Stay or Leave

Should I stay or should I leave? Am I trapped in the barrio or is the barrio an inescapable, yet beautiful part of me from which I should not flee (or even have the desire to leave)? Should the life-taking stories of my barrio take precedence (like they do in the news) or do I privilege only the life-giving (counter) narratives that dignify my city? If I stay, am I being a bad parent, allowing my son to remain in a potentially dangerous environment where opportunity and resources are scant? If I leave, am I being a bad Christian by opting for my family’s and my own comfort and safety?

These questions invaded my mind and the noises of my barrio played a conflicting melody where love, sacrifice, injustice, and pain entwined.

El ruido que amo (the noise that I love)

I love las cumbias, las rancheras y los boleros I hear desde mi ventana. I didn’t exactly request this music pero my neighbors’ music selection is everyone’s delight. Ok, maybe not everyone’s, but I like it. I’ll be hanging out in my back yard and suddenly la canción de Ana Gabriel que puso la vecina gets me going, and I start singing my heart out: ¿Quién como tú, que día a día puedes tenerle? It takes me back to the many road trips I took with my parents when I was a little girl. Ana Gabriel, Juan Gabriel, Los Bukis – those were my jams!

I love el ruido que mi gente makes when they’re hussling. Tamales, tamales, tamales. ¡Tamales de piña, de puerco, de pollo, tamales! I love when my son runs out yelling raspadooo when the street vendors pass by honking their horns announcing la llegada of those delicious raspados we all slurp with such gozo. I love hearing mi pueblo use their voice to try to make ends meet en el swapmeet: barato, barato, barato, pásele; ¿qué le damos, señorita, pásele a lo barato? 

I love la euforia que se escucha cuando la selección mexicana scores a goooooooool!

Whoever said my people have been silenced, has not set foot in my neighborhood.

El ruido que odio (the noise that I hate)

I hate that I can distinguish the sound of fireworks from gunshots. I hate that we have to run inside the house and lock every door when we hear shots fired. I hate that every other day police sirens and the noise of helicopters drown out the sound of my favorite TV show, reminding me that I am not safe. I hate the cries of yet another grieving mother as she pleas with the public to help her find her child’s murderer.

El ruido que amo y el ruido que odio are juxtaposed mainly because “U.S. barrios have been a source of cultural resistance; they function as reterritorialized spaces where it is possible to maintain one ́s culture and to resist assimilation. At the same time, the barrios are social spaces where ethnic lower classes are segregated thus impairing their economic development and creating a subculture of violence and poverty.”[1]

El silencio que mata (the silence that kills)

But the most murderous force in my neighborhood is silent. The culprit hides in plain sight. More than two thousand pounds of toxic chemicals are emitted in Wilmington, California every single day. My beloved city is surrounded by the largest concentration of oil refineries in the state and the third largest oil field in the contiguous U.S., and it is home to the largest port in North America (Grist 2022). Wilmington, which is 90% Latino and 40% immigrant, is a toxic wasteland; the dumping grounds of big oil corporations. The contaminants expelled daily create diseased bodies in a community where the median household income is 40% below the state’s average and where 28% of its residents are not medically insured, a number that represents three times more than the national average. The environmental hazard created by these companies also has an impact on violent crime. Several studies have found a link between violent crime and pollutant exposure: “air pollutants act as stressors, eliciting endocrine stress responses in our brains that lead to irrational decisions and violent tendencies and also disturb the physical, cognitive and emotional health of people exposed to it at high levels” (The Guardian 2022).

Wilmington, CA; they call it a “bad neighborhood” and bad neighborhoods are always bad because of the individuals that inhabit it. A “bad neighborhood” is never thought to be bad by virtue of systemic injustices that include racial and environmental inequalities. My family and I are from a “bad neighborhood,” but I don’t think we’re bad people. Jesus himself was from Galilea, a neighborhood deemed undesirable. Dr. Chao Romero asserts that if Jesus was from California, he would not come from Beverly Hills or Calabasas, but the most marginalized regions of the state, like East LA or the Central Valley.[2]

What we really mean when we say “bad neighborhood” is impoverished, and, often, Brown or Black. The “good neighborhoods” are strictly regulated. Associations determine rules about the colors in which you are allowed to paint your house, how often you’re supposed to do your lawn, and how much noise you can make. “Good neighborhoods” are wealthy, have good school districts, lower crime rates and are predominantly White. Language matters because language constructs truth. The use of “good/bad” as it refers to neighborhoods continues to strengthen the belief that the people who live there are inherently bad and completely disregards systemic issues that have created and continue to sustain the disenfranchisement of our barrios.

I understand the ways in which systemic issues have worked against my community. I love my community for the ways in which it has shaped me to be resilient, humble, and faithful. I am grateful for the ties I have formed there and the life lessons that have been imparted to me: to not judge people by what they have or where they came from. Nonetheless, there is another competing truth: I have witnessed more gun violence than the average American, I attended low-performing schools in the area and do not feel safe letting my teenage son walk alone to the store that is 100 feet away from my house. I have lived in this city for over 30 years and there is a certain level of comfort granted to me by familiarity, but as a mother, I face a conundrum: do I stay or do I leave?

Deciding to leave our barrios is more than aspiring to a bigger, nicer house with abundant parking, and plentiful green spaces. Leaving our barrios means that our children will have better educational opportunities, access to resources that improve their livelihoods, and the probability of being less exposed to violent crime. Ironically, the dilemma many of us face is similar to the one experienced by our first-generation immigrant parents with one distinction: my socioeconomic status and educational levels have significantly improved while remaining in my native community.

The Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) emphasizes a ministry of presence in which believers are active members of the communities in which they serve. It is a way of doing ministry that decentralizes white saviorism and centers the voices of community members. They invite people to be wholly present in their areas of ministry by becoming (and remaining) a neighbor. As a Christian that understands the importance of serving the socially dispossessed, am I to remain and use my social and economic capital to help my community flourish or should I leave relocating in a city where my children will be safer and have access to opportunity?

I left. It might seem like that was the easiest decision to make, but it certainly didn’t feel that way. I wrestled with this decision for quite some time, asking the Lord for guidance: “Lord, help us; ayúdanos a entender tu voluntad.” Months later, my husband and I received an answer to our prayers that gave us the certainty that we were being called out of my beloved city. In very God-like fashion, he set the pieces in motion and directed our steps.

