What We Forget

Advent is the season encompassing the four Sundays which precede Christmas. Traditionally for Christians these weeks mark the beginning of our year and are defined by themes of remembering and waiting. While these weeks are latent with meaning for all Christians, I want to suggest that, for white Christians who are growing to care deeply about racial justice and reconciliation, Advent can provide an especially helpful starting point for our discipleship.

Remembering and waiting. We remember the lineage of faith to which we belong, including the generations of God’s people who anticipated the coming of the Messiah. We hear the longing in Isaiah 40:10-11, “See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.” And we wait as a people who expect our Savior’s return. We understand that life as we know it in a world groaning under sin will not last forever. A day will come when the will of God will be done on earth as in heaven.

What is it about these Advent themes that can help white Christians grow in our commitment to racial justice and reconciliation? Before exploring this question, we ought to acknowledge why so many of us need to mature in these areas. For as long as there have been white churches and Christians in this country, there has been a deficit in our discipleship. Time and again, we chose racial exclusion over embodied solidarity with the rest of Christ’s body. The segregation in our churches today is not the benign result of personal or cultural preference; its roots run deep through the soil of racism and racial supremacy.

Of course, this isn’t how most of us think about ourselves or our churches. But over the years, many Christians of color have warned us about our captivity to segregation and complicity with racial injustice. For example, in 1898 Rev. Francis Grimke, the African American pastor of Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., pointed to the silence of most white Christians in response to the lynchings that ran rampant throughout the country. In his sermon he asserted, “Another discouraging circumstance is to be found in the fact that the pulpits of the land are silent on these great wrongs. The ministers fear to offend those to whom they minister… This is the charge which I make against the Anglo American pulpit today; its silence has been interpreted as an approval of these horrible outrages.”

Why has it been so hard for white Christians to confess our conformity to this wicked status quo? In large part, it has to do with what it meant to become racially white. When my ancestors arrived in this country, they did not think of themselves in racial categories. They were immigrants from Sweden and Germany and they brought with them the particularities of their histories, culture, language, etc. But upon landing on these shores, they faced a new racialized reality in which those who were white had the greatest access to the American Dream. On the other end of that hierarchy were African American and indigenous people, those most likely to experience racial oppression.

In order to assimilate, my ancestors had to discard their cultural characteristics and pick up the more recent social construct of race. They had to become white. This exchange away from cultural particularity to racial homogeneity carried innumerable consequences. As Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, “Each new immigrant had to figure out how and where to position themselves in the hierarchy of their adopted new land. Oppressed people from around the world, particularly from Europe, passed through Ellis Island, shed their old selves, and often their old names to gain admittance to the powerful dominant majority.” Because the country’s racial hierarchy was built on the plunder and exploitation of Black and Native people, newly arrived immigrants internalized these forms of racism as a necessary feature of the path toward the country’s promises. But there were other implications as well which bring us back to Advent.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

When my ancestors became white, they were engaging in an act of forgetfulness. They set aside some of the important attributes which had defined previous generations in order to access power and privilege. This was the price of admision required by the racial hierarchy and it continues to exact its toll today.

We see this legacy of forgetfulness in how many white people struggle to talk about race and racism. When I facilitate racial reconciliation workshops, it is always the white participants who stumble when asked to describe their racial identity. The difficulties only increase when we begin considering the impact of the racial hierarchy. Rather than coming to these conversations with curiosity and humility, white Christians have often reverted to defensiveness, deflection, and denial: I never owned slaves! I have Black friends! I don’t have a racist bone in my body! We’re all Christians so we shouldn’t focus on our differences!

The forgetfulness of our race engenders a false sense of innocence. Because we have not remembered the cost - to ourselves and to our neighbors of color – of becoming white, we interpret our society with the kind of boot-strapping possibility only available to the privileged. If we think about racial segregation and oppression at all, it’s with a vague evaluation of someone else’s choice. We certainly don’t assume responsibility in this story; we are but innocent bystanders.

Only we’re not. And as Christians we ought to be quick to confess not our innocence but our susceptibility to sins of all kinds, including pernicious racial ones. As Isaiah admits in another common Advent passage, “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” (Isa. 64:6) Why, for a people whose hope is so rooted in the grace of God which meets us as we confess our sins, is it so painful to acknowledge that we have, in the Apostle Paul’s language, conformed to the pattern of the world? We have forgotten.

Advent, with its invitation to remember, is the antidote that many of us need. As we approach our Savior’s birth, we are reminded of the danger posed to our faith by forgetfulness. We hear the stories of those like Simeon and Anna who recognized God’s Messiah precisely because they remembered. We hear the prophets pleading with God’s people to remember who they were - a sinful people in need of God’s comprehensive salvation.

If we listen closely enough, we’ll also hear the summons to remember our own troubled stories and histories. Advent beckons us to cast off our innocence and self-righteousness, to be done with the defensiveness, deflection, and denial which keep us from unity and solidarity with our sisters and brothers of color.

Remembering is not easy; there are reasons we’d rather forget. But as with every generation who has preceded us, when we choose to remember our histories – the losses, the complicities, the sins – we will also encounter the God has not never forgotten his people, who remembers his covenant with us. And with this memory newly refreshed, we can resolutely turn to the work of justice and reconciliation, freed of the forgetfulness and false innocence which has long kept us from our family in Christ.

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About David W. Swanson

David is the founding pastor of New Community Covenant Church, a multiracial congregation on the South Side of Chicago. He also serves as the CEO of New Community Outreach, a non-profit organization working to reduce causes of trauma and raise opportunities for equity.

David’s book, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Discipleship, is available now. Read more from David at his website, dwswanson.com.

On 'Bad Mothering'

His words infuriated me. I reacted instantaneously and clearly agitated, I replied, “I decide how to spend my time.” He had unknowingly struck a nerve – a deep wound inflicted by the tendencies of machismo[1]. It was a reflex response; the words slipped out of my mouth without pause or hesitation. He apologized and I hurriedly hung up the phone.

“I’ll let you go now so you can go be with your son,” had been his exact words. He was a romantic interest and I identified the cause of my anger almost immediately. I became a mother at nineteen. My eight-month pregnant-self waddled across the stage of my community college graduation. I had a plan. My son would be born in July and in late August, I would begin state college. And I did just that (a 19-year-old healthy body could perform such miracles). I had a whole village that supported me, and thanks to them, I eventually completed my doctoral studies. My son was nine years old when I became a doctora. 

As a single, Latina mom and first-generation college student from a low-income community, the obstacles were many. There were real challenges placed before me. My body was constantly exhausted from attending school full-time, working part-time, and raising a child. My mind attempted to juggle numerous tasks simultaneously and every second of the 24-hour period was carefully planned. My workload was unimaginable but, with the help of the abuela/os and tías, achievable. The unbearable burden was not the physical labor itself but the constant criticisms and accusations dressed as innocuous questions: “¿y cómo dejas a tu hijo tantas horas? Yo no podría” and frequent, “Y tu hijo, ¿con quién lo dejas?” paired with, “pobrecito, ¿y no lo extrañas?” I wish that at that moment I would have immediately identified them as fallacious statements upheld by the violence of patriarchy. But I didn’t.

Instead, I wept. I wept in the shower – in the place where your tears merge with the shower droplets, in the place where the noise can muffle your cries, in the place where solitude accompanies you. There were times when my tears would refuse to respect this sacred place and would instead travel to my bedroom or my car. “I am not a good mom,” I told myself. I despised myself for loving school, for loving my job. I ritualistically apologized to my son quietly as he slept every night and obsessively reminded him of how much I loved him during his waking hours. In reality, I was not trying to comfort him; I was trying to soothe myself. I was atoning for my bad mothering.

Society promotes absurd and unrealistic mothering scripts that are unsustainable. A good mother cannot have hobbies, should not enjoy a night out with friends, cannot spend money on eyelash extensions, oh, and God forbid she dates. It is ironic and almost comical that single mothers are antagonized for being single but are simultaneously forbidden from dating. If you are a Latina mother, you are also expected to ser buena cocinera, maestra, enfermera, chofer, costurera, y mucho más. La madre latina is, in reality, a mythical figure that is half human, half goddess. She is one that morphs into many things and does so willingly, effortlessly and enthusiastically. If you are a Christian Latina mother, these beliefs tend to be exacerbated by erroneous and domesticated interpretations of biblical womanhood put forth by male-dominated narratives[2]. Our love for our children seems to only be acceptable when it is self-consuming. The Latina mother is idealized, but women pay a high price for this veneration. There is nothing glorious about withstanding abuse and being disempowered, but marianismo[3] appears in the Latina/o culture masked as love and admiration. Marianismo is, in reality, a toxic ideology that stems from machismo and demands that mothers sacrifice their selfhood in service of patriarchal ideals. All those who deviate in any way from these prescriptive mothering norms are immediately deemed bad mothers.     

“75% of mothers with children are employed full time.”

— U.S. Department of Labor (2016)

The image of the traditional housewife whose primary and sole responsibility is to take care of the home and children while the father “brings home the bacon” seems to have been irreparably imprinted in the minds of many individuals. However, the reality is that 71% of U.S. mothers are formally employed[4] (Pew Research 2014). Sound judgement would lead one to conclude that since the majority of modern mothers do, in fact, work outside the home, gender expectations regarding tending the home have shifted. Regrettably, this is not the case. Women, particularly women of color, have long endured the “double shift,” working full-time as paid employees and spending considerably more time than men in unpaid labor in the form of childcare and housework. According to the U.S. Department of Labor (2019), men work an average of 7 hours and 54 minutes in paid work per day, while women labor a total of 7 hours and 20 minutes. The number of paid hours worked amounts to a 34-minute difference. In the household, however, women work an average of 120 minutes more than men and Latina women work more than men as compared to women of other ethnicities. These statistics reflect normal circumstances: that is, pre-COVID 19. The pandemic exacerbated these conditions, leading to what is now known as the “double double shift.”

