Hello, my name is Jason Suárez, and I am excited to be your instructor this semester in History 133 Online: The History of Latin America. This is an 16-week fully online course. There are no textbooks or materials that need to be purchased for this course. All of your required readings will be included in the Canvas course modules.
Your success is extremely important to me. I’ve worked hard to design a course that is interesting, well-structured, and insightful, and I hope you’ll find it both enjoyable and rewarding. To make things easier, you don’t need to purchase any texts for this course as everything you need is available through Canvas.
I’m passionate about helping students engage with the stories of the past and develop the tools to think critically about history. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions or need support. I look forward to exploring these fascinating topics with you this semester and hearing your perspectives along the way. Let’s get started!
BEFORE WE BEGIN SOMETHING ABOUT ME
- I was born in Wichita Falls, Texas. I have lived in many places and countries since my father was in the U.S. Air Force.
- I attended Santa Barbara City College and transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) where I majored in history. I also completed my graduate work at UCSB.
- My first teaching appointment was at Seattle Central College (1998-2001). I was hired by El Camino College in 2001. I am currently tenured at El Camino College and also serve as the Faculty Coordinator of Student Equity.
- I have been married since 1995 and my wife is a tenured Counselor/Articulation officer at Santa Barbara City College.
- I live in Carpinteria, California. Yes, I have been commuting back and forth to LA since 2001. One hundred miles to work and one hundred miles home. Covid-19 temporarily put a stop to my commute.
- Five months out of the year I live in Spain where my wife and I have a second residence.
- And yes, as you can tell from the picture, my passion outside of the classroom is cycling. Broken wheel! I had to walk partially up Denison Grade in Santa Paula until I was picked-up.
HARDWARE/SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS AND TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
Let’s review some of this course’s hardware and software requirements. Students must have at a minimum the following:
- A computer (PC with Windows and a Pentium processor or a Macintosh with at least system 9.0 recommended).
- A recent version of a web browser such as Microsoft Explorer, Opera, Firefox, or Chrome.
- An Internet Service Provider.
- An ECC email address provided by the college.
- PDF reader software.
- Access to a word processor that can convert text files to a PDF format.
As for the technical aspects of Canvas, I’ll be upfront: I’m not a computer or Canvas technician, so I may not be able to assist you with technical issues. To ensure you’re prepared for online learning, I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the following resources:
- Distance Education Home Page: https://www.sbcc.edu/distanceeducation
- Canvas Support: https://www.sbcc.edu/distanceeducation/canvas_support.php
COMMUNICATION
There are three ways you can contact me this semester should you have any questions about the course.
- First, you contact me via email (jsuarez@elcamino.edu) or Canvas. Your communication is extremely important to me so I will do my best to reply within 24 hours. To ensure that I see your message among my emails, please use the class name and number HIST 133 in your subject line. Be sure to use your SBCC email account when contacting me. I cannot address official course details with you if you use a personal email account.
- Second, you can visit me during office hours. My office hours are posted on the course home page in Canvas and in the syllabus.
- Third, you can schedule an appointment via email for a virtual Zoom office meeting.
For those enrolled in this course outside of the state of California please be aware of time zone differences.
PROCRASTINATION
I want to take a moment to address an important topic early in the course and that is staying on top of deadlines. With so much material to cover and so many students enrolled, it’s critical that all assignments are submitted on time. In addition, it is not fair to your colleagues who do submit their work on time. Planning ahead will be your best ally in this course. Allow me to follow-up on what I just noted by dedicating a few words to procrastination.
Why do we procrastinate? What do studies suggest? How can we address our procrastination? Procrastination is one of the biggest obstacles in online courses, and it’s something I struggled with during my own time as a college student. I know how easy it is to put things off, but I also know how much better it feels to stay ahead of deadlines. Here is the bottom line on procrastination. It often masks deeper issues like fear of failure, perfectionism, lack of clarity, or low energy. The first step to overcoming it is understanding why you’re procrastinating in the first place. Ask yourself reflective questions such as, “What am I avoiding?” or “What’s making this task uncomfortable?” Once you’ve identified the root cause, break down big, vague goals into manageable pieces. For example, instead of telling yourself to “write the report,” break it into smaller, actionable steps like outlining sections, finding three key sources, and writing the introductory paragraph.
Another effective method is using the “5-minute rule.” Tell yourself, “I’ll just do this for five minutes.” This psychological trick often lowers resistance and gets you started, which usually leads to doing more than you initially intended. Combine this with time management techniques like the Pomodoro Technique, 25 minutes of focused work followed by a 5-minute break, with a longer break after four cycles.
