Seeing Jesus in the Invisible

““Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

— (Matthew 25:37-40)

Mamaw’s Cry

Tears filled my eyes as I put my bed away.

I was visiting Mamaw and Grandpa in their nineteen-foot RV. They slept in the lone bedroom. I slept on the living-room couch, an arm’s length away from the front door and rear kitchen. Medicine bottles, heating pads, braces, and canes filled the cramped space. A walker and set of handheld massagers lined the wall. Mamaw and Grandpa had accumulated this stockpile over the years, hoping each would alleviate some of Mamaw’s chronic pains. Some days they helped. Other days Mamaw’s suffering rendered them useless. None of these resources could dampen her searing pain.

Two thin doors and a miniature bathroom separated my room from the bedroom. Even collectively they could not contain the shriek of agony that jolted me awake. Mamaw was screaming. Extreme pain in her neck and back thrusted her into consciousness. Any movement proved excruciating. The emerging sunlight made matters worse. I heard Grandpa draw the blinds as Mamaw yelled, “Bill, close them—I can’t take it!!” Like the blinds, Mamaw stayed down. She couldn’t get up. There’d be no trips to the bathroom; there’d be no gatherings in the living room; there’d be no cutting up; there’d be no physical relief. The trailer’s resident remedies proved impotent. Mamaw lay in a den of misery all day.

I knew Mamaw wouldn’t get out of bed. Two months of living with her made me familiar with early morning cries that testified to day-long, bed-ridden suffering. Mamaw’s anguish resulted from sustained physical abuse and car accidents initiated by drunk drivers. Pain had been her constant companion. A piercing form visited her now.

I waited to rise until I heard Grandpa confirm what I already knew. “Nathan,” he said stepping down into the living room, “Your Grandma is in intense pain and isn’t likely to get up today. Why don’t you go to the local YMCA to play?”

Grandpa returned to Mamaw. Fighting back tears, I got up and started making my bed. I heard Mamaw moan. I wept.

I spent the morning and afternoon at the YMCA. None of the pickup basketball games, nor shooting and dribbling drills dampened the reverberations of Mamaw’s moan. I heard it over the squeaks of shoes on hardwood. I heard it over the boombox pouring out music. I heard it over my sorrow.

Grandpa greeted me when I returned home.

“Hi Nate! Good to see you. Grandma is sleeping so we need to be quiet. How was the Y?”

“Fine. But I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be with you and Grandma. I wanted Grandma to feel better.”

“I know. I wish she felt better, too.”

“Did any of Grandma’s friends in the trailer park visit?”

“No. They’re all out of town.”

“What about her friends from Bible study?”

“No.”

“It seems like no one from the surrounding churches ever comes to help you and Grandma—not even members of her Bible study.”

“That’s because they don’t come. They never have. Hasn’t mattered where we’ve lived or who knows about Grandma. Church folks don’t come. They don’t help—or at least they don’t help for long. Only Grandma’s close friends like Nell stay with us.”

“I hate it. I absolutely hate it. People, especially Christians, should be helping you all.”

“Whether or not they should, the truth is they usually don’t. And when you’re as old as I am you learn not to expect their help. They’ve Bible studies to attend. It’s a lot easier to discuss the Bible over coffee than it is to watch Grandma suffer.”

We both grew quiet. Grandpa spoke from decades of abandonment; you could hear it in his voice.

“I’m sorry, Grandpa. It shouldn’t be this way.”

“But it is, Nate. It is.”

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““Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?  When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?  When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ ”

— (Matthew 25:37-40)

Bisabuela’s Isolation

Abuela was exhausted. Even over the phone I could hear it in her voice.

“Abuela, ¿Cómo estás? You sound tired.”

“Oh, I’m okay, Nathan.”

“Are you sure”

“Sí. I just got back from helping bisabuela, that’s all.”

“Are tíos Jr. and Tutin helping you?”

“Sí, but they’re both in the States, so I’m the only one taking care of great grandma.”

“I’m sorry abuela. That’s a lot.”

“Sí, Nathan. And bisabuela has been getting worse. She keeps repeating herself. She says the same thing over and over because she doesn’t remember what she’s said. You know what I mean?”

“Sí abuela. Yo entiendo. I’m sorry bisabuela is getting worse. I hate it. Alzheimers is terrible.”

“Sí Nathan, it is. It’s hard to hear bisabuela repeat herself. And it’s hard to tell her the same things over and over.”

“Can anyone help you while Jr. and Tutin are gone?”

“We’ve hired someone to help cook bisabuela’s meals and clean her house.”

“What about from your church? Does anyone from the congregation help?”

“Well, how do you say…they pray and say they’re sorry, but they don’t come. So, I have to do it. You know what I mean?”

“I think so.” 

“It’s not good, but it’s the way it is. You know what I mean?”

“Sí. Almost no one from church helped my Grandma. I’d hoped things were better in Puerto Rico.”

“Well Nathan, I’ll tell you something. Many people at church come for the service and then do whatever they want the rest of the week. They don’t help anybody. It’s not good. It’s very sinful. But what are you going to do?”  

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““Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?  When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?  When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ ”

— (Matthew 25:37-40)

The Spirit’s Conviction

The students and I were grooving. Lively group discussions spilled over into insightful class-wide conversation. The energy was invigorating. I was proud of the class and felt blessed to share this hour with them.

“Y’all are making excellent points. Let’s go even deeper. Remember: When we consider the state of an individual, institution, society, or nation, we must think through five categories: race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture.”

Immediately after I finished writing “culture” on the board, I felt Spirit-inspired pangs. The Spirit prompted me to look at the five categories. I did. Then I heard an inaudible question: “What’s missing.” Many answers could’ve been appropriate. I’d not mentioned religion, for example. But that’s not what the Spirit brought to my mind. Instead, the word “Ability” flashed before me. Then conviction flooded over me, and I began to cry.

My students and I had spent the past twelve weeks identifying and lamenting how evangelical discipleship in the US tends to omit the weightier things of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness (Matthew 23:23). We’d repeatedly discussed our responsibility to enter the sufferings of others. But I’d never directed my students’ attention to disabled or chronically ill. Neither had our authors. I was discipling my students into ableism. I thought of Mamaw and bisabuela as I repented to the class for this failure.

“I need to do a better job showing y’all Jesus. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

“God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13)

About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Poor Because They Are Lazy

Richard Delgado’s words stunned me. Putting his essay down, I meditated on this unsettling passage: 

[U.S. Latin@s] suffer disproportionately from poverty and school drop-out. A U.N. study showed that if all Latinos residing in the United States were considered as a separate country, that country would rank thirty-fifth in the world in a combined index of social well-being that included income, education, and access to health care.

Delgado was citing the UN’s 1993 Human Development Report. That same document noted that “In the United States, with the HDIs of white, black, and hispanic populations separated, whites rank number 1 in the world.” The U.S. Latinx community was thirty-fifth; the U.S. White community was first. And as Delgado observed, “the racial disparity noted in the 1993 report has widened and deepened.” The UN’s 2001 Human Development Report revealed that whereas U.S. Whites remained near the top of the world’s HDI index, U.S. Latin@s had dropped to sixty-eighth.

Seeing the suffering of Mi Gente

Reading these grotesque numbers carried me back to my first experiences with Puerto Rico’s poverty. Mi abuela was driving. I sat in the passenger seat. As we rode through dilapidated communities, my young eyes, raised in a middle-class New Jersey neighborhood, poured out tears. I had never seen such catastrophes. These were mi gente, my people. And they were languishing in extreme destitution. 

“Mira, Nathan,” mi abuela said. “Ellos son muy pobres y están sufriendo; they are very poor and are suffering. God calls us to love and care for the poor. We cannot look away.”

Later that visit, I spoke with a family member about the poverty I’d seen. “Oh yes, there are many poor people here in Puerto Rico. But they are poor because they are lazy. You see the same thing in the mainland.”

My relative’s callous tone and comments jarred me. Abuela had said nothing about laziness while we witnessed our people’s misery; she spoke about our divine call to love and care for the poor. Granted, abuela never explained mi gente’s poverty. But the contrast between her focus on neighbor-love and this relative’s reductive explanation for severe poverty shook me.

Returning to the Present

Chills jerked my body as I recalled these experiences. I picked up Delgado’s essay and reread the arresting passage. How to understand these truths, the poverty I witnessed, or what my relatives told me?

This multi-faceted question becomes more pointed when you engage updated data. Ed Morales writes that “on average, prices [are] about 21 percent greater in Puerto Rico than in the United States.” Though this percentage is like “major metropolitian areas like New York and Miami,” those cities only have poverty rates of “12 percent and 24 percent, respectively” whereas Puerto Rico’s “41 percent poverty rate (compared to the United States’ average of 14.3 percent) represented a much higher percentage of the population that has a difficult time just grocery shopping.” Morales presses the point. “This high rate reflects the concentration of poverty you’d expect to see in peripheral areas of US cities, showing how “American” socioeconomic problems are reproduced in an isolated island territory.” Morales wrote two years ago. Now Puerto Rico’s poverty rate is 43.5 percent—over two times higher than Mississippi’s, which has the highest poverty rate among US States.

These ghastly percentages testify to profound human suffering. And they force us again to ask: How to understand these truths, the poverty I witnessed, or what my relatives told me? Let me offer three biblical reflections that should inform every Christian’s answers.

Biblical Reflection One: Laziness and Want

Scripture identifies laziness as a cause of poverty. As Esteban Voth writes, “the book of Proverbs states that one of the causes which had contributed to the existence of poverty is laziness.” Consider the following passages.

Laziness brings on deep sleep;
    an idle person will suffer hunger. (Proverbs 19:15)

The lazy person does not plow in season;
    harvest comes, and there is nothing to be found. (Proverbs 20:4)

Do not love sleep, or else you will come to poverty;
    open your eyes, and you will have plenty of bread. (Proverbs 20:13)

The craving of the lazy person is fatal,
    for lazy hands refuse to labor. (Proverbs 21:25)

Three verses link laziness to hunger; one links it to death. Thus, these texts reveal their agrarian context. Thus, they establish laziness’s lethal consequences.

Yet each of these passages address individual poverty, not its communal form. Three verses specifically reference a lazy “person.” The “you” of Proverbs 20:13 is singular. This limited scope matters, for as Ibram X. Kendi argues, “Individual behaviors can shape the success of individuals. But policies determine the success of groups.”

When Isaiah and Amos chastise Israel for its oppressive treatment of the poor, they highlight how Israel’s anti-covenantal policies and practices—in this context, those opposed to the Mosaic covenant and law—produce or perpetuate poverty. Isaiah writes:

The Lord rises to argue his case;
    he stands to judge the peoples.
The Lord enters into judgment
    with the elders and princes of his people:
It is you who have devoured the vineyard;
    the spoil of the poor is in your houses.
What do you mean by crushing my people,
    by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts. (Isaiah 3:13-15)

The LORD condemns an elite group—elders and princes—for establishing and exacerbating poverty through their practices and anti-covenantal policies. Likewise, Amos declares:

Thus says the Lord:
For three transgressions of Israel,
    and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;
because they sell the righteous for silver,
    and the needy for a pair of sandals—
they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,
    and push the afflicted out of the way;
father and son go in to the same girl,
    so that my holy name is profaned;
they lay themselves down beside every altar
    on garments taken in pledge;
and in the house of their God they drink
    wine bought with fines they imposed. (Amos 2:6-8)

Israel’s elite exploit and oppress the poor, gorging themselves upon this community’s limited resources, and so worsening the poor’s plight. None of these condemnations come in an individualist key. All focus on groups and group dynamics. And each echoes texts in Proverbs.

Biblical Reflection Two: Injustice and Poverty

Though Proverbs identifies laziness as a cause for individual poverty, it also identifies societal level injustices as a cause for communal poverty. As Esteban Voth observes, because the same book “proposes that many times poverty is caused by injustice,” its readers “cannot generalize and attribute the existence of poverty to laziness alone.” Consider the following verse

The field of the poor may yield much food,
    but it is swept away through injustice. (Proverbs 13:23)

Whereas verses from Proverbs we considered in the previous section linked individual laziness to individual poverty and hunger, Proverbs 13:23 links the bareness of poor people’s fields to societal injustices. Thus, Proverbs 13:23 bears a striking resemblance to the texts from Isaiah and Amos we considered. 

Similar commonalities also hold. Voth argues that “In contrast to the wisdom literature, for the prophets the true cause of poverty was found in the presence of injustice. This injustice had been institutionalized in royalty as well as in the clergy.” We noted such institutionalized evils in the previous section. Here we note proverbs that echo what we and Voth read in the prophets.

A ruler who oppresses the poor
    is a beating rain that leaves no food. (Proverbs 28:3)

Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker,
    but those who are kind to the needy honor him. (Proverbs 14:31)

Oppressing the poor in order to enrich oneself,
    and giving to the rich, will lead only to loss. (Proverbs 22:16)

Do not rob the poor because they are poor,
    or crush the afflicted at the gate;
for the Lord pleads their cause
    and despoils of life those who despoil them. (Proverbs 22:22-23)

Isaiah and Amos chastise royalty for perpetuating poverty. So does Proverbs 28:3. Isaiah and Amos rebuke Israel’s elites for exploiting the poor. Proverbs 22:16 and 22:22-23 anticipate this rebuke. And Isaiah and Amos highlight how Israel’s elites have insulted God because they oppress the poor.

Reflecting on the totality of Scripture’s witness, Elsa Tamez argues, “For the Bible oppression is the basic cause of poverty.” Tamez has communal poverty in view. She continues: “The oppressor steals from the oppressed and impoverishes them. The oppressed are therefore those who have been impoverished, for while the oppressor oppresses the poor because they are poor and powerless, the poor have become poor in the first placed because they have been oppressed.” In a prophetic, proverbial register, Tamez concludes, “The principal motive for oppression is the eagerness to pile up wealth, and this desire is connected with the fact that the oppressor is an idolater.” Isaiah and Amos do not rebuke Israel’s poor for laziness; they do not exhort them to try harder and pick themselves up. Instead, they rebuke Israel’s ruling elites for unjust policies and practices that bear the mark of idolatry.