During the coronavirus lockdown, women with full-time employment, a partner and children worked 20 hours a week more than men in domestic labor. The consequences of the unequal division of home duties are manifold and produce a domino effect that affects nearly every aspect of a woman’s life. Carrying a larger workload means less sleep, no time for a jog, or coffee with friends. Enjoying a TV show, attending a Bible study or reading daily devotionals might seem impossible. Leisure and spiritual activities promote mental wellbeing by providing a balanced life that can help reduce stress, anxiety and depression. In a poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in the midst of the pandemic, 53% of women reported feeling worried or stressed, versus 37% of men. The gender gap is even more pronounced among parents of children under the age of eighteen: 57% of mothers versus 32% of fathers reported that their mental health has deteriorated due to the pandemic.

“Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.””

— Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Moreover, increased household obligations impact women’s economic growth. The economic disadvantage that women have historically suffered has worsened since the pandemic. In September alone, approximately 865,000 women left the U.S. workforce, compared to 200,000 men (UN Women 2020). These figures are not coincidental; they reflect the heavy burden placed upon women’s shoulders who are forced to renounce paid employment in order to devote themselves to unrewarded and underappreciated unpaid care work. Women’s monumental efforts and hard work are not only undervalued, they are overtly punished. Formally employed mothers suffer monetarily in the form of reduced wages through what is known as the “motherhood penalty.” Women of color, who are disproportionately at the bottom of the pay scale, are punished the most. Conversely, fathers are rewarded with a “fatherhood bonus.” “Fatherhood is a valued characteristic of employers, signaling perhaps greater work commitment, stability and deservingness,” explains Dr. Michelle J. Budig. Professor Budig’s research shows, “That is the opposite of how parenthood by women is interpreted by employers. The conventional story is they work less and they’re more distractible when on the job.” In short, fatherhood is seen as an asset whereas motherhood is considered a liability.

“In 40% of all households with children, women are the breadwinners.”

— Pew Research Center (2013)

We analyze the statistics and they are disconcerting. We hear women’s first-hand experiences and we are disturbed. We live out these injustices in our own flesh and yet we continue to do the bidding of an oppressive system that pollutes our soul. I want to be transparent, but it pains me to write this: my most fervent accusers were not men – they were women. Machismo tactically utilizes us, women, as weapons against ourselves and each other. We become machismo’s most faithful little soldiers. We point the gun at each other and shoot relentlessly, not realizing that those bullets are ricocheting and piercing our own bodies. We surveil each other, we play the comparative game, destroy each other in hopes that machismo will honor us as la más santa – mejor que fulanita o zutanita. I, too, have internalized sexist mothering notions, not only by allowing guilt to completely consume me but also by being highly critical of other mothers. I attempted to liberate myself from the shame and guilt that suffocated me by condemning other mothers, as if obstructing their airways would help me breath. I sought liberation, not by destroying my shackles, but by placing them on someone else. This is perverse. “Being female doesn’t stop us from being sexist, we’ve had to choose early or late at 7, 14, 27, 56 to think different […] act different […] to change other women’s minds, to change our own minds, to change our feelings, ours, yours and mine […] The basis of our unity is that in the most important way we are all in the same boat, all subjected to the violent, pernicious ideas we have learned to hate, that we must all struggle against them.[5]” Sexism is the norm; it is how we are socialized. However, God did not create us to be oppressors of each other; our prosperity as God’s children is not based on how much suffering and punishment we inflict on one another. On the contrary, “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26, NRSV). We must labor daily against our own social conditioning that incites us to endorse and perpetuate sexist ideals.

In order to overcome our conditioning, we (men and women) need to become aware and be intentional. We should, for example, examine the ways in which our daily expressions unconsciously sustain sexist assumptions. Mi esposa me ayuda con los niños (My wife helps me with the kids) is a phrase that I have never heard in my life. Mi esposo me ayuda con los niños (My husband helps me with the kids) is one that I hear often. The message that we transmit is that fathers “help” mothers while mothers simply fulfill their “motherly” duties. In the church, women are overrepresented in children’s ministry and vacation bible school and underrepresented as preachers and teachers. This rigid division of labor based on gender disadvantages everyone by restricting individuals from utilizing the fullness of their spiritual gifts.

Perfect mothering does not exist and “good mothers” come in many different shapes and sizes. The same can be said about fathers. Humans have an innate desire to be socially accepted but this approval should not cost us our livelihoods. One of my father’s parenting strengths was that he himself rebelled against cultural scripts that commanded him to place his two daughters in a gendered box. He refused to “play his part” and by doing so, allowed us to flourish and taught us a valuable lesson: to question and vigorously resist toxic gender scripts. About two years ago, I was in the car with my dad on our way to our favorite restaurant and I don’t recall the full context of our conversation but I vividly remember him saying something that no one had ever said to me explicitly, “Itzel, you’re a great mom.” A tear rolled down my cheek and I believed him.

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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] The Mexican National Commission to Prevent and Eradicate Violence Against Women (Comisión Nacional para Prevenir y Erradicar la Violencia Contra las Mujeres) defines machismo as, “certain behaviors and beliefs that promote, reproduce and reinforce various forms of discrimination against women. It is constructed through the polarization of gender roles and stereotypes that [strictly] define masculinity and femininity. Its main characteristic is the degradation of the feminine; its major form of expression, violence in any of its types and forms against women” (2016).  

[2] In Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualized, Vilified and Marginalized Women of the Bible, Sandra Glahn states, “In addition to maligning some Bible women, we have marginalized others wrongly downplaying or even ignoring their contributions” (15).

[3] “In many Latin American or Hispanic cultures, an idealized traditional feminine gender role characterized by submissiveness, selflessness, chastity, hyperfemininity, and acceptance of machismo in males” (APA Dictionary of Psychology).

[4] I use “formally employed” as opposed to “working mothers” because the latter term erroneously implies that mothers who take care of the home are not, in fact, “working.”

[5] Rosario Morales, We’re All in the Same Boat (1981).

Do We Have To? Engaging Pro-Trump Family

Many black and brown people faced a familiar dilemma in 2020: To engage or not to engage; that was the question. Since so many of our friends, family, and co-workers have been “doing the work,” reading (or at least buying) the bestselling books and watching carefully curated “Representation Matters” collections, we feel we have a responsibility to engage conversations about race, politics, and justice. These conversations are always exhausting, often infuriating, and sometimes they make matters worse. 

But is it ok not to engage? Especially for Christians, isn’t the burden of hard conversations the necessary price for “gospel unity?” Sometimes, maybe. In the wake of 2020’s presidential election, a previous World Outspoken article gave an example from the gospels of why Latin@s, for example,  should engage Trump-supporting family members. But every conversation with a Trump-supporter and/or racist is not a conversation with a Zaccheus. In this article we present three gospel principles for not engaging conversations about race with those who are committed to ignorance, misunderstanding, and white supremacy.

1) Scope Out the Situation: “Who All Over There?”

As any black potential party-goer will tell you, the wrong answer to the question “who all over there?” may result in the unfortunate response: “I’ll let you know” (i.e. definitely not going). The thought of interacting with a certain person or people is enough to detract from any potential good the party might have to offer. The situation must be scoped out. The words of Jesus in Matthew 7:6 express a similar sentiment. Jesus says, “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” 

While we might hesitate at the thought of naming friends and family members dogs or pigs, the idea is this: discernment must be exercised before deciding who to give the gift of conversation, relationship, and some of the most personal aspects of our existence. Not just anyone can presume to have access to our time and energy. And we need not feel guilty about saving these precious pearls for those who know how to value them. We gotta scope out the situation before deciding whether to go.

2) Shake It Off: “Aight Imma Head Out”

Many of us—whether subconsciously or not—still feel like we’re inconveniencing people when we talk about the problems of white supremacy. In reality, we’re offering a gift, a miracle really—freedom from the burden of whiteness and an invitation to a better form of life together. When this gift is treated as a burden by those who can most benefit from it, we sometimes find ourselves begging for their attention. But Jesus has a word of advice for those with a miraculous gift to give when they are not received: shake it off and head out like the Spongebob meme.

In Luke 9:5 Jesus says, “And as for all who do not receive you, when you leave that city, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.” Those with stiff necks without ears to hear from their fellow humans about the realities of injustice and oppression do not deserve more attention; they deserve less. And those of us with a gift to give can exercise the confidence and resolve of Spongebob. There’s no reason to stay in that conversation. Shake it off and head out, fam.

3) Don’t Even Try: “Woooooooow…. ok.”

Sometimes the ignorance is appalling. It’s not even funny. You hear something like, “Hasn’t every culture had slavery? What was so different about America?” and you start looking around for hidden cameras and Ashton Kutcher. The levels of empathy, education, and attention that would be needed to have anything like a fruitful conversation are so absent that the invitation to engage almost seems patronizing. In such a circumstance, sometimes all you can say is “woooooooow…….ok.”

Jesus faced a similar situation in Mark 6:6. Faced with crowds who couldn’t believe that he was who he said he was and came to do what he said he came to do, Jesus refused to give in to their patronizing. When the passage says that Jesus “could not do any miracle,” it was not a reflection on his ability. The clue is in the next verse, “he was amazed at their unbelief.” Jesus effectively said “woooooow…….ok” and worked his miracles only among a select few. With the rest of them, he didn’t even try. It wasn’t worth his attention. And it’s not worth ours, either.

Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list of potential responses to interactions about race, politics, and justice. The earlier article gives a good example of when and how we might choose to engage. But we should know that engaging is not the only gospel response possible. Many who pretend to want to learn and grow don’t deserve our precious time and attention. And we do not always endanger gospel unity when we choose to withhold our engagement. Like Jesus taught, we might need to scope out the situation, shake it off, and sometimes, not even try.

