Erasing Afro-Latinos? Pt. 1

In the evolving dialog on race, racialization, and identity formation, significant identity markers are reexamined. Debates emerge about how and to what degree people belong to a community identifying with a certain term.  In some cases, the meanings of these terms are critiqued and corrected. On other occasions, the history of a word might inspire a movement to cancel its use, purging it from the daily lexicon. Conversations about identity are intricately tied to language. And, as one philosopher notes, the meanings of our words are fluid throughout history.[1] These evaluations of words, their histories, and their meanings have introduced a tension for World Outspoken because of our use of the word mestizo. Some young scholars recently suggest that mestizaje served its purpose, that the changed conditions in the US make the word obsolete.[2] I do not believe that is right.

A theology of mestizaje is at the center of World Outspoken. It guides the articles we write, the topics we address, and our approach to addressing them. Our mission statement makes the goal clear: to prepare the “Mestizo” church; mestizaje is without doubt a key element in the ethos of the organization. In partnership with the Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH), we launched The Mestizo Podcast, but as the first season of the show was nearing its end, we started receiving submissions from fans asking, “By calling the show, The Mestizo Podcast, are you erasing Afro-Latinidad? How am I, an Afro-Latino, included?” While I was aware of a few scholars with critiques of mestizo theology, I did not anticipate this question, and while I gave a brief answer on the final episode of the season, I think a fuller response is due. My goal in writing this is to 1) acknowledge the critiques of mestizaje – no theological proposal is without its weaknesses – and 2) explain how we address these weaknesses.

I am going to do this in two articles. The first will summarize a history of how the term mestizaje and its variants came to be used as theological tools. Many of the critiques of mestizaje stem from this history and how theologians glossed over or completely detached the terms from it. In the interest of charity, it is as important to remember the historical origin of mestizaje-the-term as it is the historical context of the theologians who tried to redeem it; there is value in acknowledging the pressures and motivations that drove their work. I hope to reframe key theologians to demonstrate why their errors may be rooted in attempts to solve problems in their own day. After reviewing this history, I intend in the second article to provide my own construal of mestizaje, defining the term and the theological formulations key to my understanding of it; I still believe in the value of mestizaje for theological discourse and ministry. As with many WOS projects, these articles flow from my own explorations of identity and theology, so I begin this with a history of Puerto Rico.

Constructing Race in Puerto Rico

In an essay titled “Constructing Race in Puerto Rico: The Colonial Legacy of Christianity and Empires, 1510-1910,” Dr. Angel Santiago-Vendrell presents a critique of mestizaje. According to Santiago-Vendrell, mestizaje and mulatez perpetuate racism based on notions of sameness. By returning to the earlier history of the Spanish empire, Dr. Santiago-Vendrell demonstrates how the purity-of-blood laws implemented by the Spanish to keep conversos (converted Jews) from political, economic, and religious rights, evolved to serve a similar exclusionary purpose against black and indigenous Puerto Ricans. While it was common for Spanish colonizers to take wives from the variety of ethno-racial groups on the island, Spanish origin and whiteness “were prized commodities to secure a place in the upper strata of society.”[3] Dr. Santiago-Vendrell writes:

“The amalgamation of the races did not create a better society, which was always ruled by White elites because for them racial impurity disqualified individuals from citizenship and responsibilities.”[4]

Since whiteness was the measure by which people were given or withheld civic rights and responsibilities, the Spanish created a system of 14-20 official categories of racial mixture.[5]  Mestiza/o was one of those lesser racial designations given to those mixed children of Indigenous and Spanish blood. “Other categories included:  Castizo (light-skinned mestizo); Morisco (light-skinned mulato); Zambo (Black-Indian); “ahí te estás” (there you are); and, “tente en el aire” (hold yourself suspended in mid-air).[6]” These racial categories were fluid, but they were rooted in phenotype (i.e. skin color and other physical features). Some people managed to move up via the accrual of wealth, becoming a priest, or being appointed to serve in government, and they received certificates of “racial purity” as they arrived at the status of “pure” Spanish.[7]

The Introduction of the US ProtestanT

Dr. Santiago-Vendrell goes on to cite the words of US protestant missionaries who arrived to the island and praised the harmonious relations between races, revealing how these missionaries failed to see the nuance of racism therein. What developed in Puerto Rico was a system of whitening where the focus was “purificar la raza” (purifying the race). This notion of purity persists in the colorism entrenched on the Island and in the diaspora. “Whitening was accomplished through marriage or illicit relationships, as White came to represent honor, prestige, and social standing.”[8] When US American missionaries arrived, they reinforced these ideas and social values. Still, as is often the case with Latinas/os, “white” Puerto Ricans were considered a lower class than European and North American whites, proving that black and brown people can never make it to the very top of the white anglo scale. The entire social arrangement was built around oppressing and/or erasing black and indigenous roots, and Dr. Santiago-Vendrell brilliantly exposes this in his historical writing.

The Forefathers of Mestizo Discourse

Discussions of mestizaje commonly trace their origin to the work of Jose Vasconcelos, specifically his essay La Raza Cosmica. Vasconcelos was a Mexican politician, philosopher, and theologian writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1848, Mexico and the US signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and Mexico relinquished all or parts of their entire northern territories. With the signing of this treaty, an estimated 100,000 Mexican citizens became strangers in their own land. In his writing, Vasconcelos resisted the imperialist expansion of the US. His essays were complex interdisciplinary works pulling from church mystics, science, history, and politics. Despite his resistance to Anglo expansion, Vasconcelos was blind to the ways his writing echoed the racial logic of the Spanish empire.

In La Raza Cosmica, Vasconcelos articulates a reading of history where he interprets the European expansion as predestined by God. It was his view that human history was moving toward a future mixed (mestizo) people that would inherit all the best qualities of the previous races. His critique of the Anglo, US nation was their refusal to mix with the indigenous. On the other hand, “Vasconcelos contended that the Spaniards desired to intermix with the indigenous peoples and, in so doing, provided a solution to the problem of the indigenous peoples being an inferior group.”[9] Nestor Medina provides a helpful summary of the racist contradictions in Vasconcelos’ writings. It reads as follows:

The already mixed people of Latin America are only an imperfect shadow of what is to come. Moreover, Vasconcelos does not mean intermixture in the most general, unqualified sense … this racial fusion means that the “inferior” and “uglier” groups – African descendants and the indigenous groups – will have to be elevated by mixing with superior ones. Since inferior groups cannot escape their inferiority by themselves, once conscious of the divine intent, they will see in intermixture their redemption. These groups have little to contribute to the [future] race, so their passage from inferiority to superiority will have to be a “voluntary extinction.”[10]

Medina concludes his summary by writing, “The operating assumption was that the closer the Latin American people got to the cosmic [i.e. future] race, the more they abandoned their “backward” indigenous and African roots.”[11] Both in Mexico and Puerto Rico, the influence of Spanish racial logic persisted even when the peoples of both nations started to formulate their own national identities. For Vasconcelos, if Mexicans were to be one people, they had to all be mestizos. Functionally, to adopt Vasconcelos’ vision, Mexicans had to relegate the indigenous and African to relics of the past. They are not erased from history, but they are removed from the present. This damaged vision of the world is built on the promise of a future mestizo people that will be the culturally rich inheritors of the land.

Virgilio Elizondo and The Future is Mestizo

Quite reasonably, many scholars connect Vasconcelos’ essay with Virgilio Elizondo’s writings, particularly his book The Future is Mestizo. Most notably, the title of the latter seems to be an echo of the futurist vision of the former. To my knowledge, there is no evidence of Vasconcelos’ essay directly influencing Elizondo’s book. Still, like Vasconcelos, Elizondo was arguing for a future reality. However, unlike Vasconcelos, Elizondo was working from observations of his local context. Elizondo was a Roman Catholic priest serving in San Antonio, Texas. While Vasconcelos wrote to define and shape the Mexican, “mestizo” identity, the people in view for Elizondo were primarily Mexican Americans living on the borderlands between the US and Mexico. He was considering those who, as we noted before, were stranded between two worlds. Therefore, Elizondo developed the idea of a double mestizaje.

According to Elizondo, the first mestizaje remains the cultural, religious, and biological mixture primarily between Indigenous and Spanish. However, something unique occurs for the Mexican Americans in the Southwest. “Like the womb of a woman receiving the seed of a man to produce new life, so in Mexico and subsequently in the Southwest of today's U.S., a new child had been conceived and born.”[12] Much like W.E.B. Du Bois’ depiction of the African American as having a double-consciousness, Elizondo describes the Mexican Americans in the southwest as being of two worlds, judged by both, and never truly at home in either. Others use the Nahuatl word nepantla, meaning between two worlds/lands, to describe a similar experience. This second mestizaje, produced by the encounter with a new imperial power (i.e. the US), shapes in the people a unique lens with which to see the world. This new, mixed people can see the work of the Lord in and among the poor and the oppressed. Indeed, they can see the Lord as King who chose to identify with the oppressed.

In Galilean Journey (1983), Elizondo explores the parallels between Christ’s journey on earth and the experience of the Mexican American people, and he identifies Jesus as a mestizo living on the borderlands of his society and culture. “Galilee represents marginalization and rejection, but it also represents the birthplace of salvation in the person of Jesus. The Galilean (mestizo) Jesus, understood as the historical in-breaking of God in human affairs, represents at once the rejected and the divine siding with the rejected ones.”[13] This rich idea became a hermeneutical key for Elizondo and for the theological reflection of the wider Hispanic community. It shaped much of the theological development that would follow, and it was used to raise questions of culture, power, and justice in biblical scholarship. From Elizondo onward, the meaning and use of mestizaje and “mestiza/o” changed.

The meanings people attributed to these terms changed from being the historically grounded description of the process that resulted in the mixed children of Spanish colonizers to something redemptive. Like the African Americans who repossessed their blackness and used phrases like “black is beautiful” to take agency of their identity, Elizondo provided the Hispanic community in the US a vision for reclaiming the wealth inherent to their uniqueness. He writes, “As the white/black discourse has become multilayered and commercialized, it has also become an agent of exclusion of the many emerging narratives of race and class in the history to the United States, or the struggles, oppressions, cultural traditions, and creative engagements of Latino peoples.”[14] Elizondo mobilized groups to support the creative engagement of Latinas/os. The movements that developed around Elizondo and his work are worth reexamining here since they reveal how mestizaje and mestiza/o became prevalent theological devices almost immediately. Today, many see in Elizondo and others a reductive, homogenizing theology that flattens the experience of Latinas/os and erases variances therein. There is, however, an important context that led to the adoption of Elizondo’s ideas.

How Mestizaje Became Theological

Elsewhere, I wrote about the US American tendency to reduce conversations about race and justice to a black/white binary. This tendency is not new. Elizondo wrote in his own day about the ways the dialog was limited in scope, conspicuously missing the contributions of Latina/o people. This hints to the problem that inspired Elizondo and a group of Latina/o theologians to gather at an hacienda in Ruidoso, New Mexico to imagine an association for Latina/o theologians. There, they discussed the challenging realities of the immigrant in the US and the faith experiences of their people. In a summary of an interview with Orlando O. Espin regarding this meeting, Medina writes, “Aware of their differences and of the wrong perceptions they had of each other’s communities, they decided to downplay the differences that divided them and instead emphasize the suffering and marginalization they had in common.”[15] Elizondo had already written about mestizaje, so the language was ready and available for their discussion. This is where mestizaje was first adopted by a wider theological guild.

The expanded context that motivated this meeting further clarifies this group’s willingness to adopt Elizondo’s language and framework. In the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, Latinos across the US began to mobilize and collaborate in coalitions – organized associations like the farm workers movement led by César Chávez – to address social injustices facing their distinct communities. The 1970 Census in the US was the first occasion in which Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and other Central and South Americans were subsumed in one category: Hispanic. In addition to the term, “U.S. Latina/o activists and scholars adopted mestizaje as the common ethnocultural and religious banner of unity.”[16] Medina elaborates, writing:

In the context of exclusion from the social imaginary of the United States, and in the search for creative ways to name their reality, the category of mestizaje provided these scholars with a way to name themselves as social subjects in resistance to the assimilatory policies of the U.S. government. As a collective of diverse ethnic and cultural groups, mestizaje served as the symbolic term for cohering as a people and for engaging the struggle for sociopolitical and economic justice. They found in mestizaje a useful category for articulating people’s experiences of faith in God … their discussions of mestizaje marked the intersecting spaces of “race,” ethnic and cultural identities, and people’s experience of marginalization and oppression.[17]

The social pressures of the moment inspired their gathering under one identity. They intentionally minimized difference and homogenized into a single group, advocating for their shared needs. Today, scholars are examining the relationship between this US-specific use of mestizaje and its variants and how it relates to the use of these terms in Latin America. More work needs to be done to identify and articulate the continued usefulness of terms like mestizaje. The concept must be employed with caution to avoid repeating the exclusion and racism present in the world imagined by Vasconcelos. However, given the value and meanings of these word for exiled Latinas/os in the US and the continued black/white binary that ignores their racialized experiences, a contextualized conversation about mestizaje is critical. What is left is to ground the use of mestizaje and mestiza/o in history and explain its utility today. Is there a way to use mestiza/o theological language without minimizing the variety of Latin American and US-born Latina/o experiences? This will be the topic of our next article in the series.

ABOUT EMANUEL PADILLA

Emanuel Padilla is President of World Outspoken, a ministry dedicated to preparing the mestizo church for cultural change through training, content, and partnership development. He is also an instructor of Bible and Theology at Moody Bible Institute. Emanuel is committed to drawing the insights of the Latina/o church for the blessing of the wider church body. He consults with churches on issues of diversity, organizational culture, and community engagement.

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Footnotes

[1] See Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work Philosophical Investigations (1953).

[2] Nestor Medina and Nstor Medina, Mestizaje: Remapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/O Catholicism (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2009), 87.

[3] Willie James Jennings et al., Can “White” People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission, ed. Love L. Sechrest, Johnny Ramírez-Johnson, and Amos Yong (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2018), 160.

