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Volume 1 Issue 1 (2003)
About this Issue
This first issue of New Voices/Nuevas Voces features the work of ten Dartmouth College students who participated in a new course that was offered in the Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies (LALACS) program during the spring term of 2002. This course, LATS 41: "Representations of/from Latinas/os in the Media and the Arts," was taught by Douglas Moody. The students who were enrolled in LATS 41 considered the significant roles that the mass media and the arts play in the formation of ethnic, racial, and cultural identities for Latinas/os in the United States.
Throughout the ten-week term the students were asked to think about and then respond to the ways in which race, ethnicity, gender, and the "otherness" of Latinos are represented in various media and art forms, including: cinema, radio broadcasting, performance art, mural art, museum installations, and on the Internet. At the end of the term, rather than write a formal, academic term paper, the students explored in critical, practical, and creative ways the politics and dynamics of representation by producing their own multi-media projects, which were then shared with the Dartmouth community through a series of live presentations at the LATS 41 "Culture Night" on campus.
The final component to be integrated into the interactive and
collaborative LATS 41 course website was the "Student Project Showcase," which
digitally archived excerpts of the students' final papers and QuickTime
"mini-documentaries" of the students' final projects. A Dartmouth student, Jethro Rothe-Kushel, was hired to videotape and edit the documentary material for the Student Project Showcase, and Susan Simon, from the Dartmouth Academic Computing Services, was the LATS 41 webpage designer. It is my hope that the students' final projects from LATS 41 that now appear as part of the Latino Intersections website will inspire other teachers
to coordinate these kinds of projects with students and young people in other
parts of the world, so as to spread the word of New Voices/Nuevas Voces.
Douglas Moody, editor
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