Fall 2026:

SPAN 135, LEC 1: Mujeres en la colonia: complejidades & paradojas / Complexities & Paradoxes: Women of the Colonial World
MW 12:00-1:50PM | Instructor: Jimena Rodriguez
In this class, we will explore the role of women in colonial society from the Mesoamerican world and the earliest moments of the conquest to early New Spanish viceregal society. We will attempt neither a denunciation of denied rights nor a feminist vindication here; on the contrary, this class seeks to explore how women overcame the norms of patriarchal society and adapted and survived in the violent and hostile colonial environment of New Spain. “Neither passive, nor submissive, nor locked away” —to use the words of Pilar Gonzalbo— women in the colony were officials, intellectuals, authors, and strategists. To examine this fact, we will focus, on the one hand, on certain colonial institutional spheres where women had a voice and representation: in chronicles and other texts regarding the European invasion of America, in Academies, in Convents, and in the viceregal Court. And on the other hand, on the discursive genres practiced by women: accounts, letters, life narratives, apologies, and poetry.

SPAN 150, LEC 1: Ethnic Otherness in Latin American Culture: From Indigenismo to Indigenous Movements
TR 2:00-3:50PM | Instructor: Patricia Arroyo
Course offered in Spanish. This course explores different ways in which “ethnic otherness” has been constructed in Latin American culture during the 20th and 21st centuries. We will study the ways in which indigenista cultural expressions depicted and appropriated Indigenous heritage through different modes such as museums, literature, painting, photography, and cinema. We will also address the cultural shifts triggered in the past few decades by the emergence of Indigenous peoples as powerful political and social actors, studying new forms of Indigenous self-expression such as testimonio, digital cinema, poetry, narrative, essay, visual arts, performance arts, and music. The course’s goal is to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of the role that Latin American culture has played in the construction of racial and cultural “otherness” in highly diverse countries such as Guatemala, Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru, as well as to acquaint students with contemporary venues of expression of Indigenous identities and cultures across the continent, including California.

SPAN 150, LEC 2: Sacrilegious Stages: Transgressing the Bible in 21st-Century Latin American Theater
MW 2:00-3:50PM | Instructor: Gelsys Garcia
This course explores how biblical figures and narratives are transgressively reimagined in 21st-century Latin American drama, where familiar sacred characters repeatedly reappear in unexpected forms and contemporary “skins.” Across the plays under study, sacred archetypes are radically defamiliarized and recast within urgent contemporary frameworks: Saul as an HIV-positive man, Judith as a Latin American Wonder Woman, Daniel as a gay war veteran, Job as a victim of the Blue Whale Challenge, and Jesus as a teenager in a dystopian society. The plagues of Exodus, meanwhile, are refigured in Havana as the progressive loss of any human sensation, either pain or placer. Through these and other transformations, the course investigates how Latin American theater mobilizes biblical narrative, symbol, and archetype to interrogate present-day social, political, and cultural conditions across the region. Students will engage with dramaturgical analysis to understand why the Bible remains a contested—and generative—site of cultural struggle across Latin America.

SPAN 160, LEC 1: Linguistic Landscapes in the Spanish-Speaking World
MW 10:00-11:50AM | Instructor: Ji Young Kim
Examination of the presence, representation, meanings and interpretation of languages displayed in public places in multilingual and multicultural neighborhoods of the Spanish-speaking world, including Spain, Latin America, and the U.S. Includes community-engaged research components.

SPAN 170, LEC 1: What Remains of the Human? Robots, Cyborgs, and AI in Latin American Culture
TR 4:00-5:50PM | Instructor: Kip Tobin
Taught in Spanish, this course explores Latin American speculative fiction and film through three defining technological figures—robots/androids, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence—understood as points along a continuum of the posthuman. Though these icons originated in the Global North,Latin American writers and filmmakers have consistently reappropriated them as potent symbols rooted in local and regional realities, producing work that challenges and extends their original meanings. The course moves through three phases: the robot as a response to industrialization and cultural anxiety; the cyborg as a figure of labor, gender, and neoliberal transformation; and AI as the ultimate challenge to humanist definitions of consciousness and personhood. Throughout, the central question remains: ¿Qué es lo que nos hace humanos? — What is it that makes us human?— according to cultural producers from the region.

