About the Project
Spanish 330 Fall 2022 and 2024 studied the theme of “Borders Across the Spanish-Speaking World”. While the U.S. / Mexico border looms large in our consciousness, many Spanish-speaking countries have complicated relationships with their neighbors. We will compare and contrast how the art world (mainly literature and film) portrays these complications, at the same time learn about how borders affect culture, economics, the environment, migration routes, and everyday people. We will also learn about the role borders play in exacerbating racism, xenophobia, and nationalist tendencies.
Learning Goals for Spanish 330
- Articulate common themes and characteristics of border narratives
- Recognize the construction and breakdown of dichotomies in border narratives
- List several reasons that motivate border crossers in the Spanish speaking world.
- Grapple with the role geopolitical borders & immigration play in our world.
- Map the geographical journey of one character or person’s migration story.
Final Project
As a final project, each student was assigned a character from a film or a real person from an autobiography. This project was meant to evaluate a character’s decisions, mobility, agency, and examine how a border impacts that agency. Students learned new technical skills such as content curation and management, storytelling through a digital medium, and producing digital work for public audiences. To this end we used the free and open-source Knight Lab Storymap JS software to examine the relationship between space and narrative. In Fall 2024 we also added perspectives from conversations with everyday people across the Spanish-speaking world.
We hope our Story Maps will be enriching, supplementary content for consumers of these texts as well as for teachers who are looking to provide a visual journey map to their students.
