This excerpt comes from the book’s Preface.

***

Alejandro handed me a letter on June 2, 2016. He did it quietly, when no one else was looking. We sat shoulder to shoulder inside one of Guatemala City’s Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers, listening with fifty-five other captives (internos) to sermons about sin and salvation. The center was a grey stump of a building, a simple two-story house that held drug users (often against their will) for months, sometimes for years. Alejandro was one of these users. A proud man in his midthirties, with tired eyes and strong arms, Alejandro often waxed philosophical, but this time he didn’t. After pressing the piece of paper into the palm of my hand, he leaned in to say: “Get me the fuck out of here.”

The letter read:

Help Me National Police!

My name is Miguel Alejandro Gonzalez, born January 15, 1982. I am of sound mind and body. I know clearly that I do not want and do not need to be in this ministry and in this rehabilitation center.

On April 28, 2016, the pastor tracked me down, found me, and then brought me back to his house against my will. He forcefully detained me with the help of two men from the house by throwing me in the back of a truck.

I told them that I did not want to go to the house. I do not want to be held captive. Every day that passes I tell them that I do not want to be inside the house, but the pastor tells me that he is going to kick my ass.

The punishments here are severe. Here are some examples:

-They withhold food from me
-They yell at me in a loud voice
-They make me clean the house
-They keep me in a very hot room all day long
-I sleep on the floor
-They tie me up with ropes for hours

Please, I do not want to be here. I am here against my will. My family did not put me here, and they do not know where I am. They did not sign a contract, and they are not paying for me to be here.

Please send help so that I can get out of this house.

Thank you,
Miguel Alejandro Gonzalez

Alejandro had been hunted. At the outer edges of today’s war on drugs, where the state is weak and churches are strong, Christian vigilante groups scour the streets of Guatemala City with singular intent: to pull drug users out of sin by dragging them into rehab. Often in the middle of the night, when the capital city is an absolute ghost town, three or four recovering users drive with their pastor to the house of an active user. At the request of a wife, a mother, or a sister, each at wits’ end, this hunting party (grupo de cacería) hovers over the man while he sleeps. They say a short prayer, and then it gets physical. One man takes the legs. Another two grab the arms. A fourth (if there is a fourth) controls the neck. Sometimes they choke him out. All the while the user, suddenly and unexpectedly crucified to his bed, struggles in vain.

“They just grabbed me right off the streets and threw me in here,” Alejandro later explained. “They’ve done it a few times before. I was here six months, and then they let me go. I was out fifteen days, and then they came and got me again. I did another two, maybe three months, and then I got out again.” Alejandro looked exhausted. “And now I’m back.”

These hunts can be harrowing. I once saw four men from the center corner a young man inside his parents’ house. Too strong for his own good, he fought his huntsmen for what seemed like an hour, wrestling with each of them one by one. As I paced nervously off to the side, wondering why the four didn’t just rush him all at once, it occurred to me that they were tiring him out. When the young man eventually flagged, the four hog-tied him with such force that I suddenly found myself speaking up. The ropes are too tight, I pleaded. You crossed a line, I stammered, but as I stepped into the fray, I felt a hand holding me back. “Don’t be stupid,” someone said. That voice was Alejandro’s.

Alejandro’s letter did not just open a window into the horror of human vulnerability and the experience of being prey; it was also a stark reminder that Alejandro had hunted, and he had hunted for years.

Guatemala City

“How many?” Alejandro mused, taking a moment to count. “Three hundred.” He quickly checked himself: “No. I’ve been on more than 300 hunts.” Alejandro’s best guess signaled his years spent inside these centers as well as his ability to hunt down drug users. “I had to pick up some guy a few nights ago,” he told me not too long after handing me his letter. “See the guy over there? In the green shorts?” Alejandro pointed to a young man named Santiago. “I had to grab him from his bed,” Alejandro explained, “because his mom paid [the pastor for] us to do it.” Alejandro shook his head. “And it’s not the first time,” he said. “It’s actually the second time I’ve hunted him this year.” He then paused just long enough to get the story straight, adding, “And the worst thing is that I end up having to tie people up. We have a jacket with ropes, like a fucking straitjacket, and when someone doesn’t do what the pastor tells him to do, I have to tie him up.”

Alejandro cringed. “I’m tired of hunting,” he said, “because when I leave here, the people I’ve tied up come looking for me.” He seemed to grow indignant. “But they don’t understand that I have to hunt. It’s what I have to do to eat better, to sleep a little longer, so I can get a shower here.” Alejandro then connected the dots for me: “Hunting is why the pastor keeps me here. The pastor hunts me because I hunt for him.”

Rehabilitation facility in Guatemala

This is a book about humans hunting humans. It is an ethnography of Pentecostals who track down drug users, as if they were animals, to remind them, in classic Christian fashion, that they are human—that, in the words of so many missionaries before them, it is not enough to be human: one must also act human. After years of fieldwork alongside Alejandro but also many others, I came to understand this hunting as a kind of predatory pastoralism. This is the Christian impulse to seek out, tie up, and drag back those sheep that have wandered from the fold. It is a disruptive insight for at least three reasons. The first is that it upends the more standard philosophical position that pastoralism and predation have opposed genealogies—that persuasion is different from coercion. I now regard pastoralism and predation as not really at odds with each other but rather as interdependent modes of governance. “It’s about saving a life,” Alejandro insisted. “That’s why we beat these guys, tie them up, and drag them here like pigs.”

The second realization is that every hunt presupposes a theory of its prey, a clear sense of who can be hunted and why. Whereas manhunts tend to presume an ontological distinction between the hunter and the hunted, predatory pastoralism announces that everyone is a sinner in the eyes of the Lord. This means that salvation is the only way to escape—and that what must be evaded is not the chase or the center but oneself.

