LASC 234
Issues in Latin American Studies I
Module V Paper

In Fall 2011, the Latin American Studies Center and the Center for the History of the New America have joined forced to organize a film series that deals with patterns and problems of immigration and migration. Your final paper for LASC 234 will be a viewer's guide, suitable for the LASC website, to three films that examine Central Americans on the move. '

The three films to be covered in your guide are:

  1. El Norte [The North], a 1983 feature-length theatrical release directed by directed by Gregory Nava
  2. Sin Nombre, a 2009 feature-length theatrical release directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
  3. Los Invisibles [The Invisibles], a 2010 documentary codirected by Marc Silver and Gael García Bernal

To allow your viewers to make the most of the films, your guide must do a number of important things.

  1. The guide should introduce the significance of migration and immigration in Latin America
  2. The guide should list each film by title, director, and date of release
  3. The guide should summarize clearly the plot and characters of each of the three films.
  4. The guide should analyze the three films (individually and collectively) as ways to see and understand the critical categories of migration and immigration, notably questions of structural conditions and human experiences that propel migration and immigration in modern Latin America

It is important that your viewer's guide make explicit an engagement with the various course materials. Engagement should be demonstrated through selective quotes of assigned readings, screened videos, and handouts. See note below for additional resources that you may wish to consult.

Although you can anticipate that the main audience will be other University students with an interest in Latin American and immigration studies, you should write a review that is accessible to students from a variety of academic majors.

The viewer's guide, due at the beginning of class on Tuesday, December 13, 2011, should be 1000-1250 words (excluding footnotes, properly formatted in Chicago/Turabian style) and printed double-spaced with reasonably-sized fonts and margins. Please paginate.

Film Availability

Sin Nombre and El Norte will be screened on Tuesday, November 29 and Thursday, December 11. Both screenings will take place 4:30-7:00pm in 0226 H. J. Paterson.

Sin Nombre and El Norte are also available via ELMS Course Media Reserves and at Hornbake Nonprint Media

Los Invisibles in available on YouTube [http://www.youtube.com/user/invisiblesfilms]

A Note on Style

In the two fictional films [Sin Nombre and El Norte], you should use the real name of the actor/actress only at the first mention. Otherwise, refer to character by the name/position within the film's plotline. Film titles are always italicized.

Useful Resources

Your viewer's guide should not be conceived as a research paper. However, you may wish to consult the following online resources for some general background on patterns of migration and immigration:

The Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (2nd. ed.) [available via the Latin American Studies Guide and ResearchPort], especially entries on:

The Pew Hispanic Center has assembled statistical summaries of demographic and economic profiles of Hispanics in the United States by their countries of origin.

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