Hispanic American Religious Cultures (2 volumes set)

Hispanic American Religious Cultures

Selected titles in ABC-CLIO’s American Religious Cultures series African American Religious Cultures Anthony B. Pinn, Editor Asian American Religious Cultures Fumitaka Matsuoka and Jane Naomi Iwamura, Editors Hispanic American Religious Cultures Miguel A. De La Torre, Editor

Hispanic American Religious Cultures

VOLUME 1: A–M

Miguel A. De La Torre, Editor

Copyright © 2009 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hispanic American Religious Cultures / Miguel A. De La Torre, editor. p. cm. – (American religious cultures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–59884–139–8 (hardcopy : alk. paper) – ISBN 978–1–59884–140–4 (ebook) 1. Hispanic Americans–Religion–Encyclopedias. I. De La Torre, Miguel A. BL2525.H57 2009 200.89’68073—dc22 2009012661

13 12 11 10 9

1 2 3 4 5

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

To the millions of Hispanic congregations throughout the United States, accept this encyclopedia as our way of worshipping the Creator with all of our minds.

Contents

Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii

VOLUME 1 PART 1 ENTRIES Acompan˜amiento 3 Aesthetics 6 Africans 11 Ajiaco Christianity 21 Alcance Victoria 23 Alienation 26 Altars and Shrines 28 Anonymous Santerı´a 36 Asians 38 Assimilation 47 Aztla´n 58 Base Communities 67 Bible Institutes 71 Black Legend 78 Border Saints 80 Borderlands 83 Buddhism 89 Catholic Charismatic Movement 95 Catholicism 98 CELAM 113

Central Americans 119 Cha´vez, Ce´sar 130 Chicano Theology 133 Chicano/a Movement 135 Comunidad 142 Conquistadores 147 Conversion 156 Lo Cotidiano 158 Cuban Americans 160 Cuban Revolution 171 Cultural Anthropology 176 Curanderismo 179 Demographics 187 Dı´a de los Muertos 195 Diaspora Theology 200 Dominican Americans 205 Economics 209 Ecumenism 213 Encomienda 215 Environmentalism 218 vii

viii

|

Contents Espiritismo 220 Espiritualismo 224 Evange´lico/a 230 Exilio 237 Familia 245 Feminism 251 Fiesta 261 GLBT 269 Health Care 273 Hermeneutical Circle 283 Hip-Hop and Graffiti 285 Identity (Latino/a vs. Hispanic) 289 Immigration 294 Institutionalized Violence 301 Islam 306 Jehovah’s Witnesses 311 Jews 314

Justice 317 Language 325 Latina Evange´lica Theology 327 Literature 330 La Lucha 335 Machismo 339 Marian Devotions 341 Marianismo 346 Matachines 348 Mestizaje 351 Mexican Americans 357 Mission System 367 Mormons/Latter-day Saints 374 Mozarabic Rite 379 Mujerista 383 Mulatez 385 Mysticism 390

Index I-1

VOLUME 2 Native Americans 395 Nepantla 403 Olaza´bal, Francisco 409 Operation Pedro Pan 410 Ortega, Gregoria 413 Orthopathos 414 Palo 417 La Pastorela 419 Penitentes, Los Hermanos 421 Pentecostalism 423 Pilgrimage 436 Political Involvement 440 Postcolonialism 447 Postmodernism 449 Preferential Options 452 Private Religious Schools 454 Processions 456 Protestantism 458 Puerto Ricans 469 Raza Co´smica 479 Reconquista 482 Religious Affiliation 487

Renewalist Movement 489 Salsa Worship 493 Salvadorans 496 Sanctuary Movement 498 Santerı´a 501 Secularism 513 Sexuality 515 South Americans 518 Spaniards 525 Spiritual Hybridity 536 Structural Sin 538 Syncretism 539 Testimonios 543 Theological and Religious Education 545 Theological Anthropology 551 Transnationalism 553 Trinity 558 U.S. Political Parties 561 Universal Church of the Kingdom of God 564 Virgin Mary 567

Contents Voodoo 577 Young Lords Party 583

PART 2 ESSAYS Christology 589 Ecclesiology 599 Epistemology 611 Eschatology 615 Ethics 627 God 637 Hermeneutics 647 Latino/a Theology 657 Liberation Theology 671 About the Editor 773 List of Contributors 775 Index I-1

Liturgy and Worship 681 Orthopraxis 689 Pastoral Care and Counseling 699 Pneumatology 709 Popular Religion 713 Sacraments and Sacramentals 727 Soteriology 739 Spirituality 749 Teologia en Conjunto 761

|

ix

Acknowledgments

Most Hispanic religious academicians insist that they conduct their scholarship through a process known as teologı´a en conjunto, a collaborative methodology rooted in the social and historical contexts of the Latina/o community. Scholarship ceases to be an individual task as it becomes a shared endeavor that relies on the richness of our multiple views and voices to articulate the diversity of divergent religious perspectives within our community. Teologı´a en conjunto corrects the misconception that Hispanics are some type of monolithic group by revealing the complexity of our religious lives. To that end, this book is not, nor could it ever be, the product of one person. In a very real sense, it is the collective effort of the Latina/o scholarly and religious community. To the hundreds of colleagues who had a hand in bringing this work to completion, I say, ‘‘¡Gracias!’’ Egos were set aside as we worked together toward the common goal of creating this unique and timely contribution to the overall religious discourse. I also wish to express my deepest gratitude to Debbie McLaren who worked tirelessly beside me, helping with the proof-texting so that we could meet all of the publisher’s deadlines. Also, I express my thanks to the publishing editors, Steven Danver, who conceived the project with me, and Lynn Jurgensen, who brought the project to its conclusion. And finally, I am grateful to my wife, Deb, and children, Vincent and Victoria, for their unending belief in the work to which I am called.

xi

Introduction

For many, the religious history of the United States began at Plymouth Rock with the first Thanksgiving dinner, and then moved westward. Obviously, this view of religious history ignores the centuries of Native American spirituality. Even if we were to limit the movement of religion to faiths imported from Europe—specifically Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism—Plymouth Rock would not be our starting point. The start of the European-based religious history of the United States was both Spanish and Roman Catholic. It began in May 1493 when Pope Alexander VI, at the insistence of the king and queen of Spain—Ferdinand and Isabella—issued two bulls, the Inter Caetera I and II. Through these documents, all lands within the so-called ‘‘New World’’ that were not under a Christian ruler were granted to Spain (although a line of demarcation was drawn to carve out a space for Portugal). What was to eventually become the United States was first and foremost a Spanish colony under Spanish political and religious rule, even though the native inhabitants of the continent had no knowledge of Spaniards or of popes. In 1526, Lucas Va´squez de Ayllo´n set out with about 600 individuals from Hispaniola and founded the colony of San Miguel de Gualdape, the first European colony on North American soil. San Miguel was located in what would become the Carolinas near the vicinity of what would eventually be Jamestown, the English colony founded nearly a century later. A chapel was eventually built on the site, and for the first time on the North American continent, the Christian God was worshipped. The first prayers to the Christian God offered on the land that was to become the United States were offered in Spanish. And though the colony eventually failed, another more permanent colony further to the south was established. By 1565 San Augustine was established by Pedro Mene´ndez de Avile´s off the coast of what would become Florida, making this site the oldest continuous city within the United States. When we think of the expansion of Christianity within the United States, we have been taught to see it as an east-to-west movement. In reality, it has been a south-tonorth movement—from the Spanish Caribbean northward along the eastern U.S. coast xiii

xiv

|

Introduction

and from what would become Mexico northward along the western U.S. coast. Before English pilgrims celebrated their first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621, San Augustine already existed, and Santa Fe was the permanent center of Spanish dominion in the lands that eventually would become the southwestern United States. This historical presence of Hispanics is evident when we survey any map of the United States, where we will find states named Florida, not Flowered; Nevada, not Snow; and Colorado, not Red-Colored. Likewise, we have cities called Santa Fe, not Holy Faith; Los Angeles, not The Angels; and El Paso, not The Pass. Our map bears witness to the early presence of speakers of Spanish. The descendants of Hispanics were the earliest immigrants to arrive in what would become the United States. Their presence precedes the creation of this nation. Ironically, not only were they the first immigrants, they are also the latest immigrants. Nevertheless, their presence has mostly been ignored and marginalized throughout U.S. history, even though they are deemed to be the group most likely to change the face of America, which one can even call the ‘‘browning’’ of America. While their presence impacts many aspects of American life, the concern of this encyclopedia is focused on the religious influences of Latina/os. Before we can understand these influences, it is important that we understand who these Hispanics are. What are their demographics? Why are they here? And what characteristics seem to define Latina/o religiosity?

WHO ARE LATINA/OS? In 1992, ketchup ceased being America’s favorite condiment. According to sales figures, most Americans preferred salsa. But taste buds are not the only thing the Hispanic presence in this country is affecting. Many Americans cheer for sports personalities like baseball figure Jose Canseco or boxing legend Oscar de la Hoya. They read the literary works of Oscar Hijuelos, Christina Garcia, and Sandra Cisneros. They dance to the Latin beat of Celia Cruz, Ricky Martin, and Gloria Estefan. And their lives have been improved by the contributions made by Nobel Prize winners like Luis Walter Alvarez, Mario Molina, and Severo Ochoa. Every aspect of American life has been influenced by the Hispanic presence, including religion—specifically, how Americans conduct rituals, understand doctrinal ‘‘truths,’’ or do ‘‘church.’’ To ignore the Hispanic contribution to the discourse of U.S. religiosity is to ignore a major segment of the American population’s spirituality. The sheer numbers of Latina/os living in the United States will, whether we wish to admit it or not, impact U.S. discourse on American religiosity. Having recently become the largest minority group in the nation, they are impacting and restructuring the social, political, and economic ethos of the areas in which they settle. This makes the use of the word ‘‘minority’’ problematic. Hispanics constitute either the majority of the population or the largest portion of residents in several of the largest cities within the United States. For example, the 2006 U.S. census information showed that Latina/os represent 61 percent of Miami, Florida; 60 percent of San Antonio, Texas; and 49 percent of Los Angeles, California. Basically, in some of our largest urban areas, the major religious influence is Hispanic. Latina/os are mainly located in four