The third insight is that predation upsets an increasingly bundled set of images about pastoralism. Across the humanities and the social sciences, from a range of theoretical and methodological commitments, scholars deliver steadfast portraits of state withdrawal, their key terms telling all: dispossession and disposability; expulsion and exposure; precarity and social abandonment. While each advances an analytically distinct proposition, each also contributes to a single, powerful image of the failed shepherd, of people left to die.

Hunted tells a different story. Its subplot is not that the masses have been left behind. Instead, a more constructive reading, a more challenging line of inquiry, is that they have been given a head start. “I climbed out of that window,” Alejandro said, “before they put the bars up.” On the second floor of his pastor’s center, Alejandro gestured towards the light. “I slid out that window, hung from the sill, and then dropped to the sidewalk.” Alejandro walked me closer to the windows. “I was high a few hours later,” he then said, “but I made sure I got a gun. I knew that they would come for me. I knew that the pastor would hunt me down.” And the pastor did. The details of this hunt repeat themselves across Guatemala City with such consistency that one begins to wonder whether the failed shepherd is really such a failure after all. The shepherd seems quite capable of catching and releasing his prey. That is the point. The political demand nipping at the heels of Alejandro as he escaped from the pastor’s center was not to make live or let die but rather to hunt or be hunted.

Kevin Lewis O’Neill is a professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. The author of City of God (University of California Press, 2010), Secure the Soul (University of California Press, 2015), and Hunted (University of Chicago Press, 2019), O’Neill is currently writing a book about clerical sex abuse in Latin America.

The post Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala appeared first on The Revealer.

Sister Thea Bowman

Thirty years ago, at the 1989 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Sister Thea Bowman told a room full of Catholic leaders what it meant to be black and Catholic in America. Bowman, who was in the final stages of her battle with cancer, sat in a wheelchair, her bright caftan hanging loosely around her small frame, and the post-chemotherapy remains of her thick hair framing her face in soft and sparse curls. She would die the next year at age 52.

Last year, the Conference of Catholic Bishops appointed Reverend Maurice Nutt to examine Bowman’s life, the first step toward her candidacy for sainthood. If canonized, Bowman would become one of the few black saints in the Catholic church. But the journey to sainthood is not an easy one. The process requires the candidate to have lived a life in the service of God and the Church, to have possessed “purity of doctrine,” and to have had an intercession that resulted in a miracle. The process can take decades — for Cardinal John Henry Newman, who was canonized in October 2019, the journey started over 60 years ago, in 1958.

The possibility of Bowman’s sainthood initially began in 1995. But several Church leaders said it was too soon after her death to pursue canonization. But when Bishop Joseph R. Kopacz joined Bowman’s home diocese in Jackson, Mississippi a few years ago, her name came up again for sainthood. This time it stuck. Bishop Kopacz hoped Bowman’s potential sainthood could help foster racial reconciliation in Mississippi.

The announcement of Bowman’s candidacy for sainthood excited many Catholics who are familiar with her dogged pursuit of justice and equality. But it also reignited an old and ongoing conversation about the Catholic Church’s racial problems.

***

Sister Thea Bowman was not born Catholic; her entry into the Church came as a result of what she called “evangelization through education.” She was born in Yazoo, Mississippi in 1937 to Protestant parents, and grew up in Canton, Mississippi — “a small town,” she said, “where black Sisters were unheard of.”

In the early 1900s, few black Catholics lived in Mississippi. But with the arrival of missionaries from the North, the Catholic population grew. By the 1920s, Jackson, Mississippi, Bowman’s eventual home, went from having no black Catholics to over 300 black children in Catholic schools.

As a child, Bowman attended the Holy Child Jesus School founded by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. She converted to Catholicism at age 12. Bowman said she was initially attracted to the Catholic Church because she experienced first-hand what she called the Church’s “love in action” through education.

Sister Thea Bowman

“I was drawn to examine and accept the Catholic faith because of the day-to-day lived witness of Catholic Christians who first loved me, then invited me to share with them in community, prayer, and mission,” Bowman said in a 1984 article.

But as a black woman from the South in a religious denomination that, in the United States, is still predominantly white, Bowman described being black and Catholic as being like “a motherless child.” She was often the only African American in Catholic spaces. Despite her deep admiration for the Church, she chided the leadership for not fully embracing African American Catholics.

Although the Catholic Church is one of the largest religious institutions in the United States, the majority of American Catholics, especially American Catholic leaders, are white. According to a 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape study, African Americans and Asian Americans make up less than 8% of the U.S. Catholic population. Hispanics comprise 34% of the U.S. Catholic population, while whites make up 59% of American Catholics.

During her childhood, Bowman attended Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, and Adventist churches where most congregants were African Americans. But Bowman believed the Catholic Church could also serve the black community. In an essay she wrote in 1987, “Let the Church Say Amen,” Bowman describes a predominantly African American Catholic Church in Louisiana. With 10,000 members, it was the largest black parish in the country at the time. The church’s walls were adorned with paintings of saints in deep brown hues that showcased a fusion of black culture with Roman Catholicism. She writes:

Sunday Mass, attended by some 3,000 people, is a family celebration enriched by the gifts of the people. Black music sets the tone. The syncopated beat is accented by hand-clapping, foot-tapping, drums, and tambourines. The choir, readers, servers and celebrant move in rhythms held sacred for generations as they praise the Lord with body and song.

The service is alive, yet, contemplative; participatory and spontaneous, yet in accordance with liturgical norms. The celebrant enunciates the Gospel in the idiom of the people, with drama, energy, and intensity. His message relates to their daily lives — poverty, racism, black pride and family values, support for the hungry, the example of Martin Luther King.

The church art, created by sculptor Joe Shallow and painter Donald Alexander, both parishioners, reflects black life and experience. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the disciples, and the figures in the Stations of the Cross resemble local people with dark skin and curly hair. Red, black and green — Pan Africa colors — adorn the altar and vestments to express black pride and solidarity with all African people.