Here is an alternative perspective on the Pomodoro:
Eliminating distractions is also essential. Create an environment that supports focus. It’s also important to recognize that perfectionism is often just procrastination in disguise. Instead of aiming for perfection, aim for progress. Accountability can also make a huge difference. Finally, don’t forget to reflect on your wins. Keep track of what you’ve completed no matter how small. This practice builds motivation and helps you break the “I’m never getting anything done” mindset, reinforcing positive momentum.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Throughout the semester I will use the Announcements page in Canvas to communicate with you on a weekly basis. I not only use this to introduce the week’s topic and assessments, but also as a way of reminding about when assessments are due, office hours held and importance campus events. Be sure to check the Announcements Page regularly for information and updates.
EXPECTATIONS
Below you will find what both you and I need to do to ensure we have a successful semester. Take a moment to review this.
| What You Can Expect From Me | What I Expect From You |
|---|---|
| Meaningful Learning Environment — I will create a course that facilitates your learning through informative, meaningful, and relevant content while promoting dialogue and the exchange of ideas among you and your colleagues. | Active Participation — You will be an active learner by completing assigned course material in a timely manner and regularly engaging with your colleagues about course content. |
| Varied Assessments — I will administer a variety of assessments to determine whether course objectives and student learning outcomes are being met. | Seek Support — You will actively seek my support when you have questions about course content or assignments, or when you encounter challenges in the course. |
| Availability & Collaboration — I will be regularly available to you and will actively collaborate with you throughout the course to support your success. | Communicate About Deadlines — You will contact me if you are unable to meet an established assignment or assessment due date. |
DISCUSSION BOARD POSTS
Enough of procrastination. Let’s move on to discussion boards and posts. Discussion boards are designed to allow you to engage in historical problem-solving and critical analysis with your colleagues. They are a key part of your learning experience in this course, as they encourage you to apply your knowledge, consider different perspectives, and develop your skills in historical thinking and communication. A quality discussion board post requires thoughtful analysis and detailed academic expression. These are hallmarks of any college-level history course.
To make the most of these discussions, I encourage you to post your analysis well before the deadline. Last-minute posts often result in rushed work that doesn’t reflect your best effort. Late work can also limit your discussion board colleague’s ability to provide thoughtful responses. In the end, late discussion board post submissions impact the quality of the entire discussion. Early and well-prepared posts create a more engaging and rewarding experience for everyone involved, including you.
Discussion Board Deadlines:
- Initial Post: Thursdays by 11:59 PM.
- Responses to Classmates: Saturdays by 11:59 PM.
Below are examples of an acceptable discussion board post and response from students in History 154: History of Mexico. My expectation is that you will submit well-written, thoughtful, and insightful posts that draw directly from the course content. Strong posts will demonstrate critical thinking, integrate evidence, and stay focused on the topic at hand.
Before clicking “submit,” take a moment to read over your post. Ensure your ideas are clear and well-supported, check for spelling or grammatical errors, and confirm that you’ve stayed on topic. If you disagree with another student’s post, that’s okay as disagreements can spark great discussions! However, always be respectful and show that you value their perspective, even if it differs from your own. A constructive response might start with something like:
- “I see your point about ______, but I would argue that ______ because…”
Clear and respectful communication helps foster an engaging and supportive learning environment. Below are examples of what I consider to be an acceptable post and response. Use these as models for your own work.
| Example of a post: The second coming of liberalism tried to move Mexico toward modernization through the use of foreign capital, the establishment of a communication network (railroads and telegraphs), commercialized agriculture and the expansion of the export economy. Again, this was at the expense of the peasants / Native Americans. Mexico became an authoritarian government with cientificos, who were often elitist and racist, advising Porfirio Diaz. Diaz usurped traditional village autonomy, influenced congressional and judiciary candidates, posted rurales (rural police corp.) to control peasants. He also brought the Church back in as a powerful ally. When agriculture became commercialized, public lands used by peasants were sold at auction, with over 45 million hectares now in private hands. Campesinos and village farmers were displaced and did not reap any benefits under Diaz. After the demand for exports declined in the early 1900s, it was the campesinos that felt the effects – the devaluated peso meant a rise in food prices. The combination of high food prices, low salaries, and layoffs led to tensions in the workplace and eventually to labor organizations and unions. With all the foreign capital invested in Mexico, Mexico was largely an economic colony of the U.S. by the 1900s so their involvement in the Cananea Strikes was yet another example of the country keeping campesinos/peasants in their place at the bottom rung of society. |
| Example of a response: Great job – – – – in pointing out how Vitoria believed that Christianity must be embraced and not forced and that them not believing is a better alternative than feigning belief. I’d like to add that Sepulveda also used religion in his argument, just more as a passing thought when he mentions the following statement from the Book of Proverbs: “He who is stupid will serve the wise man.” He also brought up how Evangelical law was more gentle than Mosaic law which to me was once again trying to show superiority but this time it was Christianity over Judaism. Also, I don’t think he necessarily meant that masters had to be physically weak because a person could be both physically and mentally strong, I think he just meant that intellectual strength was more important. |
If you have questions about a discussion board assignment or would like feedback on your analysis before posting, please feel free to email me. I am here to help and want to see you succeed.
