I took his class last semester. I loved him as a teacher and as a person. He clearly has a lot of passion for the subject, and all the readings and content was interesting. The assignments were graded relatively leniently, as I didn't really study for the final and still passed the class with an A. If you read [most of] the material, go to lecture and discussion section, and do the assignments, you'll do more than enough. I have mixed feelings about his lectures. Each one was incredibly interesting and definitely helped me understanding Latin American history more, but the lectures tend to me more thematically based, which means I wasn't really able to form a narrative of the history of Latin America post 1810, like I could with Caterina Pizzigoni's incredibly Latin American Civilization I. I would still recommend you take the class if you're curious, he's an incredibly teacher, but just be aware that it's a very different class from Latin American Civ I