Race, Class, and Gender in Latin American History - Ms. Matilde Zimmermann
Semester: Year
Level: Open
History

The arrival of Europeans and Africans in the New World created new racial identities — including that of "Indian" — and new social classes, and it redefined relations between men and women. This course examines 500 years of conflict along the fault lines of race, class, and gender in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. Why were colonial officials, landlords, and mineowners never completely successful in their attempts to order society on the basis of strict hierarchy and separate spheres? How did female and male slaves, peasants, peons, peddlers, and eventually wage workers respond to the growth of Atlantic capitalism? How does the historian weigh cultural continuity against cultural change in the context of massive human migration, both forced and voluntary? What role did women play in resistance and rebellion — from slave uprisings to millenarian movements to urban riots and revolutionary wars? We will use a variety of sources to look at the tangled and ever-changing web of racial, class, and gender identities (both imposed and self-created): political and social history, autobiography and biography, letters and manifestos, fiction and film. The course covers the period from the Conquest to today, with the spring semester focusing on the twentieth century.