The U.S. Southwest and Mexico Program provides students the opportunity for intensive study and research of the Greater Southwest, an area encompassing the American Southwest and northern Mexico.
Collaborating with partnership organizations on both sides of the border, as well as within political and state borders, students actively engage in interdisciplinary research directed and supported by the program. Classrooms are based in numerous locations, presenting students with opportunities to explore intensely the complex cultural, political, economic, and scientific issues that contribute to the unique diversity of the Greater Southwest.
This hands-on involvement is key to Hampshire College’s commitment to fostering a productive arena for students to explore the transnational implications and consequences of border dynamics.
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Borderlands |
Anzaldua describes the U.S.-Mexico border as a “thin edge of barbwire una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” Nowhere else in the world is there such a close physical juxtaposition of a post-industrial nation with a developing one. While capital and goods are now freely traded with Mexico, the movement of people northward into the U.S. is strictly regulated, and deeply held notions of racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries—and their policy implications—are challenged by the growth of transnational communities on both sides of the line. Emphasizing historical and contemporary processes of nation-state formation and deterritorialization, globalization, and identity construction, the course will challenge students to investigate a range of political and legal controversies of the border area, including labor, immigration, drugs, environmental, and cultural issues.
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Integration of Science Studies For example, health data can be looked at for women working in factories on the borders and analyzed within a context of NAFTA and other economic changes. As another example, tree-coring techniques for the reconstruction of rainfall in the past can be applied to an analysis of the effects of drought on crop productivity and nutritional status for rural farmers today. Political borders that define reservations and access to resources, as well as economic borders that dictate employment and health also figure prominently in the kinds of questions that can be examined in a less scientifically driven concentration. Mexico and the U.S. share one of the longest borders on earth, and this presents, as one journalist stated, the “laboratory of our future.” Network for Research and Education Crossroads in the Study of the Americas (CISA) |