On Linguistic (In)Justice

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

“‘NO SPANISH!’ she bellowed. ‘You were all told that in your classroom! There will BE ONLY ENGLISH SPOKEN on the school grounds! Do you boys understand me!’ […] ‘I told you, NO SPANISH!’ yelled the teacher, grabbing Ramón by his shoulders and shaking him […] And she slapped him across the face, once, twice, three times.”

This excerpt, taken from Victor Villaseñor’s memoir, Burro Genius (2004), describes, in painful detail, the experiences of Victor as a young boy growing up in Carlsbad, California in the 1950s. Schools all across the country, especially in states with high populations of Spanish speakers, enforced a strict English-only policy. In Blackwell, a segregated school in Texas designated for children of Mexican ancestry, a symbolic burial of the Spanish language was performed. During the “Burial of Mr. Spanish,” students were asked to write notes of their favorite Spanish words that were then inserted in cigar boxes and buried at the base of the American flag[1]. It was, as if, to achieve true “Americanness,” students had to literally bury parts of their identity. More than half a century later, the English-only rhetoric continues to find a home in U.S. society. Students are still reprimanded for speaking Spanish in schools, families are attacked for communicating in Spanish, and English continues to be seen as the only legitimate U.S. language.

In many respects, the U.S. has adopted a replacive attitude of language learning. This posture supports the idea that, in order to learn English, one must forget Spanish or any other language. Yet, God created us with the amazing ability of learning multiple languages. We don’t have to forget a language, to learn another. In fact, monolinguals[2] are the minority (40% of the world). Bilingualism is not only normal but also greatly beneficial. In addition, there are many cognitive, socio-emotional and interpersonal advantages associated with bilingualism. For example, while bilingualism doesn’t prevent dementia, it does delay its onset by approximately 4-5 years, and a recent study[3] found that bilingual patients who had suffered a stroke were twice as likely to achieve full cognitive recovery compared to their monolingual counterparts. In short, multilingual people’s brains and worlds are expanded as a result of their linguistic abilities.

The overwhelming evidence supporting bilingualism is not only ignored in the U.S., but bilingual individuals are often seen as deviant. Thirty-four million viewers watched as Jennifer Lopez recited a Spanish line of the Pledge of Allegiance during her performance at President Biden’s inauguration: “Una nación, bajo Dios, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos!”. While this gesture was embraced by many viewers, especially those of Spanish-speaking heritage, many others took offense to this and expressed their dissatisfaction publicly. “This is America. We speak English,” “No idea what J.Lo just belted out in Spanish. Try communicating with EVERYONE,” and “Speaking Spanish at the American President Inauguration? Not everybody speaks Spanish! It was sad and shows a low education,” were some of the reactions posted on Twitter. Despite the fact that the U.S. does not have an official language at the federal level, that 67.3 million people in the U.S speak a language other than English at home[4] and that Spanish is a recognized language spoken by 500 million people worldwide, the assumptions revealed by the Twitter posts were that English is the official language of the U.S., that English is spoken and understood by everyone in the U.S. and that Spanish is spoken by uneducated people.

Language ideologies are implicit assumptions about a language and language varieties that are highly influenced by sociopolitical and cultural factors. For example, the idea that the French language “sounds romantic,” is directly linked to the perception that individuals have about French society – “sophisticated, romantic, elegant” – and these notions directly influence the manner in which the French language is perceived. Similarly, certain linguistic varieties of the same language are rendered more desirable and even appropriate based on the perception that society has of the people group that is associated with that variety; British English is “better” than Ghanaian English; Spaniards speak “correct” Spanish whereas Dominicans speak a defective variety (note that the Dominican Republic has a significantly high Afro-Latina/o population); African-American English and Latino English are substandard varieties in need of correction, etc. If you want to identify the languages and linguistic varieties that enjoy the most and least prestige in any society, it is sufficient to analyze racial and class status. In Mexico, for example, the Spanish spoken by indigenous people is often stigmatized and considered “ugly,” and in Italy there is a predilection for the Italian spoken in Milan over the one spoken in Sicily (Sicilians tend to be darker in complexion and Milan is wealthier). We may believe that language attitudes are mostly formed by inherent truths about languages and dialects; in reality, they are, to a large extent, shaped by power dynamics that sustain certain racial and class hierarchies.   

Language ideologies affect racialized bodies in different ways. I often hear from my White students, “I wish I had learned Spanish as a child” and “I always knew that bilingualism is beneficial.” They’re initially confused when they learn that bilingualism is not always encouraged and at times, even punished. In non-White bodies, bilingualism is often seen as a liability, a menace against the English language, and an assault against “Americanness.” No John Smith has ever been told, “Speak English, we’re in America” but when Spanish is spoken by a Miguel Rodriguez or Korean by a Hayun Kim, suspicion quickly arises.   

My son was ten years old when he told me that he didn’t want to speak Spanish because he was, “an American.” “El español te da de comer, mijito (Spanish feeds you),” I told him sarcastically, reminding him that our income was generated by my ability to teach Spanish. In reality, the idea that Spanish did not belong in this land nor could it exist in the mouths of “real Americans” was not his own; this message had been transmitted to him at a very young age. Admittedly, I had gone through a similar phase. I remember feeling secretly ashamed that my parents spoke Spanish, and when they attempted to speak English, I quickly intervened, not because I was trying to help them, but because I felt they would embarrass me with their “poor English.” Feeling ashamed of your family, your language, your heritage is incredibly damaging. It is imperative that we carefully examine the ways in which we might be inadvertently perpetuating linguistic notions that serve to further victimize communities of color.

It is amazing that God gave the ability of multilingualism to Jesus, who spoke Hebrew and Aramaic[5]. We know that Jesus did not come to this earth as King but as a Brown man from the margins[6]. As a Galilean Jew, Jesus did not speak the prestigious variety of the religious elite[7] and his non-standard accented speech[8] emphasized his status as a marginal subject. Our savior came to this world to deliver the message of salvation using a linguistic variety that, given linguistic prejudices, might have been considered “ugly,” “undesirable” and “unintelligent.”