So, should you stay or should you leave? I don’t know, and I don’t think there’s a generic right or wrong answer. God directs our paths in unique ways in different seasons of our lives (Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8). For people of color, these decisions are especially difficult as we encounter survivor’s guilt. Dr. Piorkowski explains that survivor’s guilt, or success guilt, is prevalent amongst first-generation college students from marginalized communities. We often ask ourselves – and God – questions that are filled with remorse: Why did I succeed when so many others in my neighborhood didn’t? Why am I alive when many of my classmates aren’t? Why do I have the opportunity to live in better conditions when many of my family members don’t? How is it possible that I love my barrio, but still want to leave it?

Guilt and gratefulness collide, but this guilt is crippling because it doesn’t allow me to faithfully receive God’s blessings. Instead of viewing the earth as a punishment that we must endure to buy our way into Heaven, we must understand the earth as a good place created by God (Genesis 1:18; Genesis 1:31) and our salvation as a free gift from our Lord (Ephesians 2:8; Romans 6:23). Perhaps God is indeed calling you to stay, but the decision to remain should not be guided by guilt. Conversely, if we are being led to leave, we must not do so developing a posture where we see our former neighbors as less-than, or inherently lacking, because of their socioeconomic status, and in doing so, engaging in the further dehumanization of our barrios. Remember that “You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are” (The House on Mango Street). 

About Dra. 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] Views of the Barrio in Chicano and Puerto Rican Narrative (Antonia Domínguez Miguela)

[2] The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology and Identity (2020) 

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Immigrants Against Immigration?

We were in our dining room table tomando cafecito and chit chatting. The TV had remained on in the background and Noticias Univision announced that there was a new wave of Central American migrant caravans approaching la frontera. She reacted angrily and exclaimed, “Nada más vienen a robar, a aprovecharse del gobierno y a quitarnos lo que es nuestro” (They only come here to steal, to take advantage of the government and to suck us dry). I had heard this phrase before, but never in my home and certainly never in Spanish. Her comments me cayeron como un balde de agua fría – they destabilized my narrative.

As a second-generation Mexican-American immigrant, I carry my family’s migration story with pride and a great sense of responsibility. Part of my identity was formed by that journey. Although I was born in the U.S., never had to flee my home in search of better opportunities, and have not suffered persecution based on my citizenship status, I am intimately connected to these stories through my family members. As a Christian, I am also linked to the migrant narrative through the Bible. Jesus was an immigrant,[1] and the Bible is filled with stories of people who had to migrate in order to escape violence, poverty, or because they felt God’s calling in a new land.

I’ve carried, protected and defended my immigrant family’s inherent value in a society that devalues them and fails to recognize their full humanity. I’ve clung to the biblical truths that exhort us to love and care for all people, particularly those in vulnerable positions.[2] I am, to a certain extent, accustomed to the anti-immigrant rhetoric repeated by individuals outside of the immigrant community. I am familiar with the misapplied Romans 13 verse used by Christians who oppose (undocumented) migration, but this rhetoric had now infested my home and disrupted my story.     

What was most destabilized were the college applications that I wrote, proudly referencing my family’s migration journey; the lesson plans I prepared for students in which we explored migrant stories in the Bible; the scholarship I produced about the immigrant experience; my multiple conversations with my son about his grandparents’ journey so that he wouldn’t forget and become one of those third-generation Mexican-Americans who ignores the plight of immigrants, or worst yet, resents it. I was haunted by this question: “Does my advocacy and story make sense now that my relative declared herself anti-immigrant in our dining room table?”

We’re used to telling simplified stories of ourselves and others. Dichotomous stories have become our templates: villain/hero, victim/victimizer, good/bad. However, our reality as humans is a lot more complex. In fact, biblical narratives do not rely on utopian, unidimensional characters. The stories told in the Bible direct us towards God’s perfect love, not to our own perfection. As humans, we embody positive and negative traits, and it is only by God’s redeeming grace that we are salvos.

When she pronounced herself anti-immigrant my story became muddied. Frankly, I wanted to pretend she had never uttered those words, but that conversation haunted me. She was a first-generation immigrant herself. How could she speak so vilely about immigrants? Renowned journalist María Hinojosa’s memoir Once I was You describes how her positionality as a 1.5 generation immigrant made her empathetic to the suffering of immigrants and keenly aware of the injustices committed against this group. But my relative, unlike María, had not developed a deeper sense of awareness or empathy. “Once you were them,” I told her, “How can you say all this?”

This article attempts to answer that question. My goal is to engage in an honest, even if difficult, reflection about why members of the Latino community, particularly immigrants, hold anti-immigrant notions. To accomplish this, in the following sections, I will hypothesize on the potential factors that contribute to the existence of an anti-immigrant rhetoric upheld by immigrants themselves.

Hypothesis #1: A distorted view of justice

Last year, when I first heard the rumors about the cancelation of student loans, my immediate reaction was anger. “I’ve paid thousands and sacrificed so much! Why do these people now get to have their loans canceled?” I thought.

My angry reaction about the cancelation of student debt and the belief that, “If I suffered, others must too” was selfish and absurd. In a way, we’ve normalized a warped vision of justice in which we believe that we are entitled to sustaining oppressive systems on the basis that those systems oppressed us. We tend to feel as though the suffering of others somehow justifies our own, but two injustices don’t equal justice. Your suffering doesn’t erase or ameliorate mine. We consider it unfair if others “get a pass” or “have it easier than us.” Some immigrants believe that if they had to go through all those troubles, so do others. We can accept God’s free gift of salvation but cannot tolerate when others are “freely rewarded.”

The parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:21-35) tells the story of a man who pled for mercy for not being able to pay his debt. After the King shows him mercy and forgives his debt, the man meets a fellow servant that owed him money, demands payment and throws him in jail when he could not pay. Many immigrants are pleading to be let in as they try to find refuge for a multitude of reasons, and some immigrants who are now living in the States refuse to welcome them. In a 2015 survey conducted by the American Values Atlas, 10% of immigrants who had lived in the States for a year or less thought that immigrants threatened traditional American customs and values, and 14% of immigrants who had resided in the U.S. for 20 years perceived newcomers as threats.