Introduction

|

states: California (31 percent of the Hispanic population), Texas (19 percent), New York (8 percent), and Florida (8 percent). This means that over 66 percent of the Hispanic population is located in these four states. Yet the states with the largest percentage of the state’s Hispanic population are New Mexico (42.1 percent), California (32.4 percent), Texas (32 percent), and Arizona (25.3 percent). According to the 2007 population estimates produced by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Latina/o population is at 45.5 million or about 15 percent of the U.S. population, with a projection of reaching 102 million by 2050 or about 25 percent of the population. Some experts believe the 25 percent mark could be reached much earlier—in 2030. It is safe to say that by 2050 at the latest, one in four Americans will be a Latino/a! When we consider that in 1950 Hispanics represented 4 million residents, comprising 2.6 percent of the population, their growth has been unparalleled, making them the fastest growing ethnic or racial group in this county. In the year 2000, Hispanics contributed to 37 percent of the nation’s growth. The Census Bureau estimates that between the years 2000 and 2014, their contribution to growth will be 43 percent. This growth rate is expected to increase to 57 percent between the years 2030 and 2050. Nevertheless, the numbers reported by the Census Bureau are deceiving. Excluded from the count are about 3.9 million residents of Puerto Rico and about 12 million undocumented ‘‘immigrants’’ who are treated as nonentities. These tallies are further complicated by the Census Bureau’s own admission of underrepresenting Latina/os (and other minority groups) by as much as 3 percent. Misrepresented in the national consciousness, Hispanics become misrepresented also in demographic statistics. If we were to adjust these figures to count every Latina/o living under the domain of the United States, there would appear to be more than 62.75 million Hispanics or about 20.6 percent of the population. In other words, one out of every five Americans is presently a Latina/o! A danger exists that this group of people we call Hispanics or Latina/os are seen as some type of monolithic group. For many Euro-Americans, there exists little difference between a Chicana/o, a Mexican American, a Central American, or a Spanish Caribbean native. In reality, Hispanics represent a very diverse population—some of whom are White, some indigenous, others Black, and most somewhere in between. They are a mestizaje (mixture) of cultures, races, and ethnicities. Some are heir to different indigenous cultures (such as Taı´no, Mayan, Aztec, and Zapotec); others trace their roots to medieval Catholic Spain (influenced by Muslims and Jews), or Africa (specifically those who come from the Caribbean and Brazil), or even Asia. This mixture is further complicated by their continuous presence in the United States, which adds new dimensions to their ethnic backgrounds due to interethnic marriages. In a very real sense, Hispanics represent all the colors of the human rainbow of skin pigmentation, coming from a multitude of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. It would be an error to assume that all Hispanics speak Spanish. Some only speak Spanish, but others only speak English, some are bilingual, and others prefer to speak Spanglish (a mixture of English and Spanish). Some barely know Spanish and instead speak one or several Mayan languages. It is also an error to assume all Hispanics crossed the borders into the United States. For some, the borders crossed them. Their forbearers have been on the land that would become the United States before there

xv

xvi

|

Introduction

was a United States. Others are born U.S. citizens, while others are naturalized citizens. Some are resident aliens, while others are undocumented. Some groups were well received and quickly integrated into the U.S. fabric, while others have faced significant discrimination. It would also be misleading to assume that all Latina/os belong to the same economic stratum. Yes, many are poor, but several are multimillionaires. They live in the despair of the barrio, the comfort of middle-class suburbia, the open spaces of rural America, and the luxury of gated communities. Some pick grapes for a living, while others pick stocks and bonds. Consequently, there is no such thing as a ‘‘pure’’ or ‘‘typical’’ Hispanic. Likewise, there is no such thing as one Hispanic religious expression. According to research done by the Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL), 93 percent of all Latina/os identify with Christianity. Many may be Catholics—70 percent of those claiming to be Christian—but surely this does not represent the totality of the Latina/o religious experience. About 22 percent are scattered among the other nonCatholic Christian expressions, specifically Protestants, Pentecostals, and Evangelicals, with the highest concentration among Pentecostal groups—specifically the Assembly of Christian Churches, the Pentecostal Church of God, and the Apostolic Assembly of Faith in Christ Jesus. The breakdown in faith affiliation reported by HCAPL was confirmed by a study conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, which found that 68 percent of Latina/os claim to be Catholic, of which Mexicans (74 percent) and South Americans (71 percent) were disproportionately higher. Of the 15 percent of Hispanics who claimed to be Evangelicals, Puerto Ricans (27 percent) and Central Americans (22 percent) had larger representation than the average. And of those Hispanics who self-identified as secular, 8 percent, Cubans represented the largest share (14 percent). The Pew Hispanic Center estimated that one-third of U.S. Catholics and 6 percent of Evangelical Protestants are Hispanics. These numbers are expected to grow along with the overall demographic growth of Hispanics within the United States, thus impacting the nation’s religious expression. For example, if the conversion rate over the past quarter century remains constant, the overall Catholic population will decline from 68 percent in 2006 to 61 percent in 2030. Yet, over that same period, the proportion of Catholics who are Latina/o will increase from 33 percent to 41 percent. While many are loyal to one Christian tradition, others participate in more than just one belief system. Although they may be Christians by day, by night, or in cases of emergencies, they might consult the orishas—African quasi-deities of the religion Santerı´a—or visit a curandera/o (healer) to access ancestral Amerindian religious traditions. For some Latina/os, spiritual succor is found in U.S.-based faiths like the Jehovah Witnesses representing (according to HCAPL) the largest Hispanic membership to a non-Catholic Christian tradition, and Mormonism, which ranks eighth among Hispanic’s largest religious traditions. For others (about 1 percent), spiritual solace is found within other world religious traditions like Islam, Judaism, or Buddhism. And, of course, there are those Hispanics who chose no particular religious preference (about 6 percent) or are atheist (about 0.37 percent).

Introduction

HISPANIC DEMOGRAPHICS According to 2002 Census information, the largest ethnic group among Hispanics is from Mexican origin, representing 59.3 percent of the Latina/o population and 7.4 percent of the overall U.S. population. The second largest Hispanic group is the Puerto Ricans who comprise 9.6 percent of the Latina/o population and 1.2 percent of the total U.S. population. The third largest group is the Cubans who consist of 3.5 percent of the Latina/o population and 0.4 percent of the U.S. population. For the past halfcentury, these three groups have been considered the big three Hispanic groups. However, the spot for third place is being challenged, and if current demographic shifts continue, Dominicans (2.3 percent of Hispanics) or Salvadorians (2 percent of Latina/os) could very well become the third largest U.S. Latina/o ethnic group. If we consider the median age of Hispanics at 26, as noted by The Hispanic Databook, we notice that they are younger than the overall U.S. population age of 35.4. Cubans at 40.3, Spaniards at 35.8, and Uruguayans at 37.3 years of age are the only three Latina/o groups older than the U.S. median age. The youngest group, which is also the most populist group, is the Mexicans at age 24.4. Puerto Ricans are also among the younger Hispanic groups at 27.7 years. The Hispanic Databook goes on to show that Hispanic families of 3.59 persons in a household tend to be larger than overall U.S. households of 2.59. The largest household sizes are among Salvadorians at 4.14 persons, followed by Guatemalans at 4.08 persons. There are no Latina/o ethnic groups that have household sizes smaller than the average U.S. household. Only one group, Spaniards, have an equal household size of 2.59 persons. The other two groups that come closest to the U.S. household size are Argentineans at 2.75 persons and Cubans at 2.76 persons. When it comes to those five years of age and older who speak English only in Hispanic households, Spaniards top the list at 40 percent of their population. The next closest groups are Paraguayans at 28.1 percent of its population and Panamanians at 26.1 percent. Salvadorians at 6 percent, Guatemalans at 6.9 percent, and Dominicans at 7.1 percent are the ethnic groups with the fewest household members speaking English only at home. Mexicans (21.2 percent) and Puerto Ricans (24.6 percent) are closer to the average at 21.4 percent. Cubans are below that average at 13.7 percent. Of the entire Latina/o population, 40.2 percent, according to The Hispanic Databook, are foreign born. With the exception of Puerto Ricans at 1.4 percent and Mexicans at 41.5 percent, all other Latina/o groups have a vast majority of foreign born. Cubans at 68.5 percent and Dominicans at 68.2 percent have the least foreign born among those groups with a majority, with Venezuelans at 80.1 percent having the most. All other groups have about three-quarters of their population born outside the United States. Of the entire U.S. Hispanic population, only 11.2 percent of those who are foreign born are naturalized citizens. Cubans have the largest group of naturalized citizens at 41.4 percent of its foreign-born population. If we ignore Puerto Ricans at 0.6 percent of its foreign-born population because they are born with U.S. citizenship, the group with the lowest percentage of its foreign-born population who have obtained naturalized citizenship are Mexicans at 9.2 percent of its population.

|

xvii

xviii

|

Introduction

Almost half of the Hispanic population (47.6 percent) that is 25 years and older do not have a high school diploma, compared to 80.4 percent of the U.S. population that has a diploma. Argentineans (80.44 percent), Bolivians (84.6 percent), Chileans (83.1 percent), Panamanians (84.9 percent), Peruvians (82.5 percent), and Venezuelans (88 percent) all exceed the U.S. population average. Among the ‘‘big three,’’ Cubans (63 percent) and Puerto Ricans (63.3 percent) are above the Hispanic average while Mexicans (45.8 percent) fall below. The groups least likely to graduate from high school are Salvadorians with only 36.1 percent obtaining a diploma and Guatemalans at 38.9 percent. When it comes to a four-year college degree for those who are 25 years and over, only 10.4 percent of the Hispanic population has a degree, compared to 24.4 percent of the overall U.S. population. Those least likely to have a college degree are Salvadorians at 5.5 percent of its population, Guatemalans at 6.9 percent, and Mexicans at 7.5 percent. Puerto Ricans (12.5 percent) and Cubans (21.1 percent) are above the Hispanic average. Venezuelans are the most likely to have a college degree at 44.1 percent. In 2004, The Hispanic Databook reported that the Hispanic median household income at $33,676 is below the overall U.S. population median income. Mexicans are very close to the Hispanic median at $33,621. Puerto Ricans fall below the Hispanic median at $30,644, while Cubans are placed above the median at $36,671. The lowest household income is among Dominicans at $29,099, while the highest is among Bolivians at $47,245. But these numbers can be deceiving. When we examine the per capita income, we note the extent of poverty among Hispanics whose per capita income at $12,111 is almost half of the overall nation at $21,587. Mexicans have the lowest per capita income at $10,918. Puerto Ricans per capita income stands at $13,518, slightly above the Hispanic average, with Cubans at $20,451, slightly below the national average. Only three groups have a per capita income greater than the national average: Argentineans at $26,121, Spaniards at $23,046, and Uruguayans at $22,870. While 12.4 percent of the overall U.S. population falls below the poverty level, 22.6 percent of Hispanics lives below the poverty line. Dominicans (27.5 percent of its population), Puerto Ricans (25.8 percent), Hondurans (24.3 percent), and Mexicans (23.51 percent) are the ethnic groups with the largest portion of people living below the poverty line. Only Paraguayans (11.5 percent), Peruvians (12.2 percent), and Uruguayans (11.2 percent) have a lower percentage of their population living in poverty than the overall U.S. population. Not surprisingly Latina/os who own their own homes (45.7 percent of the Hispanic population) are less than the U.S. overall average (66.2 percent).

WHY ARE THEY HERE? As previously mentioned, Hispanics have been present on lands that would become part of the United States before the United States existed. Before the English colonial venture began, the ancestors of Latina/os occupied these lands as either the original inhabitants (through their Native American roots) or as the first colonizers (through their Medieval Spaniard roots). For most Latina/os, especially those who trace their