[4] Ibid.

[5] As cited by Dr. Robert Chao Romero in Brown Church. Magali M. Carrera, (1998) Locating Race in Late Colonial Mexico, Art Journal, 57:3, 36-45; 38.

[6] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race,” 572-573.

[7] Robert Chao Romero, Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity, n.d., 113.

[8] Jennings et al., Can “White” People Be Saved?, 160.

[9] Nestor Medina and Nstor Medina, Mestizaje: Remapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/O Catholicism (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2009), 66.

[10] Ibid., 67.

[11] Ibid., 70.

[12] Virgilio Elizondo, Davíd Carrasco, and Sandra Cisneros, The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, Revised Edition, Revised, Subsequent Edition (Boulder, Colo: University Press of Colorado, 2000), 40.

[13] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 29.

[14] Elizondo, Carrasco, and Cisneros, The Future Is Mestizo, xxi.

[15] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 145.

[16] Medina and Medina, 5.

[17] Ibid., 6.

Divided We Stand: Latina/o Students in White Institutions

This article was originally published on Shetheordinary, a blog created for those of us experiencing life in our diverse faith, culture, & identity.

“I don’t associate with that group of people,” he replied after I invited him to our El Puente club meeting, a student club designed for Latina/os enrolled in my Southern California alma mater. I was confused and offended. He shared that he was Mexican-American, had dark brown eyes, and brown hair with tan skin but resisted my invitation to meet other students like him. With a surprised face I looked at him and ended the conversation with a simple and quiet “ok.”

I could not verbalize my disbelief.

Here I was, a sophomore in college, attempting to connect with someone who looked like me but shared a completely different view of our cultural identity. I never experienced this before. Being born and raised in Los Angeles exposed me to a majority of Latina/os friends who identified with their parents’ culture. We grew up bilingual and well aware of our raices. There was no question in proclaiming ourselves as proud Brown children.

After my brief conversation with this young Latino, I was left sitting alone at the table in a college cafeteria. My coraje (anger) crept in. With him gone, my delayed reaction came in full force.

“Forget you!” I thought to myself, “You can’t even see your nopal en la frente, Pocho!”

In our small Christian college campus there were two sub-groups of Latina/o students. Those who proudly associated themselves as Brown and those who disassociated themselves from their Latina/o roots. My dad would call these people, ‘Pochos.’

As a Mexican-American, if you did not know or speak the Spanish language, and rarely identified with your cultural roots, you were called a ‘Pocho.’ This was an insult and a statement indicating that your latinidad has been revoked by your unworthiness to prove it. You were seen as a white-washed Latina/o, uncultured and assimilated.

My interaction with this young Latino was not the only one that angered me during my time as a student. Many other Latina/o classmates created a dichotomy of us versus them within our own Brown students on campus. This created a deeper scar on all of our cultural identities from wherever we stood on the spectrum of identifying with our heritage. I could not help but wonder why these young men and women were so ashamed of their identity - ashamed of the language of their ancestors? Eventually I wondered why they were even ashamed of associating with a person like myself, someone who fully identified with her latinidad.

In Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity, author Robert Chao Romero quotes Laura Gomez on the following: “As Brown-somewhere between white and black-a select minority among us has always had the option to slip into whiteness and forget about the rest.”[1] I can’t help but think this is what happens with some of us struggling to identify with our cultural identity.

We slip into our whiteness when we choose to disown our Brown brothers and sisters. We repress who we are to be accepted and seen in the same value as our white counterparts. This comes at the cost of cutting our raices and cultural ties with one another as Brown people.

In her article, “El Español in the US: Memoria and Resistance”, Itzel Reyes shares a little more behind this decision to repress and assimilate. In her words, some of our parents “stopped teaching Spanish to our children as a protective strategy, as a survival mechanism disguised as choice. We sacrificed our descendants’ ability to speak with their own family in service of racist ideologies. We forcefully traded our ability to communicate with our familias in exchange for a little bit of acceptance from a system that does not recognize us as image-carriers.”

For some of us, our assimilation has been an act of survival passed down from generation after generation in order to survive in White America.

We repress, disassociate, and look at our proud Brown people with little to no connection. Yet, no matter how much some of us try to remove our ‘Brown’ attributes, language, and heritage, this will never make us immune to the discrimination and ignorance we face in this country because our society has been embedded with historically racist systems that still haunt us today.

I look back and cannot help but feel a nudge from the Holy Spirit to reconcile with this young Latino in the cafeteria. At the time, I disliked him for thinking he was better than me. Yet, my reaction to his comment placed me in the same path as him after calling him a Pocho (sorry God). He pushed proud and expressive Latina/os away from him and I only drew this line farther back. I thought I had the right to exclude him from our heritage, one that has been scrutinized and judged by a toxic racist ideology only learned and adopted. We traded our native tongue for a language of self-hate. In consequence of this complex disconnect, you see my example of losing respect for him thinking that latinidad was something I could measure and hold to a standard. I failed to understand the history of this country that stripped him, his family, and many others from being their authentic selves.

Institutions and systems built on racism will pin us against each other leading us to cut cultural ties from one another. We cannot give in to this division because in the end we are in the same fight to be seen and heard for who we are.

As God’s people, we must make room at the table even for those who are not there yet to fully embrace their latinidad and culture. We make room for those still struggling to fully embrace the beauty in the color of their skin, their different shades of brown, and the beautiful language(s) of our ancestors. As Latina/os, building community is a core value among us and assimilating and rejecting one another is not how we will move forward in this country. We will progress only by meeting each other where we are, through the full embrace and grace led by the God who draws us closer to one another.

From time and time again we will see those of us who are approaching the cafeteria table blindfolded with the red, white and blue bandanna of racism. They will come rejecting you and themselves, rooted out of a generational fear and burden passed down from long ago. Give grace and leave a seat open at the table for them. They are going to need a gentle uncovering in due time to see life in the light of Christ.

In the book of John chapter nine, Jesus heals the man born blind to show those who think they see that they are truly blind. Verse three of chapter nine states that neither did this man nor his parents sin for him to be born blind. Instead, this circumstance and moment is presented for the Messiah to display his work as the one who recovers sight to the blind.

In his healing power, Christ leads us to see one another for who we truly are. Through his grace and power, Jesus uncovers our eyes to see the goodness and beauty in our Brown face and with one another.

We no longer remain blind to one another and our God-given color, instead we see each other in the light of Christ with kindness and full acceptance. May we continue this restorative work and find healing, reconciliation and connection once again.

About Heidi Lepe

Heidi Lepe is a West Los Angeles Latina blogger and creator of Shetheordinary, an online platform for individuals experiencing life at the intersections of faith, culture and identity. As a daughter of Mexican/Honduran immigrant parents, she completed her dual Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Sociology from Vanguard University in 2015 where her love for theology and culture began. She loves reading/writing, traveling, and eating a traditional Central American breakfast at any time of day. You can read more of her writings at www.shetheordinary.com and follow her upcoming projects on Instagram/Facebook @shetheordinary.

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Footnote

[1] Robert Chao Romero, Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity, n.d.

“Don’t worry Mamaw, I’m Black”

“The racism which caused the relegation of the Negro to a status of inferiority was to be applied to the overseas possessions of the United States.””

— Rubin Francis Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism

“The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction.””

— Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question”

Racial Schooling: Lesson One

Like W.E.B. Du Bois, I learned I was a racial problem during school. But unlike Du Bois, my teacher, not a classmate, taught me this lesson.

While frantically taking notes to ensure I succeeded in my first-ever honors class, my sixth-grade teacher Mrs. Noone rebuked me in front of the entire class for not paying attention. I remember her words:

“This is an honors class, Nathan, not a daycare center.”

“Yes ma’am, I know. But I was paying attention.”

“Enough! You do not belong in this class, Nathan. Do you understand? You are only here for racial diversity numbers.”

Mrs. Noone had racialized the entire class and found me wanting. I alone, as she would later tell my mom, did not have what it took to receive an honors education. I was Puerto Rican. I was inferior.

Racial Schooling: Lesson Two

For reasons I cannot discuss here, my dad never taught me Spanish. And this gift was something he alone could give, for unlike my Anglo Mom, my Dad speaks fluent Spanish with an Aguadillan accent.

My Dad’s omission haunted me throughout my childhood. It haunts me now. But it was during my childhood that other Latin@s most consistently distanced themselves from me: They refused to associate with self-identifying Latin@s who spoke Spanish as poorly as I did. As Augustine said, “difference of language is enough to inhibit society.”

To most of my Latin@ peers, I was adulterated Anglo trash, an assimilated mongrel—a mutt to be shunned.

I acutely felt my double-racialized rejection in the weeks after Mrs. Noone denounced me before my honors-English classmates. I had no racial home in the communal spaces Anglo and Iberian white supremacy forged. Whiteness, the racist reasoning goes, is pure. Those deemed non-White frequently counter by constructing and defending purist, essentialist logics to police their own communities. Blatant white supremacy begets whiteness of a different color.  

Policed by biological and linguistic racial border patrols, I felt damned to be people-less. And as Mrs. Noone and Latin@s daily abused me, I started confiding more and more in my African American friends. They listened. They acted mercifully. They knew something of diaspora life—of being foreign but in a domestic sense.

After several weeks of confiding in my friend Thomas, I decided to let it all out.

“Thomas, I don’t know what I am. The Puerto Ricans and other Latin@s don’t want me because my Spanish is shit. And the Whites know I’m not one of them the moment a teacher botches my last name. What the hell am I, man?!”

Thomas looked dumbfounded, but quickly replied.

“Damn Nate, it’s obvious—you’re Black. Everybody knows that Puerto Ricans are Black. What the hell you so worried for? You straight tripp’n, not knowing yo ass is Black.”

I thought long and hard about Thomas’s words and confidence. Could he be right? Was I Black? The suggestion seemed absurd.

But as I kept thinking, I realized Thomas had a point. The Puerto Ricans and African Americans in my schools and neighborhood always hung out. We wore similar clothes, liked the same English-speaking music, found the same people attractive, and received similar treatment from Whites. Indeed, Whites and non-Puerto Rican Latin@s had hurled the N-word at me countless times by this point in my life, with some Latin@s telling me that racist terms like “spic” were too good for me.

I decided to take a survey. I asked students across racialized lines if they thought I was Black because I was Puerto Rican. The overwhelming majority said yes. This sealed the deal. These people thought I was Black and usually treated me accordingly. It was time for me to live into my racial identity. It was time to belong.

Racial Schooling: Lesson Three

My embracing being Black caused enormous family strife. My Anglo mom did not understand it, and we repeatedly fought over my racial identity. Similarly, mi familia in Puerto Rico were flummoxed. For some, my embrace of being Black proved I was a fool. It showed I did not understand the truths imbedded in the “mejorar la raza” rhetoric.

Though this strife hurt, I pressed on. I was Black and no one was going to persuade me otherwise. My Blackness was too precious, too explanatory. I would not be people-less. Not again.

But returning to the State of my birth forced an unexpected racial reckoning.

During a hot, humid day in South Carolina, Mamaw and I decided to go on a walk and, as was our custom, got lost in conversation, meandering around her childhood town. Eventually the heat and humidity conspired and forced us to sit under a shade tree. Thirsty, Mamaw asked if I had water. I did not.

But ever desiring to problem solve, I told Mamaw not to worry: I saw a gas station down the road and was happy to go and buy us some water. Mamaw rejected my proposal.

“Honey, we cannot go down there,” she laughed.

“That’s a Black gas station.”

Here too I had a solution. For though I lacked water, I brought my Blackness with me.

“Don’t worry Mamaw—I’m Black! They’ll let me buy water there. No problem.”

Mamaw became serious; I’d never seen such concern in her eyes.

“Honey, who told you you’re Black?”

I knew my answer mattered, so I carefully choose my words.

“Mamaw, I’m Puerto Rican. And Puerto Ricans are Black. The people in the gas station know this, and they’ll let me shop with other Black people. That’s why I said I’d get the water. You stay here—since you’re not Black.”

Mamaw was livid.

“Who the hell told you—my grandson—that you’re Black?! I’ve never heard such stupidity my whole life. What a bunch of crock. Look here. I’m White; your Mom is White; and your Dad has light skin, light eyes, and speaks good English—he doesn’t even have an accent. And now you’re telling me that you’re Black?! I don’t know what they’re teaching you up North, but down here we know that you ain’t Black. And I’m not gonna let my Grandbaby get beat to a pulp because he’s some dumb delusion about being Black. We’re heading home, ya hear?!”

To her childhood home we went, in silence—a silence forged by what Frantz Fanon calls an “epidermal racial schema.” Jim and Jane Crow had rendered Mamaw incapable of entering into my racial experiences and racial pain. Her socialization trained her to carry the white man’s burden, not a racialized Black blanquito’s. Besides, she had already fended off acquisitions that she sinfully let her daughter marry a Black man. No Northern racial schemes could dislodge her certainty about her family’s whiteness.

Racial Schooling: Lesson Four

Mrs. Noone’s denouncement injected me with internalized racism that still courses through my body. So did my language-based rejection by Latin@s. Mi esposa can testify to the racial trauma that my body exudes when I publicly speak Spanish. Every utterance is an act of resistance that presses on racial scabs and renders me vulnerable to new racial wounds.

Mamaw’s rejection of my Blackness forced me to confront race’s fluidity. In the process, I learned from Rachel F. Moran that Puerto Ricans are the Latin@ group in the US “most apt to identify themselves as Black.” And as they do, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton report, they experience higher degrees of segregation from Whites—even White Presidents. Recall President Richard Nixon’s infamous campaign ad rehearsal in 1968. Having noted the need for school discipline—“Discipline in the classroom is essential if our children are to learn”—he goes off script, apparently speaking to himself: “Yep, this hits it right on the nose, the thing about this whole teacher—it’s all about law order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.” The Negroes and Puerto Rican’s are one racialized menace, a collective whose groupings lawlessly occupy classrooms and street corners.