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About Michael Yorke

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

A Word on Trump-Supporting Latinos

It should already be common knowledge. It should not need repeating. Still, the obvious truth of the “Latino community” was, for lack of a better word, discovered by many on election night. With surprise and disbelief, political analysts spent the days after the election discussing a simple truth: Latin@s are not a monolith. We already know this. It was not news to us, but what the election did reveal was the deep divisions disintegrating the Latin@ community. Some news outlets were quick to simplify this division, pointing to generational distinctions to explain who voted for Trump or Biden. Others proposed it was a difference of regionality. A few thought it could be reduced to nation-of-origin. In all cases, these simplifications are reductions of reality that prove more about the analyzing world than they do about nuestra gente.

I am not going to explain why an increased number of Latin@s voted for Trump. Political scientists and sociologists will do enough of that in their writing. My concern is for those Latin@s who are feeling betrayed by these voters. Among our supporters and friends, fellow activists, and nonprofit workers, many are angry. In the moment, many of my colleagues were tempted to fury, and some took to social media to lacerate their familia with “prophetic speech.” I understand this frustration well. For a decade now, my work in Christian Higher Ed has been in entrenched, white, evangelical spaces. Many of the Latin@s I meet along the way are actively working against the pursuit of justice, and at times, I retaliate too. There is, however, a person the Spirit keeps bringing to my attention since the election. His story is worthy of reflection because it is a story of empire, betrayal, and Christ’s response to both.

Passing through Jericho

Of the four gospel writers, Luke stressed the upside-down Kingdom of God and revealed Jesus as the liberator. Jesus came to “proclaim the Good news to the poor… to proclaim liberty to the captives… to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Lk. 4:17). Jesus subverts the religious and political establishments of Israel and Rome. Like Moses, He is a deliverer. On His way to Jerusalem to make His ultimate sacrifice, Jesus passes through a borderland city named Jericho. At the time, this border city served as a customs station, an outpost of the Roman empire. The shock of Jesus’ passage through Jericho was who Jesus visited while there.

Luke tells us that Jesus stopped for one person in Jericho, Zacchaeus. He was a rich man, the chief tax collector, a publican. Zacchaeus was responsible for the extortion of his own people. Therefore, he was hated and despised by most Israelites and barred from religious practice because of his betrayal. In fact, Jesus’ words at the end of the story suggest that the Jews considered Zacchaeus’ sin so severe, he was no longer one of them (19:9); They disowned him. Yet despite his service to Rome and his role in oppressing the Jews, Jesus called Zacchaeus down from the tree to dine with him in his home. The scandal of Jesus’ choice caused the crowds to grumble. How could Jesus welcome this man? Worst, why would Jesus choose to dine in his home?

¿Y que con el Publicano?

Many of my ministry friends think of Trump-supporting Latin@s as modern-day tax collectors. Their view is that Latin@s in power have reached their position by following the path of Zacchaeus. By aligning themselves with the empire, they are elevated from among their own, only to support a structure that oppresses their people. And indeed, some have done that. But the story of Zacchaeus is instructive for our moment. Jesus’ words to the Jewish crowd bear repeating to the angry Latin@: “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (19:10). What transformed Zacchaeus was not judgment – of which he got plenty from fellow Jews – but kindness. Jesus did not resist Zacchaeus, He welcomed him. His welcome changed this man. The minute Zacchaeus’ feet hit the ground, he reversed his injustices, paying back what he stole beyond what the Law required.

This Thanksgiving we have an opportunity to bear witness to the gospel as we (virtually) dine with Trump-supporting family. Our welcome and embrace, despite their betrayal, is an echo of Jesus’ love for Zacchaeus and His love for us. As we pray prayers of thanksgiving, pray as non-innocent tax collectors, not self-righteous Pharisees (Lk. 18:9-14). Remember what Paul asked self-righteous Jews later in Rome: “do you presume on the riches of [God’s] kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Rom. 2:4). It’s kindness, not judgment, that transforms the tax collector.

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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.

The Future of Evangelicalism is Mestizo

As an Indian adoptee raised in Northeast Wisconsin, I grew up in a world of white faces. I was caught in between two communities, benefiting from the privileges of a white family, yet often sitting alone as the only person of color in a crowded room. Surrounded by white pastors, educators, and friends, my perception and imagination of the world were inherently shaped by a white lens. By “white,” I don’t mean to speak only to ethnicity, but imagination. Whiteness, in this way, is a theological and sociological construction in which people of all ethnicities and cultures may imagine the world. In this system, goodness, success, and power, are seen in approximation to how close one may come to mirroring this white identity. 

An honest analysis of American history reveals how whiteness is deeply embedded in evangelical practice. Since the first colonists arrived on the eastern shores, the evangelical church has borne witness to a nation governed by this white imagination, yet has intentionally remained silent and complicit. Through national genocide of First Nations people, the transatlantic slave trade, the Civil War, the Reconstruction era, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and even in our current moment, this expression of evangelicalism has little to say about seeking justice and reparations for those who continue to be marginalized and oppressed in our nation. Instead, white evangelicals have embraced a faith centered around Christian nationalism. Rather than reckoning with our history, many have continued to believe the lie that America is a “beacon of light,” “a city on a hill” that will carry the Gospel into our modern world. 

As this history becomes more widely recognized, many scholars have argued it is necessary that we “follow Jesus out of evangelicalism” and into a “new Christianity.” This, of course, is one of many answers to the question frequently asked in recent years: is evangelicalism worth redeeming? 

In short, I do believe that the evangelical tradition is worth redeeming from its cultural heritage; and I believe evangelicals are already equipped with the theological tools to acknowledge and repent of our historical patterns of sin, both individual and systemic.

““God might have created the world in seven days, but it takes us many generations to create a new humanity, a new culture. It cannot be merely legislated. It has to develop gradually through the efforts of the poets, the artists, the thinkers, the culture-makers.””

— Virgilio Elizondo

However, any future for American evangelicalism requires more than a simple denouncing of whiteness. In return, it must reconstruct something new. If evangelicalism seeks to be redeemed from a history of racism and nationalism, we must ask what it is being redeemed towards? In other words, to exclusively deconstruct evangelical practice is to eliminate evangelicalism as a tradition and move on to a new Christianity. To reconstruct, on the other hand, is to critique our tradition without abandoning it. It is to both claim and reckon with our history so we may be released into new possibilities — a new reality. As Brian Bantum summarizes, “This is important because in rightly seeing the de-formation, we can also see the lines of re-formation. We can see the textures of humanity and its possibilities in Christ’s person and work.”

This reality, I am convinced, is a mestizo evangelicalism: a tradition that is centered around a theology of belonging and community. This multi-ethnic vision is not antithetical to the theological commitments of evangelicalism, but rather it is a greater living-out of our core beliefs: the truthfulness of Scripture, the central, atoning work of Jesus Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the importance of evangelism. This, I believe, can be our evangelical witness for centuries to come: that we may be known as a faith that crosses racial and ethnic lines because of our shared unity in Jesus Christ. We may be known as a faith that disrupts dehumanizing racial binaries by embracing a Galilean Christ. 

In this reconstructing project we must remember, as Virgilio Elizondo wrote decades ago, this mestizo reality does not happen overnight. “God might have created the world in seven days, but it takes us many generations to create a new humanity, a new culture. It cannot be merely legislated. It has to develop gradually through the efforts of the poets, the artists, the thinkers, the culture-makers.”

By God’s grace, this culture-shaping work was already begun by the saints who have gone before us. While white evangelicalism has centered around political dominance and cultural influence, the overlooked mestizaje of evangelicals in minority communities has been one of diligently sowing gospel seeds in the margins of society. This is the silent work of evangelicals serving in underprivileged neighborhoods, homeless shelters, prison ministries, and food pantries. It is the thousands of evangelical ministers who took up Martin Luther King’s call to march in Selma. It is the work of evangelicals who have faithfully sought to emulate the leadership and activism of those who have gone before us. It is evangelical pastors willing to condemn white supremacy and anti-blackness from the pulpit. It is the work not broadcasted on the news or written in headlines. It is the long-suffering work, the costly grace, of Christian activism.

In practice, this future looks like shared power and equity within vibrant, multi-ethnic communities.  As Dr. Eric Baretto notes, this future “puncture[s] the myth of scholarly objectivity and demonstrate[s] the persuasiveness and power of contextual theologies and readings.” In other words, hearing the Gospel preached and theology taught from a diversity of ethnic communities has the power to awaken evangelicals to a world of Christianity that extends far beyond their church buildings. This communal reading of Holy Scripture from beyond the reaches of the white imagination invites American evangelicals into the global practice of our tradition.

This vision looks like Black theologians tracing the themes of God’s liberative action alongside Latino/a theologians juxtaposing the experience of Jesus, a Galilean Jew, with “Mexican Americans living on the geographical and cultural margins of the borderlands.” It looks like reading Scripture corporately, not only in English but in Spanish, Hindi, German, Arabic, Latvian, and Greek. It is bringing our bodies, our full, ethnic self, and orienting ourselves toward one another in hope and faith. 

This is the work of moving from blindness to sight; from darkness to the full spectrum of color. It is in this moment that the world takes on a new form, words take on new meanings, and one’s perception of the world is seen in proximity to the greatness of the world around them.  

In America today, the events of 2020 have opened the eyes of many evangelicals. The dirty mud of whiteness has been wiped from their eyes and they are moving from blindness to sight. White evangelicals are listening to a theology that speaks to the terror Black Americans, Asians, and Latin@s continue to face in our nation. They are entering into something greater, a global tradition of evangelicalism that has stood for centuries. They are reimagining Christianity by reading God’s inspired word alongside their neighbors. Just a taste of this community leaves many craving more.

I have hope for my tradition because this work is faithfully being done. Across our nations, evangelicals at the grassroots are speaking up in their churches, their communities, and their institutions. As we protest, raise our voices with charity and grace, and love our neighbors as ourselves, may the tide of evangelicalism slowly turn away from whiteness and into the mestizo, Christ-centered tradition we have been called to. 