SPAN M172XP / CCAS M170XP, LEC 1: “¡Cine vivo! Community-Engaged Sensory Ethnography Workshop”
R 2:00-4:50PM | Instructor: Greg Cohen
This theory-practice workshop merges intellectual inquiry with hands-on training in basic techniques of participatory video and sensory ethnography. Throughout the quarter, students will work in small teams while collaborating directly with community partners, as they develop short “urban video portraits” that focus on particular aspects or issues of urban life in the Latino community of Los Angeles. Alternating with the periodic exchange and critique of works in progress, class discussions will address past and current forms of experimental, collective, and community-based cinema in the Latin American and Iberian contexts. Practical training isspecially tailored to methods of “portable cinema,” utilizing equipment and technology students already own or can easily borrow at UCLA. The course culminates in the public screening of student videos. Taught in Spanish.

SPAN 175, LEC 1: Creative Writing in Spanish
TR 10:00-11:50PM | Instructor: Alejandro Castro
This course invites students to explore poetry as both a practice of language and a form of inquiry into experience. Through close readings of literary theory and poets from Latin America and the Latino diaspora in the United States, we will consider how a poem listens to the world and reimagines it through rhythm, image, and silence—how, for the poetic imagination, language serves as a laboratory for reshaping personal and social experience. Students will engage with published poetry that demonstrates diverse approaches to voice, logic, and form, using these works as both models and provocations. Writing exercises and workshops will explore how sound, syntax, and imagery shape perception, while theoretical readings and discussions will provide tools to analyze the intersection of language, social context, and aesthetic practice. The course will also consider what it means to write in Spanish within a U.S. setting, including how translation, migration, and linguistic friction generate new creative and political possibilities. By the end of the term, students will have assembled a portfolio of original poems in Spanish. All readings and materials will be provided by the instructor. Evaluation will be based on participation, writing exercises, workshop contributions, and a final revised portfolio. Taught in Spanish.

SPAN 290, LEC 1: Autofiction in Mexico
R 3:00-5:50PM | Instructor: Maarten van Delden
The genre of autofiction has enjoyed a remarkable upsurge across Latin America in recent decades. This class explores key works in this genre written by Mexican authors from the late twentieth century to the early 2020s. Topics for discussion include the definition of the genre, including the question of where it shades over into the genre of the memoir; the approach to selfhood developed in the worksstudied; and, relations to social and political developments in the period under consideration. Authors studied include Carlos Fuentes, Bárbara Jacobs, Héctor Aguilar Camín, Ricardo Aguilar Melantzón, Cristina Rivera Garza, Julián Herbert and Guadalupe Nettel.

SPAN 290, LEC 2: Latin American Poetry and Psychoanalysis
T 3:00-5:50PM | Instructor: Alejandro Castro
Complex and significant, the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry exceeds the question of what the clinic owes to the poem, and vice versa: more fundamentally, it examines the experience of language. From its earliest formulations, psychoanalysis has been interested in the resources of poetry, in poetic “well-saying” and its cured words or words that cure. Shortly thereafter, poets also drew from this new science of the soul, in form, thematically, conceptually -perhaps seduced by the imaginary of the unconscious. The seminar will be organized around three axes: poetry as a problem for psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis as a Latin American cultural archive, and the poetic uses of Freudianism in the region. We will analyze how Freudian vocabulary continues to offer a critical horizon for reading Latin American poetry and its ways of interrogating the limits of language. Conducted in Spanish.

PORT M142C, LEC 1: Travel Narratives, Testimony, Autobiography
MW 2:00-3:50PM | Instructor: José Luiz Passos
Exploration of 200 years of travel, migration, and exile in Brazil through literary text, film, and documentaries depicting issues of displacement, contact, diversity, assimilation, and visiting rituals. Primary sources include Maria Graham (author of early 19th-century illustrated travel books), Afro-Brazilian author Machado de Assis, 20th-century poet Elizabeth Bishop, Brazilian feminist writer Clarice Lispector, French-Algerian existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, contemporary Brazilian-American novelist Frances de Pontes Peebles, and film directors from Brazil and beyond. Overview of connections between Brazil, Europe, and U.S. Films screened with English subtitles. Texts available in translation and original language. No previous knowledge of Brazilian literature or film required.