Mrs. Noone, my Latin@ peers, and Mamaw—each identified me as a racial menace, a problem. And each resorted to disciplinary measures steeped in white supremacy to set me straight. None of their actions promoted intimacy or belonging. They never could; racial reductions ultimately prove impotent.

This impotence testifies to the need for race-conscious formation that acknowledges the fluidity and complexity of racialization and the traumas it produces. Without such formation, teachers, families, and racialized communities will be ill equipped to commune with the multi-racialized among them.

About Nathan Luis Cartagena, PhD

Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy. Cartagena also serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, and is writing a book about critical race theory. You can read his writings at nathancartagena.com, and follow him on Twitter @MeditarMestizo.

El Español in the US: Memoria and Resistance

Me inculcaste el odio hacia mi idioma. El español lo rechazaste, como peste lo valoraste. El inglés lo alabaste, como lengua suprema lo elevaste. I don’t need Spanish, I told my mother and it pierced her heart. I’m American, le repetí, American, le grité. Mr. Smith’s words echoed in me: “English only, Juan. Spanish will deform your lips and rot your tongue.” Petrified, el inglés abracé y solo a él, me aferré. Now, I’m in Spanish class undoing the trauma and writing en español.[1]  

“Speak English, we’re in America!” he told my aunt in a demanding tone. He was a passerby and her Spanish words were not being directed at him. “Y usted, ¿qué le dijo?” I asked my aunt incredulously. “Nada, mija. Hay muchos como él,” she replied. She was right. English-only discourses have been disseminated for centuries in the U.S. In the early 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt stated, “We only have room for one language in this country, and it is English.” In 1998, California passed the infamous Proposition 227 that would eliminate bilingual education. Despite the fact that California has one of the most abundant populations of non-native English speakers in the country, it took almost twenty years for Proposition 227 to be repealed. In 2015, Donald Trump criticized former Florida Governor Jeb Bush for speaking in Spanish: “He’s a nice man. But he should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States.” The direct implication of President Trump’s assertion was that monolingual English speakers are nice and Spanish speakers are, well, not nice. The ease to which people can record everything on their smartphones has exposed numerous incidents across the country of individuals berating others on the basis of language use and the demand that only English be spoken. In 2019, a substitute teacher in Texas was caught on camera as she told a student, “Speak English. We’re in America. Give me your phone.” In West Virginia, a customer told the manager of a Mexican Restaurant to “get the f*** out of her country” and demanded for him to speak English while in America. In Wisconsin, a woman verbally attacked a Puerto Rican family for listening to Spanish music while barbequing at a park. In New York City, where 48% of the population speaks a language other than English at home[2], a lawyer threatened to call immigration after he heard two women speak Spanish at a restaurant. These incidents are not uncommon occurrences caused by deranged individuals – they are the fruit of our nation’s racist history against brown people.

The insistence that Spanish should not be spoken in the U.S. is driven by anti-immigrant and racist beliefs that are historically inaccurate. Anti-Spanish language policies, discourses, and behaviors cannot be examined in isolation from white supremacy. The fact that English is the most commonly spoken language in the U.S. is indisputable, but the U.S. does not have an official language at the federal level. Anti-Spanish-language views are prompted, in part, by incorrect assumptions that Spanish is the language of foreign invaders. Spanish is not a foreign language, and in many parts of the U.S., it has a longer history than English.[3] In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe ended the Mexican-American War and the U.S. took over 55% of Mexico’s territory, which included present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. In 1898, the Treaty of Paris ended the Spanish-Cuban-American War, making Puerto Rico a U.S. territory, and in 1917, the U.S. granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship through the Jones Act. Spanish is a U.S. language. There are currently close to 53 million Spanish speakers in the U.S. There are more Spanish-speakers in the U.S. than in any other nation in the world, except for Mexico.[4] “Speak English, we’re in America” is, at its best, an ignorant declaration and at its worst, a hateful attempt to deny our existence.

You told me that if I spoke a little less Spanish you would love me, that if I looked a little more white, you would hug me. I masked my brownness, buried my language and still, you despise me. Jesus is light, Jesus is white! You color-coded my existence. Now, I’m in a dark place, a brave space.[5]  

“With your head facing the wall, you would bend down and he [the teacher] would get a paddle and hit you in your bottom and it was hard enough that your head bounced against the wall,” recalls Irene Tovar, Executive Director of the Latin American Civic Association and alumna of Pacoima Elementary School in Los Angeles. The violation? Speaking Spanish, whether it be in the classroom or on the playground. This was not an isolated case in the 1960s-70s or one that created public outrage or civil suits. It was a common and accepted form of punishment for teachers to wash the mouths of their Spanish-speaking students with soap, hit them and verbally abuse them for uttering words in their home language. Latina/o children were explicitly taught through violent measures that Spanish was dirty, undesirable, unworthy and transgressive. The message communicated to them was that the language that their parents spoke was inferior and should be forgotten. The U.S. public education system taught Latina/o students to be ashamed of the Spanish language, literally beating it out of them. Traumatized by the abuse they had endured, when those students became parents, many of them made the conscientious decision to not pass on the language.    

Despite the staggering amount of evidence that supports bilingualism, many well-intended teachers and administrators promote English monolingualism and discourage parents from speaking to their children in other languages. Fearing that their child will be confused, develop a stutter or language disorders, some families opt to not teach their children their home language, and by doing so, unknowingly, disadvantage them. Some of these myths were initially propagated by seemingly reputable studies that were deeply flawed. These studies compared the performance of monolingual students from privileged backgrounds to bilingual students from disadvantaged groups. Researchers concluded that the use of multiple languages was harmful and ignored socioeconomic vulnerabilities as a factor; they saw bilingualism, and not poverty, as the problem. Though these studies have long been debunked, they have persisted as truths, largely, because they support anti-immigrant and racist ideologies that believe brown bodies, and their languages, to be inferior.   

“I don’t want my kids to speak with an accent,” was commonly said by Latina/o parents who did not teach their children Spanish. This statement was usually followed by, “because I don’t want them to be discriminated against.” In reality, we all have accents. Linguists define accent as a particular way of speaking distinctive of a specific nation, location, or individual. Therefore, it is impossible to speak without an accent. To Californians, individuals from New York, Texas and Chicago have accents, and vice versa. Irish and Australians might note the American accent of tourists and city folk will allude to the accent of rural people. Non-standard or undesirable accents in any given group are contextually determined. Jesus himself had a non-standard accent[6]. Despite the fact that everyone has an accent, not all accents are perceived to be equally acceptable. In the U.S., British and French accents are usually thought of as being sexy or sophisticated whereas Indian or Nigerian accents are discredited. The concern that children will be discriminated against for speaking with a non-accepted accent is valid and well-grounded. However, Latina/o children will also be discriminated against for looking brown, having a Spanish last name, or living in a certain neighborhood. We stopped teaching Spanish to our children as a protective strategy, as a survival mechanism disguised as choice. We sacrificed our descendants’ ability to speak with their own family in service of racist ideologies. We forcefully traded our ability to communicate with our familias in exchange for a little bit of acceptance from a system that does not recognize us as image-carriers. Acceptance that is based on negating parts of our identity, that asks us to hate ourselves and that demands us to sever ties with our communities is not acceptance, it is oppression.  

Assimilation is a frail lifeline created by a racist system that confuses uniformity with unity. Assimilation demands us to inflict pain on ourselves as a rite of passage. Assimilation defies God’s creativeness and rejects the heavens described in Revelation: “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands” (7:9, NRSV). We are united by one true God, integrated into God’s kin-dom[7], but our differences are not erased, they are God-made, welcomed and celebrated.    

Quería decirte sana, sana, colita de rana pero para protegerte te murmuré, everything will be ok. Quería darte un apapacho but instead, I gave you a hug. Quería que supieras que a Dios le hablamos de tú, que ‘extended family’ es inexistente y que el ‘si Dios lo permite’ y ‘con el favor de Dios’ forman parte de nuestro andar. Quería que el español no fuera background noise to you, como un eco atrapado en el olvido. They held a gun to our head and said, “give us your children’s Spanish or we will kill them.” Mijito, I couldn’t see you die. I gave them what they wanted. Quería que entendieras las palabras en este poema, quería que no te sintieras como foráneo en tu propia familia, quería que el abuelo te contara sus historias, pero también quería, quería que sobrevivieras…[8]   

Visualize the following scenario: A Spanish speaker is walking to the store. She buys milk, hurriedly walks back to the house and answers a phone call. Who did you imagine? More specifically, what was the ethnic background of the person that you envisioned? It is highly likely that your visual reference was that of a Latina/o person. If you are Latina/o, you might’ve even pictured yourself or a family member. Languages are intrinsically associated to people groups and Spanish in the U.S. is immediately linked to Latin-American immigrants. The notion that a country has of a people group will directly impact their perception of the language spoken by that group of people.

“When white people speak Spanish, it’s a global skill. When Latinx people speak Spanish, it’s a threat to the country”

— Dr. José Medina

It is estimated that 50-70% of the world population is bilingual or multilingual.[9] In many parts of the world, including Asia, Latin America and Europe, multilingual education is the norm and the importance of languages is highly stressed. Many wealthy families even pay private language tutors and yet, in the U.S., where we are blessed to have the opportunity to be in community and learn from individuals of diverse linguistic backgrounds, we discourage bilingualism. However, bilingualism is not discouraged equally amongst all ethnic groups. People of color, specifically, are punished for their linguistic skills while white people are praised for their abilities. “Kylie La Gringa King” recently became a TikTok sensation for making videos in which she appears speaking Spanish, specifically a Mexican colloquial variety, while performing daily tasks. Her efforts are publicly applauded, and her Spanish is admired. Learning a new language is an arduous task and a profound undertaking. It takes dedication, humility, and courage to learn a new language and Kylie should be praised for her efforts but so should Alejandra, Natalia, José, and Ernesto. Instead, Latina/o people are discriminated against for speaking Spanish but also vilified by their own communities for not speaking it.  

I was riding the bus with my best friend one afternoon when I asked a girl, who clearly looked Latina, a question in Spanish. “I don’t speak Spanish,” she responded, with a tone of exhaustion in her voice. My friend and I laughed at her and murmured, “esta quien se cree, si tiene el nopal en la frente.”[10] I vividly remember feeling annoyed and offended that another Latina girl would dare to pretend she didn’t know Spanish. Years later, as I sat in a college class unearthing my history, I felt the desperate impulse to find that girl on the bus and ask for her forgiveness.

Shame has persistently burdened the Latina/o community in the U.S. We have been put to shame for speaking Spanish and have also shamed each other for not speaking it or not speaking it as well as others think we should by virtue of the brownness of our faces. Humiliation is a terrible pedagogical strategy. If you are a Spanish speaker who desires to encourage other Latina/os to learn the language, do not humiliate them. Twenty-seven percent of the U.S.-Latina/o population does not speak Spanish at home (Pew Research Center 2015). Poet Melissa Lozada-Oliva, describes her relationship with Spanish as an “itchy phantom limb” that “is reaching for words and only finding air.”[11] Many heritage learners[12] are working tirelessly in Spanish classes and elsewhere to reconnect with the language. For U.S.-Latina/os, Spanish is not simply a global skill or a resume booster – it is the opportunity to reconnect with their loved ones in a deeper way; it is the possibility to understand the stories that shaped their families. Black U.S.-Mexican poet Ariana Brown expresses the emotional turmoil felt by Latina/o learners in Spanish class in a powerful poem titled, Dear White Girls in my Spanish Class: “What is it like to be a tourist in the halls of my shame? To not be expected to speak better than you do? How does it feel to take a foreign language for fun? To owe your history nothing?”[13]       

El español es resistencia en este país. Learning or speaking Spanish while Latina/o is an act of resistance. Proving one’s Latinidad should not be the motivating factor behind learning Spanish. Teaching Spanish to future generations cannot be tied to issues of cultural authenticity or legitimacy and “linguistic ability should not be held against the diaspora’s children.”[14] However, speaking Spanish allows us to form deeper bonds with our communities; it enables us to explore parts of our heritage that can be illuminated more clearly under the light of the Spanish language and makes it possible for us to learn from our abuelitas’ theologies.        

Me inculcaste el amor hacia mi idioma. El español abrazaste, como agua lo valoraste. El inglés lo aprendiste, como lengua adicional lo quisiste. I love learning Spanish, I told my mother and it warmed her heart. I’m a child of God, I said. Un hijo de Dios, I smiled. Yahweh’s words echoed in me: “All languages are beautiful, Juan. Spanish will give you wings and help you fly.” Excited, el español usé y el Spanglish también lo adopté. Now, I’m in my home, tomando café con pan y leyendo la historia de Rut con mis nietos.[15]  

About Dra. Itzel meduri soto

As an academic from el barrio, Dra. Meduri Soto strives to engage in scholarly work that honors and gives visibility to her community. Her faith drives her passion for justice as she seeks to reveal the ways in which certain language ideologies are constructed to operate unjustly against our communities. Her work acknowledges language as a powerful tool and promotes linguistic diversity in its different manifestations. Bicultural and bilingual identities are at the center of Dra. Meduri Soto’s work. She is a Spanish professor at Biola University where she teaches second language and heritage language learners. To learn more about her work, follow her on Instagram: @la.dra.itzel

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Footnotes

[1] “El español crucificado” (2020) by Itzel Reyes.

[2] Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2019).

[3] See Dr. Rosina Lozano’s book titled, “An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States” (2018).

[4] Instituto Cervantes (2015). For full article, click here.

[5] “Burying my Language” (2020) by Itzel Reyes.  

[6] Galileans were peasant farmers who were bilingual in Aramaic and Greek, as explained by Dr. Robert Chao Romero in Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology and Identity (2020).

[7] A term used by mujerista theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz.

[8] “Our Spanish is Hostage” (2020) by Itzel Reyes.

[9] Grosjean, Francois. Bilingualism’s Best Kept Secret (2010).