In times of financial hardship immigrants become economic scapegoats. “I hear they’re getting free health care,” she said trying to strengthen her case, “and I have to pay for mine out-of-pocket.”

Placing blame on the most socially dispossessed groups of people in our society during times of economic adversity is not uncommon. Perhaps immigrants that have been in this country for decades feel an added sense of frustration as they realize that the promise of the American Dream was not fulfilled in the ways they had imagined and la mentalidad cangrejo or “if I can’t have it, why should others,” prevails. Instead of binding together to help each other, we tear one another down and call that fair, but Christ points us in the direction of love, humility and compassion.

Hypothesis #2: Racism, colorism & nationalism

Although we might be more accustomed to thinking about the evils of racism within a white vs. POC framework, the truth is that racism and colorism also operate within our own communities. Being a Latin American immigrant doesn’t automatically place everyone on an “equal playing field;” racism and colorism don’t disappear in immigrant spaces and these corrupt ideologies often impact the experiences of immigrants in the country of destination.

Pew Research (2021) found that Latino-on-Latino discrimination is almost as common as discrimination experienced from other ethnic groups, and skin color and nativity seem to play a role; 41% of Latinos with darker skin report receiving unfair treatment by other Latinos, compared to 25% of lighter skin Latinos. Latinos born in Latin America are 9% more susceptible to suffering discrimination from other Latinos. Furthermore, close to 50% of Latinos reported hearing racially insensitive or racist remarks about other Latinos often (13%) or sometimes (35%).

In a skin tone stratified society that privileges fair skin, skin color also plays a role in the experiences encountered by immigrants. A recent report published by Freedom for Immigrants revealed that Black immigrants are six times more likely to be placed in solitary confinement; that although Black immigrants only make up 7% of all non-citizens in the U.S., they account for 20% of immigrants detained on criminal grounds. Indigenous peoples are also disproportionately affected by anti-asylum policies, face linguistic exclusion within immigration services, and are victims of anti-Indigeneity racism (Amnesty International 2021).  

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There are also elements of nationalism that play a role in Latino intragroup discrimination. If you are part of a Mexican family, you’ve probably heard many derogatory comments said by your family about Central Americans. The anti-Central-American attitudes predate the migrant caravans, but the influx of Central Americans traversing Mexico has strengthened feelings of hostility and rejection felt by Mexicans towards the Central American community. In fact, a 2019 survey conducted by Washington Post and Reforma found that 6 in 10 Mexicans (who lived in Mexico) considered migrants to be burdens and 55% supported deporting migrants. One would assume that Mexicans, many of whom have family members living abroad as immigrants, would welcome immigrants with open arms.

As a Church, our call is to welcome everyone, not only those who look like us, speak like us or have the same passport as us. Rev. Alexa Salvatierra reminds us that, “The Church is called to embody the boundless love of God by being a community of radical welcome to all God’s children.” Radical welcome embraces the wholeness of the guest and allows engagement in mutually life-giving relationships.

Hypothesis #3: Whiteness as an ideology that also infects immigrants of color

Whiteness is an ideology that can be upheld by white and non-white people alike; much like machismo, a male-centered ideology that is, on many occasions, supported and perpetuated by women. It is perplexing, but we must recognize that as social beings we breathe the same air; whiteness, in this country, is the polluted air we all breathe. Survival is the name of the game for many first-generation immigrants and “the desired proximity to whiteness and white acceptance, and the temptation to protect it once you have it, is a survival mechanism” (Vu). Perhaps the animosity felt by first-generation immigrants towards other fellow immigrants is birthed out of decades of contorting their identities in white-appeasing ways for the purpose of fitting into a society that views whiteness as normal and everything else, as undesirably foreign. 

People of color who uphold whiteness and by extension, immigrants who oppose immigration, seem to be preposterous and self-harming, but internalized oppression leaves us all exposed. In his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire claims that the oppressor’s concern is to change the consciousness of the oppressed in order to convince them that oppression isn’t actually occurring, enabling conformity and uniformity. According to Frantz Fanon, the “breaking in” of the oppressed happens when the oppressed themselves admit “loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values” (The Wretched of the Earth). Internalized oppression occurs when we turn against ourselves, our families, and our communities and we take to heart and mind the lies of the enemy. This type of oppression doesn’t always manifest in loud and clear ways; instead, it lurks in our subconscious, inhabits our deepest thoughts, and expresses itself in the most unexpected ways. Whiteness contaminates our mind. We suck in this polluted air for so long that it becomes our norm, even as it destroys us. This is why people like my relative can have first-hand experiences, intimately know the stories, bear the oppression, and still become their community’s most avid persecutor.  

Final Thoughts

Sometimes the stranger becomes known, the foreign land becomes familiar, and the powerless gain power. Our circumstances may change, but our compassion, empathy and love for each other should not wane. Oppression, says Freire, “is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life” and God is the antithesis of death.

According to a Pew study, people’s religion greatly influences their views on abortion, the death penalty, and homosexuality, but not immigration. Similarly, a LifeWay Research poll found that only 12% of evangelicals think biblically about immigration, citing the media as more influential on their immigration views. There seems to be an obvious disconnect considering that the Bible speaks amply about immigration and references the foreigner extensively[3]. God doesn’t speak to us tangentially about immigrants; in fact, God commands us to welcome the foreigner (Leviticus 19:34), treat them justly (Deuteronomy 27:19; Exodus 22:21) and care for them (Matthew 25:35-40; Deuteronomy 10:18-19).   

Sinful ideologies can also infect the very same people we’re trying to defend, but our advocacy for the vulnerable should always be guided by God’s unwavering word and His love for immigrants.

“El inmigrante militante”

Aún huelo tu aroma en ese recoveco en el cual te escondiste. Aún siento tu sudor y escucho el pálpito de tu corazón al intentar cruzar desapercibidamente. Anhelabas con que ese espacio minúsculo, carente de luz, te condujera hacia tu nuevo hogar. Y ese hogar te dio tanto, pero también te quitó todo. Treinta años después, la casa de oro te construyó, y el corazón de piedra te formó. Ahora, tú vigilas la frontera, destruyendo sueños ajenos. Pero esos sueños también eran los tuyos. Formaste enemigos imaginarios, volcándote contra ti misma. Creíste la mentira del enemigo, sabiendo por experiencia propia la verdad. Recuerda, hija, el día en que tú saliste de Egipto.

