Course Description: A Bilingual English/Spanish Course on individual and collective memoirs, diaries, confessions and traveling accounts. Students read and analyze written texts and films, keep journals, and do life writing or multimedia production in either Spanish or English. Taught in Spanish.
Course Narrative: In this course we spent time reading, analyzing and discussing, written texts and films in English and Spanish. The texts included controversial topics that we always discussed in class and also reflected on by writing our own thoughts and opinions on certain texts or films. Many of these written texts were testimonials of marginalized people that suffered due to the political issues at their countries such as Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and many others. Throughout the semester we continued to learn more about the political injustices that affected many people all over Latin America. All the texts we read in this course were a great way to learn about important events that affected and changed the lives of millions of people all over Latin America, but also we continue to learn more details about those events as time goes by. All the testimonies I read helped me realized that most of the South America and Central America countries have all done some type of brutal or political aggression towards their own people, especially those who are affected by poverty and lack of a proper education. The survivors of the countries continue to share their stories in order to inform people all over the world of the tragic events that affected them in particular, but the government did everything they could to hide it. However, now these survivors have the courage to share their experiences without feeling like their lives are in danger. This class hasmotivated to learn more about the history of several latin american countries in the future and how the people have overcome all the political and/or social changes in their particular countries. I enjoyed completing our final project because we had the opportunity to interview a person from my hispanic community, who had been part of the foster system and were in the process of starting their own lives outside of the system.