English Composition in Connection with Reading of World and Hispanic Literature

Imagine yourself in nineteenth-century New York City, in the midst of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Spanish migrants, mostly all living in exile in the United States. Many of them employed as tobacco workers, these migrants would often work to the sound of the voice of a reader–a person specifically employed by the workers to read texts out loud in Spanish. You might hear them reading novels, newspapers, theatrical pieces - all while the tabaqueros rolled their cigars. After the act of reading, the workers would join in a shared discussion: Had they liked the text? Had it given them anything new to think about? And, most importantly, what did the reading have to do with their everyday experience as migrants, as workers, as Latin Americans and New Yorkers? As the tabaqueros listened and shared, they turned the cigar factories into some of the many, unrecognized spaces where members of what would later be known as the Latin American diaspora would individually and collectively build knowledge and forms of expression to work through the complex experience of creating a sense of belonging for themselves while immersed in a country, language, and city that seemed to constantly remind them that they weren’t ‘home.’ 

These spaces don’t just exist in this distant past. Decades later, the children of Puerto Rican migrants created a similar version of the cigar factory - one centered around artistic expression and ever-evolving conversations about what scholars now call diasporic experience. The reader of the tobacco factories became the inspiration for the Nuyorican Poets Café-- an artistic enclave where people could gather to listen, converse, dance, speak their versions of Spanglish, and make art, all while theorizing with their bodies and tongues what it meant to be a New Yorker and Puerto Rican, what it meant to be Black, Indigenous, americano, and Latine, and ultimately what it meant to be Nuyorican. The Café still exists today. 

Taking as inspiration the Nuyorican Café–and the tabaquero voices that still echo through its walls– our class will work to continue this legacy of expressing and theorizing forms of diasporic belonging through the acts of reading, discussing, and writing. What are the possibilities and limitations of the now common term diaspora? How do Latin American people and communities in the U.S. use their bodies and tongues to practice and articulate forms of diasporic belonging? Together, we’ll explore questions like these in conversation with materials produced by Caribbean, Chicanx, Afro-indigenous, Mexican, and Central American thinkers who position themselves both inside and outside the United States while testing the larger boundaries of nation-states and historically-defined languages. As part of our own exploratory work of theorizing diaspora, we’ll co-construct the final unit of our course as a class, dedicating multiple weeks to studying the diasporas that are reflected in our own classroom. Our major writing assignments—including the final research project—will be composed in English, but readings will move across Spanish(es), English(es), and Spanglish(es), as will our class discussions, so a strong desire to read and dialogue in and across Spanish is a must for every member of the class community. Students who consider Spanish their ‘home,’ first, or heritage language are especially encouraged to join this course. 

Note: This course fulfills the second semester of UC Berkeley’s undergraduate writing requirement.