Amar D. Peterman is a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary, focusing his studies on American religious history. He is a featured writer at Ideos and his work is published in Sojourners, The Christian Century, Faithfully Magazine, Fathom, and more. Amar holds a B.A. in Theology from Moody Bible Institute. You can follow his work on his website or on Twitter: @amarpeterman

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Reconstruct

“As a Latino growing up as the son of an undocumented pastor in the Midwest, my experience was much different from those who surrounded me. I wanted to believe in what my family and church taught me as truth but I slowly drifted away from my beliefs as a result of the testimony I received from the Anglo church and their members. Even to this day those same Protestants refer to us as ‘wetbacks, beaners, and spics.’ I find myself conflicted with my identity.”

I received this note from a student last year and it broke my heart. I, and so many others, can identify with this identity conflict in the current historic moment where racism and white nationalism have been so blatantly wedded to the church in the United States. It’s a painful place to be, and this conflict of identity has launched millions of us on a journey of spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction.  In my observation, social media and the metaphorical bookshelves are filled with ideas—good and bad—about how to deconstruct. Almost nothing exists, however, to help us reconstruct in a healthy way.  If I may be so bold, I’d like to propose five thoughts which have helped me in my journey of Christian reconstruction over the past two decades.  

Lament

My wife Erica poignantly defines lament as “honesty in suffering.” In the path towards healthy reconstruction, the first step is to be completely honest with God. Talk with God and with friends. Let it all out. Journal. Scream if you have to. God can handle it. Don’t hold anything back. Your reasoning doesn’t have to be perfect, and your theology doesn’t have to be all figured out. Jesus understands. The Psalms are a great model, and in fact 40% of the Psalms are reflections of lament. Psalm 22 is probably the most famous: 

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
    Why are you so far from saving me,
    so far from my cries of anguish?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
    by night, but I find no rest. 
Psalm 22: 1-2 ”

Healthy Models

As the writer of Ecclesiastes declared, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). In this difficult moment, it’s easy to feel alone and to think that we are struggling by ourselves. If we dig a little deeper, however, we’ll find that we’re not alone because the Brown Church has been deconstructing and reconstructing faith in the face of racial injustice for five hundred years. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Bartolomé De Las Casas, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Justo Gonzalez, Orlando Costas, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Alexia Salvatierra, René Padilla, and Samuel Escobar are just a few examples of those who have walked this journey before us, and whose lives and writings we can study to find healthy models of reconstruction. 

The Bible vs. “la ropa anglo-sajon”

As part of the deconstruction process, the Brown Church has always had to distinguish between what the Bible actually says and racist colonial interpretations.  Power will always try to justify itself through theology and civil religion. Every single time throughout the centuries, Brown theologians have risen up to say:  “No. The Bible does not teach that. You’re just trying to justify your greed.  You are in violation of 2,000 verses of Scripture which speak about God’s heart of love and compassion towards immigrants, the poor, and all who are marginalized.” 

“Radical evangélicos” René Padilla and Samuel Escobar put it this way: We need to learn to tell the difference between what the Bible actually teaches and the “ropa anglo-sajon,” or Anglo-Saxon cultural clothing of the gospel which has been exported to Latin America and the U.S. Latino church.[1]  And how do we know the difference? That’s why we need to know the Bible better than anyone.  

As a professor of ethnic studies at UCLA for fifteen years and a community organizer, I want to offer a warning from the other side as well. There are great things to learn from ethnic studies and secular activism, but we need biblical discernment to sift the helpful from what could be ultimately damaging.  To simply replace “la ropa anglo-sajon” with secular activist principles leads us down another path which is not the kingdom, or “kin-dom” of God. 

Reconstructing Jesús of Galilee and a Holistic Gospel 

As part of its healing process, the Brown Church has also had to decolonize its Christology and reconstruct a full-bodied, holistic gospel. As Latino theologians such as Virgilio Elizondo and Orlando Costas have taught us, Jesus was a “Galilean.” Galilee was far from the center of religious, political, and economic power in Jerusalem. Galileans like Jesus were poor, bilingual, and spoke with an accent. They were oppressed by Roman colonizers, as well as by the elites of their own people.  They were shunned as cultural “mixed breeds” or “mestizos,” and their cultural and religious purity was often called into question. Galilee was the “hood” or “barrio” of Jesus’ day, and our Lord was a Galilean. To put it another way, Jesus was “Brown.” 

As a marginalized Galilean himself, Jesus understands the suffering of our Latina/o community in this present moment. And the “good news” is that he came as Lord and Savior to make us and the whole world new. Nothing and no one is left out. Jesus transforms us as individuals to be more and more like him, and then he sends us out as agents of transformation of all the brokenness and injustice of our world. René Padilla and Samuel Escobar call this misión integral: “the mission of the whole church to the whole of humanity in all its forms, personal, communal, social, economic, ecological, and political.”[2] 

Spiritual Practices 

In my experience, personal transformation in Christ and healing of colonial wounds[3], come through specific practices. For me, the big ones have been Scripture reading, therapy, spiritual direction, and intergenerational community. 

It may sound simple and old school, but for me, reading through the Bible once a year is the central spiritual practice which sustains me. I’m on my 19th time, and the more I read, the more I find healing and hope. And also, the more I find that I have so much to learn. As Dr. Elizabeth Conde-Frazier tells us, it is within the Bible where we find hope and wisdom for the daily realities and hardships of life, and in the Scriptures where we encounter the living God who brings liberation.[4] 

Therapy and counseling have also been critical for me. I bear the scars and open wounds of machismo deep within my soul, and have gone to counseling for two decades in order to better understand myself and break free from destructive emotional patterns. 

Spiritual direction is another key practice which has helped me to reconstruct my faith and heal from racism in the church.  According to David Hoover: “The task of the Spiritual Director is to honor the questions that have no right to go away.” As Erica has shown me, “God is always present, loving and working in our lives, but sometimes it’s difficult to listen by ourselves. A spiritual director, or companion, helps us to notice and connect with the Real Director, who is God.” 

Finally, it is common in activist circles today to hear it said that we should seek the wisdom of the ancestors. I could not agree more. And as Latina/o Christians, we have so much to learn from the 500-year justice tradition of the Brown Church. This tradition of our ancestors represents a treasure trove of God-given community cultural wealth which is invaluable for our reconstruction process. But this community cultural wealth is not found just in books. By God’s design it is also deposited in the intergenerational community of the local and global church: 

“When we refer to the Church, we should define the word a little. We mean the whole Church, the Church as an ecumenical body spread around the world, and not just its particular form in a parish in a local community…That Church is one form of the Presence of God on earth, and so naturally it is powerful. It is a powerful moral and spiritual force which cannot be ignored by any movement.” César Chávez. [5]

ABOUT DR. ROBERT CHAO ROMERO

Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero is "Asian-Latino," and has been a professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA since 2005.  He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Latin American History and his Juris Doctor from U.C. Berkeley.  Romero is award winning writer, publishing 15 academic books and articles on issues of race, immigration, history, education, and religion.  

In addition to being an attorney and professor, Robert is an ordained pastor.  Together with his wife Erica, he is the co-founder of Jesus 4 Revolutionaries, a Christian ministry to activists, as well as board member of the Matthew 25 Movement in Southern California.

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Author’s Note: For more resources on lament visit Soul Care with Erica.

[1] Ruth Irene Padilla DeBorst, “Integral Mission Formation in Abya Yala (Latin America): A Study of the Centro de Estudios Teológicos Interdisciplinarios (1982-2002) and Radical Evangélicos” (PhD diss., Boston University, 2016), 45; Robert Chao Romero, Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020), 156.

[2] Tetsunao Yamamori and C. René Padilla, eds., The Local Church, Agent of Transformation: An Ecclesiology for Integral Mission (Buenos Aires: Kairos Ediciones, 2004), 9.

[3] Oscar García-Johnson, Spirit Outside the Gate: Decolonial Pneumatologies of the American Global South (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 3-4. 

[4]  Loida I. Martell-Otero, Zaida Maldonado-Pérez, and Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Latina Evangélicas: A Theological Survey from the Margins (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 35,36.

[5] Romero, Brown Church, 137.

Double Punishment: Immigration and Anti-Blackness

How can I adequately attempt to address the complexities of the Afro-Latino/a experience in a society where we’re considered a threat by the mere virtue of having rich, melanated skin? An experience only amplified by the plight of the Afro-descendant, Spanish-speaking immigrant here in the United States.

Afro-Latinos/as are not a monolith, so our stories are varied and complex—from South America to the Caribbean to the U.S. and worldwide. But one thing we share is our rich African ancestry.

Our Rich Diasporic Roots

My family is from Colombia. Somos Afro-Colombianos. My dad is from Buenaventura, and my mom is from Cali. They are scholars, pastors, educators, and so much more. They have ministered in Colombia and other parts of the world for over 30 years. My parents, along with the rest of my extended family, immersed me in the beautiful world of my rich diasporic roots as an Afro-Latino in Colombia.

My family would have gatherings in our neighborhood in Colombia called “Sancochados,” which were parties with food, dancing, and conversation. But the most important part was el sancocho on full display in the middle of the street inside a huge cooking pot. El sancocho is a soup inspired by rich West African roots mixed with indigenous flavor. It’s a reminder of who we are and where we came from.

During the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, enslaved African women in Colombia were forced to cook only the best meals for their slave masters while they were left with scrapes and crumbs. What the slave masters didn’t realize was that these African women were taking the “scraps” to make the most delicious and nutritious meal for themselves and their families.

Sancocho was a reminder for these kidnapped, trafficked, and dehumanized African women that they weren’t slaves by identity but enslaved by circumstance. They were Black queens and kings, no matter what their masters said. And so, my family and I feast today.

Our Woundedness

That tradition shaped my identity as a young Black boy born in the United States but raised in part in Colombia, dealing with English as my second language and a dual identity. Growing up, my dad would share the complexities of the lived experiences of Afro-Colombianos in Colombia and even here stateside.