Biblical Reflection Three: Legal Injustice and Poverty

Rulers and ruling-class elites often promote exploitation and poverty through law. Isaiah condemns Israel’s elites for this very sin.  

Woe to those who make unjust laws,
    to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights
    and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
    and robbing the fatherless. (Isaiah 10:1-2)

These unjust laws stand in sharp contrast to the laws God instituted in the Mosaic covenant. There we read:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 19:9-10);

For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe,  who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the Lord your God; him alone you shall worship; to him you shall hold fast, and by his name you shall swear. (Deuteronomy 10:17-20) 

God establishes laws to care for the poor and remediate poverty. Loving and worshiping God involves knowing that he executes justice for the marginalized and opposes oppressive, poverty-inducing regimes like Egypt’s.

Concluding With Puerto Rico

We return to the grotesque data about Puerto Rico’s poverty and our multi-layered guiding question: How to understand these truths, the poverty I witnessed, or what my relatives told me? In reverse order, we see that mi abuela was right to stress God’s call to care for the poor. We must love them—and so love their and our Maker. In contrast, we see that my relative’s linking of laziness to Puerto Rico’s wide-spread poverty is biblically dubious. Whereas Scripture links such societal level poverty to societal injustices perpetuated by ruling elites, my relative settled for a reductive and false linkage with individual behavior.

Biblically speaking, we must evaluate Puerto Rico’s poverty in terms of systemic evils perpetuated by ruling elites and the policies and practices they promote. This requires us to analyze and chastise elites on the island. But it also requires us to analyze the elites of Puerto Rico’s colonizer: The U.S. What Delgado says of Latin@s generally applies to Puerto Rico particularly: Latin@s require freedom from “the badges and incidents of conquest, including loss of ancestral lands, destruction of culture, suppression of their native language, and a public school system that systematically renders their history invisible.” And as I’ve written elsewhere, White U.S. elites crafted the laws governing US-Puerto Rico relations to solidify these badges and their accompanying poverty. These laws and the economic structures they protect trample Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico’s poor. Moreover, scholars such as Ed Morales and Teresa Delgado have shown that Puerto Rican elites like Ricardo Antonio Rosselló added cronyism and domestic domination to these evils. And unlike Zacchaeus, the island’s oppressive elites never repaid what they stole. Decolonizing this multi-sourced catastrophe requires confronting Egypt- and Rome-like exploitation and idolatry.

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Imagining Una Iglesia Mestiza: Vision Amid Crisis

This article is from the forthcoming Moody Center magazine, set to publish spring 2022. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

Middle-America is currently facing a years-long identity crisis.

The March 2018 issue of National Geographic includes an article by Michele Norris titled, As America Changes, Some Anxious Whites Feel Left Behind. Its subtitle reads: “Demographic shifts rippling across the nation are fueling fears that [white] culture and standing are under threat.” The story centers on Hazleton, Pennsylvania, an old coal mining town transformed by an influx of Latin Americans, particularly Afro-Latinos from the Caribbean. White residents – themselves children of European immigrants to Hazelton – repeatedly told Norris during interviews they now felt “outnumbered.”  She writes about white residents no longer participating in the town’s fall parade because it “became too scary. Too uncomfortable … too brown.” White Hazletonians were feeling, perhaps for the first time ever, the cultural collision, el choque, that has shaped the borderlands of the US for over a century. Their reaction to this encounter is unsurprisingly defensive:  

“With Hazleton’s changing demographics and persistent economic decline, the community began to see itself as white. The city reasserted its identity as white.”[1]

The realities of the US borderlands are no longer bound to the outer edges of the country, and Hazelton’s identity crisis exemplifies a common response. This crisis, and the fear stemming from it, marks wide-reaching debates about racial justice and the role of the evangelical church; it raises questions about who US Americans are and what must be conserved as things change. Few evangelical leaders are addressing the identity question inherent to the growing tensions in towns like Hazelton. Fewer still are asking if a non-white community identity can help congregations bring peace between neighbors. Ironically, the very people whose presence is cause for Hazeltonian suspicion produced a theological category and identity from which to imagine this peace. US-Latin American theologians reimagined the meaning of a racist identifying name and in doing so created a good tool to use according to the guidance of the Spirit. This article explores the US-Latin American use of the “mestiza y mestizo” identity as a tool to resolve the crisis and move toward peace.[2]

A Brief History of “Mestizaje”

During their colonization of the Caribbean and Latin America, the Spanish developed a system of racial classifications to assert their superiority. Sanctioned and perpetuated by the church, these racial categories became the hierarchical and ordering arrangement of Spanish colonies. Those designated “blanco” (white) were given the full rights and privileges of a colonial citizen. The Spanish system included 14-20 official classifications of racial mixture to distinguish between greater and lesser “whiteness” and provided measured rights and privileges accordingly. These racial categories were fluid but rooted in phenotype (e.g. skin color, hair type, etc.). 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 “white” status.

Mestiza/o was one of the official classifications of the Spanish colonies. It was given to those mixed children of Indigenous and Spanish blood. This designation would later become the leading self-identity for several Latin American countries attempting to establish their own peoplehood. Mexico, for instance, under the guidance of philosophers and politicians like Jose Vasconcelos, attempted to encourage (often by force) the mixing of remaining African and Indigenous people in the land, so they could become one “mestizo” people. Cuba, Colombia, Brazil, and other nations had similar blanqueamiento (whitening) programs that were justified according to racial improvement logics.[3] The goal of these programs was to move the people further up the scale toward becoming “white.”

In the 1960s, along the borders of the US, Latin-American pastors, poets, activists, and theologians reappropriated the word mestiza/o to describe the experience of Latina/o diaspora. That is, the term now described the bi-cultural tension of Latina/os born along the border who felt neither fully of the US or the country of their parentage. These Latina/os felt they belonged to both and neither at once; They were, as one writer would say, living “on the hyphen.” These borderland mestiza/os made mistakes in adopting such a term for their purposes, yet their use of mestiza/o reveals a way of imagining belonging that can be useful to the church. Here are three ways the mestiza/o identity can serve the church’s witness to a US in crisis.

1) Rejecting the Purity Myth

By definition, mestiza/os are impure. They are the byproduct of colonization by Spain and US-empire expansion. The former produced people of literal mixed heritage. The latter created the circumstances in which the already mixed person experienced a second-level mixing of culture, theology, and race. Gloria Anzaldúa would call this second mix a product of a “choque” (collision) that created dissonance for the Mestiza/o. This dissonance, what Anzaldúa calls “mestiza consciousness,” stands in stark contrast to “the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices.”[4] Because the mestiza must operate between worlds that neither accept nor include her fully, she can better handle ambiguity and develops a tolerance for contradictions. She learns to participate as a partial exile in worlds borne of conflict. To say it plainly, mestizas are disinterested in the claims of objectivity and purity used by whites to protect and insulate themselves from others.

Consider the way the Hazeltonian reaffirmation of whiteness animates retreat by its residents; they flee from that which they cannot understand. They wish to retain the “purity” of their vision for Hazelton. They accuse their Afro-Latina/o neighbor of distorting, deforming, and breaking the town fabric. Anzaldúa demonstrates the irrationality of this purity myth. Her ideas press the Hazeltonians to see themselves as equally impure byproducts of their collision with new lands and exile from former European roots. Their practices are not more true, good, or beautiful. Both “white” and non-white exist as impure products of a violent history, mixtures born from empires.

2) Accepting a Non-Innocent History

The complexity revealed in the mestiza/o identity echoes a truth long affirmed by the Church: no human is pure and innocent (Rom. 3:23). Whiteness, understood as a purity claim, records a history of innocence that reifies that purity. The default for whites is innocence, not guilt; racial purity is equated with moral purity. This began with the endorsement of the church on the racial arrangement of colonies, and it persists in many respects today. This self-defense is only possible through organized forgetting – “the intentional, repetitious omitting of certain facts, narratives, and artifacts, and the repetitious presenting of other facts, narratives, and artifacts, [by which] communities form themselves to know some things and to overlook or disremember other things.” Any attempt to disassociate from historical (and present) racism is conditioned by this form of forgetting. The normalcy of the forgetting is what makes it possible for “whites” to feel innocent regarding racial systems. They simply do not know what they do not know. Once more, whiteness moves away from sound doctrine, and the mestiza/o identity offers a corrective.

Theologian and church historian Justo Gonzalez, referring to Hispanics and their inherited history, 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.[5]

Anzaldúa expands Dr. Gonzalez’s line of reasoning. In a world deeply marked by conflict, Anzaldúa believed mestiza/os could serve as mediators because the mestiza consciousness “serves as a mode of self-critique.”[6] 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.”[7] These scholars echo truths of Scripture. The historical church acknowledges it is not beyond the guilt and crookedness of this violent world. The identity of God’s people is always simul justus et peccator (simultaneously righteous and sinner). As those who confess their non-innocence, Christians engage ministry differently.

3) Inverting the Scale (Life in the Middle)

Mestiza/os must make a choice: (a) attempt to move up the scale toward whiteness or (b) as mediators and ambassadors, pursue justice for all those negatively affected by the scale. If Dr. González is right that the mestiza/o identity is a “painful identity” marked by inherited guilt, this must include the ways mestiza/os have made attempts to move up the scale to white. Surely mestiza/o history does not stop with the earliest ancestors. Those blanqueamiento (whitening) programs meant to produce mestiza/os demonstrate the ways Latina/os perpetuate racism. On the other hand, shaped and informed by theology, mestizaje offers a vision for ministry rich with gospel implications. This vision begins with the subversion of the scale all-together. In other words, it begins by resisting whiteness’ invitation toward preferential treatment of the powerful (James 2:1-13). Instead, mestiza/os are invited to take up God’s missional focus on the poor.

The mestiza/o who prioritizes those affected by racial injustice also approaches their ministry methods with deep humility. In their work, they acknowledge their impurity and non-innocence; they are aware of the real risk for self-contradiction. These three lessons inform the church’s approach to the identity crisis poisoning towns like Hazelton. Rejecting whiteness is about remembering collective guilt, acknowledging shared impurity, and prioritizing the inverted scale.

“It is in the very way of Jesus that mestizos find their mission: to create. In this is both the excitement and challenge. 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.[8]

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About Emanuel Padilla

Emanuel Padilla is president of World Outspoken and cohost of the Mestizo Podcast. He is committed to serving bi-cultural Christians facing questions of identity, culture, and theology. He also serves at The Brook, a church on the northwest side of Chicago, along with his wife Kelly.

Follow him on Twitter to learn more.

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Footnotes

[1] Jamie Longazel, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, as quoted by Norris.

[2] The words “mestiza, mestizo, mestizaje” and related variants have unique meanings in various Latin American countries. The focus in this article is the specific use of the word(s) by Latin Americans in the US.

[3] See PBS documentary Black in Latin America (2011) for more information on forced miscegenation political programs.

[4] Gloria Anzaldúa, Norma Cantú, and Aída Hurtado, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. Edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), p. 99.

[5] Justo L. González, Manana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Abingdon Press, 2010), p. 40. As a point of observation regarding non-innocence, it is worth noting the exclusions in Gonzalez’s comments about Hispanic heritage. It could be said that Gonzalez is guilty of exclusion of the African in his historical account, and in so doing, is non-innocent regarding their erasure.

[6] Nestor Medina and Nstor Medina, Mestizaje: Remapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/O Catholicism (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2009), p. 25.

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

[8] 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).

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Tempted to Silence

Stage Setting

To borrow a line from Willie James Jennings, “The things I tell are precise accounts while being exact fabrications…everything I tell you, everything, is the truth. It is the truth in service of moving us to a new place of gathering.”

Here is a temptation story. Does it sound familiar?

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En El Parque

We sipped our coffees between sympathetic sighs and pain-laced chuckles. We had suffered greatly and we knew it. That’s why we agreed to grab café and walk to a park where we could talk freely. We knew our colleagues wouldn’t be there. We knew the police rarely patrolled it; no need to worry about “inquiries.” Sometimes you must escape modes of surveillance so you can be—so you can listen and cry en conjunto.

Our visit did not start with sipping and sighs. Because our coffees were too hot to drink and our stories too agonizing to share without the security of a secluded space, we carried our coffees and swapped fun family updates while we walked to the park. We had much to celebrate. We had jokes to tell. Smiles adorned our faces and joyous laughter filled the space between us as we spoke. These laughs were divine gifts. We needed them and we knew it.

We reached the park and scanned the grounds. No one was there. Relieved, we selected a place to sit. Some burdens demand stillness. Sometimes movement fosters avoidance.

Our moods changed as we began discussing our personal pains. So did our cadence. Nervous, trauma-infused laughter filled the space between us. We had suffered greatly and we knew it. The brown bench bowed under our weight.

“Remember the racist meme?” I ask.

“Of course. How could any Latino or Latina forget it?”

“During a conversation, an institutional leader asked me if I had to use the word ‘victim’ when I talked about being pictured in that anti-Latin@ meme. ‘Perhaps another word is more appropriate?’ If I’m not a victim for being pictured in a racist meme that hundreds of people viewed on the internet, when would I be a ‘victim’?”

“Right? Sometimes these attempts to ‘reframe’ things to appease the constituents of historically white Christian spaces like ours leave you wondering: ‘Did I just hear that, or am I going crazy? You can’t be serious. Is it still the 1950s or something?’”  

“Exactamente. The subtle efforts to nudge Latinx folks into more ‘respectable’ speech—the kind that won’t rock the Anglo boat—infuriate and terrify me. They require so much vigilance! I’m telling you: It’s easy to become a cooked frog, assimilating to every minor temperature adjustment designed to keep ‘certain’ Anglo constituents appeased.”

“And when you resist, when you ask, ‘Why are you adjusting the water temperature?” they look you in the eyes and say, ‘What are you talking about?’”

