Erasing Afro-Latinos? Pt. 2

Intercultural competence is a difficult skill to teach. In a single classroom of 20 students, there is a myriad of complex possibilities. Each person is an intersection of theological beliefs, regional culture, family patterns, personal temperament, conflict style, previous trainings … the list is difficult to exhaust. Of course, the main challenge is the variety of racializations and experiences with racism each student brings to the discussion. To measure the range of skill present in the class, I use an assessment tool called the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI). This tool measures intercultural competence on a spectrum consisting of five levels, the third of which is called “Minimization.” According to the IDI, minimization is a mindset that “highlights commonalities in both human Similarity (basic needs) and Universalism (universal values and principles) that can mask a deeper understanding of cultural differences.”[1] In other words, those who minimize tend to flatten difference and reduce conflict by emphasizing – often overemphasizing – what a group shares in common. “We are all the same in Christ,” a minimizer might say, dismissing the differences between believers. Imagine my discomfort when I discovered my use of mestizaje was perceived by some as minimizing.

There is a history of minimization in Hispanic communities in the US, and I unpacked it in a previous article. Minimization is about keeping peace. For minorities relying on this intercultural strategy, it is about “going along to get along;” it is about building rapport between people of different backgrounds. Minimization often works, making it harder for people to want to try a different, more complex form of intercultural engagement. Perhaps many of the scholars who wrote about mestizaje in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, those Dr. Santiago-Vendrell and others critique, did not go far enough. Perhaps they believed minimization was sufficient for their task. Perhaps they were unaware of their minimizing, as is often the case. Regardless, looking back on over thirty years of discourse built on Elizondo and others’ use of mestizaje, it becomes quite apparent that their intentional minimization introduced problems they did not foresee.

Nestor Medina, in his book Mestizaje: Remapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/O Catholicism, writes an extended critique of US-Latina/o theologians who “constructed a romantic version of mestizaje that naively promised the inclusion of all peoples but effectively silenced the rich diversity of the U.S. Latina/o population.”[2] He evaluates the work of several major cultural and theological scholars and demonstrates ways their use of mestizaje continues to exclude, homogenize, and at worst, reinscribe racial hierarchies present in the Spanish colonial empire. The groups most affected by the dominant use of mestizaje, according to Dr. Medina, are the living Indigenous and Afro-Latinas/os present in the diaspora and in Latin America. Detached from the history that birthed the language of mestizaje, scholars too often present a utopian vision that is not grounded in present conditions or history. Therefore, Medina recommends US-Latina/o theologians engage in a self-critical examination of mestizaje and mutual conversations with Afro-Latina/o and Indigenous theological partners without demanding their acceptance of the language.

This article is an attempt to do the first of Dr. Medina’s recommendations by presenting an intercultural theology of mestizaje. I am going to rely on a foremother who introduced a use of mestizaje that avoids the minimization tendencies of other scholars. Both habits of minimization (e.g. flattening difference and reducing conflict) will be dealt with directly, focusing on the particularity of the discussion and those having it. After surveying each minimization tendency and how it affects our theological discourse, I intend to provide my own construal of mestizaje, defining the term and the two theological themes key to my understanding of it. World Outspoken is also taking up the second recommendation, so this pair of articles will be followed by a series of explorations of identity, history, and theology written by Afro-Latina/o ministry partners.[3] The goal is to expand our theological horizons to account for the great wealth present in our whole community. To that end, I present my views here as an open invitation for dialogue.

Flattening Difference

“Seeking to present a united front among U.S. Latina/o theologians and scholars, mestizaje-intermixture quickly became characteristic of the U.S. Latina/o communities and obscured the “unmixed” and “differently mixed” indigenous and African voices among U.S. Latina/o populations.”[4]

There are Latinas/os who are not mestizas/os (i.e. mixed children of Spanish and Indigenous blood). There are also mixed heritage Latinas/os who do not identify with the term. Part of the problem that developed as mestizaje became the dominant theological category to describe intermixture and promote a future vision of peace and unity is that it absorbed – in what I imagine felt like an act of force – the unmixed indigenous, unmixed Afro-Latino, differently mixed Afro-Latino, and others into an identity designation that historically did not include them. Furthermore, in some places in Latin America, the term is presently associated with their disenfranchisement. It is reasonable, then, for non-mestizos to resist the use of mestizaje to describe their experience and/or identity.

The error committed by Elizondo and others was to construe mestizaje as a single global process that has already or would eventually produce a future, mestizo people.[5] I agree with Dr. Medina’s claim that, “Mestizaje must be seen in the plural sense and qualified in light of the historical contexts from which those plural meanings emerge.”[6] In the post-colonial world, there are many processes of intermixture, each described with terms contextualized to capture certain nuances (e.g. mulato, creole, metis, sato, etc.).  It is an oversimplification to suggest that Latina/o theologians and scholars have an agreed upon definition of mestizaje. Even in limiting the scope to the U.S., there are competing and even contradictory notions of what mestizaje means in this context, so it should be noted that not all scholars reduced mestizaje to a single process tied to a single identity. While this is the dominant understanding of mestizaje in the US, there is an alternative worth strong consideration.

The Foremother of Mestiza Discourse

I previously introduced Elizondo as the leading voice on mestizo scholarship, but there is an alternative, arguably as influential voice that deserves credit for defining the uses of mestizaje in the US. Her name is Dra. Gloria Anzaldúa. She was a Chicana scholar, focusing on feminist theory, cultural studies, and LGBTQ+ advocacy. Her books have been studied in a wide variety of disciplines, demonstrating her influence on several academic fields. For my purposes, Anzaldúa’s book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, is of particular interest. The book is a collection of essays and poems building a framework for understanding the experiences of those who live in the borderlands. Anzaldúa grew up miles from the border between Mexico and the US, and she used her borderlands experience as a metaphor for describing several kinds of tensions in the complex development of identities. “For Anzaldúa, the borderlands are important not only for the hybridity that occurs there, but also for the perspective they afford to their inhabitants.”[7]

What is unique about Anzaldúa is that she does not reduce the community of the borderlands to one identity. As a lesbian woman, she recognized the need for multiple identity markers that shift and rearrange in dialog with one’s context. The borderlands reveal that all category designations for people are social constructions. For Anzaldúa, mestizas gain the ability to see “the arbitrary nature of all social categories,” and their life in the borderlands builds in them the ability to “hold multiple social perspectives while simultaneously maintaining a center that revolves around fighting against concrete material forms of oppression.”[8] The borderlands is also home to Afro-Latin@s. It is the dissonant home of all those who experience nepantalism, “an Aztec word meaning torn between ways.”[9] More recently, my friend Dr. Chao Romero recaptures this idea in his use of the term Brown.[10] Dr. Chao Romero is careful to stress:

As a metaphor for racial, cultural, and social liminality, brown should be considered a fluid “space” as opposed to any body of static, essentialized cultural characteristics.  In this sense, “brown” is an apt descriptor for many cultural and ethnic groups in the United States—such as Asian Americans, South Asians, Pacific Islanders, Middle Easterners, and the fast growing mixed race community-- who also find themselves in the liminal space somewhere betwixt and between that of Black and White.[11]

This metaphorical place, the borderlands, is a powerful and useful tool for theological reflection. It supports one of the two theological themes fundamental to my understanding and use of mestizaje. It indicates that mestizaje is an exilic process.

Mestizaje as Exile

In Scripture, the exile is carried out by a violent enemy of Israel. The people of Israel are dislodged from their land, separated from loved ones, and absorbed – by force – into a foreign kingdom. Those left in the homeland are, in some ways, impoverished by this separation, and there would later be conflict between them and those who return from the exile because of it. This displacement and disenfranchisement profoundly shaped God’s people for the rest of the story, and the exile even becomes an identity marker for the Church (1 Peter 2:11). Mestizaje is a process that produces exiled people.

