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Teaching Migration, Race, and Place: A U.S. Latino Historian's Perspective
ADRIAN BURGOS JR.
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THE MAJORITY OF courses I teach at the University of Illinois focus on U.S. Latinos, race-ethnicity, and urban history. "Caribbean Latino Migrations" is an intermediate-level course aimed at a general audience. "Latinos and Cities" and "Immigrant America" are upper-division courses for history majors and Latino/Latina studies minors, with the former focusing on migrations of various Latino subgroups to urban centers in the Midwest (Chicago), West (Los Angeles), Northeast (New York City), and South (Tampa) and the latter exploring immigration from Europe, Latin America, and Asia as well as African American migrations starting in the mid-nineteenth century. "Race and the City" is a graduate course that examines the overlapping formation of racial and ethnic communities in major urban U.S. centers since the late nineteenth century. Finally, an occasional capstone history course examines baseball and integration. |
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My teaching and research interests lie in examining the intersections of race, ethnicity, culture, and nation as they manifest in the migrations of people from the Spanish-speaking Americas to and within the United States. As one can gather from the slate of courses above, I am not a "baseball" historian—a label often hurled my way when people learn that my research involves Latinos, race, and baseball. This brief Forum piece will discuss several teaching strategies adopted over the years from ideas generated in conversations about teaching with colleagues and through trial and error in the classroom. The examples I cite are drawn primarily from the undergraduate course, "Caribbean Latino Migrations," which draws the broadest cross section of students of all the courses I teach involving immigration history, race, and ethnicity. |
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That teaching and learning are simultaneous processes is a constantly reinforced pedagogical reality, whether teaching an undergraduate survey, a capstone research seminar, or a graduate course. As a trained historian whose work focuses on Latinos, I employ historically grounded interdisciplinary approaches in the classroom. A central objective is to foster an environment of intellectual collaboration where the students and I engage in the productive exchange of ideas over the assigned materials that builds their critical thinking and analytical writing skills. |
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Assignments such as students serving as discussion facilitators, making group presentations, and writing critical response papers build their awareness of the agency of historians in producing historical narratives while placing them in the position of interpreters of the past. These assignments expose students to the various mediums through which we can represent and learn about the past as well as how our understandings of the past can change through the perspective we employ and the source materials we draw upon to build our interpretations. This, moreover, quickens their awareness of how history (and historical interpretation) is produced in our own time. Better able to appreciate that history is much more than the facts of the matter, students more readily learn to ask key questions about the production of history and historical narratives and to look beyond the surface of documents, traditional narratives, mainstream media coverage, and popular lore. |
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Due to my position as a U.S. Latino historian, the courses I routinely teach do not feature a traditional structure for a U.S. immigration course. They do not offer a sweeping engagement of the different waves of immigration to the United States. Rather, focusing primarily on Latino migrations, the courses I teach are organized around three major themes: "becoming American," the quest for meaningful inclusion, and community formation. |
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