“Preach.”  

“You see their hand on the nob. You watch them turn up the heat. But when you ask them why they’re doing that, they say they aren’t doing anything. The blatant gas-lighting is gross.”  

“Sure is.”

“Ever notice how often these leaders gas-light you right before charging you with being a troublemaker?”

“Ah—the dreaded T-word. Not sure any racialized minority can recover from being labeled a ‘troublemaker’ in a historically or predominately white institution.”

I sip my coffee; my friend is silent. No one sighs. Our muscles tense. Apprehension fills the space between us.

“Nathan, you know people are calling you a troublemaker, right?”

“I know some people are calling me much worse than that!”

“I’m serious.”

“I am too…”

“Okay, but hear me. I’m worried about you. People are labeling you a troublemaker, hermano—and some are trying to keep you from getting a seat at important institutional tables.”

“I know…and I’m grateful for your loving concern. You unfortunately have good reasons to worry.”

“Yes I do. We both do.”

“This reminds me of a line from Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. Du Bois says that the U.S. will never have a truthful history ‘until we have in our colleges men [and women] who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race.’ What Du Bois says about U.S. higher education generally holds for U.S. Christian higher education in particular—especially in historically white institutions. My speaking out against the histories of racism, white supremacy, and U.S. Anglo-Saxon imperialism has upset some folks.”

“Sí; it has.”

“Fans of white Christian Nationalism are outraged. Some have called for my job. ‘He’s racist and a liar!’ they say. ‘Fire him, or I’ll stop financially supporting your institution!’”

 “Got to love the financial power plays coming from the very people who decry ‘cancel culture.’ I wish you never faced those threats. It must be anxiety inducing.”

“You know they are, because you get them too. Nothing like having to trust God for your daily bread when people are calling for your job or labeling you a troublemaker.”

We both look down. The bench remains bowed. My hands start to sweat as I raise my coffee to drink with my friend. We sip. We shake our heads and sigh. Then we look at each other. My friend continues.

“If you dialed it back—and I’m not saying you should—I suspect you could shake the label ‘troublemaker.’”

“I can’t dial it back. We both know that. If anything, I have been too quiet. Mi gente in Puerto Rico are the world’s oldest colony. They continue to suffer from U.S. white supremacy and economic exploitation. God has called me to bear witness to their miseries and amplify their voices in places where they have gone unheard.”

“You and your people have suffered greatly. And I agree about your calling. But I worry that your pace and the labels you carry may keep you from amplifying these voices in the halls of power. I mean, just look at how I’ve been ostracized and disrespected—and I’ve said far less ‘incendiary’ things than you have.”

Pain radiates from my friend’s eyes. Psalm 35 comes to mind as I consider my next words.

“I hear you,” I begin. “And I’m sorry you’ve suffered so much for confronting institutional racism. I hate it. I wish yours wasn’t a vocation of agony.”

“Thanks, Nathan. Me too.”

“The ‘reprimands’ and gas-lighting you’ve faced have been egregious. Simply egregious.”

“Seeing the institutional underside has been rough. I’ve shed many tears while crying out to Jesus. You’re right: It’s been a vocation of agony.”  

“I got that phrase from MLK. He says promoting justice is a vocation of agony in ‘Beyond Vietnam.’”

“I haven’t read that.”

“It’s so good. That’s where King says there comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

“Some Latinx folks justify their institutional silence by saying that we need to go poco a poco.”

 “Yeah. I’ve received this counsel several times. It flies in the face of history. And it’s eerily similar to the gradualism King denounces in ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’”

“Ever the race scholar…But you’re right: Those are good connections.”

“Thanks...I wish they weren’t. I wish those pieces weren’t relevant to our lives.”

“If only…”

“Silence and gradualism remain enticing temptations. But often silence is betrayal and gradualism is an ideology that sooths flawed consciences while it perpetuates exploitation and oppression. ‘Don’t worry: We’re moving prudently—with ‘all deliberate speed.’”

“But Nathan, don’t you see, ‘We’re making big strides: We’ve written statements. You should be impressed—and grateful.’”

“You and I have heard those lines time and time again, haven’t we?”

“Yep.”

“So many evangelical institutions and institutional leaders repeat this mantra. It’s painfully predictable.”

“And it often accompanies gas-lighting.”

“You’re right.”   

We pause to sip our coffees. They’re nearly empty.

“Even when we do the work God’s given us,” my friend says, “promoting justice for and amplifying the voices of Latinx folks, we still end up in a position where we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“If we promote justice and amplify our people’s pains, people ostracize us, removing us from institutional or societal places of power. But if we’re silent or play the institution’s desired gradual game, we’ll get accolades and mammon—but we and our people suffer, though in different ways.”

“I hear you. That’s it, isn’t it? Nothing like being stuck between a rock and a hard place while you’re trying to stand firm upon the Rock.”

“It’s exhausting.”

“It sure is. Racial battle fatigue is no joke. We must recognize it. We need to take time to recover from it. I say this knowing that, for some reason, the LORD keeps preparing a table for us in the presence of our enemies, keeps calling us to a Eucharistic feast in which we participate in Christ’s sufferings.”

“In these circumstances, it is easy to succumb to the temptation to remain silent or ‘work’ for ‘gradual change.’” Those paths are less painful and the fast tracks to fame, money, and power. ‘Forget all this misery. Isn’t Christ’s yoke supposed to be light? This isn’t light—it’s heavy!”

“You got me thinking about Jesus’s temptation. We face something similar. ‘If you just bow an assimilated knee,’ figures in historically or predominately white institutions tell us, ‘all these kingdoms can be yours. No need to suffer.

And why not better position yourself to empower your people?’ As if we could have those kingdoms and advance the Kingdom. As if we could support our people by selling them out.”

“Can’t serve God and mammon. No wonder some of the nudges and calls to assimilate feel satanic.”

“Now that’s a word.”

We wrap up our conversation expressing our gratitude for friendship. We stand and the brown bench creaks in relief. It is no longer holding our burdens. Our burdens aren’t gone; our coffee cups are empty. Still our cups runneth over.  

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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No Context, No Gospel

“If the gospel is not contextualized, the Word of God will remain a logos asarkos (unincarnate word), a message that touches our lives only tangentially.”—C. René Padilla 

Una Tradición

For over fifty years, Latin@ theologians have stressed that divine-human relations, theologies, and Christian practices are culturally laden. For example, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier writes, “the nature of God is contextual and bearing witness to [the] gospel is a contextual matter.” When considering theological education, Conde-Frazier adds, “The loci of our theological education are the lakes and oceans of our lives, the intersection of the practical and the theoretical as we move toward pastoral action. Our theology never comes from a blank space.” Thus, Conde-Frazier echoes a tradition of Latin@s including C. René Padilla, Ada María Isasi-Diaz, Orlando Costas,  Justo González, and Elsa Tamez.

Like many Latin@s, I knew nothing about this tradition for most of my life. No one shared it with me; no one passed it down. In an effort to break this cycle of erasure, let me share some of what I have learned by listening to the Latin@ call for contextual theologies. 

The Word Became Enculturated 

The Son of God’s incarnation is one of the great mysteries Christians celebrate. The Son is the one “through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6); the “appointed heir of all things, through whom [God] also created the worlds” (Hebrews 1:2); and the “first born of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:15-16). Put succinctly, the Son of God is the Word (John 1:1-5). And this Word “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). The Son of God became Jesus of Nazareth.

When the Son assumed human flesh, the Son assumed a cultural identity and context. As René Padilla writes, “The Word became flesh. It was acculturized, since humans are cultural beings.” Understanding or proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ necessarily requires referring to a human culture. Again Padilla: “The climax of God’s revelation is Emmanuel. And Emmanuel is Jesus, a first-century Jew! The incarnation unmistakably demonstrates God’s intention to make himself known from within the human situation. Because of the very nature of the gospel, we know it only as a message contextualized in culture.” Padilla’s point about the necessity of a culture for people to know the gospel echoes Orlando Costas’s insight about revelation. “Biblical contextualization is rooted in the fact that the God of revelation can only be known in history. Such a revelation comes to specific peoples in concrete situations by means of particular cultural symbols and categories….Theology in the Old Testament appears as a culture-bound, historically situated reflection on the God who is known in human language. In the New Testament, however, this revelation reaches its peak: God is known in human flesh.” We can summarize Padilla and Costas thus: The Son assumed a first-century Jewish culture and revealed the image of the invisible God through it (Colossians 1:15).

Scripture equips us to say more about God’s enculturation in Christ. When the Son became Jesus of Nazareth, the Son became a colonized a Jew under Roman imperial occupation in the northern lands of Galilee, a backwater region far from Rome and Jerusalem. Moreover, some regions of Galilee were seen as worse than others. Nazareth is a case in point. This small town was a backwater within a backwater. Hence when Nathanael received an invitation to meet “Jesus son of Joseph of Nazareth,” Nathanael mockingly asked, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (John 1:46). Nathanael asked this question without knowing that Jesus and his parents were poor and former refugees. As René Padilla observes, “The offering Joseph and Mary [Jesus’ parents] brought on the occasion of his presentation in the Temple was the one that the Old Testament stipulated for poor people—namely, two doves or pigeons (Luke 2:23). Quite early in his life Jesus was a refugee.” The Son of God did not assume a privileged culture. He assumed a multiply marginalized one. Emmanuel carried a culture forged in oppression. And within this culture he “grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40). 

All Theologies are Culturally Shaped

If the incarnate Son of God assumed a multi-oppressed culture, it is also true that people can only know him from their own particular cultural locations. Consider the practice of reading Scripture. Justo González observes that all theologies arising from an interpretation of Scripture “are contextual, and therefore express the gospel as seen from a particular perspective.” González notes that this truth follows from another: “If there is anything we have learned during these last decades of modernity, it is that knowledge is always perspectival.” We all read scripture from a certain perspective, a particular place. And as Oscar García-Johnson argues, “the place in which theology is formed matters. Place matters because language, culture, and traditions are never neutral carriers of ideas; they always shape what they receive according to the values and inclinations of that place and its people.” In the U.S., for example, many Anglo evangelicals summarize “the gospel” in four words, “Jesus in my place.” Translation: “Jesus taking my (substitutionary) legal place.” This linguistic shorthand neglects many components of the gospel, including its cosmic scope. Paul writes: “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:20-21). Jesus of Nazareth’s redemptive work accomplished creation’s liberation from the curse of Genesis 3. U.S. Anglo evangelicals carrying the truncated conception of the gospel in their interpretive tool kit are likely to misread or overlook passages that stress the gospel’s cosmic breadth.

The previous example illuminates how traditions mediate readings of Scripture. Oscar García-Johnson writes, “theology develops in a particular place out of the interaction, not simply between the Scriptures and culture, but between some version of the Christian tradition and the indigenous traditions of that place—both cultural and religious.” The “Jesus in my place” conception of the gospel that many Anglo evangelicals in the U.S. champion is common among U.S.-based, historically white Baptist denominations; it is largely absent in the U.S.’s historically Latin@ or Black Catholic communities. Hence, members of these different Christian traditions bring contrasting tradition-shaped lenses to their readings of Scripture and the theologies constructed from them.

Because everyone engages Scripture and constructs theology from particular cultural and tradition-shaped perspectives, Justo González argues that we should beware theologies that fail to note the social locations from which they arise.

Precisely because perspective cannot be avoided, when it is not explicitly acknowledged the result is that a particular perspective takes on the aura of universality. Thus it happens that theology from a male perspective claims to be generally human, and that North Atlantic white theology believes itself to be “normal,” while theologies from the so-called Third World or from ethnic minorities in the North Atlantic are taken to be contextual or perspectival.

There are no “universal” interpretations or theologies from nowhere. Presumptions that there are correlate strongly with historic modes of racist and nationalist hegemony. They also correlate with interpretations that fail to confront mammon.

James’ epistle frequently chastises the materially rich and offers encouragement to the materially poor. Chapter 2 is a case in point. “Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?” (James 2:5-7). Elsa Tamez notes that the “poor” in 2:5 are the πτωχοι (ptochoi), “those who have absolutely nothing, not even a job; they depend on alms.” C. Leslie Mitton neglects this basic point in his commentary. Instead, Mitton identifies the poor as the spiritually devout and claims that this term refers to “the class of people for whom prosperity means little since obedience to God means everything.” This reading cannot account for the Greek term’s actual meaning, nor the role that meaning plays within James’ discussion of how the materially wealthy oppress the materially poor. And as Tamez writes, “Only someone with a job, food, and shelter could affirm such a thing. The hungry, the exploited, the jobless want at least to satisfy their basic necessities, and they turn to God with those hopes.” Many “universal” interpretations of Scripture are corrupted artifacts of the middle to upper-middle class that fail to account for God’s special concern for the poor.

Nothing we have considered excludes the possibility that a particular contextualized reading is evil. It may be. A self-conscious proponent of machismo may note this commitment and offer a misogynistic reading of Hagar’s experiences. Of course, flagging this commitment prepares readers for what they will find and keeps their claims out of a “universal” register. Interpretations or theologies with unconscious contextualization perform neither of these functions. Moreover, they consistently prove divisive. As González writes, “Unconscious contextualization…will certainly lead to fragmentation, because it is by nature sectarian, not recognizing that it is but part of the whole.” González continues:

What leads to fragmentation is not the existence of a black theology, a Hispanic theology, or theologies that explicitly take into account the theologian’s gender. What leads to fragmentation is the lack of recognition that all these theologies, as well as all expressions of traditional theology, are contextual, and therefore express the gospel as seen from a particular perspective.

As M. Daniel Carroll Rodas’s puts it, we must strive to be “self-aware contextualized interpreters” and theologians. Such awareness, Conde-Frazier writes, requires an ever-growing consciousness of “the cultural blinders and ideological filters through which we interpret the world.” Though such self-awareness is insufficient for an accurate reading or theology, it is a key component of Christian discipleship and the Christian commitment to resisting and remediating oppression. As Ada María Isasi-Díaz argues, “Who I am, where I am coming from, and where I wish to go shapes the method and content of my theological work. Though such self-revelation is always dangerous, I have entered upon it because I believe that the pretense of objectivity by theologians indicates complicity with the status quo, a status that for me and my Hispanic sisters is oppressive.” 