Like the Israelites in the OT, Chicanas like Anzaldúa lost their tie to the land when an enemy of Mexico occupied it. This occupation produced similar dissonance for those now exiled Mexicans. They are disassociated with the land, separated from their families, and absorbed – by the force of war – into a country not their own. Describing Anzaldúa’s context, Dr. Medina writes, “the political barrier between the two communities strained and oftentimes ruptured the connection of Mexican Americans with their ancestral land. This break forced Mexican Americans to find new and creative ways of asserting their identity as people.”[12] For Anzaldúa, this meant taking on Chicana, Mestiza, Mexicana, and other identities as were appropriate for her context. On the east coast, among Puerto Ricans, this exile from the homeland caused some Ricans to take on a black identity. 

Anzaldúa argues that the exile forced the production of multiple new identities. Rather than flatten the borderlands experience, a better understanding of mestizaje is that it indeed produces a multiplicity of “between world” identities. It also demonstrates that this does not happen peacefully or without power differentials. “The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”[13] Later, in attempt to describe the creative power of the Mestiza, Anzaldúa writes, “though it is a source of intense pain” the energy of a mestiza consciousness comes from the continual breaking down and rebuilding of identities and making room for ambiguity. For many, mestizaje opens old wounds, but Anzaldúa leverages these wounds to resist the duality of the world around her. She is not like the Mexican, nor is she like the Anglo American. She is neither. The exiled mestiz@s make their home in the borderlands, and that place includes others as well (Afro Latin@s, Indigenous, etc). But, as Anzaldúa demonstrates, the borderlands themselves are not without conflict.

Reducing Conflict

“We can learn from the “mistakes” of mestizaje about constructing alternative societies based upon the celebration of difference and diversity without making universal, homogenizing claims and without erasing or silencing the histories and stories of other people groups by bringing premature resolution to internal conflicts through superficial unity that forecloses those conflicts.”[14]

In their introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of Anzaldúa’s book, Cantú y Hurtado write, “[Anzaldúa’s] frequent visits to Mexico … also made her keenly aware that oppression was not the exclusive province of one country or another, of one racial group or another, or even of one ethnic group or another.”[15] Their description of her experience hints to the conflicts between Mexican and Mexican Americans produced by the exilic experience. Medina elaborates this reality, writing, “There were differences and tensions between Mexicans and Mexican Americans: to the former, the latter had sold out to the U.S. culture and were not true Mexicans; the latter were oblivious to the social and political plight of the former.”[16] The borderlands are charged with internal conflict among the exiles who call it home.

The sad truth of life in the borderlands is that many Latinas/os in power have reached their position by following the path of Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector. By aligning themselves with the empire, they are elevated from among their own, only to support a structure that oppresses their people. In Brown Church, Chao Romero uses a different biblical illustration, comparing these Latinas/os to the Sadducees and the Herodians, sell-outs who colluded with the Romans. He writes, “In the 21st century it is the Ted Cruzes of our community—those who leverage their education, money, and light pigmentation to gain honorary membership in the white social club of privilege.”[17]  Afro-Latin@s and the Indigenous have more than sufficient evidence of the ways “white” Latinas/os have not been their allies or brethren.[18] This reality is part of the reason Afro-Latin@s and Indigenous communities resist mestizaje.

As I demonstrated in part one of this series, in Puerto Rico mestizaje was a process by which some Latinas/os pursued whiteness and supported the oppression of blackness. In describing this wickedness, I think Anzaldúa provides a corrective for mestizaje not by denying this evil but by naming it as part of the mestiza identity. Here too, Justo González presents a key theological contribution to the use of mestizaje. For both scholars, the mestiza/o is someone marked by impurity, marked by non-innocence.

Mestizaje as Impurity (Non-Innocence)

Anzaldúa has a remarkable and distinct voice on conflicts in the borderlands. Rather than distance herself from the conflicts, she commits to using some of her energy to serve as a mediator.[19] She believed she could serve as a mediator because the mestiza consciousness “serves as a mode of self-critique.”[20] Anzaldúa resisted the idea of simple two-sided conflicts where one group is oppressor and the other is oppressed. She believed “no one is exempt from contributing to oppression in limited contexts.”[21] This idea that all mestiza/os are complicit in and inherit guilt is echoed in the words of Justo González. González did something masterful when redeeming mestizaje for theological readings of Scripture and history. One of the first elements in his theological account is this idea that mestizos carry a “noninnocent history.” For Dr. González, this is about challenging the myth intrinsic to white readings of history. He writes,

“Our Spanish ancestors took the lands of our [Native] ancestors. Some of our [Native] ancestors practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism. Some of our Spanish forefathers raped our [Native] foremothers. Some of our [Native] foremothers betrayed their people in favor of the invaders. It is not a pretty story. But it is more real than the story that white settlers came to this land with pure motivations, and that any abuse of inhabitants was the exception rather than the rule. It is also a story resulting in a painful identity.”[22]

Both writers argue that mestiza/os are never beyond guilt. They are instead, quite comfortable confessing the guilt they inherit, and their complicity in current injustice. The heart of the colonizer is never far away for the mestiza/o because they know its in them. Indeed, this is true of exiled Israel too. The reason Israel was exiled was because they had Babylonian hearts; they built a nation of oppression and injustice in connection with their idolatry. The notion of inherited guilt must be extended to include what is missing from dominant understandings of mestizaje. If Dr. González is right that the mestizo identity is a “painful identity” marked by inherited guilt, this has to include the ways mestiza/os have made every attempt to move up the scale to white and away from their black heritage. Surely our inherited guilt does not stop with our earliest ancestors. Those mestizos, criollos, mulatos, and satos that assimilated whiteness at the expense of their black family incur an additional weight of guilt that only complicates our history and further marks our identity. We cannot deny our status-hungry ladder climbing nor the ways whiteness encouraged it.

Para el Mestizo y la Afro-Latina

Given the complexity of these discussions, its best to refer to a plurality of mestizajes than a singular mestizaje. Scholars like Medina and others invite those of us who use this language to be open to dialog with those who resist it. There are multiple identities experiencing the exile of the borderlands. Those marked by these identities have been marginalized by an outside empire, but they also marginalize one another. Therefore, all the borderlands exiles need the great deliverer to rescue them and bring peace among them. Anzaldúa admonishes all the residents of the borderlands to know each other more deeply. She writes, “we need to know the history of their struggle, and they need to know ours … each of us must know our Indian lineage, our afro-mestizaje, our history of resistance.”[23] In this set of articles, I attempted to make myself more clear and better known. I invite the readers to stay close to World Outspoken as the next articles in the series will introduce the histories of Afro-Latin@s who share space with us in the borderlands.

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] Hammer, Mitchell R. Intercultural Development Inventory Resource Guide, (Olney, MD: IDI LLC, 2012), 31.

[2] Nestor Medina and Nstor Medina, Mestizaje: Remapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/O Catholicism (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2009), 59.

[3] There are additional writings planned with Indigenous ministry partners, but these will publish at a later date. 

[4] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 82.

[5] It is worth remembering that for Elizondo, mestizas/os were those who lived in a dual culture, dual conscious environment.

[6] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 137.

[7] Gloria Anzaldúa, Norma Cantú, and Aída Hurtado, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. Edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 7.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 100.

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

[11] Romero, Brown Church, 26-27. Quoting Asian American theologian Sang Hyun Lee, Chao Romero defines liminality as “the situation of being in between two or more worlds, and includes the meaning of being located at the periphery or edge of a society.” (see pg. 26).

[12] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 61.

[13] Anzaldúa, Cantú, and Hurtado, Borderlands / La Frontera, 100.

[14] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 132.

[15] Anzaldúa, Cantú, and Hurtado, Borderlands / La Frontera 5.

[16] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 62.

[17] Romero, Brown Church, 163.

[18] Derrick Bell calls this racial ladder climbing “advanced racial standing.”

[19] Anzaldúa, Cantú, and Hurtado, Borderlands / La Frontera, 107.

