HY239      One Unit
People, Power and Protest in Latin America, c.1895 to the present day

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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HY239 is designed to provide students with an introduction to the history of Latin America from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Its focus is predominantly on Latin Americans and what happened within the region. However, the course will also explore Latin Americans’ interaction with the wider world, including their pivotal and expanding relationship with the United States during the twentieth century. Major themes covered on the course include identity, citizenship and nationalism; neo-colonialism and anti-imperialism; state-building and concepts of “development”; revolution and resistance; dictatorship and violence; democratization and the struggle for social justice. Among more specific topics covered in lectures and seminars are Cuba’s War of Independence; the Mexican Revolution; migration and workers’ movements; the Guatemalan Revolution and the US-sponsored 1954 coup against Jacobo Arbenz’s government; the Cuban Revolution; the Catholic Church and Liberation Theology; Allende’s Chile and the 1973 Chilean coup; military dictatorship in the Southern Cone and resistance; solidarity networks and Human Rights; Central American revolutionary movements and conflict; democratization and peace; transitional justice and memory wars; the rise and fall of Latin America’s Pink Tide; neoliberalism; extractivism and the environment; migration; and the struggle for indigenous and LGBTQ+ rights. In addressing these themes and topics, we will be paying particular attention to histories of race, class and gender with students encouraged to consider how different Latin Americans experienced and influenced the course of history in the region.

4 hours of lectures, 16 hours of classes and 1 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.
4 hours of lectures and 16 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Students will be required to do one presentation, write one 2,000-word essay and one 1,000-1,500-word book review, which they will present to class. These assignments will not form part of the final assessment but they are a required component of the course.

A detailed course outline and reading list, subdivided by weekly topics, will be provided at the first lecture and will also be available on Moodle and in the departmental public folders. However, the following works are useful introductions for the course:

• • Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt (eds), Race and Nation in Modern Latin America; • Brown, From Frontiers to Football: An Alternative History of Latin America since 1800; • Burgos-Debray, (ed.), I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala; • Chase, Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962; • Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents; • Drinot (ed), Che’s Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America; • Gibbings, Our Time is Now: Race in Postcolonial Guatemala • Lasso, Erased: The Lost Towns of the Panama Canal: A Forgotten Story of Tropical Modernity • Meade, A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present • Moya, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History; • Pensando, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture in the Long Sixties • Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 • Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to post-Extractivism in Ecuador (2020) • Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America; • Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America/n

Course participation (20%)

Essay (40%, 3000 words)

Essay (40%, 3000 words)