Bowman talked openly about why the Catholic Church should embrace its black congregants and what it would mean for the Church to do so honestly. Bowman called on Church leaders to acknowledge the realities of being black in America. In her 1989 address to the United States bishops, she said:

Surviving our history physically, mentally, emotionally, morally, spiritually, faithfully, and joyfully, our people developed a culture that was African and American, that was formed and enriched by all that we experienced. And despite all this, despite the civil rights movement of the 60s and the socio-educational gains of the 70s, blacks in the 80s are still struggling, still scratching and clawing as the old folks said, still trying to find home in the homeland and home in the church, still struggling to gain access to equal opportunity.

In the same speech, Bowman addressed what it means to be both black and Catholic, saying:

It means that I come to my church fully functioning. I bring myself, my black self, all that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become. I bring my whole history, my traditions, my experience, my culture, my African American song, and dance and gesture and movement and teaching and preaching and healing and responsibility as gifts to the church.  

***

A predominantly black Catholic mass

The Catholic Church has never been all white. The majority of the world’s black Catholics reside in Africa and the Caribbean, where race does not loom as heavily as it does in the United States—a country whose foundation was built on the backs of enslaved African Americans. In many of these other countries, being black and Catholic does not seem ill-fitting. In fact, the African continent is set to have the fastest-growing Catholic population in the world. But in the United States, being black is more than skin color. Bowman, therefore, urged the Church to address race relations that hinder many African Americans from participating in Catholic communities.

American Catholic leaders have attempted to address issues of race. In multiple letters from U.S. Catholic Bishops, the Church has denounced the multilayered effects of racism and how the Church has contributed to racial injustices. A 1979 letter from the Bishops, titled “Brothers and Sisters to Us,” exemplifies this:

Mindful of its duty to be the advocate for those who hunger and thirst for justice’s sake, the Church cannot remain silent about the racial injustices in society and its own structures….

How great the scandal given by racist Catholics who make the Body of Christ, the Church, a sign of racial oppression! Yet all too often the Church in our country has been for many a “white Church,” a racist institution.

Each of us as Catholics must acknowledge a share in the mistakes and sins of the past. Many of us have been prisoners of fear and prejudice. We have preached the Gospel while closing our eyes to the racism it condemns. We have allowed conformity to social pressures to replace compliance with social justice.

Adding to such efforts, Sister Bowman called on Catholic leaders to make racial justice a priority. For white priests in predominantly black communities, Bowman urged them to remember that they work in service of the people in those neighborhoods. White priests, Bowman insisted, had an obligation to understand the history of black Americans and to “share love, life and laughter” with them.

She also encouraged the Church to be more intentional about recruiting African Americans and Catholics of other races into the priesthood.

“Go into a room and look around and see who’s missing and send some of your folks out to call them in so that the Church can be what she claims to be, truly Catholic,” Bowman said in her 1989 address to U.S. Bishops.

Despite her urging 30 years ago, the lack of black priests in the Church is still a concern. A recent article in The Angelus, a Catholic publication in Los Angeles, highlighted the small number of African American priests in Los Angeles, which is one of the country’s most diverse dioceses with an estimated 150,000 black Catholics.

Father Stephen Thorne

“I believe that God has called black men to the priesthood in the Catholic Church, so it’s not about the call,” said Father Stephen Thorne, a priest with the National Black Catholic Congress. He told the The Angelus, “It’s that we have not done our best to recruit them and to sustain that vocation.”

Not all Catholic leaders, though, support transforming the Church through outreach to black Americans. In a 2016 story in Crux, an online publication that covers the Catholic Church, Reverend Bryan N. Massingale, a priest and scholar of black Catholicism, said the effort “to bring black cultural expression into the Church [has been] met with anxiety and fear and rejection and hostility that doesn’t surround Irish or German or Polish” Catholicism in the United States.

Sister Bowman contended that Catholic churches must embrace African American culture in order to serve black Americans’ spiritual needs. In “The Gift of African American Sacred Song,” her essay about music and black spirituality, Bowman argues that black music expresses the essence of black spirituality. “African Americans,” she said, “for 400 years have used symbol and song to express a faith and yearning too high, too low, too wide, too deep for words, too passionate to be confined by concepts.”

***

While some Vatican leaders have questioned the need for the Church to think about black Catholics as distinct from white or Latino Catholics, Sister Bowman declared that God created these differences for a reason. In a 1984 National Catholic Educational Association essay about the richness of diversity, Bowman writes, “If I begin to believe that we are all alike, look at what I’m going to miss: the richness, beauty, wholeness, and harmony of what God has created.”

For Sister Thea Bowman, differences mattered. Race mattered. And her canonization would be an acknowledgment that the Catholic Church should heed her call for racial justice.

Ashley Okwuosa is a Nigerian journalist currently based in New York.  Her stories on immigration, education, and gender have been published on WNYC, Quartz Africa, OZY, Popula, and  Latterly. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School where she was a recipient of the African Pulitzer fellowship. She is currently working as a project lead for Maternal Figures, a maternal health research project that documents successful health interventions in Nigeria.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

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Carving of La Llorona by Gabriel Perez Salazar

One of my first memories of Luís D. León, a renowned scholar of Latinx religious practices, is helping him construct a Days of the Dead altar for one of his undergraduate classes. He asked each student to bring an object that represented a dead loved one to place on the makeshift altar. I’d only met Luís three months before, when I arrived at the University of Denver from southern California to begin my Masters’ program in Religious Studies. I was touched by the invitation and the opportunity to participate in an activity that reminded me of my family and community. As a first generation Chicana graduate student, I was happy to join a celebration that connected me to my home. I don’t remember what object I took to the event, only that Luís pulled a small plastic lion out of his pocket—“Un león, for my father.” Luís set it on the table with pride for his dad, the deceased Reverend Daniel León.

Luís died of natural causes on October 16, 2018. He was 53 years old. After the initial shock wore off, his close friends and colleagues wanted to do something for him the next month during the annual American Academy of Religion (AAR) meeting, a gathering of religion scholars from around the world, in the city he’d called home for over a decade, Denver, Colorado.

A group of five of us video conferenced to brainstorm and plan an event, but the usual recommendations of panel presentations fell flat. The memory of Luís was still too fresh, our pain still immediate, and the conference approaching fast. We wondered aloud to each other: How would we honor and remember Luís in a way that reflected his playfulness, his clever and biting wit, and the critical contributions of his academic work?

One of us mentioned an altar. Someone else added that it should be a moving altar. Eventually someone joked, “We should have La Llorona haunt the AAR.” We all laughed and then nodded in agreement. It was the perfect suggestion, as Luís used the Mexican legend of La Llorona, the wailing female spirit, as the namesake of his first book. We decided to construct an image of La Llorona and wheel her throughout the conference for the duration of the annual meeting.

Luís published La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the United States-Mexican Borderlands in 2004. A study of the religious diversity of Chicanx and Mexicans in Mexico and the United States, the book title is based on the Mexican folk legend of La Llorona.

La Llorona, a cautionary and tragic tale of the apparition who is condemned to roam the world in search of her murdered children, is also a story of the Mexican-United States borderlands. The legend of La Llorona is ubiquitous among Mexican and Mexican-American communities. Some trace the story to pre-Hispanic mythologies of the serpent goddess, Cihuacoatl, the first mother, who can be heard weeping as she wanders the night dressed in white. Others understand her through the framework of colonialism, as the ghost of La Malinche (first known by the name Malintzin, and later Doña Marina), the infamous indigenous translator and consort of Hernán Cortés, who has been subject to various historical narratives as a traitor who helped the Spanish conquer the Aztec empire and the symbolic mother of modern Mexicans. The significance in her part of La Llorona myth derives from a tradition of vilifying La Malinche, the woman who betrayed her nation and her people, and folk stories of her killing her son to prevent Cortes from taking him. Both La Llorona and La Malinche have been imagined as condemned to search for their dead children, lost in grief and regret.

Luís’ portrayal of La Llorona uses Chicanx feminist ideas to reinterpret this mythological tale. Luis describes La Llorona’s children as the descendants of Mexicans in the post-colonial diaspora to include those who live in the United States. Luís uses the tale as a metaphor for his academic pursuits—like La Llorona, he searches for children across the borderlands and identifies them through local forms of religious practices that provide meaning to marginalized communities. In Luis’ scholarship of Mexican and Chicanx practices of Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism, he recognizes ancestral ties to pre-Hispanic indigenous traditions amidst contemporary religious innovations. Like the wandering mourning mother, Luís followed narratives of transnational migration and religion. He searched for her children across the borderlands and found them (alive!) and embodying religion and identity in temples, botánicas, and store front churches in spite of institutional forces that rendered them invisible. Luís worked continuously to construct an ethical position within post-colonial violence, just as La Llorona searched for her family, for forgiveness, and for justice.

***

On Saturday night, November 17,  2018, in the lobby of a Denver conference hotel, Luís’ friends and colleagues gathered to create a set of ofrendas, offerings. Family and friends constructed a table altar with objects and art from his home. Upstairs, another group of us constructed a less conventional offering: La Llorona, veiled in black to cover her crystal tears, resting on a mobile catering cart decorated with white votive candles and a scattering of the same orange flowers that we used to make her crown. With hands outstretched, she held small buttons printed with an image of “El León,” beckoning people to approach her, to leave an offering, or take a button. The front of the cart was decorated with the Mexican pride flag, secured with large paper flowers. The tribute reflected Luís’ multiple identities—queer, Latinx, and scholar of religion—identities he fought hard to maintain and make present. He made it his life’s work to create spaces for Latinx women and queer people of color.

We wheeled La Llorona downstairs, and together the group of us completed the largest of the ofrendas—in community, Luís’s friends, colleagues, mentees, and family celebrating his memory.

Carting La Llorona through the halls of the Denver Convention Center, at panel presentations, and receptions, created an alternative mode for experiencing the event – it imbued the conference with our memories of Luís and our shared connection through those memories. As La Llorona interacted with people putting on their león pins, we began to see a visual representation of how many lives Luís touched. This network invoked his memory through nods of mutual recognition, smiles, and waves. There were also moments of disgust and confusion — La Llorona was an aesthetic and spatial disruption to the conventional conference atmosphere of business casual outfits and long sterile hallways.

Sometimes we introduced La Llorona when she arrived at a panel; often she simply sat in the corner of conference rooms, her black veil hiding her face as academics read their papers and discussed their scholarship. She was invited to sit in on the emergency session on the Catholic Church sexual abuse crisis, and she sat next to the podium during the Religion in Latina/o Americas panels that Luís helped create. La Llorona represented our mourning and loss of Luís, but she also beckoned to the possibilities for future scholarship following his example. La Llorona bore witness to the loss of one of our own, but also to the possibilities that Luís’ work created for the future.

***

Altar for Luís D. León – University of Denver

I think about Luís often—in my teaching, scholarship, and personal life. I left the University of Denver in 2012, but my relationship with Luís grew stronger as I pursued a Ph.D. at the University of California, Riverside. We were reflections of each other’s choices to be academics—scholars of religion, unmarried, and child-free. Between conferences, Luís visited Riverside and the Los Angeles area. His colleagues soon became my colleagues—he gave me the gift of community. Luís was my academic father, quick to take me under his wing and provide rigorous critique. His scholarship continued to inform my doctoral work, and his comments and advice were formative as a I continued my research among Latinx communities in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In the last year of his life, we corresponded regularly about applying to tenure-track positions and research opportunities. Luís was proud of my appointment as Assistant Professor in Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona. His last email to me was a reminder to apply to the Young Scholars of American Religion Program–advice that I am eternally grateful to have received.

While I remember Luís as an academic mentor, my favorite memories are much more personal. I remember his sunglass-clad face riding in the passenger seat of my car when he’d visit southern California, his emails signed “El León,” the club lights in his dark hair, his laughter at introducing me to strangers as his daughter. I can imagine him watching academics pose with La Llorona at the AAR, laughing with joy even amidst the tragedy.

***

In haste, we packed La Llorona into a cardboard box with her flowers and her votive candles at the end of the conference. When I collected her from the baggage carousel in the Tucson airport, rattling sounds of broken glass warned me against removing her from the box. I’m unsure about whether she’ll make another appearance; I imagine the shards of glass have formed thorns on the orange flowers. La Llorona won’t journey to San Diego for this year’s American Academy of Religion conference, but we will participate in another ofrenda instead. 

Last year, La Llorona’s specter haunted the conference with memories of Luís; this year, we answer her call as we gather to remember Luís in a panel presentation that imagines the future of Religious Studies from the perspectives of his mentors, colleagues, and mentees. Many of us will be wearing the Leon button with pride, as members of Luís’s pride. I’ll be sitting there too, with a small plastic lion on the panel table.

Daisy Vargas is an Assistant  Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona.  She is currently writing a book manuscript tentatively titled, Mexican Religion on Trial: Race, Religion, and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs. 

The post La Llorona Visits the American Academy of Religion: A Tribute to Luís D. León appeared first on The Revealer.

Moses. Designed for the Revealer by Zeke Peña

“Just what did she inherit from her ancestors? This weight on her back—which is the baggage from the Indian mother, which the baggage from the Spanish father, which the baggage from the Anglo? Pero es difícil differentiating between lo heredado, lo adquirido, lo impuesto.”
– Gloria Anzaldúa

“Has the name ‘Moses’ got a fixed and unequivocal use for me in all possible cases?”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

“What does it mean that Moses entered the darkness and then saw God in it?”
-Gregory of Nyssa

***

In kindergarten, they placed me in ESL—English as a Second Language—even though I was born and raised in the United States. The year was 1996. By then, it had been over 20 years since my parents boarded an Avianca flight on the 23rd of March, trading the warmth of Barranquilla, Colombia for the cold of Long Island, New York.

I spoke mostly Spanish at home with my parents and grandmother, but English with my older siblings. When I started school my English was not terrible, even if I remember struggling with vocabulary that my peers already knew. Mercifully, my ESL stint only lasted a few years. But I’d hardly count my “progress” as a success. While I advanced in English, I regressed in Spanish.

When I see kids in bilingual programs today, I get jealous. They read, write, and do homework in two languages. During my time in elementary school, I didn’t have the option to develop my Spanish or to learn much about Latin American history and culture. The focus was on improving my English.

In the past, opposition to bilingual education in the United States relied on faulty science that claimed teaching children multiple languages would confuse them. Research by linguists and educators debunked this theory several decades ago. But many people remained hostile, deeming any bilingual education or cultural studies anti-American. It wasn’t until 2016 that California officially ended its English-only instruction in public schools. Arizona banned ethnic studies until a federal judge struck down the ban in 2017 as discriminatory. In my own educational journey I experienced confusion about my identity, but not in the ways that English-only advocates envisioned.

My early education resulted in a form of segregation within myself. English became the language in which I read, wrote, and moved through school and eventually jobs. Spanish became relegated to private conversations with my parents, older relatives, family friends, and church folk. Over time, the quality of my Spanish deteriorated. I could understand most of it, but I increasingly struggled to communicate the depths of my thoughts and feelings in Spanish.

Still, it didn’t matter how feeble my language skills were. At parent-teacher conferences, I translated. Conflict of interest? Maybe. But there I was translating my 4^th grade teacher’s comments on my behavior and performance across subjects to my parents. By God’s grace, most of the news was positive. If there were discrepancies between my translations and my teachers’ reports—and I’m sure my parents could piece it together based on words like “FAILED” and “HIT A BOY,” accompanied by unhappy facial expressions—I knew something worse than a bad report card would await me.

I would say my translation duties were light compared to most. I had three older siblings who took turns helping. But I knew immigrant kids who did it all. Little homies translated everything for their parents and ipso facto were in-house editors, medical advisers, and legal aides.

My parents didn’t pressure me with language. Their priority was neither assimilation into the New World nor preservation of the Old, but making sure I focused on God and knew la Palabra de Dios. At home they continued to speak Spanish. They stopped correcting me and accepted my garbled sentences. Sometimes they adopted Spanglish-isms of their own. “¿Todos están ready para el lonche?” “Tengo que chequear.” “Por favor, eh-stop.”

Intimacy can transcend language. I’ve seen it on elementary school bus stop corners with immigrant parents conjuring conversation, exchanging words like precious beads humbly strung together. I’ve seen distant relatives shatter language, breaking through words with a love that leaps like a flame beyond its wick. I’ve seen eyes embrace in silence.

But I’ve also seen and felt the limits of such transcendence. Running out of words, you eventually run out of bridges and roads that can connect the deepest parts of you with someone else. Smiles, stares, and awkward laughter can’t transmit the glaciers in one’s soul.

I’ve never asked my parents to speak English instead of Spanish to me. How could I? Asking my parents not to speak Spanish would be like asking them to cut out their tongue. Life could go on, but a deeper understanding would be lost. I believe this is one way of showing respect to my parents who’ve made the journey here, navigating an Anglo world that can render them flat, a shadow of themselves.

But what have I lost along the way? Can my parents understand me? Can this nation ever understand me? Speaking one language or the other, is my self always left with a remainder? Straddling two ways of life, is my full self only to commune with other misfits who share the dialect of this strange place?

Although I became English-dominant, my rearing in Spanish has found ways to haunt me. I’ve said things like “I’m going to pass the vacuum,” which always made sense to me until I confused an Anglo once. Even into my 20s, there were words I only knew how to say in Spanish. I was shocked when I learned that soursop was the English word for guanábana. Soursop is such an ugly word for a delicious fruit.

