HY200 Topics in History: Social Movements in American Southwest

HY/SW200:

Social Movements of the Southwest United States

Professor Paul Adler

padler@coloradocollege.edu

Classroom: 219 Palmer Hall

Office: 215B Palmer Hall

Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00-3:30 or by appointment

Course Description

With its particular mix of peoples, resources, and politics, the Southwestern United States of America has long been home to exploitation and resistance. Given the sheer number of activist causes that have arisen over the course of the twentieth century, this course will not offer a comprehensive overview of social and political movements in the Southwest. Rather, we will examine three particular movements that are emblematic of key themes in Southwest history.

We will start with some of the first peoples on these lands – the Navajo nation. We will explore how Navajo peoples’ labor and lives went into building the atomic age and how Navajo communities have fought for labor and environmental justice and their peoples’ self-determination. We will then move to a labor, feminist, and racial justice struggle that occurred in Grant County, New Mexico in the 1950s. In the midst of the Red Scare, a strike by zinc miners turned into a conflict over racism against Mexican-Americans, a struggle for women’s equity, and workers’ power. The fight was turned into a film – Salt of the Earth – which will center our discussion. In our final unit, we will cross the ideological spectrum to explore various manifestations of libertarian politics that have emanated from the Southwest. No understanding of current day politics is complete without exploring how everyone from ranchers asserting property claims to billionaire financiers from the Southwest have shaped U.S. history.

Course Goals

1. Understand the mechanics of how various political and social movements have organized and agitated for change. Examine in what ways different movements have made changes or have failed to.
2. Increase understanding of how social movements have shaped history in the U.S. Southwest, the United States, and transnationally.
3. Learn to engage with a variety of primary sources – audiovisual, visual, oral histories, written documents, etc.
4. Practice analyzing and presenting information through different media – papers and oral presentations.

Required Texts

These texts are available at the bookstore or through a variety of online sellers.

Brugge, Doug, Timothy Benally, and Esther Yazzie-Lewis, eds. The Navajo People and Uranium Mining. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 2006. ISBN: 978-0826337795

Baker, Ellen R. On Strike and On Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8078-5791-5.