Multilingualism is a God-given gift that must be cherished and celebrated. Every language you speak gives you access to a particular group of people and allows you to form deeper bonds with those individuals. My languages are the bridges that enable me to traverse paths that would otherwise remain unknown to me. My languages give me the possibility to understand the sorrows of my neighbors and share the joys of my friends. Through my languages, I can speak of Jesus in a way that is understood by multiple communities. ¡Gloria a Dios! Glory to God!

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] Bacigalupo, Chantelle (2019): https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-04-29/no-spanish-allowed-texas-school-museum-revisits-history-segregation

[2] Monolinguals are people who only speak one language.

[3] Alladi, Suvarna, et al. “Impact of Bilingualism on Cognitive Outcome After Stroke.” Stroke, vol. 47, no. 1, 2016, pp. 258–261., doi:10.1161/strokeaha.115.010418. 

[4] Center for Immigration Studies (2018)

[5] According to Dr. Jonathan Katz of the University of Oxford, Jesus may have also spoken Greek, as cited in https://www.history.com/news/jesus-spoke-language

[6] See Robert Chao Romero’s book, “The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology and Identity” (2020).

[7] See Virgilio Elizondo’s book, “Galilean Journey: the Mexican-American promise” (2000).

[8] It is important to note that we all speak with an accent. Accents are contextually determined; for instance, people from England might think Canadians have accents and vice versa. “Standard” and “non-standard” accents are not “scientifically” determined; instead, they are based on social perceptions.

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The Rocks Shall Cry Out! Why not the Dust, Too?

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

“Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. . . . All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken” (Acts 2:2, 4–6).

“Listening to wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own” (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass 48) 

“Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples!’

‘I tell you,’ he replied, ‘if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out’” (Luke 19:39–40)

From the moment of birth, children begin the amazing journey toward speech. The process, frankly, remains a mystery to us all, even the most dedicated of researchers. Fresh to the smells, sights, and sounds of the world, most babies simply offer the most basic of speech: the utterance of cries. Yet over time the communicative cries give way to thoughtful attempts to shape words. But from where do these words come? Unlike the disciples in Acts 2, babies do not receive the Spirit of obscure tongues never before known in their communities. Rather, babies listen, process, and eventually repeat. That is to say, their language is a function of their place. People all around them speak, and they speak out of their places and speak the formation of places. In a more modest sense than God’s acts in Genesis 1, people form the world around them through the simple-yet-complex utterances of language. People utter words from a prior place of reception, for we all began as babies. The cycle repeats, bringing forth new communicators taking on the languages of their places and adding to the descriptions of their places, both through the fine-tuning that happens in places and through the interactions that occur between places. We were born to form words drawn out of our places and to utter words that continue to form our places.

What I want to explore is the connection between words and places—a connection taken for granted in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures—and the malformation of places when that connection is lost. Our lives exist in the intersection of words and places, for we are communicative beings taken from the dust of the ground who live in a communicative world and who were brought into being by a communicative God who began it all with a simple, “Let there be!” Places and words are intimately connected. We know places through our acquaintance with the language(s) of a place, and we know each other within those places and through our shared (or differing) tongues. These languages are those of people but also of the earth itself. When we lose the connection between place and words, we are doomed to do violence to both people and the earth. Before turning to the violence, though, we should first turn to what we take for granted: people belong in places.

From the dust of the ground

Often seen as two “tablets” of creation, Genesis 1 and 2 present two different yet complimentary accounts of creation. Genesis 1 provides a genealogy of creation moving from heaven to earth (Gen. 1:1) while chapter 2 moves from the earth to the heavens (Gen. 2:4). The Bible persistently sees “heaven” as the abode of God, while the “earth” is the abode of humanity. The first tablet is the account of God’s movement from his abode into his formation of the abode of humanity, so the account fittingly culminates in the creation of the creatures of the earth as bearers of the image of the heavenly Father on and in the earth. The parallels of the six days of creation further clarify the movement. Days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, and 3 and 6 parallel each other, where the first day in the couplets presents creation through separation (e.g., light from darkness, water from firmament, water from land) while the second day of the couplets narrates God’s formation of places and population amid the same realms (e.g., celestial bodies, fish and birds, animals and humans). The final description is the creation of humanity to be creatures of the earth alongside animals, but the special commission to humanity is to be the presence of God in the earth and amid the creatures of the earth. Humanity was made to be God’s image.

Meanwhile, the second tablet takes up the task of describing the place of humanity, specifically the work of making places and doing so around the presence of God. Humanity was to be a species of priestly gardeners and caretakers, cultivating life in the earth encircled around the Tree of Life, which sat in the middle of the Garden (Gen. 2:9). That life was a life of promise and nourishment: in the Tree, the fruit of God’s lips joined with the fruit of the earth to be a source of life in its fullest for all the creatures of the Garden. Physical and spiritual nourishment were one in that tree at the center of the Garden. The earth received its life from God and was sustained in that life by God’s life-giving presence in her midst. Humanity’s priestly task was to direct all of creation to its fullness in God by encircling it around his place of joining. Humanity was perfectly equipped to the task, for humanity was a creature of the dirt yet received life from the breath of God himself (Gen. 2:7).

Of course, tragedy enters the tale in Genesis 3, where creation is undermined by the priestly humans enclosing creation around the false promise—the lie of the serpent—which brought death. All of creation suffers because the one who belonged to the earth betrayed the earth. The place of life in the presence of God became the place of shame and hiding. The whole earth felt the effect, for her own priest and caretaker enclosed her around death. The same space teaming with life was now the site of two places: the possibility of life through the joining of the earth and the abode of God, the heavens, and the new reality of death through the separation of the earth from God’s presence. An act equally fit for judgment and mercy, God bars the path to the possibility of life. The earth was no longer fit, for the time being, to occupy the place of life. With the fall of humanity goes the fall of the earth because the two belong together. Humanity belongs to the dust of the ground, but now facing toward death, humanity will lose its life and dissolve back merely into the earth, devoid of the breath of God.