I never abandoned Spanish. Classes in high school and undergrad helped me. But beyond simple conversations or expressions, I still struggle. I have to speak slowly to not butcher words. I embarrass myself, often. Like the multiple occasions in which I used tú instead of usted to address my future suegros, which is not the best way to endear yourself to potential in-laws. Asked how I am feeling, I stammer in my response like Jennifer Lopez playing Selena at a press conference in Mexico: “Me siento muy…excited.”

Plus, I’m stuck with an Americanized Spanish accent that can be spotted across an ocean. I remember my cousin from Colombia telling me I sounded like a gringo on the phone. This made me hesitant to jump into my parent’s calls, calls which once required physically going to the deli to purchase BOSS-brand international calling cards. The smallest comments about my accent cut my confidence, making me reluctant to speak. But what did I expect? That I could escape the fact of my Americanness?

At every turn, shame pricks the tip of my tongue. Shame for having an accent. Shame for not having the right type of accent. Anger when someone is surprised I can speak English “well.” Dominating English, ¿ or English dominating me?, has allowed me to advance professionally and has given me access to the lingua franca of the world. But that, in itself, has never made me feel whole. I was born in this country, I’ve traveled to the motherland, but it feels like I’m still searching for home.

***

My mom tells me that, of all the Coritos we sang in Iglesia Metodista Unida Hispana De Hempstead when I was a child, one of my favorites was Juan Carlos Alvarado’s rendition of “Los Carros del Faraón.” This song celebrates the destruction of Pharaoh’s chariots that chased the newly free Hebrews in the Exodus story. I liked the fast pace of the song. While I looked forward to belting out the scatting portion that went “La la la la la la,” I suspect some adults around me meditated on a holy escape, on God’s protection from the chariots of death that hounded them over there or over here.

Dreamworks’ 1998 animated film, The Prince of Egypt

This story from the Torah has reverberated for millennia. It’s been absorbed into Christian and Islamic canons. In the 1^st century of the common era, Philo of Alexandria painted a biographical sketch of Moses as the ideal philosopher-king. In the 19^th century, Harriet Tubman earned the moniker “Moses” for helping to free over 300 enslaved African Americans. Besides learning about Moses in church, I saw him depicted in films like The Ten Commandments (1956) starring Charlton Heston, and Dreamworks’ The Prince of Egypt (1998), which I remembered for Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston’s duet “When You Believe.”

The Exodus text begins with politically subversive women. Fearing that the population of enslaved Hebrews—later known as the ancient Israelites—were becoming too numerous, Pharaoh enacts a policy to control this community’s birthrate. But Shiphrah and Puah, midwives to the Hebrew women, disobey Pharaoh’s edict to kill male Hebrew babies. Pharaoh then commands that every Hebrew baby boy be separated from its mother and tossed into the Nile river. Moses is born with a target on his back. Through the cunning of his biological mother and sister, Moses miraculously survives in a papyrus basket plastered with bitumen that floats to Pharaoh’s daughter who adopts him. For a season, the child Moses is nursed by his Hebrew mother. This child grows up and, one day, reluctantly heeds a divine call to confront the Egyptian ruler’s oppression of the Hebrews.

Moses’ birth narrative draws on motifs that pervade ancient literature, including that of the Akkadian and Egyptian Empires. Like the Moses story, Sargon of Akkad’s mother places him in a reed basket sealed with bitumen on the river, which carries him to Aqqi, who adopts Sargon as a son. Isis hides her son Horus in papyrus marshes from Seth, the ruler that Horus will grow up to depose.

It wasn’t until I re-read Exodus later in life, after graduate school in religion and years of reflecting on my identity, that I noticed the particular tensions within Moses’ identity as the story unfolds. His identity crisis reaches a crescendo in the litany of excuses Moses makes when God first calls him from a burning bush. The exchange goes something like this:

God: The cry of the Israelites has come to me; I have seen how the Egyptians oppress them. I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.

Moses: But who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?

God: I will be with you.

Moses: But If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?

God: I am who I am.

Moses: But I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.

God: Who gives speech to mortals?

Moses: O my Lord, please send someone else.

When I now read that Moses told God not to send him because he lacked eloquence and was slow of tongue, I wonder if Moses had an accent. That would make sense considering that Moses was born a Hebrew, raised as an Egyptian, and exiled to Midian. Based on Moses’ words, textual commentators have speculated whether Moses had a speech impediment or a fear of public speaking. Some rabbis of the Talmud suggest a young Moses burned his tongue with a piece of a coal. But I wonder: What if Moses was also self-conscious about his broken Hebrew? Or, what if he had forgotten his Hebrew? What if Moses’ society saw his Hebrew-Egyptian Spanglish as a lack of eloquence?

My imagination runs between the lines of this story. Moses is caught in between. But in another way, so is his mother. Like many mothers, she relocates her child for survival and a better chance at life. Yet, it must have been a difficult choice. She sends her child to the very heart of the royal court that has contributed to the oppression of her people.

What is going through Moses’ mind? He was born to a people oppressed, but raised and educated in the heart of this empire. What did he think when he looked out of the windows of the palace and heard the familiar tongue of those laying bricks for others who barely acknowledged their humanity?

Moses. Designed for the Revealer by Zeke Peña

Moses couldn’t neatly separate a public and private identity. His citizenship couldn’t escape the power dynamics that existed between them. Although Moses individually ascends, his destiny remains linked with a community that is systematically mistreated.

Moses grows up in the Egyptian palace but notices the Hebrews’ forced labor. One day, he kills an Egyptian who’s beating a Hebrew. With news of his deed spreading, and his own life endangered, Moses flees to Midian in northwest Arabia. Sitting beside a well, he witnesses a group of shepherds drive out a group of seven sisters who were getting water for their father’s flock. Moses rises to their defense. When the sisters return to their father and recount what happened, they identify Moses as an Egyptian. Moses goes on to marry one of the sisters, Zipporah, and they have a son whom he names Gershom (“Stranger There”).

