Advanced Topics

Learners who have completed the core undergraduate curriculum in Latin American Studies should select one or two specialization tracks aligned with their specific research focus, regional interests, or career objectives, rather than attempting to complete all five tracks.

Specialization Tracks Index

Decoloniality, Indigenous Autonomy, and Afro-Latin Politics

Investigates how colonial hierarchies persist within modern institutions, centering Indigenous and Afro-descendant theoretical paradigms, self-governance models, and struggles for racial and territorial justice.

Decolonial Epistemology and the Modernity/Coloniality Matrix: The Idea of Latin America (Walter D. Mignolo / Wiley-Blackwell) - Deconstructs "Latin America" as an imperial, Eurocentric geopolitical invention and outlines the epistemic shifts necessary to build decolonial alternatives.

Indigenous Autonomy, Plurinationalism, and Customary Law: Indigenous Latin America in the Twenty-First Century: The First Decade (World Bank Open Knowledge Repository) - An extensive open-access monograph analyzing legal recognition, demographic shifts, urban migration, and political mobilization across seventeen Latin American countries.

Afro-Latin Formations and Ancestral Territorial Rights: Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction (Alejandro de la Fuente & George Reid Andrews, Eds. / Cambridge University Press) - A comprehensive open-access survey volume examining racial inequality, social thought, quilombo land rights, and cultural mobilizations across the African diaspora in Latin America.

Afro-Latin Formations and Ancestral Territorial Rights: Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (George Reid Andrews / Internet Archive) - A landmark historical survey tracing how Afro-descendants shaped nation-building, labor systems, and civil rights mobilizations across the hemisphere.

Political Economy, Neo-Extractivism, and Environmental Justice

Examines the structural reliance on natural resource extraction, the ecological and social conflicts generated by global commodity frontiers, and alternative paradigms of territorial governance.

The Commodity Consensus and Neo-Extractivism: Neo-Extractivism in Latin America: Socio-Environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives (Maristella Svampa / Cambridge University Press) - An open-access study theorizing the shift from the Washington Consensus to the "Commodity Consensus" and documenting the eco-territorial resistance led by rural and Indigenous communities.

Agrarian Reform, Peasant Resistance, and Agribusiness Frontiers: To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (Angus Wright & Wendy Wolford / Food First Books) - An in-depth political-economic and ethnographic study of Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST) and its organized resistance to latifundia land concentration and industrial monoculture.

Political Ecology of Resource Conflicts and Buen Vivir: Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America (Anthony Bebbington & Jeffrey T. Bury, Eds. / University of Texas Press) - Examines how transnational extractive concessions transform Andean and Mesoamerican river basins, community institutions, and local livelihoods.

Political Ecology of Resource Conflicts and Buen Vivir: Extractivisms: Politics, Economy and Ecology (Eduardo Gudynas / Fernwood Publishing) - Systematizes the concept of extractivisms across South America, offering critical theoretical tools on modes of appropriation and the Andean constitutional philosophy of Buen Vivir.

State Violence, Authoritarianism, and Transitional Memory

Analyzes the dynamics of systematic state terror during the Cold War, the strategies of armed revolutionary groups, and the complex institutional mechanisms of transitional justice and collective memory.

Cold War State Terror and Transnational Repression: The Condor Trials: Transnational Repression and Human Rights in South America (Francesca Lessa / Yale University Press) - A definitive archival and trial-ethnography investigation of Operation Condor's cross-border terror coordination and the decades-long legal campaigns that secured convictions against military perpetrators.

Armed Revolutionary Insurgencies and Guerrilla Warfare: Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956 (Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley / Princeton University Press / Internet Archive) - The canonical comparative sociological study evaluating why guerrilla insurgencies succeeded in Cuba and Nicaragua but collapsed across Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and Bolivia.

Transitional Justice, Truth Commissions, and Human Rights Jurisprudence: Violence, Human Rights, and Justice (MIT OpenCourseWare) - An advanced syllabus and reading program examining state terror, anthropological perspectives on political violence, international human rights law, and post-authoritarian reconciliation.

Transitional Justice, Truth Commissions, and Human Rights Jurisprudence: Nunca Más: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP / Internet Archive) - The foundational 1984 primary truth commission report establishing the factual and legal architecture of systematic forced disappearances in South America.

Hemispheric Geopolitics, Borders, and Transnational Migration

Explores how asymmetrical power relations between the United States and Latin America manifest through military interventions, border externalization policies, forced displacement, and transnational illicit flows.

U.S. Imperialism, Interventions, and Hemispheric Hegemony: Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Lars Schoultz / Harvard University Press / Internet Archive) - A comprehensive diplomatic and intellectual history detailing the racialized and paternalistic premises guiding two centuries of U.S. interventions in Latin America.

U.S. Imperialism, Interventions, and Hemispheric Hegemony: Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Greg Grandin / Metropolitan Books / Internet Archive) - Demonstrates how U.S. covert intervention in Central America during the late Cold War served as an ideological and tactical laboratory for modern imperial projection.

Undocumented Migration Corridors and Border Necropolitics: The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Jason De León / University of California Press) - A groundbreaking forensic and ethnographic study of U.S. border enforcement, detailing how the Sonoran Desert is utilized as an instrument of state violence against Latin American migrants.

Illicit Transnational Economies and Narco-Geopolitics: Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (Paul Gootenberg / University of North Carolina Press) - A rigorous historical commodity study exploring how Andean coca was transformed into an illicit global industry and how prohibitionist policies catalyzed regional criminal networks.

Gender, Feminist Political Ecology, and Queer Mobilizations

Assesses gendered dynamics of power across the Americas, focusing on decolonial feminist theory, community-based anti-femicide organizing, and the legal recognition of LGBTQ+ rights.

Decolonial, Indigenous, and Abya Yala Feminisms: "Toward a Decolonial Feminism" (María Lugones, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. 25, No. 4, 2010) - A seminal essay formulating the concept of the coloniality of gender, demonstrating how European conquest violently imposed a hierarchical, binary gender system onto colonized societies.

Decolonial, Indigenous, and Abya Yala Feminisms: Feminist Subversions: Thinking and Acting in Latin America (Breny Mendoza / Palgrave Macmillan) - Explores Latin American and decolonial feminist theory, challenging Global North liberal feminism through Central American and Abya Yala political perspectives.

Femicide, Structural Impunity, and Mass Feminist Mobilization: The War Against Women (Rita Laura Segato / Polity Press) - A foundational anthropological intervention analyzing femicide in Latin America as an expressive language of territorial control, corporate extractivism, and patriarchal dominance.

Femicide, Structural Impunity, and Mass Feminist Mobilization: Feminist International: How to Change Everything (Verónica Gago / Verso) - Theorizes the mass strike movement spearheaded by #NiUnaMenos in Argentina, linking violence against women directly to financial extractivism and unpaid social reproduction.

LGBTQ+ Rights Expansion and Sexual Citizenship: The Politics of LGBTQ Rights Expansion in Latin America and the Caribbean (Javier Corrales / Cambridge University Press) - Analyzes why Latin America emerged as a global leader in same-sex marriage and gender identity legislation, detailing electoral incentives, judicial politics, and conservative backlashes.

LGBTQ+ Rights Expansion and Sexual Citizenship: The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America: A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights (Javier Corrales & Mario Pecheny, Eds. / University of Pittsburgh Press) - An indispensable multidisciplinary reader collecting activist manifestos, legal rulings, and analytical chapters documenting decades of sexual minority organizing across the hemisphere.