Liaison Magazine - LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and ...

teaching
Teaching Chicano/a Studies in the UK: mobilising
Hispanic Studies students’ empathetic responses to
promote equality and diversity
Following a paper presented at the LLAS / English Subject Centre conference,
“Borderlands:Themes in Teaching Literatures of the Americas” (18 October 2007),
Thea Pitman describes what students can gain from Chicano/a Studies.
Chicano/a Studies, in the fullest
sense of the term,
encompasses a wide range of
disciplines in the humanities and social
sciences and is devoted to
investigating the experience of the
substantial and still fast-growing sector
of the US population that is “of
Mexican ancestry”. In the United
States the subject entered university
curricula in the early 1970s, largely as a
result of pressure from the Chicano
Civil Rights Movement and the
demands of Chicano/a activists to be
allowed fair access to higher education
and to be represented fairly in the
subject matter taught (Aguirre 1999:
267). It was, and still is, heavily involved
in initiatives to socially engineer a
more diverse and tolerant society. 1
In the UK the rationale for teaching
the subject is quite obviously very
different.With no “native born
Chicanos/as” in our midst to give it
purpose, the subject can (occasionally)
be studied as “just another optional
content module” on a degree in
English or American Studies or,
perhaps more often, one in Hispanic
and/or Latin American Studies.
However, it is my contention that,
particularly for students of Hispanic
and Latin American Studies, the
subject can function as more than “just
another content option”. Instead, it can
offer them an insider’s perspective on
discrimination with which they are
particularly predisposed to empathise,
and subsequently it hopes to mobilise
such empathy and indignation to
encourage students to approach
instances of discrimination in their
own society in a more enlightened
way. It thus helps promote tolerance
and an awareness of social diversity
among such students in a much more
lateral sense than when taught in
the US.
For the last five years I have taught a
final-year undergraduate module
entitled “Identity in Chicano/a
Literature and Film” from within the
Department of Spanish, Portuguese
and Latin American Studies at the
University of Leeds.The creation of
this module was motivated by the
desire to come up with
something that would
be attractive to
students (it is,
of course, an
optional
module). It
is hence
predominantly contemporary, dealing
with both literature and film produced
by Chicanos/as (of a generally more
militant than assimilationist nature),
and it benefits from the ongoing
attractiveness of the topic of identity.
However, I also wanted it to be
relevant and useful to students in their
lives beyond university; that is to say, I
wanted it to go beyond the acquisition
of knowledge about a different society
and culture. However, I equally wanted
it to do more than promote standard
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