[20] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 75.

[21] Anzaldúa, Cantú, and Hurtado, Borderlands / La Frontera, 8.

[22] Justo L. González, Manana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Abingdon Press, 2010), 40.

[23] Anzaldúa, Cantú, and Hurtado, Borderlands / La Frontera, 109.

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.

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.

What you missed in the “Halftime Show was Inappropriate” Debate

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? If this paradox were possible, it would be about Latina music and fashion in the US. The unstoppable force of Latina hips as they gyrate to the rhythm of dembow, salsa, and champeta would crash like hurricane winds against the fortified opinions of white America’s glass house. On Sunday, Feb. 2nd, the paradox was on full display when Shakira and J.Lo became the first Latina singers to headline the Super Bowl halftime show. The debris of opinions scattered all over Twitter and Facebook are the unavoidable aftermath from this collision. On one level, that may have been the desired effect of a performance as culturally centered as this one, but on another, the opinions trending online reveal deep undercurrents of racism, cultural myopia, and some problems with woke culture. Here are three key points where the conversation went wrong and a proposal for new dialogue.

Modesty Standards and Whiteness

Whiteness is a loaded word; I realize that it strikes many readers differently. For my purposes, whiteness is not about pigmentation. I am not referring to people with lighter skin tones. In fact, no one has ever been white, and there are many Latino/as with light complexions. I use whiteness as the name for the racial system here in the US and in other countries affected by colonization. Whiteness has theological underpinnings and is supported by bad science. It is rooted in the idea that physical differences gave inherent, God-given, superiority to Western Europeans, their descendants, and their way of life. As a system, whiteness continues to promote this singular culture, forcing all others to conform to it. Much of the conversation regarding this year’s halftime performance reflects the way the system (what I am calling whiteness) shapes our experience.

Many viewers felt as though the half time show was a “racy, vulgar, and totally inappropriate performance.” These opinions mostly focus on the clothing and movement styles of the Latina performer, and they usually reduce the performance to a display of erotic sexuality meant to arouse. However, this perception of the performance drastically misunderstands the differences between Hispanic and “White” culture. These opinions either reflect a polarizing posture toward cultural difference that overly romanticizes one’s own culture (in this case, white culture) and overly criticizes the other culture (in this case, Latin American culture), or they could reflect a minimizing posture toward cultural difference that assumes that all cultures operate under universal rules for modesty, displays of human sexuality (particularly female sexuality), and dance.

The differences between the two cultural worlds reflect a network of values, beliefs, and assumptions about the body and its meaning. What does it mean to demonstrate technical skill in rhythmic, Afro-Latin dance styles? What does it communicate to move our bodies in outfits that accentuate the movements? How should it – Latin dance in Latin clothing – be understood? To answer these questions, we need a dialogue about female bodies that is not framed by whiteness.  We need a conversation where the terms match the subject. At present, the majority response to the halftime show suggests we do not fully know what to make of Hispanic female bodies.

The Big Picture

In most cases where pop-culture events cause controversy, people zero-in on a specific moment that epitomizes what they appreciated or what displeased them. This event did the same. In many of the reactions for/against the halftime show there appears to be a handful of moments that standout. The most meme-able of these moments was Shakira’s zaghrouta, a sound made by sticking out one’s tongue and letting out a high-pitched sound which is common among women in the Middle East expressing joy or other strong emotions. (Shakira is of Lebanese descent). There was also J.Lo’s brief dance on a pole, something that no doubt was incorporated after her grueling training in preparation for the Hustlers movie. These two, among other moments from the show, were cause for critique and dismissal. In response, however, many have argued that the focus is wrongly placed. Instead, they propose the emphasis should be on the choir of children displayed in cages as J.Lo’s 11-year-old daughter, Emme, led them in a rendition of “Born in the U.S.A.” [1] This, they counter, should be the focus of the event because it sends a powerful message about the border crisis.

In both arguments there is a flaw. No event, much less one as packed with symbols and meaning as this one, should be reduced to a single moment. Instead, the event must be interpreted in its totality. The viewer must ask questions about how each moment and symbol contributes to the meaning of the other. Once done, the viewer should decipher a theme, and they should consider how each symbol contributed to it. To understand the theme, the viewer should also explore the world behind the event. What factors led to Shakira and J.Lo being the first Latina’s to headline the halftime show? What might have inspired the choreography and setting of the show? How do these antecedents affect the way the viewer reads the event? This performance, as any pop-culture product, must be interpreted as a complex whole rather than be reduced to a simple flashpoint.

The Black/White Binary?

There is a third current of discussion worth reviewing here. In the many reactions that flooded Twitter after the Super Bowl Halftime show, Jemele Hill’s exemplifies a response that may implicitly communicate two assumptions worth challenging. Here is her tweet:

The language of crucifixion aside, Hill’s point seems to be that black woman had to pay a price, pave the way, for Latinas to now thrive. It also may imply – though it is worth emphasizing that it also may not – that Latinas are reaping a reward that is not their due. While Janet Jackson did have a role in the start of J.Lo’s career, the point may be overstated. First, it implies a bad binary. It is possible that those who are making this argument are still working from a black/white binary that requires all acts of social progress to come from one of these two “archetypes.” This, however, misunderstands the role Hispanics really have in the fabric of American culture. I dealt with this in a previous article, but my thoughts can be summarized this way: we cannot make sense of race in America by using two categories. These Latinas have women in their own heritage that contributed to their success. Women like Selena, Celia Cruz, and Gloria Estefan all contributed to the foundations of Latina celebrity that J.Lo and Shakira now embody so fully. The Latina contribution to progress in pop-culture should not be reduced just as the African American women’s contribution should not be overemphasized. Progress is not zero-sum. The success of Latinas only contributes to the overall reimagining of American society without taking away from the success of African American women.

Reimagining America con Salsa y Sabor

The halftime show included one moment that caused some viewers, especially Latinos, brief anxiety. While her daughter Emme sung “Born in the U.S.A.,” J.Lo reemerged on the stage wearing what appeared to be an American flag. After joining her daughter in the song, J.Lo opened the flag to reveal that it was double-sided, displaying the Puerto Rican flag on the inside. This symbol, in the context of the whole show, reimagines the US-American identity, putting a new proposal on center stage. The NFL Super Bowl is an US holiday, and the NFL has recently been the stage for conversations about what it means to be a US-American and even patriotic. This year’s halftime show added to the conversation by reminding us that mestizos are American, and Americans are mestizo. Shakira and J.Lo put their mestizaje on full display by singing in Spanglish, honoring their heritage in the Bronx, Baranquilla, and Lebanon, and dancing in Afro-Latin styles. They showed the world that there never really was a paradox. They were unstoppable. Now we have to be movable. Join their dance and the new world that it imagines.

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Footnote

[1] It’s worth noting that as an 11-year-old, Emme lives in an America that is remarkably different from her mother’s version. Non-Hispanic whites already are less than 50% of the youth population in 632 of America’s 3,142 counties. According to research published by National Geographic, 2020 was projected as the year when 50.2% of American children would be from today’s minority groups. “As America Changes, Some Anxious Whites Feel Left Behind,” Magazine, March 12, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-rising-anxiety-white-america/.

Planting in Babylon Pt. 2

Maybe I’m not over it. Maybe the choice to start by telling this story is proof that it still bothers me. Still. Even if I’m “in my feelings,” I’m convinced he missed the point. Several years ago, while still in grad school, I submitted a paper on a model for multi-cultural congregations that I was quite proud of in the end. I had worked hard on the paper and included a theological argument for diversity I thought was soundly reasoned. When I got it back from my favorite professor, it included this feedback:

“I am puzzled why you have turned to the Exodus narrative to emphasize the multiethnic nature of God’s redeemed people.  Why not [use] the NT passages that more explicitly emphasize … God’s design of making His church multiethnic and its theological significance?”