The biblical story only just begins with the fall, though. Throughout the pages of the Bible, the people of the earth and the life of the earth remain intertwined. In Genesis 3, the earth is cursed with humanity. In Genesis 4, the earth is stained with the blood of Abel and thus protests by refusing to yield crops to Cain. In Genesis 6, humanity becomes so horrific that days 3 and 6 of creation must be undone—“baptized” according to Peter (1 Pet. 3:20–21)—as the waters submerge the earth and all its life. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, “wild beasts” signal echoes of the loss of Eden, foreshadowing Revelation, where the lion and the lamb rest together. God provides an image of a new Eden in the giving of a land flowing with milk and honey to a new humanity, the people of his covenant through whom he will bring redemption, yet in their disobedience, they too are sent out of the land and away from the presence of God. Indeed, as Jesus, the last “Adam”—meaning “person of the dirt”—proclaimed in Luke 19, the rocks cry out. Humanity and the earth belong together, so much so that Revelation culminates in the image of a new Eden with a new Tree of Life nourishing the creatures of the earth.

In the contemporary world, our imaginations are not shaped toward awareness of our being creatures who belong to the earth; nonetheless, our daily lives demonstrate this reality. Our lives are characterized by technologies that obscure the dependence: we mostly live and work in buildings with climate control systems that keep our bodies in relatively narrow bands of atmospheric conditions; we traverse space primarily in automobiles, hovering over the earth and with their own climate controls; we board public transportation and walk through cities wearing headphones and earbuds that block our auditory connection to our places. Our food travels great distances by land, air, and sea before reaching sanitized supermarkets with more climate control.

Yet the fact remains that we are creatures of the earth. Our food, from wherever it comes, is the fruit of plants, the meat or eggs of animals, or a factory combination of both through processing. Our growth from womb onward depends upon nourishment from the earth. Our muscles gain their strength from the protein in the food and the gravity of the earth, their energy from the sugar in plants, and their health from the vitamins and nutrients in the sun’s rays and earth’s soil. Despite the environmental systems of buildings and cars, the air we breathe is the air that permeates the earth, a living sign of the Spirit that hovered over the deep and filled the lungs of the first gardeners and first apostles (Gen. 2:7; Jn. 20:22). Our skin bears the marks of the soil in which our ancestors experienced differing intensities of the light and heat of the sun. Our finger nails bear the dirt of the earth that we grasp in our hands. Our bodies take their form at least partially from their terrain: people of the mountains have thicker and stronger thighs, farmers have stronger arms and hands, while ocean dwellers have bleached hair.

Our cultures are constantly changing ways of life in tune with particular places and its particular people. Indians beget Indians in more than genetic ways. Yet Indians of the village beget Indians with different sensibilities than Indians of the city, who are different from Indians in diaspora in the United States. The same can be said of Puerto Ricans. American soil and its places provide new earth in which to learn how to be Indian and Puerto Rican, as do the interactions of Indians and Puerto Ricans on American soil. We bear customs borne of the joining of places, taking customs that reflect local practices into new places, new soil, thereby creating new ways to be in the earth that are both true to the soil that bore us and to the soil of the place in which we set new roots. There is, perhaps, no better image of this exchange than language, for we are creatures of language who become audience to people and places and the earth each with their own languages. In the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, we become “audience to conversations in a language not our own.”[1]

Name the animals

Contemporary philosophers have noted that language only works for communication because it enables the formation of shared ideas on the basis of generalities that create common expression. For example, take the word “apple.” For speakers of English, the apple is so basic to our perception of the world that we rarely think twice before qualifying it. We simply say things such as “I love apples” or “I hate apples” or “buy some apples at the store.” In fact, whereas we might qualify something much less basic to our lives, such as “I like action movies but not romantic comedy movies” or “I can tolerate salmon but have no interest in catfish,” we usually do not think twice about the simple designation “apple.” No one would assume that “I hate apples” would be a way of denouncing a group of people. Yet, as I learned early in my marriage, a lot more is taken for granted in the simple designation “apple” than my wife or I realized. One day, she sent me to the grocery store with a list, and atop the list was “apples.” As a child, my mother bought red delicious, granny smith, and golden delicious apples, and by my late 20’s, I had firmly settled upon a preference. I had had other apples, but in my mind, the choice was rather clear: in the store, I would look for the red delicious apples and then move on to the next item on the list. I do not recall even noticing other kinds: my childhood, my house, my family had formed the language of “apple” in a specific way. When I returned home, my wife was appalled at my decision to bring those “spongy” things into the house (a decade later, I still don’t know what that means). For my Canadian wife born in a different place in a different family and country, red delicious was not remotely on her radar. She wanted pink ladies! Rest assured that the simple designation “apple” did not appear on a list for a long time thereafter.

A second example will solidify the point. For several years, I taught on a summer study abroad program that took primarily Euro-American college students to Italy, Switzerland, and Germany for two months of immersive learning. In Germany, we stayed in a youth hostel, and every morning, we would begin the day together with an open breakfast. Among the offerings was a bowl full of fruit. Many students were accustomed to eating fruit with their breakfast but were thoroughly bewildered at the offerings before them in the hostel. Rather than the waxed, rotund, symmetrical apples that American chain grocery stores sell, the students encountered small, asymmetrical, unwaxed apples with skin blemishes. Rather than juicy and sweet, the German apples had a much more subtle taste to them. I had one German student for whom everything seemed in order, but the American students could be heard complaining, “What kind of apples are these?”