PORT 290, LEC 2: Way-Out and Multi-Tongued Essays On Poets From the Americas
M 3:00-5:50PM | Instructor: Patricia Lino
Collective, creative and conceptual encounters with American poetry based on themes that seem to unfold multiculturally to fascinate or torment poets. Among the themes: the weight of tradition, the obsessive and humorous metalanguage of poetry, homoerotic affection, death, the relationship of poetry with other arts or the representation of animals. Among the authors: Frank O’Hara, Anne Carson, Pat Parker, Nicanor Parra, Augusto de Campos, Gary Snyder, Susana Thénon, Cristina Peri Rossi, Danez Smith, Rocío Cerón, or Marília Garcia. In addition to the readings and traditional academic analysis of the texts to be worked on, students are asked to recreate, every week, a specific literary object. Class and texts are both taught and read in Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

Winter 2027:

SPAN 140, LEC 1: Topics in Modern Studies: The Latin American Short Story
TR 2:00-3:50PM | Instructor: Maarten van Delden
Readings of short fiction by Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Roberto Bolaño and Julia Alvarez. Explores innovations in narrative form developed by these writers, as well as the ways in which they responded to the social and political changes taking place in the world around them. Taught in Spanish.

SPAN 150, LEC 1: TBA
MW 12:00-1:50PM | Instructor: TBA

SPAN 150, LEC 2: Mexican Climate Fiction: from Environmental Crisis to Eco-utopian Futures
TR 12:00-1:50PM | Instructor: Kip Tobin
Description: TBA

SPAN 150, LEC 3: Contemporary Coming-of-Age Stories by Spanish and Catalan Women Writers
MW 2:00-3:50PM | Instructor: Mckenna Middleton
While history books might focus on how historically significant events affected masses of people, coming-of-age literature offers intimate portraits of daily life. Study looks at examples of Bildungsroman–coming-of-age stories written by Spanish and Catalan women in 20th and 21st centuries. Analysis of how protagonists mature their sense of self, and their understanding of the world around them; as well as how their temporal and spatial context affects their growth and development. Study asks how these characters cope with loss and conflict and how process of character development is informed by political and social contexts. Students analyze coming- of-age stories through understanding of literary theory, feminist theory, and historical context of Spain and Catalonia. Reading of novels, graphic novels, and short stories in Spanish or Spanish translation of Catalan. Taught in Spanish.

SPAN 155, LEC 1: Stories of the Unaccompanied Alien Child
TR 2:00-3:50PM | Instructor: Alejandro Castro
The course examines the invention of the figure of the unaccompanied alien child as a way to understand the cultural dynamics that shape Latin American communities in the United States. Drawing on literary, journalistic, visual, and cinematic works, we will explore how the “epic adventure” of children traveling alone illuminates broader patterns of racism, infantilization, and displacement. Through a comparative and transnational framework, students will analyze questions of belonging, citizenship, ethnicity, race, sexuality and representation. Materials include works by Sonia Nazario, Javier Zamora, Valeria Luiselli, Justin Torres, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Óscar Martínez, John Moore, Don Bartletti, among others. This diverse and comparative corpus will allow us to reflect on the unaccompanied alien child as the liminal figure of juridical and aesthetic discourse who traverses the hemisphere on top of “La Bestia,” challenging our political imagination and narrative capacities. Taught in Spanish.

SPAN 160, LEC 1: Sounds of Spanish, English, and Spanglish in Los Angeles
MW 10:00-11:50AM | Instructor: Ji Young Kim
Descriptive and critical overview of languages spoken by Latinx populations in Los Angeles–specifically Spanish, English, and Spanglish. Focus on phonetics, phonology, sociophonetics, and bilingualism. Includes community-engaged research components.

SPAN 170, LEC 1: TBA
MW 12:00-1:50PM | Instructor: Jimena Rodriguez
Description: TBA

SPAN M172XP / CCAS M170XP, SEM 1: TBA
W 2:00–4:50PM | Instructor: Carla Suhr
Description: TBA

SPAN (SPAN) M172XP, LEC 1: Latinos, Linguistics, and Literacy (Same as Chicana/o and Central American Studies M170XP)
W 2:00–4:50PM | Instructor: Carla Suhr
Seminar, four hours; field project, four to six hours. Recommended requisite: course 100A. In-depth study of various topics related to literacy, including different definitions of literacy, programs for adult preliterates, literacy through the arts, approaches to literacy (whole language, phonics, Freire’s liberation pedagogy); and national literacy campaigns. Required field project involving Spanish-speakers in literacy programs. P/NP or letter grading.

SPAN 180, LEC 1: Screening the Isthmus: Introduction to 21st Century Central American Film
TR 10:00-11:50AM | Instructor: Patricia Arroyo
Course offered in Spanish. This course will explore the contemporary cinematic production  the Central American isthmus. Through watching a variety of Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Costa Rican, Panamanian, and U.S.-Central American documentary and fiction films, we will analyze the recent boom of the film industry in the region, focusing on the multiple ways in which post-2000 movies engage with pressing issues across the isthmus. Among other topics, this course will address the ways in which Central American films depict social inequalities, postwar violence, and transnational migrations; the different modes of filmic representation of Afro-Central American populations, Indigenous peoples, and LGBTQ+ communities; the ways in which Central American movies have addressed a complex past of social upheavals, revolutions, civil wars, political repression, and genocide; and the ways in which Central American women, children, and teenagers appear on the big screen.

