In this course, Professor Ruben Flores utilizes a case study approach that emphasizes primary sources and monographs. Students analyze a variety of strategies through which recent historians have interpreted the relationship of Latinos to American society.
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One of the great changes in the curriculum of the UR Department of History has been the addition of courses on Latin America and the Latino population of the United States as we have hired professors who bring new research specialties to the university. The department now offers courses in Mexican and colonial Spanish history, for example, and classes on Brazil are part of our rotating schedule of courses. Likewise, America’s Latinos has quickly become a regular part of our curriculum. I began offering the class five years ago, and it has grown from five or six students each fall semester to twenty today.
Latinos include a diverse collection of nationalities and ethnic groups whose variety poses analytical challenges to historians and other scholars. Using a variety of monographs and primary sources, I challenge my students to identify the analytical approaches through which scholars continue to debate the relationship of Latinos to American society. Are they best understood as ethnic citizens with unique histories? Are they the unwitting products of empire that resulted from American economic expansion after the Spanish-American War? Are they sojourners with ongoing ties to Latin America?
I also juxtapose the movement of Latinos into the country alongside the great European migrations of the late 19th century and the Great Migration of African-Americans in the early 20th century. Why do this? Because a comparative analysis gives students a sense of continuous movement across time while asking them to create a chronology as a whole. Once they track immigration as a whole, they are then able to analyze the unique characteristics of each moment. For example, my students are surprised to find that 90% of all Latinos in the USA today arrived in the USA after 1970. They are surprised to learn that the decade between 1990-2000 witnessed the single largest movement of immigrants into the USA in the entire history of the American republic. They are surprised to learn that the USA choked off immigration in 1924 from every part of the world except Latin America.
The comparative framework also gives students whose families are descended from Asian and European societies a chance to add their own histories to the class. I tend generally to have classes that are 50% Latino and 50% non-Latino, which presents the opportunity for students to speak to one other about different ethnic histories. These moments of conversation across differences are excellent teaching moments, because the major turning political and economic turning points that have characterized migration history can be extracted from the life histories of my students. You can see federal policy changes as shifts occurred in the communities that came to the US and those that did not. Cold War tensions between the US and the Soviet Union radically changed immigration priorities whose consequences are reflected in lives of my students. The role of religion in determining whom Congress has allowed into the country can likewise be seen in the biographies of my students and their parents and grandparents.
I love learning from my students the variety of experiences that have defined Latino history across time. And both the similarities and the contrasts to earlier moments in immigration history are fascinating. For these reasons, America’s Latinos remains one of my favorite courses in the department’s curriculum.