In both examples, “apple” turned out to bear far more meaning than it initially seemed. For all of its ability to present a general category, the word “apple” gained meaning only insofar as it connected to people in their places. Apart from its connection to places, “apple” means little more than “snow” does to one who grows up in the Sahara and “heat” does to the Alaskan. The ideas of “apple,” “snow,” and “heat” bear little meaningful significance apart from life in places. We receive a hint of this joining of language and place in Genesis 2, where God tells Adam to name the animals. Actually, the situation is more enigmatic, for God first reflects that it is not good for Adam to be alone, and then tells him to name the animals. While the text does not reveal the names that Adam provided, given the close connection between language and place, we can begin to understand the divine rationale. As a gardener and a caretaker of the animals, Adam knew Eden as his home, the way that a gardener or zoologist knows her place today. Naming generally reflects some sort of intimate acquaintance, for it says something about the person or thing being named relative to the one(s) doing the naming. As caretaker, a degree of intimacy between Adam and the animals is taken for granted. His act of naming took place amid the type of acquaintance with the animals that taught him about companionship. He experienced the intimacy that a hippo shared with another hippo yet could not with him. He saw that for all his familiarity, none of the animals could take his own name. After this exercise teaches him what he is missing, God gives him “bone of [his] bone, flesh of [his] flesh” (Gen. 2:23). Adam names her from his intimate understanding of his position within his place. She is like him in a way that the rest are not. Not surprisingly, they are then together to fill the place and serve it as gardeners and caretakers. Word and place belong together, and people are creatures of both.

The rocks will cry out

So what happens when people and words lose the significance of their birth from places and earth? What happens when people forget that ideas are borne out of places rather than supervene over those places? What happens when people miss that ideas are generalities that are communicative shorthand for those practices, discursive practices, and encounters borne of and taking place in the earth? Modern history is marked by colonialism, where the normalcy of one place and its ideas, language, and practices borne of their earth imposes itself as the universal mark of “civilization” upon another. The nature of universal claims is the removal of all local specificity: it is communication in generalities. The “essence” of the apple—that is, what joins competing local understandings of apples—is the idea that is simultaneously no particular apple at all and the core of what unites all apples. The problem here is not that we have the language of “apple” that enables communication. Rather, the problem is the forgetfulness that none of us become acquainted with or know “apple” independently of the particular apples that we encounter. The generalities of language helpfully enable communication, but when we are hungry, we want an actual physical apple. That physical apple—no less than our stomachs—has no interest in universal, general claims. The truthfulness of the apple is in the particular apple before us that can satisfy our hunger.

In colonialism, though, the idea of the apple reins, but as we have seen, the idea is nothing other than the image of an apple that belongs to one group of people in one place. Yet that people has forgotten that their particularity has shaped their understanding of the universal. In that forgetfulness, they impose the “true” idea of “civilization”—goodness, beauty, nobility—upon another. Rather than listening to the language(s) of a place, rather than taste and feel the distinctives of a locale, they impose the developments of goodness, beauty, nobility, and truth of their places upon the other as though the language of their own places were universal. The colonizer often genuinely believed he was doing a good thing, for he was a theological agent of perfecting nature according to the logic of his place. In the process, though, the beautiful truth of Pentecost in Acts 2 fell away.

After Jesus ascended, he sent his Spirit to fill his disciples, and the immediate manifestation was their speaking the languages of all of those present in the court around them. What the disciples learned in that instance—even if it took thirteen more chapters for it to sink in—was that the message of Jesus was capable of taking up the specificities of any language. Everyone present heard in his or her own tongue. Indeed, the beauty of their wondrous news was the transfiguration of all peoples and places. It was the message of the return of the possibility of Eden, where every people and place—with their languages—could now receive life by being encircled around the new joining of heaven and earth. Jesus, the second “Adam” or “dirt-person,” was also the man of heaven (1 Cor. 15), and in him, the heavens and earth met in intimate union again. But the joining did not destroy the languages of people and earth. Instead, Pentecost provided an image of the transfiguration of all the languages. That is to say, the earth in all its beautiful complexity was capable of bearing the presence of God in Jesus the Christ.

Conversely, modern colonialism destroyed places, imposing the conquering nations’ languages, clothing, agricultural systems, conceptions of beauty, and systems of discipline, and they did all of this in the name of Jesus. Note, for example, the way that the world is largely divided among English, Spanish, and French speaking countries, despite some contemporary parallel efforts to form the world according to Russian or Mandarin. The modern colonizers believed that their “Christian civilization” needed to be replicated everywhere in order to bear the infinite. The logic of Pentecost was destroyed, and one by one, the potentially rich mosaic of languages foreshadowed in Acts 2 began to lose possibilities, with languages falling away.

Equally significant was the loss of speaking the languages of the earth itself. Modern colonialism views the earth as commodity, raw material to be shaped. One could refer to this as the McDonald’s effect, where the goal is rarely sensitivity to the language of a place but instead the imposition of a form of maturity upon a place. Wherever we go, we can be sure that McDonald’s is basically the same because its ingredients are produced centrally and exported to its various locations. The earth is terraformed according to the imagination of economic ideas, all of which arose from particular philosophical meditations in a particular part of the world, abstracted for the terraforming process of colonialism. The earth was no longer a collection of people speaking local languages derived from their being in the earth. It was now an idea—a “globe”—that enraptured bodies from the earth and brought them into the imagination of those who had ceased to hear the languages of the earth itself. Local languages began to die: both the languages of cultures and the languages of intricate ecosystems. The earth became raw commodity to be conquered, developed, and sold.

