Updates: Latino Cultures

Harvard’s Latino Cultures Seminar, to be held for the second year, has “a new, coordinated design,” according to its organizers, Professor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco from the Graduate School of Education and Professor Doris Sommer from Romance Languages and Literatures.

Speakers at the Thursday afternoon seminar to be held at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies will be clustered in three general subject areas: Education and Sociology; Humanities; Political Science, Law and Government.

The interdisciplinary course seeks to present a broad range of issues and disciplines that the organizers hope that students will later develop in future and more specialized courses, or through independent reading with expert mentors. “The double promise here is that colleagues and students from traditional disciplines (history, literature, anthropology, politics, music) will be able to learn about particular developments in Latino Studies at the same time that a committed group of students (graduate and undergraduate) attends the whole series in the context of a course,” the organizers explained in a letter of invitation to potential speakers.

Speakers range from Diego Vigil, UCLA, who will speak on gangs in Latino communities, to Juan Flores, CUNY Visiting Professor at Harvard, who will address the subject of Nuyorican popular culture, to Gary Orfield, from the Kennedy School of Government, who will discuss civil rights.

Other speakers include Catherine Snow, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Roberto G. Fernandez, Cuban-American novelist from Florida State University; Alejandro Portes and Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, sociologists from Princeton; Jorge Domí­nguez, Government; Jorge Esquirol, Northeastern University Law School; and George Sanchez, University of Southern California, History.