A proposal to implement a Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALS) minor passed with 111 faculty voting yes and one voting no at the Nov. 4 faculty meeting.
The six-course minor will be added to the course catalog at the start of the 2025-26 academic year, but currently enrolled students may declare it at any point, including seniors.
Professor of Latin American Studies and Politics Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz said the major itself has only been around for a decade or so, but that student interest pushed them to design the minor.
“The interest is in having something that means more than maybe a GEC does and also is a slightly deeper engagement,” Pérez-Armendáriz said. She adds that, “A lot of our majors are double majors and sometimes a double major with a thesis is just too much.”
Pérez-Armendáriz says that many students find a huge benefit of pairing LALS with a second degree.
“If you’re a politics major with Latin American and Latinx, you can point to having this deep regional knowledge. And same with if you’re econ, if you’re anthropology, or even a biology or med studies,” Pérez-Armendáriz said. “Some people who do pre-med really want to focus on Latinx or Latin American original communities in the US or abroad.”
The overall goal of the department is to understand the “cultures, societies and environments of Latin America and its diasporas” according to the course website. This includes communities that pre-date the United States, communities that have been created since and the descendants of those communities.
It’s an interdisciplinary degree including courses from Africana, American Studies, Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Hispanic Studies, History, Politics and Religious Studies. In the presentation at the faculty meeting Clarisa said that they anticipate opportunities to cross-list courses with additional departments such as Economics, Sociology and Art and Visual Culture.
At the moment, the department offers 12 of their own classes, according to Pérez-Armendáriz.
“Given that we only have one dedicated faculty, and the rest of us teach in different departments where some of our obligations are not necessarily LALS, I think that’s pretty amazing,” Pérez-Armendáriz said. “I’m really proud of that.”
The department also makes a point to assist students in developing their personal connection to their Latin American heritage. And Pérez-Armendáriz notes that Spanish language skills are not a requirement of the degree.
Despite that, she notes that students who know another language spoken in the Americas are able to access different sources of information. “Language, in and of itself, is an important way to understand the region,” Pérez-Armendáriz said, “but that doesn’t have to be Spanish.”
“It is not the case that Spanish is exclusively the language of the Americas,” Pérez-Armendáriz said. “And obviously there’s sort of this colonial roots of that. I was actually for a really long time a strong supporter of Spanish being required.”
For students looking to learn more about the multitude of languages spoken across the americas, the impact they have on societies and what happens when a language is lost, Pérez-Armendáriz recommends the class “Language Death and Revitalization” taught by Professor of Anthropology Joyce Bennett.
“I actually think our courses really open people’s eyes to like ‘Whoa, the Americas is like this really big thing,’ bigger than what most students come to understand,” Pérez-Armendáriz said.
