaz, Junot Díaz, Denice Frohman, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roy G. Guzmán, Daisy Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, John Leguizamo, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Nicholasa Mohr, Miguel Muñoz, Achy Obejas, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Miguel Piñero, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Gary Soto, Piri Thomas, Justin Torres, and Helena Maria Viramontes. Hiram Perez.

This course fulfills the REGS requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS