¿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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Reclaiming Spiritual Formation for the Mestiza Body

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

Whether we realize it or not, we all exist at the intersections of differing realities. For me, I exist as a Second-generation American-Filipinx, heteronormative female, and this is hardly an exhaustive picture of who I am and what constitutes who I am becoming. All the elements of who I am, come together in my body in a way that reminds me that I straddle various realities always at once. I am Mestiza. The same is true of several bodies today. With the rise of globalization, the internet, and other sweeping factors that are beyond any singular person’s control, we all find ourselves straddling the lines of various realities, a world of mestizaje, not by race or by blood, but by history and by experience. Many of us hold this mestizaje in our bodies, and while mestizaje by blood might manifest itself by the mixed color of skin, that which we inherit by history and experience is far more subtle, but nonetheless significant.

As a Filipina woman growing up in America, I was made ignorant to my people’s subjugation first by the Spanish and then by the US. Especially since the history I was learning was disseminated by our conquerors. However, even despite such ignorance, there still existed in my body a trauma for which I could not account. I moved about my space as though it didn’t belong to me, and no affirmation of inclusion could quell the voice that whispered: “You don’t belong.” It wasn’t just the lack of brown faces in the crowd that taught me this, nor was it solely the micro-aggressions I suffered at the hands of well-intended people—although these did not help. No, that voice came from something deeper; something like my very DNA (the stuff that made me me) seemed to communicate this. My body didn’t fit the world it was born into, or at least the world it was born into did not make space to fit my body.

As it turns out, trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. Recent psychological advancements have found that trauma can intricately affect the DNA of future generations. Thus, the particulars of my mestizaje brings with it not just difficulties in the present, but traumas of the past as well. As an Asian American woman, I am affected by the centuries of sexualizing the “exoticized” Asian female body. As a Filipina, I am impacted by the lifetimes of colonization. The older I get, the more I believe the historic trauma of subjugation, violent misogyny and racism affect my very body. They accumulate and bear what at times feels like actual weight on my body. I feel it in my shoulders. It is hard to form a person spiritually, when the body feels burdened physically. I was in need of a spiritual formation that involved and included my body.

For this reason, as a member of the church, I often find myself asking: What does spiritual formation look like when it includes my body? This question is now a key lens for how I listen to a sermon, take spiritual direction, and participate in church community. I would argue that this was a key lens for me, even before I could articulate it. Whether we realize it or not, since we are products of a violent history, we will eventually seek out a spiritual formation that heals all of who we are.

Being that we are mestizas in our own respective ways, a good question to ask is what does it look like to involve the reality of our mestizaje in our ministries? Most assume spiritual formation is an individual’s concern, and they treat it as a task of personal work that must be done by each Christian. However, I would caution the minister from absolving herself from responsibility for the spiritual formation of her community. In my personal experience, I would not know to look into my communities shared traumatic history, had it not been for visiting preachers of various backgrounds, considering book recommendations from mentors, and penetrating questions from my friends. My spiritual formation was and is complemented by thoughtful ministers.

In this way, I implore ministers to be aware of the possibility of their role in a mestiza’s spiritual formation, and in the same meticulous way she brings thought to her exegesis and hermeneutics, space can be made to explore the wide range of spirituality and spiritual teaching that exists in the greater body of Christ. The church is in need of a communal consciousness that recognizes its reality as a mixed people. Who better to awaken this consciousness than the ministers who provide our spiritual guidance? For this reason, ministers must begin to engage deeply the diverse breath of scholarship and voices that exist on the topics of race, gender and diversity (to name a few). Engaging this diversity within a ministry might begin to spark the curiosity of her congregants and begin the important work of discovering the intersections of their reality.

Moreover, learning to ask the right questions also aids in holistic spiritual formation. How do we invite this sort of inquiry into our ministries? Where in your body do you hold trauma? Where do you hold pain? What parts of your given reality do you feel like the pain stems from? These are good questions to begin asking yourself, and as you become more acquainted with your own histories you will learn better the questions that help encounter fellow mestizas. We begin the work of learning what the right questions are by letting ourselves be self-critical, knowing that we have probably asked many of the wrong questions. The right questions begin in introspective humility.

These are simply starting points to reclaiming spiritual formation for the mestiza body, and it cannot end here. If it is true that we hold our given realities in our bodies, then it must be true that any spiritual formation must include the body. What does this look like in the church setting? If we are to be honest about who belongs in our church, then our pulpits and stage must reflect this. The body as it presents itself looks to what’s similar to follow and to belong. If there are congregants in your seats that cannot find anyone on the stage that even remotely resembles themselves or their journeys, they might be hard-pressed to feel like they belong. The voice that has followed me my whole life might haunt many of your congregants as well. Perhaps it is time to invite other voices and other faces to the pulpit to preach, to read scripture, and to share. Reclaiming spiritual formation for the mestizo Body must include the whole of the Church Body.

As you look to the ways of introducing the intersecting realities of your congregations and ministries, know that you are not alone. Your particular body cannot be all things to all people at all times. There are limitations that our bodies put on us. It is good, then, that our Body extends beyond our singular selves. It is thus a question not just of our own humility but also our spiritual agility. There is a whole cloud of witnesses, mestizo people, whom we can learn from and lean on and invite. There is no time like the present to begin this important work.

I still remember the first time I encountered a minister who looked like me. It was pivotal, not just because I could then perceive myself in ministry, but because I knew there was someone in ministry who might understand and see in some part my particular experience of mestizaje. For the first time my Filipina American body could rest in the belief that I belonged. This began a journey of spiritual formation that sought to grasp all of who I am as crucial to the Body of Christ. For this reason, I am convinced that the invitation of another and of someone different is how we begin to reclaim spiritual formation for the mestizo Body.

About Jelyn Leyva

A Second-generation Filipina born in Tampa, FL, Jelyn Leyva graduated Moody Bible Institute in Chicago on May 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in Women in Ministry and an Interdisciplinary in Theology. She is currently in Los Angeles, CA pursuing an MDiv at Fuller Theological Seminary with her emphasis in Christian Ethics. Having lived in various places in the US, Jelyn’s interest lie in the complex history and multi-ethnic life of the Protestant Church in the US. Her hope is to serve this church and its many colors with the consideration of traditional and contemporary theological scholarship.

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White Jesus and Brown Mouths: A Colonized Communion

This Spring we are featuring three pieces by student writers who are engaging theologically as bi-cultural leaders. We are thrilled to give platform to these up and coming voices who will surely shape the trajectory of the mestizo church. -The Editors

As a child, my family did not go to mass or recite the rosario often. Instead, cooking was our liturgy. The tortillas we made were coupled with frijoles that satisfied any unmet craving. When we did attend mass, the incense penetrated our senses as the priests’ hands presented the eucharist like a flag of victory waiving over a pueblo that didn’t feel mine. The white wafers communicated what Christ’s body is, and this body was not like that of the brown bodies in the pews. 

Years later, I converted to a White protestant tradition, and as a Chicano, whose home contained white American and New Mexican culture, my mestizaje was accepted. Still, assimilation to a kind of white culture was implied. Mexican cuisine was a source of spiritual nutrition in the home—all was well with a tortilla on the comal. Tortilla-making primed me to experience God. Yet, the protestant church that I attended worshiped outside of my cultural context, and the Christ presented to me viewed the world unlike me. The celebration of the Eucharist was less of an experience with God, rather, it was an intellectual exercise to simply “remember” Christ’s death and resurrection.  

At the height of COVID, church service was online. One time, worshiping in my living room, the congregation was invited to break bread and drink wine (juice for us). I was disappointed that all we had in the pantry were corn tortillas. “We eat this in memory of you,” the pastor said as I split a tortilla in my hands. With tortilla in hand, worship was now in my context instead of one that valued an essentialized form of communion over others.

Centuries of theological developments on the eucharist provoked an embodied fear against deviations from tradition. The white wafers I had become accustomed to were made foreign over a slight change from the norm—from wheat to maíz—and I was unsure if my act of communion was valid. Did eating a corn tortilla count as eating the body of Christ? Whiteness deeply formed my perception of the eucharist, so that instead of being fed the body of Jesucristo, I was being fed a colonizer’s “Christ.” Jesus could never be like a tortilla, nor could he be like me—this Jesus was white. The cognitive and physical experiences stood divorced from the mestizo body and replaced with a pervasive colonial imagination of the eucharist.[1] This alienation was what I came to understand as the long-lasting projection of “superior” bodies upon the elements and the degeneration of ‘other’ bodies. Colonization consecrated the sacrament to Eurocentrism at the cost of Black and Brown bodies, but as the church operates today in multicultural contexts, the perceptions of sacramental elements must be reimagined to create an inclusive partaking of Christ’s body.

The Arrival of “White Jesus”

When the Spanish arrived at the shores of Abya Yala, awestruck, they noticed first the people, then their food. The Spanish utilized the association between diet and body to identify the people they encountered as “savages.” This issued moral categories for maíz, yuca, and other foods: considering the diet of “savage” bodies reprehensible[2]. Simply put, those who ate these things, especially maíz, were considered no different from animals. Consequently, unsuccessful attempts to make indigenous cuisine disappear expected the “uncivilized” to exclusively eat Spanish cuisine. To this day, tortillas de harina (flour tortillas) are viewed in contrast to those of maíz. In some instances, they are viewed as a “treat” in comparison to the old familiar corn tortilla.

This culinary colonization was an attempt to make indigenous pueblos transfigure into Spanish bodies.[3] Their preference for Castilian bread and wine for the eucharist was a confirmation of eurocentrism and, by proxy, a Western Jesus. Moreover, preachers communicated the expectation of proper elements by appropriating the closest Nahuatl word for bread, castellan tlaxcalli or Castilian tortillas—their tongue was mastered not to understand but to conquer.[4] The strong disapproval of indigenous cuisine led to what Jeffrey Pilcher calls the propagation of a “gospel of wheat” that served as a “symbol and sustenance of Christianity.”[5] The Spanish projected their bodies upon that of Christ, a homogenous perception of the gospel.            

Rebecca Earle recounts an instance when an indigenous man mimicked Catholic mass with tortillas, anti-bread, which was later met with severe punishment.[6] Two fears grew from the faithful deviance from the “gospel of wheat”; (1) that Jesus would become foreign to the European and (2) that their European bodies would then follow suit to become animalistic.[7] This created further distance between the target population of the gospel and the Jesus behind it. Whiteness presented a gospel limited to elements never dictated by Scripture. Despite not always having access to wheat in the New World, it was standardized that it was virtually impossible to commune with Christ until inferior brown bodies folded under the kneading of Eurocentric assimilation. Because this intense folding was often followed by cruelty the indigenous had no other option but to view Christ’s body as fuel for cruelty.

Paula E. Morton’s Tortillas: A Cultural History,  introduces a woman’s childhood in Mexico, describing the relationship between maíz, the working father, and the mother who learned the art of nixtamalización (a laborious process to make maíz nutritious).[8] Tortillas were inherent to familial life, bearing a likeness to that of the sacraments. Corn itself is not nutritious like wheat until it has undergone a vigorous process to become life-giving. The work behind making corn nutritious communicates the labor needed to save the starving, to then prosper them with maíz. Christ’s life and final work on the cross can be understood in this way—he labored to not only save but to continuously nurture his people.

El Pan de Jesucristo

In the “Bread of Life Discourse” found in the gospel of John, Jesus makes extravagant claims. He reminds the crowd of their ancestors’ time in the desert when “He gave them bread [manna] from heaven to eat” (Jn. 6:31). Jesus clarifies further that the provider of the bread was the Father who wanted to “give life” (vv. 32-33). What is then revealed is that He [Christ] is the bread of life sent from heaven to give salvation.[9] The manna in the desert was the foreshadowing of Christ, the bread of heaven, that would eternally sustain the people of God.

From a deeply Jewish context, bread represented the life-giving power of Christ’s passion and resurrection. With echoes of the Jewish people’s connection with bread, God entered into their rich culture to not only communicate with his people but to commune with them. Like me, a Chicano who loves tortillas, Jesus as a Jewish man, would have a similar love for his culture’s “tortillas”. As Jesucristo spoke of bread throughout the gospels, memories of his mother kneading dough, jest conversations over the dinner table, tears, and the many Shabbat dinners were inevitably attached to his public discourse and speech at the Last Supper. Culture is deeply connected to human nature, to which YHWH has always been attentive.

Yet, as Whiteness permeated the church, this connection was forcefully replaced with eurocentric idealism. Whiteness taught the indigenous, later generations of pastors, theologians, and abuelitas that relation to God could only come from a Western perception of “bread”. Ultimately excluding Black and Brown bodies from relation to God through familiar comidas representing manna; maíz could not be our manna but their manna had to be ours.

A Blessed Proclamation

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes” (1 Cor 11:26).

When he speaks of this bread, St. Paul is not speaking of elemental specificities, rather, he is speaking of theological ones. The function of the eucharist, according to Paul, is to “proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”[10] However, traditionalism created false theological gates around the host, perpetuating eurocentrism. Involuntarily syncretizing Whiteness with theology, the host can fail to proclaim the Lord’s death free of colonial regalia, oftentimes ignoring the needs of the people.

Some sectors of the RCC staunchly maintain a wheat eucharist despite gluten allergies and limited access to such materials. In instances where believers have no access to wheat or wine: pastors and theologians must acknowledge that they are withholding a communal relationship between creature and Creator by limiting the possibilities for the host.

As the church expands, touching new soil with new comidas, we risk promoting a neo-colonial mission. One where human bodies—their preferences and needs—are diminished for the elevation of others that have deemed themselves or their traditions to be more important. Therefore, leaders of the church must prayerfully consider how Christ is presented when caring for the diverse needs of the people.

A Redeemed Communion

What I hoped for in writing this was not to condemn the way people participate in the sacrament or to inappropriately displace the host. However, the essentializing of wheat for the host mimics the way of the colonizer which has little patience for diversity. Assessing the past and the Scriptures latinamente espouses a liberative vantage point of the sacraments–freeing the oppressed and the oppressor from heterogeneous ways of being.[11]

There is no returning to 1492 to prevent the manipulation of Christian images and practices, but we can dream of a world anew. In a similar fashion to Colton Bernasol’s verbal essay on Christian symbols, la iglesia can be honest about their history with the eucharist and formulate a “liberating meaning”. This task requires a teologia en conjunto approach joined with prayerful discernment and critical reconsiderations for the future.

Three possibilities exist as a result of considering the oppressive uses of the host. The Church can reject and ignore what has happened to Black and Brown communities by the “gospel of wheat”—doing what “has always been done”. Another, as a Christian community, they can strictly adhere to a eucharist reflective of their immediate culinary contexts, deprioritizing wheat. Or lastly, a community can recognize the latter and, as a unified Body, decide to use wheat in a liberating and redeemed fashion.

Though I am a part of a tradition that prefers a wheat eucharist, I favor the second and third options as both express liberation in multiethnic contexts. I pray that the Church not only reviews its past role in the making of the “gospel of wheat” but also looks forward to an integrated approach that is inclusive of Black and Brown bodies. More specifically, inclusive of the foods adored by those communities so that Jesucristo can do what he has always done—liberate and nurture su gente out of the desert. Which will we choose, and how will we seek a redeemed perception of Christ through the host?

About Christian Silva

A biracial Chicano raised in a New Mexican home in Colorado, Christian integrates theology, biblical theology, and history to advance the Church. He is a full time student of theology at a bible college in the Chicagoland area. Christian’s family were some of the first Chicanos in the South West post “Treaty of Guadalupe”. Constantly living between two cultures, his approach to post-colonial thought, race, and ethics stem from his cultural upbringing. He hopes to further his work in graduate school to continue his studies in Latinx theologies and histories pa’ la gente. Christian is equally fascinated by the history of the South West and what Latinidad looks for him as a diaspora-Chicano navigating theological spaces. He loves drinking coffee with friends and perfecting his abuelita’s recipes.

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Footnotes

[1]Angel F Mendez-Montoya., The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist (Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012), 46. Montoya discusses in chapter 2, the relationship between sabor y saber as it pertains to our bodies’ experience and our minds’ cognition between our relationship with food and our bodies—leading to a holistic experience with the eucharist.

[2]Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience (Cambrdige: Cambridge University, 2012), 119-124. Disgust was the hermeneutic of reading the indigenous’ bodies.

[3]Ibid, 65. “Bread, wine and olive oil were thus markers of a Christian identity, and Spanish bread, wine and oil helped make men Spanish”.

[4]Dominicos, Doctrina Cristiana en lengua español y mexicana (Tecnólogo de Monterrey, 1550), 209. Credit is due to Earle in Body of the Conquistador (151) for directing me to the document for my analysis.  The adjective “Castilian” seems to be used to lay specificities despite the apparent consequences of indigenous perceptions.

[5]Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22.

[6]Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, 152-53.

[7]The term “gospel of wheat” is used differently from Pilcher to express the culinary colonization through the supremacy of wheat.

[8]Paula E. Morton, Tortillas: A Cultural History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2014), xiii-xxiii.

[9] John 6:35, 38, and 40b.

[10]Eucharistic theology encapsulates many theological nuances in various traditions. However, Paul here is speaking to a disunified audience. Paul is intending to “set the record straight”. The eating of the host proclaims a very distinct reality–Christ’s salvific work. In light of this proclamation unity should grow because they are unanimously proclaiming their shared salvation.

[11]Doing theology latinamente is to do theology in a “Latin American way”. Here latinamente means to do theology from a perspective of criticism in light of colonialism, culture, language, and our Latin@ realities. In this way we disrupt traditional theologies that deemphasize liberation. 

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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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Imagining Una Iglesia Mestiza: Vision Amid Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

A Brief History of “Mestizaje”

During their colonization of the Caribbean and Latin America, the Spanish developed a system of racial classifications to assert their superiority. Sanctioned and perpetuated by the church, these racial categories became the hierarchical and ordering arrangement of Spanish colonies. Those designated “blanco” (white) were given the full rights and privileges of a colonial citizen. The Spanish system included 14-20 official classifications of racial mixture to distinguish between greater and lesser “whiteness” and provided measured rights and privileges accordingly. These racial categories were fluid but rooted in phenotype (e.g. skin color, hair type, etc.). Some people managed to move up via the accrual of wealth, becoming a priest, or being appointed to serve in government, and they received certificates of racial purity as they arrived at “white” status.

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

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

1) Rejecting the Purity Myth

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

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

2) Accepting a Non-Innocent History

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

Theologian and church historian Justo Gonzalez, referring to Hispanics and their inherited history, writes:

Our Spanish ancestors took the lands of our [Native] ancestors. Some of our [Native] ancestors practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism. Some of our Spanish forefathers raped our [Native] foremothers. Some of our [Native] foremothers betrayed their people in favor of the invaders. It is not a pretty story. But it is more real than the story that white settlers came to this land with pure motivations, and that any abuse of inhabitants was the exception rather than the rule. It is also a story resulting in a painful identity.[5]

Anzaldúa expands Dr. Gonzalez’s line of reasoning. In a world deeply marked by conflict, Anzaldúa believed mestiza/os could serve as mediators because the mestiza consciousness “serves as a mode of self-critique.”[6] Anzaldúa resisted the idea of simple two-sided conflicts where one group is oppressor and the other is oppressed. She believed “no one is exempt from contributing to oppression in limited contexts.”[7] These scholars echo truths of Scripture. The historical church acknowledges it is not beyond the guilt and crookedness of this violent world. The identity of God’s people is always simul justus et peccator (simultaneously righteous and sinner). As those who confess their non-innocence, Christians engage ministry differently.

3) Inverting the Scale (Life in the Middle)

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

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

“It is in the very way of Jesus that mestizos find their mission: to create. In this is both the excitement and challenge. God might have created the world in seven days, but it takes us many generations to create a new humanity, a new culture. It cannot be merely legislated. It has to develop gradually through the efforts of the poets, the artists, the thinkers…” the culture-makers.[8]

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About Emanuel Padilla

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

Follow him on Twitter to learn more.

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Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[8] Virgilio Elizondo, Davíd Carrasco, and Sandra Cisneros, The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, Revised Edition, Revised, Subsequent Edition (Boulder, Colo: University Press of Colorado, 2000).

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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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Taking Off Ropaje Anglosajón

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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About Wendy Cordero rugama

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

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Footnotes

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

[2] Ibid. 97

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

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

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

[6] Padilla DeBorst. 45

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

[8] For a long time.

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.

The Future of Evangelicalism is Mestizo

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

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

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

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

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

— Virgilio Elizondo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reconstruct

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

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

Lament

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

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

Healthy Models

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

The Bible vs. “la ropa anglo-sajon”

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

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

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

Reconstructing Jesús of Galilee and a Holistic Gospel 

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

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

Spiritual Practices 

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABOUT DR. ROBERT CHAO ROMERO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[5] Romero, Brown Church, 137.

Double Punishment: Immigration and Anti-Blackness

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

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

Our Rich Diasporic Roots

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

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

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

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

Our Woundedness

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

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

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

Our Identity Crisis

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

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

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

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

Immigration & Anti-Blackness

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

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

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

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

Our Anti-Black Histories

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

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

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

Anti-Blackness Today

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

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

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

A Way Forward

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

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

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

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

Who Are We?

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

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

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

About Jon Aragón

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

Photo by Savannah Lauren

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

Representando donde quiera: The Afro-Latin@ lived experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[7] Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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