[10] Translation: Who does she think she is, she’s obviously of Mexican descent. Con el nopal en la frente is a derogatory Mexican expression that literally translates as, with a cactus on your forehead.

[11] My Spanish (2015).  

[12] A person who has a cultural connection to the language they are learning.

[13] Dear White Girls in my Spanish Class (2017).

[14] Emanuel Padilla. Too Much or Not Enough (2020)

[15] “El español resucitado” (2020) by Itzel Reyes.

Racism: A Discipleship Problem?

Just prior to the death of George Floyd and a fresh wave of civil rights demonstrations taking hold of the US, InterVarsity Press released David W. Swanson’s Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity. A white man and ministry leader, Swanson pastors New Community Covenant Church, a multi-cultural congregation in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. Encouraged by his friends of color to speak to the topics of racism and whiteness in America, Swanson wrote Rediscipling in an effort to address a historic issue from this place in time. Many white Christians want to better understand the realities of systemic racism; they want to be better allies to their black and brown family. Swanson comes alongside these white believers, and the white church as a whole, with a historical, theological, biblical, and a deeply personal analysis of whiteness. Thoughtfully written and formed through the practical experience of pastoring, Swanson’s Rediscipling is a balanced resource for the ministry leader entering the hard work of racial reconciliation.

A Method Unquestioned

While Swanson’s Rediscipling is about whiteness, he begins in an unlikely place—the American church model of discipleship. The choice to begin here is an interesting one. For me, it proved successful in disarming my assumptions of the conversation. By starting with ministry method, not historical construct, Swanson reframes the topic at hand and captures the heart of the ministry leader. Swanson then employs philosopher Charles Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries. Taylor’s concept explains how our view of the world is shaped by what we expect from it.[1]  Drawing on discipleship methodology, Swanson shows how white Christians have been discipled into racism by culture and the world in which we live, leading us to conceptualize people of color biasedly. Swanson states: “White Christianity has been blind to the powerful racial discipleship that has formed the imaginations of white Christians.”[2]

It is interesting to reflect on the many ways in which the white church has rightly identified ways the culture and values of the world lead believers away from the gospel and holy living. We are quick to identity pornography as a sexual distortion and critique our culture for promoting its creation and consumption. Sadly, our whiteness has not allowed us to see how our world has enculturated us away from the reconciling gospel of God on issues of race. Rather, we have been enculturated towards viewing the world through a lens of racial difference. Swanson rightly asks, what should Christians be discipled into? How do the values of God’s Kingdom speak to race, racism, and ethnic or cultural divides? Swanson argues biblically and theologically that our white church discipleship has not produced Christians who mirror the God who desires to reconcile all things to himself: Jew, Roman, male, female, regardless of socio-economic status or color of skin. Rather we have been discipled by our world when it comes to matters of racial division. Swanson explains: “We can think of the narrative of racial difference as invisibly polluted air or contaminated water; the fact that we don’t recognize it doesn’t dull its impact on our way of moving through the world.”[3] How did we get to this place of being discipled into what Swanson calls racial difference? This is where the turn to history is important.

A History Unheard

If historical evidence has fallen on deaf ears in discussions of race, Swanson utilized it successfully. By approaching the conversation of whiteness first as a discipleship and cultural issue, Swanson interweaves the historical underpinnings for why American history and culture has discipled white Christians into white privilege. Swanson’s use of history spans the entirety of his book but comes heavily into play in the chapter, “Wounded by Race.” The conversation gets challenging here for the white believer, as Swanson unpacks the tragedy and evils of whiteness as a racial construct and white privilege, at length. He addresses this honestly: “We prefer not to linger. Yet the discipleship journey to redirect our desires toward the reconciled kingdom of God cannot be rushed.”[4] Many discussions of whiteness begin with the historical construct, using it as evidence to prove systemic racism. These evidences are not always well received by white believers as they present a new, unfamiliar, uncomfortable view of history. However, having already established the validity to the issues of race and whiteness, Swanson uses history well as explanation, not proof, for why these issues exist in America as they do. History becomes hard truth spoken to those who are ready to journey with Swanson through these tough realities. Swanson is not hurried, but he also speaks freely of the white Christian’s historical complicity to racism, segregation, and sin against their colored brothers and sisters. If you are willing to take this journey of learning with Swanson, you will make it to part two of Rediscipling, which paints the vision of the “reconciled kingdom of God.”[5]

A Vision Unseen

The second part of Swanson’s Rediscipling excites and provides hope for the ministry leader who wants practical steps forward for the internal soul work this book initiates. In each chapter, Swanson looks at a piece of congregational or fellowship life, analyzes it, and proposes ways these areas can be changed to allow believers to be re-discipled into racial reconciliation. Looking at children’s ministry, communion, liturgies, and potlucks, Swanson’s years of pastoral ministry shine through as he presents tangible ways in which white Christians can take their current practices and traditions and allow them to be informed by the reconciling gospel of Christ. Most significant is Swanson’s emphasis that re-orienting our hearts, lives, and congregations away from racial difference is possible even for believers in monolithic communities and congregations. Swanson explains that the goal of this re-imagined discipleship is to bring believers into true solidarity with the whole of the Body of Christ.[6]

This emphasis on solidarity rather than diversity, which has been championed in the race conversation at other points, allows for all to participate. Swanson explains: “The second reason for making solidarity our goal is that every expression of white Christianity can pursue gospel reconciliation immediately. Rather than outsourcing this essential Christian vocation to multiracial churches or to congregations in urban or racially diverse regions, every white congregation can contribute to the unity of the body of Christ across lines of cultural division.”[7] This vision of reconciliation, accessible even to believers in rural or suburban white communities, is a fresh vision for what must and can happen in the US church.

A Vision for All

While Swanson creatively and thoughtfully takes the reader on a journey to consider whiteness and reimagine discipleship, his target is ministry leaders. After finishing the book, I longed for a simplified and abbreviated version to hand off to my family and friends. Swanson writes as a practical theologian and pastor to those who have influence over church life. But this leaves me wondering if this critical conversation will get stuck at the leadership level, when so many lay persons are craving resources to take steps towards racial reconciliation. This brings us back to Swanson’s guiding ministry methodology—discipleship. Be it through worship, conversation, communion, the preaching of the word, or a chat over coffee, the flourishing we long to see in our church communities and our world is only made possible through the original biblical mandate—to make disciples. While this discussion of whiteness is a bit heady to make it into the layperson’s evening reading, the essential information and journey that Swanson unfolds for the ministry leader is replicable in the lives of those we disciple and lead.

A Higher Vision

The margin note that will stick with me in my personal copy of Rediscipling is this: “He cast something in my mind I have not yet fully seen.” All theologians, from the pew to the pulpit to the academy, wrestle with the “already, not yet” of our faith. Nearly ever doctrine is touched with an incompleteness that calls our hearts home to the Father and a future completeness found only in the Son, Jesus Christ. Why should it be surprising to my soul that Swanson prompted this holy discontent through his discussion of whiteness and the American church. Swanson sees, not naively, a vision of what God intends for His Body—a reconciliation of all people to Himself within His one Body, the Church. For Swanson, we can work towards that now.

We can see a glimpse of the New Earth John spoke of in Revelation in our churches today. We can make ministry choices that change the trajectory of the American church—a trajectory that has been shaped by racial difference more than by the gospel of Jesus Christ. I saw a glimpse of this vision through reading and reflecting on Rediscipling. While my vision is incomplete, and there is so much growth to be done in my own heart, mind, and actions, I am convinced there is a way forward. There is, to quote the old hymn, “a higher plane” than we have previously found. And so my prayer for all of us is to say, “Lord, plant our feet on higher ground.”

About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily C. Alexander recently completed her undergraduate degree in Ministry to Women at the Moody Bible Institute. Emily lives in Chicago where she enjoys long walks admiring architecture and pondering theological and sociological issues. Her hope is to impact the lives of women and the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.

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Footnotes

[1] 18-21

[2] 20

[3] 21

[4] 45

[5] 53

[6][6] 60

[7] 61

What's in a Name? A Personal History

My maternal grandfather was born in 1895 and my grandmother, his wife, in 1916. They both died before I was born but I heard about them from my mother, Andrea. My grandmother, I gathered, was a sturdy woman, a loving and responsible mother of 13 with little patience for backtalk. My grandfather, it seems, was a warm and well-liked gentleman with kind eyes, soft hair, and the fair skin typical of those on the island with Carib blood. Although unrelated, both were Lavilles, indicating some French influence either through ownership or marriage. Both were Roman Catholic. Despite knowing all of this, I only recently learned their first names. Della and David. For whatever reason, their names were never given, and for 27 years I never thought to ask.

I’m not sure what prompted the realization that I never learned their names. It may have been my studies in historical theology. The study of history often results in a desire for tangible personal connection with the past. The names of countless strangers, their geographical and cultural settings, their dates of birth and death, all become crucial windows for meaning, however opaque. Skipping across the centuries in search of ideas and their consequences, the names of people in their times and places remind us of our finitude and our mutuality, of our own relationship with the dirt and our bond with those who have already returned to it.

In the historical study of race, though, it is dangerous to care for names. Necessary, to be sure, but dangerous. So many names lost, so many others denied. So many, as Ellison knows, invisible to the eyes of history.[i] My grandfather was not born in the United States, but he was born during that period of U.S. history called the nadir. This period began upon the failures of reconstruction immediately following the Civil War and is considered by many historians the worst period of anti-black racism in our history. From 1877 well into the 20th century the terrors of mob violence and lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and various expressions of white supremacy flourished. Hatred, violence, and death reigned. Meanwhile, in the room of a home somewhere in a village on a small island in the Lesser Antilles, a baby was given the name David.

Long before the nadir in the U.S., the racial economy was in development on a global scale. No later than the 18th century in the Caribbean, “black” Caribs were already distinguished from “yellow” Caribs, Kalinagos distinguished from Garifunas and Taínos. Enlightenment racial schemes already exported to the indigenous people of the Greater and Lesser Antilles. To some degree classification is unavoidable, especially as people groups strive to maintain their own cultural particularity. But the seeds of a vile pigmentocracy were already being sewn, whiteness already laying claim to preeminence. What was at stake, the true commodity, as Willie Jennings notices, was the power to name.

*   *   *   * 

Grandma Clementine

My only living grandparent is named Clementine and her late husband’s name was Harold Hubert Hazelwood Yorke. While my other three grandparents represented France, Harold represented the British side of the colonial contest for Dominica. They named their son, my father, Anthony Roosevelt Yorke, and he gave his name, in some form or another, to all of his children. Harold was born in 1919 and Clementine in 1930. Again, both were born in the Caribbean. Harold was born the same year that the 19th amendment passed in both the House of Representatives and the Senate of the United States. Fully ratified by all states in 1920, the 19th amendment was a step toward recognizing the inherent dignity of women. Unfortunately, Harold hadn’t gotten the memo. The few stories I heard of my paternal grandfather involved his mistreatment of his wife and family. My grandmother faced what Kimberlé Crenshaw calls intersectionality—the cross-section of her identities as black and as a woman which forms a complex matrix of oppression. But Clementine was a praying woman. A Baby Suggs type, holy.[ii] And several of her children, including my father, became answers to her deepest prayers.

Not every generation is an outright improvement on the one before. If it were, the world would be utopia by now. Still, because of Clementine’s prayers, Anthony is a better husband and father than Harold was. When I got married I wondered if I would be a good husband and, eventually, a good father. My grandfather, after all, passed down not only a name but genetic information. What limitations, thought patterns, or propensities did we share? Which insecurities were ours to manage? And which of these would I pass on to my own children? Then, about a hundred years after Harold was born, and about 2500 miles away, my wife Chelsea and I faced infertility.

*   *   *   *

Chelsea and I constitute what our racialized world names an “interracial” relationship. It is a tragic-redemptive name for particular kinds of coupling. On the one hand, the names, in our case “black” and “white,” point to and reiterate the same biologically essentialist logic that provides the foundation for white supremacy. While skin pigmentation is, no doubt, a function of biology, the names “black” and “white” are not reducible to biology alone. They must be observed through the prism of history. The names mark levels on what Jennings calls an “abiding scale of existence” that places whiteness on top and blackness at bottom. Whether we recognize it or not, these names still function this way. The pigmentocracy is no longer as explicit as it once was; few people in our day use names like “quadroon” (one quarter black) or “octaroon” (one eighth black) to describe themselves. But the gap between the names, what Eddie Glaude calls the “value gap,” remains alive and well. If you don’t believe it, imagine a “black” neighborhood. Now imagine a “white” neighborhood. For either, don’t think of the exceptions. Now choose where you believe you will have access to adequate levels of safety, comfort, and opportunity. To be said to be participating in an “interracial” relationship, then, carries insidiously racialized connotations. It subconsciously signifies the impossible coming together of fundamentally disparate realties. It is tragic.

On the other hand, the names “black” and “white” point to and reiterate identification with particular communities. Especially for racialized minorities, this self-identification points to what Ian Haney Lopez calls “community ties,” familiarity with and concern for the interests of one’s community of origin. Understood through the lens of community ties, “blackness” does not signify the bottom of a racial scale of existence, it signifies dignity, strength, and participation in a beautiful community of people bearing the imago Dei. It signifies those who have gone on existing, and beautifully, despite every effort against them. Historically and sociologically speaking, the community to which “white” identity points has been the community of the oppressor, the community who took the power to name themselves and others. Those who are named “white,” then, have the difficult task of reckoning with this identity, of bearing the name, while working to dismantle its meaning and renounce its power. In this way, to be said to participate in an “interracial” relationship may be understood as redemptive. It may represent a supernatural work of reconciliation between communities who have redefined, relinquished, and/or redeemed the names they were given or that they gave to themselves. It may represent submission to the power of God in Christ by the Spirit to name, rename, and redeem for God’s own purposes.

