Hum 110 Book Club Syllabus
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Each unit is expected to take approximately one month for each book club to cover. Individual schedules may vary by group.
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Year 2: Mexico
(Year 1 is also still available.)
Books Needed
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Penguin Books, 1997).
- Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991)
- Jose Emilio Pacheco, Battles in the Desert, trans. Katherine Silver (New York: New Directions, 2021
These specific editions are suggested, but not required, for alumni participants. Books may be purchased through the Reed Bookstore. Additional assigned texts are available on e-reserves accessible to participating alumni via links embedded in the syllabus below.
Unit I: Introduction to Tenochtitlan: Mexica Worldviews
How are worldviews expressed in myth, architecture, and practice? What aspects of precolonial society survive in these documents? To what extent can we recognize and understand those survivals in retrospect? Many assignments from this syllabus involve buildings or artworks. It is important that you spend time looking at these and thinking about their significant features and their larger meaning—actively looking, as if actively reading.
Assignment
- Gallery: Templo Mayor and city of Tenochtitlan
- Additional resource: A Portrait of Tenochtitlan
- Additional resource: Tira de la Peregrinación
- “The Five Suns or Cosmic Ages,” “The Cosmic Ages, the Rescuing of the Precious Bones, and the Discovery of Corn,” and “The Birth of Huitzilopochtli, Patron God of the Aztecs,” Native Mesoamerican Spirituality: Ancient Myths, Discourses, Stories, Doctrines, Hymns, Poems from the Aztec, Yucatec, Quiche-Maya and Other Sacred Traditions, Miguel León-Portilla (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 135-44, 220-225.
Lectures (links coming soon)
- Margot Minardi, “Mapping the Cosmos at the Templo Mayor.”
- James Maffie (University of Maryland, guest lecturer) “Mexica (Aztec) Philosophy at the Time of the Conquest.”
Unit II: Origins and Survivals / Mexica Codices
How do different actors make use of the past to understand or interpret their own contemporary society, worldview, or culture? How are the past and the present shaped and narrated in order to justify contemporary social orders? What aspects of precolonial society survive in these documents? To what extent are precolonial survivals translated or effaced by the colonial context of their creation?
Assignments
- Codex Mendoza, ed. Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), selections: Facsimiles of folios 1-18r and Facsimiles of folios 18v-19r, 37v-38r, 45v-46r (=Vol. III, 9-45, 82-83, 98-99), blank pages omitted; and Translations of folios 1-18r and folios 18v-19r, 37v-38r, 45v-46r (=Vol. IV, 7-43, 80-81, 96-97), blank pages omitted.
- Gallery: Tira de la Peregrinación (Boturini Codex). [link coming soon]
Lectures (links coming soon)
- Nathalia King, “We Walked a Long Time to Get Here; We Have Been Here Forever.”
- David Garrett, “Reading Mexica Imperialism through the Codex Mendoza.”
Unit III: Narrating New Spain / Accounts of New Spain and the New Spanish Order
How are the past and the present shaped and narrated in order to justify contemporary social orders? What aspects of precolonial society survive in these documents? To what extent are precolonial survivals translated or effaced by the colonial context of their creation? What is cultural hybridity?
Assignments
- Selections from The Universal History of the Things of New Spain [La historia general de las cosas de Nueva España], Book 12 = We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, ed. and trans. James Lockhart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 48-9, 126-163, 301, 306-7. [also available: view the full Universal History of the Things of New Spain, also known as the Florentine Codex.]
- Bernal Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain [Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España], J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1963), 284-307.
Lecture (link coming soon)
- Nigel Nicholson, “Telling the Story of New Spain.”
Unit IV: Narrating New Spain / Accounts of New Spain and the New Spanish Order
How are the past and the present shaped and narrated in order to justify contemporary social orders? What aspects of precolonial society survive in these documents? To what extent are precolonial survivals translated or effaced by the colonial context of their creation? What is cultural hybridity?