This question is at the heart of this article. I believe God’s plan was always about making a mestizo people that would reflect His character on earth by making the world as it should be – a place of beauty, justice, and goodness. People failed to do this time and time again, but that doesn’t change the plan. He is redeeming a mixed multitude and calling them to create, to plant gardens, and build communities that set things right and restore His order. If this was always His plan, then it should be seen in the story the first time He rescued people and called them His own. In fact, the identity of Israel should hint to God’s plan for a multiethnic people just as the Church finally displays it. And, it does.

Returning from Exile

At the end of part one of this series, I noted the promise God made to Israel while they were exiled in Babylon. He said, “I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you, and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile” (Jer. 29:14). This promise reveals a second important identity marker for God’s people. The first was our non-innocence, our inability to work in Babylon as self-righteous missionaries detached from the city. The second is our mestizaje, our mixed identity as one chosen nation, a royal priesthood called to reveal His character (1 Pet. 2:9). We do this in our work (which will be explored further in the final part of this series), but we also do this in our very existence as a community. This is the focus of this article, and with all due respect to my former professor, the best way to show the importance of our mestizaje is to start at the beginning of the story.

The first time God rescued a people from slavery and called them His own, he rescued a mixed multitude (Exod. 12:38). The exodus story – the story of how the Lord rescued Israel from slavery to Egypt by sending Moses as His messenger – is essential to understanding how salvation happens in the Bible, what it means, and what it does to those who are saved. The Exodus was a significant part of ancient Israel’s history and identity.[1] It shaped their understanding of God and His works of salvation.[2] In fact, every time salvation happens in the bible, it’s meant to be understood as an echo of the exodus, a “new exodus,” a repetition of the pattern set in Egypt. While in exile, Israel waited on God to rescue them yet again in another powerful exodus that would bring them back home to their land. However, when they finally did return home, they quickly realized they had not yet been fully freed, and the exodus pattern remained unfinished. That is how the Old Testament ends, but for the careful reader paying attention to the pattern, the start of the New Testament should thrill because it introduces a new Moses, Jesus of Nazareth.

The writers of the New Testament, being faithful Jews, framed the story of Jesus as a great exodus. N.T. Wright argues that in the letter to Ephesus Paul is using the phrase, “guarantee of our inheritance” to draw from the themes of the Exodus narrative.[3] According to Wright, Galatians chapter four is part of a larger thought-unit “of the rescue of God’s people and the whole world from the ‘Egypt’ of slavery.”  He observes clear “exodus language” in Galatians 4:1-7 that is echoed in Romans 8:12-17. He goes on to say, “by overlaying that great story across the even greater one of the accomplishment of the Messiah, rescuing his people from the present evil age, Paul is able to say… this is therefore how you are rescued from sin and death.”[4]

If the exodus is this important to our understanding of all the salvation acts in the Bible, especially the way we understand Jesus’ acts in saving the Church, then the details of Israel’s salvation identity should inform the way we read Paul and other NT writers’ words about the multi-ethnic makeup of the Church. Precisely for this reason, Exodus chapter 12 verse 38 can’t be glossed over. At the very least, the mixed multitude of Israelites who left Egypt as God’s people included the half-Egyptian children of Joseph that formed the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. That means that “Israel” included some who had the blood of their oppressor. The verse says that a “mixed multitude also” (emph. mine) went with Israel. This suggests that other non-Israelites-by-blood went out of Egypt as part of God’s people. The instructions that follow Israel’s exit assume this mixed group.

The first instructions are for the Passover meal which commemorated God’s rescue of Israel from slavery. In these instructions God includes this accommodation: “A foreigner residing among you who wants to celebrate the Lord’s Passover must have all the males in his household circumcised; then he may take part like one born in the land … The same law applies both to the native-born and to the foreigner residing among you” (Exod. 12:48-49). This instruction, including its details about circumcision, and the ones that immediately follow are all about marking the identity of Israel. They make clear who belongs as part of God’s people. For instance, the next instruction is for a memorial that would be celebrated on the new calendar God gave them (see 12:2; 13:3-9). Holidays were established for Israel to remember who they were as the rescued slaves that were now God’s people.

The New Exodus

As the greater Moses (Heb. 3:3), Jesus accomplished a greater exodus. Therefore, the mixed multitude of Israel is only but a hint of the mestizaje of the Church. Like any biblical theme, the mixed identity of Israel grows more complex yet clear as the story continues. By the time Israel was exiled in Babylon, Ruth the Moabites had married into Israel. Rahab the Jerichoan prostitute joined the nation. These are only two examples of the many times Scripture makes clear that “Israel” is a complex name for a mixed people belonging to the Lord. When Jeremiah writes his letter to the exiles, he reveals that the Israelites were going to experience another mestizaje. They wouldn’t return to Israel exactly as they had left it. They would now bring back some of Babylon with them.

The Lord’s instructions to the Babylonian exiles was to plant gardens, build homes, and marry off their children. They were to become part of the fabric of Babylon. It was there, as members of the city, that the Jewish community developed synagogues. It was there that they developed new cultural rhythms that would mark them as God’s people. When Jeremiah, on behalf of the Lord, writes, “I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you, and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile” (Jer. 29:14), he is hinting that Israel would be a land of diverse experiences with a new Israeli community that now includes cultural expressions from nations abroad. Indeed, this is seen today. In Jerusalem, near the old city, there is a series of banners along a popular bike/walk path that display people from many ethnic groups in a prayer position. The text below the banners reads, “One of the most important visions for the city of Jerusalem is its existence as a cultural and religious center for all peoples.” The banner then quotes another prophet, “for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations” (Isaiah 56:7).

Jesus was born a Jewish man in Israel while it was under Roman rule. His experience, his cultural context, included yet another mestizaje where Roman culture played a significant role. As the new Moses, He accomplished the greatest exodus of all, and through His death and resurrection, those who follow Him are part of the greatest mixed multitude to be saved from slavery. He is fulfilling that promise written by Jeremiah and more. There is one final theological contribution from the Exodus story. Peter Enns comments that the Exodus pattern is closely aligned to the new creation theme. According to Enns, “to redeem is to re-create.”[5] God, in recreating a people of a mixed identity, is now calling them to care for and develop a culture that reflects the world as He intended it. This is the subject of the final part in this series. For now, may we live in Babylon as one beautiful display of God’s unifying love for all people. Together, we are His holy nation, His Church.

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Footnotes

[1] Ronald S. Hendel, “The Exodus in biblical memory,” Journal of Biblical Literature 120, no. 4 (2001) 601 [601-622].

[2] Otto Alfred Piper, “Unchanging promises: Exodus in the New Testament,” Interpretation 11, no. 1 (January 1, 1957) 4 [3-22].

[3] Wright, Simply Christian, 125.

[4] Wright, Justification, 136. See also pg. 157-158 point 4, where Wright argues the Exodus slavery language is part of the summary of Paul’s theology

[5] Enns, New Exodus, 216.

Somos Todos Juan Diego (We Are All Juan Diego)

I was never a Roman Catholic. I only remember a handful of experiences in a Roman Catholic church, all for the baptism or confirmation of friends. As with most Puerto Ricans I know, my faith heritage was Pentecostal-Protestantism.  We were the legacy of Azusa street. Evangelists like Nicky Cruz and Yiye Avila were the heroes of my father. My abuelo was there in New York standing precisely on the corner where David Wilkerson first preached the gospel while balanced on a fire hydrant. These were the legends passed on to me with pride and faith. They shaped more than my beliefs; they shaped my identity. I associated the boldness of these preachers with being Puerto Rican. As a theology professor, I continue to discover other treasures I inherited, women and men like Elizabeth Conde-Frazier and Orlando Costas. These now sit among the many European, African, and Middle Eastern believers from church history that form the cloud of witnesses surrounding me. Yet, among all these greats, the legend of Juan Diego now stands out as one I failed to appreciate rightly.