Contextualizing with and for Latin@ Eyes 

Latin@s should be particularly aware of the need to consider the oppressive influences that shape people’s reading of Scripture. The Iberians who colonized present-day Latin American championed biblical interpretations and theologies that justified imperial conquest and murder. The Spanish’s El Requerimiento makes this clear. And it confirms Elizabeth Conde-Frazier’s liberating insight: “Colonizers presented their own readings as the only possible readings, and it can seem that disagreeing with colonizing readings is disagreeing with the Bible itself. But this is not so, for there is a gap between the colonizers’ interpretation of the Bible and the Bible as the living Word of God.”

Of course, what is true of the Iberian colonizers is also true of twentieth-century missionary endeavors in Latin America. Again Conde-Frazier: “The seeming inflexibility of the interpretation of the Word beyond the ‘truths’ prescribed by the missionaries has created confusion for the Latin@ church in a time of crisis for the community as well as many changes in the present society, including generational changes of perspectives within her own families.” Many missionaries to Latin America proclaimed and formed Latin@s in imperial, Euro- or U.S.-centric, middle-class, whitewashed conceptions of the gospel. Yet they perpetually failed to see the cultural baggage they added to the gospel and discipleship. For them, what they offered was Christianity, pure and simple. Similar patterns hold for Latin@ evangelicals in the U.S. Most reside in congregations, parishes, and denominations draped in ropaje anglosajón with U.S.-style imperial, nationalist, racist, classist, and sexist embroidering. Even Latin@ evangelicals who avoid fellowship in these ecclesiastical communities face the reality that they dominate Christian publishing, Christian radio, and Christian film and television media. “Even if we have not come from Anglo-run church structures,” Conde-Frazier writes, “the theological ideological structures still proliferated throughout our lives.” Regardless of its pervasiveness, ropaje anglosajón is not the gospel nor a part of the biblical witness. Moreover, it is unfit for the task of helping Latin@s faithfully navigate the distinctive challenges they face. Indeed, it typically baptizes and advances beliefs, narratives, and images that legitimize these exact challenges.

Despite this evil legitimizing function, Latin@s and Latin@ communities frequently find it difficult to shed and resist ropaje anglosajón. For them, the cultural clothing is the tradition through which they understand Christianity. As Conde-Frazier observes, “The tradition has become the filter through which we read the Scriptures. When the Spirit breathes new life into the interpretation of the text, we are not always ready to hear what it says to us. If it doesn’t sound familiar, we are quick to believe that it is unorthodox or not sana doctrina (sound doctrine).” Who will shed or resist what they believe is sana docrtina? Some recognize that interpretations and theologies covered with ropaje anglosajón are not sana doctrina. Yet they also recognize that prominent people, communities, and institutions advancing these interpretations and theologies hold a disproportionate amount of money and power. Consequently, parting with the ropaje is likely to land these individuals and communities in an extremely vulnerable position. Still others are willing to take this risk, but they hesitate because they have internalized beliefs about their inferiority that decorate the ropaje.

René Padilla spoke of the Latin@ challenge to redress the problems of ropaje anglosajón in terms of “theological dependence.” He writes, “An examination of all these aspects of our church situation will show that our ‘theological dependence’ is just as real and serious as the economic dependence that characterizes the countries of the Majority World.” For Padilla, this dependency is profoundly problematic. Speaking about the gospel, Padilla declares, “as long as the gospel does not attain a profound contextualization in the local culture, in the eyes of people in that culture it will continue to be a ‘foreign religion.’” This point returns us to the epigraph. “If the gospel is not contextualized, the Word of God will remain a logos asarkos (unincarnate word), a message that touches our lives only tangentially.”

The Latin@s in the tradition we are listening to call upon Latin@s and Latin@ communities to construct interpretations and theologies that, informed by the truths about the Son’s enculturation and the contextualization of human knowing, contextualize the gospel and biblical witness to their particular social locations. These theological constructions must account for what Ada María Isasi-Díaz calls lo cotidiano—the everyday lives of Latin@s and Latin@ communities. The goal, Padilla explains, is to have ecclesiastical communities that “through death and resurrection with Christ [embody] the gospel within its own culture.” This does not entail that the gospel differs across groups, nor exclude listening to and learning from the Church catholic. Padilla is clear on both counts.

This is not to say that the message of the gospel should be one thing here and another one there. It has been given “once and for all,” and its proclamation is faithful in the degree to which it manifests the permanence of the revealed data, either here or there. Nor am I suggesting that there is a need for an “indigenous theology” characterized by local folklore and completely conditioned by the historical situation. Even less would we wish a theology that, in an effort to “contextualize” the gospel, superciliously ignores the results of long years of work in the field of biblical research carried on by theologians in Europe or North America.

Padilla and the other Latin@ theologians we have heard encourage us to learn from the Church catholic and other sources to determine the particular contextual “relevance of biblical revelation to our culture, the relation between the gospel and the problems that the church is facing in our society.”

Some will object that the emphasis on contextualizing the gospel and bible to current, concrete cultures and situations will produce syncretism—a settling for something that is the mixture of pure Christianity and a polluted culture. To this argument, Padilla offers this reply. “When there is no conscious reflection on the form that obedience to the Lordship of Jesus Christ must take in a given situation, conduct can quite easily be determined by the culture rather than by the gospel.” The resonances between Padilla, Isasi-Díaz, and González are striking. 

Una palabra final 

Latin@ theologians have taught me that we all love, follow, and learn about the enculturated Son of God from a particular context. They taught me of the need to be a self-aware interpreter and theologian working to contextualize the gospel and biblical witness to my social location and my ecclesiastical community’s. They taught me I must do this work en comunidad. And they taught me that C. René Padilla is right: “The contextualization of the gospel can only be a gift of grace granted by God to a church that is seeking to place the totality of life under the Lordship of Christ in its historical situation.”

About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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We Speak Spanglish ¿Y qué?

My parents are from Mexico but they have lived in the U.S. for over 35 years. I was born and raised in Los Angeles and have lived most of my life in a predominantly Latino community. I am also a Spanish professor. This is the lens from which I am writing.[1]

My dearest Spanglish, 

They despise you. They think you’re an abomination, a creature birthed from insufficiency and miseducation. They punish you in Spanish class and beat you in English class. Dicen que eres un bastardo, un malparido.  

“¡Habla bien! ¿Por qué hablas mocho? No se dice aplicación, se dice solicitud. No se llama librería, se llama biblioteca. Deja de decir esas barbaridades – jangear, mapiar, lonchar, marketa – Dios mío, le vas a provocar un paro cardiaco a la grandísima, estimadísima y respetuosísima Real Academia Española. ¿Qué diría tu abuela? Mira como se ríen de ti tus tías en México. Tu existencia es un insulto, una vergüenza. No maltrates a nuestra hermosa lengua con tus medias palabras. El idioma se respeta y tú, mentado Spanglish, eres un irrespetuoso”. 

That’s what they say, querido Spanglish. But I… I love you. You’re the language of my people, birthed from love and sacrifice. Tu existencia brotó in our communities como las estrellas brotan en el cielo. And when I hear you, I recognize myself and when I utter your words, I know I’m at home, en esa casa that my parents built con tanto sacrificio en una tierra desconocida.  

They insist, querido Spanglish, que no existes, but languages are not formed in the cradle de las academias reales. You are not held hostage by official institutions; you are held in the arms of your people and rest on the lips de tu gente.  

Tu descendiente, 

La Chicana.

Ask ten people in the U.S. Latina/o community what they think of Spanglish and you might obtain ten different answers, but their responses will never be dull. The use of Spanglish provokes emotionally-charged reactions that elicit everything from joyful expressions to furious replies. Renowned Mexican author Octavio Paz once said that Spanglish was, “neither good nor bad, but abominable” (Ni es bueno, ni es malo, sino abominable). Carlos Varo, a Spanish-Puerto Rican author called Spanglish a chronic illness, and Eduardo Seda Bonilla claimed that it was a colonial crutch, a linguistic form that is “characteristic of colonial situations where there is an attempt to eradicate and lower the language and culture of a subjugated nation”[2]. Still today, for many people, Spanglish represents just another form in which colonial English is encroaching into our space. Spanglish, perceived in this vein, is a contaminated form of Spanish that is no longer recognizable, one that bears the violence of colonial traces.

Nevertheless, there are those who vehemently support the use of Spanglish and claim that it enhances their linguistic repertoires. When the question, “Why do some people speak Spanglish” was posed on Quora, a person responded, “Because it’s fun! I enjoy saying that my daughter is malcriada, she had a huge berrinche this morning’ rather than ‘my daughter is badly behaved, she had a huge tantrum this morning’ Spanglish is more fun than either language by itself.”[3]

So, what is Spanglish? Well, linguistically, Spanglish has different manifestations. Perhaps the one most distinguishable is code-switching, when the speaker alternates between English and Spanish in a single conversation. Calques and loan words are also common in Spanglish phraseology.

1. Code-switching: Fíjate que ayer I went to the store y me compré muchas cremas that were on sale

2. Calques are literal translations, such as te llamo pa’tras (I’ll call you back; te llamo después), tener buen tiempo (to have a good time; pasarla bien), hacer decisiones (make decisions; tomar decisiones)

3. Loan words: lonchar (to have lunch; almorzar), el mol (the mall; el centro comercial), friser (freezer; congelador) mapear (to mop; trapear), checar (to check; revisar), breik (break; descanso), brecas (car brakes; frenos)

Regardless of whether you personally love or hate Spanglish, it is important to acknowledge that Spanglish, similar to all languages, is rule-governed, guided by grammatical and social principles. Speakers of Spanglish abide by certain rules, albeit unconsciously, just as native speakers of Spanish and English construct sentences with ease without being cognizant of the grammatical rules that guide their speech. Read the following examples:

1. Fernanda wants el ice cream from the casa de my madre.

2. José se enojó and he gritó.

3. Lorena me va dar un raite once she’s done with work.

4. Estoy jugando soccer with Blanca.   

I surveyed twenty Spanglish speakers, asking them to identify the ones that sounded “wrong” to them and their answers revealed a high degree of consensus, as was expected. Although the four examples given above are all written using hybrid speech, not all sound right. Numbers one and two are not natural Spanglish expressions, while three and four represent normal incidences of code-switching. Interestingly, two people responded that all sentences were problematic because they were written in Spanglish, perhaps echoing what they’ve heard their whole lives – that Spanglish is incorrect.

In reality, Spanglish isn’t wrong or right, it just is, and perhaps that’s the beauty of it. Spanglish is patterned but these patterns can change over time and are extremely malleable. People can’t correct you in your Spanglish, the way they would with Spanish or English, for example. Spanglish is not a made-up language either. We didn’t make up Spanglish – Spanglish is a natural expression of who we are as bilingual and bicultural individuals living in liminal spaces. I can’t tell you how I learned Spanglish. I can tell you that I learned Spanish at home and English at school and that my life was not as linguistically compartmentalized as some might think because my friends spoke English, but also Spanish and my family spoke Spanish, but also English and I embraced that through Spanglish.

Spanglish, similar to formally recognized languages, has distinct varieties, or dialects. Ilan Stavans, who wrote an adaptation of Don Quixote in Spanglish and authored Spanglish: the Making of a New American Language (2004), explains,

“There is no one Spanglish, but a variety of Spanglishes that are alive and well in this country and that are defined by geographical location and country of origin. The Spanglish spoken by Mexican Americans in, say L.A., is different from the Spanglish spoken by Cuban Americans in Miami or the Spanglish spoken by Puerto Ricans in New York. Each of these Spanglishes has its own patterns, its own idiosyncrasies.”[4] 

Moreover, Stavans indicates that generational and geographical differences also impact the type of Spanglish that is spoken by each group. Similar to English and Spanish, Spanglish has many dialects that are influenced by a myriad of factors, including communities of contact, age, and social status.

I remember my cousins in Mexico exclaiming, ¿cómo pueden hablar así? when my cousins from the U.S. and I visited Mexico and spoke to each other in our comfort tongue. It wasn’t a question that denoted disgust, but admiration. They thought it was fascinating that we could switch between languages in the same sentence with such ease and they asked us to teach them, the same way they had taught us to speak “el idioma de la F”[5] but we couldn’t teach our Spanglish because we had acquired it organically as part of our identity as U.S. Latina/os.

I know many people in Mexico that speak English as a second language and Spanish as their native tongue, but they cannot produce Spanglish. Similarly, many native English speakers who learned Spanish as a second language are unable to speak Spanglish. Simply knowing both languages does not guarantee Spanglish proficiency. So, what is the breeding ground of Spanglish? Spanglish was born in the United States. It is in this country, in Latino communities, where it flourishes.

Dr. Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, a professor at UT Austin who has been studying bilingualism for decades claims that, “CS [code-switching] remains a stigmatized bilingual behavior, viewed as a failure on the part of the speakers to ‘control’ their languages […] Some see it as a lack of competence or even poor manners”.[6] Often times, the assumption is that speakers of Spanglish are lazy, deficient or ashamed of the Spanish language.

There’s a constant safeguarding of dual spaces and we are asked to split ourselves and to not “cross-contaminate.” This is an impossible request and one that should not be made. “To survive the Borderlands, you must live sin fronteras,” affirmed Gloria Anzaldúa. English says, “Spanish is prohibited in my land” and Spanish replies, “Este es mi territorio, fuera el inglés” and Spanglish thrives, sin fronteras. Spanglish does not attempt to usurp either language; it is its own mode of expression. Do you criticize burritos for not being taco enough?

