Imagining the Indio in Hispanic American Culture and Politics

Catalog description

In this course students trace the uses and appropriations of the term indio in Hispanic American culture and politics since the conquest to the present. Indigenous groups have been imagined as indios since Columbus misrecognized them when he arrived to the Americas in 1492. However negative connotations regarding the indio as subhuman or the culturally and racially inferior “other” started to shift during the independence period. Some of the questions that we attempt to answer are: Who is talking on behalf of the indio ? Who is “the other”? What is modernity? Can the indigenous groups be a part of a project of modernization? What is the relationship between the development of capitalism and indigenismo ? Semester(s) Offered: Offered as needed