When Moses first encountered Zipporah and her sisters in Midian, they identified him as an Egyptian. Perhaps he was assimilated in appearance. Either way, Moses is going through an identity crisis. He names his son “Stranger There” because, he explains: “I have been a stranger residing in a foreign land.” The place, the “there” in the text, remains ambiguous. Maybe Moses feels like a stranger in Midian, or felt like a stranger in Egypt. Moses might have felt like a stranger most of his life.

In describing himself as a stranger, Moses uses the Hebrew word commonly used in the Torah to describe foreigners: גֵּר (ger). It’s the same word used in Exodus 23:9: “You shall not oppress a stranger (ger); for you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Making space for others begins with making space for your own complicated self.

***

I might dare call Moses a proto-Latinx figure. He’s caught between political and cultural pressures that resemble what some younger Latinxs face today. Like the ancient Hebrews in Egypt, our community is seen as a threat—to national security, but really to this nation’s allegedly white cultural fabric.

Political commentators repeatedly employed the metaphor of the “Sleeping Giant” to describe the inevitable way surging Hispanic demographics would translate into power and remake the nation. Some white Americans took this as a warning. In a 2009 article titled “The Hispanic Challenge,” the late Harvard University professor Samuel P. Huntington described Latin American immigrant fertility rates as “the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity.”

Donald Trump’s presidency became the boiling point of anti-immigrant sentiment that had been simmering for several years. Like the Pharaoh described in Exodus, Trump has responded to cries for compassion with a particularly calloused heart. Through rhetoric and policy, he has echoed the worst nativism of this nation’s history, conflating brown immigrants with criminality and separating children from their parents, among other things.

The Pharaoh in Moses’ story approached the Hebrew people as dangerous invaders in spite of the fact that they had been there for generations. It didn’t matter that they had originally arrived in Egypt as refugees during a famine or had helped build up the kingdom. Similarly, although cheap Latinx labor has been used to build and maintain the United States, Latinx immigrants have become scapegoats for everything that’s wrong in society. How or why we ended up here remains an afterthought.

Pre-Mexican American War

Latinx migration has often been the boomerang effect of America’s imperial meddling in the other America, which it has treated as a backyard playground. Before we came to the United States, the United States came to us in the form of territorial annexations, monopolistic fruit companies, actual invasions, colonial occupations, orchestrated coups, shock doctrines, death squads, failed drug wars, neoliberal trade agreements, and a lie called the American Dream.

Recent waves of migration don’t alter the fact that our peoples have been here since the founding of the United States. Spanish was spoken in this land long before English. By the time the English settlers landed in Virginia in 1607, it had been 94 years since Juan Ponce de León had landed in Florida. This nation’s oldest known church, which dates back to 1610, is the San Miguel Mission. When the United States border crossed into Mexico and enveloped numerous Mexicans in 1848, many articulated their new American citizenship in Spanish. The myth of American exceptionalism is often pegged to an exclusively white, English, and Protestant foundation. The Latina writer María Ruiz de Burton was challenging this hypocrisy in 1872.

We are not foreign. But “we,” who? I refer to those of us who—for better or for worse—have been thrown together underneath an umbrella term that shades us, whether you consider the umbrella benign or problematic. We were once mostly scattered nationalities. Mexicans. Puerto Ricans. Cubans. And so on. Then activists, government bureaucrats, and media executives collaborated to invent the “Hispanic” category that first appeared in the 1980 Census. In order to not reduce our identity to Spain and the Spanish language, we became Latino. In an effort to be gender inclusive, we’ve become Latino/a, Latina/o, Latin@, and Latinx.

Many Americans debate what Latinxs will become in the future and how our assimilation, or lack thereof, might change the cultural landscape. The hidden question is this: Can Latinxs become white? Whiteness within the United States has proven to be a malleable hierarchy that can evolve over time and incorporate newcomers. Still, Latinxs are not uniform. We’re unlike earlier European immigrants, and we fall across a wide spectrum in terms of physical appearance and ancestry.

In Latin America, the term mestizaje has been used to describe our mixed reality. Derived from mestizo, a term the Spanish used to categorize the offspring of a Spanish father and Indigenous mother, mestizaje highlights not only the mixing of peoples, but the mixing of cultures.

José Vasconcelos, an influential Mexican leader in the early 20th century, wrote about mestizaje as an ideal that created a new “cosmic race.” On the one hand, Vasconcelos pushed back against the race science of his time that promoted Anglo-Saxon superiority. On the other, his vision reduced Indigenous and African peoples to stepping stones on the way to a higher racial fusion.

The poet José Martí criticized the racism and historical short-sightedness of the United States when he wrote about nuestra America. At the same time, in “Mi Raza,” Martí viewed his native Cuba through a colorblind lens that downplayed the struggles of Afro-Cubans. The desires for racial unity and a mixed future can be, and sometimes have been, grounded in anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity.

On a certain level, mestizaje—whether as a descriptor or ideal—never fundamentally addressed the issues of power that resulted from the conquest of the Americas and independence from Spain. Latin America has always had a race problem, even if the way race is imagined and discussed (or not) is somewhat different than how it is imagined and discussed in the United States, where race has historically operated in a black/white binary.

Against this backdrop, it’s not clear what Latinxs will become once we are transposed here. In the United States, some lighter-skinned Latinxs might pass or attempt to pass as “white.” Others might find themselves in the limbo of being “off-white,” of never being fully white even while carrying privileges associated with lighter skin. Darker-skinned Latinxs may get coded as black or foreign. Other factors such as mixed partnerships and geographical location could also pull Latinxs in different directions. Are Latinxs the next immigrants to become white? It all depends. “We,” who?

The adoption of the term Latinx, like the idea of grouping us as a collective, is deeply contested. But I like the way this term symbolizes a kind of in-betweenness.