This latter sense of the name “interracial” was, and is, the case for Chelsea and me. And we looked forward to thinking through this complex identity for and with children who would represent physically what we now understood about our relationship. A kind of visible sign of an invisible reality. In this context, the verdict of infertility named not only our inability to have biological children; it also suggested the improbability of naming a new way of being in society, a new way of relating to one another in a racialized world. So, Chelsea shared in the longing of Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth. For these women of canonical fame, longing for children proved to be holy longing; they desired to participate in the story of redemption to whatever degree they understood it as such. On this side of Pentecost, we long to participate in the redemption of a society ravaged by those who would claim the ultimate power to name. The redemption itself has already occurred and is occurring, however improbable. Even improbability kneels in the presence of God; dry bones come to life. Even a virgin could become theotokos, mother of God.

*   *   *   *

Chelsea had learned some years before of embryo adoption. In truth, Chelsea and I decided independently, even before we dated, that we would someday adopt children. Upon marriage, we thought of it as a future endeavor, something to pursue after starting a biological family. Somewhere in the midst of our grieving the verdict of infertility, though, the memory of adoption returned. In waves, over time, joy and hope returned, too. Our conceptions about family and biology challenged, we took heart again. Ultimately, we pursued embryo adoption, in which the embryo of a donating family is carried and delivered by the adoptive mother; the child grows in the womb and is delivered by the adopting mother but carries neither of the adoptive parents’ DNA. In the United States, there are currently over a million embryos in cryopreservation. Over a million embryos waiting to be named.

From their biological father’s side, the embryos that Chelsea and I adopted are half Kenyan. Because of the “one-drop” racial logic of the U.S., they will be racialized as black even as they are simultaneously racialized as mixed.[iii] Our children will change our names. We will now be mother and father. Further, I will be named a “black” father and Chelsea, a “white-mother-of-black-children.” These names carry complex meaning and emotion, in fact, the same tensions inherent in the name “interracial couple.” Tragic-redemptive.

It is tragic that one effect of racism and socio-economic disenfranchisement on black families has been the paradigm of the absent black father. Tragically, this hasn’t resulted in proportionate praise for the paradigmatic strength and resilience of black mothers. It is tragic that the narrative of black male absenteeism has become, for many, the cause and not an effect of socio-economic disenfranchisement in black communities. The blame is shifted and all responsibility for social action is placed back onto the black community. It is tragic that the fetishization of black men and black children by white women is an historical reality and has even become a trope in popular culture. It is also tragic that many women named “white” who happen to love men named “black” and parent children named “black” and/or “mixed” may be seen to perpetuate this fetishization.

It is redemptive to know that the active, present, loving, sensitive, strong black father is not an anomaly. It is redemptive that countless men and women across the country and across the world have always fought on the side of anti-racism without reduction. It is redemptive that countless interracial couples around the globe lean into the complexity of their joining, bringing all of their names with them, and considering together what kind of world our children should inhabit.

From their biological mother’s side, our child(ren) are part Cajun. The name Cajun is laced with racial history. French Canadians born in Louisiana during the late 18th and 19th centuries increasingly felt the need to distinguish themselves as “white” in contrast to those French Louisianans with darker skin, those who came to be known as Creoles. This racial distinction predictably and increasingly corresponded to socio-economic disparity. While the names in themselves—Cajun and Creole—do not inherently point to race, they have been made to conform to modernity’s racial logic.

Still on their biological mother’s side, our child(ren) are also part Honduran. Honduras, like many Caribbean islands, is paradigmatic in the colonial and neo-colonial history of the west. It is what O. Henry named a “banana republic,” a socio-politically unstable community. These banana republics were exploited for their rich natural resources, their societies forced to yield to capitalistic visions of time, space, and relating. Honduras’s prolific land attracted “namers” who would try to bring the land into submission; it would become what Pablo Neruda called “America’s sweet waist.”

It will be our task as parents to pass down what we know of these histories, in all of their beauty and complexity because our child(ren) will be named “mixed,” and this name will be truer than the namers know. It will seem as though our child(ren) are the mixture of Chelsea and myself—and they will be that, too—but they will be so much more. They will be the mixture of the stories of Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. They will be the mixture of the past and the present, of already but not yet. They will be the mixture of histories with History. Ultimately, they will be the mixture of human sinfulness and redemptive grace.

*   *   *   *

This is the reason that the Son, eternally begotten of the Father, took on the name Jesus in a particular time and place. Submitting himself to Mary and Joseph, the God-man allows himself to be named and to grow in favor with both God and people. In his ministry, Jesus exercises his own power to name—Simon is named Peter, servants are named friends. Not knowing sin himself, Christ took the name “sin” so that many might have the name “righteous.” Upon his resurrection Jesus instructs his disciples to baptize into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, the followers of Jesus are named the Church, sinners are named saints, those who were once not a people are named a people for God’s own possession. For this reason, Christ has been given the name above every name. Christ has assumed, and therefore, redeemed humanity’s power to name which was broken at the fall. This power has been abused by those who have the name Christian, but there is redemption for this, too.

So, our child(ren) will have names. They will have names which identify them as individuals who bear the divine image, each one a “Thou” existing alongside others in what Martin Luther King Jr. named an inescapable network of mutuality. Names signifying particular finite lives in time and space for whom the infinite God, in Christ, opened eternity.

And the names will be given by us, their parents. Not in domination, but in love. This given-ness points to our contingency, to our dependence—along with all of creation—on God for life, breath, and being. It points to our unity with those who came before us and it means that we carry their lives and stories with us. We carry the names we’ve been given. This, after all, seems to be the point: that because of the love of God in Christ, it may be a beautiful thing to name and be named.

About Michael Yorke

Michael Yorke holds a degree in Historical Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School in Illinois. He thinks and writes at the intersection of race, history, and Christian theology with a view toward a liberative and antiracist future. He is married to Chelsea and their first child will be born in December.

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Footnotes

[i] Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man

[ii] Morrison, Toni. Beloved

[iii] According to Winthrop Jordan, “In this country, the social standard for individuals is superficially simple: if a person of whatever age or gender is believed to have any African ancestry, that person is regarded as black. Basically, by this social rule, a person was, and is, either black or not. Any person of racially or ethnically mixed descent who has some ‘Negro blood’ has been or still is regarded as ‘colored,’ or ‘African,’ or ‘Negro,’ or ‘black,’ or ‘Afro-American,’ or ‘African American’—whatever designation has prevailed by convention at the time.”

Works Referenced and/or Consulted

Bantum, Brian. Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity

Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A Theological Account

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, et al. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man

García-Johnson, Oscar. Spirit Outside the Gate: Decolonial Pneumatologies of the American Global South

Glaude, Eddie S. Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

Jordan, Winthrop “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States”

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Lopez, Ian Haney. “Community Ties, Race, and Faculty Hiring: The Case for Professors Who Don’t Think White”

Morrison, Toni. Beloved

Raboteau, Albert J. A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History

Does Righteousness Have a Color Scheme?

Editorial Note: Remember, a theology of clothing and a modest spirit are not solely a woman’s issue. The principles discussed below are also applicable to men, and we encourage our male audience to consider their role in this conversation as culture-makers.

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It wasn’t until moving to Ecuador for a teaching assignment that Chicago born Latina, Jacqui[1], saw firsthand that modesty is understood differently culture to culture. Surprised by the way women dressed when attending church, she realized that even while Latina, she was raised with an American perspective of modesty. “When I think ‘what does modesty look like in the Christian US,’ it’s covering yourself,” Jacqui explained. “But more specifically it’s covering the shape of a woman’s body.” Jacqui is mestiza, representative of the children and grandchildren of immigrants who find themselves caught between the cultural values of their heritage and the American values in which they have been raised. Jacqui had sensed this tension but living in a Latin culture outside the US for a couple years helped her begin to sort out these differences and gave her a fresh perspective on modesty.

“For Latins,” she explains, “it’s not about covering the shape but about covering the skin. Whereas, in the US, it’s more about covering the shape of your body.” What she saw in Ecuador rang true in her personal experience, as she identified in times of celebration, like a graduation, her family reverted to a Latin understanding of modesty, focusing more on covering one’s skin than shape. This cultural difference affected how Jacqui saw the Super Bowl half-time performance, and she thinks it is this cultural tension that contributed to the heated dialogue that followed. “I think that’s why at the Super Bowl a lot of people in the Latin community were upset when people said it was scandalous.”

Jacqui’s experience is an example of the diversity in modesty principles that exist in US churches today. While the loudest voice on the topic of modesty might be the white evangelical one, our churches are filled with believers from a variety of cultural contexts and ethnic backgrounds. First and second-generation citizens, mestizas/os like Jacqui, are in the process now, more than ever, of working through their cultural identity and understanding how it informs belief and practice as a follower of Jesus. In explosive debates, like the ones seen online after the Super Bowl half-time show, Christians can easily talk past each other, forgetting a fundamental yet complex difference we all have—context.

In February, the we published “Too Soon to Talk About Modesty” and the response was overwhelming, prompting constructive conversations in the WOS community and beyond. This article proposed we first talk about being clothed in the righteousness of Christ, before developing a practical theology of clothing. But what’s next? This month I sat down, virtually, with four Christ-following women who have thoughtfully developed their own relationship to clothing. Representing a variety of ages, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, and church contexts, the experiences of these women tell a broad story, one that acknowledges the influence of culture and ethnicity on our relationship to clothing. God has given us the Word, the Spirit, and Biblical community as three means of pursuing wisdom—whether deciding what to wear, who to marry or what career to follow. What do we do when we disagree on what is modest? Clothing, as a cultural artifact, as well as a physical covering, tells a story. Some would say the story a Christian’s clothing should communicate is the gospel. Or at least, clothing should not hinder the gospel. The beauty in expanding our perceptions of modesty is that it opens us to reflecting the robust diversity of the Church and her people.

A Story of Cultural Identity

Wife, mother, First Lady, and professional, Shay is a woman who loves the Lord and loves fashion. In living life and doing ministry within the evangelical church, Shay has experienced firsthand the cultural differences in being a Christian and relating to clothing. “The issue of Christianity and modesty,” Shay shared, “really does come from a white evangelical background, and a very conservative background.” Coming from the very background Shay names, I listened intently to what she shared. Looking at an issue through the lens of another is the first principle of humbly seeking unity in the Church. Shay continued, “So women of color like myself, black and brown, as we come into the church, we are always taught that we have to look a certain way and act a certain way. But for many of us, we honor culture and race, we honor who we are and where we come from, and all the different pieces that make us, us. Even how we are raised and our personality types. And that is always a struggle, when churches say, ‘Hey, you’re welcome,’ but then I come in dressed in my sweats or my J’s—'Sorry, women don’t dress like that.’”

Cultural differences lie not only in how we cover our shape or skin, but in style. In attempting to define modesty, conservative evangelicalism has also dictated style, which isolates those from non-white ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. Rachel echoes a similar sentiment. As a church planter in Chicago, Rachel has spent time through the years reflecting on her cultural identity as Puerto Rican, with being a modest, yet fashionable, woman of God. “Too often we are not sensitive enough to someone else’s culture,” Rachel reflected. “We may want them to be part of our church, but we want them to assimilate into our culture. But if you want someone as part of your church…you will want their culture as well. And not say, “Come but leave your culture behind.’” Shay and Rachel point out that our clothing tells a story of our cultural identity. This piece of someone’s story is hindered when modesty is made to be a universal standard. But there is no universal standard.

A Story of our Uniqueness

Broadcast journalist Lecia was raised with a British/Caribbean cultural understanding to dress up for church, as a sign of respect. Residing in Florida where it is common for congregants to gather on Sundays in shorts, Lecia prefers to wear dresses and jewelry, yet humbly acknowledges that her clothing preferences are preferences. “Where do you find that middle ground? First of all, I acknowledge that it’s not a universal standard, so I realize I am not going to please everyone in what I wear.” Lecia emphasized the need to consider a social setting when making clothing choices and asks trusted friends for advice when she is unsure. However, she isn’t burdened by trying to be modest and doesn’t care if she is dressier than most. “Clothing is like an art and your body is the canvas,” she said, laughing that quarantine had been limiting her opportunities to dress up. “Dressing isn’t about drawing attention to specific body parts…it’s expressing your passions and your personality.” While seeking to be modest, Lecia sees clothing for what it is, a storytelling artifact that communicates the many facets of a person to the world around them.

Each woman interviewed listed numerous aspects of a person that influence clothing choice: body type, age, cultural background, church context, style preferences, personal comfortability, setting, and personality. Approaching the topic with a ministry mindset, Rachel expressed caution for those who try to develop rules or guidelines for modesty. “It’s such a multi-faceted conversation,” she mused. “I find myself leery of setting some kind of standard, that everyone then thinks, ‘This is God’s standard.’ We all would love to have, at our core, standards to follow so we could either look good or judge someone else or say we did it, but it was never like that for God. He was about our heart.” Raising her own daughter, and modelling Christ-likeness as a church leader, Rachel’s relationship to clothing is definitely on her mind. But her perspective is wisdom driven—not rule based. “There’s also the aspect that I want to do as Galatians 5 says—if I live by the Spirit, I will walk in step with the Spirit and bear the Spirit’s fruit in my life,” she explained, pointing back to scripture. “How do I do that? Well, let me ask questions that probe my heart, and get to the root of why I wear what I wear, and why am I choosing this.” This perspective rightly defines clothing—as an element everyone interacts with, that for the believer, needs submitted to Christ as any other area of life does. This perspective does not elevate clothing to what it is not—the telltale sign of a Christian’s character or righteousness.

Shay summarized it well: “Righteousness never had a color scheme, a style, a corset, a big baggy hoodie. It’s a manner of life that God has called us to live.” Clothing both covers and communicates. Just as the righteousness we wear communicates Christ to the world around us, clothing communicates the uniqueness of each person’s story, the diversity of our backgrounds, and the many pieces of our contexts. Getting practical with modesty starts with wisdom and continues with learning to love the Body of Christ in its many stripes and colors, baggie hoodies and all.

[1] All names of interviewees changed for privacy.