There is a larger tale to tell deep within the wounds. We could speak of the formation of identity. If Eden saw identity intimately binding together in life the heavens and the earth and humanity as creatures of the earth commissioned by the God of heaven, the expulsion from Eden necessarily signals identity formed in ways bound by death. We could speak of the dirt-people’s loss of ears to hear the languages of the earth and the subsequent ravaging of the earth. We could speak of the colonized pulled away from the earth such that bodies no longer received definition from being in and from the earth but instead from cultural markers of distance from the colonizers and their universal “ideas.” We could speak of racial formation amid the same colonizing and terraforming processes, as people who called themselves “white” and named others “black” and others somewhere in between established rules for who could migrate into “whiteness.” All of these are significant aspects of the tale of the modern world. But before we tell these stories, we need to listen. The rocks really do cry out—in distress, in hope of renewal, in worship. Why not the people of the dust, too?

About Ashish Varma

Dr. Ashish Varma is an Indian American theologian based in Chicago, IL. His dissertation work explored theological grounding for virtue ethics. In recent years, his research has sat at the intersection of theological engagement with race and ecology, writing and speaking on both. He is a regular contributor to the God Here and Now substack of Princeton Theological Seminary's Center for Barth Studies. Additionally, he edited and contributed to A Praying People, a collection of essays on prayer (Wipf & Stock, 2023).

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Further Reading

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983, reprint 2003.

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Have, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Woodley, Randy. Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012.

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Footnotes

[1]Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 48.

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¿Y lo indígeno, donde está?

December 24, 2023

“Grampa,” I said to mi abuelo as we sat around family on Noche Buena, waiting for the pozole to heat up. My Grampa understands English but is much more comfortable having conversation in Spanish. Even so, at a very young age in our predominantly Spanish-speaking household, I called him “Grampa” in English with a slight Spanish accent. I don’t know why, but it stuck, even as our conversations always continued in Spanish.

“Grampa, sabes como hablar en Nahuatl?”[1] I asked him.

Nahuatl is the indigenous language of the Mexica people, the group that resided in what we now know as Mexico City before the Spainards came to colonize them. Although the Spainards spread their own language and religion throughout the land, many groups remained indigenous, retaining their own language and culture to the best of their ability, often resulting in various religious expressions. A multitude of indigenous languages and dialects still remain even today in the land of Mexico and Guatemala.

Right when I asked my Grampa if he knew Nahuatl, my tía scoffed at my question. Why would my Grampa, su padre, know Nahuatl? My Mexican American family only speaks Spanish and English. And how could my Grampa, her father, know Nahuatl? Right as she scoffed, my Grampa answered, “Si, pero nomas las palabras malas. Y también puedo contar hasta diez.”[2] He continued to count up to ten without wavering: “Ce, Ome, Yei, Nahui, Macuilli, Chicuace, Chicome, Chicuei, Chiconahui, Mahtlactli.” My tía gaped at me and her father.

“I…I didn’t know that…” she said, baffled.

How could she? We never talk about our indigenous roots.

The more I learn about the indigenous people and the Nahuatl language, the more I learn about myself and my theology. For the longest time, I saw my mestizaje at the intersection of my Mexican and U.S. American culture. As a second-gen daughter of immigrants, I grew up in a household that was proud to be Mexican, even if at times I was not. But we never talked about our indigenous roots—they did not exist.

This semester, I had the privilege of taking a class on the History of Mexico. Although I knew that the Mexica people commonly referred to as the “Aztecs” were in the land long before the Spanish came, to me they were simply distant history. They were ancient people who wore fancy headdresses and sacrificed on pyramids, all generalizations from the cartoons I would watch; I had no real connection to them. It wasn’t until I learned about the complexities stemming from the colonization of the indigenous people in Mexico that their culture came to life in my own. It was then that I realized that mestizaje did not completely erase the indigenous roots of my family.

Mestizaje occludes the past. 

A theology of borderlands, of mestizaje, has always been essential to my thinking. Does God reside in the borderlands? Does Jesus not represent mestizaje? Virgilio Elizondo, a Catholic theologian who pushed forward the idea of mestizaje, considers a theology that outlines just that—a God who sits in between cultures, who came to flesh as a Galilean Jew. However, as various treatments of mestizaje point out, this theology has the potential to fall victim to a flattening of difference. It has the potential to ignore people at the margins of the margins—the Afro-Latine and indigenous people that are often overlooked in constructions of mestizaje.

But mestizaje cannot completely erase it. 

I also learned in my academic exploration that my family commonly uses a word that they thought was Spanish, the word choquía. It describes a wet-like, stale scent and comes from the Nahuatl language. Growing up, my abuela would tell me that I smelled like choquía after playing outside all day. Just recently, my abuela asked me if the tiramisu I was eating tasted like choquía after it was sitting out in the air for an extended period of time. When I asked my mom if she knew that the word was Nahuatl, she denied that it even was. “How could it be Nahuatl?” she had said. “Everyone around me growing up in Mexico used it. It was always just in Spanish.” She had no idea that some of her words had carried on for centuries into her own mestiza language.

Some things just stick. 

I never would have thought of myself as indigenous. My mestizaje always represented the in-betweenness of Mexican and U.S. culture, but as I learn how many indigenous traditions carry on, even in my own family, my mestizaje has become more complicated. It has changed. It’s more like the pozole we eat on Christmas Eve now. Known as a traditional Mexican dish of maize kernels in a tasty stew with a mixture of spices and vegetables, it is typically eaten during times of festivities. Not many know, however, that it originally came from the Nahua people, called pozolli before the Spanish took the word and made it their own. Although the word was changed, the food did not. It did not disappear. People have forgotten its origins, but its thick chunks have made their way into the Mexican culture. The taste still remains.

Mestizaje has the potential to hide these differences, but the pieces are not so easily erased.  The one experiencing mestizaje is constantly aware of the ways they are torn between cultures, languages, spaces. Instead of viewing mestizaje as a process that eventually produces “one” future mestizo people, perhaps we can follow the thread of viewing it as nonlinear, as something that constantly shifts and rearranges. A theology of mestizaje is an invitation to theologize through a lens of “in-betweenness,” one that does not diminish difference, but allows difference to enrich faith. These chunks remain and will continue to be revealed as long as we recognize that each person experiencing the “in-between” has a story to tell. It is the power of liminality.