Introduction roots to Mexico and Central America, they are the product of the violent clash of these two cultures, making them children of the conquistador oppressors and their Indian victims. For others, especially those from the Caribbean, they are the children of slaveholding Spanish plantation owners and their slaves. Most Latina/os find themselves within the boundaries of the United States because their lands were conquered through military superiority (Mexico). Others find themselves here because their lands were annexed (Puerto Rico) or economically exploited (most of Central America, South America, and the Caribbean). The first major ‘‘influx’’ of Latina/os to the United States occurred with the territorial conquest of Northern Mexico, recognized by the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The treaty brought a cessation to the Mexican-American War and created a border between the two nations by drawing a surveyor line across the sand, literally through an area that, according to the archeological evidence, has historically experienced fluid migration. This border created through military conquest resulted in Mexico’s loss of 40 percent of its northern territory to the United States. The immediate consequence of creating this artificial 1,833-mile border is that the United States acquired gold deposits in California, silver deposits in Nevada, oil in Texas, and all of the natural harbors (except Veracruz) necessary for commerce. The acquisition of these natural resources contributed to the wealth building of the United States at the expense of Mexico. Also lost with the signing of the treaty were some 50,000 of their citizens who were residing on those lands. Overnight, these Mexican citizens who were the majority in their nation became a minority Mexican American population within a foreign land. The second major ‘‘influx’’ of Hispanics to the United States occurred with the annexation of Puerto Rico at the close of the Spanish-American War in 1898. The war, to a great extent, was a fight for control of colonial territories between the declining empire of Spain and the emerging empire of the United States. With U.S. victory came the territorial acquisition of almost all of Spain’s colonial possessions, including the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The Philippines fought for independence against the United States in the Philippine-American War. Millions died before they became a commonwealth in 1935 and an independent nation after World War II. Cuba was declared independent from the start, but in reality remained under U.S. economic control until the 1959 Castro Revolution. Guam and Puerto Rico, to this day, have remained colonies of the United States. The annexation of Puerto Rico and the granting of citizenship during World War I to acquire needed soldiers have facilitated easy migration to the U.S. mainland. The U.S. history of conquest and annexation explains why the two largest Hispanic groups within the United States are from Mexico and Puerto Rico. For many representing the remaining Latina/o population, their presence is a result of economic exploitation. According to the Census Bureau, the component most responsible for the increase of the Hispanic population between 2000 and 2006 was ‘‘Net International Migration’’ at 52.4 percent. A century of ‘‘gunboat diplomacy’’ where Latin American governments were overthrown to install ‘‘banana republics’’ responsible for protecting U.S. business interests created poverty and death in many Latin American countries, specifically in Central

|

xix

xx

|

Introduction

America and the Caribbean. For many Latin Americans, specifically the poor exploited due to foreign business interests, resistance was manifested as either fight or flight. Many chose the former, resulting in hundreds of thousands being killed or ‘‘disappearing.’’ Others chose the latter and fled north. They mainly settled in urban areas including New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. For example, Salvadorians and Nicaraguans immigrated because the United States conducted wars in their countries by either supporting an oppressive regime (as in the case of El Salvador) or funding the rebel forces (as in the case of Nicaragua). When the century-long policy of ‘‘gunboat diplomacy’’ provided U.S.-based multinational corporations (i.e., the United Fruit Company) the ability to build roads into these developing countries to extract, by brute force if necessary, their natural resources, or when U.S. factories known as maquiladoras were built along the border to extract cheap labor, some of the inhabitants of Latin America, deprived of a livelihood, took these same roads following the resources taken.

CHARACTERISTICS OF HISPANIC RELIGIOSITY A comprehensive 2007 study done by the Pew Hispanic Center on how Hispanics are transforming American religion showed that as a whole, Latina/os express greater commitment to religion (68 percent) than the overall U.S. population (60 percent). Nine out of ten Hispanics identify with a specific religion. The sheer increase in numbers of Hispanics is not the only variable impacting U.S. religiosity. Latina/os are bringing change to religious communities, and these religious communities are bringing change to Hispanics. These changes are rooted in the prevailing characteristics of the Latina/o religious experience. One of the prevailing characteristics defining Hispanic religiosity is its emphasis on ethnic-oriented worship. The Pew study showed that two-thirds of all Latina/o worshippers attend churches that have Hispanic clergy, conduct services in Spanish, and have a large Latina/o portion of worshippers in the congregation. While one can expect this phenomenon to be predominant among immigrants and/or Spanish speakers, it is just as prevalent among U.S.-born and English-speaking Hispanics. This indicates that Latina/os mainly worship with Hispanic congregations due to reasoning rooted in ethnic identity more so than simply being a product of immigration or language. As the growth of the Hispanic population continues, so too will the continuous emergence of Hispanic-oriented congregations within all U.S. religious traditions. A second characteristic of Latina/o religiosity, according to the same Pew study, is the prevalence of ‘‘spirit-filled’’ religious experiences. This renewalist movement emphasizes the Holy Spirit and its daily intervention in the lives of believers. The Spirit is present within the faith community through metaphysical manifestations, which include speaking in tongues (glossolalia), performing miracles (including healing), and prophesying. The renewalist movement encompasses both Pentecostal and charismatic groups—both Catholic and Protestants. While about a fifth of nonHispanic Protestants identify with a spirit-filled religion, more than half of Latina/o

Introduction Protestants do (57 percent). Likewise, more than half of Latina/o Catholics (54 percent) self-identify as charismatics compared to only an eighth of non-Hispanic Catholics. This renewalist movement may explain some of the major beliefs held by Hispanic Christians. According to the Pew study, a majority of these Latina/os view God as an active force in the world and in their daily lives; thus three out of four Hispanics believe that miracles still occur today as they did in biblical times. Half of all Latina/ os (76 percent of Evangelical Latina/os) believe the Bible is the literal word of God compared to 35 percent of non-Hispanics (62 percent of Evangelical Non-Hispanics). They are more likely than non-Hispanics to claim religion as an important component of their lives, many subscribing to a ‘‘prosperity gospel,’’ believing that God rewards the faithful with financial prosperity and good health. Also, when compared to the rest of the population, Latina/os are more likely (52 percent) than non-Hispanics (33 percent) to hold the belief of Jesus’ second coming within their lifetime. Finally, about two-thirds of Latina/os say that their political thinking is influenced by their religious beliefs and commitments, and thus more than half of them say that the pulpit is an appropriate place to address political and social issues. Not surprisingly, a correlation exists between political party affiliation and religious conviction.

CONCLUSION Over the past few decades, Americans have started to take notice of the Hispanics among them. Most automated phone services begin by asking the caller to press two if they want to continue in Spanish. Daily newspapers carry stories on undocumented Latina/o immigrants. And most are finding, with increasing frequency, Hispanics living in the same neighborhoods, shopping in the same malls, eating in the same restaurants, and attending the same schools as Euro-Americans. Hispanics are here, they are here to stay, and with each passing year their numbers are growing. Their presence is changing many aspects of American life—including the religious landscape. This is the first encyclopedia ever written to provide an academic resource to Hispanic religiosity within the United States. Many scholars have contributed to this project from their areas of expertise in the hope that a resource can exist that provides an intellectual understanding of the Hispanic religious experience. —Miguel A. De La Torre

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING Aponte, Edwin David, and Miguel A. De La Torre. Handbook of Latina/o Theologies (St. Louis, MO: Charlice Press, 2006). De La Torre, Miguel A., and Edwin David Aponte. Introducing Latino/a Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001).

|

xxi

xxii

|

Introduction

Espinosa, Gasto´n. ‘‘Methodological Reflections on Latino Social Science Research.’’ Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´n Espinosa (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2006). The Hispanic Databook (Millerton, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2004). Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007). Rodrı´guez, Havida´n, Rogelio Sa´enz, and Cecilia Menjı´var, eds. Latinas/os in the United States: Changing the Face of Ame´rica (New York: Springer, 2008). U.S. Census Bureau. http://www.census.gov/.

Part 1

ENTRIES

A complicit in existing injustices. The work of Gutie´rrez and other Latin American theologians was very influential throughout Latin American Christianity and beyond. Indeed, in their general conferences at Medellı´n, Colombia (1968), and Puebla, Mexico (1979), the Catholic bishops of Latin America committed themselves to a preferential option for the poor; they called for the Church to become a ‘‘Church of the poor.’’ Gutie´rrez insisted that the option for the poor and all Christians as both individuals and Church is rooted in the Bible itself, suggesting that there are two principal overarching themes in Scripture: (1) the universality and gratuity of God’s love and (2) God’s preferential love for the poor. Though, at first glance, these themes appear to be incommensurable, they are in fact mutually implicit. If we live in a world divided between the powerful and the powerless, and if God loves everyone equally, then God’s love for the powerful must manifest itself differently than God’s love for the powerless. For purposes of illustration, one

ACOMPAÑAMIENTO The notion of acompan˜ amiento, or ‘‘accompaniment,’’ emerges within U.S. Latino/a theologies and Latin American liberation theologies as a development of the preferential option for the poor that grounds these theological movements. In his groundbreaking work A Theology of Liberation (1971), Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutie´rrez argues that theology must be ‘‘critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word’’ (Gutie´rrez 1988, 11). Christian theology must be rooted in Christian action in the world as a critical reflection on that lived commitment that will nurture and embolden the struggle for social change. Conversely, when theological reflection is undertaken in isolation from such social engagement, it will, by its silence, implicitly support the unjust status quo. A politically neutral theology is thus not possible; either theology reflects on and contributes to the struggle for justice or, by its silence on political questions, theology—and the theologian—will be 3

4 |

Acompañamiento

At sunrise on Good Friday, members of Tucson’s Los Dorados organization walk up a mountain near the city, carrying a cross. (Stephanie Maze/Corbis)

might take an example from family life. If a father comes upon his teenage son fighting with his younger, smaller daughter, the daughter would not appreciate the father’s refusal to take any action on the ground that he loves his children equally and, therefore, must not take sides. Were the father to step in and restrain the son, such an act would not diminish the father’s love for the son, nor would it mean that the father loves the daughter more than he loves the son. It would simply mean that, in that context, the father’s equal love for the two must manifest itself in different forms. Equal or universal love does not imply neutrality; indeed, the former precludes the latter. In the years since its earliest articulations, the notion of the preferential option for the poor has been critiqued, developed, and deepened. Further

analyses have focused, for instance, on clarifying terms such as ‘‘the poor.’’ Other analyses have focused on the nature of a ‘‘preferential option.’’ In what, precisely, does a preferential option consist? If a commitment to justice is central to such an option, what would constitute such a commitment? It is in the context of these latter questions that the term ‘‘acompan˜amiento’’ emerges, as an attempt to specify an essential dimension of the preferential option for the poor and the commitment to social justice. The notion of accompaniment as central to the struggle for justice was already present among Latin American pastoral workers who, informed by liberation theology, ‘‘accompanied’’ the poor in their struggles during the 1970s and 1980s. Acompan˜amiento meant the act of being

Acompañamiento | 5 present alongside the poor in their everyday lives and struggles. Gutie´rrez averred that any genuine commitment to the liberation of the poor must be grounded in concrete, particular friendships with poor persons. In other words, one might infer, the simple (yet dangerous!) act of being present with poor persons, of befriending them, in such a way that their humanity and worth is affirmed and valued is the most fundamental form of liberation, which grounds and gives rise to the more explicitly political forms of liberation. Such inferences have been further developed and systematized in the work of U.S. Latino/a theologians influenced by the insights of Latin American liberation theology, especially the preferential option for the poor. Where the poor are treated as— in Gutie´ rrez’s words— ‘‘non-persons,’’ the act of accompaniment, of being present with, of walking alongside the poor is the most fundamental way in which we affirm the personhood of poor persons, not as an abstraction (‘‘the poor’’), but as particular human beings worthy of respect. Such an affirmation of another’s dignity, through the simple act of everyday presence with them, contributes to that struggle for survival which itself is the most basic form of resistance in a society that seeks the destruction or, at least, disappearance of the poor. U.S. Latino/a theologians have drawn attention to the liberating dimensions of U.S. Latino/a popular religion as a key context of acompan˜amiento. Though not overtly political, the religious practices of the poor are important instances in which the poor accompany each other, are present to each other, and give expression to the bonds that unite them so that, even in the midst of much suffering, they are empowered to continue

hoping and struggling. More importantly, such religious practices give expression to their experience of a God who accompanies them in their suffering and struggle. Thus, for example, the Good Friday Via Crucis, in which the community comes together to walk with Jesus on his way to Calvary, is an important way in which the community reaffirms its bonds with a God who suffers and struggles with them. Those bonds become sources of hope, which can form the basis not only of the everyday struggle for survival, but of more public and political struggles for change. The connection between the experience of empowerment in everyday relationships and empowerment for political and structural change is one that has been especially developed by Latin American feminist, U.S. Latina feminist, and mujerista theologians in their concept of lo cotidiano (the everyday). By contributing to our understanding of Christian praxis, or Christian action in the world, such reflections have contributed to the further development of a ‘‘critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word.’’ Thus, the act of acompan˜amiento becomes an essential source and context for the theological task, particularly as that task seeks to promote the liberation of the poor and a more just society. Roberto S. Goizueta

References and Further Reading Aquino, Marı´a Pilar. Our Cry for Life (Eurgene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002). Berryman, Phillip. Stubborn Hope: Religion, Politics, and Revolution in Central America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994).

