Latinx literature, or literature by writers of Latin American origin from the colonial period to the present, gives to modern thought the concept-metaphor of the "border," to refer to contact zones that define and situate humans in identifiable and interactive locations. Latinx writers imaginatively represent the experience of these borders, which signify more than geopolitical perimeters of nation states to address borders of race, gender, sexuality, language, class, and first and third worlds. This section of the Gen Ed course, Reading Latinx Literature, focuses on literature by and about undocumented arrivants from Latin America and the Caribbean. In these texts it is possible to see how U.S. citizens depend upon undocumented subjects materially--as these immigrants harvest and process fruits and vegetables, cook and deliver food, wash dishes, care for children and elderly, clean offices and homes, and write--but also theoretically, as the defining limit of "citizen-ness." We will consider representations of the relations of citizens to non-citizens, a group that today constitutes eleven million or so "undocumented" residents of the United States, the vast majority of whom are migrants from Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America. We aim not to verify who these people are, what they want, nor what they do, for all access to truth and the real are mediated by language. Rather, we aim to learn to read structures of power, discursive formations and figurative language that represent these relations. Through these texts we glimpse an uncommon, yet indispensable angle: that of the undocumented subject reflecting critically on their own process of subjection.

In this course we will engage in reading and writing on questions such as: How have Latinx authors and filmmakers represented undocumented migrant subjects and their attempts to stop deportations and detentions? What alternatives to the "detention industrial complex" do Latinx writers imagine? How do these texts position themselves with respect to white "American" traditions, African-American and Asian-American? How do undocumented and formerly undocumented Latinx writers narrate these scenes of their subjection, i.e. becoming subject to U.S. citizenship regimes and, at the same time, gaining a voice through them? What literary strategies do undocumented and formerly undocumented Latinx writers draw upon to represent the subjective experience of policies of exclusion? If, as Harvard-based social scientist Samuel Huntington claims, nonassimilating Latinx migrants threaten to alter the very "foundation" of U.S. values, how do Latinx writers re-define the foundations of American culture and values? What is the after-life of state terror (both foreign and domestic), for those marked by or still caught in the U.S. immigration apparatus? What is the relationship between racialized policing, the prison-industrial complex, and migrant detention? How do Latinx migrant subjects respond to, remember and narrate memories of state violence? How does the literature of undocumented migration reframe national self-representation? How do representations of undocumented migration prompt us to rethink naturalized categories of U.S. citizenship, especially if we consider how citizenship is constituted through the exclusion of the non-citizen? How does citizenship status intersect with categories of race, class, gender/sexuality in these texts, and specifically, how do these writers relate to racialized categories of Blackness and Asian-ness? What genres and forms do the undocumented subject find available and/or best suited for self-representation? What geographies do undocumented subjects inhabit? Latinx literature takes pains to represent the subjective states and intergenerational trauma that this immigration subjection regime provokes, but of course, many different writers in the United States address and experience the violence of the immigration regime. So why Latinx literary representations? How do Latinx literary representations like Anzaldúa or Villavicencio's differ from non-Latinx representations, like American Dirt or the essay by Harvard-based schoolar, Samuel Huntington?

Necessarily interdisciplinary in scope, our readings and assignments will address history, memoir, novels, poetry, a play and a film.