I told you earlier that I’m a Spanish professor pero yo no respeto el español because languages are not meant to be respected – people are. When you tell people that Spanglish es una forma incorrecta de hablar, you’re really telling them that who they are is a “wrong” version of themselves, one that should be rejected. I know it can be difficult for a lot of immigrant parents to accept that their children are culturally and linguistically different from them and, to a certain extent, I understand why so many first-generation Latina/os are resentful of Spanglish. However, we can’t forget the fact that there are millions of individuals who identify as Latina/o but were born and raised in the U.S. We were not raised in our family’s countries as monolinguals. We do not have the same culture as our parents, but mainstream U.S. culture does not represent us either. We’ve created our own spaces and have formed new cultural expressions that should not be viewed as tainted versions but as unique creations. Hablamos espanglish because it’s who we are.

“Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.
”

— Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)

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] Poem titled, “Querido Spanglish” by Itzel Reyes (2021)

[2] “Réquiem por una cultura: Ensayos sobre la socialización del puertorriqueño en su cultura y en ámbito del poder neocolonial” (1970).

[3] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-talk-spanglish

[4] As quoted here: https://people.howstuffworks.com/spanglish.htm 

[5]  “El idioma de la F” is not an actual language. It is a playful way in which children could speak “in code” by adding the letter F to every vowel. For example, “te amo” would be “tefe afamofo”. I learned how to speak this “language” in Mexico and it was mainly used when we didn’t want the adults to understand our dialogue.

[6] As quoted on, “Love it or hate it, Spanglish is here to stay and it’s good exercise for your brain”  (2018).

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Believe Me When I Say it Hurts

I saw her smile slowly disappear. She pressed in hard, frantically gliding the ultrasound, searching for a heartbeat that would never again beat. “Keep trying!” I screamed at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “there’s no heartbeat.”

“Keep trying,” I sobbed.

The well-intentioned doctor offered me several explanations that were intended to extinguish my sorrow. She explained that this was a normal occurrence, that it happens to nearly 1 in 4 women, that I was young, and that I would surely become pregnant again soon. She said that miscarriage was a protective mechanism that the body uses when disposing of unhealthy organisms and what I heard was, “You should be grateful that your body is so smart.” She tried to bury my pain in scientific reasoning and normalcy. Normal, normal, normal. Normal, as in trivial, as in my life should not be altered and my heart should not ache. Her words felt cold, the type of cold that burns.

I was convinced that my doctor was not Christian, or she would understand the meaning of sanctity of life and surely know why I was in so much pain.

“She’s desensitized,” I thought. “She’s had to deal with so many miscarriages that she has convinced herself that these are not human lives but a conglomeration of cells with little to no human value.” I believed that her lack of faith had caused her insensitivity so I instinctively sought refuge in my community of faith. To my dismay, Christians also minimized my pain. They wanted to subdue my pain and transform it into something nicer, like hope or gratitude, as if hope and gratitude were the only sentiments allowed to be felt by a Christian woman who had just experienced great loss. “At least you are already a mother,” “You’re young, you can have more kids,” “At least you were not further along,” were some of the comments that pierced me open.

The legitimacy of my pain came into question and I was led to believe that I was foolish for carrying this pain. I only carried my child for nine weeks, yet I carried this pain everywhere I went. I carried it to my bedroom, to my office, and to my car. I carried it in my dreams and in my prayers. The pain accompanied me everywhere and filled spaces that my child could no longer fill. It’s true that your heart physically aches when the pain is too overwhelming, but the heart is not the only part of your body that suddenly feels too heavy. Walking, even the shortest distance, absorbed all of my energy, and eating became a laborious task. It’s odd how the heaviness can be accompanied by an emptiness. The pain becomes so unbearable that your body turns numb, but it’s not the type of numb where you feel nothing; it’s the kind of numb where you feel everything.

My pain was slowly being coupled with something even more isolating – shame. The general perception was that my pain was rather unreasonable or exaggerated. I could hear it in their tone; nine weeks wasn’t enough for me to feel this sorrow. My loss was being compared to the suffering of a woman who lost her baby girl to SIDS[1] and of another whose daughter was stillborn.[2] I think people assumed that this would give me “perspective” and alleviate my pain. I’m sure they weren’t trying to hurt me – they thought these stories would help me heal, but shame is no antidote to pain. 

“I should feel better because someone else’s tragedy is worst” was the message being conveyed by people who truly thought were helping me.

Toxic positivity is defined by therapists Samara Quintero and Jamie Long as, “the overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state that results in the denial, minimization and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience.[3]” This seemingly helpful mindset, actually produces more harm and trauma because it encourages silencing and transforms pain into a “dirty secret.” In Christian circles, toxic positivity disguises itself as faith and hope and can make individuals feel inadequate in their faith.  

One in four women have suffered a miscarriage.[4] “Because it’s so common, medical professionals tend to dismiss pregnancy loss, and friends and family members often fail to register its impact,” explains Dr. Janet Jaffe, director of the Center for Reproductive Psychology. However, the fact that so many women experience miscarriages does not mitigate the suffering. A recent study found that 29% of women who had experienced a miscarriage before 12 weeks, suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. The study also showed that 24% of these women had moderate to severe anxiety and 11% had moderate to severe depression.[5] I soon discovered that several of my own family members had suffered miscarriages. They quietly shared small pieces of their stories with me, almost hesitantly and I wondered if shame had silenced them too. I suspected that the lack of empathy that their stories had been met with transformed their accounts into a hasty narrative. They recounted their experiences in a way that seemed rather frivolous, though their glistening eyes revealed a different truth. “This is what pain looked like under submission,” I thought.  

Our sufferings are often placed on a hierarchy constructed by cultural understandings that determine which events should hurt more. Certain tragedies are automatically considered more sorrowful than others. Some griefs are “top-rated,” while other losses are rendered unimportant or are even stigmatized – the pain caused by a son being incarcerated or the death of a loved one due to drug overdose, for example. Society invalidates certain pains at the expense of the sufferer, and we don’t tend to pains that we think do not or should not exist.

Neglecting pain based on prejudices is a phenomenon that is also present in the medical industry. Pain bias negatively impacts women as their pain is often dismissed or minimized.[6] Gender bias in medicine leads to a dismissive attitude that often times, causes misdiagnosis. Christin Veasly, director at the “Chronic Pain Research Alliance,” explains that, “women have been more often referred to psychologists or psychiatrists, whereas men are given tests to rule out actual organic conditions.” A study revealed that women are 50% more likely than men to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack.[7] Maya Dusenbery, author of Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed and Sick (2019), identified two principal reasons for which women experience significatively higher levels of misdiagnosis than men: 1) there’s a long-standing legacy of women being underrepresented or completely excluded from medical research, which means that medical professionals do not know as much about the female body as they do the male body and 2) women’s accounts about their pain are often met with distrust.

Gender bias contributes to the idea that women are hysterical, making it easy to dismiss their pain, and racial bias insists that certain bodies can withstand more pain. A 2016 study revealed that, “a substantial number of white laypeople and medical students and residents hold false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites and demonstrates that these beliefs predict racial bias in pain perception and treatment recommendation accuracy.[8]” These beliefs date back to the 19th century when Thomas Hamilton, a plantation owner and physician obsessed with medically justifying the enslavement of Black people, conducted torturous experiments on John Brown, an enslaved Black man. Hamilton claimed that Black people had thicker skin and less sensitive nerve endings. This myth, plagued with racist conjectures, seems to persist in today’s medical community. According to a 2019 study, Black and Hispanic patients are significantly less likely to receive pain medication, compared to White patients[9]. In short, medical practitioners are less likely to believe us when we say it hurts if we happen to be women or people of color.   

The lack of empathy expressed by people changes the manner in which you are able to tell your story. Truth and transparency become marred and you are left with remnants, carefully curated words that vaguely resemble what you feel. The way we listen to people’s stories can help them heal or it can cause more trauma. L.J. Isham describes listening as, “an attitude of the heart, a genuine desire to be with another which both attracts and heals.” To exercise sympathy and compassion and to adopt the type of listening described by Isham, it is not a requirement to have experienced every single type of pain imaginable to the human condition. We don’t even have to agree with the pain, its cause, duration or intensity. Our holy responsibility is not to rate each other’s pain, but to listen lovingly and to believe one another when we say it hurts. 

The way we listen to those in pain can have life-altering consequences. Pain is a real, intense sentiment that is often difficult to characterize using words, and culture can also influence the modes of expression adopted by each individual. This is why, it is important to listen with an open heart. I felt that my pain was delegitimized to such an extent that, even as I write this now, I have the lingering impulse to justify my pain to you. I am tempted to convince you that my pain was real. I want to explain what this pregnancy meant to me and detail the agonizing moments with such rawness that you would not be able to sanitize my pain. However, I will not do that. That is too much of a burden for a suffering person. I wrote this piece, not with the intention of putting my pain on display, allowing readers to dissect it and examine it thoroughly until they can recognize its validity, but to address the fact that we should believe people when they say it hurts. We can stand with people in their pain without understanding it. We can come alongside suffering people without having had to experience that specific pain ourselves. We can accompany people in their sorrow and console them without any “words of advice” or proposed “solutions.” We can pray for these individuals without even knowing the full story. The Bible tells us that when one member suffers, we all suffer (1 Corinthians 12:26). It is pain that unites us, and that propels us to love one another as we understand our interconnectedness in God.

We have a tendency to run away from pain and in reality, it is all too easy, especially if it is not our own pain. We look away and cover our ears and hearts with much ease. Indeed, it is much more difficult to stand with someone who is in pain. However, pain is not alien to the human condition, nor is it unfamiliar to Jesus. Our Savior experienced immense pain. In fact, it was the shortest verse[10] in the Bible that brought me the greatest consolation in my moments of sorrow; “Jesus wept” (John 11:35).  I was reminded that He didn’t weep because he was overwhelmed by joy and gratitude; He didn’t shed happy tears. He wept in suffering. He wept in loss. Profound pain caused those precious tears, and it was His pain that ultimately brought salvation to the world. Pain, generated by His everlasting love, is central to the gospel message, yet we often try to disguise it or swiftly move past it in our understanding of Him. In fact, “in early Christian times, the belief that Jesus Christ suffered pain was usually not accepted […] freedom from emotion was something to strive for at that time. Only after the acceptance of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380 AD did the pain of Christ again stand in the centre of the Christian doctrine of salvation.[11]” When all trace of pain is removed from the gospel, we are left with an anemic version, one that represents God as just a happy character, incapable of being in the midst of our grief and our suffering. When we attempt to alienate our pain from God, we are inadvertently supporting a theological vision that believes that God is incapable of understanding our pain. When we try to hide our pain away from our Creator, we undervalue His love and grace for us. In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis wrote, “Pain insists on being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” The Bible does not say that God ignores our pain and pretends it does not exist; Psalm 147:3 reminds us that, “God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (NIV). Our pain does not condemn us or separate us from God; on the contrary, it draws us closer to our Maker and to each other. 

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] Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

[2] “A still birth is the birth of a baby who has died any time from 20 weeks into the pregnancy through to the due date of birth. The baby may have died during the pregnancy or, less commonly, during the birth” (Pregnancy Birth & Baby).

[3] https://thepsychologygroup.com/toxic-positivity/

[4] American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

[5] “Posttraumatic stress, anxiety and depression following miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy: a multicenter, prospective, cohort study” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (2019).

[6] “‘Brave Men’ and ‘Emotional Women:’ A Theory Guided Literature Review on Gender Bias in Health Care and Gendered Norms Towards Patients with Chronic Pain” Pain Research and Management (2018).

[7] “Impact of Initial Hospital Diagnosis on Mortality for Acute Myocardial Infarction: A National Cohort Study” European Heart Journal – Acute Cardiovascular Care (2018).

[8] “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs about Biological Differences Between Whites and Blacks” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[9] “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Management of Acute Pain in US Emergency Departments: Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review” The American Journal of Emergency Medicine.

[10] It is the shortest verse in many translated versions. 

[11] Markschies C. Der Schmerz und das Christentum. Symbol für Schmerzbewältigung? [Pain and Christianity. A symbol for overcoming pain?] (2007). 

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The God Who Hears

God is a liberating listener. I first grasped this truth while reading Walter Brueggemann’s classic The Prophetic Imagination. In the opening chapter, Brueggemann unpacks a key contrast in the book of Exodus: Pharaoh does not hear Israel’s cries; God does. Pharaoh ignores Israel’s pleas for liberation from slavery, exploitation, and oppression. He is a cruel ruler who orders Egyptian slave drivers and overseers to worsen Israel’s misery (Ex. 5). God, however, hears Israel’s cries and enters into their sufferings. “And the people of Israel groaned under their bondage, and cried out for help, and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant…And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition” (Ex. 2:23-25). Likewise, when God calls Moses to liberate Israel, God connects hearing Israel cries to calling Moses. “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians…And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come, I will send you” (Ex. 3:9-10). Pharaoh’s refusal to listen reinforces and extends Israel’s oppression. God’s listening initiates Israel’s liberation.

Brueggemann is not the first Christian to spot this contrast. Scholars such as Eddie Glaude, Jr. and J. Laurence Cohen have detailed myriad ways African Americans identified and employed the difference between God’s liberating listening and Pharaoh’s oppressive non-listening before, during, and after the U.S. Civil War. Yet as Delores Williams argues in Sisters in the Wilderness, many of these interpretive traditions have proven male-centered, principally conceiving of God’s liberating actions in terms of Moses. Such interpretive traditions obscure another tradition that highlights the biblical witness about God’s hearing, speaking, and liberating oppressed women. This second tradition begins with Hagar.

A Sister in the Wilderness

Whereas Exodus 1-15 recounts Gods liberating Abraham’s descendants from Egyptian slavery, Genesis 16-21 recounts God’s liberating Hagar, a female Egyptian enslaved in Abraham’s household. It is likely that Hagar became enslaved to Sarah and Abraham when the two were “Abram and Sarai” and living in Egypt rather than the land to which God called them (Gen. 12). During this time, Pharaoh believed the false report that Sarai was Abram’s sister—a lie Abram crafted to protect himself despite Gods promising to protect him (Gen. 12:2-3)—took Sarai into his harem, and lavished Abram with “sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels” (Gen. 12:15-16). Perhaps one of these slaves was Hagar. 