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About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily C. Alexander recently completed her undergraduate degree in Ministry to Women at the Moody Bible Institute. Emily lives in Chicago where she enjoys long walks admiring architecture and pondering theological and sociological issues. Her hope is to impact the lives of women and the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.

Too Much or Not Enough

“The distance between one person and another is really a story.””

— Karen Figueroa, The Mestizo Podcast, Ep. 2

I don’t remember what I said. Whatever it was, it made an impression on him. He pressed again, asking, “Where did you learn that?” “I don’t know,” I responded. “It’s just something we say all the time back home.” “I haven’t heard that since my Abuela died years ago,” he said, speaking more to himself than to me. It was as if he was reliving a memory; he was transported somewhere else. So was I. He was an elder at the church I recently joined in Chicago, a Puerto Rican who spent nearly the entirety of his life in this city.  I was new to Chicago, returning to the Midwest after a decade in Central Florida. Whatever I said, sent him from the city to the Island, but the words didn’t have the power for a joint trip. I landed just short of the island. Close, but not close enough.

The irony of this exchange is that it endeared me to this elder. It made me an insider, someone who understood the “old tongue.” He made a habit of inviting me to Sunday meals where his wife cooked “a lo antiguo.”[1] Arroz con gandules. Carne guisada con arroz y habichuelas. These were contidiano (ordinary) in my house growing up. What was not ordinary was the impression it made on this elder. Apparently, he was surprised to see a young man still eating this way. I wasn’t used to being treated like I was “authentically” Puerto Rican, yet there I was each Sunday being celebrated by a man and his wife for doing simple things like enjoying tostones.

In Chicago, with this elder, I was celebrated for being “more authentic” than some of the other Puerto Ricans in my generation. To my shame, I reveled in the admiration. Back in Florida, where an estimated 34% of Osceola county’s population identified as Puerto Rican and a large portion of these residents are recent arrivals from the Island, I was never “authentic” enough. My Spanish sounded learned in comparison. My taste for traditional Puerto Rican dishes was refined, but my rhythms, my “flow” was never quite right. Pero en Chicago, I was to my peers what the Ricans in Florida were to me. I was “authentic.” Or, at least, in the eyes of this elder, I was close enough.

Distancia y Dynamica

The Mestizo Podcast is a project that came with an emotional risk. I was nervous about publishing content from a uniquely Latina/o perspective and how that would be received. For my white peers in evangelical academia, I worried it would turn them off to the content, but the greater fear was related to how my Hispanic peers would receive it. Would it be welcomed as an answer to prayer? That was my hope. I prayed regularly for an outlet for conversations about interstitial identities. Experience taught me, however, that whomever starts these conversations gets evaluated, measured against the listeners’ perceptions. For some, I would be too Hispanic to be relevant. For others, I wouldn’t be Hispanic enough. I would be perceived as too white, too Americano, “de afuera” (from the outside). Exiled from one. Not welcome by the other.

During the second episode of the show, Karen Figueroa said, “The distance between one person and another is really a story.” I wondered weeks later about the amount of distance a story could cover. Could a story really tie the two generations of Hispanics together? Could it bridge the distance between Florida and Puerto Rico? In my experience, your proximity to the Island defined how Puerto Rican you were. How often did you visit as a kid? Did you live there at any point? Were you born there? Did you speak Spanish? If so, how was your accent? These questions represented the hermeneutic for deciding your Puerto Rican-ness. But Karen made me wonder, could a story relativize the island? Could narrative beat land the way paper covers rock?

A recent chat with a friend brought these questions to greater focus. After making a joke about the phrase “sin pelos en la lengua”[2] not making sense to me, we debated the image and origin of the phrase. She reminded me that these kinds of expressions are “formed en los barrios de la isla por gente con mucha oralidad.”[3] Then she concluded by saying that the idiom is not meant to be convenient for “gringos” or “una generación que no está conectada a ese contexto.”[4] Admittedly, the joke may have offended her as an Island-born Puerto Rican. In our chat, I felt I was perceived as an outsider mocking something I couldn’t understand. I felt I was perceived as lacking the connection that led to understanding. That may be true, but there is also another possibility. Is my connection strictly related to my physical distance to the Island, or is it possible I am connected via something else?

Oral Cultures and Exiles

In his Nobel-prize-winning book, El Hablador (The Storyteller), Mario Vargas Llosa tells of a young man named Saul, who abandons Peruvian society to become an Hablador of the Machiguenga. The Machiguenga is a tribe that lives as scattered family camps across the Peruvian-Amazon rather than live together as one complete community. In this unusual, dispersed way, the Machiguengas claim the entire forest as theirs, each family taking up their own corner of it and moving as food would require. Only one person traveled from family to family connecting them together. El Hablador.

For the Machiguenga, the storyteller is of sacred, indeed religious importance. The storyteller’s job was simple enough: to speak. “Their mouths were the connecting links of this society that the fight for survival had forced to split up and scatter… Thanks to the storytellers, fathers had news of their sons and brothers of their sisters … thanks to them they were all kept informed of the deaths, births, and other happenings in the tribe.” The storyteller did not only bring current news; he spoke of the past. He is the memory of the community, fulfilling a function like that of the troubadours of the Middle Ages. The storyteller traveled great distances to remind each member of the tribe that despite their miles of separation, they still formed one community, shared a tradition, beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes, and joys. The storytellers, writes Vargas Llosa, were the lifeblood that circulated through Machiguenga society, giving it one interconnected and interdependent life.

The Machiguenga storyteller is “tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment … something primordial, something that the very existence of a people may depend on.”

Vargas Llosa’s book highlights the importance of the story for exiled portions of a people group. What makes the Machiguenga a single people isn’t their proximity to a center or place of origin. There is no required pilgrimage for the Machinguenga that reinforces their identity. The story, and their regular submersion in it, is what makes every member, even those born on the outer limits of the jungle, part of the tribe. For persons like me, this makes sense as an explanation of my identity. Yes, as my friend rightly noted, Puerto Rican phrases come from an oral culture, but many of us US-born Puerto Ricans understand that far more than we are given credit. We know that our Rican-identity is rooted in this oral tradition. We aren’t Puerto Rican by the simple fact of an Island birth. Our identity relies on something more complex; it relies on our live connection to the oral tradition – stories, bombas, dichos, bailes, poesías, and even phrases like the one I lightheartedly teased. Like the people of Israel in the Old Testament, we are a people because of a shared narrative.

Generational Responsibility

Many of my Chicago friends who identify as Puerto Rican don’t speak Spanish. For a long time, I put on airs because I did. This is typical among 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics, to judge and be judged. Those who rank higher on the Puerto Rican-ness scale usually take on the role of gatekeeper, withholding the right to claim certain parts of Puerto Rican identity from others lower on the scale. There are so many stories about the pain caused by this kind of intercommunity conflict. Here are just two snapshots of how it makes the non-Spanish speaker feel.

Both tweets reflect infighting between LatinX people based on judgments about what it means to be LatinX. There are myriad reasons why this kind of conflict continues, and some are legitimate and worth addressing; the colorism in our community primary among them. However, there are also several reasons why linguistic ability should not be held against the diaspora’s children. As Gina Rodriguez, star of Jane the Virgin, stated, many parents refused to teach children Spanish, hoping they would lose the accent and be offered greater opportunities in the “white world.” Learning Spanish was not an option. It was discouraged.

I sympathize with parents who made this tough decision in hopes for a better life for their children. They could not foresee the way the Hispanic community would boom and gain influence today. Of course, this is one of many possible reasons for the loss of the language and culture. I am not accusing parents or blaming them for this loss. An individual’s flourishing (or diminishing) ability to access their cultural resources is in large part affected by the community. If the immigrant generation made a mistake by not passing the language down, there is still enough time and resources for it to be restored by the community. Once more, this is where the Machiguenga teach a vital lesson. Cultures survive because of storytellers not gatekeepers. We need a new way forward in the restoration and preservation of the Latinos’ community wealth, one that removes the judgment and includes the diversity of the diaspora’s children. We need more Habladores and fewer gatekeepers.

Galatas and the First Gatekeepers

Again, a gatekeeper is someone who “takes it upon themselves to decide who does or does not have access or rights to a community or identity.”[5] Gatekeepers may do this intentionally or by instinct – an impulse taught to them by the culture. I acted as a gatekeeper in my hubris about speaking Spanish. Whether with the intention of keeping the culture “pure” or the instinct to establish their standard, gatekeepers devalue “other’s opinions on something by claiming they’re not entitled to the opinion because they’re not qualified, … [or] a part of a particular group.”[6]

One of the earliest accounts of cultural gatekeepers is the small letter included in the Bible as the book of Galatians. The conflict that inspired Paul to write this letter was the arrival of Jewish believers to the region of Galatia. These new arrivals argued that non-Jewish Christians had to adopt Jewish practices and customs to truly belong to the people of God. Paul wrote with passion, reminding the church of his past as a zealous follower of Jewish tradition. He writes, “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers” (Gal. 1:14). Like the generational ranking that happens among LatinX people today, Paul was highly ranked as a Jew among Jews, yet he relativizes the Jewish Law by reminding the church of the essential element that identifies them as Christians – the gospel.

Paul is an Hablador. He knows the stories and focuses on the central narrative that ties this people together as one. Paul acknowledges the wisdom of the Law but presses the point that the Law was insufficient. It is faith in Jesus Christ that makes them sons and daughters of God. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). The good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection births a mestizo Church. It also enables a new form of relating between mestizos. “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other” (Gal. 5:25-26).

The gospel is a unique story in that it has the power to birth community across disparate and even enemy groups. Paul’s argument is also instructive for people within the same group. Puerto Ricans in the diaspora already know the importance of storytelling. While we may not understand every practice nor practice every custom, Habladores like Paul help us stay connected to them. They also help grow the story’s community to include the diaspora’s experience. Among young US-born Latina/os, there are some recording our history, researching our dances, and writing new poetry. These represent a collection of new Habladores, storytellers who bring new life to the older generation, demonstrating that the culture isn’t dying. The culture has always been close to the diaspora, not because of their proximity to the Island, but because of their rehearsal of the stories.

About Emanuel Padilla

Emanuel Padilla is President of World Outspoken, a ministry dedicated to preparing the mestizo church for cultural change through training, content, and partnership development. He is also an instructor of Bible and Theology at Moody Bible Institute. Emanuel is committed to drawing the insights of the Latina/o church for the blessing of the wider church body. He consults with churches on issues of diversity, organizational culture, and community engagement.

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Footnotes

[1] Trans. - Old school or traditional.

[2] An expression that generally means, “When you’re so blunt not even hairs could soften the words.”

[3] Translation: “formed in the hoods of the island by people with an oral tradition.”

[4] Translation: “a generation that isn’t connected to that context.”

[5] “Urban Dictionary: Gatekeeping,” Urban Dictionary, accessed May 24, 2020, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gatekeeping.

[6] “Urban Dictionary: Gatekeeper,” Urban Dictionary, accessed May 24, 2020, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gatekeeper.

Soy Tu Madre. I See You.

“Because I’m your Mom, it counts the most, because I know you the most.””

— Isabel in Wonder

I remember the first time I felt seen by my mom. It was a random Saturday when I was seven or eight. “A girls’ day,” she called it. I don’t remember all the details of that day. I know we had lunch out, and likely went shopping, possibly buying some new clothes for me. It is the feeling that stayed with me—the feeling that I mattered. Being a middle child of six, and the only girl, my Mama knew I needed to be known, she knew I needed to feel seen.

In the 2017 film Wonder, America’s beloved Julia Roberts plays Isabel, an ordinary Manhattan mom who gives up completing a master’s thesis to homeschool her special needs son, Auggie. Wonder begins as Auggie starts a new and terrifying journey—middle school. For the first time Auggie and his family learn to navigate friendships with children who often cannot see past Auggie’s physical differences. Being seen and known by his family gives Auggie the courage to go to school each day, but being unseen (ignored) and unknown leaves his older sister, Via, swimming in isolation as she starts high school. In the film, Isabel’s growth as a mother is not about rediscovering her life or finishing her education, as one would expect. It is putting to practice what she already does so well with her son—learning to see and know her teenage daughter.

In a post-modern, justice and truth driven Christianity it can be easy to overlook a hidden task force for God’s kingdom that quietly, and often thanklessly, works each day shaping and changing culture. This task force? Mothers and grandmothers—the women who birth and raise children to know and love God.  Mothers as culture-makers is not a new concept, but an ancient, biblical one, reflected in the abuelita theology of the Latinx church.

Abuelita theology elevates the influence of women in the passing on of faith. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre defines abuelita or “kitchen theology” as an understanding of the role mothers and grandmothers take in the “transmission” of beliefs and practices in the Latinx community.[1] This informal education happens in the most ordinary place—en casa. Latina scholars Loida I. Martell-Otero, Zaida Maldonado Perez, and Elizabeth Conde-Fraizer highlight the importance of this home environment, in their book, Latina Evangélicas. Latina theology is deeply rooted in the “’womb’ of daily life.”[2] More than a set of correct beliefs or practices, abuelita theology is an approach to faith formed within the community of a marginalized people, and is consequently rooted in “lo cotidiano,” the struggles of the day to day life historically faced by US minorities. Abuelita theology cannot help but be practical, as the effects of poverty and discrimination necessitate a livable faith.

In his new book, Brown Church, Robert Chao Romero suggests the Exodus story reflects the strength and influence of matriarchs.[3] The beginning chapters of Exodus reveal God’s people in a precarious place. Enslaved in Egypt, the Israelites population growth and potential power was concerning to Pharaoh. He commanded the Hebrew midwives to kill male infants as they assisted in deliveries. Fearing God, these women continued to help Hebrew mothers successfully birth their sons. As the Israelites grew in numbers, Pharaoh declared to all people that male Hebrew infants should be thrown in the Nile. Exodus 2 introduces us to Jochebed, a Hebrew mother: “The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months.” Jochebed allowed her son to live. Three months later she submitted him to God’s sovereignty by placing him in a basket in the river, and dispatching her daughter to watch and wait. Moses was found, given favor, and raised in the house of Pharaoh. Later in his life, he would become the deliverer God had ordained for His people.