SCHOLARLY ARTICLES
When I transferred to the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), one of the first things I noticed in my upper-division history courses was the requirement to read articles from scholarly journals. As a transfer student, I was new to the academic culture of research institutions like UCSB and found myself unsure of how to approach these types of readings. I didn’t have a clear methodology, which made the process overwhelming at first.
Scholarly journals, also called peer-reviewed journals, are an essential part of academic scholarship and research. They house the latest findings and debates across disciplines such as history, mathematics, music, sociology, and psychology. Understanding how to engage with these articles is crucial because they represent one aspect of academic knowledge in each field.
When reading a scholarly article, I don’t expect you to master every technical term or detail. Instead, focus on the following key aspects:
- What is the author’s main question or problem?
- What sources does the author use to address the question or problem?
- What conclusions does the author reach?
- How is the article relevant to the topic we are studying?
Not everything in the article will be relevant, and that’s okay! The goal is to extract the most important information and connect it to the themes and topics of this course.
Table 1: Widely Recognized Peer-reviewed Scholarly Journals for Latin American History
| Journal | Chronological coverage | Useful for |
|---|---|---|
| Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR) | Colonial–present | One of the flagship journals for Latin American history |
| The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History | Colonial–modern | Colonial, religious, social, Indigenous, gender & modern history |
| Journal of Latin American Studies (JLAS) | Colonial–present, especially modern | History alongside politics, economics, sociology & anthropology |
| Latin American Research Review (LARR) | Broad | Historical research plus interdisciplinary scholarship |
| Colonial Latin American Review | Primarily colonial | Colonial culture, society, literature & intellectual history |
| Colonial Latin American Historical Review | Colonial era | Colonial institutions, society, borderlands & regional histories |
| Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura | Colonial–modern | Colombian and broader Latin American social history |
| Historia Mexicana | Pre-Hispanic–modern | Major source for Mexican historiography |
| Estudios de Historia Novohispana | 16th–early 19th c. | Colonial Mexico and New Spain |
| Historia Crítica | Colonial–contemporary | Political, social, cultural & intellectual history |
| Revista de Historia de América | Broad | Comparative and transnational history of the Americas |
| Revista Brasileira de História | Colonial–contemporary | Major Brazilian historical scholarship |
| Hispania Nova | Modern/contemporary | Useful for Spain–Latin America and transatlantic topics |
| Caribbean Studies | Colonial–present | Caribbean history, colonialism, slavery, migration & culture |
| Cuban Studies | Colonial–present | Cuban political, social, cultural & economic history |
| New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids | Colonial–present | Slavery, colonialism, Atlantic history & Caribbean societies |
| Slavery & Abolition | Primarily 15th–19th c. | Brazil, Caribbean, Atlantic slave trade & emancipation |
| Atlantic Studies | Early modern–modern | Transatlantic Latin America, migration, slavery & empire |
| Ethnohistory | Precolonial–modern | Indigenous Latin American history and ethnohistorical methods |
| Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History | Colonial era | Comparative colonialism and empire |
To help you organize your thoughts, I will provide you with article analysis forms. These forms are a tool to help you summarize the key points of each article and reflect on how the content fits into your assignments. While I won’t collect these forms, I strongly encourage you to use them, as they will make it much easier to integrate the article’s ideas into the essays you’ll be writing. Personally, I relied on tools like this throughout my undergraduate and graduate studies to manage the information I was responsible for, and I found them invaluable.
Remember, learning to engage with scholarly articles is a skill that will serve you well beyond this course. It may seem challenging at first, but with practice, it will become second nature. I’m here to support you, so don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions or need guidance.
Three steps for approaching scholarly articles.
- Check to see if the article has an abstract. If it has an abstract, I want you to read that first. If not, go directly to the introduction.
- I want you to read the article’s introduction and the article’s conclusion. After completing this you should know what this article is about.
- I want you to read the article’s introduction and the article’s conclusion. After completing this you should know what this article is about and be ready to fill out the article analysis form.
PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS
Throughout this semester, you will have the opportunity to practice one of the most fundamental skills of the historian’s craft, analyzing primary sources. A primary source is a piece of historical evidence created during the period you are studying that has survived to the present. These sources can include documents, letters, photographs, artifacts, newspapers, and more. Historians use primary sources to construct narratives about the past, but this process requires a specific methodology to interpret these materials effectively.
