The Indian has traditionally been regarded as a fundamentally rural subject. We will examine the sources of this deeply ingrained belief, what ideological purpose it has served, and will consider cultural examples which counter it. One might regard the mestizo as the vanguard of a specifically Latin American modernity. It is, however, only too easy to entertain a wholly celebratory attitude toward hybridity, when this often entails not only creativity and self-invention, but poverty, loss, diaspora. This course will aim for a theoretically balanced approach to the processes which have given shape to the modern Latin American city.
Ethnicity intersects in complex ways with gender in Latin America.
While in the past investigations have emphasized factors such as the subjugation of indigenous women in rural areas by the Spanish conqueror, new attention is being directed toward the overlap of gender and ethnicity in urban centers. Studies have also focused on the way that the transition from a provincial city to the modern liberal urban center displaced women from positions of power. The complexity of the colonial heritage and the way that it persists in the overlap of ethnic, class, and gender identities in the city is reflected throughout the literary texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist and ethnic issues have sometimes coincided in Latin American intellectual production but quite frequently authors have chosen to emphasize one side of the equation to the exclusion of the other. This course will attempt to arrive at an understanding of the inextricable relationship between gender and ethnicity in the Latin American city.