In Colombia, for example, our first black president was erased from history books for years because of the color of his skin. And my father can tell many more personal stories of racial injustice he and his family experienced in Colombia. By the time my family moved to the U.S. from Colombia, it was clear to us the disdain for los negros (and the resulting internalized self-hatred of Black people) wasn’t just an issue in Colombia pero tambien aquí en los Estados Unidos.

Internalized pain is part and parcel of the Afro-descendant community. More specifically, woundedness is a part of Afro-Latindad—a designation not merely for a racialized category or an insufficient pan-ethnic term, but an experience marred by a turbulent, misrepresented past and a difficult path forward.

Our Identity Crisis

Growing up, I had an identity crisis. Here stateside, we’re trained to homogenize communities and strip individuals of their rich and varied ancestral cultural identity. So I was not “Black” enough to be Black, even though I’m dark-skinned. I wasn’t embraced by the African American community because that’s not the culture I grew up in. But I also wasn’t “Latino” enough to be Latino, even though I’m Colombian. I didn’t look like white and light-brown actors on Telemundo. Somehow, being Black and Latino became mutually exclusive. I couldn’t be both. So who—or what—was I?

The fact that Afro-Latinos/as don’t fit into a Westernized construct of what it means to be “Black” doesn't mean that we’re not Black. And the fact that Afro-Latinos/as don’t fit into a Westernized construct of “Latinidad” doesn’t mean we’re not Latino/a. Race—a human-made social construct—is a system that assigns degrees of social capital and value based on proximity to whiteness. In this system, skin color is the main and most determining feature. This created a social reality in which there is a proportional correlation between the amount of melanin in your skin and the number and nature of disparities you face in this world.

I cannot tell you how many times I've been discriminated against by fellow Colombians or people from Latinoamérica due to the color of my skin. Growing up in Latin American culture, I've been called “negro feo” (ugly Black boy), “mico” (monkey), “sucio” (dirty), etc. That sort of verbal abuse is soul-wounding and disruptive.

In some of those difficult moments, my mother’s sweet words were a balm to my soul. She would hold me while tears ran down my black cheeks. She would tell me, “Ser negro es hermoso. No te olvides, mijo.” (“To be black is beautiful. Don’t forget that, my son”).

Immigration & Anti-Blackness

Black immigrants suffer a “double punishment” because they are immigrants in a xenophobic culture, and they are Black in a white supremacist society. In the United States, Black undocumented immigrants are detained and deported at higher rates than other racial groups. But their stories are largely left out of the bigger narrative around immigration.

It is no secret to my Afro-Latino family that this country’s immigration system is unjust and biased against immigrants of African descent. For years, my parents, sisters, and extended family dealt with debasing comments and treatment by immigration officials, as well as predatory and neglectful immigration lawyers.

But this current administration—and its president—has been the single greatest threat to my family since we immigrated here from Colombia. The rhetoric used by this administration to vilify Brown and Black immigrants has only empowered ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and immigration policy makers to remove immigrants from this country in some of the most dehumanizing ways.

Unfortunately, my family and I have personally experienced this. Just last year, our world was turned upside down when my tío and tía were unjustly deported after following the laws of the land for nearly 20 years. Their deportation had traumatic emotional, financial, organizational, and relational ramifications for our family over the last year. Their journey has only reminded us how corrupt and racist our immigration system is.

Our Anti-Black Histories

Anti-Blackness is a global issue, and it is prevalent in Latin America. During the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the 1500s–1800s, over 11 million Africans disembarked from slave ships. Of those 11 million Africans who survived that brutal, inhumane transport, only 450,000 came to the United States. That means only 5% African slaves came here stateside. Five percent.

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, to learn that anti-Black immigration policies aren’t unique to the United States. In Brazil, for example, immigration policies were put into place after 1850 in order to receive over five million European immigrants from 1872 to 1975. Why? They wanted to “whiten” the country.

Hate was not the only culprit that led to the dehumanization of the African Diaspora. It was self-interest motivated by economic gain that justified the thought that we were not human. Here in the United States, trafficked Africans were enslaved and forbidden to speak their native tongue. By the unmerciful hand of a master’s guile, these African immigrants were stripped of their God-given dignity by these slave masters who perverted God’s Word.

Anti-Blackness Today

Today’s racist ideologies, policies, and institutions perpetuate the anti-Blackness of yesterday. Afro-Latinos/as are often stifled in our societal advancement and human flourishing. Centuries of micro-aggressions are perpetuated by fear of afrodescendientes and corrupt systemic structures that further diminish God’s image-bearers (Gen. 1:26–27).

K.A. Ellis once said, “Satan is uncreative in how he deploys destructive and dehumanizing ideologies, but he’s particularly good at repackaging oppression. Looking through history, we see his tactics repeat.”

Oppression is repackaged. Acquiring knowledge about the pervasive air of anti-Blackness in our society is easy. What’s difficult is to know how we can be active and complicit in anti-Blackness and oppression against Afro-Latinos/as.

A Way Forward

Afro-Latino/as are a growing population. According to the Pew Research Center, almost a quarter of all U.S. Hispanics identified as Afro-Latinos (Afro-Caribbean or of African descent) in 2016. Within our families and communities, we need spaces where we can heal and have meaningful conversations of what it means to be Afro-Latino/a.

We need to learn and celebrate the richness of our African heritage expressed in various forms. Cumbia, for example, is a traditional Colombian dance created by enslaved Africans who worked mines. The small foot movements of the dance mimic the only movements their feet were allowed while bound by chains.

Music from Grupo Niche, ChocQuibTown, and others also proudly represent the flavor of Afro-Latinidad. Colombian star Shakira recently paid respect to Afro-Colombians during her Super Bowl performance by dancing Champeta & Mapalé—dances created by enslaved Africans in Colombia.

These kinds of positive representations are a better way forward than media and entertainment that only portrays Afro-Latinos/as as hyper-sexualized villains, criminals, and brujas (witches).

Who Are We?

Soy Afro-Colombiano. I am a product of the Afro-Latino/a Diaspora. The blood and resilience of my West African ancestry runs deep inside this beautiful, sun-kissed skin.

Somos Afro-Latino/as. We’re the African diamond exported from its homeland and extorted in foreign places. Far from home, our perceived value has depreciated by virtue of white supremacy. But it is not lost. Its true worth was never truly lost or depreciated because it’s God given.

Who are we? We’re like the sugar in coffee. You can’t see us—our value is hidden and largely untold—but best believe, we bring the flavor.

About Jon Aragón

Jon Aragón is an Afro-Colombiano entrepreneur, advocate, and multidisciplinary designer. He serves on the teaching and preaching team at Living Faith Bible Fellowship where he also leads the small group ministry. A proud son of Colombian immigrants, Jon has a heart for the unique beauty and challenges of immigrants and Afro-Latino/a people. He’s worked with World Relief, advocating for DACA recipients and other immigration issues on Capitol Hill. He currently works with the Chasing Justice team and is the founder of Jon Doulos. He’s also the creative director and co-owner of Native Supply. Jon resides in Tampa, FL with his wife, Quina, and their daughter.

Photo by Savannah Lauren

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The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of World Outspoken.

Between Plainfield and Barrio Three: Theological Reflections on Home and Belonging

This article was first published in Issue #69 of Inheritance magazine, and can be read at here.

I spent my childhood and teenage years in a small suburban village just on the boundary of the Chicagoland area, Plainfield. Memories from that time flow with a thick, childlike belonging, a sense that this place — its people, cornfields, dilapidated business strips, skateparks, prairies, and forests — was my home, a space where I was loved, a space that I loved. This isn’t to say that I lived shielded from the ill-shaping forces that decimate this world. I am an immigrant’s son, aware of my family’s fragile and strange presence in a place of mostly white families. Still, this awareness comes with the fact that I discovered those wonderful parts of life like joy, laughter, friendship, and community in the only place I ever knew.

My parents were deeply Pentecostal, so I learned to think of home through vibrant religious language, the biblical stories of the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament. Plainfield was home for me, not simply because of my attachment to this particular place, but because of the feeling of a quiet and personal presence sustaining this attachment: a suggestive whisper witnessing to the reality that God loved me, loved my family, loved my neighbors, and loved the world we inhabited. Even still, I always had a nagging sense that my father struggled to belong, struggled to make this outskirt village his home, as much as it was mine. ‍

Memory of Fracture

My father is from Barrio Three, South Cotabato, the Philippines.[1] When I was a child, he’d tell me stories of this island he was from, always with an erupting pride. In one story, he recalled an early morning responsibility he had to feed his family’s water buffalo. He was supposed to feed it a tiny proportion of the already eaten grass but had accidentally fallen asleep to the gentle heat of dawn and the slow graze of the animal. He spoke to me of the clear and pristine water that swayed between the islands and of the blooming and blossoming density of foliage that clothed Mindanao’s mountains. As I reflect on it now, I sense he felt rooted. He managed to feel at home in Barrio Three, at home enough to rest on top of a grazing animal.

Still, this sense of home does not take away from the tremendous difficulties that accompanied my father’s childhood. His parents — my grandparents — ranked among the lowest classes of Filipino society. Their house was pieced together by scraps of cardboard, sheets of metal, and plastic, built on land they did not own. In size, their house was probably equivalent to today’s suburban one-port garage. They had learned to keep anything nice in plastic bags because a rainstorm would soak their little house thoroughly. In tears, my grandma would send my dad off to school with tattered clothes, muddied flip flops, and a measly handful of rice for lunch.

This poverty was caused by the colonial history my father was born into. In the late 1500s, the Philippines was conquered and colonized by the Spanish empire. For a short period in the late 1800s, Filipino revolutionaries managed to overthrow this colonial regime. But after a few years of independence, the United States sent an army over and waged war until they gained control of the islands. From then until 1946, the Philippines was an official colony of the United States.[2]

“This U.S.-centered education engrained within many Filipinos the idea that what was good, true, and beautiful was possessed only by those who declared themselves to be white. If Filipinos were to gain any sort of status in the eyes of their colonizers, they’d have to adopt and mimic their ways of life — everything from the language they spoke, the food they ate, and the extent to which they could lighten their skin.”