For me, Latinx captures a fluidity in gender and more. Latin-X points to future possibilities, to multiple directions like Latin-XYZ. When I think of Latinx, I think of Exodus. We come from the other America. Our bodies, a battered all-American bridge. X marks the spot, the crossroads many of us find ourselves in. We’re figuring out who we are here and this is not neutral. We can assimilate into systems of oppression or chart paths of liberation. When I think of Latinx, I think of Moses.

Will I speak with the tongue I have, not the one I wish I had? Will I speak truth to power—even when I’m awkwardly attached to it as an American? My identity can be the result of forces out of my control, but Moses’ story tells me that what I make of it and who I become is still something I decide.

***

I’ve been using Moses as an allegory for Latinx identity and vice versa. But if I extend this allegory further, it leads me to places I’d rather not go. Because this story of deliverance quickly turns into a story of conquest. God tells Moses that his people will enter and possess the “promised land.” The problem: this land already had inhabitants collectively labeled the Canaanites.

God commands the ancient Israelites to exterminate the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan. Moses dies before the Israelites make it to this promised land. But the next generation, led by Joshua, carries out the conquest, entering towns and slaughtering men, women, and children. Joshua 11:11 says the Israelites “totally destroyed them, not sparing anyone that breathed.”

In the article “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians,” written in 1989, Native American scholar Robert Allen Warrior challenged how Christian liberation theologians used the Exodus story. Christians of all colors have often adopted Exodus in their own freedom struggles without addressing the narrative’s baggage, including its use against Native Americans. In the early colonial era of the United States, white Christian settlers saw themselves as a chosen people, this land as their inheritance, and Native Americans as “Canaanites” worthy of either conversion or extermination. Deliverance for some meant erasure for others.

For Warrior, the fact that scholars doubt the historical accuracy of this biblical conquest story doesn’t lessen the horror of this genocidal fantasy. In reality, the Canaanites were not wiped out and the emerging Israelites shared their culture. Within the story, though, the annihilation of the Canaanites is sanctioned by God. The story is read, reread, and used to justify violence that is real. “As long as people believe in the Yahweh of deliverance,” Warrior writes, “the world will not be safe from Yahweh the conqueror.”

Is the God who meets Moses in his insecurities and hears the cries of oppressed people the same God who orders genocide? No canon, creed, or church can redeem the horror of that violence.

Moses’ story can hold another lesson. Warrior says, “A delivered people is not a free people.” I take that to mean that trying to escape violence from one place does not grant one innocence in the ongoing violence of another place.

I could say “we are all immigrants” when that’s simply not true. If I am to make a home in this land, then I should consider its earlier inhabitants and those enslaved to work it. I should remember that the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” sung by abolitionists and civil rights leaders was set to the tune of “On Canaan’s Happy Shore.” If I am to read the Bible honestly, then I must accept—as Womanist theologian Delores Williams points out in Sisters in the Wilderness—that the violence that runs through Moses’ ancestral lineage begins with Abraham and Sarah’s violence against Hagar, an enslaved Egyptian woman.

Who will I become in the narrative of the United States? The story of Moses reminds me that I can experience oppression and easily oppress others. Not in some fallacious “reverse-racism” type of way, but in ways that harm nevertheless. Embracing my culture doesn’t negate that. Proudly speaking Spanish among racist Anglos won’t absolve me. I wish the problems could end with the colonists kicked out, the tyrannical leader removed. I am still left with what courses through me. I am still left attempting to reclaim—what exactly? The Spanish word guanábana is actually derived from a Taíno word. When I look in the mirror, I see that my body is the story of conquest written in flesh and blood.

Daniel José Camacho is a writer and editor. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Sojourners, ABC Religion & Ethics, TIME, and the Washington Post. He has a B.A. in Philosophy from Calvin College and an M.Div. from Duke Divinity School.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs. 

The post Moses Speaks Spanglish appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

I am writing this letter the day after the current president of the United States announced in Pittsburgh that he will have a border wall built in Colorado. His crowd cheered. But much of the media mocked the president for thinking Colorado shares a border with Mexico. The next day the president tweeted that he had been joking. Watch the video and decide for yourself, or if you think his intent matters. The crowd, after all, applauded. So, what, then, should we make of the crowd’s response? Perhaps they believe the Southwest is filled with hordes of people who shouldn’t be citizens, so many that a border wall should snare through the region to protect everyone else? Maybe they don’t care about actual borders, but about making the “land of the free” exclusively in their own image and in their own tongue? Or, maybe they know borders can change and they want to remain in the president’s favor?

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

This issue of the Revealer looks at borders and boundaries, at insiders and outsiders, at race and ethnicity. The articles begin from the premise that race and ethnicity are central to understanding religion in the border-shifting Americas. In “Moses Speaks Spanglish,” Daniel Camacho, a child of Spanish-speaking immigrants who was forced into English as a Second Language classes even though he was born in the United States, imagines Moses as a bilingual, proto-Latinx figure. In “La Llorona Visits the American Academy of Religion: A Tribute to Luís D. León,” Daisy Vargas pays homage to a pioneering queer scholar of Latinx religions. In “Thea Bowman: A Black Nun for Sainthood,” Ashley Okwuosa profiles a black Roman Catholic nun who challenged the Church’s racial injustices. And, in an excerpt from his book Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala, Kevin Lewis O’Neill describes his time following Guatemalan pastors who kidnap addicts, often at the request of their families, and take them to rehabilitation centers to eradicate their addictions by saving their souls.

As this issue highlights, religions, like countries, have borders. People in power also use religion to establish boundaries, to exclude, and to maintain an “us” that is free of “them.” But so, too, do people use religion to tear down walls and to open up paths to greater freedoms. There is not, as these articles attest, a single, simple picture of how religion functions in our world, in our nations, or at our borders.

Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Borders & Boundaries appeared first on The Revealer.