We are left to wonder what Jochebed saw in her son. The word translated “good,” or also “beautiful” in Exodus 2:2, does not give us a clear understanding of her thinking. In Stephen’s speech to the Sanhedrin in Acts 7 we learn that Moses was “lovely to God.”[4] Did Jochebed have an inkling of her son’s future purpose? Did God reveal his set-apartness to her? Or did she simply see and know her child, and that was enough. In both the darkest adversity, and the daily struggle as a member of a marginalized people, Jochebed influenced the world through her motherhood. The future of God’s people was secured by the faithful obedience of many women—and one mother who saw her son.

Joechebed’s story introduces the power of “lo cotidiano.” It is in the struggle of life that Jochebed’s choices as a mother take shape. Romero explains how this daily struggle is typified in Latinas: “Though many may look down upon our mothers, tías, and abuelas for their daily commutes on the bus, travails in domestic and factory work, exhausting familial responsibilities, and faithful church participation…it is precisely in the daily rhythm and grind of lo cotidiano that unique theological and epistemological understandings flow.”[5] This daily grind, lived out by every mother, is amplified in the life of the stay-at-home mom. The home becomes that “womb of daily life” that allows the child and mother to experience a reciprocal relationship of seeing and being seen.

Mothers and abuelas en casa create environments where the lives of children matter. In daily conversations, responses, sacrifices, and challenges, mom becomes a disciple maker and the children the disciples; the home is a safe space of shared experiences. Through this day in-day out proximity, stay-at-home moms create with their children a unique opportunity to both shape and be shaped. A mother sees her child each day in present circumstances, but as Jochebed and Isabel, also with a heart full of future hopes. Out of love, knowledge, and hope mothers speak into the lives of their children with the intent to shape whole and holy people. This relationship is reciprocal, as children also see their mothers up close. This allows space for immediate questions and conversation, as a child watches mom deal with “lo cotidiano.” This vulnerable relationship, when embraced, also sharpens the mother’s conviction and character. In the most mundane moments—over diaper changes, tearful shoe tying, math homework, fights over music choices, marital disagreements, and requests for forgiveness—mothers model godliness and shape the next generation of the Church, while also experiencing growth themselves.

In abuelita theology, the Latino community gifts the global church with theological language—words and imagery to honor the critical role of mothers and grandmothers in the propagation of the Christian faith and the strengthening of the Church. Possibly, like me, you expect women to cultivate an identity outside of being a mom. The progression of time and culture have shown us that women can successfully raise a family and pursue education or a career. I have this conversation with friends often: how we are eager to bring truth to our cultures, build the church, and share the gospel with our communities, but we also want to have strong families. As culture-makers who are working from the ground up to bring the beauty, justice, and wonder of the Cross to the world, we can lose sight of our strongest ministry partners—mothers.

In a concluding scene of Wonder, Julia Robert’s character Isabel attends her daughter Via’s play. Forgetting her glasses, Isabel strained to see Via enter the stage. Determined not to miss this special moment, Isabel took her husband’s glasses and watched the entirety of the play leaning forward to see her daughter perform. Shocked by the talent and beauty of her own child, the glasses did more than allow Isabel to see Via act, they helped Isabel realize she had not been truly seeing her daughter. It was finally being seen by her mom that gave Via the confidence she needed to face the world outside her home. Isabel and Via were changed and so was the world around them through their strengthened relationship.  

Today we stop to honor motherhood—the women, mothers and grandmothers, who have birthed and shaped our lives. Theirs is a faith defined by labor and sacrifice, and a love that chooses to see and know as God sees and knows. While many of us labor as pastors, teachers, writers, artists, advocates, thinkers, and activists, trying to make new the world in which we live—these women labor alongside us, creating and nurturing life that is new, young, and vulnerable. Today we stop to honor the women who see.

About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily C. Alexander recently completed her undergraduate degree in Ministry to Women at the Moody Bible Institute. Emily lives in Chicago where she enjoys long walks admiring architecture and pondering theological and sociological issues. Her hope is to impact the lives of women and the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.

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Footnotes

[1] Hispanic American Religious Cultures, De La Torre, 347.

[2] Latina Evangélicas, Martell-Ortero, et. all, pg. 6.

[3] Romero, 211

[4] Acts 7:20

[5] Romero, 317

Should It Stay or Should It Go?

As humans, our history is marked by wounds of the past. We fight one another. We exploit one another. We kill one another. Our history is shaped by human injury; so, it makes sense that in a retelling of this history we would perpetuate injury. Injury begets injury. History-telling always runs the risk of aggrandizing someone’s story at the expense of another’s. That is the tension that exists between history and injury. This tension can even find its home in tangible spaces. Today, that tension found a home at the sites of many U.S. monuments. One of these homes is in Brandenburg, KY.

“On April 29, 2016, Louisville announced the removal of the Confederate monument, but attorneys stopped the city by filing a temporary injunction to stop demolition, and a lawsuit.”

– “New Monument History” Plaque in front of “Our Confederate Dead” statue in Brandenburg, KY.

“Our Confederate Dead” monument, which once stood in Louisville next to the Ohio River, is now situated about 45 miles south of the river in Brandenburg. The plaque, quoted above, stands in complement to two others. The one mentioned has a heading that reads, “New Monument History,” which tells the story of the new placement of the old monument. The second contributes a haunting echo of history by commemorating a quote from Basil Duke, a Confederate General Officer, on the folly of forgetting history. And the third, a plaque titled “Southern Causes for the Civil War,” offers a 248-word proof of the South’s motivation for entering the Civil War. In the shadow of that monument, all three plaques—not yet 5 years rusted—make clear that we are still fighting remnants of a war that ended 151 years ago. As the third plaque alludes, the Civil War was a war of sentiment.

I still remember my first time hearing the history of the Civil War explained to me by someone not from the South. It was like being told of a new war, one that was completely different from the Civil War that I had learned about. Having grown up in Florida, under the careful tutelage of southern evangelical curricula, my understanding of the Civil War was that it was a war of rights and not of slavery. Slavery was a footnote to the overall question: Who gets to enforce the rights of a man—God himself or man’s governing body? In fact, when reading the “Southern causes for the Civil War” plaque, it was like being reintroduced to an old memory. The plaque reads,

“Northern abolition movements with a goal to end slavery threatened to undermine the entire southern economy and culture free from northern interference, the south under pressure from the aristocratic plantation owners, seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America.”

According to the South, the North has painted over (or overwritten) the true economic and political issues behind the war with a manipulative picture of an evil slave state. The sentiment of the South is that they and their confederate kin are misunderstood, and the story of their fight is unfairly eclipsed by a history of slavery. Granted, it is quite hard to fit all that on one plaque, but this sentiment cannot be overlooked. Here is a history marked by injury. However, this injury is multi-faceted. What is not portrayed on this small plaque, is the exploitive reality of a South built on the backs of slaves. This an obtuse and glaring omission, which explains the contention of the very existence of the monument. For understandable reasons, the African American communities in the South want this monument torn down. Which brings us to our question: Should monuments like “Our Confederate Dead” stay or go?

Ghosts of the Past

Before we venture into the ethics of monuments, perhaps it is best to first ask: What are monuments? Why do we build them? What is their significance?

The monuments in our parks that we tend to overlook are not unassuming artifacts. Monuments capture history that we believe merit our remembrance in a significant, permanent way. Presumably, we create monuments to share memories with the generations that follow us. Built in stone, iron, or some other precious element that we believe can stand the test of time, we erect our monuments with the intent to provide a witness to history, but not just any history: our history, our nation’s history, our land’s history. Or at least, that is what we could hope for in our monuments. Through monuments, we attempt to speak beyond the grave. In a way, our statues surround us like ghosts begging to tell us a story.

We fashion our monuments with respectable facades, all so that we can bring resolve to the actions of our ancestors and expound their sentiments in hopes that they will still be relevant in the future. That is what I hear in the whispers of Southern Confederate statues, a plea to remember them in a perspective that regards their own inclinations and their own sentiments. I hear a cry of a people who never had the chance to publicly mourn the loss of their dead. The fallen confederate soldier wants to be remembered as having died a death that had purpose. This is indicative of a South that argues that it fought a war righteously regardless of its accused sins.

I think it is difficult for the South to dismantle its monuments because she has not yet grappled with her loss, both the loss of her dead and the loss of her conviction. Herein lies the problem; The South remains in limbo. She has not nursed her wounds. She continues to replay them over and over again like a trauma not processed. To nurse wounds would be to recognize them, and she has not quite reached that level of awareness because the world moved on after simply indicting her of her sins and leaving her destitute. While the work force she had was obtained by exploitive means, once the South lost the war, she had not a penny to her name and no means in which to gain it back. The South had nothing left but injury and history. So, she built monuments, erected legends, created myths to make it bearable to move forward in a new world.

This is history marked by a wound that was never dealt with, and now the buried grief resurfaces as generations pass and questions begin to be asked. There are other parts of the South’s history, not just the Confederacy’s, that have not been dealt with. Drowned out by the pleas of the dead proud confederate, is the forgotten cry of disenfranchised black slaves.

There must be a better way to build monuments that honors all of our histories and allows all of us to grieve the loss and the injury perpetuated on our kin.

Rest in Peace

In Washington DC, there is a memorial dedicated to the Veterans of the Vietnam War, which is arguably one of the most controversial wars of our modern day. The erection of a Vietnam Memorial caused a public outcry, and to add to the controversy, the architect chosen to design the memorial was an Asian-American.[1] Maya Lin, who was at that time 21-years old and unknown, created a stir in DC as she designed a memorial to look like what many could only describe as a wound in the earth.[2] Lin was attentive to everything from the material (black granite with a polished finish), to the way the names were displayed (chronologically by the deaths of the veterans and not alphabetically), to the way the memorial stood (sunk below the ground). She did all this so that we as a country could be attentive to the wound of that war. On the 35th anniversary of the memorial, then acting President Obama said this of the memorial:

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has changed the way we think about monuments, but also about how we think about sacrifice, and patriotism, and ourselves. Maya’s pieces have changed the landscape of our country and influenced the dialogue of our society, never more profoundly than with her tribute to the Americans who fell in Vietnam by cutting a wound into the Earth to create a sacred place of healing in our Nation’s capital.

I am a daughter of immigrants. This land I grew up in does not know my family line. My family’s history in the United States is young. When I look up at most monuments in this country, I have no ancestral blood tied to it. There are, however, some monuments that do hold more weight to me as an Asian-American. The Vietnam Memorial is one such monument. A monument dedicated to a country’s fallen for a war of interference in a land nearer to mine echoes the sentiment of the third plaque from the statue of “Our Confederate Dead. The difference is that Lin’s monument, with all its raw ugliness, brings into greater focus the pain of warring sentiments and the human loss we create by our sins against one another. She allows the dead to truly rest by making us, the living, contend with the past. To her, monuments are more analogous to scars, in that they should be reminders of a past injury that have healed but forever marks us.

I believe that what Maya Lin’s monument provides for us is a better way forward. Her monument is a reminder that wounds can only heal if allowed to be exposed to air and sunlight. Moreover, it is strong proof that it is important to allow all parties of conflict and injury to have their say in the way we portray history. Imagine what the monuments in the South could look like if we had both Confederate descendants and African American kindred in open dialogue and empathetic construction. I think, if we employed both collaborative imagination and gracious sympathy more often and more earnestly, the monuments in our country could look much different.

It is time to restore our US monuments in a way that honors all parties. A collaborative restoration. Perhaps it is audacious, but I believe that in our world there is enough physical space for all of our dead to rest in peace, but only if the living are willing to fight for it.

“The absence of a narrative in which people of color are recognized for the contribution to society is dangerous because it leaves unquestioned the dominance of white people of the planet today, thus tacitly endorsing the notion of white superiority. People of color receive no credit for being an essential, although coerced, part of the development of the modern world.” ”

— Carl Anthony, Earth-City, 2017

About Jelyn Leyva

A Second-generation Filipina born in Tampa, FL, Jelyn Leyva graduated Moody Bible Institute in Chicago on May 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in Women in Ministry and an Interdisciplinary in Theology. She is currently in Los Angeles, CA pursuing an MDiv at Fuller Theological Seminary with her emphasis in Christian Ethics. Having lived in various places in the US, Jelyn’s interest lie in the complex history and multi-ethnic life of the Protestant Church in the US. Her hope is to serve this church and its many colors with the consideration of traditional and contemporary theological scholarship.

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Foootnotes

[1] https://www.biography.com/news/maya-lin-vietnam-veterans-memorial

[2] http://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/photos/maya-lin-ceremony-marks-35th-anniversary-vietnam-memorials-healing-power/

Tips To Moderating Quality Virtual Meetings

With COVID-19 creating a global stir, many of us are having to resort to the internet to connect us for our group meetings. Perhaps, you are already well-versed in the medium of virtual meetings and have often used Google Meets, Zoom, BlueJeans, etc., but when it comes to moderating you feel anxious about facilitating a quality conversation. Having moderated various virtual meetings and webinars, I have worked to compiled a list of tips that have worked for me in virtual space. These are tips on how to moderate quality virtual meetings.

1. A WARM VIRTUAL WELCOME

    Say hello to everyone by name as they log in. Not only is this a way to offer a warm welcome, but you also do this as a kind of Video and Mic check. Let your members know if you can or can’t see their video feed and or hear their sound. If you cannot hear or see them, troubleshoot with each individual.

   Quick Tips:

   Never assume that your members know or are familiar with the platform. Take the time to walk through every detail and be use visual language when doing it.

   Example

   “Hello, ______. Thanks for logging on. Happy to have you here. Would you be able to me a quick wave (to check their video) and a “hello” (to check their audio)?”
    “Tim, I see your video is not on. Would you be able to drag your mouse over the icon of a camera and click on it? It looks like a box with a triangle, and should be in the bottom right hand corner. [express where the icon is in your respective platform].