SPAN 180, LEC 2: TBA
MW 2:00-3:50PM | Instructor: TBA
Description: TBA

SPAN 191B, LEC 1: The Art of Revolution and The Politics of Art in Latin America
T 3:00-5:50PM | Instructor: Greg Cohen
Where and how do art and politics coincide? What role can or should the artist play in local, national, or global social movements? What is the relationship between art and its public, and how do institutions and governments either promote or undermine them? What, in other words, are the politics of art and the art of politics in any historical moment? This course examines how the visual arts in Latin America have addressed such questions since the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. Through the analysis of diverse aesthetic objects, theoretical texts, and arts archives, we will probe the possibilities and the limits of “political art” in modern Latin America. For their final project, students will curate an on-line, “virtual exhibition” of Latin American political art. Possible objects and contexts may include films, photographs, installations, and performances from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, and Cuba. Weekly study materials in both Spanish and English. Taught in Spanish.

SPAN 290, LEC 1: Representations of the Chilean Dictatorship
W 3:00-5:50PM | Instructor: Veronica Cortinez
This seminar will examine the literary and cinematographic representations of the military Chilean dictatorship and the subsequent democratization of Chile. The seminar will be held in Spanish.

PORT 141C, LEC 1: Documentary Film: Unforeseen Connections. Brazilian Film and The World
MW 2:00-3:50PM | Instructor: Patricia Lino
Hollywood. Werner Herzog. Blindness. Karim Ainouz & Cecil B. Demille. Have you ever thought about the various types of connections that Brazilian film has established with the world since the late 19th century?In addition to being geographical, aesthetic or thematic, these connections often consist of the recreation or decolonial metamorphosis of one or more cinematographic and communicative tools developed around the globe. In this class, we will have the opportunity to not only discuss these references but also understand them in practice through a series of creative and collective exercises. Taught in English (may vary according to student preference).

Spring 2027:

SPAN 150, LEC 1: Topics in Contemporary Studies
TR 4:00-5:50PM | Instructor: Maarten van Delden
Description: TBA

SPAN 170, LEC 1: Visual Futures: Science Fiction, Media, and Technology in Latin America
MW 2:00-3:50PM | Instructor: Kip Tobin
Description: TBA

SPAN 170, LEC 2: Te voy a contar mi historia / I am going to tell you my story: First Generation at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese
TR 10:00-11:50AM | Instructor: Jimena Rodriguez
In this upper division writing class we will explore personal narratives. Our goal is to make connections between the classroom and life experiences working with First Generation Students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. We will explore different forms of writing personal narratives through the exploration of four different genres: chronicle; testimonio, oral history and visual narratives & maps. We will be studying critical readings. We will consider our positionality and reflecting on our own experiences with power and authority. We will think about the concept of identity based on the idea that Identity relies on discursive mediations that both limit and shape it. Identity does not exist a priori in culture, nor in History or substantialism (Hall, Anderson). Rather in day to day experiences and dialogue and as a process of ‘identification’ inconstant change.

SPAN 180, LEC 1: Mexican Science Fiction Film: Aliens, Monsters, and Machines
MW 10:00-11:50AM | Instructor: Kip Tobin
Description: TBA

SPAN 180, LEC 2: “History, Memory, Truth, Fiction: Documentary Practices in Latin America”
TR 12:00-1:50PM | Instructor: Greg Cohen
This course examines a variety of critical documentary practices in contemporary Latin America since the 1960s. While focusing primarily on non-fiction film and video, we also account for related documentary production in the region, from photography and installation to participatory media. Our research will address the ways in which Latin American documentary artists from diverse contexts and periods have used their medium to negotiate a number of complex issues at the heart of documentary representation itself. These may include the relationship of the present to the past and of cultural knowledge to the archive; the (re-)construction of individual and collective memory; the nexus of political agency and social space; the tension between art and everyday life; and the limits of “truth” and “fiction”. Weekly films, readings, and related materials in both Spanish and English, with occasional Portuguese-language films and videos subtitled in English. Taught in Spanish

SPAN 256A, LEC 1: Syntax of Heritage Languages
W 3:00-5:50PM | Instructor: Rodrigo Ranero
This course examines theoretical and methodological issues related to the study of the syntax of heritage languages.