In this immersive three-week program, students explore how borders—visible and invisible—shape human lives, communities, and environments. Faculty from the humanities, social sciences, and arts guide students in examining migration, identity, and belonging through multiple lenses: the U.S.-Mexico border, the Mexico-Guatemala corridor, Brazil’s environmental frontiers, and the cultural borderlands of literature and art.
We ask pressing questions: How do borders influence migration, identity, and community? In what ways do walls and boundaries divide, yet inspire, creativity and resistance? How can environmental and personal stories of movement reshape our ideas of home and belonging?
Students will explore belonging, displacement, and transformation through reading and writing, examining how language shapes identity and how stories reveal what it means to cross visible and invisible borders. Through literacy narratives and memoir-based writing, students will examine moments of navigating between worlds—times they felt out of place, learned to “translate” themselves, or shifted identities to belong. This work fosters empathy, voice, and a deeper sense of how storytelling bridges the personal and the political.
Throughout the program, students will build key academic skills: analyzing diverse sources, interpreting visual and literary texts, strengthening writing and speaking abilities, and engaging in thoughtful dialogue. We are looking for students eager to approach complex issues with curiosity, creativity, and commitment — students ready to challenge assumptions, expand perspectives, and think deeply about migration, identity, and belonging in the 21st century.
Academic Credit
Summer Carls can earn up to six Carleton course credits (typically transfers as three semester credits) for successfully meeting faculty expectations and completing course requirements. In addition to receiving written feedback about course performance from faculty, students will receive one of the following three possible grade designations: satisfactory (S), credit (Cr), or no credit (NC). Formal academic transcripts are available upon request for Summer Carl alumni and will reflect the name of the course and grade earned.
Click on each topic below to view the course description and faculty information.
Voices from the Borderlands: Migration, Identity, and Resistance
This course examines the dynamics of migration and identity along Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala and Belize, as well as the northern border with the United States. Integrating experiential learning through films such as Home is Somewhere Else by Carlos Hagerman and Jorge Villalobos, students will reflect on real stories of movement, belonging, and resistance. Readings include works by authors such as Javier Zamora and Valeria Luiselli, whose narratives bring human voices to the complexities of migration. Through reflective journaling, guided discussions, and creative projects, students will analyze how literary and visual storytelling illuminate the politics of language, code-switching, and the ethical dimensions of representing lived experiences across borders.
Program Director: Fernando Contreras Flamand, Lecturer in Spanish, Carleton College
Fernando Contreras teaches Spanish at Carleton College, where he also leads the Spanish Tutoring Program. He has designed and led Carleton’s Spanish Language and Cultural Immersion Program in Mexico and co-created and co-led a faculty-led trip to the U.S.–Mexico border focused on migration and belonging. His teaching and scholarship center on social justice, immigration, and indigenous communities, and he is coauthor of the textbook Proyectos (Klett World Languages).
Originally from Mexico, he has taught in Japan, Russia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, bringing a global and inclusive perspective to his courses. When he’s not teaching, he enjoys spending time in nature with his wife, daughter, and two furry companions, Ricky and Patagonia, and traveling wherever he can.
Documentation, Identity and Storytelling
Photography is a means of understanding and interacting with both the world and the inner self. In this course we will emphasise the importance of personal and collective storytelling. The core of this class is a series of photographic assignments. While some will have a technical basis, all work should be approached in the service of creative expression and exploration.
Students’ work will be constructively discussed in class and small group critique sessions.
The student will learn basic camera operations and digital processing. The student will produce both digital and printed images that will be sequenced with the purpose of telling a unique story.
Through a series of projects, the student will learn the importance of photography as a tool for expressing personal as well as community and cultural stories.
The students will participate in collective creative projects, and will learn how to collaborate with each other, making collective as well as individual decisions.
Faculty: Xavier Tavera Castro, Assistant Professor of Art, Carleton College
Xavier Tavera has had a passion for portraiture for most of his life as a way to engage with people and their stories. Tavera’s work oscillates between documentary and the imagined with the sole purpose of telling a story. After moving from Mexico City to the United States, Tavera has devoted himself to tell the stories of the Latin American diaspora, often recontextualizing with the purpose of providing visibility and fair representation.
Tavera has shown his work extensively in the Twin Cities, nationally and internationally including Germany, Scotland, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece and China. His work is part of the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Plains Art Museum, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Minnesota History Center, Ramsey County Historical Society, the Weisman Art Museum and the National Museum of Mexican Art. He is a recipient of the McKnight fellowship, Jerome Travel award, State Arts Board, and Bronica scholarship.
Brazilian Frontiers:Literature at the edge of land and law
This course explores how contemporary Brazilian literature and cultural texts engage with urgent environmental and migration crises, framing them as struggles over land, law, and belonging. Through short stories, poetry, biographical narratives, and Indigenous thought, students will examine how writers narrate deforestation, climate change, displacement, and border politics.
Faculty: Satty Flaherty-Echeverria, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish, Carleton College
Satty Flaherty-Echeverría received her PhD in Spanish and Portuguese studies from the University of Minnesota. Her research and teaching interests focus on Afrodescendants’ literature and cultural production in the Caribbean and Latin America, African literatures written in Spanish and Portuguese, Colonial/Postcolonial literatures, and “Race” and Black intellectualism in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds.
Her current book project examines the transformative literary exchanges produced in the Black Press among black thinkers of the Iberian Transatlantic between 1920 and 1950 (under contract with SUNY press). Flaherty-Echeverría has published her work in sx salon, the C. L. R. James Journal, the Interdisciplinary Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies, Portuguese Studies, Machado em Linha and Letras Hispanas. She has over a decade of teaching experience at both U.S. and international universities and has directed study abroad programs in Brazil, Belize, Cuba, Costa Rica, Mexico and Austria.
Narratives of Home and Belonging
This course serves as a bridge between the three other courses, connecting their themes through writing. It examines the deep and inseparable ties between place of origin, identity, and belonging through literature and personal narrative. Building on explorations of migration and identity along Mexico’s borders, students will engage with storytelling that reflects real experiences of movement, resistance, and cultural encounter, echoing the visual narratives studied in the other courses.
Readings create dialogue across languages and cultures, highlighting how writers and artists navigate displacement, home, and environmental or social justice, linking directly to themes explored in the Brazilian literature course. Through reflective writing, creative projects, and guided workshops, students will refine their own narratives, developing clarity, authenticity, and ethical representation, and producing polished, compelling final projects.
Faculty: Ginny Sawyer, Adjunct English Faculty, University of St. Thomas
Ginny’s main area of study and passion is creative non-fiction, including essays, memoirs, short stories, and plays. She values writing that is authentic and vulnerable, using the personal to explore universal truths. Her teaching focuses on helping students find their own voices and recognize the power of their words beyond the classroom.
A native Minnesotan, Ginny has lived and taught in Japan, Mexico, Hungary, Russia, and the Czech Republic, and has traveled to over forty countries. She is also a certified yoga instructor. Ginny currently lives in the Twin Cities with her husband and fourteen-year-old daughter, always seeking new adventures in both life and literature.