2. ORIENT YOUR GROUP TO THE PLATFORM

   Invitation Correspondence before the meeting

   When you type that first email to invite your group to your meeting, walk through every detail. You may want to login beforehand and ask yourself: “What are the steps I am taking to get onto this virtual meeting?” And then type them up step-by-step. Virtual meetings are not intuitive for everyone! You don’t want to alienate or make someone feel incompetent just because they do not know how to type in a meeting code, turn on their camera, etc. Take additional care in that first email invitation. Be sure to communicate that you will be available up to 30 min before the meeting to help with any set up questions and add a work/cell phone number that they call, just in case they are still struggling the day of the meeting

   Example

   You can find at the end of this handout, a copy of an Email Correspondence for a Google Meet event. You will want to adapt this to your respective platform.

   Quick Tips:

   Find ways to help alleviate your group member’s anxiety by making yourself available! There is nothing more frustrating than dealing with new technology without guidance.

    Orientation in the Initial Meetings

   Take about 15 minutes of your first few meetings to orient your group to the platform by explaining the functional pieces of the platform. You will want to make sure they know how to mute, turn their camera on and off, and utilize whatever chat function is available.

   Example (adapt to your respective platform)

   “Here in Google Meet you will have access to a few functions. You will find at the bottom of the screen three circular buttons with icons in them. The one on the left with the icon of a microphone, will give you control of your computer mic. Clicking this, will allow you to mute and unmute yourself. The middle circle button, is a red phone icon, clicking this will make you exit the meeting. You will want to avoid this until the end of the meeting. The right circle button with the icon of a camera, will give you control of your computer’s camera. Clicking this, will allow you to turn on and off your video feed. For purposes of our meeting, I ask you to keep this on so that I can see your head nods and/or thumbs up. However, if you are uncomfortable with this, or don’t have access to a camera, know that that is okay! I will just ask those of you without a camera to utilize the chat function. Speaking of chat, on the upper right-hand side, you will see a button, that looks like the chat square similar to the icon used for text on your phone. When you click this, you will open the chat box. We can use this to chat to one another throughout the meeting.”

3. SET VIRTUAL GUIDELINES FOR YOUR CONVERSATION

   You might consider yourself a loose and “freestyle” leader, however in virtual space a looser moderating style might eventually leave your group members confused and talking over one another. As the moderator you control the conversation. In virtual meetings, it is much harder to pick up on visual cues and body language. In face to face conversation one normally turns their head towards the person of whom they wish to address. Also, in in-person meetings we oftentimes open our mouths and/or point in someone’s general direction as they are speaking to express that we would like to respond to what they are saying. In virtual space, these bodily cues do not translate well, but there are ways that you can implement more virtual friendly cues and behaviors that will substitute to function similar to our in-person bodily cues.

   Make your group aware of the communicative obstacles of this medium.

   It’s hardly a secret that virtual meetings are not the same as face to face! Sometimes it is hard to put a finger on exactly why that is. We might not be aware of what we are losing in virtual space, like unspoken body language and understood addressing glances. So, In encourage you to make your group aware to this fact. This explanation can look very similar to what I wrote above.

   Regardless of how you feel. Make sure to be positive about this medium. If you are not happy or excited about virtual meetings your group will follow suit. Explain to your members, that while you recognize the obstacles, that you are certain that the medium will feel relatively seamless if you and you group decide to agree to follow certain guidelines.

    Delegate, Delegate, Delegate!

   Lay down your guidelines.

   Your guidelines are the new adaptive behaviors and virtual cues that you request of your members to keep a general rule of order in the meeting. You decide what this looks like as a moderator.

   For consideration, here is a list of some general guidelines that I apply and request to have followed in my group meetings:

   • When you are not speaking mute your mic. This keeps white noise at bay, it also helps in keeping members from speaking out of turn and over one another.

   • (Quick tip: In most platforms, it is also indicated when someone unmutes, and so you can use this as a moderating cue that someone wants to speak.)

   • Don’t speak over one another or interrupt one another. If someone is talking and you would like to make an interjection make it known by either lifting your hand so that the moderator can see you want to speak, and/or typing that you would like to follow up in the chat box.

   • As best, as you can let the moderator know you want to speak. Even if it is just by raising your hand. The moderator will make sure to be diligently watching your video feeds and the chat comments, so as to delegate conversation in a way that everyone has their turn to speak.

   • Examples:

     o   I saw your hand, Jane. Did you have something to add or a question?

     o   I saw your unmuted your mic, Tim. Did you have a question?

     o   I see your question in the chat, Kim. Did you want to expound on that?

     • Address one another by name. In general, when you are speaking, especially in response to someone, make sure to introduce your response by addressing that person. (e.g. “Jim, I like what you said. I have a clarifying question in response…). We don’t have the body cue of a turned head to know who is addressing whom. So just address one another by name.

     • Affirm one another. If someone said something really good, and you want to affirm it but don’t know how to translate that virtually, give a very animated and muted nod, and/or put it in the chat box. (e.g. “Yes, I definitely agree, Jane!”) 

Quick Tips:

Don’t be afraid to be a bit stern in the beginning. Making sure everyone is following your guidelines ensures a quality conversation for all your members. 

In the beginning, you may find some of your group members not abiding your guidelines. That’s okay, just make sure to swiftly correct them, remind them that following the guidelines ensures a quality conversation for all your members, and that you do not want anyone to feel out of place or like they are not being heard. Don’t be afraid to respectfully correct people.  

Example

“Hey Jim, thank you for your comments. However, Jane was speaking. Let’s agree to let people finish what they are saying before we speak. Remember, if you would like to respond, just give us a wave or shoot us a comment in the chat box, and we’ll make sure that you get your chance to speak after the person speaking.

FINAL COMMENTS

Technology is amazing. We are now able to connect with one another from all over the world! I know that even in this medium it can still feel a little disconnected, especially compared to the in-person meetings many of us prefer. Virtual meeting can feel a little foreign at first, but if you are conscious of the ways that the medium is different and find ways to adapt and accommodate to the differences, you will soon find yourself at ease and comfortable with Virtual Meetings. You may even find for yourself and your group other benefits utilizing this virtual medium, that you might not otherwise have in a more in-person setting.

When approaching Virtual Meetings: Be optimistic! If you are excited your group members will follow suit. Shared optimism among people, be it virtual or in-person, is what really ensures quality conversation.

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About Jelyn Leyva

A Second-generation Filipina born in Tampa, FL, Jelyn Leyva graduated Moody Bible Institute in Chicago on May 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in Women in Ministry and an Interdisciplinary in Theology. She is currently in Los Angeles, CA pursuing an MDiv at Fuller Theological Seminary with her emphasis in Christian Ethics. Having lived in various places in the US, Jelyn’s interest lie in the complex history and multi-ethnic life of the Protestant Church in the US. Her hope is to serve this church and its many colors with the consideration of traditional and contemporary theological scholarship.

Cover Image

Job Leyva. March 2020. “Connecting in an Era of Social-Distancing”

For the Abuelas en el Barrio

This week many church leaders made the hard decision of going virtual these upcoming Sundays. More so, it was made clear through official statements made by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that we have not yet reached the height of medical or financial devastation in the US or the world. Many are getting the sense that things are going to get worse, before they get better.[1] Anxiety and fear are pervasive among our friends, family, and congregants.   

Only a short scroll through social media makes it appear that we as a country have lost a sense of cordiality and neighborliness. The videos of people stampeding over one another to grab rolls of toilet paper would seem comical, if not contrasted to the images of our elderly standing in a picked-over grocery aisle empty handed. In times like these the Church must ask: “How do we respond faithfully during this pandemic?”

Moving to a virtual format is a valuable first step, as it recognizes the need for “social distancing” to keep safe the most vulnerable of our communities. However, while this is a good first step, I would argue it is still simply just the first step of a potentially long journey. A good next step is to reflect on our society’s current actions and rhetoric and ask, “What do these tell us about how we understand our world”?

“Every Man for Himself” | Counteracting an Economy of Scarcity 

“Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions.” ”

— Exodus 16:4

The sense of not having enough, or eventually coming to a place of not having enough is arguably what is driving the mania that has people flocking to the stores to buy items in bulk. The anxiety of not enough is a tell-tale sign of a culture that exists in an economy of scarcity. These mentalities and sensibilities don’t just happen overnight, they come from years of formation. Within Western culture, individuality is a virtue. It is good to look out for yourself. While this comes with benefits, like the ideals of democracy and of individual voice, it also comes with pitfalls.

The Christian faith has a history of counteracting the economy of scarcity. In the wilderness, the people of God had to submit to vulnerability, believing that God would provide day by day. And despite disproportionate collection, “some gathered much, some little,” (Ex. 16:17) God always made sure his people had enough. In fact, it was the hoarding of goods that produced rot (Ex. 16:20). Unlike the rest of the world, ours is an economy of enough.

If we are going to make it through this time, with some semblance of sanity and good-will, it is incumbent upon the Church to innovate and implement systems that counteract the current economy of scarcity. This could look as simple as encouraging your fellow congregants and friends to take only what they need to last them for the next two weeks at the stores, in order to reduce hysteria and defy this sentiment of scarcity.

We find that acting based on scarcity eventually produces scarcity. The economy of scarcity is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When individuals decide to take beyond their need, someone else suffers disproportionately. This is currently reflected by the desperate positions of many of our elderly.

“It’s okay, I’m low-risk.” | Learning How to Honor Lola

“But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

— 1 Timothy 5:8

It has been made common knowledge that the most vulnerable of our communities in this time of pandemic are our elderly and those with pre-existing conditions (e.g. those with auto-immune disease, going through chemo, etc.). So, while it may not seem like the disease poses a significant threat to you or your immediate family unit, the same is not true for everyone in your congregation. We must ask ourselves always how we are actively seeking to honor everyone, especially the most vulnerable of us.

In the Filipino culture, it is very common for elderly family members to live among younger generations in the same household. Intergenerational contact is normative; one household could hold up to four generations. The idea of leaving Lola (Abuela) by herself or in a nursing home, is a relatively foreign concept. In addition to this, the elderly in your “barangay” or “barrio” are also met with a great deal of respect. Thus, the well-being of the elderly is naturally taken into consideration. Now, this does not mean that there is no anxiety of scarcity in Filipino/as, but in days like these I find myself reflecting on my culture. I am compelled to stop and consider the ways that my heritage teaches me how to love my community, especially the Lolas and the Lolos of them. 

When writing to Timothy, Paul makes a seemingly indicting statement that to not provide for relatives is paramount to denying the faith. This seems almost counterintuitive to the scarcity mentality that I just described, especially since many are hoarding with their families in mind. Keep in mind that the Biblical context was perhaps much more similar to intergenerational contexts, like that of the Philippines, and less like our Western, individualized contexts. In a Filipino culture, we would read this to apply to the most vulnerable in our family units. Therefore, every action we take during a communicable pandemic is taken with care and always takes into consideration our Lola and Lolo at home.

The Church can learn a valuable lesson from its Filipino members during this crisis. We must prioritize and give special care to not just our elderly, but our most vulnerable brothers and sisters. We must not operate based on an assumption that most of us are "low-risk," but rather keep in mind that among us there are thousands of people, seen and unseen, who are especially vulnerable to this illness. Because we are a body, a family, that includes people who are vulnerable, we are compelled to protect them with our actions as best we can. The Body of Christ must be conscious of every member, including our Lolas y Abuelas. As one Body our identity, and thus our “risk,” is always absorbed in the whole of our community.

What Does It Take to Be a Neighbor?

When the world is in crisis, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and lose sight of our immediate context.

In times like these, I almost feel like the lawmaker who asked Jesus the question, “Who is my neighbor?” This question, of course, inspired Jesus to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan. What I often forget is how economically prodigal or reckless the Samaritan Man was in response to the hurt stranger on the side of the road. He poured out oil and wine, expensive commodities, to address the man’s wounds, and he paid for the man’s accommodation and any other possible costs. The Samaritan was lavish in his care for a stranger. At the end, Jesus asked his initial inquisitor: “Which of these do you think was a neighbor[...]?”

To which the inquisitor answers, “The one who showed mercy.”

In truth, neighborliness finds its fullest expression when we not only consider the needs of the most vulnerable, but when we consider their needs more important than our own. Ministry at this time cannot simply end at accommodating a mandate of “social distancing,” it must venture on into neighborly acts.

Going virtual is a meaningful first step for many churches, but there is more work to be done. Many church leaders in my area have taken it upon themselves to mobilize the healthy and able in their churches to assist their most vulnerable. They have asked those in their congregations who are over 60+ and most at risk to contact them directly with a shopping list and have made plans to find shoppers for them during this time. This is an innovative way to counteract the anxiety of scarcity, create opportunities of intergenerational partnership, and actively pursue the act of neighborliness. The Church needs more innovative ideas such as these.

What are the ways that you can be a neighbor today for those who are most vulnerable? If you are already living out neighborliness, share them with us using #WOSNeighbor #forAbuela!

“Jesus asked: “Which of these do you think was a neighbor[...]?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who showed mercy.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.””

— Matthew 10:36-37

About Jelyn Leyva

A Second-generation Filipina born in Tampa, FL, Jelyn Leyva graduated Moody Bible Institute in Chicago on May 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in Women in Ministry and an Interdisciplinary in Theology. She is currently in Los Angeles, CA pursuing an MDiv at Fuller Theological Seminary with her emphasis in Christian Ethics. Having lived in various places in the US, Jelyn’s interest lie in the complex history and multi-ethnic life of the Protestant Church in the US. Her hope is to serve this church and its many colors with the consideration of traditional and contemporary theological scholarship.

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Footnote

[1] “Coronavirus: Over 1,000 Cases Now In U.S., And ‘It’s Going To Get Worse,’ Fauci Says,” NPR.org, accessed March 19, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/11/814460233/coronavirus-1-000-cases-now-in-u-s-and-it-s-going-to-get-worse-fauci-says.