Mexican hermanos y hermanas will know immediately the story of Juan Diego, but for many Christians, particularly protestants, he is an unfamiliar witness. Today, December 12th, is a holy day for Mexicans as they remember Señor Diego and the first appearance of La Virgin in America. According to legend, ten years after Spanish colonizers took central Mexico in 1521, the apparition of Mary appeared to Juan Diego, an indigenous farmer and laborer. The brown-skinned Mary revealed herself to him on a hill which was formerly the site of an Aztec temple and sent him to the bishop to command that a church be built on that site. The bishop, of course, dismissed Juan Diego demanding proof of his encounter with Mary, the mother of God. Days later, Mary revealed herself to Juan again, providing the proof he needed in the form of her image miraculously painted on his tilma (a kind of hood), which can be seen in the Basilica of Mexico City to this day.

My experience with Latin-American students of a Roman Catholic heritage is that they now maintain a sharp boundary between their protestant faith and their catholic upbringing. They prefer to keep their distance from all things catholic because they have seen the heavy catholic influence on Latin American culture keep many Latinos from really considering a relationship with Jesus. This boundary is significantly reinforced from the other side of the fence. Many of my students tell tragic stories of their families rejecting them for their conversion to Protestantism. Since my experience of Roman Catholicism is limited, I do not have the same anxieties about rituals, legends, or holy days associated with it. I recognize that my lack of these experiences colors my view of Juan Diego, yet I see great value in honoring the truth implicit in his legend.

How protestants choose to engage the legend of Juan Diego is a question of contextualization. If we move too quickly to critique the legend as pagan worship of an idol, we miss the opportunity to affirm a significant treasure hidden in the story. Juan Diego was an indigenous laborer. He was not part of what Justo Gonzalez refers to as the hierarchical church that was an arm of the Spanish power. That church had no place for Juan Diego, nor did it preach a message of hope and life for people like him. The astounding twist of Diego’s story is that he was sent to speak a revealed word to the bishop. “Thus the Virgin of Guadalupe became a symbol of the affirmation of the Indian over against the Spanish, of the unlearned over against the learned, of the oppressed over against the oppressor.”[1]

The story of the appearance of Mary to Juan Diego brought millions of Mexicans to the catholic church. Laura G. Gutierrez of the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies says, “The fact that Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared as a brown-skinned woman speaking Nahuatl to an indigenous peasant is an important part of the narrative.”[2] The power is in the details. Mary appears with a sash around her waist, indicating she is pregnant. She is brown-skinned and speaks with one of the people in their language. She meets Juan Diego on a familiar worship site, making clear to him that he is encountering the divine. As Father Johann Roten, director of research, art, and special projects at the University of Dayton said, “You don’t have to be Catholic to respond to the affirmation, affection, and security that she offers. These are central values that go all the way back to the first appearance of the apparition.”[3]

As I consider the legend of Juan Diego today, I think it is important to affirm the truth therein that God is indeed a God for the weak. I do not worship Mary, yet this story of her revelation echoes a truth about Jesus. God made Himself knowable by taking on human flesh. He is a Jewish man from Israel. Luke, one of the writers of the gospels, emphasizes that Jesus’ arrival turns the world upside down. The first to hear of His birth are lowly shepherds like Juan Diego. Repeatedly in his account of Jesus’ life, Luke shows Jesus as concerned for the religiously hated, the unclean, and the despised. He did more than spend time with the Diegos of the ancient world, Jesus took their place, becoming despised that they might have new life. On a hill, like the Mary of this legend, Jesus reveals the love of God for the lowly. His story gives shape to Juan Diego’s legend by providing the central themes that resonate so deeply with the Mexican identity. Others have recontextualized the legend of Mary. All these retellings recognize the inherent beauty of a God who reveals Himself in recognizable ways to a poor people in need of His rescue. Somos todos Juan Diego. We are all Juan Diego.

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Footnotes

[1] Justo L. González, Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective, Reprint edition edition (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), p. 61.

[2] “‘Our Lady Signifies a Lot’: Here’s Why We Celebrate the Virgin of Guadalupe on Dec. 12th,” NBC News, accessed December 11, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/do-you-know-about-our-lady-guadalupe-here-s-why-n828391.

[3] “‘Our Lady Signifies a Lot.’”

Planting in Babylon Pt. 1

We like this or that propositions. Apparently, our brains prefer them. Decisions are simplified into either/or choices. Conflicts are reduced to good vs evil. Politics, at least here in the US, are framed by a two-party system. We like these binaries. Right or left? In or out? For or against? These thinking habits help us with simple decisions, but this kind of thinking is ill-used when applied to complex problems. A friend recently told me that in his counseling practice, every person he’s worked with thus far has developed a bad binary. They oversimplify their problem into two alternatives that do not account for the nuance in their stories, and this hurts them. This tendency toward binary thinking is seen in the way many local churches treat culture, and we need to move away from it to something new if we are going to live out our calling as God’s people.

Paradise Lost or Future Heaven[1]

In the consulting we do at World Outspoken, we generally encounter two postures toward culture. Some leaders approach cultural engagement with a deep sense of loss. They think back to a golden age, either in their country or in their local congregation, where things were better or right. These leaders express a desire to return their organizations to a past version. Their memories of the “good ol’ days” are romanticized, and the people of that age become heroes/legends. “For the person whose focus is mostly on the past, the present is a cemetery filled with monuments to the glory days that will never come again or with a painful record of the injuries and slights we have suffered.”[2] These leaders need the words of the teacher: “Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions.”[3]

A second, equally common posture toward the present culture is to look beyond it to the future. Leaders with this mentality misapply the teacher’s words: “better is the end of a thing than its beginning.”[4] This group risks minimizing current events and borders on escapism when they focus too much on the truth that the Lord will one day make all things new and right. “To someone whose interest is chiefly on the future, the present is only a way station. Its primary function is to serve as a staging ground for what comes next.”[5] This group risks disengaging in significant ways from work that reflects the future they imagine. Rather than work toward that future, they wait passively for it. As my friend, Dr. Koessler writes, “The future and the past can both be an unhealthy refuge for those who are disappointed with their present.”[6] What we need, then, is another type of “imaginative response …  focusing neither on a past golden age nor an anticipated utopia.”[7]

The Exiled Imagination

This article is the first of a three-part series that develops an alternative response to present culture. We focus on themes drawn from Scripture’s exilic writers. Exile “is the experience of pain and suffering that results from knowledge that there is a home where one belongs, yet for the present one is unable to return there.”[8] The most iconic experience of exile in the Bible is the capture of Israel by the Assyrians (722 B.C.) and the fall of the southern kingdom of Judah to the hands of Nebuchadnezzar (586 B.C.). It was during the exile of the southern kingdom that Jeremiah penned his popular letter (i.e. Jer. 29). In this letter, we discover the first image necessary for a healthy imaginative response to culture; we discover an image of ourselves. While developing this image, my goal is to move beyond simple binaries to a robust imaginative posture that accounts for who we are and where we are today.

The first few verses of the 29th chapter of Jeremiah’s anthology sets the stage for this letter. It was written to Israelites who were taken as prisoners of war from the city of Jerusalem to Babylon. The letter begins with a simple but hard declaration from God. The Lord takes credit for their exile, for sending Israelites as POWs to a perilous city. We forget that these Israelites were not sent to Babylon as missionaries. They were not pure, innocent, and godly people who were given a special call to this dangerous and unjust place. They didn’t choose to move there. The truth, in fact, is that the Israelites were Babylonian before they ever lived in Babylon. Jeremiah makes this point repeatedly throughout his anthology.