6 |

Aesthetics

Espı´n, Orlando. The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). Goizueta, Roberto S. Caminemos con Jesu´s: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Gutie´rrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996).

AESTHETICS The noun ‘‘aesthetics’’ usually refers to a branch of philosophical inquiry dealing with the nature, meaning, and interpretation of art; the creative processes used to create it; and the kinds of experience that art offers. The adjective ‘‘aesthetic’’ commonly refers to the perceptual, the beautiful, and the artistic. This entry provides a brief sketch of how the term has been used in philosophical and religious discourse, with the aim of showing the contributions that U.S. Latino/a theologians and scholars of religion are making today.

Historical Development Western theories of art and beauty may be traced back to Plato, but the concept of aesthetics is a distinctly modern one. Drawing on the Greek word ‘‘aesthesis’’ (perception), Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten coined the term in 1735 to mean the science of sensory knowledge. Whereas initially aesthetics was broadly conceived of as an inquiry into the sensory knowledge of any (or, indeed, all) experience, many theorists soon limited

this inquiry to the sensory knowledge of exceptional pieces of fine art. One sees this shift clearly, for example, when comparing Immanuel Kant’s wide-ranging discussion of the transcendental aesthetic in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and G. W. F. Hegel’s more limited thoughts on the fine arts in Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (1835). This shift was not a completely decisive one. Subsequent thinkers, like the Romantics, would highlight the broad reach of aesthetics, as witnessed by their fascination with the beautiful and sublime features of nature and the human body. In spite of the Romantics’ gains, aesthetic theory since the late eighteenth century has been premised largely on the more limited idea that aesthetics is a matter of art proper, and perhaps more importantly, that art is to be contemplated by a perceiver in a disinterested and detached way. This contemplative view of art, which is often described as ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ or ‘‘art-as-such,’’ emerged largely in the writings of Joseph Addison, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and, most notably, in Kant’s later writings, particularly the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790). For the later Kant, aesthetic experience refers to a pure judgment of taste. The perceiver contemplates the object in an immediate way, irrespective of its use or external end. This view was fueled by the rise of a new leisure class in Europe who, at the time, sought to enjoy the fine arts for their intrinsic value. This eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury contemplative model of ‘‘artas-such’’ differed significantly from the more long-standing constructive approach to art. Since Aristotle’s Poetics, theorists of art had approached the topic largely through the viewpoint of the

Aesthetics | 7 maker, rather than the perceiver, of art. An art object was seen as a true work or craft, and it was designed specifically to affect certain external ends. This construction model made function and context integral to the meaning of art. The contemplative model of art, on the other hand, stripped art from its multifaceted environment and derived meaning instead from its inherent worth. Today, scholars still draw upon both contemplative and constructive approaches to art, sometimes highlighting the tension between the two. Critical theorists and post-structuralists, for instance, have taught us to be suspicious of intrinsic or culturally independent conceptions of art. Yet, at the same time, thinkers in these traditions often affirm that, in certain respects, aesthetic experiences and objects do enjoy a relative autonomy from their material, historical, and cultural preconditions. Much of the ensuing debate has to do with how best, exactly, to understand the relation of the relative and the autonomous qualities of the aesthetic.

Religious Discourse and Aesthetics There is a natural fit between religious and aesthetic discourse. Insofar as an aesthetic object or experience transcends ordinary experience, it may approach, if not approximate, a sense of the sacred. According to Paul Tillich, ‘‘All the arts penetrate into the depths of things which are beyond the reach of cognition’’ (Tillich 1989, 15). Theologians and religious scholars often invoke the discussion of aesthetics to highlight a dimension of human experience that in some way exceeds the normal ‘‘reach of cognition.’’

Many of the classic themes in the philosophy of art discussed above— detached contemplation, active construction, and relative autonomy—may be reinterpreted in more religious terms. The eighteenth-century idea of ‘‘art-assuch’’ had already functioned previously in the realms of metaphysics and theology, primarily in the writings of Plato and Plotinus, and, later, Augustine. In one of the strangest turns in intellectual history, early Christian theology began to identify the God of the Old Testament —a personal, relational, and historical God—with the Greeks’ pagan notion of an autonomous and self-sufficient Absolute Beauty. According to M. H. Abrams, Augustine was mainly responsible for this fusion of the Hebrew God and the classical Absolute. Augustine’s understanding of caritas pitted uti, which suggests, in a constructive fashion, loving things for their utility as a means to something else—against frui, which connotes, in a more contemplative way, loving God as an end in God’s-self and for pure enjoyment. Within Christianity, the seed for the idea of ‘‘art-as-such’’ had been planted as early as the fifth century. Today, religious studies scholars and theologians continue to debate many of the classic issues in aesthetics. Among other things, they continue to differ as how best to approach creative objects and practices (‘‘art’’ in the largest sense). Some opt for an Augustinian model of contemplation, whereas others prefer a more Aristotelian (and often, by extension, Marxian) approach. Furthermore, while most theologians and religionists would not want to restrict aesthetics to the realm of art proper, many continue to debate where aesthetic objects and experiences can best be found. Those interested in theological

8 |

Aesthetics

RETABLOS Even though retablo means literally ‘‘behind the table,’’ the first retablos were made to be placed on a table that would serve as an altar for Christian worship in the ninth century. These retablos were made of sheets of wood or metal and depicted scenes from the life of Christ or a particular saint. Oftentimes, it would also have the portrait of Jesus or the saint being venerated. In the twelfth century retablos were installed in the apses behind the altars in many churches throughout Europe. It was not until after the Tridentine reform, however, that retablos became an important part of the altar. In Spain and other parts of Europe, as retablos became a permanent part of the main altar, they became larger and more ornate. These ornamental retablos with statuary, reliquaries, and tabernacles made their way into many large towns in Latin America. At the same time, missionaries recovered the use of small portable retablos to be placed upon tables and altars for the purpose of worship and teaching Christian doctrine. In many parts of Latin America and Southwestern United States it is these small, movable works of folk art that come to mind when the word ‘‘retablo’’ is used. —GCG

aesthetics, for example, tend to focus on the texts, doctrines, worship practices, and ethical norms of a single religious tradition, such as Christianity. They tend to highlight beauty as an important attribute of God, revelation, and moral character. Others interested in religious aesthetics tend to foreground the aesthetic-religious dimensions of human experience at large. These scholars are more prone to look at aesthetics across cultures and religious traditions as well as to utilize nonsectarian language and categories.

The Contribution of U.S. Hispanics to the Discourse of Aesthetics As important and instructive as the European discourse on aesthetics is, one cannot overlook the fact that it has not significantly addressed the aesthetic works and experiences of much of the

world’s population. In light of this void, scholars of U.S. Latino/a religion have made significant contributions to our understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of religion. These scholars borrow from inherited classical and European frameworks, but they also bring a distinctly American approach to the subject, drawing on a rich and varied religious history. One of the greatest contributions made by scholars of U.S. Latino/a religion has been to take account of the indigenous roots of Hispanic religiosity. Scholars have identified at least three distinct premodern aesthetic sensibilities that continue to inform the religious practices of many Latino/as today: the Amerindian, the Iberian, and the African. Within each, there is no sharp distinction between the realm of the sacred and the realm of the profane. Instead, everyday experience may qualify as religiously significant. The divine is sacramentally mediated, through a variety of aesthetic

Aesthetics | 9 forms, as an intensification of everyday experience. As Allan Deck and Chris Tirres have noted, Africans, Amerindians, and the newly arrived Iberian Christians imbued their rituals, symbols, and polyrhythmic music with sensuality, power, and a sense of freedom, in effect, making their world holy. Today, such aesthetic expressions continue to play a major part in Latino/a culture, serving often as sites where the sacred is experienced. Furthermore, the ongoing cultural exchange between Latin America and the United States, fostered by the ongoing movement of immigrants, continues to infuse U.S. Latino/a religious practices with a vital and integral sense of the sacred. In addition to drawing attention to indigenous and premodern cosmologies, scholars of Latino/a religion have also broached aesthetic themes by demonstrating how, in the colonial encounter, human creativity and imagination helped subjugated peoples forge a sense of identity and agency. In his study of Mesoamerican religion, historian of religion Davı´d Carrasco notes that the story of religion in the New World is, in many ways, the story of colonial conquest and the overcoming of this hardship through human striving and artistic ingenuity. Through the creative, transcultural processes of what Carrasco calls ‘‘worldmaking,’’ ‘‘worldcentering,’’ and ‘‘worldrenewing,’’ colonized people not only made their world bearable, but also meaningful. Carrasco shows how this is so through such diverse examples as the Virgin of Guadalupe, the peyote hunt of the Huichol Indians, the celebration of Dı´a de los Muertos, the Fiesta of Santiago among the Tzutujil Maya, and the Chicano Movement in the United States. Numerous other scholars also highlight

various types of human creativity and imagination utilized by Latino/as in the face of oppression, including visual art, murals, women’s literature, film, music, and popular ritual. Though these aesthetic media may differ greatly, at their best they all may reflect what theologian Harold Recinos refers to as a ‘‘poetics of power.’’ Far from taking a detached view of aesthetics or religion, scholars of Latino/a religiosity tend to root their discourse in particular histories, stories, artistic forms, or ways of life in the Latino/a context. Such is seen in the works of Alejandro Garcı´a-Rivera and Roberto S. Goizueta. Garcı´a-Rivera laments the fact that Western thought, beginning with Plato and continuing through Kant, has tended to divorce aesthetic experience from religious experience. Noting the impressive efforts of Latin Americans to reconstruct their own history and philosophy, Garcı´a-Rivera calls for theology to expand beyond the confines of ‘‘textual’’ theology and to explore the richness of ‘‘living’’ theological and artistic texts—such as symbols, images, music, poems, drama, and dance. When this happens, Garcı´a-Rivera believes that we may witness the beautiful as a means for the soul to ascend to a blissful union with God. As he puts it, theological aesthetics ‘‘attempts to make clear once again the connection between Beauty and the beautiful, between Beauty’s divine origins and its appropriation by the human heart’’ (Garcı´a-Rivera 1999, 11). Goizueta is similarly interested in validating Latino/a ‘‘lived’’ religion, with a focus on how popular Catholicism may be an authentic and liberating form of human action. Goizueta draws, in part, on Jose´ Vasconcelos’s notion of ‘‘empathic fusion’’ in order to

10 |

Aesthetics

underscore the communal character of human action (praxis). Over and against modern (constructive) notions of praxis that reduce human action to a mere ‘‘making,’’ Goizueta argues for a (more contemplative) version of praxis—what he calls ‘‘aesthetic praxis’’—as an intrinsic end in itself. Aesthetic praxis is interpersonal relationship at its best, and its value is intrinsically, rather than extrinsically, derived. As Goizueta suggests, such human action serves as the seedbed of all ethical-political action (Goizueta 1995, 77–131). In turning to everyday experience, many Latino/a theologians and scholars of religion have utilized the category of lo cotidiano (daily life) and have thereby widened the definition of what counts as aesthetic. This category of analysis, first developed by feminist critical theorists in the 1960s and 1970s, has exposed problematic social hierarchies, such as patriarchy, that pervade people’s daily living. As theologian Marı´a Pilar Aquino has noted, lo cotidiano highlights aspects of daily life that have been passed over by androcentric theories, including questions of sexuality, culture, and aesthetics. In privileging the category of lo cotidiano, Latino/a theologians and scholars of religion have rooted aesthetics—and, by extension, claims about sacred power or God’s revelation—to the experience of the lifeworld. Michelle Gonzalez broaches the intersecting themes of theological aesthetics and lo cotidiano in her study of Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz, the first female theologian of the Americas. Gonzalez explores how Sor Juana’s plays and poetry pushed the borders of the dominant male academic theology of her time, and she argues that Sor Juana’s literary creations continue to challenge the

patriarchal and scholarly norms by which we do theology today. In terms of her literary form, Sor Juana drew on Baroque excess in order to affirm the dramatic as a powerful vehicle for probing theological questions. As for theological content, Sor Juana probed the sacrality of everyday life (lo cotidiano) and affirmed a relational and egalitarian anthropology that is compatible with contemporary approaches by many Latino/a theologians. Finally, Miguel De La Torre, who also relies on lo cotidiano, develops a Cuban Christology constructed from the margins of society. Influenced by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, De La Torre uses visual art to tackle serious ethical issues of the ruptured Cuban community separated between those on the island and those in exile. Art, as a sign, contains within it the meaning given to it by the culture from which it arises. For De La Torre, the work of art, as ‘‘text,’’ can raise human consciousness by unmasking the false utopias of the Cuban culture when the marginalized of that culture resignifies the sign, thus destabilizing the normative power structures. Scholars of Latino/a religion and theology have made significant contributions to our understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of religion. Aesthetic practices and products continue to offer useful entry points for understanding the complex reality of Latino/a religiosity. One area that scholars of Latino/a religion seem especially well suited to pursue further is the ethico-political dimension of aesthetics. Historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have underscored the fact that Latino/a religiosity carries the postcolonial scar of asymmetrical power relations, while, at the same time, showing that aesthetic