The most sickening consequence of colonization was the establishment of a society organized around white supremacy. One of the ways the United States did this was through the development of an education program known as the “Pensionado program”. Through this education program, the U.S. sent Filipinos to colleges and universities in the United States, and then sent them back to the Philippines as teachers to aid in the transformation of Filipino society around U.S. cultural values. This vision was rooted in the desire to make Filipinos “educated and civilized”, according to the then-U.S. President William McKinley. This U.S.-centered education engrained within many Filipinos the idea that what was good, true, and beautiful was possessed only by those who declared themselves to be white. If Filipinos were to gain any sort of status in the eyes of their colonizers, they’d have to adopt and mimic their ways of life — everything from the language they spoke, the food they ate, and the extent to which they could lighten their skin.

This colonial legacy affected my father. The first time he went to school was the first time he encountered someone with much lighter skin. He was bedazzled by the fairness of this light-skinned person. In his memory, he recalls them being clean, kept up, and having nice clothes. The tragedy is borne out of the comparison he begins to make after seeing them. His skin is dark, deeply dark because of his work out in the tropic sun, and he recalled it as being scorched and dirt-crusted, signifying everything that fair skin is not: poverty and inferiority.

This inferiority became a driving force for his immigration to the United States. After working some time as a merchant marine, he decided to move to Chicago to prove that he could become everything the color of his skin seemed to deny. And for some time, it appeared to work. He started a family, managed a successful business, sent his children to good universities, and semi-retired at the age of 50 to focus on humanitarian work.

But this kind of success did not exist without a slow wounding alienation. He worked 20-hour shifts, was diagnosed with a blood disease due to high levels of stress, strained his marriage, attempted multiple failed business ventures, and slowly grew distant from his sons and family. In it all, I’m sure he was ever reminded of this infinite chasm that separated his instability from the stability of those white families that surrounded us. In the shadow of this alienation, I could sense the looming belief of inferiority become more real to him. In his eyes, the stability of white families, the size of their houses, and the ease with which they appeared to navigate Plainfield only magnified the instability of our family, the struggle to pay for our house, and his failing business ventures. The tragedy of comparison was back, and this drove him to work with greater intensity. During this time, he started taking trips back to the Philippines for longer periods. First, one month; then two months; then four. I saw him less, talked to him less, and his presence slowly faded to absence as he delved deeper into his attempt to become what he saw in those successful white individuals.

Eventually, my father returned to the Philippines because he decided he couldn’t live here. When he left, he told me that he felt he could either be Filipino or human, and that in the United States, the former was incompatible with the latter. That is what colonialism and white supremacy do. They crush the possibility of belonging either through poverty or shame, which forces you to leave a place you once learned to rest in; they teach that only white people belong in certain places and have the authority to make a place like Plainfield home. Such alienation can plunge a person so deeply into a pool of confusion, anxiety, and crippling pain that one wants out in any way possible; we don’t realize how these forces can strangle the souls of those caught in them.[3]

Belonging Amidst Fracture

My father’s alienation must be close to what the exiled Israelites must have felt so far from Jerusalem. Like the Israelites, my dad’s sense of belonging was fractured by forces and powers he could not control, and he found himself searching for life within the swirl of this violence. The Israelites were forced into such a position as the Babylonian empire invaded their land, pillaged villages, and decimated Jerusalem and the temple, the dwelling place of God. The survivors were then sent into a foreign land, and this exilic state is all the more extraordinary that even in Babylon, they continued to affirm the idea that their creaturely existence on earth meant that God had not abandoned them.

Scholars believe that the Old Testament was collected in today’s form during this traumatic period of Israelite destruction.[4] In the ashes of a destroyed temple, away from the promised land, Jewish readers gathered around to listen to prayers: “O come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!” Despite the shadow of their devastation, they pray on: “For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hands are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed.” In their view, there is no relationship to creation that is not mediated by God. All of creation lives in the palms of God. And if God is the liberating God whose divine will is for Israel’s flourishing, exile cannot undo this fact. So long as they were creatures in creation, they exhaled God’s promise with every breath they took, signifying a freedom that at any point could dawn. This was both a comfort and a call: If it were true that their bodies signaled liberation, then they had the responsibility to witness in their actions to this liberating end.

The New Testament heightens and expands this liberating promise. The gospels, for example, declare Jesus to be God-in-flesh and liberator of the world. But Jesus wasn’t just any god, nor was his message of liberation quite what Israel expected. He threatened the religious establishment, denounced the corruption of the temple, and proclaimed a new kingdom oriented around love for those who were oppressed.[5] His message entailed a promise of freedom and flourishing to those who found themselves to be outcasts of societies — Gentiles, the sick, the dying, the poor — everyone who the Jewish elites and the Roman Empire ostracized from community. In other words, Jesus formed a community of the alienated and lowly, oriented around his message that the kingdom was near. He opened up a space that centered love of neighbor and justice as essential actions.[6]

A High Responsibility

In truth, my dad’s story is just one among many. Though existence exhales the promise of liberation, this breath is often brutally cut short by colonialism and white supremacy’s annihilation of life. This can be seen in high rates of infection and death among Black and Latinx communities and by the ongoing racialized police violence, highlighted in the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the shooting of Jacob Blake. That Kyle Rittenhouse could kill two people protesting in solidarity with Blake only stresses the extent to which white supremacy ensnares us all. We remain trapped in the myth that this land only belongs to those who are white.

But this land is also God’s pasture, a space opened up to be a place of belonging for the exiled and alienated, for racialized minority communities, for my father, and for myself. Christians, then, are here imbued with a high responsibility: We must — whether in protest, policymaking, writing, community organizing, teaching, or pastoring — bear witness against white supremacy and colonialism to God’s liberation, to Jesus’s kingdom of the alienated, and make a space for all to belong. If colonialism and white supremacy are witnesses trying to proclaim my father’s inferiority, then scripture is an equally powerful counter-witness. No matter where I or my father choose to claim as home, I pray that we might bear witness to the reality of belonging, and trust that quiet but liberating whisper of love.

About Colton Bernasol 

Colton is from Plainfield Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He is a graduate from Wheaton College with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Biblical and Theological studies. Currently, he is a student at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary where he is pursuing a Masters in Theological Studies with a concentration in Theology and Ethics. He is interested in questions at the intersection of theology, race, and colonialism. Read more at his website. 

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[1] See Godofredo Bernasol, Jr. “Fresh Milk is Like Heaven: A Walk with God and a Life of Missions”. Stories from my dad are drawn from my memory and his memoir. I admit that I have a complex relationship with this book. On the one hand, it was written 11 years ago, when his business was successful, and he believed that he fulfilled both God’s will and the American Dream. They were equated in his mind. On the other hand, this book highlights the struggle of a Filipino immigrant in the United States. It’s a treasure of stories told from the perspective of someone I not only love, but also someone searching for meaning in an immensely beautiful, painful, and complex life. 

[2] For a short and accessible survey of American colonization of the Philippines, see Erika Lee, “The Making of Asian America: A History”. See also Anthony Christian Ocampo, “The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race”. 

[3] See Willie James Jennings, “The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race”. This book has been immensely helpful in thinking about the relationship between colonialism and white supremacy and how these forces have alienated us from place.

[4] See Jacob L. Wright, “The Commemoration of Defeat and the Formation of a Nation in the Hebrew Bible”.

[5] For classic accounts of God’s desire to liberate creation, see Gustavo Gutiérrez, Caridad Inda, and John Eagleson,“A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation". See also James H. Cone, “God of the Oppressed".

[6] For a reading of how Jesus creates a new community of belonging, see Willie James Jennings, “The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race” and his commentary “Acts”.

Are Black Bodies Cursed? Dominican Racial Identity and the Life of Oscar Wao

“The family claims the first sign was that Abelard’s third and final daughter… was born black. And not just any kind of black. But black black – kongoblack, shangoblack, kaliblack, zapoteblack, rekhablack – and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact. That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen.””

— Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 248

During the early stages of this project on Afro-Latin@s, I had a conversation with my cousin about Dominican racial identity. My cousin worked at a bank and often perplexed Dominican clients when she asked them to mark their race. “Dominican,” they’d respond. “No, your race.” The confused client would look at the list in front of them for a moment, read past the more common designations: White… Black, and self-identify as “Indio.” Not Black. Not White. Indio.

I recently had a similar conflict filling out the U.S. Census for me and my son. After looking over the list for far too long, I circled “other” and wrote “Hispanic/Dominican.” Dominican, and especially Dominican-American racialization is a complex subject mixed with a variety of understandings and histories.[i] Ginetta E.B. Candelario notes that “for much of Dominican history, the national body has been defined as not-black, even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. In the place of blackness, officially identity discourses and displays have held that Dominicans are racially Indian and culturally Hispanic.”[ii]

To many observers, this racial identification is a denial of what is visually undeniable (“Dominicans are Black”) and proves that Dominican histories, social hierarchies, and political policies have and continue to contribute to Dominican anti-Black sentiment - see Haitian immigration and citizenship in the Dominican Republic. Historians, sociologists and ethnographers have substantiated this claim to one degree or another. Literature also provides a unique lens to examine Dominican racial identity and its role in establishing anti-negritud (anti-Blackness) in our people. This article will consider the topic in conversation with the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscao Wao by Dominican-American author, Junot Díaz.[1]

The novel tells the story of Oscar de León, an overweight Dominican nerd living in Patterson, New Jersey. The novel goes to great lengths to explain that Oscar was not a “normal Dominican.” And yet his story unfolds within the landscape of the Dominican experience. Though he is the protagonist of the story, his story is told alongside the stories of his sister Lola, his mother Beli, and his abuelo Abelard Luis Cabral. Our characters are set in New Jersey, then in Dominican Republic and back again. And because this is a Dominican story, Rafael Trujillo and el Trujillato (The Era of Trujillo) shape the lives of our primary characters. But this isn’t typical historical fiction. This story is a Fukú story.