Beginning in chapter two, we are told that the priests, the shepherds, and the prophets disobeyed God’s instructions. The entire nation’s crimes are summarized in two statements: 1) They disowned their God, and 2) replaced him with other gods (2:13). The leaders were corrupt, and the people were wayward, leading to rampant injustice (6:10; 7:5-20, 30-31). Jerusalem was the capital city, the city of God and His chosen king. It was the Lord’s special dwelling place, meant to reflect his peace, justice, and prosperity (Ps. 72), but the first 24 chapters of Jeremiah’s writings reveal a different reality. Israel never built the Jerusalem, the city which was a blueprint of Heaven on earth. Instead, they built a mirror-image of Babylon, following the plans for a city built on libido dominandi (the lust for mastery). What was ruling Babylon was in them too. God’s people were more Babylonian than they were citizens of Jerusalem, and after many warnings, they were cast out from the city of God to live in the real Babylon they lusted after.

A History of Non-innocence

The Lord sent Israelites into Babylon not as good people to a bad city, but as chastised people to a depraved city. A healthy imaginative response to our Babylonian world depends on a healthy view of ourselves. In a previous article, we discussed the Latino understanding of history. The Hispanic identity is shaped by the conviction that our heritage carries a deep sense of inherited guilt. The bible gives shape to a similar identity for God’s people (Rom. 5:12). Today, we are not beyond the guilt and crookedness of this sick world. Paul tells us as much. After listing a group of sinners that would make a kind of “top 10” list of criminals and deviants, Paul writes, “and such were some of you.”[9] The identity of God’s people is always simul justus et peccator (simultaneously righteous and sinner). Our sin tendency tethers us to Babylon. It forces us to acknowledge our complicity in Babylonizing the world. But we are also righteous.  We are washed clean only to be planted back in the world as God’s ambassadors (1 Cor. 5:20). It is with this dual identity that we are to read the instructions of Jeremiah’s letter.

The Bible gives us two examples of what it means to live well in Babylon: Daniel and Nehemiah. Both men worked in the royal court, directly engaging the political systems of the city. Both men have long prayers that are recorded for us to read, and both men confess their inherited guilt. Daniel chapter 9 records Daniel confessing the sin of all the people, declaring the shame inherited because of the corruption of all Israel. The 9th chapter of Nehemiah is very similar. In his prayer, Nehemiah recounts the history of Israel, highlighting the consistent mercy of God and the consistent failure of the people. In these men, we have examples of culture-makers who don’t pretend to be innocent when reflecting God in their present cultural home. They go before God on behalf of their collective guilt, then engage their city.

Planting in Babylon

When God chooses people to be his ambassadors on earth, He instructs them to reflect Him in what they make. Jeremiah, speaking on behalf of God, encourages the people to go back to basic culture-making. He tells them to plant gardens, build houses, and have families in Babylon. They are not supposed to spend their days dreaming of their past in Jerusalem, nor are they are to passively wait for a future rescue, refusing to enter and engage their new home. They are not going back anytime soon, and the rescue is still far out in front of them (vv. 8-9). In the present, God calls them to make culture, to create communities that live out His story in this city. They are tied to Babylon and instructed to give shape to it.

The Lord says, “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” The italicized word here is a translation of the word shalom. “In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, … Shalom, in other words, is the way the world should be.”[10] This command breaks our binary patterns of thinking. The good of God’s people is interconnected to the good of a corrupt city. This should scare us. We know, because Israel gave us an example in Jerusalem, that we can never produce shalom in the cities we make.

It is in view of this, that the Lord’s promise in the middle of this letter is so comforting. The Lord tells a non-innocent, chastised people to live in Babylon as active seekers of shalom, as those who pray for shalom and make small pockets of its beauty in their cultural works. While they work, they are told to hope and wait because their exile is not permanent. After a set time, the Lord promises to visit Babylon and bring the exiles home, back to the city where God and humanity dwell together in peace. Thankfully, He has visited. He can be found by those who seek Him, and He is gathering people from all the nations and places of exile (v. 14). This last hope – the hope that God brings people from every nation and place to His city – is the remarkable truth that we will explore in the second part of Planting in Babylon. Until then, may we be sober-minded makers who remember our sin-tendency and live in God’s grace for the shalom of Babylon.

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Footnotes

[1] Credit to my friend and colleague, Dr. Baurain for these title phrases. Bradley Baurain, “By the Rivers of Babylon We Weep: The Exiled Imagination,” Christianity & the Arts, accessed July 23, 2019, link.

[2] John Koessler, “Practicing the Present,” April 22, 2019, Link.

[3] Ecclesiastes 7:10

[4] Ecclesiastes 7:8

[5] Koessler, “Practicing the Present.”

[6] Koessler.

[7] Baurain, “By the Rivers of Babylon We Weep.”

[8] I. M. Duguid, “Exile,” NDBT, 475. The author of this quote adds an * symbol to suffering that has been removed from the quote here. The symbol signals the reader to read a particular nuance he has added in a previous paragraph. By suffering, the author is referring to guilt or remorse stemming from the knowledge that the cause of exile is sin.

[9] 1 Cor. 6:10

[10] Cornelius Plantinga Jr, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, Mich. u.a.: Eerdmans, 1996), 10.

Beyond Racial Binary Pt. 2

Miles Morales. That’s the name of the Spider-man at the center of the newly released Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse. He is half African American, half Puerto Rican, and the first bi-racial superhero to hit the big-screen. As a true coming-of-age story, the movie portrays Miles ascending to the idea that he too can be spider-man. This is the main theme of the film, and it’s summarized in a mid-credit title card that reads: “That person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero” (Stan Lee). The Spider-verse, with its many spider-people, is a forward-thinking contribution to the race conversation, one that subtly adopts a thicker identity than the binary (i.e. black/white) so common to the discussion. Miles is more than a black character. Spider-man is more than a white Peter Parker. The super-hero behind the mask is recast as a Criollo, a product of a complex racial world.

Original Artwork/Christian Perez

After reading our previous article on the racial binary, a reader sent me the following critique (I’ve shared it in full because it is the question at the center of this second article):

“This article proved that historical events demand a more nuanced view. Now you should take it further and explain how [a tri-racial history] will not only account for what actually happened in America but what that historical accuracy will do for discussions about race in America. So yes, the truncated [binary] starting place doesn’t account for the history of the west and south, but how will the new proposal change the discussions about our racialized history?”

Essentially, I believe this reader is asking for points of application, for the “what now” that follows from a tri-racial American identity and history. My goal is to answer his question by building from the same two points that I proposed in the original post. A tri-racial dialog on race is one that is rooted in a thick history of non-innocence and the Criollo/Mestizo Identity, and together these provide a base for reconciliation and unity. Miles Morales will serve as a contemporary case study, an example of how a history of non-innocence and a Criollo identity can shape us all for the better. While Miles serves as the social example, I intend to draw points of connection between these ideas and the Bible when appropriate. In making these connections, my aim is to show that the Church is uniquely equipped, when guided by Latino/a brothers and sisters, to be the ambassador of reconciliation in a racialized America.

A History of Non-innocence[1]

In the previous article, I briefly covered a history of racial oppression and violence in the west coast. By recounting this history, I demonstrated that the Hispanic experience in America includes acts of racism dating back further than the history used to support a racial binary. However, this more nuanced historical account is not meant to be used to lay claim on land once stolen by Americans. That is not my goal.  On the contrary, the Hispanic social identity does not permit me, nor my people, the gift of innocence when it comes to ownership claims on the land. Remember, the means by which these lands became Spanish was conquest and encomienda (see previous post), practices no more honorable than those used by Americans years later.

Hispanics are the mixed products of Spanish conquistadors and indigenous people. Our inheritance is always a mix passed down from guilty ancestors. As Justo Gonzalez remarks,

Our Spanish ancestors took the lands of our [Native] ancestors. Some of our [Native] ancestors practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism. Some of our Spanish forefathers raped our [Native] foremothers. Some of our [Native] foremothers betrayed their people in favor of the invaders. It is not a pretty story. But it is more real than the story that white settlers came to this land with pure motivations, and that any abuse of inhabitants was the exception rather than the rule. It is also a story resulting in a painful identity.[2]

A Criollo history, a mixed, tri-part history that accounts for the crimes of our ancestors and acknowledges that our inheritance is the result “not merely of hard labor, daring enterprise, and rugged individualism but also of theft” can cultivate the empathy necessary to pursue justice together.[3] This is the great gift and therefore the great responsibility of a Hispanic heritage: to challenge the myth of innocence in the American past.