Africans practices and products may serve a lifegiving and liberative function. In his groundbreaking work, Virgilio Elizondo has begun to explore the theological implications of this theme, inspiring others to probe the dialectic even further. Although the relationship between aesthetics and ethics may often prove indirect and elusive, Latino/a scholars of religion and theology are in a unique position to explore how cultural identity may help to bridge aesthetics and ethics. Their starting claim is a promising one: when religious aesthetics is rooted in the cultural memory of a people, it remains true not only to a reality of suffering but also to the eschatological promise that the horizon of history is still open. Christopher Tirres

References and Further Reading Carrasco, David. Religions of Mesoamerica: Cosmovision and Ceremonial Centers (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990). Casarella, Peter. ‘‘Art and the U.S. Latina and Latino Religious Experience.’’ Introduction to the U.S. Latina and Latino Religious Experience, ed. Hector Avalos (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004). Deck, Allan, and Christopher Tirres. ‘‘Latino Popular Religion and the Struggle for Justice.’’ Religion, Race, and Justice in a Changing America, ed. Gary Orfield and Holly Lebowitz Rossi (New York: The Century Foundation Press, 2000). De La Torre, Miguel A. The Quest for the Cuban Christ: A Historical Search (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). Elizondo, Virgilio. Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983).

| 11

Garcı´a-Rivera, Alejandro. The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999). Goizueta, Roberto. Caminemos con Jesu´s: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Gonzalez, Michelle A. Sor Juana: Beauty and Justice in the Americas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003). Tillich, Paul. On Art and Architecture, ed. John Dillenberger and Jane Dillenberger (New York: Crossroad, 1989).

AFRICANS This entry is an examination of the story of African culture encountering the Iberian modern west within the social confines of slavery. It will map a path from the experiences of Africans in the construction of the modern west to the emergence of Afro-Hispanic religiosity. However, to properly do so, this entry explores the story of ‘‘the things themselves,’’ that is, the story of African slaves encountering the so-called New World. Without this story of the trials that African culture survived, the history of the socioreligious encounter between African and Hispanic worlds is fatally truncated. The examination begins with the sociohistorical development of African slavery in the Iberian west, and then moves to a look at the Africans’ Middle Passage into the New World. Next it observes how African cosmology, even in the chains of slavery, functioned to inform the religious nature of Iberian colonial territories. Lastly, a brief examination of the mulatez controversy highlights ways that the mixing of African/ Latino/a identity has functioned to

12 |

Africans

problematize modern racial and ethnic reasoning. As it is, this entry speaks more broadly of African religious traditions and cosmologies, giving preference to those traits that are evidenced in AfroHispanic religiosity. A continent as large and diverse as Africa contains more religious traditions than can be abundantly examined in this entry. Nonetheless, it is the persistence of an African perspective or worldview that is most important for the topic at hand. At the conclusion of this entry, the reader should have an understanding of how and why African slaves became the staple product in building the modern west; why Iberian Catholicism was more tenable than the Protestantism of other European nations in providing religious space for the survival of African gods; how African religiosity was able to mask and manifest itself within the Catholicism of slave masters; and how the confluence of African culture and Latina/o religiosity contributes to racial and ethnic (i.e., identity) complexities in modern Hispanic communities.

The Emergence of African Slavery in the Iberian West Nearly a century before a Dutch ship carrying 20 Africans docked in British North America in 1619, the enslavement of Africans in the Iberian colonies of Central and South America was already common. By 1510, the Spanish were receiving African slaves in the Caribbean via Portuguese ships. The slaves from these ships were put to work in the mines at Hispaniola. In 1518, Spain shipped 4,000 slaves to its colonized islands in the so-called ‘‘New World.’’ Furthermore, by 1540, the Spanish were

transporting about 10,000 slaves per year to the newly colonized west. Meanwhile, the Portuguese, by the mid-1500s, were combining indigenous and African bodies to work on northeastern Brazilian sugar plantations. Though northern European countries—especially England, France, Denmark, and Holland—would eventually challenge the Iberian strongholds of the Caribbean, the earliest activity in the trade of African slaves took place in Caribbean areas where Spanish and Portuguese colonizers controlled the land. Slavery was not a novelty of fifteenthcentury European society. It had been a part of every major civilization in recorded history and had been a regular practice dating back to the Hellenistic Empire of the sixth century BCE. Forced labor was also a part of Islamic nations in the Mediterranean from the eighth century CE forward, and the use of slaves was likewise vital to the functionality of many African nations. Yet in most of these cases, slavery was limited to domestic servitude. While the social status and treatment afforded to slaves were never things to be envied, they were a far cry from the dehumanized status of those forced to work themselves to death on the sunup to sundown plantations that developed in the west. Rarely before the sixteenth century was a slave system central to market and industrial production; yet this, combined with western European politics of identity, ideology, and power, was precisely the role that slavery played for Spain and Portugal. In the early part of the fifteenth century, Portuguese ships were already making trips to sub-Saharan Africa. However, these pre-1492 traders did not have the same interests that would develop into the desire for large

Africans quantities of bodies forced to perform free labor in the New World. Instead, they sought to undermine the dominance of North African trade routes by discovering new pathways to trade with subSaharan Africa. These early Portuguese vessels were more interested in spices, fabric, and especially gold than they were in slaves. When these ships did begin to attain Africans through trade in the 1440s, the slaves were typically shipped to the Iberian ports at Lisbon and Seville where they were usually put to work in domestic roles. After Columbus’s encounter with what are now known as the Americas, Spain and Portugal raced to capitalize on the new lands. The initial victims of these Iberian colonizers were the Natives, but these indigenous peoples were quickly decimated by a combination of disease, murder, and slave labor. Spain and Portugal needed to replace the nearly exterminated Natives with other bodies that could be forced to build their ‘‘New World.’’ Along with the exigency for new free labor, the Iberian nations had to contend with Northern European nations that were now following Spain and Portugal across the Atlantic and into the Americas. Out of this race for free labor emerged the transatlantic slave trade, through which Africans became the new fodder for Spain and Portugal’s westward colonial machine. The desire for African slave labor increased as sugar plantations became the new money-maker for the Iberian nations. Around 1517—the same year that Bishop Bartolome´ de Las Casas successfully advocated for the transportation of African slaves to the New World, an event which officially legitimized an already existing practice—slaves began

| 13

to be disbursed to the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica (all colonies of Spain at the time) as well as to mainland Brazil (land claimed by Portugal), which was Europe’s biggest supplier of sugar by 1580. By the mid-seventeenth century, sugar had surpassed tobacco as the most desired commodity in the New World colonies, and the rapid establishment of sugar plantations helped mold the makeup of Caribbean populations. The sugar plantations replaced smaller farms, and an enormous influx of African slaves forced to work on the plantations displaced farmers and indentured servants. The production of sugar was a major reason that areas south of the United States are estimated to have received approximately 95 percent of the Africans brought as slaves to the New World. Sugar, however, was not the only reason that the Caribbean received so many slaves. Slaving patterns, which will be examined later, were another contributing factor to the large African-born slave population.

The Middle Passage and African Existence in the Iberian New World The Middle Passage was the second leg of the tripartite journey that displaced Africans from their native lands to the New World by European nations. The Middle Passage was preceded by a journey from Europe to the west coast of Africa where a combination of trading and kidnapping was used to attain African slaves. Once in the New World slaves were exchanged for goods (e.g., minerals, gold, spices, and cotton), which they would eventually farm, harvest, and mine for their masters. These goods would

14 |

Africans

Africans captured by Tippu Tip, the Arab slave trader from Zanzibar, are sent into bondage, as purportedly witnessed by British explorer Henry Morton Stanley, about 1850. (Library of Congress)

then be returned to European countries through a final excursion; the return voyage was the third and final leg of the triangular trade. Most scholars agree that, at the least, somewhere between 10 and 15 million Africans survived the torturous journey across the Atlantic. However, there is no precise method to calculate how much higher the actual number of slaves might have been. Because of the death of slaves on the scandalous westward voyage, and the illegal transportation of Africans after various pieces of legislature limited or banned the slave trade, the exact number of slaves brought to the Americas will perhaps remain a mystery. The journey across the Atlantic was hell for the slaves. The ships were inhumanely packed and food, water, and air

were scarce for the African captives. Chained below deck, enveloped in their own urine, vomit, feces, and blood, it is no wonder that the slave ship has been described as a floating deathtrap. Historians have differed as to whether the deaths of slaves were more a result of sickness or the overall time spent at sea in cramped space. Nonetheless, whether one, the other, or a combination of both were the cause of death, the regularity of slave casualty was a fact accepted as normative by European governments, slave traders, ship captains, and their crews. In the early stages of the mass transportation of African slaves, it is estimated that 15 to 20 percent of the human cargo died before reaching the land that their captors had destined for them. This number, in some cases, saw a significant

Africans

| 15

LIMPIEZA DE SANGRE Limpieza de sangre, known in English as ‘‘washing the blood,’’ is a concept that originated in Medieval Spain. It was an attempt to prevent the lost of a family’s reputation due to an interreligious marriage. The idea was to ‘‘wash the blood,’’ specifically Christian blood from contamination due to marrying a Jew or a Muslim. With Spain’s conquest of the New World, the danger existed of Spaniards marrying or cohabitating with Indians, Blacks, or any mixture thereof. What was once considered a religious concept now became racialized. A self-imposed prerequisite developed to always marry a lighter person so as to perform la limpieza de sangre. This phraseology indicated a metaphysical notion of blood being a vehicle toward lineage equality. For most of the first half of the nineteenth century, parents’ concern with the socioeconomic consequences of their ‘‘white’’ child marrying a person of darker complexion was argued in terms of ‘‘washing the blood.’’ Pursuing racial endogamy, parents felt a marriage across racial barriers degraded the family’s reputation and contaminated the metaphysical purity of blood. —MAD

drop to 5 to 10 percent mortality rate in the seventeenth century when the Portuguese passed formal legislation limiting the tonnage of cargo on slave ships. It should be clear, however, that Portugal’s legislature regarding the capacity of slave ships was far from a sanguine expression of concern for the well-being of the slaves who had been relegated to the bowels of the ship. Instead, these precautionary measures sought a mode of transportation that might be more economically efficient. After all, the death of a slave often meant the loss of revenue for colonial powers. Slavery in the New World marked a significant period not only in the development of Europe’s economic power, but also in the history of European thought. The westward push reinforced Western Europe’s imperial status, and also reified Europe’s xenophobic worldview. These nations traveled, not in order to learn more about the world, and hence about themselves, but to prosper—even and especially at the expense of non-

European peoples. Hence, while slavery itself was not unique to Europeans, the type of slavery practiced by European colonists beginning in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is what made these European nations unique. Theirs was an especially peculiar type of inhumane bondage through which the existence of African slaves was relegated to a space outside of the western societies that emerged in the aftermath of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 journey. No longer were slaves the unenviable beings that existed beneath even the peasants (as was the case in many slavery-practicing nations prior to the advent of western colonization). African slaves were actually chained to a mode of nonexistence in what would become known as the Americas. Beyond the economic prosperity that slave labor produced, the lives of slaves were worthless in the eyes of the slaveholding Europeans. Slaves in the Caribbean who survived the Middle Passage found no mercy on dry land. Constantly vulnerable to the

16 |

Africans

most whimsical forms of torture from their masters, slaves could, at any moment, be subjected to whipping, branding, rape, and even murder. To compound this agonizing existence, the high volume of slaves transported directly from Africa made it more costeffective to work a slave to death, rather than provide her/him with the food, shelter, and medical care necessary for a prolonged life. In parts of the Caribbean, seven years was considered an average life span for an African slave. This technique of replacing slaves was radically different from the method employed in the United States, where slaves were bred domestically more often than they were shipped directly from Africa. As a result of these different slaving patterns, Iberian territories maintained a much larger population of African-born slaves than did the United States. The disparity in the number of African-born slaves in Iberian territories vis-a`-vis the United States contributed to the forging of a radically different social and cultural existence for slaves under Spanish and Portuguese ownership. These differences would be especially evident in the religiosity of slaves in the Caribbean.