Either way, Genesis 16 recounts that Hagar became enslaved to Sarai and the victim of sexual assault. Desperate to have the divinely promised child, Sarai blames God for her barrenness and persuades Abram to have sex with Hagar so that Sarai “can build a family through her” (vv.1-2). Sarai seizes Hagar and gives her to Abram to be his wife. Abram then forces Hagar to copulate with him, and she conceives a child. Throughout this grievous process, Sarai and Abram treat Hagar as little more than sexualized chattel capable of producing their children. This is unadulterated domination.

Sexually dominated, exploited, and pregnant, Hagar despises Sarai. Sensing Hagar’s righteous rage, Sarai complains about her to Abram and calls upon God to judge Abram if he does not rectify the situation. Despite being his pregnant wife, Abram calls Hagar “your slave” when speaking with Sarai. Rather than protect Hagar or their unborn child, Abram tells Sarai “Do with her whatever you think best” to both. For Abram, Hagar is not bone of his bone or flesh of his flesh (Gen. 2). She is Saria’s problem—Sarai’s slave. Within this evil family structure, Sarai again abuses Hagar, who resists her oppressors by fleeing to the desert.   

In the desert’s bareness, God visits Hagar. Unlike Abram, God addresses Hagar by name. Unlike Sarai and Abram, God invites Hagar to talk, to disclose her sufferings. Unlike Sarai and Abram who dominate and plunder Hagar, God blesses her. Indeed, God’s blessing upon Hagar is similar to the Abrahamic blessing: “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count” (v.10). God then names the child in Hagar’s womb Ishmael—“God hears”—emphasizing, “the LORD has heard of your misery” (v.11). God sees, hears, validates, and enters into Hagar’s sufferings. These are divine acts of liberation.

A Liberation Delayed

Though the LORD hears, sees, and speaks with Hagar, the LORD does not yet fully liberate her. Preceding Hagar’s divine blessing is a divine command: “Go back to your mistress and submit to her” (Gen. 16:9). Hagar obeys. After bearing Ishmael, Hagar and Ishmael live in servitude to Sarah and Abraham for over fourteen years (see Gen. 16:16; 21:5, respectively). The text never suggests Hagar’s treatment improves. Despite God visiting, blessing, and renaming Sarah and Abraham, we only read of the patriarch’s affection for Ishmael (Gen. 17). Hagar’s abusive marginalization continues.

Sarah eventually conceives and bears a son, Isaac. Sometime later, Abraham celebrates Isaac’s weaning with a party. During the festivities, Sarah sees Ishmael mock Isaac. Outraged, Sarah commands Abraham, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac” (Gen. 21:10). For Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael are potential threats whose names—one of which is God-given—she still does not utter; Hagar is the “slave woman” and Ishmael the slave woman’s “dangerous” son; they are not family; son personas desechables. Sarah’s old patterns of dehumanization and domination persist. So do Abraham’s.

After God assures Abraham that Ishmael will become a great nation, the chosen patriarch sends Hagar and Ishmael out from his household. We read nothing about Abraham voicing concern over Hagar’s fate—not even a parting word of sorrow or blessing. Abraham still does not see nor treat Hagar, his long-time wife, as bone of his bone or flesh of his flesh. In his eyes, Hagar is the slave woman, a disposable commodity.

A functionally divorced and single mother without social support, Hagar quickly faces the unspeakable: She may witness Ishmael’s death, for they have run out of water. Desperate and profoundly grieved, Hagar and Ishmael cry. God hears them and intervenes, providing them water and dwelling with them throughout their life-long pilgrimage. This is the path of Hagar’s final liberation from Sarah and Abraham, her cruel, exploitive oppressors. Its parallel with God’s care of liberated, sojourning Israel are striking (see Exodus 15, 17).

Listening Like God   

Delores Williams is right: God “made a way out of no way” for Hagar. But this way was long and painful. And unlike Israel’s bondage in Egypt, the source of Hagar’s oppression was the covenant community, those chosen by God to bless the nations. Abraham and Sarah never utter a word of blessing to Hagar. Instead, they ravage her in word and deed. Together, Exodus and Genesis teach that sometimes nations rage against the people of God, and sometimes the people of God rage against the vulnerable in their midst.

Yet Exodus and Genesis also reveal that God hears the cries of these victims, of oppressed communities and individuals. God enters into their sufferings. And God, the liberator of the oppressed (see Ps. 9:9; 10:18; 68:5-6; 103:6; and 146:3), promotes their freedom.

God’s liberative listening and work culminate in Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Abraham who is a greater liberator than Moses and defender of enslaved and sexually abused women. In Luke 4, Jesus publicly declares in the backwater, colonized town of Galilee that he came to usher in a new age of justice—the ultimate Jubilee year. As C. René Padilla writes, “the mission of the Messiah [i.e., Jesus of Nazareth] in the power of the Spirit is oriented toward the most vulnerable persons in society: the poor, the prisoners, the blind, the oppressed.” Jesus announces that he came to preach good news to the poor, proclaim freedom for prisoners, provide recovery of sight for the blind, and release for the oppressed. As Padilla again observes: “Jesus was convinced that his ministry was to promote radical socioeconomic changes big enough to be regarded as signs of the coming of a new era of justice and peace—‘the year of the Lord’s favor,’ the Jubilee year (Lev 25)—a metaphor of the messianic era initiated in history by Jesus Christ, in other words, the Kingdom of God.” The saver of sinners like Abraham and Sarah is the listening liberator of oppressed communities and individuals like Israel and Hagar.

Jesus calls his disciples to enter into his divine work of liberation. Christians are to listen to and act for and with the least of these—those with whom Jesus identifies (Mt. 25). We are to care for widows and orphans in their distress (Jas 1). Like God, we should meet Hagar in the desert. Like God, we should listen to oppressed peoples and champion their deliverance from evil systems and regimes. Let us hunger and thirst to participate in the divine life through these Spirit-empowered works.

For more about hermano Nathan, visit his website.

About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Living in my Memory: Pastor Rich Perez on “In the Heights”

This article was first published by Rich Perez on his personal blog and can be read at here.

In the Heights, Warner Brothers 2021

Like everyone else, we were excited. Beaming with pride that any semblance of our story — our neighborhood story was being told on the silver screen. We were especially proud because our son, who has been acting for 6 years now, was able to land an on-screen background role in the movie. So, no matter what suspicions or reluctance some of us had about which story would be told, “In The Heights” had us all waiting with eager expectation.

And it delivered…kind of. Well, it’s complicated. Within a few days of its long anticipated premier, social media and news outlets like The Root exploded with criticism mainly about the movie’s misrepresentation of Washington Heights, a neighborhood that recently was canonized as “Little Dominican Republic” to pay homage to the many Dominican residents that call it home.

And that may be the source of the rub.

There are much smarter people than me talking about the nuances of Latinx identity. I won’t attempt to be scholarly about that. These are my reflections, most of which are birthed out of my experiences as someone deeply shaped by Uptown culture. The only other motivator here are my kids, who I feel the exciting responsibility to pass on the legacy of my identity so that they could discover who they are.

Art will always be complex

No matter how deeply a piece of art is connected to a real moment in history, place or person, its expression will always be at the mercy of the artist. As enjoyers of art, there will always be room to insert your observations or interpretations of the piece, but ultimately the artist decides — even if subconsciously — what the pen writes, what the brush strokes, what the camera captures. Lin-Manuel is the architect; he’s the artist. In The Heights was shaped by his experiences of Uptown (mainly Inwood, or Dyckman for us natives, which is the northern most part of the neighborhood. how that difference shapes his storytelling is also important, but for another time). For those of us that took to the theaters in celebration of what could be, we watched a movie about a neighborhood that existed in his imagination. and we didn’t leave with the level of satisfaction we had hoped for. Why? Because we don’t live in his imagination. Not as main characters, at least.

Art will always be complex, because art is birthed out of us. And we are complex beings who are shaped by nuanced experiences, privileges or lack thereof. We’re shaped by our desires and preferences — spoken or unspoken. As the architect Lin created what he imagined, a “mosaic.” But therein lies a fundamental obstacle. Washington Heights is not a mosaic. While it may be home to a variety of Latinx identities, Washington Heights is demonstrably Dominican; Afro-Dominican.

There have been so many Mexicans, Cubans, even Brazilians declaring their praise for In The Heights because they felt seen. And rightfully so, their flags and accents were in the movie. They felt seen because they were on screen. The movie’s effort to celebrate Latinidad (I don’t want any of the smoke that comes with this word) was beautiful but it minimized the Dominican story that lives in the very air of this community. Now, this is dicey, because I’d hate for this to be interpreted as a campaign to not celebrate those cultures. This is not that. We should celebrate them.

This is, however, an effort to show that Latinx expression varies across the different Latinx ethnicities, and this movie was an opportunity to put that on display.

Beyond the tasks of filmmaking

Casting, as much as the wardrobe, the script, the director, or any other department on the set of a movie, is not so much a task, but an opportunity. Better yet, it’s a responsibility to build the world of the film. And in the case of a movie about a neighborhood with such a unique expression, it is difficult to see the right cast in the backdrop of the wrong setting. It’s also devastating to see (on the big screen no less) our streets, our bodegas, our corners, our stoops with strangers occupying them. Even more — what the cast wears, how they sound, their accent, their syntax, their references, their isms, their music, their skin color, the smells of the movie, el sabor of the movie. All of those are special and important to the telling of our story. All of those serve as bricks in the construction of the world that the movie promised simply by virtue of its name. Oh, how i wished there was a perico ripia’o or a number with una bachatica ensendi’a!

But this is not In The Heights through my eyes, nor your eyes. It’s through the eyes of two Puertoriqueños, one of whose relationship to the Heights could perhaps be understood as periphery having grown up in West Philly. This may be the reason for a heavy presence of salsa music and a dominant Puerto Rican cast. Even if they played the role of Dominicans. This may explain why the beloved piraguero cooled los vecinos from the sweltering heat with piraguas and not frio frios. ¡Dame uno de chinola!… not parcha. When you know the artists, you better understand the art.

And as for the visual direction, well, that was in the hands of an Asian man and a white woman. Jon Chu and Alice Brooks are responsible for what, and more importantly, who, is captured by the camera. And listen, this is no indictment on them for those things. I could never. And I wouldn’t want to. But it is a call to awareness that they are the source of this art. And the truth is that perhaps for some of them, this wasn’t their story to tell.

Casting directors and other executive roles in the film-making journey are like the visual managers at retail stores. It’s their vision that decides which mannequins and outfits are considered most attractive for the windows that face the street. Yes, we got to see Latinos on the screen in ways that we never have, yet there still remains glass ceilings to be shattered for the Afro-Latinx community. Perhaps much of the frustration is coming from the expectations we had on this movie to deliver some of that shattering.

Nonetheless, as a Dominicano from Uptown, Lin-Manuel has given me sufficient reasons to be proud of my Latinx identity — no matter how nuanced it may be. But we shouldn’t make the conclusion that critique means that we hate the project and can’t appreciate it generally. I think Lin knows that. He’s also just an artist navigating all the heat his work is receiving. That’s no easy place to be in. I get that, too.

I won’t beat a dead horse. Afro-Latinos were desperately absent in the foreground of this story, and thus, in the present imagination of its creators. But it’s important to share that I won’t condemn anyone for not highlighting me in their imagination. None of us can, I suppose. We can only hope to inspire imagination, stretch it with truthful criticism — whether it spills out of us harshly or not. Though we hope it wouldn’t.

It’s a big deal to have this movie in Hollywood. And I’m thankful for that. There is nothing like In The Heights that has been memorialized into cinema history. That should be celebrated. As big, however, is the missed opportunity to tell the story more truthfully. Again, I think Lin gets that. His humility and active listening is a hopeful sign for great future projects and advocacy of the stories some of us felt fell short here.

If anything I’ve gotten from the loving relationship in my life is that mature love leads with celebration while holding space for growth, transformation, correction.

In the Heights, Warner Brothers 2021

The Gift of Becoming Yourself

Yes, Hollywood is watching us have our disagreements, but I want to strongly encourage us to reframe the way we have these discussions. It’s important that we don’t frame those bringing critique as “hating” on the movie and damaging our perception to Hollywood. And on that note — big production companies, like Warner Bros., with their white dollars, are not the only way to have our stories told. The film-making industry is like any other industry, I imagine. There are enough creators, writers, producers, actors, directors, DP’s of color telling our stories without the help of big wig executives. I’m hopeful for the stories In The Heights will give birth to, but I’m wary of adjusting ourselves to mass appeal. I know it produces dollars, but it dwarfs our stories into something foreign. The road to getting Hollywood to see the value in our stories is long and arduous. Surely, there are other ways.

Perhaps the next best thing that we can do is more simple than we imagine: create. Tell your story. Tell your ancestor’s story. Tell your block’s story as you know it; as you experienced it. Tell it truthfully. Don’t be held hostage by mass appeal. It’s one of the pitfalls we’ve inherited from the social media age. If you drink from the cup of mass appeal you risk the integrity of your story because you decide that what others think is more valuable than the deepest truth of your experience.

There’s no question that this movie has poured gas onto the on-going conversation about Latinx identity. And for that I’m thankful. Our Latinx identity is nuanced and complex, with Afro-desendencia and Indigeno-descendencia. Learn your story. Climb your family tree. Saca tu abuela del closet. With all its twists, painful turns and pleasant surprises, there is no journey more important than the one where you become yourself, as you’ve been made. To share both that journey and what you discover is a gift to the world. To experience that in your art, your stories, your movies is to construct a bridge that allows me; that allows us, the opportunity to enter your story. The only catch is that it must be done truthfully. No hiding the mess. Not forgetting a chapter. And not making anyone invisible.

