This Seminar is devoted to the study of people with ties to Latin America who have become part of the US through colonization and/or migration. Rejecting the top-down dynamics that often animate area studies, the Seminar instead draws on the grassroots efforts of Latinx communities to center their histories, cultural production, and political interventions. For this reason, the Seminar is interdisciplinary, with founding members approaching Latinx studies from traditional fields like history, English, and anthropology, as well as from newer fields such as media studies, performance studies, and the environmental humanities. And it leverages this interdisciplinarity to understand pressing problems, ranging from local struggles over gentrification to national tensions around labor and immigration to the global effort to survive climate change. By building on the historic strengths of the Seminars, it thereby engages not only a present in which 2.5 million Latinx people live in New York City, but also the past and the future at various “x-ings” of the Americas.