Two Worlds Collide: The Formation of Afro-Hispanic Religiosity As recently as the 1930s, African-born former slaves could be found in the Caribbean; this fact has a melancholy affect on how the existence of Africans in the new world is understood. On one hand, the presence of African-born former slaves in the Caribbean is a reminder of the recent nature of slavery, the institution in which White masters rendered

Black life disposable. On the other hand, the perseverance of African life, culture, and especially religion in the lives of these former slaves and their descendants makes the memory of slavery a dangerous, potentially liberating one. The existence and cultural persistence of people of African descent testifies to a mode of history that challenges White supremacist renderings. In the margins of White history, in the blind spots of White supremacy, African life survived and thrived brilliantly and defiantly vis-a`-vis a White society that treated them as something less than human. Central to the slaves’ defiance against being finally conquered by White supremacy and slavery was an African religiosity that, in the Caribbean, was masked in the culture and religion of White oppressors. The religious infrastructure of the White supremacist culture to which African slaves were subjected was totally foreign to the worldview of the Africans themselves. According to philosopher Cornel West, the ‘‘secretion’’ of the idea of White supremacy was a result of the scientific revolution, the adoption of neoclassical ideals, and the shift to subjectivism in philosophy. These three traits, within the context of imperial Western Europe, were vital to the development of what West names the ‘‘normative gaze’’ of White supremacy. This normative gaze created a racist vacuum that engulfed the lives of African slaves as they arrived in the New World. Within this vacuum, religion functioned to ‘‘divinely’’ sanction the most horrendous system of slavery. The White Christian God, in the lives of the slaves, was the God who had ‘‘saved’’ the savage Africans from eternal damnation, and the temporal hardships of slavery were nothing compared to the eternal reward of

Africans

| 17

LUCUMI´ ‘‘Lucumı´’’ is a term from the Yoruba people of Africa that means friendship. The Yoruba were brought to the Caribbean, specifically Cuba, as slaves. The term is believed to be derived from the Yoruba greeting ‘‘oluki mi,’’ which literally means ‘‘my friend.’’ Some scholars believe it refers to the ancient Yoruba kingdom called Ulkumi. The word has come to be used in reference to any characteristic of the Yoruba culture, including their language. For some contemporary believers and scholars of the religion Santerı´a, there is an attempt to use the term Lucumı´, or ‘‘Regal de Ocha’’ (Rule of Ocha), to describe their faith. ‘‘Santerı´a,’’ a term that became popular during the 1940s in Cuba, was originally a pejorative term employed by Catholic clerics on the island to signify what they considered to be a syncretism of African traditional spirituality and the veneration of Catholic saints. —MAD

salvation. Yet the very structure of the normative gaze, with its religious and philosophical limits set in the humanistic boundaries of the Enlightenment, could not finally contain the immemorial nature of African divinity. The culture of Africa has been described as extremely religious, and, in a sense, this is certainly true. Based on the modern White understanding of religiosity, African culture could be described as immensely religious. Religion certainly pervades African life. Yet, in another sense, there was no ‘‘religious realm’’ in African life. Stated differently, the Eurocentric separation between church and state, and between sacred and secular, which molds and delimits religious life in the modern West, did not exist in the cosmology of the traditional African religiosity that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the bodies, hearts, and minds of enslaved Africans. It is not the case that African culture had no conception of the sacred; however, the English language, restricted as it is by a Eurocentric worldview, struggles to express the conception of ‘‘sacred’’ that

was and is vital to African existence. As Africans were brought to the Caribbean as slaves, they brought with them conceptions of the divine that could not be comprehended by the racist God of their masters. The religious worlds, though altered, of the Yoruba, the Ibo, the Bakongo, and the Mandike—to name a few—sustained the slaves in their most dire situations. In these African religions, everything has value and meaning. From one’s family members, to a rock lying on the side of the road, all things have been created to contribute to the experience of human life. Hence, harmony— not control, domination, or the ability to conquer—is the aim of life within African religiosity. While imperial European cosmology sought to give colonial countries mastery over nature, African cosmology recognized humanity’s dependence on nature and sought harmony with, not dominance over, the world. Where imperial European theology set out to interpret God in light of its colonial aspirations, Africans knew the divine as the source of all things and sought harmony with God’s

18 |

Africans

NEGRITUDE AND NEGRISMO Negritude emerged from a literary and ideological movement of the 1930s–1950s led by three French-speaking Black intellectuals: Aime´ Ce´saire from Martinique, educated in Paris; the poet Leopoldo Se´dar Senghor, the first president of Senegal; and Le´on-Gontran Damas, a French Guyanese poet and member of the National Assembly. The literary contributions of women such as the Nardal sisters (Martinique) also require mention. Ce´saire coined the term in his 1939 poem ‘‘Notebook of a Return to my Native Land,’’ Return to my Native Land (1969). For him, ‘‘negritude’’ meant recognition of one’s blackness and the acceptance of the common destiny of Black people. Negritude called for the revalorization of Black African culture and heritage and the rejection of Western social, political, and cultural domination. The movement was also influenced by Afro-centric movements such as the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, a similar movement emerged as ‘‘Negrismo,’’ as represented in the work of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen’s Songoro Cosongo (1931) and from Puerto Rican Luis Pale´ s Matos’s Tun tun de pasa y griferia (1937). In the Dominican Republic, Manuel del Cabral was noted for his Tropico Negro (1942) and Compadre Mon (1943). The Cuban Caribbean contributions predated the Frenchspeaking movement. —AMF

wonderful creation. When these two worlds collided in slavery, African religiosity was not simply destroyed. In spite of the agony that African bodies and minds were subjected to at the hands of Iberian colonists, African culture and religiosity endured. It would be incredibly idealistic to say that enslaved African existence in the New World was identical to African life on the continent. It is true, however, that the gods of Africa created a space, even in the depths of slavery, where Africans could worship in forms that testified to the malleability of African religiosity. This remarkable persistence is especially evident in Santerı´a in Cuba and Candomble´ in Brazil. The why of African religiosity in the New World is clear: the gods traveled in the minds and bodies of African slaves and were far too vital to life itself to be killed off even amidst the evils of slavery. However, in order to fully understand the how

of African religious perseverance, it is essential to understand the structure of Catholicism as practiced by the Iberian colonizers. It is not the case that colonial religion helped Africans survive. Colonial religion, as already discussed, sought dominance for Whites and only cared about Black bodies as sources of economic advancement. Thus, the importance of understanding Iberian Catholicism has nothing to do with giving credit to White religion. Instead, the aim is to understand the space that African gods (re)claimed in order to show faithfulness to African slaves. Unlike the colonial United States, the early stages of Iberian-controlled territories were lorded over by mostly Catholic colonists. While the racist culture of these regions mirrored that of the colonial United States, the religious and cultural differences contributed to a radically different religious life for slaves in

Africans these regions. Catholic-Iberian nations also had a radically different notion of what evidenced salvation. Where Protestant conversion was to be accompanied by a ‘‘sanctified’’ (read: immersed in White culture) lifestyle, conversion to the Catholic faith was a much less dogmatic process. This is not to imply that Africans experienced total religious freedom in the Caribbean—far from it. The very fact that Africans were enslaved was a constant challenge to any semblance of complete freedom. However, the less socially stringent expectations around conversion in the Iberian Catholicism of Latin America was much more conducive to a more ocular survival of African faith than was White U.S. Protestantism. The Catholicism of Iberian colonizers gave primacy not to holy sacraments, but to religiously significant persons, especially the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and, most importantly for African religiosity, saints. Where traditional Catholicism aimed to maintain a clear distinction between veneration of the saints and worship of the triune God, the distinguishing lines were often blurred and even crossed in the religious lives of Iberian colonists. Saints were worshipped for their ability to provide immediate aid in the face of existential urgencies; thus Iberian colonists lit candles to saints, knelt before their images, and also observed days set aside for saint celebration with remarkable discipline. In the practice of saint veneration or worship, many Africans saw striking parallels with divine conceptions of Africa. Many African religions held that there was one High God responsible for creation. This God was largely transcendent in nature and was thus only marginally concerned with the affairs of the earth. There were,

| 19

however, lesser gods that were constantly involved in the workings of the world. Africans would appeal to these gods when the vicissitudes of life caused physical and spiritual anguish. When slaves saw their masters kneeling before these lesser but immediately important figures, they discovered a medium through which the gods of Africa might commune with them even in the New World. Africans began to ‘‘mask’’ their gods in the form of Catholic saints and, in doing so, brilliantly resisted spiritual colonization. This masking process was aided by the fact that the roles and iconographic appearances of many Catholic saints were strikingly similar to those of African gods. For example, Shango, the god of thunder and lightning, wore the mask of St. Barbara the saint trusted with protecting Catholics from thunder and lightning, while Oshossi, god of hunting, was often masked by St. George or St. Michael, saints who were traditionally depicted holding swords. The masking of African gods is far more significant than the word ‘‘syncretism’’ denotes. This was not simply a case of a defeated people mixing their belief system with that of their conquerors as a last, desperate attempt to claim some semblance of Africa. Instead, the masking of African gods reminds one that the strength of African religiosity is its ability to transform itself when confronted by other religious traditions without dehumanizing those that practice other faiths. In the deepest sense, the persistence of African religiosity in the face of Iberian colonization functioned to challenge the European attempt to name everyone and everything in the world. Because the ability to name one’s self and one’s world is central to being a free human being, the masking of African

20 |

Africans

gods was a way to resist complete bondage. As long as African slaves remembered African culture and religiosity, they could never be finally conquered.