Living in my memories

My teen years were all about basketball at Dyckman park, bread runs to Kenny’s bakery, and parties at Incarnation Catholic School’s gym on 175th and St. Nicholas. For over a decade I lived in Dyckman with my wife and two kids as a faith and community leader. In 2017 I debuted my memoir about what it meant for me to love this place that had changed so much over the years. I’ve had a number of non-native New York friends message me after watching the film: “Wow, I feel like I understand your story more” or some version of that sentiment. If I’m honest, these reflections are in large part to ensure that those unfamiliar with the place that shaped so much of me wouldn’t conclude that this film captured all what that place is.

If your conscience makes room for it, go buy a ticket. Watch this movie. Take with you what you can from this story. And trust me, you can. There’s plenty there for you. There’s plenty there for us. Beauty does not evade this movie. El fuego Caribeño wasn’t a stranger. To see the hydrants open, the streets flooded with kids, and the struggle to find our place in society — that was still especially beautiful and compelling.

About Rich Perez

Rich is the author of Mi Casa Uptown: Learning to Love Again, a memoir of his experiences growing up in the inner city of Nueva York and the intersection of faith, family, identity and the significance of place. Founder and pastor of 10 years at Christ Crucified Fellowship in NYC before transitioning to Atlanta, GA with his wife, Anna, and their kids, Josiah and Hayden.

Taking Off Ropaje Anglosajón

This month we are featuring two pieces by student writers who are engaging theologically with their cultural identity. We are thrilled to give platform to these up and coming voices who will surely shape the trajectory of the mestizo church. -The Editors

I sensed a call to ministry from very early in my life, although I had no idea what that meant. Hoping to find clarity about this calling, I moved from Costa Rica to the United States to attend Bible college. Among all the options that crossed my mind about what ministry would look like, being a theologian was never one of them, mainly because I had never heard of Latinos doing theology. Until this point in my life, the only theologians I had heard about were American or European, so I subconsciously assumed they were the only people with something worth saying in this area. When during my first semester, a professor told a group of Latino students and me that Latinos in theology were not saying anything white people haven’t said before, I felt like I had no option but to believe him. Then, I came across The Story of Christianity by Justo González in my Christianity and Western Culture class. In a meeting where I expressed my surprise and joy at seeing a Latino name among my reading list for the semester, my (non-Latino) professor was the first person to tell me about the valuable voice of Latinos in theology. He encouraged me to find my voice in this theological legacy and recommended I started this journey reading González’s Mañana.

Mañana was written in English, but this was theology in a language that I was able to understand more than just cognitively; it was theology con sabor Latino. After two years in Bible college, I was not sure I wanted to be a Christian anymore. I could understand English perfectly, yet I was learning about God in a foreign language I could not grasp. The Euro-American theological language offered me dichotomies and neatly organized categories that didn’t resonate with the faith I had inherited - a faith that didn’t fit into the complementarian versus egalitarian or Arminian versus Calvinist debates. Recovering my faith meant going back to my theological hogar to sit with my theological foremothers and forefathers and discover the rich well of theology the Latino community has to offer.

Mañana was the starting point of my journey back to my theological home. To my surprise, the next stop in this pilgrimage was a look into the Catholic roots of Latin American Christianity (an unexpected place to begin as an evangélica). I wrestled through the role of the church in colonization and the pain my Spanish ancestors inflicted upon my indigenous ancestors, all in the name of Christ. In this, I discovered the second church that formed shortly after the arrival of the colonizers. In the 16th century, this second church was led by people like Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Casas. These Spanish missionaries devoted their lives to the true gospel that protected the dignity of the indigenous peoples, even when this meant being persecuted and rejected by the church of the hierarchy. In the following century, the mestiza Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz spent her life educating herself in theology, philosophy, literature, and more, becoming “the first Latina feminist intellectual and theologian of the Americas.”[1] Sor Juana was forced to write a statement of repentance for her views a few years before her death, but not satisfied with that, those in the church of the hierarchy that felt threatened by the truth she spoke, suppressed her works for three hundred years.[2]

Later, in the 20th century, we encounter the birth of liberation theology in 1968. This movement that has expanded and adapted to contexts outside of Latin America has as its hermeneutical hinge the perspective of the poor. In other words, liberation theology is concerned with providing pastoral and theological answers to the issues of injustice and oppression that riddle this world. Liberation theology is deeply concerned with the historical dimension of salvation, with how Christ’s salvation is reflected in the here and now through material liberation.

The next stop on my journey opened the door to a movement within the iglesia evangélica, the tradition I call home. With similar concerns to those of liberation theology but from an evangélica perspective, the Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana (FTL) was formed in the 1970s. The theologian Ruth Padilla DeBorst explains that the founders of the FTL “were people who sought to remain faithful to Scriptures and, at the same time, incarnated in the Latin American socio-political reality.”[3] The FTL proposed a vision of misión integral (holistic mission), a practice that “integrates the proclamation of the Kingdom of God and its justice with the demonstration of its presence in history through the action carried out by the people of God.”[4] In this way, misión integral offers a paradigm that transcends the false dichotomy of gospel proclamation versus the pursuit of justice and liberation for all people.

One of the challenges I faced during my first year learning theology in a different language was the repeated message I received from several of my professors who believed true theology is not affected by or even concerned with life experiences. In other words, they proclaimed there was such a thing as universal theology, while every other expression of theology that considered the experiences of people was a contextual theology. Justo González explains that in this framework, “North Atlantic male theology is taken to be basic, normative, universal theology, to which women, other minorities, and people from the younger churches may add their footnotes.” He adds, “White theologians do general theology; black theologians do black theology. Male theologians do general theology; female theologians do theology determined by their sex.”[5] On my journey back to my theological hogar, I found Latino theologians recognize that, in fact, all theology is contextual, and so they seek to faithfully honor their contexts by producing theology that speaks to and from them.

Padilla DeBorst argues that the radical evangélicos of the FTL, “…recognized the need to differentiate between biblical content and the ropaje anglosajón (anglo-saxon clothing) in which North-Atlantic versions of the Gospel were wrapped and exported to the rest of the world.”[6] The journey to recover my faith led me to evaluate the ropaje anglosajón I had been trying to fit into. This process of evaluation was the second of the three conversions Orlando Costas identified in his own spiritual journey. Costas’ first conversion was when he first came to saving faith in Christ, the second when he rediscovered his Latino cultural roots, and the third when he experienced a “conversion to the world” that led him to become an advocate for justice and to work towards a holistic theology that would account for the necessity these three conversions.[7] My third conversion began when I found my calling in the academic practice of theology. I found my hogar in the legacy of Latinos who have been doing theology for over 500 years, and I am humbled and honored to join this “great cloud of witnesses” from de las Casas and Sor Juana to Ruth Padilla and the FTL. I will not pursue a supposedly universal theology that speaks a language I cannot comprehend, but a contextual, specifically Costa Rican theology, a theology con sabor Latino, which is what we, Latinos in theology, have been doing desde hace rato.[8]

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About Wendy Cordero rugama

Wendy is a Costa Rican theology student and WOS Instructional Designer. Her life in the US has brought her to reflect more deeply on issues of race, gender, and Latinidad. Wendy is passionate about studying how theology impacts all areas of life, especially through its intersections with the social sciences. She hopes to become a theology professor and, through that, build bridges between the academy and the church, inviting students to do scholarship embedded in their particular places.

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Footnotes

[1] Chao Romero, Robert. Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity. IVP Academic, 2020. 97

[2] Ibid. 97

[3] Padilla DeBorst, Ruth. Integral Mission Formation in Abya Yala (Latin America): A Study of the Centro de Estudios Teologícos Interdisciplinarios (1982-2002) and Radical Evangélicos, 2016. Boston University, PhD dissertation. 29

[4] Padilla, René qtd in Padilla DeBorst. 54

[5] González, Justo L. Mañana: Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. Abington Press, 1990. 52

[6] Padilla DeBorst. 45

[7] Escobar, Samuel. “The Legacy of Orlando Costas.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 2001. 50.

[8] For a long time.

Pressure Cooker

This month we are featuring two pieces by student writers who are engaging theologically with their cultural identity. We are thrilled to give platform to these up and coming voices who will surely shape the trajectory of the mestizo church. -The Editors

When I was a little girl

I would get up in the morning to get ready for school

Amma was already up, 

showered and dressed before the sun 

She had prepared breakfast, lunch and dinner 

before the day had begun

The monotonous routine of the Indian woman

Was the pillar of our household

When everything else was falling apart

The rich spices were strong and bold 

like coffee, the daily aroma functioning as an alarm

Flavors that burnt my nose 

but comforted my heart

The clunky metal pressure cooker was on the stove,

Yet again

Just like me, it was imported all the way from India

And just like me, it existed as a daily functioning member of this household

And just like me, it cooked consumed rice everyday

Not a day went by in my first 11 years of existence

that white basmati rice did not enter my system

The clunky metal pressure cooker became my nemesis

As it’s whistle blew it reminded me of a train

That had the capacity to steal me and take me faraway

Reminding me of how nothing ever felt safe

Amma.

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

And just like the white rice it cooked

The whiteness boiled inside of me

Pressurizing into a pristine product for others pleasure

I bathed in the waters of the pressure cooker thinking it would cleanse me

But now I feel dirtier than ever

pain was the corpse that i buried thinking it was dead

but pain isn’t a corpse it’s a seed

once it's in the ground and nourished

it sprouts up into nasty weeds and surprises you

There is value in my culture and I don’t want to throw it away

Throw it into the melting pot to let it boil and disintegrate 

A one way ticket to a faraway place

The train is waiting. 

The whistle is screeching. 

Next stop--your life long American dream.

Amma, I never was strong enough to open the lid and escape

Why couldn’t I have been strong enough?

Why couldn’t you have been strong enough for me?

Amma. 

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

White rice is not enough flavor for some

But paired with too much and suddenly 

you are overwhelming

A dangerous game people play

When they control their intake

Thinking they can tolerate more spice than they can handle

The aftertaste

Leaves an unpleasant mark on their face

Eyebrows furrowed

Lips puckered

Confusion is uncomfortably sour 

Regret floods in 

as they reach for a glass of water

Foreign flavors to them

But savory memories to me

That train will take them to a museum

Where they can gawk and gaze in amazement

But walk out the minute their eyes get tired of looking

Like a field trip where the kids have to go for school credit

But the minute they get off the bus

They are no longer at school

And therefore, 

done learning

Foreign concepts to them

But second nature to me

But if only that train were taking me to my utopia

Where nothing has to be sacrificed

And I wave goodbye to all my fears as they fade off in the distance

Fear of man

Fear of exclusion

Fear of abandonment

In this faraway land, 

chickappa and chickamma will send me Indian care packages

And I open them up with excitement instead of remorse 

In this faraway land,

I never get tired of eating Indian food

And I never complain

Because this time I won’t have to learn the hard way

What I had when I had it

In this faraway land,

The nuances of my culture are known and understood by all those around me

Like we were watching an old movie we had seen a hundred times

Nobody is even wondering what will happen next

But from memory, they annoyingly recite the next character’s lines 

In this faraway land,

My heritage is defended by my loved ones 

like one would argue their favorite superhero or sports team

And instead of our culture being like a set of clothes we could donate once it didn’t fit anymore

it would be our precious keepsake we tucked away to pass down to future generations

It would be intrinsically woven inside of us

Amma. 

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

You see, the white rice is boiling to be plain and simple

Affordable and safe

I am made into something digestible

Spicy flavors are dangerous and to be placed on the side

Eaten in the tiniest increments only if one so chooses

We put Jesus into the pressure cooker

And cook him into a white, fluffed up rice

steamed of any unnecessary and extra components

Now He is digestible

Culturally gnosticizing the gospel 

Extracting Him of his ethnicity 

A palatable Jesus, 

we take Him in aculturally

Generational sin has the nastiest fruit

Because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree

the tree that was planted must uproot itself and leave

far away from getting entangled in the same old roots

of the same old trees

and if all i am to you is red on the outside and white on the inside

than you just picked the wrong apple

and there begins your sin cycle

And we produce safety

Because once the rice is cooled down it's safe to eat, right?

Because they are safe,

I have to be pressurized

Day after day

Laughing and playing the same game

To protect myself in this melting pot we call tasty

Give up the charade

It's not a melting pot where every flavor stays the same

But a pressure cooker where whatever was left disintegrates

Washed away

Washed white

White washed

The American pressure cooker

Has lost its taste

And now I am the whistle screaming

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About Shreya Ramachandran

Shreya Ramachandran is a sophomore at Moody Bible Institute, studying Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). She was born in India and moved to the United States when she was two years old. After many life transitions, Shreya is beginning to embrace her identity in Christ as an Indian-American woman. Being mestizo resonates with Shreya, as she has always lived on the borderlands of culture. Shreya shares: “I am blessed by the ministry at WOS, one that deals delicately with the nuances of culture in order to equip the Church and be the Church.”

Jesus and John Wayne Review

White Masculinity and Theology

It was in graduate school that I first heard the phrase “contextual theologies.” I was intrigued since context - both cultural and historical - is crucial to understanding theology. While reading the assignment, I realized that contextual theologies are essentially theologies with an adjective placed in front: feminist theology, womanist theology, latinx theology, LGBTQ+ theology, liberation theology, black liberation theology, etc. You may notice (as I did) a couple of categories that are missing from these “adjectival” theologies: white theology and masculine theology. The reason is that these are assumed - the “mythical norm” of theologies, as it were.[1]

Since white, masculine voices have been privileged in the field of theology for centuries (or since voices were assumed to be white and male, regardless of the truth of that assumption), any attempt to equally privilege latinx, black, female, LGBTQ+, Asian, Indigenous, or any other perspective alongside those voices is often resisted. “Those'' voices, it is argued, are too influenced by their own subjective viewpoints and focus too much on one or two aspects of theology to be taken as seriously as the other (white and masculine) voices that have dominated for centuries. As if these white, masculine voices are not equally subjective and focused on particular issues.