About Dra. 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] See Octavio Esqueda’s What’s Your Immigration Status? Divine (2017)

[2] See Robert Chao Romero’s The Brown Church (2020). 

[3] For theological references that center immigration, consult the Mygration Christian Conference.

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Is your Bible Anti-Black? Pt. 2

Editors Note: Throughout this essay, “black” and “white” refers to the colors, while “Black” and “White” refer to historic racialized communities.

שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה בְּנ֖וֹת יְרֽוּשָׁלָ֑יִם כְּאָֽהֳלֵ֣י קֵדָ֔ר

כִּֽירִיע֖וֹת שְׁלֹמֹֽה

אַל־תִּרְאֻ֨נִי֙ שֶֽׁאֲנִ֣י שְׁחַרְחֹ֔רֶת שֶׁשְּׁזָפַ֖תְנִי הַשָּׁ֑מֶשׁ בְּנֵ֧י אִמִּ֣י נִֽחֲרוּ־בִ֗י שָׂמֻ֨נִי֙ נֹֽטֵרָ֣ה אֶת־הַכְּרָמִ֔ים כַּרְמִ֥י שֶׁלִּ֖י לֹ֥א נָטָֽרְתִּי

—Song of Songs 1:5-6

This is essay two of two for the mini-series “Is Your Bible Anti-Black.” In the first essay, I engaged renowned Old Testament scholar Wilda Gafney’s critique of how the King James Version renders Song of Solomon 1:5. Whereas the original Hebrew literally reads “black am I and beautiful,” the KJV’s translators choose to write “I am black, but comely [beautiful].” Reflecting on this glaring difference, Gafney argues that the KJV’s translators “could not see blackness as beautiful, and so their whole identity [as self-identified white men] went into that one conjunction saying, ‘in spite of being Black, she’s all right.’ But that is not what the text said. And so that was the first place where I understood that people make choices when they translate [the Bible], and those choices affect what we hear [from the text].” The KJV’s rendering is wrong, Gafney contends, and layers anti-Black racist ideas onto the biblical page. Accepting Gafney’s argument, I extended her work by detailing the KJV’s cultural and racial context and noting how modern versions compare to it.

In this essay, I return to Song of Solomon to offer an interpretation of verses five and six. I again think with Dra. Gafney, following her lead as I listen to this ancient Song’s textual rhythms. Join us.

Setting the Stage: Song of Solomon 1:1-4

Song of Solomon shocks its readers. Whereas the song never explicitly mentions God, it repeatedly and exuberantly details human love. And this is not the love of mere friends. As Gafney observes, the text focuses on “the love of two people expressed sensuously, sexually.” More specifically, the song celebrates “the love of and between two black bodies—offered as scripture and revelation.”

The first black body the song introduces is the text’s lead woman. She is the focus of our passage and essay. And she immediately makes her romantic desires known.

May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
For your love is sweeter than wine.

Your oils have a pleasing fragrance,
Your name is like purified oil;
Therefore the young women love you.
 Draw me after you and let’s run together!
The king has brought me into his chambers. (NASB, vv. 2-4)

Intoxicating kisses, fragrant oils, an alluring name, romantic flight, and a royal bed chamber—these are the Song’s opening themes.

The beloved declares her ballad publicly. She does not conceal her sensuous love. For immediately after we read her love song, an enthusiastic, supportive chorus enters the text, greeting us and the beloved with a celebration of her imminent sexual union.

We will rejoice in you and be joyful;
We will praise your love more than wine.
Rightly do they love you. (NASB, v. 4)

All are joyful. All rejoice. All celebrate a woman’s sensuality and sexuality. All are elated about the beloved’s foreshadowed lovemaking with her beloved.

A Beautiful Black Woman: Song of Solomon 1:5

This women that the chorus celebrates as rightly loved, what does she look like? Verse five tells us.

I am black and beautiful,
You daughters of Jerusalem,
Like the tents of Kedar,
Like the curtains of Solomon. (NASB, v. 5)

As noted above, the Hebrew text literally reads “black am I and beautiful” (שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה). The order matters. As Gafney writes, the verse “emphasizes [the woman’s] blackness by opening with it.” Gafney makes a related point elsewhere: When describing the woman—the one her beloved declares the “most beautiful among women” (v.8)— “[b]lack is the first word.”

Like her beloved, the Song’s lead woman champions that black is beautiful. “I am black and beautiful.” The word “and” translates the text’s vav conjunction וְֽ at the start of וְֽנָאוָ֔ה. This basic conjunction stresses blackness’s inherent beauty. Indeed, Rabbi Marcia Falk’s translation conveys the text’s tone: “Yes, I am black! And radiant/O city women watching me.”

The Song’s lead women again highlights her blackness in verse five by comparing it to the tents of Kedar, or Qedar, and Solomon’s curtains. This analogy, Gafney notes, reveals that the women’s body “is blacker than your average brown-to-black ancient Afro-Asiatic person.” The reference to Qedar tells readers that the woman “is black as a black-haired goat.” As Gafney explains, the Song’s woman is “as black as the black goats’ hair tents woven from the famed goats of Qedar renowned for their beautiful black coats in antiquity.” Gafney’s use of “renowned” is important. As Old Testament scholar Aubrey Buster notes, the Qedar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains “were considered to be striking and beautiful” in the woman’s culture. Hence, the Song’s lead woman affirms that her blackness is strikingly beautiful, worthy of renown and communal adulation like Qeadar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains. Thus, verse five starts and ends by emphasizing the woman’s beautiful black body.

Many commentators and translators miss verse five’s celebration of blackness. Gafney laments this trend among translators:

[A] myriad of bible translators continuing into modernity persist with “I am black/dark but beautiful/comely/lovely.” Blackness and beauty cannot occupy the same space in the imaginations so they cannot occupy the same space in their translations, no matter what the text actually says. (emphasis added)

Numerous translators render verse five’s opening vav conjunction “but,” not “and.” This interpretive choice injects an aesthetic distance between blackness and beauty. Nothing in verse five requires this distance. Moreover, and more important: the conjunctive-vav’s common “and” meaning and the positive, culturally loaded invocations of beautiful black goats, tents, and curtains provide immediate linguistic and contextual grounds against this disjunctive, distancing reading.