“In-betweenness is not only pain; it’s promise. It is power. It parallels the power of Jesus, the Galilean Jew, who all said nothing good can come from Galilee. In-betweenness holds us together.” —Justo González[3]

About Michelle Navarrete

As a second-generation Latina who lives in between the Mexican and American cultures, my faith inevitably intersects with my culture and experiences. My passions stem from within the Old Testament, and I use storytelling in my academics to engage others and cultivate connection.  People are part of this passion and I want my work to reflect that. Currently located in the most diverse square mile of the United States in Clarkston, GA, I am a doctoral student of the Old Testament at Emory University. During my time at World Outspoken, I hope that my contributions will renew faith perspectives in a way that mobilizes restoring change within communities.

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Footnotes

[1] “Grampa, do you know how to speak Nahuatl?”

[2] “Yes, but only the bad words. And I can also count to ten.”

[3] I had the privilege of listening to Dr. González speak for an intensive week-long course I took at Emory. He speaks about how mestizaje can connect even those who do not identify as Latine.

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A Language for the Pain

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

Mi Amiga

Her lowered head spoke as we sat in silence. So did her hands busily crumpling a napkin from lunch. I listened to mi amiga’s body language while she gathered her thoughts and braced to share her pain.

“This place is wearing on me, Professor Cartagena. I don’t know how much I can take. Some days I feel like I’m gonna loose it…like I’m going to explode.”

Mi amiga was silent for a moment. Her brown hands continued to work on the napkin.

“I can handle the big things—the in-your-face racism or sexism. They’re terrible, but they’re so big that people can’t pretend they didn’t happen, can’t pretend that you’re making something up. Does that make sense, Professor Cartagena?”

“It does, hermana. It does. I hear what you’re saying.”

“When students taped ‘Beaner’ posters on my dorm door, there was no hiding it, no denying it. When they dumped dried beans into my laundry, it was clear that they’d been racist and had violated my privacy and my roommate’s privacy—I mean, they went into our room and put the beans in my clothes hamper! And when white students post racist or sexist things about me on social media, my friends and I can take pictures. We have the evidence!” 

After briefly raising her head to look me in the eyes, mi amiga again gazed at the ground. Her napkin resembled a powder. The evidence of its existence was nearly gone.

“But you can’t screenshot the stares, Dr. Cartagena. You can’t make sure other people see the sideways glances and stink eyes. You can’t pause the question, ‘How did you get into this school?’ to make sure other people hear it. You can’t rewind and play the ‘You know we can date and mess around but can’t marry, right?’ question white males ask you to prove that they’re trying to exploit your ‘exotic’ body and sexuality. You can’t prove that these things happen. You don’t have the evidence, just your memory. And the pain…It’s so isolating, Professor Cartagena. And it adds up. These things add up. They take a toll on you, on your body and your mental health. Sometimes…sometimes the big racism is easier to face.”

A Language for the Pain: Microaggressions

Mi amiga was suffering. She’d experienced neon-light racism, the kind that makes skeptics about racism’s existence confident that, here, at last, is an instance of racism that they may, nay, must denounce. But if we listen to her words and her body, this form of racism wasn’t the greatest source of her pain. Something else had taken a toll, and still was.

What caused my friend to lower her head? What prompted her to dismantle a napkin? What overwhelmed her? What made her feel like she might explode? Stares, sideways glances, stink eyes, racist questions about ability, racist questions about gendered sexual exploitation—these were the culprits.

Race scholars call these culprits microaggressions. Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce introduced the term “microaggression” in his essay “Offensive Mechanisms” (1970). Reflecting on abusive behavior, Pierce writes:

Most offensive actions are not gross and crippling. They are subtle and stunning. The enormity of the complications they cause can be appreciated only when one considers that these subtle blows are delivered incessantly. Even though any single negotiation of offense can be considered of itself to be relatively innocuous, the cumulative effect to the victim and to the victimizer is of an unimaginable magnitude. Hence, the therapist is obliged to pose the idea that offensive mechanisms are usually a micro-aggression.

Pierce acknowledges that some abusive actions are glaringly gross and large scale. They include the neon-light racism and sexism mi amiga suffered. But not all abusive actions are this glaring or large. As Pierce notes, most aren’t. Instead, they are smaller slights and put-downs some people receive every day. Moreover, the cumulative effect of these smaller scale injustices takes a toll on victim and victimizer alike, leaving both bowed under these evils’ compounded weight.

In this and later work, Pierce develops the concept of microaggressions to account for subtle, quotidian forms of racism. He argues that antiracists “must not look for the gross and obvious [forms of racism]. The subtle, cumulative mini-assault is the substance of today’s racism.” Thus, Pierce encourages antiracists to look for the stares, sideways glances, stink eyes, and racist questions mi amiga suffered. He contends that “the relentless omnipresence of these noxious stimuli” fill the U.S.’s social fabric. “These cumulative, minor but incessant put-downs often remain psychopollutants in the social environment,” Pierce writes, “[and] their lingering intractability is a major contributor to the continuing traumatic stress” racialized minorities suffer individually and communally.

A Language for the Pain: Racial Battle Fatigue

Building upon Pierce’s work, race scholars such as William Smith study the toll that racial microaggressions enact upon racialized minorities like mi amiga. Within an interdisciplinary framework called “racial battle fatigue,” Smith and fellow investigators examined how the cumulative stress of microaggressions impacts Latin@s and Black Males in historically and predominately white schools. The following chart details the cause and stress responses they uncovered.

Smith, William A., et al. “Racial Battle Fatigue and the MisEducation of Black Men: Racial Microaggressions, Societal Problems, and Environmental Stress.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 80, no. 1, 2011, pp. 63–82.