The Fukú: A Curse on Black Bodies

The narrator of the story is Yunior, a “proto-typical” Dominican who ends up dating Lola and rooming with Oscar in college. Yunior provides commentary throughout the story. In the first chapter he explains the prevailing belief in Fukú in Dominican culture. “Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú – generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.”[iii] The Curse came from Africa, but to Dominicans, Rafael Trujillo is its high priest. Yunior helpfully notes, “It was believed, even in educated circles, that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond.”[iv] So this is a story about a family that crossed Trujillo so badly, they had incurred a Fukú for at least three generations. Given our limited space, our focus will be on the curse itself rather than Abelard’s offense against Trujillo.

Throughout the novel, two realities are linked together. Our primary characters have black skin, and the unfolding of their lives suggests that a generational curse has in fact been placed over their lives. With the exception of Abelard and La Inca, attention is given to each of our primary characters’ black complexion. In school, Beli’s black complexion is noted by a classmate. “You black, [a classmate said], fingering Beli’s thin forearm. Black-black.”[v] Lola observes that she has her mother’s complexion which means “[she] is dark.” In D.R., a boyfriend calls her “his morena.” Oscar too is notably of dark complexion. His afro, along with his other “non-Dominican traits” confuse those around him and they question whether he actually is Dominican or not. Alone, these descriptions might seem insignificant: evidence of family resemblance. But they serve a more significant role in the novel and its examination of Dominican racial identity.

To family members, Beli’s dark complexion was evidence that the family had been cursed. Shortly after her birth, her mother stepped in front of a moving truck and her two sisters each died under unusual circumstances. Beli was left an orphan. “She was so dark [that] no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her… and no one outside the family wanted the darkchild to live.”[vi] Beli was eventually sold to strangers to work as a servant girl. She’s eventually rescued by La Inca, a cousin of her father who discovers that the girl is alive and being kept in a chicken coop after she is burned by hot oil for “skipping out on work to attend classes.”[vii]

A few years later, Beli falls for Dionisio who is married to none other than Trujillo’s sister. When la hermana Trujillo discovers the affair, she has Beli taken out to a sugar cane field where she is nearly beaten to death. Yunior reports that “they beat her like she was a slave. Like she was a dog.”[viii] While laying there she slides into a deep lonliness “[where] she would dwell forever, alone, black, fea.”

These descriptions are not accidental. The author intends for us to recall the slaves who worked the sugar cane fields during early Spanish Colonialism. During the Spanish conflicts with France and England, the economy of the Island of Hispanola collapsed. Eventually many Spanish Whites left the island. In their place descendants of White men and Indigenous and African women “ascended the social ladder.” Together with freed Blacks they became the “blancos de la tierra.” The term black “came to be used in Santo Domingo only in reference to those who were still enslaved.” Beli and later Oscar, in his final moments, become stand-ins for the the histories of Blacks who received violence in Sugar Cane fields on this island.[ix]  

The lives of these primary characters seem to confirm a sinister truth: our Black protagonists were under the fukú; they were cursed. It isn’t always clear whether their Blackness was the Curse itself or the evidence of their being cursed, but the problem remained. They were Black, and black bodies in the Dominican Republic have often been subjected to marginalization, violence, and trauma.

The novel also demonstrates another side of the Dominican racial imaginary: the identification as non-Black and more importantly non-Haitian. Throughout the novel, to be Haitian is viewed as an insult. When Oscar returns from his first trip to Santo Domingo, his uncle greets him, “Great… now you look Haitian.” Later, on his return trip to the Island, Oscar notices a group of peddlers on the street. “So dark,” he noticed, and his mother said, dismissively, “Maldito haitianos.”[x] On that same trip, Lola and Beli have an interesting exchange at a restaurant. The waiters look at their group strangely, Lola teases her mother and says “Watch out Mom… they probably think you’re Haitian.” In response her mother retorts, “La única haitiana aquí eres tú, mi amor.”[xi] Anti-Haitian rhetoric was a strategy implemented throughout Dominican Republic’s history, especially during Trujillo’s reign. Haitians were Black, not so Dominicans.

Fukú vs Zafa

Yunior began the story by framing it as a fukú story. But at the end of the first chapter he introduces a second folk word: the zafa, or the counter spell. The novel, as a whole, is tragic. Upon first reading, one is left with the impression that the fukú will remain over this family for generations to come. But when Lola’s daughter is introduced in the final pages of the novel, Yunior hints at the possibility of a more powerful magic: a zafa of sorts. Lola’s daughter is dark like her mother, uncle and grandmother before her. But on her neck she wears three pendants: “the one that Oscar wore as a baby, the one that Lola wore as a baby, and the one that Beli was given by La Inca… powerful elder magic.” Yunior is not completely convinced it will work. He imagines eventually she will hear the word fukú. Maybe then, he imagines, she will come to see him and he will bring out old photographs and papers. Yunior doesn’t name it, but I suspect behind this little dream of his, is the counter spell itself. In those photographs and the pendants is connection and memory.

Together the opening and close of the novel suggests a way out from under the Curse of the New World. The Curse isn’t Blackness. It is the racialization that we’ve experienced and participated in throughout our histories. The Curse is the trauma and the silence of a people who experienced violence and marginalization under Trujillo and then again in the Diaspora. The Curse finds expression in our loss of memory and our erasure of all of our history, especially our African history.

Junot Díaz has often noted that his life and writings have been shaped in large part by silence caused by trauma.[xii] Throughout the novel, his characters are also made silent. Beli never says a word about her childhood trauma. She never tells her children about Dionisio, nor about the night she was almost beaten to death. Oscar doesn’t get the chance to finish his own story. His last correspondence to Yunior and Lola are lost. So what is the counter spell? The counter spell is connection and memory. Yunior is right when he suspects that the book is his own sort of counterspell. The act of storytelling, when it is honest and embracing of the good and the bad parts, can become our counterspell.

Our racial histories are complex. How can they not be when we are the fruit of the “new world?” How can they not be when we are the heirs of Trujillos’s Santo Domingo? How can they not be when we are the Diaspora, seeds planted in United States and all over the rest of the world? We cannot deny our afrodescendencia. Nor can we deny our own complicity in anti-negritud. So we must speak the counter curse. We must break the silence of our past traumas and our own acts of violence and tell our full history.

About Kerwin A. Rodriguez

Kerwin A. Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Pastoral Studies at Moody Bible Institute. He teaches in the areas of preaching, cultural dynamics, spiritual formation, and Bible interpretation. He is currently a PhD in Preaching student at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary. His doctoral research will be on Caribbean Latin@ preaching with a particular focus on the Dominican Republic. Kerwin and his wife, Meredith live in the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago with their son Ezra Joél, where they serve in their local church, Good News Bible Church.

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Footnotes

[1] Note: It should be acknowledge that in May 2018 Junot Díaz was accused of sexual misconduct and verbal abuse by multiple women. In a statement made to the New York Times, Díaz stated, “I take responsibility for my past.” He later amended his statement and told the Boston Globe, “There is a line between being a bad boyfriend and having a lot of regret, and predatory behavior.” This article is not the place to give extensive commentary on the serious allegations made about Junot Díaz’s conduct. It should be noted that shortly before the allegations were made public he wrote about his own experience as a victim of sexual abuse, and a prominent theme throughout his writings is the relationship between sexuality and trauma.

[i] Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016).

[ii] Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 18.

[iii] Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 1.

[iv] Díaz, 3.

[v] Díaz, 84.

[vi] Díaz, 252.

[vii] Díaz, 255.

[viii] Díaz, 147.

[ix] Ashley Kunsa, “History, Hair, and Reimagining Racial Categories in Junot Diáz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54, no. 2 (2013): 211–24.

[x] Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 273.

[xi] Díaz, 276.

[xii] Junot Díaz, “Junot Díaz: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma,” The New Yorker, accessed October 12, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma.

Representando donde quiera: The Afro-Latin@ lived experience

“Negro soy desde hace muchos siglos” - Jorge Artel[1]

I was 10 years old. I was living in this country for about a year in Washington Heights. Washington Heights is a mostly Dominican and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Manhattan, NYC. There, through the many Latin@ kids I met while in school, I realized I was part of a larger community of Latin@s. My experience outside of NYC, specifically in Hackettstown, NJ, a small town in central New Jersey, reminded me of another important part of my identity. There, I briefly lived with some close friends of the family while learning to acclimate to the U.S. I knew very little English, and some of the boys in my Sixth-grade class invited me to play a game of American Football. My team won. I don’t know how, but according to one of the boys from the losing team, “You only won because you have the nigger on your team.”  I, without knowing a word of English or any of the customs here, could not understand why a fight suddenly broke out amongst the boys with whom I played, but what triggered it was the word nigger and everything it means historically in the United States. Not only did I learn English very quickly then, but that’s when I began to understand myself as holding multiple identities here in the U.S., not only as a Colombian boy, as a Latino boy, but also as a Black boy, an Afro-Latino boy.

Afro-Latinidad is an identity that some claim to be new, a term that some misunderstand as trendy, or an idea that people think is novel, but it is more properly understood as a word that became representative of an implicit conceptualization of Blackness amongst Latin@s that has been around for decades. The reality of Afro-Latinidad is that it is not simply a concept or a term. If we are to only focus on the specific time where this term was coined, we would have an incomplete understanding of Afro-Latinidad.  Afro-Latinidad is a lived experience that has been a part of the Latin@ identity for centuries. Simply defined, Afro-Latin@s are “people of African descent in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and by extension those of African descent in the United States whose origins are in Latin America and the Caribbean.”[2] However, as simple as this definition may seem, a consensus of the term has been difficult to standardize:

“Afro-Latin@? What’s an Afro-Latin@? Who is an Afro-Latin@? The term befuddles us because we are accustomed to thinking of “Afro” and “Latin@” as distinct from each other and mutually exclusive: one is either Black or Latin@.”[3]

To some members of the Latin@ community, one can be either Black or Latin@, but not both.[4] This false dichotomy led many people today to think that Afro-Latinidad is a recent phenomenon when, in reality, the study and experience of Afro-Latinidad have been a part of the Latin@ identity since its origins.