One respected Old Testament scholar overlooks the previous two points. Tremper Longman argues that readers face a choice at verse five: “Should we translate the waw as a conjunctive ‘and’ or a disjunctive ‘but”?” For Longman, the answer is simple. “The context is actually quite clear. She is not happy with her darker-than-normal skin, so the disjunctive makes sense.” The contrast between Longman’s reading and those of Gafney and Falk is striking. So is Longman’s silence about the rest of verse five. He says nothing about Qeadar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains. It’s as if they weren’t there.

Gafney, Buster, and Falk read verse five as celebrating blackness and its beauty. Longman reads it as lamenting “darker-than-normal skin.” If verse five doesn’t’ drive Longman’s interpretive decision and commentary, what does? His reading of verse six.

Sun Gazed: Song of Solomon 1:6

Desire and joy fill verses two through five. A choir praises the woman after her opening declaration of longing to be with her beloved. Then the woman celebrates her blackness. She is black and beautiful like Qeadar’s famous tents and Solomon’s splendid curtains. Given the prevalence of parallelism in Hebrew songs and poetry, we might expect the chorus to support the woman’s celebration of blackness with their own hymn of praise. But the text doesn’t meet this expectation. Instead, it introduces the Song’s first rebuke.

The translation I’ve used throughout renders verse six thus:  

Do not stare at me because I am dark,
For the sun has tanned me.
My mother’s sons were angry with me;
They made me caretaker of the vineyards,
But I have not taken care of my own vineyard. (NASB, emphasis in translation)

This translation doubly obscures verse six’s first sentence. The word translated “dark” carries the connotation of “black” from verse five. Likewise, the sentence contrasts people’s staring/looking with the sun’s staring/looking. The KJV captures both details: “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me.” Still, the word “stare” better expresses the Hebrew meaning involved in the woman’s rebuke-saturated command to the daughters of Jerusalem. Gafney writes, “It seems the city-women can’t keep their eyes off of her. They keep staring, looking her up and down.” These stares aim to pierce, penetrate, and judge. Again Gafney:

The shout out to the daughters of Jerusalem is an acknowledgement that our bodies are always under scrutiny. We are weighed and measured, consumed and labeled acceptable or defective in a glance. The black beauty Shahorah—we can call her Ebony, Raven, Jet or Onyx—Shahorah says you call me black like that’s an insult. Let me tell you, I am black, as silky-black as the luxurious coat of a Kedari goat, like mink, only blacker.

The Song’s lead woman told the daughters of Jerusalem that she was black and beautiful in verse five. Now she tells them, Gafney writes, “don’t stare at me because my beautiful black skin has gotten even darker while I bask in the sun.”

The sun gazed upon the Song’s black woman and made her darker, gave her a tan. Some modern readers assume that the text’s implied talk of tanning entails that the Song’s lead woman is but a white woman with a tan. This reading projects a white normative gaze onto the text and ignores verse five’s repeated discussion of rich blackness. It also elides the truth that black-skinned people tan. Gafney discusses personally suffering this elision.

I am regularly asked to give an account of my presumptively alternate biology, imagined to be fundamentally different from the interrogator’s own normative experience of being human.

“Can you tan?”

“Do you burn?”

I am expected to answer when questioned. To explain myself and my race. Public access to my body is unquestioned.

And deeply entangled with the notion of otherness is the notion of beauty.

The false assumption that Black people don’t tan which regularly confronts Gafney also occupies a place in study bibles. As Gafney recalls, “Some say...doesn’t verse 6 say that she is sunburned, therefore, she can’t be black – that’s what the notes in my study bible says.” For some readers, “being black and sunburned [is] impossible, as impossible as being black and beautiful” (emphasis in original). Even Tremper Longman joins Gafney in rejecting the assumption that the Song’s lead female is a tanned or sunburned white woman. “The woman was Semitic and likely had a dark complexion to start with. The darkness about which she complains is not her natural skin color but a tan or burn.”

Yet the differences between Longman’s and Gafney’s readings remain sharp. Longman says that the woman “likely had a dark complexion to start with.” Gafney, following verse five’s emphasis on the woman’s blackness, highlights that the woman was black and “revels in the blackness of her skin.” Longman says that the woman “complains” about her “tan or burn.” Though Gafney acknowledges that “the woman in the text ruined her beautiful black Qedari complexion with a sunburn,” Gafney never says that the woman complains about her sunburn. Instead, Gafney says that the woman “embraces the kiss of the sun” while denouncing the Jerusalem women’s glares and how her family treated her. The women’s glares are “reminder[s] that everyone won’t look at [black skinned people] and see the glory that God created.” These glares carry negative class associations with field labor. And her family’s mistreatment of her has left the Song’s lead woman unable to care for her own vineyard—for herself.

Let’s unpack the previous point. Verse six’s second half reads:

My mother’s sons were angry with me;
They made me caretaker of the vineyards,
But I have not taken care of my own vineyard. (NASB)

Though the woman claims her mother, she doesn’t claim her brothers. They are “my mother’s sons.” Similarly, although the woman says her mother’s sons were angry with her, she doesn’t explain why. The text doesn’t say she did anything wrong. It does, however, stress that these sons made her care for the vineyards. The joy of agency is missing; the cruelty of coercion is present instead.   

This is not the only time the Song’s lead woman describes her “brothers” controlling her body. In the Song’s final chapter, we read them saying:

We have a little sister,
And she has no breasts;
What shall we do for our sister
On the day when she is spoken for?

If she is a wall,
We will build on her a battlement of silver;
But if she is a door,
We will barricade her with planks of cedar. (NASB, 8:8-9)

In these verses, men alone speak. We do not hear the Song’s lead woman discussing her body. We do hear the men referring to the woman’s genitals as a “wall” (i.e., premarital chastity) and a “door,” a common Near Eastern image that alluded to a prostitute. As Gafney writes, the “brothers” work “to constrain and confine her.”