Miles and his Heritage (Spoiler Alert)

One of the tensions of the Spider-verse movie is the relationship between Miles and the male figures in his family. His father, Jefferson, is a hard-nosed police officer who lives on clear cut lines of right and wrong and pushes Miles to transcend the mire of life in Brooklyn. In a powerful moment between father and son, Miles questions why he must go to the new magnet school instead of being in a traditional public school “with the people.” Jefferson’s answer is firm: He wants something better for Miles; he doesn’t want Miles to become his uncle. To this, Miles responds, “What’s wrong with uncle Aaron?”

Miles admires his uncle Aaron, who is a clear foil of Jefferson. The big reveal of the film is that Aaron is The Prowler, a murderous villain who works for the Kingpin. During a tragic scene following the revelation of Aaron’s alter-ego, Miles is encouraged by his dying uncle to do better, to be better, because he is “on his way” to greatness. Miles’s own family is complicit in the crimes, his uncle is caught up in the wrongs, yet he drives Miles to transcend as Jefferson had hoped. Miles’s hero was also a villain. This is part of his complex inheritance. This history of non-innocence undergirds Miles’s embrace of his call to be Spider-man. In the end, we see Miles paint a tribute to his uncle in the police station with his father, a beautiful act of remembrance.

A History of Non-innocence and the Church

The way we capture and relate history affects the way we perceive the world and the Bible. This is one of the basic claims of Justo Gonzalez’s book, Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. Justo demonstrates that Bible stories are not politically and socially neutral, and he convincingly argues that American retellings of biblical stories tend to sterilize them and remove these aspects. However, a slow examination of the Older and Newer Testament would prove to be quite contrary to this mostly innocent account of the stories. The history of Israel is a dark heritage which includes rape, the murder of the innocent, and the oppression of the poor. The heroes of the Old Testament are often deceitful and out for their own gain. The disciples in the New Testament are not much of an improvement. As Justo writes,

In short, biblical history is a history beyond innocence. Its only real heroes are the God of history and history itself, which somehow continues moving forward even in spite of the failure of its great protagonists. Since this is also the nature of Hispanic history, it may well be that on this score we have a hermeneutical advantage over those whose history is still at the level of guilty innocence, and who therefore must read Scripture in the same way in which they read their own history.[4]

Justo concludes his remarks with a clear challenge to read the Bible as it is intended, as a record of an entirely guilty humanity in need of God’s grace. This reading of Scripture and act of responsible remembrance, argues Justo, leads to right action in the present. Again, if we are all ladrones (thieves), we are readier to empathize and challenge injustice together.

A Criollo/Mestizo Identity

I introduced the criollo/mestizo identity in the previous article. These words have been given theological significance as well. Jose Vasconcelos (a Mexican writer, philosopher and politician) was the first to take the term mestizo and redeem it as a positive term. In his early writings, Vasconcelos argued that America could be the place where La Raza Cosmica (The Cosmic race) could develop. He saw great potential for unity in the Hispanic identity because it transcends designation by skin color. Many Hispanic theologians since have followed his line of reasoning to portray the Church as a kind of mestizo group.

Virgilio Elizondo, for instance, argued similarly in The Future is Mestizo.[5] Much of his work focuses on the theological significance of the mestizo/a and the process of mestizaje, which defines the mixing of the three bloodlines (African, European, and Native) not only biologically but culturally and religiously as well. These theologians reflect deeply on their ethnic-social identity, but they also reveal a key observation about God’s people throughout history. From their very origin, the people of God were a mestizo (mixed) group. A brief review of the biblical story reinforces this identity.

When the Lord first redeemed Israel from slavery in Egypt, the Bible tells us that “a mixed multitude also went with them” (Exod. 12:38). Moses married a black woman, though he was criticized for it (Num. 12). When Israel crossed the Jordan river into the promised land, Rahab, a prostitute, helped Israel in their conquest of Jericho. She would marry into Israel, and later genealogies reveal that she is a foremother of Jesus (Matt. 1:5). Ruth, a moabite, is another foremother of Jesus. The Bible tells us that one of the earliest converts to Christianity was an Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:28-40). The church where the term Christian was first used was a mixed church led by a group that included a black teacher named Simeon (Acts 13:1). The early church included Jew and gentile alike, and the startling conclusion of the Bible foretells that God will be praised by a multitude “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev. 7:9).

From the beginning, God’s people include a mix of Africans, Europeans, and Israelites as one group. The history is one of non-innocence and the identity is uniquely and profoundly mixed. Mestizaje is the process by which Hispanics became one group consisting of brown, white, and black people. One of my Abuela’s favorite reminders is that you cannot identify a Puerto Rican by the color of their skin. Indeed, my family includes relatives of white skin with blue eyes and others with dark skin and curly hair. Despite these physical differences, we are united in one culture, one spirit, and one family. Is this not what Paul envisions in Ephesians chapter 4 when he challenges the church to walk worthy of their call by living in profound union?

Anglo Americans already have a sense of this mixed identity and union. They typically do not self-identify as German, English, French, Dutch, etc. Instead, the identity is now subsumed in the racial category: white. Mestizaje, however, moves beyond skin color and is rooted in more nuanced history; it produces a social group readier to welcome the other with genuine hospitality.

Conclusion

Miles Morales is a criollo Spider-man deeply committed to his family. When he faces the villain of the film, it is his connection to his family that lifts him to the task of defeating evil. He wins the fight by remembering his father’s words and using his uncle’s move. Miles is black, he is Rican, and he’s Spider-man. His empathy and desire for justice are rooted in his heritage and the complexity of his identity. Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse was an excellent display of the gift of mestizaje. Like Miles, the Church can learn from their brown family members to remember responsibly and act justly in the world. This is the great gift and great responsibility inherited from the Hispanic identity and the Latino/a church.

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Footnotes

[1] Credit must be given to Justo L. Gonzalez for this title and framework for history. His thoughts on history shaped what I propose in this section, and I recommend readers consider his book Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective.

[2] Justo L. González, Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective, Reprint edition edition (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 40.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 77.

[5] I suggest reading Nestor Medina's book called Mestizaje: ReMapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism as a primer. Nestor dedicates an entire section of the book to expounding and critically reviewing the ideas of Elizondo.

Beyond Racial Binary

I recently attended a panel discussion on race, diversity, and the city. The panel included a prominent African American church leader, a Canadian social scientist, a white professor of urban studies and politics, two pastors working in a Hispanic context (one Hispanic, the other white), and an Asian American pastor. In all, the group represented a fascinating intersection of theology, policy, and ministry. During the discussion, the moderator addressed the Hispanic and Asian pastor and said, “Often these discussions about race and diversity are framed as racial binaries (black/white). How do you think the conversation should be reframed? What do you think about the black/white binary?”

Much to my surprise, the two pastors were comfortable with race discussions as is. In fact, one of them said, “I think blackness and whiteness are the two archetypes for us to understand race. We can’t understand Asian-ness or the Latino-type without first understanding these two primary types. Black and White should frame and help us make sense of the other experiences.” I suspect that many in the audience found his answer profound and insightful, but I think there are several problems with this line of thinking. The black/white binary does not sufficiently account for the experiences of either group – Latino/a or Asian – and reflects a certain set of historical biases that need to be reconsidered.

I am asking the question again and attempting an answer from my Latino perspective. I do not pretend to know the Asian experience sufficiently enough to address it, but I believe my answer will help reframe the discussion such that someone more able than I can fill in the Asian perspective where I cannot. There are two basic lines of thinking that I use to address the question and introduce a new way of discussing race in the city. The first will be an analysis of Puerto Rican heritage as represented in public artwork. The second will be a brief history of the United States that will focus on events in the 1800s. When appropriate, I will suggest places where the Asian perspective is likely lacking and can be purposely inserted.