Microaggressions cause physiological, psychological, and behavioral stress responses in racialized minorities. The twenty physiologically responses Smith records include headaches, hives, intestinal problems, and insomnia. Similarly, the sixteen psychological responses range from irritability to hopelessness. And the seventeen behavioral responses vary from overeating to procrastination.

In subsequent conversations, mi amiga mentioned suffering from headaches and insomnia. She told me that she struggled with frustration and feelings of helplessness. And wondered aloud why she’d grown impatient and struggled to do easy class assignments.

“Professor Cartagena, I feel like I’m falling apart. What’s wrong with me?”

“You’ve suffered greatly, hermana. And your body has kept the score.”      

Returning to Mi Amiga

Each time I spoke with mi amiga, a passage from James Baldwin’s “Uses of the Blues” came to mind. Reflecting on Black suffering, Baldwin writes:

You’ve seen these black men and women, these boys and girls; you’ve seen them on the streets. But I know what happened to them at the factory, at work, at home, on the subway, what they go through in a day, and the way they sort of ride with it. And it’s very, very tricky. It’s kind of a fantastic tightrope.…And I know that some improbable Wednesday, for no reason whatever, the elevator man or the doorman, the policeman or the landlord, or some little boy from the Bronx will say something, and it will be the wrong day to say it, the wrong moment to have it said to me; and God knows what will happen. I have seen it all, I have seen that much.

When mi amiga said, “Some days I feel like I’m gonna loose it…like I’m going to explode,” I thought, “I know what happened to you. I know what happened to me. I know what we go through in a day.” But I didn’t share these thoughts with her. I didn’t even recommend that she read Baldwin—at least not yet. Instead, I shared the words “microaggression” and “racial battle fatigue.” I offered her language that illuminated reality and empowered her to name her experience. Naming the causes of our festering wounds is an important step toward our healing.

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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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We Speak Spanglish ¿Y qué?

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

My dearest Spanglish, 

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

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

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

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

Tu descendiente, 

La Chicana.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. José se enojó and he gritó.

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

4. Estoy jugando soccer with Blanca.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)

ABOUT DRA. ITZEL meduri soto

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

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Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Believe Me When I Say it Hurts

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

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

“Keep trying,” I sobbed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Dra. Itzel meduri soto

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

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Footnotes

[1] Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

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

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

[4] American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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You Can Call Me by My Name

The dreaded first day of school was especially frightening for me. The fear of being called on to introduce myself and the anticipation of meeting new people was accompanied by the terror of seeing my teachers’ faces at the exact moment in which they encountered my name. Their reactions often reminded me of the expressions of movie characters in sci-fi films when a UFO was seen descending to earth.  

Itzel y su papá. See footnotes for a correct pronunciation of the name.

Itzel, a beautiful Mayan name carefully chosen by my parents for their primogeniture. Itzel, a name that claimed my heritage and honored my indigenous ancestors. Itzel, a name gifted to me while I was still in the womb. Itzel, a name that painfully alienated me. Itzel, a name that I hated and often fantasized of changing. Itzel, a name that I daydreamt of transforming into something more “palatable;” my notebook filled with the names that I yearned to have. While most of the girls my age would write the name of the boy they liked, I used to obsessively write the names that would render me normal. They were always generic names, names that would not cause attention, names that would appear on “the most popular list of baby names.”  

To the dismay of many, my parents did not give me a middle name. They thought my first name was so beautiful that they could not possibly pair it with anything else. “Do you have a middle name?” I was commonly asked. “Do you have a nickname?” was usually the follow-up question. My dad and other family members often called me “Itzelita,” the Spanish diminutive form of “Itzel,” but I did not think “Itzelita” posed a solution. They were grasping at straws and I, too, was desperately searching for a name that would resolve their confusion. Sometimes my teachers would not ask me for a middle name or a nickname but would directly resort to usurping an authority that did not belong to them by asking if they could rename me: “Can we call you something else?” At that moment, I wanted desperately for the attention to be diverted away from me and I would hastily reply, “Call me whatever you want.” I convinced myself that my name was unimportant and that my parents were to blame for giving me such a difficult name.  

And so, I became “It-soul” for many years. Every single time my name was mispronounced I cringed internally but silence and shame prevailed. My beautiful name was ripped to pieces and what remained was ugly and hostile, unrecognizable. I avoided saying my own name, and when I found myself in an unavoidable situation, I said it quickly and quietly, hoping that it would go undetected.   

What still bewilders me is the fact that I attended schools in a Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles, where most of the children had Spanish names and a strong linguistic background in Spanish. Why were they unable to pronounce my name? I suspect that it had little to do with my classmates’ ability or lack thereof to say my name. We imitated the pronunciation adopted by our teachers and authority figures at our schools and somehow convinced ourselves that we could not pronounce our own names.  

Some names are indeed difficult to pronounce for the unaccustomed tongue. I, myself, have had trouble pronouncing multiple names. I cannot, in good conscious, blame people for not knowing how to pronounce my name. What is disheartening is not that people don’t automatically know how to pronounce my name but that they do not even attempt. They glance at it once and decide that they are incapable. They find renaming me an easier endeavor than learning how to properly pronounce my name. They overuse pronouns as a cover-up and whenever possible, prefer to ignore my existence. To evade my name, they resort to sophisticated jugglery that ironically requires more cognitive work than learning how to say my name.  

Individuals of all different ethnic backgrounds have their names chronically mispronounced, including Whites. This phenomenon is not exclusive to the Latino population in the United States. However, mispronouncing the names of people of color is especially harmful. In their article, “Teachers, Please Learn Our Names!: Racial Microaggressions and the K-12 Classroom” (2012), Kohli and Solorzano contend that mispronouncing the names of students of color is a racial microaggression that, “supports a racial and cultural hierarchy of minority inferiority […] that can negate the thought, care, and significance of the name, and thus the identity of the child” (444). Mispronouncing or changing the name of a student becomes an additional form of othering: “Often unconscious and unintentionally hurtful, when these comments are made to Students of Color, they are layered insults that intersect with an ‘othering’ of race, language and culture” (448).  

