Description: An advanced language course for Spanish heritage learners that aims to: strengthen students’ oral and written linguistic range, with emphasis on Spanish use for academic contexts; and to further develop students’ critical language and social awareness around important issues for Latinos in our globalized era: Spanish as global language, identity, language rights, global migration and labor, U.S.-Latino America relations, food and environment, the ’war on drugs’. Students explore these topics through various genres (newspapers and academic articles, debates, literary essays, short novels, poetry, visual art, film and music) and through 4 hours a week of community service.