And this male coercion returns us to it’s first appearance in the song, verse six. For there we read that the lead woman has not cared for her own vineyard—her own body. Because her “brothers” forced her to labor outdoors, the sun burned her. It harmed her beautiful black body. And in act of resistance, the woman rebukes the Jerusalem’s daughters for trying to inflict similar pain by staring at her. She is black. She is beautiful. She is unashamed of herself and refuses to internalize negative class associations with field labor. And she is tending to her vineyard, she is loving her body and her beloved. “It is time,” Gafney writes, “to tend our own vines and their sweet, luscious, intoxicating fruit.”

Conclusion

Let’s consider one final contrast between Longman’s and Gafney’s readings. Longman argues that “In spite of some ambiguities, [Song of Song 1:5-6] is clear about two matters: (1) the woman considers her dark skin unattractive, and (2) her dark skin is not her natural skin color but rather the result of a tan.” Both claims run afoul of verse five’s celebration of blackness, which verse six never negates. Taken together, Gafney argues, these verses teach that “Black is beautiful. Blackness is beauty. Blackness is worshipful. All blackness is divine. It is the imprint of the holy darkly radiant God in whose image we are created.”

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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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The Grace of Babel

Very few Latin@s in the Christian faith know the importance of small town Ruidoso, New Mexico. There, in a little hacienda in the late 80s, a group that would become some of the leading Latin@ voices in theology and biblical studies made a choice that changed the Brown Church for the next thirty years. The scholars gathered to imagine a new theological association for Latin@s. They discussed the challenges facing Latin@ immigrants to the US and the faith experiences of their people. Nestor Medina had the opportunity to interview Orlando O. Espín, a participant at this gathering, and he summarized the group’s decision by writing: “Aware of their differences and of the wrong perceptions they had of each other’s communities, they decided to downplay the differences that divided them and instead emphasize the suffering and marginalization they had in common” (emphasis added).

Downplay the differences. Emphasize the common struggle. This became the standard style for Latin@ theology in the US. To downplay the differences, the group of scholars adopted mestizaje as a central hermeneutic for understanding Latin@ identity and experience. Three decades later, theologians are asking if flattening the differences between Latin@s made certain struggles – like that of Afro-Latin immigrants who face the “double punishment” of anti-immigrant and anti-black bias – more difficult to overcome. By disaggregating the category “Latinos,” these younger academics reveal the greater challenges facing Latin@s made invisible by the homogenizing work of the past. Many today argue for a dispersion of Latin@s into smaller, specific designations rather than larger monolithic categories. Perhaps it can be said that Latin@s need the scattering of Babel. It’s time we speak in different languages.

For many, the Tower of Babel is a story of curse and punishment. The people in the story gathered to build a city and a tower to reach the heavens. After reviewing their project, the Lord thwarted their work by changing their tongues. Unable to speak to one another, the people scattered across the earth. It is common for this reading of Genesis 11 to be accompanied with a reading of Pentecost (Acts 2) as the reversal of Babel. In Genesis, God cursed the people into language diversity; in Acts 2, the Holy Spirit makes people understand one another. Several biblical scholars have challenged this reading of Babel and Pentecost, and it is important to reconsider these stories in light of the question of Latinidad. How are Latin@s one together? Must our oneness equal sameness? Must we focus only on our commonalities while ignoring our differences? How might a rereading of these stories provide a new biblical vision?

Eric Barreto points to the particulars of Acts 2 to note the disconnect between it and Babel. If God intended to reverse a curse, would God not have caused the people to speak the same language? Instead, the Holy Spirit causes those diverse speakers to hear and understand the good news in their own tongue. Language diversity remains intact. Therefore, it seems unlikely that God intended language diversity as a punishment, and the Holy Spirit does not appear to be undoing such diversity. If Acts 2 honors the diversity of languages, how does that change the way we read Genesis 11?

Pablo R. Andiñach proposes that we read the story of the Tower of Babel as an anti-imperialist story. He observes in the story an ironic use of the name Babel that relies on similarities in different languages. In Akkadian, the city is named Bab-il, which means the “door of God.” This was the short form of the full word, babilani¸ “the door of the gods.” A careful reading of Genesis 11 notes the motivation credited to the builders of the city. They wanted to make a name for themselves (v. 4). These builders, says Andiñach, were attempting to establish their supremacy by declaring their city as the gateway to the gods. Their city was to be the city, and their empire was to be endorsed by the gods connected there. It was their intention to establish this city as the seat of power. Already, Genesis 11 foreshadows the hegemonic vision of domination embedded in Babylon. The Hebrew writers mock this city when they write that God scattered the builders, and it is for this reason the place is now named Babel (Hebrew: confusion). God renames. God does not choose Babylon, nor does God permit the imperialists to absorb all peoples into their kingdom. The empire has been confused, scattered, left in disarray. What does this mean for language diversity?

“Destroy, O Lord, divide their tongues; for I see violence and strife in the city.”

— Psalm 55:9

Andiñach argues that language control, like the naming of a place, city, or people, is tied to power. Babylon is the biblical name for the empire, one which Israel would later enter as prisoners of war. The Israelites would one day be forced to speak the language of the empire, forced to live under the cultural hegemony of its oppressors. Genesis 11 is a foreshadow of God’s intention for Babylon. God condemns Babylon’s supremacy claims. God scatters the empire, and in doing so, God privileges those the Babylonians would eventually oppress. The story indicates God’s intention for the world. God does not want monolithic absorption into the empire’s ways of being. Instead, God forced the peoples back out to continue to fill the earth with teaming and flourishing. Language diversity is what God intended for the world. Babel was dismantled because it threatened God’s intended order. The rest of the Hebrew Bible cyclically shows God destroying Babylonian echoes; wherever monolithic violence is the dominant form of being, God dismantles it.

We must be cautious about how we judge the Latin@s of the past as they faced the empire’s monolithic violence. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the US was operating an assimilationist vision for racialized minorities. This vision dates back even further to the early 1900s, as Daniel Burnham and other prominent city planners imagined field houses where immigrants would be taught the “American way of life.” These field houses would also host language classes, and it was Burnham’s vision that immigrants be required to attend these classes. This vision didn’t fully materialize in Chicago, Burnham’s city, but the spirit of this planning continued in similar political programs. The goal was to produce one way of being, according to the logics and visions of white leaders in power. In the face of assimilation programs like these, the scholars of the past resisted by naming themselves and honoring their own traditions and cultures. The protection of identity and culture is, in part, what drove the Latin@ scholars meeting in Ruidoso to collaborate. To understand their decisions, they must be reviewed against the Babylonian operations of the US.

