Hispanic Cities on Film: Urban Theory in the Freshman Seminar

Dedicated to the students of WSM L, 2010

Introduction

The freshman seminar, now ubiquitous across US campuses, is designed to introduce the typical freshman to the rigors of college life; namely, to the higher level of reading, writing, and critical thinking that will be required in all their future college level classes. The purpose of this essay is to map out a successful freshman seminar that was exceptionally interdisciplinary in nature through the combination of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Film Studies, and the diverse field of urban theory. My intention is to showcase the process of the course (selections of what we read, what we viewed, what we wrote) as a way of not only meeting the demands of the macro concept of the freshman seminar—which at my institution, Westminster College, is to teach critical thinking and citizenship in a global community—but also of introducing students to the micro concerns involved in the title of the course “Hispanic Cities on Film.” My objective for the end of the seminar itself was that the students would leave my classroom with the understanding that the world is connected through a structure, i.e. neo-liberal capitalism, that in turn replicates itself in the places where we live, in the lives of individuals, and in all of our thought processes.

Rather than hear the world’s connectedness described as “neo-liberalism,” students will more often hear this process described as ‘globalization.’ I approached this polemic term from two angles. First, I introduced the students to the various understandings of globalization (economic, political, and cultural) through a geographer’s lens as found in Globalization and Diversity: Geography of a Changing World. Secondly, and more importantly, given that this is a concept that freshmen will no doubt encounter throughout their academic and professional lives, I wanted their first higher education experience with the notion to be one that also emphasized humanistic empathy. Especially at an institution whose explicit mission is to “educate students to be leaders in a global community,” I wanted to define the relationship between that global community and the United States as interdependent and move away from harmful or biased stereotypes about national or cultural superiority. To achieve something akin to “humanistic empathy,” I did not present the historical, political, and social processes in a disinterested manner. Instead, by placing ethical, moral and even aesthetic value on the range of human experience from economics, to music, to narrative, to the plastic arts, and then asking questions that were aimed at eliciting empathy, my intention was that the course would work as a catalyst to push the students toward an active interest in social justice. This is not to say that there was intent to have the students engage in forms of resistance. Instead, I wanted to begin the process of consciousness formation through reading and hearing multiple perspectives on the situations presented in the films. It is only by first understanding the human consequences of economic systems on all factors of life that paths of resistance may be formed. In this way, my pedagogy follows closely geographer David Harvey’s imperative that abstract ideas of economy or culture never be separated from the real life issues of social injustice, nor disassociated from personal experience.

As Harvey has theorized, this urban process influences not only how we view ourselves and our place in our world, it has the power to dictate our interactions at various scales of experience that include the individual, family, community, class, and state (Urban 231). Consequently, these interactions extend far beyond the realms of the campus, the coffee shop, or the neighborhoods that the sixteen freshmen in my course would call home. Moreover, through the lens provided by Hispanic film directors who situated their stories in major urban centers, students might be able to distinguish aspects of the urban experience common to various international cities. Indeed, what binds the potentially divergent experiences of both the domestic and the international students to the Hispanic cities represented through film is the urban process that all in the classroom undoubtedly have...