“Generación tras generación, la humanidad ha enseñado una historia falsa; una historia que excluye las contribuciones de la comunidad africana y sus descendientes.” – Arturo Alfonso Schomburg[5]

A little over a century before my own racial incident in Hackettstown, another young boy from Santurce, Puerto Rico, was also told something that would change his life trajectory. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, born in 1874, was in grade school when he asked his teacher why there were no mentions of Black people’s contributions in his books. His teacher replied that it was because Black people had no history.[6] A young Arturo decided then to dedicate his life to collecting and researching everything he could about Black people’s history throughout the Diaspora. This led to the creation of one of the most internationally acclaimed research centers for the study of people of African Descent from all over the world.[7] While not credited with creating the term Afro-Latin@, it is undeniable that Schomburg’s personal experience is as an Afro-Latin@. As someone who self-identified as Negro and Puertorriqueño, his collection, research, and studies of the African Diaspora and its ties to the Americas led to the beginning of a more comprehensive understanding of what we today call Afro-Latinidad.

The term Afro-Latin@ has been used loosely in one form or another since around the 1970’s, it was then that the U.S. Census asked residents to select their racial category in addition to their Hispanic identity.[8] But the use of the term as empowerment for an understanding of Black Latinidad comes from a Diasporic understanding of Blackness. This is specifically highlighted by Prof. Miriam Jiménez Román:

“The concept of an African diaspora, while implicit for decades in this long historical trajectory, comes to the fore during these years [1980’s] and serves as the guiding paradigm in our times. Most importantly for our purposes it acknowledges the historical and continuing linkages among the estimated 180 million people of African descent in the Americas. Along with the terms “Negro,” “afrodescendiente,” and “afrolatinoamericano,” the name Afro-Latin@ has served to identify the constituency of the many vibrant anti-racist movements and causes that have been gaining momentum throughout the hemisphere for over a generation”[9]

We cannot trace the beginning of the term Afro-Latin@ to a specific moment or a specific person, but rather it is a term that expresses a lived identity that has been in the Americas for centuries. Furthermore, the term Afro-Latin@ is a result of transnational conversations between people of African Descent; it is a derivative term that comes to the United States from Latin American anti-racist movements and other pan-African movements in the world. It is important to note that the term, as important as it is, is centered in the United States and it is chiefly used to describe a reality of Latin@s of African Descent in the United States. In Latin America the term Afro is usually linked to a national understanding of one’s identity, namely Afro-Colombian, to describe someone who is Black and Colombian. However, in the United States, as the pan-ethnic term Latin@ became normalized to define a multi-ethnic people, it was necessary to create a term that highlights individuals of African Descent who are Latin@s.

Through research, started by Schomburg but continued by countless others, we realize that Afro-Latinidad is not just a term, rather, it is a lived experience, an identity, that has permeated all aspects of Latinidad. This identity, with or without a term, has roots very early in the history of the Americas[10] and has been developed and preserved through various means –those recognized by academia and those not– that served to awaken us to the reality, resistance, and permanence of Afro-Latin@s in a culture that had created a pigmentocracy to erase all vestiges of Blackness.[11]

The lived experience of Afro-Latin@s, whether here in the U.S. or in Latin America, was not preserved exclusively via written texts and other works that subscribe to a specific anthropological and archival ideology. Rather, Afro-Latin@ customs were preserved throughout the centuries via a variety of traditions, whether oral, musical, or gastronomical[12], serving to remind the world of the visibility and presence of our community both here and afar. This is important to note because the current diverse expressions of Afro-Latinidad here in the United States and throughout Latin America are emblematic and consistent with the way that Afro-Latinidad has been preserved and proclaimed for centuries.

Novels depicting quotidian Afro-Latin@ life, such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz and Soledad by Angie Cruz; comic books depicting Afro-Latin@ superheroes, such Miles Morales: Spider-Man; books informing the Afro-Latin@ experience in the U.S., such as From Bomba to Hip-Hop by Juan Flores; and music performed by a variety of artists from all of the different genres influenced by the African Diaspora (salsa, merengue, reggaeton, tango, cumbia, etc.), such as Ismael Rivera, Grupo Niche, Machito and His Afro-Cubans, and Tego Calderón. All these artists that write and perform songs indicative of an Afro-Latin@ experience should be considered essential when thinking of how an Afro-Latin@ expression of identity exists in multiple dimensions over time and place.[13]

In addition, many organizations and institutions have consistently emerged since Schomburg’s research and collection began to challenge a white supremacist historical record. We do not have the space here to account for all of these, but we can consider some contemporary organizations that study Afro-Latinidad as emblematic of the continuation of this line of study. Organizations and institutions such as the AfroLatin@ Forum in New York City, Encuentro Diaspora Afro in Boston, and the International Society of Black Latinos in Los Angeles continue the legacy laid by Schomburg. Other grass-roots efforts focused on expanding the visibility of Afro-Latin@ culture such as Latinegras, the Black Latina Movement, the Afro-Latin@ Festival; blogs such as Ain't I Latina and #IAmEnough all point to the same idea, that the Afro-Latin@ experience and identity cannot be reduced just to universities who are studying Afro-Latinidad from an academic perspective. Rather, Afro-Latinidad should be understood by the interdisciplinary nature with which it has consistently been displayed in and throughout the Americas by many people, over a variety of countries, social classes and religious affiliations, con una meta, como dice ChocQuibTown, de “Representarnos donde quiera.”[14]

For us to fully recognize, affirm, and value Afro-Latinidad as an identity, as a lived experience, and as an expression of the fullness of Latinidad, we also have to challenge our racialized theologies and challenge the use of antiquated language, theories and terminologies that all have one purpose, black erasure. Given its history, does mestizo appropriately convey the fullness of Latinidad or does it perpetuate racialized theologies that deny Black and Indigenous Latin@s? This is a necessary question to explore. A full appreciation of Blackness within Latinidad will not happen until we change how we talk about all people created in God’s image, and reaffirm what is written at the beginning of the Bible. That all people, Black people, Afro-Latin@s, are created in God’s image. “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our likeness, to be like us.’ (Genesis 1:26a, TFET) and “Humankind was created as God’s reflection, in the divine image God created them…” (Genesis 1:27a, TFET).

Understanding the diversity of how Afro-Latinidad is expressed can be an initiation into a broader, richer personal recognition of how our identities connect us to various people across time. I don't know when or how old the next young person will be when they have that experience with Afro-Latinidad. I certainly hope that by then we have embraced a fuller definition of Latinidad, one that no longer places Afro-Latin@s on the margins, in liminal spaces, or claims that Afro-Latinidad is something new. I hope that when this happens we are able to understand the wholeness of Latinidad and center Blackness within it.

“Quisieron borrar nuestras huellas... ¡y hoy somos miles de miles!

Quisieron callar nuestras voces... ¡y hoy somos coros y ecos!

Quisieron invisibilizar nuestro rostro... ¡y hoy nuestra presencia más grande se yergue!

Quisieron arrancarnos de nuestra tierra... ¡y hoy somos raíces en el universo!

Porque no hay Lugar en el mundo -terrestre o etéreo- donde no existan huellas -profundas y perennes- dejadas por la mujer y el hombre negro.” - Lorena Torres Herrera[15]

Guesnerth Josué Perea is a teaching Pastor at Metro Hope Covenant Church, and one of the directors of the afrolatin@ forum, a non-profit that raises awareness of Latin@s of African descent in the United States. Josue holds a MA in Theology from Alliance Theological Seminary, a Continuing Education Certificate from Union Theological Seminary and a BA in Latin American History from CCNY. His research on Afro-Colombianidad has been part of various publications including Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora and the Journal for Colombian Studies. Josué was named by the newspaper amNewYork as one of five Colombians "making a mark" in New York City.

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[1] In Laurence E. Prescott, Without Hatreds or Fears: Jorge Artel and the Struggle for Black Literary Expression in Colombia (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2000).

[2] http://www.afrolatinoforum.org/defining-afro-latin.html

[3] Román Miriam Jiménez and Juan Flores, “Introduction,” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1-3.

[4] See this video for context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrtkPEBDUzM&t=1s

[5] Lachatanere, Diana. The Schomburg Papers. New York: University Publications of America, 1983.

[6] Schomburg, Arturo A. "The Negro Digs Up His Past". New York, 1925.

[7] Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

[8] In Román Miriam Jiménez, Juan Flores, and John Logan, “How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans,” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 471-484.

[9] Román Miriam Jiménez and Juan Flores, “Introduction,” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 2-3.

[10] “The earliest manifestations of Afro-Latin@ presence actually predate the very founding of the country and even the first English settlements. As reflected in Peter Wood’s title of the opening reading, the “earliest Africans in North America” were in fact Afro-Latin@s.” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 4.

[11] For more info see Telles, Edward Eric. Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America. Chapel Hill, NC, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

[12] “Latinos use sound and music to narrate a history of resistance and create a sense of belonging.” - Petra R. Rivera-Rideau et al., “Rethinking the Archive,” in Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan., 2016).

[13] Not to mention the many different visual artists that have kept Afro-Latinidad at the forefront such as Firelei Baez, Maria Magdalena Campos Pons and William Vilalongo just to name a few.

[14] Full video and song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wzqWhwt8zE

[15] Guiomar Cuesta Escobar, Alfredo Ocampo Zamorano, and Lorena Torres Herrera, “Siempre Presentes,” in ¡Negras Somos!: Antología De 21 Mujeres Poetas Afrocolombianas De La región pacífica (Bogotá́, Colombia: Apidama Ediciones, 2013).

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.