Migration and Labor in the Americas: Praxis, Knowledge, and Nations

Abstract

This article examines the conceptualization, development, and implementation of two related courses on the lives and labors of migrants in the United States. Both courses focus on the histories and hemispheric experiences of migrant workers, within and between the United States, Latin America, and the Spanish Caribbean. The courses are used as a means to think more broadly about what it means to teach courses on Latin America in the twenty-first-century context of the transnational turn in scholarship, the debates over immigration and its reform, concerns over the future of labor organizing, and efforts to seek social justice. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, students in the seminars engage in praxis and work to deconstruct four interrelated and seemingly fixed binaries: structure and agency, theory and practice, classroom and outside world, and teacher and student.