Latin American Studies

Foreign Language and Area Studies Scholarships (FLAS)

Culture and Language Across the Curriculum (CLAC)

About the Center

The Latin American Studies major is designed to provide students with critical language and cultural skills that serve as the foundation for careers in public service, business, humanitarian work, law, and health care, among others, in Latin America and with Latino populations at home. Students are strongly encouraged to combine the LAS major with a major (or minor) in a discipline, so that graduates can combine discipline-specific skills with a high degree of language and cultural competency. More Information

News & Events

Cosmopolitan Feminism: Adelina del Carril, Ramakrishna, and South-South Cultural Exchange

Aarti S. Madan - Associate Professor of Spanish and International Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute Tuesday, October 15, 2024 - 12pm - CTIHB Jewel Box/Room 143

09/25/2024
Martin Cortes - University of Buenos Aires

"Exploring the Contributions of Non-Western Marxisms" Thursday, October 3, 2024 | 3pm | CTIHB Jewel Box/Room 143

09/23/2024
Rossana Castiglioni - Legacies of Authoritarianism: Social Protest and the Politics of Constitutional Reform in Chile

Tuesday, March 26, 2024 - 12pm-1pm - CTIHB Jewel Box/Room 143 Since the democratic transition in 1990, politicians and pundits have regarded Chile as one of the most successful Latin American countries. Economic performance has been remarkable, democracy has been stable, and most social indicators (including poverty and extreme poverty) have improved. However, since the mid-2000s, social protest and malaise have increased, reaching a peak in October 2019 when Chile experienced a wave of nationwide mobilizations known as the estallido social (social explosion) that lasted several weeks and almost brought the government to its knees. In a desperate effort to bring mobilizations to an end, most political leaders, including those who were the gatekeepers of the status quo, agreed to begin a process of constitutional change. For some, the objective was to tackle the most salient people's grievances; for others, the aim was to draft a Constitution to erase authoritarian legacies. However, more than four years later, after two unsuccessful attempts, constitutional change did not occur. This presentation explains why Chile, an allegedly prosperous country, entered a deep political crisis and the (possible) reasons behind the dramatic constitutional process failure that ensued.

03/19/2024
Edward Mack - Acquired Alterity

Friday, February 16, 2024 - 10am-11:30 - LNCO 2120 Acquired Alterity provides a history of the Japanese-language literary activities of early migrants to Brazil, examining bookstores, serialized newspaper fiction, original creative works, and critical apparatuses. It challenges the dominant mode of literary study, in which texts are often explicitly or implicitly understood through a framework of ethno-nationalism. Self-representations by writers in the diaspora reveal flaws in this prevailing framework through what Edward Mack calls “acquired alterity,” in which expectations about the stability of ethnic identity are subverted in surprising ways. These flaws destabilize cultural analyses that make peoplehood constructs the ultimate objects of literary knowledge production.

01/17/2024