To fully capture this idea, one must take into consideration the historical and political contexts in which mispronouncing and changing the names of people of color are situated. As a symbolic manifestation of disregarded humanity and stripped personhood, enslaved Africans were forcefully renamed according to the names of their masters. Seen as property with no real human value, their names were exterminated. Today, many white families enthusiastically excavate their family’s history using their names as tools and proud cultural markers, while many African Americans are only able to trace their lineage back to the masters of their ancestors. Indigenous people also suffered the violence of name modification as a vehicle of racist practices and forced assimilation. According to anthropologists David H. French and Katherine S. French[1], in Native American societies, "names have a dual role, serving also as signs (or symbols) of social identities, relationships, categories, or positions, and as vehicles for modes of social interactions. They make statements, significant ones, both about persons and about groups” (200). In a grotesque disregard of indigenous identity, indigenous people were reassigned Anglicized names for the comfort of the English-trained tongue and as part of their efforts to forcefully assimilate them into White society. As Liliana Elliott explains:

“Anglo-American names were an initial step that marked social death […] Teachers, officials, and administrators expected Native children to fully inhabit their new names by the time they emerged out of industrial school and assumed daily life in white civilization. Indeed, much of the rhetoric of assimilation reflects a belief that true personhood remained impossible until assimilation was complete[2]” (59).

Indigenous names were mocked, considered odd and incomprehensible. Rather than learning about the cultural richness and significance of these names, they were confronted with animosity and torn apart.  

Latina/o names suffered a similar fate in schools. It was a common practice for teachers to change their students’ names to an Anglicized version: Ramón became Raymond, Juanita became Jane and María became Mary, for example. As Orlando Patterson argues, "the changing of a name is almost universally a symbolic act of stripping a person of his former identity[3]" (55). A man that went by the name of Jesse told a story of how his birth name, Jesús, was permanently transformed. The nun of the religious school where he attended refused to call him Jesús, asserting that his name was blasphemous. Operating within the limits of her cultural lens, the nun failed to understand that Mexican families tend to name their children after people they consider admirable or important to their family’s legacy. Jesús, a very common name amongst Mexican families, is a way to honor Christ and not an act of defilement. That day, terrified at the “realization” that his name was profane, young Jesús went home and told his parents to call him Jesse.  

“Non-Western names are perceived as an unwelcomed inconvenience and whiteness seems to believe itself deserving of ridding individuals of their identity for the sake of its convenience.  ”

The insistence that names must be “easily pronounced” in English is linked to the idea that English is the superior language. The linguistic dexterity that seems to be demanded of people of color is ironically not pursued by the people making these demands. Speakers of other languages are expected to pronounce English names with ease as if English was an inherently “easy” language to learn as compared to other languages. Texas Representative Betty Brown boldly stated in the matter of voter identification legislation: “rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese – I understand it’s a rather difficult language – do you think it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here.” Non-Western names are perceived as an unwelcomed inconvenience and whiteness seems to believe itself deserving of ridding individuals of their identity for the sake of its convenience.  

Names are of high importance in the Bible and serve a variety of functions. Jacob’s name was changed to Israel in Genesis 32:28: “Your name will no longer be Jacob,” the man told him. “From now on you will be called Israel, because you have fought with God and with men and have won” (NLT). God also changed the names of Abram and Sarai to Abraham and Sarah after God made a covenant with them. The names Jesus (he will rescue people from their sins) and Immanuel (God with us) were meaningfully chosen and their significance explained. One of the greatest gifts that God gave Adam was the power to name. Naming is a necessary component of creation, as God literally spoke the world into existence. Our names comprise a fundamental aspect of our identity. As parents, we have been entrusted with the power to name our children and as individuals, we have been given authority over our own names. Forcefully anglicizing names seems to be one of the various ways in which whiteness tries to mold people of color into their image.  

The study conducted by Kohli and Solorzano found that the social-emotional well-being of children is negatively affected when their names are mispronounced in the classroom which, in turn, harms their learning. The National Association for Bilingual Education and the Santa Clara County Office of Education in California partnered to establish an initiative titled, “My Name My Identity” with the objective of raising awareness about the importance of names. Under this initiative, students and teachers are able to present their learning at school, parent and district board meetings. Some of the sample lessons that they recommend include discussion questions such as: Is there a story behind your name? Who gave you your name? What does your name mean? What is something positive about you or your name that no one can forget. While these initiatives represent a step forward in recognizing the impact of names on student learning, they must become a critical component of teacher training.  

Learning how to correctly pronounce someone’s name is an act of love. When someone takes interest in learning how to say my name correctly, I have the certainty that they care about me as a person and value me. As a child, I did not have the words nor was I aware of the scholarship that gave voice to my experience. I could not articulate why I felt the way I did, but I knew exactly how I felt – I felt small and unimportant like a piedra en un zapato; an inconvenience, a discomfort. My name was trampled every single day of the school year. I had thousands of opportunities to correct my teachers, but I was too embarrassed, afraid of “offending them.” I like to think that if I would have said something and explained how deeply it affected me, they would have corrected themselves. The truth is that my name is not inherently difficult to pronounce as many people had

led me to believe; the truth is that they had a hard time pronouncing my name but they also had the ability to learn it. Now, when people ask what they can call me, I firmly reply, “You can call me by my name.”

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ABOUT DRA. ITZEL Meduri Soto

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

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Footnotes

[1] Goddard, Ives and William C. Sturtevant. “Personal Names,” Handbook of the North American Indians: Language. vol. 17, Smithsonian Institution, 1978. 

[2] Elliott, Liliana. Names Tell a Story: The Alteration of Student Names at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1890. 2019. University of Colorado Boulder, History Honors Thesis. https://www.colorado.edu/history/sites/default/files/attached-files/elliott_thesis.pdf

[3] Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 2018.