What Kristin Kobes du Mez accomplished in Jesus and John Wayne is tracing a history of American white, masculine, evangelical theology and to identify the historical, cultural, and political forces that influenced, guided, and focused its theological emphases for decades. In the book, Kobes du Mez draws back the curtain on the assumption that American evangelicalism has developed its theological emphases and ecclesial ethics in some sort of vacuum outside of cultural influence - that it is not just as “adjectival” as any other sort of contextual theology. Kobes du Mez argues that the guiding force behind white evangelicalism for the last 50-some years has been a “militant white masculinity.”[2]

In a fascinating study that follows, Kobes du Mez traces the history of how “militant white masculinity” has always been the guiding force behind American evangelicalism and how it was shaped by and utilized symbols such as John Wayne, William Wallace, and other “rugged, masculine figures,” the Republican party, consumerism, and even the American military as an ideal force for good in the world.[3] Kobes Du Mez takes her readers on a dizzying journey through historical periods of evangelicalism that, despite its comprehensive nature, can only really scratch the surface of white evangelical subculture and all its manifestations. Beginning her history as far back as the 1890s, when the Victorian “model of manly restraint had begun to falter” and the new economy of the early twentieth century demanded a different type of “softer” work than toiling in fields or factories (and as women began to attend college with more regularity), Kobes du Mez records that a call for a new type of more aggressive masculinity emerged.[4]  

Christianity as White, Militant, and Masculine 

Kobes du Mez’s primary argument in Jesus and John Wayne is that this “militant white masculinity” has been the guiding force behind evangelicalism for decades. In so doing, she highlights more effectively than any theology textbook I’ve ever read just how contextual white masculine theology is. Perhaps one of the most devastating moments in her book is when she outlines how white evangelicalism was used to perpetrate segregation through church polity, Christian private education, and through both its constituents’ silence about and active railing against the Civil Rights movement. She does point out that “evangelicals’ response to civil rights varied, particularly in the early stages of the movement.”[5] Kobes du Mez uses Billy Graham as a prime example of one such evangelical leader who even personally removed ropes between white people and black people at his crusades and invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to pray at his 1957 New York City Crusade.[6] However, she also points out that he distanced himself from backing activists when they began to engage in civil disobedience, and that many white evangelicals responded similarly, finding it “hard to accept that the sin of racism ran deep through the nation’s history.”[7]

She argues that this lack of willingness among white evangelicals to continue standing by civil rights activists coupled with their silence about the demand for continued segregationist policies among their fellow white evangelicals had devastating effects. One of these was using private Christian schools to continue segregation and revealing that ultimately, white evangelicalism was more concerned with continuing its own political purposes than fighting for its black brothers and sisters. Kobes du Mez states, “Although blatant defenses of segregation and racial inequality would be rare, many southern evangelicals and fundamentalists who persisted in their unreconstructed views of race would find common cause with more ‘tolerant’ evangelicals on issues like social welfare policy and ‘law and order’ politics that would carry clear racial undertones.”[8]

Millennials from white evangelical spaces will recognize that similar patterns emerged in the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement. Refusal to support that statement - “Black Lives Matter” - was defended by many white evangelicals because they claimed that the movement had ties to a more liberal political agenda and that the civil rights activists within the movement were anti-police. This movement drew fault lines across white evangelicalism that, for some, resulted in splitting away from the evangelical church due to its refusal to support what they viewed as a basic civil rights issue. These divisions only became more pronounced when Donald Trump was elected as the Republican party’s candidate for the 2016 election. What was not widely recognized, however, was that these patterns had been present in white evangelicalism from its very start. The widespread reception of Jesus and John Wayne by those of us who grew up (or are still part of) white evangelicalism has been a resounding agreement that the book puts its finger on exactly what felt off as we grew up, particularly surrounding issues of race, “family values” voting, and the strong connection to the U.S. military (which is brilliantly outlined in Chapter 12, entitled, “Pilgrim’s Progress in Camo”).[9] 

Where are the Women?  

For me, one of the most eye-opening chapters of Kobes du Mez’s book was Chapter 11, provocatively entitled, “Holy Balls.” While some readers may be drawn to other chapters, this chapter described the period of my life when my faith was becoming my own. I found my heart feeling twisted as I realized how whole-heartedly I had swallowed certain parts of toxic masculinity because I truly believed Scripture demanded that I did, and because much of the Christian culture around me absolutely encouraged me to do so. Kobes du Mez begins the chapter with some less common examples of militant masculinity, such as churches hosting MMA viewing parties and Christian mixed-martial arts groups, but speaks to the heart of what was happening at the time by saying, “As militant masculinity took hold across evangelicalism, it helped bind together those on the fringes of the movement with those closer to the center, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the margins from the mainstream.”[10]

A poignant example of this collapsing of the margins into the mainstream is the support New Calvinism gave to two “fringe” voices in the early 2000’s: Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson. Kobes du Mez writes more in-depth about these two men and the way that they were given platforms and endorsements by the leaders of New Calvinism despite many of them expressing discomfort with their crass talk, sometimes violent focus, and even, in one case, denial that American slaves had been treated with brutality.[11] This, to me, was the gut-punch of the chapter. These two men were endorsed by other men who were at the heart of founding various church-planting networks and conferences that were wildly popular among me and my peers during college specifically, and their endorsements meant a great deal. While these organizations and coalitions claimed to hold the gospel message as the most important thing, Kobes du Mez points out that the unifying factor among many of these very doctrine-conscious men was not solely the simple gospel message, but “gender and authority.”[12]

“It was both disheartening and a reminder to me of where my place was at all times - out of the pulpit and out of any leadership that was not solely over women or children. Knowing that I wasn’t going to seek pastoral leadership was far more important to these men than my love for Christ, desire to serve the Church, and my passion for theology, and that oft-repeated question made it painfully clear.””

These two examples most brutally highlight her point about gender and authority trumping simple gospel messaging within white evangelical alliances, but so does the lack of female leadership in many churches that ascribe to this New Calvinism. Sure, there are shining exceptions, but the question I was most often asked when I stepped into a new church in the early aughts is most illustrative - “Why do you want to study theology?” which was code for “Do you want to be a pastor?” It was both disheartening and a reminder to me of where my place was at all times - out of the pulpit and out of any leadership that was not solely over women or children. Knowing that I wasn’t going to seek pastoral leadership was far more important to these men than my love for Christ, desire to serve the Church, and my passion for theology, and that oft-repeated question made it painfully clear.

One area of critique that I have for Jesus and John Wayne is the book’s claim to analyze how white evangelicals got to where they are today, while women are conspicuously absent from many of the chapters as perpetrators of this “militant white masculinity” that Kobes Du Mez describes. It was not simply men advocating for patriarchal norms in churches, nor was it only men leading the “family values” Christian Right, but women were crucial in the formation of and enforcement of this “militant white masculinity,” and one place the book falls short is in fully demonstrating that. A notable exception is Chapter Two (entitled “God’s Gift to Man”), in which Kobes Du Mez highlights women such as Marabel Morgan and her The Total Woman course, Anita Bryant, Elisabeth Elliot, and Phyllis Schlafly. Kobes du Mez continually documents Schlafly’s influence among white evangelicals (particularly politically) throughout the book, which is utterly engrossing for anyone (like me) who had not known much about this woman before. However, Schlafly appears to be the sole woman whose contribution to “militant white masculinity” is traced throughout the entire book. While I think it is important to include white women’s culpability in the propagation of “militant white masculinity,” Kobes du Mez has recently announced that she will be publishing a new book about evangelical women called Live, Laugh, Love, and I believe she intends to address much of what she left out in Jesus and John Wayne within that book. I, for one, look forward to reading it. 

Christianity, Consumerism, and a Dangerous “Culture-Making”

One poignant observation Kobes du Mez makes in Jesus and John Wayne is the way that white evangelicals harnessed consumerism to propagate their cultural message.[13] By doing so, they created their own culture and provided a weapons store for the culture war that consumed much of their recent history. This culture was created through celebrity culture (particularly as pertained to pastors, radio stars, and motivational speakers), radio ministry, Christian television shows, the Christian music industry, Christian films, the Christian book publishing business, and Christian bookstores.

Andy Crouch has written much about culture and culture making. In For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, he describes how Genesis informs our understanding of culture making by demonstrating how God was the first culture maker and cultivator - planting a garden, which Crouch calls “nature plus culture.”[14] He describes the call of those in the Church to create good and beautiful art and other such cultural contributions. Crouch speaks of culture making as a creative, positive endeavor that the Church ought to participate in joyfully, creating art in and for the Church as well as for the world. Through the creation story, he highlights that the problem with culture making occurs when Adam and Eve no longer wait on and partner with God, but “...take and eat, and set in motion the process by which everything that God had originally given as a gift, a sign of relationship and dependence, will be twisted into a right, something grasped from a world presumed to be threatened and threatening, something that insulates us from needing relationship or dependence.”[15]

“Culture making, in the form that Kobes Du Mez documents, is dangerous, homogenizing, and used as a battering ram against anyone who stands in its way or disagrees with its narrative. It also robs white evangelicals of the incredible gift of listening to the voices of their many siblings in Christ who could expand, correct, lead, and joyfully participate in culture making alongside them had the culture wars they participated in not eradicated that focus on relationship and dependence.”

In this description of the Fall, Crouch illustrates precisely what Kobes du Mez identifies as problematic with white evangelicalism’s attempt at culture making. White evangelicals took the gift of cultural creation given by God and twisted it into a utilitarian tool used to fight a culture war - usually shouting about rights rather than gifts (whether second amendment rights, rights to gather around a flagpole at a school and pray, rights to not have to pay taxes to support people “on welfare,”, rights to defend “traditional family and cultural values,” etc.). By taking that gift of cultural creation and fashioning it into a weapon, white evangelicalism lost sight of the gift of relationship and dependence on other Christians. The reverberations of their culture war drowned out the voices of brothers and sisters who had something to contribute to the conversation about culture, and their warring cost them the opportunity to participate in culture-making alongside them.

This was not the only negative effect; when white evangelicals invited siblings of color into their spaces, they acted as gatekeepers to the culture making of that space. While siblings of color were invited to contribute to the worship teams, lead the youth groups, and act as outreach coordinators, rarely were they given roles of actual leadership to set the priorities of churches and organizations. If they stepped outside of white evangelicalism’s priorities for culture making, they were instructed to “get in line” or get out. Many chose the latter after years of being silenced and abandoned by those in leadership. Culture making, in the form that Kobes Du Mez documents, is dangerous, homogenizing, and used as a battering ram against anyone who stands in its way or disagrees with its narrative. It also robs white evangelicals of the incredible gift of listening to the voices of their many siblings in Christ who could expand, correct, lead, and joyfully participate in culture making alongside them had the culture wars they participated in not eradicated that focus on relationship and dependence.

So, What Now?

Jesus and John Wayne provided for me the context of what was happening backstage during my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. The reason the book resonates so strongly with so many (particularly white) evangelicals is that it gives answers to questions we never knew how to ask. It also articulates what our young minds may not have yet had the maturity to say about the culture wars we lived through, and in many cases, were even used as agents in.

Kobes du Mez successfully articulated a succinct, utterly readable account of the last 50-some years of white American evangelicalism, and whether you agree with her thesis or not, the book’s already astounding cultural impact will force you to grapple with it in your churches, schools, and institutions. And this is a very good thing, because so many of the historical and recent events that she brings to light have needed to be wrestled with for a very long time in a way that accounts for the historical context surrounding them and without making apologies for being bold enough to articulate what was wrong about those events.

Kobes du Mez’s historical account of white evangelicalism and how we got to where we are succeeds in highlighting a theological point: all theologies are contextual theologies. Even (and especially) white masculine evangelical theology, though the way it is often taught in many university, seminary, and Sunday school classrooms over the years may argue otherwise. Just as feminist, black liberation, womanist, latinx, or any other “contextual” theology has a cultural and historical context, so does white theology and masculine theology. More than any theology textbook I’ve read, Kobes du Mez demonstrates the danger of prioritizing one viewpoint as normative, simply by laying out the history.

So, is there hope for white evangelicalism? Kobes du Mez seems to think so, ending her book by saying, “What was once done might be undone.”[16] It all depends on us. If we as white evangelicals and former white evangelicals react to her description and critique of how we got here with defensiveness and a plugging of our ears, we are only doing more of the same. However, if we begin to consider Crouch’s culture making and what Makoto Fujimara has called culture care, perhaps we can find a way forward. Any way forward must involve focusing on relationship and dependence once more - not just including diverse voices at our tables in minor roles, but in submitting to those voices humbly (even if they no longer trust our tables and have built their own). It must also involve putting in the long hard work to earn back trust, and eventually, culture-making together again, joyfully participating in creation with one another and with the God we serve together.

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About Luci Frerichs Parrish

Luci Frerichs Parrish is a Midwestern native living in the South. She lived on the South Side of Chicago for seven years, working in various non-profit and church ministries. She has an M.A. in Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School with an emphasis in Systematic Theology. Her current areas of study include systematic theology, theological aesthetics, and ecclesiology. She is a coffee enthusiast, independent bookstore fanatic, and Pittsburgh Penguins fan. She is passionate about doing theology to serve the local and global church.

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Footnotes

[1] Audre Lorde defines the “mythical norm” as “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure.” Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 116.

[2] Kristin Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 4.

[3] See Ted Cruz’s now-infamous quotation of William Wallace at CPAC 2021 for a relevant current example of this exact point. See also Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 4.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 37.

[6] Ibid., 37-38.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 39.

[9] Ibid, 205.

[10] Ibid, 187-188.

[11] Ibid, 202.

[12] Ibid, 204.

[13] Though white evangelicals are certainly not the only American Protestants to do so!

[14] Andy Crouch, “The Gospel: How Is Art a Gift, a Calling, and an Obedience?” in For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, ed. W. David Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2010), 32.

[15] Ibid, 34.

[16] Kobes du Mez, 304.