La Fuente de la Herencia

There is a small promenade in San Juan, Puerto Rico called “Paseo de la Princesa.” This promenade includes two public art installations worth considering as we think through race in America. Both are sculptures in a garden called La Fuente de la Herencia (The Fountain of Inheritance) that is tucked away in the ancient walls of San Juan. The fountain includes five sculptures representing the heritage of Puerto Rico: 1) the inheritance of the faith, 2) the inheritance of liberty, 3) the blood inheritance, 4) the social inheritance, and 5) the cultural inheritance (i.e. the inheritance of the arts). I want to focus on the third and fourth inheritance depicted by this collection of sculptures because they nudge the conversation from binary to tri-part.

The Blood Inheritance

According to the description of the garden, this sculpture represents the “integration of the three principle races of America, symbolized by Ponce De Leon, Chief Agüeybana’s sister, and a black African slave who later makes his ethne-cultural contribution to the new world.”[1] In 1508, Juan Ponce De Leon established the first settlement on the Island of Puerto Rico and named it Caparra. This depiction of him shows him taking the princess of the indigenous Taino tribe as the spoils of battle. The description of the piece reminds us that Spaniards later brought African slaves to the Island to help with the search for gold. The three characters suggest that the heritage of the America’s includes three bloodlines, not two. We cannot make sense of race in America by using two categories. If we do, we fail to acknowledge the indigenous people whose bastard children are known today as Hispanics. This points directly, as Ponce De Leon does in this picture, to a new social reality.

The Social Inheritance

Directly across from Juan Ponce De Leon and the bloodline sculpture is this piece. Here we have three other significant figures to consider. According to the descriptions on the plaque this sculpture depicts “the ibero-american priestess as symbolic mother of the new world and the Spanish conquistador, who together present their son, El Criollo, to the world.”[2] El Criollo is the Hispanic son, the mixed product of indigenous people and Spanish colonizers.[3] Over a hundred years before the arrival of English immigrants to America, the criollo children of the Spanish conquest where forming into a new ethnic-social group. The social situation in America has since been at least about the interaction, just or unjust, between these three races.

I suspect that part of the reason conversations about race in America fail to move from binary to tri-part, including Native Americans and Hispanics, is a truncated history that focuses too much on the eastern region of the United States. Instead, I’d like to propose a few key events that are regularly forgotten as we engage in dialog.

The East Coast Bias

I’m not going to provide a very long history, and it is important to acknowledge that the panel discussion I attended may not reflect the kind of thinking present everywhere in the city and church. However, for those who do think issues of race and reconciliation are essentially black/white problems first before considering everyone else, I propose a different narrative. In my experience, those who think in the way expressed by the pastor-panelist have the events of African slavery, the civil war, reconstruction, and the civil rights movement in mind. They are rightly trying to confront longstanding systems of black oppression and the traumatic social impact of these systems today. I do not want to diminish the importance of that element of the discussion. However, the civil war, for instance, only accounts for 11 states in the southeast and 20 states mostly in the northeast part of the U.S. My point is that the whole US, including that 3rd bloodline, is not accounted for in the story of the civil war. To capture the fullness necessary to have a good discussion on race reconciliation, we must go a little further back in history and work out the situation in the west.

Encomiendas - The Spanish Slavery System

Early in the 1500s Queen Isabella established a system of encomiendas in which Native Americans were grouped together and “entrusted” to a Spaniard colonizer to be “civilized” and “Christianized” in exchange for free labor. While the native people were not technically enslaved, the conditions were often indistinguishable from slavery as we know it. In 1510, Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos arrived as one of the first colonial citizens to la Republica Dominicana. He preached vehemently against encomiendas, and in 1512 the system was changed though not abolished. Other priests followed. For instance, Bartolome de Las Casas was an avid defender of native people. In 1515, de Las Casas gave up his Native American slaves and chose to denounce the evils being committed in the colonies. These two priests reveal that the apparently monolithic Roman Catholic Church in Latin America really has always been two churches from the very beginning.[4] One of the “two” Roman Catholic churches was an arm of the Spanish power and an aid in the conquest, colonization, and oppression of the Americas (1519-1532). The second, however, repeatedly stood with the oppressed and decried the abuse of power. This later version of the church became deeply associated with the ethos of the Mexican people.

Remembering Mexico

By 1819, Mexico was a significant portion of New Spain. The population growth of the colonies led to dispersal over greater distances. Here is a map reflecting the area of Mexico that is now the Western United States:

CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=937608 [5]

Again, there are a few historical events worth noting briefly. First, Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821. Due to the war for liberty, the Northern lands of Mexico were severely underpopulated. Therefore, the government enacted the General Law of Colonization. Under this law, white Americans were given right to migrate into Texas and other lands. In 1830, Mexico halts further immigration because white settlers began to outnumber Mexican citizens. Tensions began because white immigrants refused to honor Mexico’s anti-slavery laws. This is where I believe the connection with the second Roman Catholic Church was perceived as a problem for protestant white immigrants. Tensions reached their height in 1836, when Texas became an independent nation, and in 1846 the Mexican-American war began.

The war ended tragically for Mexico. 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, 100,000 Mexican citizens became strangers in their own land. Like their parents in the 1500s, Mexicans were displaced, removed, and rejected as “greasers.” Remembering this history, along with the social identity of Hispanics, would help us resist the tendency to discuss issues of race in black/white binary terms. The Mexican-American war precedes the civil war and did much to increase the tension regarding black slavery in America. My point is that these issues are interrelated and ignoring them only reduces our ability to reconcile as one people.

Conclusion

The black/white binary isn’t a helpful way of thinking about race in America because it does not account for the displacement of ibero-americans and it reflects a historical bias for the eastern narrative of the United States. I said I would at least identify where I think the Asian voice may have important contributions to make, and I want to conclude there. If we recall, it was in the west where Japanese interment camps were most prevalent during WWII. Prior to the war, California was the scene of severe violence against Filipino migrant contract workers during the Watsonville Riots of 1930. It wasn’t until 2011 that CA publicly apologized for these hate acts. I suspect more must be said regarding the experiences of Asian Americans in the west and no doubt broadly in the US. This, however, may be a starting point. We have to know our stories (intentionally plural) if we are ever going to make something different of our divided city.

Recently, there is significant discussion and tense debate regarding the migrant caravan from South America. Our president has unabashedly referred to it as “an invasion.” In response, I heard a Native American brother plead with a group of evangelicals, saying, “I have some cousins on the way back home. When they get here, I hope you’ll treat them kindly.” Indeed, I hope we remember that they once received white immigrants into the very lands we are now accusing them of invading.

The plaque at the center of La Fuente de La Herencia says that the base of the fountain, where the waters meet, represents the unification of the Americas in the grand cause and inheritance of universal man. The fount elevating from the base and shooting water symbolizes “the hope for a better world, founded on the values of our grand inheritance and the faith in the eternal life that is the aspiration of all mankind.”[6] Written around the edge of the fountains base is this prophetic utterance:

I will run like the rivers to the heart of the world

to nourish your inheritance

With my faith, my blood, my intellect, and my ancestral origin

In the name of God almighty I took these lands

To later dedicate them to the divine principle

That all men are created equal

Under the shelter of an Indian Chief, a European, and an African who gave their blood

To you. I give you the most noble of the old and new world

The future awaits your key for its destiny[7]

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Footnotes

[1] My trans.

[2] My trans.

[3] Another common word for a mixed person of Spanish and Native American descent is Mestizo.

[4] Justo L. González, Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective, Reprint edition edition (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 56.

[5] “Adams–Onís Treaty,” Wikipedia, October 27, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adams%E2%80%93On%C3%ADs_Treaty&oldid=866029907.

[6] My trans.

[7] Ibid.