Assignments
- Selections from Luis Lasso de la Vega, The story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega's Huei tlamahuiçoltica of 1649, eds. Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole and James Lockhart (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 54-93.
- Gallery: Virgin Mary, Basilica of Guadalupe. [link coming soon]
Lecture (link coming soon)
- Jenny Sakai, “‘She is Ours, All Ours’: The Virgin of Guadalupe as a Political Symbol.”
Unit V: Colonial Hierarchies and Resistance / Sor Juana
How did New Spanish colonial society figure itself in relation to Europe and Central America? How do gender, class and race intersect in the self-fashioning of Sor Juana? What voice or voices does she adopt or project?
Assignments
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “Reply to Sor Filotea,” “First I Dream,” Redondilla 92 (“A Philosophical Satire”), Decimas 130 and 132, Sonnet 161, and “Loa to Narcissus” in Poems, Protest, and a Dream, in Poems, Protest, and a Dream, 1-75, 77-129, 148-51, 165, 179, 195-239. [Book]
Lectures (links coming soon)
- Ann Delehanty, “Knowledge in the Reply to Sor Filotea”
- Ariadna Garcia-Bryce, “Sor Juana’s ‘First Dream’ Baroque Poetics”
Unit VI: Envisioning the Modern Nation / Constitutional Debates
What is modernity? What is the nation? How do different agents represent the modern nation? Who speaks for the modern nation? Who is the national audience, and how can it be addressed? How is the Mexican past framed?
Assignments
- Selections from The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 189-95, 220-38 (José Morelos, Agustín de Iturbide, the editors of El Tiempo, and Mariano Otero).
- Branch, H.N., trans., The Mexican Constitution of 1917 compared with the Mexican Constitution of 1857 (American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1917), 1-3, 15-32, 94-113.
- “The Plan de Ayala” (1911), in John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 400-404.
Lectures (links coming soon)
- Margot Minardi, “Turning Points: Mexico in the Nineteenth Century.”
- David Garrett, “Modernity and the Mexican Revolution.”
Unit VII: Envisioning the Modern Nation / The Mexican Muralists
What is modernity? What is the nation? How do different agents represent the modern nation? Who speaks for the modern nation? Who is the national audience, and how can it be addressed? How is the Mexican past framed?
Assignments
- Gallery: Mexican Muralism [link coming soon]
- “Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors” (1923-1924), in Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, ed. Alejandra Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adèle Greeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 319-321.
Lecture (link coming soon)
- Nigel Nicholson, “State-Sponsored Art.”
Unit VIII: Envisioning the Modern Nation / Luis Buñuel
What is modernity? What is the nation? How do different agents represent the modern nation? Who speaks for the modern nation? Who is the national audience, and how can it be addressed? How is Mexico City framed?
Assignments
- Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned), a film directed by Luis Buñuel (1950). [link coming soon]
- Cesare Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” Sight and Sound 2 (1953): 64-69.
Lecture (link coming soon)
- John Sanders, “Dreams and Nightmares: Form and Context in Los Olvidados.”
Unit IX: Envisioning the Modern Nation / José Emilio Pacheco
What is modernity? What is the nation? How do different agents represent the modern nation? Who speaks for the modern nation? Who is the national audience, and how can it be addressed? How is Mexico City framed?
Assignment
- José Emilio Pacheco, “Battles in the Desert,” Battles in the Desert and Other Stories, trans. Katherine Silver (New York: New Directions, 1987), 81-117. [Book]
Lecture (link coming soon)
- Libby Drumm, “All Roads Lead to ‘Roma.’”
Unit X: Envisioning the Modern Nation / Elena Poniatowska
What is modernity? What is the nation? How do different agents represent the modern nation? Who speaks for the modern nation? Who is the national audience, and how can it be addressed? How is Mexico City framed?
Assignment
- Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991) [Book]
Lectures (links coming soon)
- Jan Mieszkowski, “Representation and its Discontents”
- Ann Delehanty, “Testimonio and the Politics of Genre.”
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