The Mulatez Controversy: A Part of Contemporary Afro-Hispanic Existence The persistence of African religiosity provided space for slaves to control a part of their lives that was otherwise widely dominated by the evil wills of their masters. Along with control over one’s life comes control over one’s identity. Yet in the same way that African slaves had only marginal control of their worlds, they had only partial control over naming themselves. This crisis of identity still pervades contemporary Afro-Hispanic societies as Spanish descendants of African slaves wrestle with the frustrating complexities of White, modern racial, and ethnic reasoning. White supremacist notions of the self force many Afro-Hispanics to feel that one must choose a racial or ethnic side. This side-choosing ethic combined with the stigma of being Black in a White supremacist society reveals the extent to which African existence is still rejected —even by those who have African ancestors. The controversy surrounding the term mulatez is a prime example of the difficulty that comes with attempting to name one’s self after having been named by others for so long. Mulatez is a term used to denote the interracial ‘‘mixing’’ of African and Hispanic peoples, but its use has been interpreted many different ways. For some, mulatez is potentially liberating because it (along with mestizaje, which highlights racial and ethnic mixture beyond

Hispanics and Africans) helps denote the hybridity and diversity of Latino/a culture. Scholars who think positively of mulatez often use it as a starting point to undermine oppressive identity politics that attempt to divide peoples of color under the gaze of White supremacy. These scholars argue that having a mixed starting point further challenges the ability of Whites to define bodies and minds, and also keeps White supremacist categories from frustrating liberative dialog. Other scholars see mulatez as potentially oppressive in that it may harbor anti-Black sentiments that are rooted in colonial racial reasoning. These scholars believe that mulatez is often applied by Latino/as who are closer to White and therefore benefit from the pigmentation politics of White supremacy. In this line of thought, the application of mulatez and the denotation of racial and ethnic mixing are not about solidarity with other oppressed peoples, but about being closer, because of miscegenation, to the White racial and ethnic ideal. Here, it is believed that those who use mulatez may have internalized the mental and physical oppression of European colonists and therefore seek the perpetuation of racism for their own benefit. As a third way, some thinkers withhold loyalty to either accepting or rejecting mulatez. These scholars believe mulatez (and mestizaje) to be important in its ability to bring peoples of color together, but are also leery of the danger of enveloping all Latino/as into a monolithic vacuum. The vital point here is that the presence and effect of Africans on Latina/o culture survive to the present. In the same way that African religiosity challenged the imperial religion of Iberian colonizers, the legacy of this resistance continues to problematize racial

Ajiaco Christianity and ethnic reasoning that has its basis in White supremacist structures. The amazing and confounding truth is that the gods of African culture and religion continue to persist. For those who seek a ‘‘pure’’ race or ethnicity of any kind, these gods, in the malleable tradition of African religiosity, continue to challenge any normative racial and ethnic reasoning. Ben Sanders III

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. ‘‘Rethinking Mulatez.’’ Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gaston Espinosa (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2006). Gonzalez, Michelle A. Afro-Cuban Theology: Religion, Race, Culture and Identity (Orlando, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006). Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 8th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). Klein, Herbert S. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Mbiti, John S. African Religions & Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990). Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The ‘‘Invisible Institution’’ in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). West, Cornel. Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, Anniversary ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002).

AJIACO CHRISTIANITY An ajiaco (ajı´, African name for an Amerindian ingredient plus the Spanish

| 21

suffix -aco) is a Cuban indigenous stew made from readily available native root vegetables and chunks of meat. As the stew cooks, the ingredients partially disintegrate yet retain their distinct identity and flavor. New and perhaps different ingredients are added as the ajiaco is consumed. Thus each serving of stew has a unique and unpredictable combination of flavors. In Hispanic religious discourse, ‘‘ajiaco’’ signifies less a particular essence than the unfinished status and cultural and ethnic unpredictability of the Cuban people. Amerindians, Africans, Chinese, Spanish, and AngloSaxons are some of the ingredients that have undergone rearrangement and change on the cooking fire that is the island of Cuba.

Historical Development Fernando Ortiz, the Cuban legend and polyglot intellectual, was the first to use ajiaco as a metaphor for cubanidad (the distinctive Cuban identity). Ortiz emphasizes that since Cuba is an ajiaco, la cubanidad is not found in the fusion of different cultures’ lineages dissolved into Cuba but in the continual and complex process of formation, disintegration, and reintegration within the dynamic Cuban cultural milieu (Ortiz 1940, 169). Ajiaco is the concretization of Ortiz’s abstract notion of transculturacio´n, a neologism stressing the transitional and fluid nature of the Cuban condition. Over and against the hegemonic concept of ‘‘acculturation,’’ which only names the phenomenon of acquiring a new culture, Ortiz proposes three phases of cultural contact in Cuba: (1) deculturation, the loss of certain cultural elements; (2) acculturation, acquisition of parts of another culture; and (3) neoculturation, the creation

22 |

Ajiaco Christianity

of new cultural elements through the amalgamation of the two cultures. For Ortiz, not only does ajiaco offer a more appropriate, complete, and precise description of Cuban culture, but it also functions as an anticolonial rhetorical tactic, replacing the externally imposed metaphor of a melting pot or crisol. Though the metaphors are close, ajiaco is preferred because it is a ‘‘native’’ word derived within Cuba. Hence, as the culinary emblem of Cuba, ajiaco forms a concrete and distinctly Cuban image of constantly changing cultural configurations of Cuban society.

Characteristics Religious scholars, more notably Miguel A. De La Torre, have adopted and reformulated ajiaco as an attempt to accurately describe the complex multiracial Cuban identity. Until its introduction, Hispanic religious discourse had only two terms to metaphorically describe the heterogeneity of Latino/a identity: mestizaje and mulatez. Mestizaje refers to the mixing of indigenous and Spanish heritages. It is most often used for Latino/as from Mexico, Central America, and most of South America. The second term, mulatez, refers to the mixing of African and Spanish cultures. Scholars use mulatez to describe Hispanics descended from areas of continued African presence: the Caribbean islands, the coastal areas of Columbia and Venezuela, and Brazil. However, mulatez derives from the root word mulo or mule. Despite the attempts by academics to fabricate a more positive meaning, ‘‘mulatez’’ remains a racist term. A mule is the sterile result of breeding a horse and a donkey. In contrast, ajiaco is a hearty and life-giving food that nourishes and sustains the

community from its own indigenous roots (De La Torre 2003, 17). Over and against monolithic, pan-Latino/a identities, Ajiaco Christianity insists on the distinctiveness and varieties of Latino/a experiences of Hispanics from various countries of origin, in particular the Cuban experience. In the tradition of Ortiz, the adoption of ajiaco becomes symbolic resistance to hegemonic imposition of identity from the outside, even from within the Hispanic community, in the ongoing attempt to define the nature of what it means to theologize from a Cuban perspective. Like the stew for which it is named, Ajiaco Christianity takes exogenous ingredients and ‘‘cooks’’ them into new and unexpected permutations. Ajiaco Christianity contains elements from postmodern and postcolonial theories as well as liberation theology. Like postmodernity, ajiaco recognizes itself as a social construct and celebrates multivalent diversity, rather than modernity’s insistence on homogenization. Consistent with the radical critique of modernity’s assumptions of identity and culture, Ajiaco Christianity deconstructs Cuban identity to debunk the social construction of machismo and the sexism, racism, and classism inherent in it. As a postcolonial theory, Ajiaco Christianity situates religious discourse in the colonial context of mass trauma and challenges the normalizing authority given to Spanish and Anglo roots. As a liberation theology, Ajiaco Christianity emphasizes orthopraxis over orthodoxy and counteracts postmodernity’s paralyzing plurality through the unifying principle of liberating praxis (De La Torre 1999, 22–27). Ajiaco Christianity does not refer to a specific Cuban religiosity. Instead it

Alcance Victoria constitutes a Cuban ethical response toward reconciliation, in particular of Resident and Exilic Cubans, the Cubans alla´ (over there) and those aquı´ (here). Ajiaco Christianity draws on the tradition of the Hebrew prophets calling on all, not just Cubans, to cooperate with God to bring about reconciliation. Like the Hebrews, Exilic Cubans resist reconciliation, aligning themselves with the dominant powers. Identifying the refusal to reconcile as the central Cuban sin, Ajiaco Christianity alters the liberationist equation. Instead of salvation or liberation leading to reconciliation, salvation and liberation are synonymous with reconciliation (De La Torre 1999, 18–19).

A Preliminary Assessment How useful is the rubric of Ajiaco Christianity to the overall project of Hispanic Religion Studies? Michelle A. Gonzalez has argued that ajiaco, despite insistence to the contrary, is as artificial an academic construction as mestizo or mulatez. In addition, she questions the real-world applicability of the term, since no one refers to themselves as ajiaco (Gonzalez 2006, 28). On the other hand, ‘‘ajiaco’’ successfully describes the existential space of a multicultural people, the inheritors of five broad cultural traditions, a reality masked by the use of either mestizo or mulatez. Just as discussions from distinctly Mexican or Puerto Rican perspectives have enriched the varieties of Latino/a religions, ‘‘ajiaco’’ adds to the Latino/a religious discourse by enabling discussion of Cuban religious identity on Cuban terms. More broadly ‘‘ajiaco’’ moves beyond questions of identity by providing a way to deconstruct oppressive social structures

| 23

and reveal racist assumptions within the Latino/a community. Rodolfo J. Herna´ndez-Dı´az

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. Ajiaco Christianity: Toward an Exilic Cuban Ethic of Reconciliation (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, Philadelphia, 1999). De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Gonzalez, Michelle A. Afro-Cuban Theology: Religion, Race, Culture, and Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006). Ortiz, Fernando. ‘‘Los factores humanos de la cubanidad.’’ Revista bimestre cubana 21 (1940): 161–186. Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azu´car [Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar], trans. H. D. Onı´s. 1st American ed. (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947). Pe´rez Firmat, Gustavo. ‘‘The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature.’’ Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

ALCANCE VICTORIA Alcance Victoria’s goal is to assist drug addicts, gang members, and prostitutes by keeping them off the street and out of prison. They attempt to achieve this goal through the proclamation of the life-transforming power of Jesus Christ. Founded in 1967 by Sonny Arguinzoni in East Los Angeles, Alcance Victoria, better known today as Victory Outreach,

24 |

Alcance Victoria

has become an international inner-city ministry phenomenon.

The Legacy of Sonny Arguinzoni Sonny Arguinzoni, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants, was a heroin addict, gang member, and ex-convict. According to his autobiography and personal ‘‘testimony’’ entitled Sonny, at the age of 21 he was cured of his six-year addiction to heroine and converted to Christ when he came into contact with ex-gang leader Nicky Cruz and Teen Challenge, the ministry of David Wilkerson. In 1962, Sonny left New York to attend the Latin American Bible Institute (LABI) of the Assemblies of God in La Puente, California. While in school, Sonny continued to work with Teen Challenge and quickly became discouraged by local churches that refused to embrace the ex-drug addicts and gang members that he brought along with him. Undaunted, Sonny started a new ministry that specifically targeted society’s rejects (Arguinzoni 1987). In 1967, Arguinzoni and his small band of disciples purchased a small church in a drug- and gang-infested section of East Los Angeles and began what was then called ‘‘Victory Temple Addicts Church.’’ Since 1967, Alcance Victoria (Victory Outreach) has grown from a single inner-city church to a worldwide network of over 600 churches and ministries with locations across the United States and 30 countries throughout Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. According to information available on the church’s official Web site (www .victoryoutreach.org), more than 10,000 drug addicts and alcoholics go through their intensive rehabilitation program each year. They claim that seven out of

ten drug addicts who participate in their boot-camp program kick their habits. Approximately 40,000 people attend services each Sunday at one of 250 Victory Outreach (VO) churches in the United States. Each local VO church strives to promote a positive image in the community and instills self-respect and dignity in its members. While most VO churches have between 100 and 300 members, some congregations are larger. For instance, VO churches in San Diego and San Jose, California, have more than a thousand members. The mother church in La Puente, California, now led by Sonny Arguinzoni Jr. has over 4,000 members.

