Latin American History and Critical Media Studies: Curricular Explorations

The time has arrived to assess critical pedagogical methodologies for teaching Latin American history incorporating moving-image and sound media. The larger tradition of using film and video in humanities university classrooms is a much more well-laid path. Teaching-scholars who are readers of this journal are no doubt aware of the defining works: John E. O'Connor's Film and the Humanities and Image as Artifact and Robert Sklar and Charles Musser's Resisting Images—as well as pioneering work by Martin A. Jackson, Nicholas Pronay, K. R. M. Short, Peter C. Rollins, Paul Smith, Robert Brent Toplin, Robert A. Rosenstone, Richard C. Raack, Hayden White, and others. The American Historical Association's newsletter Perspectives alongside Film & History, University Vision, The History Teacher, and a few other scholarly journals have provided over the recent decades a forum for exchange of teaching-related issues and ideas and syllabi for courses involving moving-image and sound media.

This essay extends this tradition and focuses upon Latin America by briefly surveying the most relevant sources and following up on their discussion of pedagogically theoretical issues in current use. The second section of this essay spotlights a sampling of syllabi from leading scholars in the field, offering a variety of effective approaches and templates for teaching Latin American film and history in the university classroom, especially given the issues covered in the first section. The final section will list the handful of available filmographies and contact points for film distributors and databases relevant to Latin American film and history studies. Rather than simply focus on the mechanics and processes of teaching, readers will find that the materials collected herein will build upon those practical matters in a conscious application of the philosophies behind the methods. We find that, since the 1970s, critical media studies within history and other humanities courses in the academy have grown less rigidly defined by institutional definitions and progressively more inter-disciplinary. In the case of many Latin Americanist teaching-scholars, their critical media instruction traverses the cultural geography of Latin America, marking for their students both at the same time the importance of time-tested historical topics and themes now vantaged by myriad disciplinary models as well as, equally, the multiple forms of literacy required to read them. While still expecting students to critically consider the veracity of certain historical documents and materials, pedagogical methodologies must consider historiographic and self-reflexive hermeneutic issues involved in mediated historicizing of the past.

Readings on Latin American Film and History Instruction

Perhaps the earliest significant figure for Latin-Americanist who are also critical media educators is E. Bradford Burns, whose Latin American Cinema: Film and History and other works have provided the basis for the instruction of Latin American history through filmic texts. Standing alongside Burns' pivotal early work are Leon G. Campbell, Carlos E. Cortés, and Robert Pinger's Latin America: A Filmic Approach, Cortés and Campbell's Film as a Revolutionary Weapon: A Pedagogical Analysis, Jane M. Loy's Latin America, Sights and Sounds, and Zuzana M. Pick's Latin American Filmmakers and the Third Cinema. Where these groundbreaking works laid a foundation, many recent sources have taken up even more directly some of the theoretical issues involved in teaching the moving image and sound texts.

Recent scholarly interest in approaching Latin American historical topics in humanities curricula demonstrates a new popularity in this field and suggests a growing concern for its careful study. "Teaching" sections of Radical History Review periodically include syllabi, such as the Winter 1995 special section devoted to Latin America, although the only syllabus to include film screenings as a course activity claims to examine their "historical accuracy," evaluating the film texts with "the same kinds of questions ...ask[ed] of written texts" (Gosse 142). More recently, a special issue of Latin American...