Latin@s and Asian Americans

As mentioned earlier, the hacienda meeting is the origin of mestizaje as a significant theological tool for Latin@s in the US. Those present chose to use Virgilio Elizondo’s work as a central hermeneutic for understanding the Latin@ experience. To this day, mestizaje remains the dominant way of understanding Latin@ identity. We are the mixed people of the borderlands. Those who are ni de aquí, ni de allá (not from here or there). We are, according to the logic of mestizaje, neither white nor black; we are “brown.” Mestizaje presented the possibility to speak of our in-betweenness. The usefulness of the identity marker was its gathering power. Latin@ theologians from Cuba, Mexico, the US, and Puerto Rico could now speak as one “mestizo” people. They could live under one name.

This decision is not strange for its time. In the late 60s, student activists in California went on strike for an ethnic studies curriculum. In an interview for Asian Americans Generation Rising, Penny Nakatsu says she heard the term “Asian American” for the first time in 1968 while attending these strikes. The 60s and 70s were a time of coalition building, of gathering people from diverse nationalities under a single name. With their larger numbers this group could apply political pressure to get their needs met. Like the Latin@ theologians, Asian American students were most concerned about the shared suffering and marginalization of their peoples. They gathered to resist a common oppressive regime.

In 2021, Asian American, Latina/o, Hispanic, and other similar designators are contested by politically active students and scholars who share the motivations of their counterparts in the 60s and 80s. Today’s activists use a greater diversity of identifiers with the expressed desire of advocacy for unseen groups. This commitment is an echo of the past, but many in this younger generation believe the terms of the past are too homogenizing. Too monolithic. Among Latin@s, some even accuse the scholars of the past of essentializing the Latin@ identity. Essentialism is the inflection point. Yet the turn to more specific identities may not solve the essentialism problem. In a video about the erasure of black Latinas from reggaeton music videos, La Gata suggests we reinstate the brown paper bag test to ensure sufficiently dark Afro-Latinas are cast; Afro-Latinas with the potential to “pass” are her concern. In a desire to do justice, she risks essentializing Afro-Latinidad around the boundaries of pigment.

Missed in the tension between generations is the origin of the essentializing/naming problem. The marginalization of distinct groups in the 60s, which demanded a gathering response, and today’s homogenizing of minorities into a single “othered” group, which demands a scattering response, are both operations of white supremacy. These machinations are part of what Emilie Townes refers to as the fantastic hegemonic imagination of the US. “The fantastic hegemonic imagination traffics in peoples’ lives that are caricatured or pillaged so that the imagination that creates the fantastic can control the world in its own image.” The fantastic is not limited to works of art, marketing, or media. Townes argues that images of and about minoritized peoples shape the very fabric of the everyday. Yolanda M. Lopez reveals this most vividly in her 1994 art installation The Nanny, from the Women’s Work is Never Done series, in which she sets the uniform of a nanny, often worn by Latinas, between two marketing posters depicting white women exploiting Latinas. The marketing, in this case a tourism ad and a wool fabric promotion from Vogue magazine, continues to perpetuate an imagination that negatively shapes material conditions for the most abject.

Artworks like The Nanny demonstrate what Townes calls the cultural production of evil. The ads, uniform, and other elements of the installation demonstrate the way little everyday things perpetuate evil imaginings of minoritized peoples; they maintain the fantastic hegemonic imagination. The ubiquity of things that perpetuate this imagination ensures that everyone internalizes it. Townes again: “It is found in the privileged and the oppressed. It is no respecter of race, ethnicity, nationality, or color. It is not bound by gender or sexual orientation. It can be found in the old and the young. None of us naturally escape it, for it is found in the deep cultural codings we live with and through in US society” (emphasis added). How, then, do we avoid the cultural production of evil that consistently marginalizes whole collections of diverse peoples? How do we resist the fantastic hegemonic imagination and its tendency to group, name, and define people according to its own image? How do the generations work together to resist the empire?

ESSENTIALISM AND WEST SIDE STORY

In the 60s, when Latin@ scholars chose to live under a single name, they did so to gain greater political power within a system that ignored them unless they assimilated. The system, however, turned their gathering efforts into a tool in the fantastic hegemonic imagination, and it was used to perpetuate visions of Latinidad that further marginalized the people it named. This is perhaps most evident today in Spielberg’s recent remake of West Side Story. During a recent panel discussion with leading Puerto Rican scholars, Grammy-nominee Bobby Sanabria shared about his involvement on an advisory board that consulted Spielberg, Tony Kushner, and their team on the cultural issues to consider for their remake. Sanabria explained that the original film resonated with him personally because he remembered having to join a Puerto Rican gang in the 50s “to protect ourselves from the white gangs that didn’t ‘dig us’ too much…” He continued, “it’s a reality that happened and is still a reality today.” Brian Eugenio Herrera, another panelist, pushed back, noting that the reality of gangs was and is certainly true, but the impact of West Side Story is that it filled the US imagination with images of Caribbean Latin@s as criminal gang members.

The image produced by the film is not of gang life as self-defense but rather gang life as violent criminality. Over the 60 year period since the release of the original film, young Afro-Latinos have resisted this perception. What had been impactful for Sanabria was poison for the next generation. The problem, as explained by Herrera, was the development of an aesthetic archetype, a permanent caricature of what it means to be Puerto Rican. The film may have portrayed something specific to its time, but this image became the universal, essential description of Latino youth even beyond Puerto Ricans. With the release of this remake, the question of essentialism returns to the fore.

RESISTING THE AESTHETIC ESSENTIALISM OF BABYLON

The debate about West Side Story runs along the grain of the generational tensions already described here. An older generation praises the film; a younger generation resists it. Some within the older generation perceive positive power in it. A younger generation feels debilitated by it. Herrera rightly notes that the film, like the scholars of Ruidoso, set the style for what it means to represent Latin@ people. The scholars of the hacienda in Ruidoso also set the theological style for Latin@s, adopting mestizaje as their tool to downplay their differences. To resist the empire today, however, perhaps what we need to do is release the hegemonic controls of style and aesthetic. Again, we need the grace of Babel and the affirmation of Pentecost.

