ANTHR 6762 - Law, Latinxs, Illegality

(crosslisted) AMST 6762, LSP 6762

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with AMST 3762/ANTHR 3762/LSP 3762.

V. Santiago-Irizarry.

The Latinx experience in the United States is, too often, predominantly shaped by law, state power, and police action. Drawing from a theoretical and methodological toolkit developed within the anthropology of law, this course considers how a spurious condition of illegality and the constitution of Latinxs as a population presumably in need, as scholars Flores and Yúdice argued in a seminal 1990 article, have shaped individual and collective life among them and their communities. Although immigration is salient among the issues we will examine, it will not be the only one and we will stress how it articulates with multiple sociocultural and legal domains to suffuse and inform a variety of processes.