When you analyze a primary source, your goal is to go beyond simply understanding what it says. In addition, you’ll evaluate the source critically, asking questions that help uncover the context, purpose, and perspective behind it. To guide your analysis, strive to identify the following:
Table 2: Primary Source Analysis
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Source Type | The type of primary source being analyzed (e.g., artifact, document, image, map, photograph, letter, diary, newspaper, oral history). |
| Source Date | The date or approximate period when the primary source was created or written. |
| Content | A description of what the primary source records, depicts, or contains, including the key people, events, objects, or ideas represented. |
| Context | The historical circumstances surrounding the creation of the source, including its purpose, intended audience, creator, and the social, political, cultural, or economic conditions that influenced it. |
| Data Analysis | An analysis of the source’s content and context, evaluating what it reveals, its reliability, potential biases, limitations, and significance as historical evidence. |
| Discussion | An interpretation of the broader historical implications of the analysis, explaining how the source contributes to understanding historical events, perspectives, continuity and change, or historical debates. |
To help you organize your thoughts and prepare you to discuss this text, I provide you with primary source analysis forms. This form can be filled out and printed and filed in your course records. Be sure to save your form regularly to avoid losing information. You are not required to submit this form to me. It is a tool to help you master the primary sources.
SOME FINAL THOUGHTS
When I was first hired by El Camino College in 2001, a student stopped by my office and asked me a question I’ll never forget: “Do you teach the real history of the past, or do you teach that other stuff?” This question struck me as both important and complicated. It’s something I’ve carried with me ever since this meeting. As we begin our work together this semester, I want to make it clear that the historical narrative we are studying is interpretive. I cannot verify for you with certainty that the narrative we’re exploring represents the past exactly as it was. Instead, we will approach history as a field of inquiry, one that involves constructing interpretations based on evidence.
We’ll examine the concept of narrative versus the past in more depth next week. For now, it’s important to recognize that history is not simply a list of facts but rather a process of interpretation. Equally important to share with you is that this course, like any other, has a certain bias. What do I mean by that? As the instructor, I made decisions about what we’ll read, what topics we’ll study, and how I’ve designed your assessments. While this means that the course reflects my choices, it also gives you a foundation from which to develop your own perspectives and decide what historical truth means to you.
Think of this course not as a destination, but as the start of a journey. The knowledge and skills you gain here will help you critically evaluate history and continue to grow in your understanding long after the semester ends. Each of you will take this journey in your own direction, and I look forward to being part of the first steps in your exploration.
A STORY
| “How stupid medieval Europeans living before the time of Copernicus must have been to look at the sky and think that the sun was circling the Earth. Surely, even a bit of astronomical good sense would have told them the reverse was true.” |
The point Wittgenstein was trying to make is that if the Sun were, in fact, circling the Earth, it would look exactly the same as what we see every day when it rises and sets. Let me explain with a simple experiment you can try yourself.
Tomorrow morning, just before the Sun rises, go outside and mark an “X” on the ground. Stand on the mark and face east. As the Sun begins to rise, point at it with your right-hand index finger and follow its movement across the sky throughout the day. Notice what happens: does your arm move as it traces the Sun’s path? Have you moved, or does it feel as though the Sun is moving around you? For most of human history, this everyday observation led people to conclude that the Sun revolved around the Earth. After all, it looks that way, doesn’t it?
From this story, James Burke concludes, “When we observe nature, we see what we want to see, according to what we believe we know about it at the time.” This statement captures a central idea about how perspective and context shape our understanding of the world.
In the Middle Ages, Europe’s inhabitants had a geocentric view of the cosmos (Earth-centered), based on their observations and the knowledge available at the time. It wasn’t stupidity but rather it was a worldview grounded in their understanding of nature and the universe. Today, with the advantage of centuries of scientific discovery, we know that although it appears as though the Sun revolves around the Earth, it is actually the Earth that revolves around the Sun. This is what we call a heliocentric (Sun-centered) solar system.
What can we learn from the example I have just provide? Both perspectives, geocentric and heliocentric, are based on observation, but the interpretations of those observations depend on the beliefs, knowledge systems and technology of the time. History works in much the same way. Just as medieval Europeans observed the world through their own lens, we, too, interpret the past through the perspectives and evidence available to us.
As you study world history this semester, I encourage you to think critically about the narratives we construct, the assumptions we bring, and how context shapes both what we see and what we believe to be true. If approached in this manner, this journey will not only deepen your understanding of the past but also help you develop the tools to critically evaluate the present and shape your own narrative of the world you live in.
IN CLOSING
This course may help you begin to answer this question, as well as others you might have. Before we embark on this journey of discovery we need to first establish a foundation. In our first topic, Decoding the Discipline, we’ll examine some key concepts that will help you succeed in this course and better understand how history is constructed, interpreted, and applied.