Victor Anderson, Professor of the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, observes a similar generational tension in the work of his black students. According to Anderson, students continue to ask questions he thought were resolved by the previous generation of scholars. Questions like, “What makes one black? Must black scholarship be political? Are black films, literature, and arts anything produced by a black person? To what extent may black scholars embrace multiculturalism as a mode of difference and remain distinctively black? Is not there something about being black that is shared with no other race?” These questions echo contemporary questions about Afro-Latinidad and Latin@s more generally.

Instead of essentialized styles that restrict the identity to one form, Anderson proposes that black scholars conceive their work as expressions of the manifold manifestations of blackness. For Anderson, blackness should be understood as an “unfinished state” and a “complex subjectivity.” By unfinished state, Anderson is suggesting that the final, definitive word on black identity remains unsaid. Each new generation contributes to the shape and formation of black identity; they add another manifestation to the manifold. Complex subjectivity is an acknowledgement that each person within a group is multi-site, connected to other worlds that shape their identity. As Emilie Townes puts it: “we do not live in a seamless society. We live in many communities – often simultaneously.” Together, the ideas of these scholars point to a post-Babel world that affirms the desires of both generations and opens to a diversity of peoples.

The story of Babel and Pentecost reflect God’s affirmation of a diversity of peoples. Again, Babel is not a curse into diversity, nor is Pentecost a reversal into homogeneity. In both stories, God affirms the minoritized other and does so in contrast to the empire. (Pentecost serves as an early encounter between the Church and Rome.) How do we reconcile the two generations and avoid the essentializing tendency of Babylon? There are at least three lessons presented by the scholars discussed here.

1)    Resist the fantastic hegemonic imagination inside us

Emilie Townes stressed the real possibility that the hegemonic imagination can be internalized. This is just as true for the older generation as it is for the younger. Is it possible that the older generation failed to see the inherent essentialism in their advocacy? Yes, of course. However, to critique them without acknowledging the ways they resisted hegemonic forces of assimilation in their own day is to reduce their story. Is it possible that contemporary discussions about Afro-Latinidad risk essentializing blackness in Latin@ communities? Again, yes. But, to ignore the ways black experience was made invisible since mestizaje became an archetype would align us with the empire’s tendency to erase and assimilate. All peoples are non-innocent regarding the empire. To remember the Latin@ story in detail, that is part of our resistance. To acknowledge what inspired students in California to adopt “Asian American,” to remember why Latin@s adopted mestizaje, to remember why their differences were less important than their shared struggle, this is what’s required if we are to collaborate against the empire’s operations.

2)    Celebrate “Complex Subjectivity” as the grace post-Babel

While trying to explain her womanist theo-ethics, Emilie Townes writes, “life and wholeness (the dismantling of evil/the search for and celebration of freedom) is found in our individual interactions with our communities and the social worlds, peoples, and life beyond our immediate terrains.” The point is that diversity does not equal a society without seams. Diverse communities, however distinct, continue to have points of intersection. And, as Townes says so well, wholeness demands we work within our distinct group and with others beyond our tribe. We can delight in and celebrate the gift of Babel, the gift of diversity in language and peoples, while still connecting along the seams of connection. To say it differently, we can now celebrate the differences instead of downplaying them. This celebration should parallel our continued work against our common struggle. Celebrate difference. Resist the common struggle. That should be the formula going forward.

3)    Work in the Everyday (lo cotidiano)

For Latin@ and Black scholars, the everyday is the location for resistance. The artwork of Yolanda M. Lopez reminds us that the fantastic hegemonic imagination of the empire produces everyday objects of evil. So, our resistance must also operate in the everyday. Everyday we must be attuned to the ways our imagination is being shaped, and everyday we have an opportunity to make otherwise worlds. As non-innocent, complex subjects who live together in the grace of God’s work in Babel and Pentecost, we can create virtuous cycles of cultural production that set people free to live into their language and identity. Everyday arts, everyday products, everyday words can liberate people from the monolith. Everyday rituals can point people to the Word that judges Babylon and sets its captives free to testify of His goodness in their tongue and tribe.

About Emanuel (Ricky) Padilla

Emanuel Padilla is president of World Outspoken, a ministry preparing the mestizo church for cultural change. Emanuel 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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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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What We Forget

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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About David W. Swanson

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

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

The Future of Evangelicalism is Mestizo

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

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

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

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

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

— Virgilio Elizondo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Erasing Afro-Latinos? Pt. 2

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

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

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

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

Flattening Difference

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

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

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

The Foremother of Mestiza Discourse

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

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

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

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

Mestizaje as Exile

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

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

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

Reducing Conflict

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

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

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

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

Mestizaje as Impurity (Non-Innocence)

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

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

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

Para el Mestizo y la Afro-Latina

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

ABOUT EMANUEL PADILLA

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

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Footnotes

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

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

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

[4] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 82.

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

[6] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 137.

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

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 100.

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

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

[12] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 61.

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

[14] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 132.

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

[16] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 62.

[17] Romero, Brown Church, 163.

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

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

[20] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 75.

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

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

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

Divided We Stand: Latina/o Students in White Institutions

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

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

I could not verbalize my disbelief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Heidi Lepe

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

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Footnote

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

“Don’t worry Mamaw, I’m Black”

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

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

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

— Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question”

Racial Schooling: Lesson One

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racial Schooling: Lesson Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas looked dumbfounded, but quickly replied.

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

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

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

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

Racial Schooling: Lesson Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s a Black gas station.”

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

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

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

“Honey, who told you you’re Black?”

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

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

Mamaw was livid.

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

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

Racial Schooling: Lesson Four

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

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

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

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

About Nathan Luis Cartagena, PhD

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

El Español in the US: Memoria and Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Dr. José Medina

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

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

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

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

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

About Dra. Itzel meduri soto

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

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Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[11] My Spanish (2015).  

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

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

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

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

Does Righteousness Have a Color Scheme?

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

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

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

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

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

A Story of Cultural Identity

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

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

A Story of our Uniqueness

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

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

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

[1] All names of interviewees changed for privacy.

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About Emily C. Alexander

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