More Than a DrugRehabilitation Program Since 1967, Victory Outreach has become more than drug-rehabilitation or gang-prevention programs. VO is a comprehensive outreach and discipleship ministry that spans the globe. Programs such as ‘‘Mighty Men of Valor’’ and ‘‘United Women in Ministry’’ help members live out their faith. ‘‘Victory Outreach International Bible Institute’’ provides biblical, spiritual, and theological training to its members. ‘‘Urban Training Centers’’ (UTC) provides extensive one- and two-year training programs for young adults wanting to go into full-time ministry. Victory Outreach is now training a new generation of young people referred to as ‘‘God’s Anointed Now Generation’’ (GANG). Many of those involved in GANG and the UTC are the children of ex-addicts converted through VO. Many of these young men and women have gone on to start group recovery homes,

Alcance Victoria drug treatment centers, urban intervention programs, churches, prison visitation outreaches, and family counseling centers In his book entitled Internalizing the Vision, the unofficial ministry manual for VO, Pastor Sonny insists that boldness is one of the secrets to the movement’s success. ‘‘Because of our boldness, we are able to move into the worst neighborhoods of some of the world’s roughest cities with aggressiveness and dedication and effectiveness’’ (1995, 76–77). Another key to the success of VO is an emphasis on leadership development within the context of the local church, short-circuiting the traditional role of preaching schools, Bible colleges, and seminaries in most Protestant and Evangelical denominations. Two factors drive this unique strategy. On the one hand, the vast majority of the promising pastoral candidates in VO would not qualify for admission to most preaching schools and Bible colleges. On the other hand, leaders at VO have learned from experience that would-be pastors must first earn their credentials in the local church, where the would-be pastors are given opportunities to develop preaching and pastoral skills under the direction and supervision of a local pastor.

Born in the Barrio Victory Outreach is unique in that it specifically targets the inner city, drug addicts, ex-convicts, gang members, alcoholics, prostitutes, and other social outcasts. As one might expect, VO is a multiethnic and interracial movement. Still, an outside observer would quickly notice that the overwhelming majority of the movement’s members are second-

| 25

and third-generation English-dominant Latino/as. Nevertheless, VO resists referring to itself as a Chicano or Latina/o Pentecostal church, even though the demographics, including the overwhelming number of Latino pastors throughout the movement, cannot be easily overlooked. For example, seven of the denomination’s eight elders, including Pastor Sonny are Latinos as are 75 percent of the 39 regional pastors.

Conclusion Pastor Sonny and VO have been recognized for their ongoing efforts and commitment to combat drug addiction and gang violence by a growing list of lawenforcement agencies as well as local, state, and federal officials, including former presidents George H. W. Bush, and William J. Clinton. In anticipation of Victory Outreach’s 40th anniversary in 2007, President George W. Bush sent Pastor Sonny a special note thanking him for his involvement and support with the mission of making the United States a better place to live. In Treasures Out of Darkness, an anecdotal history of VO, Pastor Sonny acknowledges that many people today have a hard time believing that God still performs miracles. He insists that Victory Outreach is proof that God does. Since 1967, the approach of VO has transformed lives from addiction, gang violence, and self-destructive behavior. Daniel A. Rodriguez

References and Further Reading Arguinzoni, Sonny. Sonny (San Dimas, CA: Vision Multimedia, 1987).

26 |

Alienation

———. Internalizing the Vision (San Dimas, CA: Vision Multimedia, 1995). ———. Treasures Out of Darkness, 2nd ed. (San Dimas, CA: Vision Multimedia, 2000).

ALIENATION From the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean runs a 1,833-mile border that separates Latin America from the United States. This artificial line, created immediately after the U.S. territorial conquest of northern Mexico that ended with the Mexican-American War (1846– 1848), is more than just a border separating countries. The creation of this border, along with the Spanish-American War (1898), the consequences of which was the territorial conquest of Puerto Rico, resulted with the borders crossing over

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans living on their own lands—making them and their descendants aliens in their homelands. For this reason, many Hispanics see these artificial borders as a scar where the First and Third Worlds rub up against each other. There are millions of Latino/as who live in cities that are located along this artificial line. But the U.S. borderlands are more than a geographical reality; they are also the existential reality of Latina/o alienation. A Hispanic does not need to reside along the 1,833-mile border to experience the alienation of living on the borders. Regardless of where Latino/as live or how they or their ancestors ended up within the U.S. borders, Hispanics live with the alienation caused by borders. These are the borders that separate Hispanics from Euro-Americans.

Slum neighborhood built up near maquiladoras (border factories) owned and operated by foreigners, Chihuahua City, Mexico (opposite El Paso, Texas). (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Alienation Regardless of their proximity to the militarized 1,833-mile line separating the United States from Latin America, these borders exist in every state, county, city, town, and village throughout the United States. The invisible walls are as real in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Omaha, Nebraska; and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as are the visible walls in Chula Vista, California; Douglas, Arizona; or El Paso, Texas. To be a Latina/o living anywhere in the United States is to live alienated, to constantly live on the border, that is, the border that separates them from privilege, power, and whiteness. To live on the borders throughout the United States means that Hispanics live in a state of alienation that keeps them separated from the benefits and fruits that society has to offer its inhabitants. Latino/as who demand a share of the benefits and fruits of society are asking for neither charity nor some sort of handout, but rather for what belongs to them. Through their labor (usually cheaply paid labor) they have contributed for centuries to the wealth building of this nation. Yet exclusion from the product of their labor occurs mainly because Hispanics are perceived by the dominant Euro-American culture as not belonging, as unwelcome aliens. They are seen as inferior partly due to the pervasive raceconscious U.S. culture. For centuries Euro-Americans have been taught to equate non-Whites, specifically mixedrace persons, as inferior. Seen derogatorily as ‘‘half-breeds,’’ a mixture of races and ethnicities (Caucasian, African, Amerindian, or any combination thereof) has historically meant, and continues to mean, limited access to education and social services.

| 27

Alienated from the wealth they produce due in part to many Latina/os being seen as inferior due to their mixture (specifically racial mixture), it should not be surprising that many Hispanics cluster in the lower stratum of the economy, receiving the lowest weekly wages of any major group in the labor market. Hispanic poverty is often understood by the dominant Euro-American culture as being a choice made by Latina/os or the consequences of lacking a EuroAmerican Protestant work ethic. They are usually stereotyped as lazy, backward, and mentally underdeveloped. If this is true, then the only hope for Hispanics would rest with the generosity of Euro-Americans who might attempt aid by providing food, affirmative action, or charity. Instead of blaming those made victims for their condition, it is important to understand that Hispanic poverty exists due to economic forces that cause the prosperity of some to be rooted in the poverty of many. As the wealth of the rich grows, so too does the number of those falling into poverty, making the former dependent on the latter. Thus the main consequence that Hispanics living in the borderlands face is alienation, not only from the goods they produce, but from the dominant culture itself. To exist in the social location called the borderlands means that Latina/os construct religious perspectives from the location of imposed alienation, marginality, and disenfranchisement. The spirituality that emerges from the borderlands is one that is contextual, where the everyday experience and struggle for the survival and life of the disenfranchised becomes the subject and source of religious reflection. For example, the God who is understood and worshiped in the

28 |

Altars and Shrines

borderlands is a God who became human and still continues to enflesh Godself in the everyday lives and experiences of the alienated. It is these alienated people who are crucified each day so that those whom society empowers can enjoy their privileged space. This salvific experience of God, in the here and now, is experienced by the alienated in their daily struggles for humanization. The theological perspectives arising from the space caused by the alienation of Latino/as are not only salvific for the Hispanics who live throughout the U.S. borderlands, but they are salvific for the dominant Euro-American culture that erected the borders in the first place. A preferential option is made for the religious understandings and interpretations of the alienated and disenfranchised (in our case the residents of the borderlands) not because they are better Christians, nor because they are more intelligent. A preferential option for borderland spirituality is made because, unlike the dominant Euro-American culture that sees reality only through their privileged social location, Hispanics—in order to survive—must be aware of the reality of the dominant Euro-American culture as well as their own. This double consciousness, to use a W. E. B. Du Bois term, places Hispanics (and other marginalized groups) in the position of being capable of having a better grasp on reality because they can perceive it from both the perspective of privilege (due to their need to survive in that world) and their own marginality, while those of the dominant culture have no need or reason to make themselves aware of the perspectives of those existing on their underside. The theological and spiritual perspectives that develop in the Hispanic borderland space of alienation serve as a

salvific religious contribution made to the dominant Euro-American culture. A clearer understanding of the Good News emerges through the debunking of pervasive emphasis Euro-Americans place on a personal piety that justifies their power and privilege. From the alienation of Latina/os emerges an evangelical message of salvation for those who worship the false idols of power and privilege masked as Euro-American Christianity. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading Abalos, David T. Latinos in the United States: The Sacred and the Political, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). De La Torre, Miguel A. ‘‘Living on the Borders.’’ The Ecumenical Review 59, no. 2–3 (April/July 2007): 214–220. Rodrı´guez, Havida´n, Rogelio Sa´enz, and Cecilia Menjı´var, eds. Latinas/os in the United States: Changing the Face of Ame´rica (New York: Springer, 2008).

ALTARS AND SHRINES The tradition of altar or shrine making, or ‘‘an ordered arrangement of objects with symbolic meaning’’ (McMann, 1998:9) with the intent of bridging the physical and the spiritual realms, has its roots for Latinos/as among the ancient indigenous cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the medieval cultures of European Catholicism. In Mexico, the Toltecs (950–1200 CE) of central Mexico, maintained small shrines or altars dedicated to specific deities in the privacy of domestic space. The Mexica or Aztecs (1200–1521 CE) continued the domestic tradition with small alcoves

Altars and Shrines | 29 designed for an effigy of a deity and a container for burnt offerings. Among the Toltec, Mexica, and Maya, large stones with flat surfaces suitable for the burning of oblations served as public altars. Monumental temples or ceremonial platforms commonly referred to as pyramids were dedicated to specific deities where elaborate public rituals took place on the highest level of the temples. These sites served as the sacred center or axis mundi of densely populated urban areas. As an example, in Tenochitlan, the Mexica capitol, two colossal temple platforms, one dedicated to Tlaloc, the rain god, and Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, were erected for the necessary oblations and sacrifices required for these central deities. The size and grandeur of these temple platforms were consciously located along the horizon of the natural sacred mountains surrounding the urban areas. In this manner, humans constructed a continuum with the natural sacred environment. According to David Carrasco, the temple dedicated to Tlaloc also represented a ‘‘mountain of sustenance’’ or ‘‘mythic mountain that was the source of abundance, rain, seeds, corn, food’’ (1990, 167). Oftentimes, buried within the temple structures were sacred bundles holding the remains of powerful leaders, animal bones, or other items deemed essential to the religious and political identity of the society. The temple platform with its public altar located in the core of a society served as the central marker for a state religion while also maintaining the essential balance between humanity and sacred cosmic forces. Indigenous peoples continued their practices of altar making after the period of contact, collision, and convergence with European colonizing powers by

accommodating, but at the same time influencing, Catholic practices. During the early colonial period Catholic missionaries demanded the destruction of the public temples or axis mundi. In their places rose the baroque architecture of Catholic churches constructed from the recycling of ‘‘pyramid’’ stones and the forced labor of indigenous peoples. Within these churches, numerous altars dedicated to the Christian God, his mother, and canonized martyrs offered a new axis mundi to native and mestizo communities. The sacred bundles would be replaced by the tabernacle holding the body of Christ, with admittance to the new sacred center requiring the rite of baptism. Native neophytes, however, would often be restricted to attending worship services in the open atriums outside the inner sanctuary. The practice of home altar making would continue for native populations most likely in adherence to tradition, but also now as a strategy to resist the marginalization experienced in the new state religion. Despite the efforts of church officials to curtail the importance of home altars for native peoples, these sites of spiritual vitality persisted, but with Christian symbols supplanting native iconography. However, for colonized indigenous and mestizo populations, the complexity of nepantla (a Nahua term meaning ‘‘in the middle’’) began to be visualized in religious iconography especially during the first century of contact. Indigenous and mestizo altars revealed the emerging synthesized nature of Latin American Catholicism with a symbol system incorporating indigenous and Christian elements in one object. For example, a cross with the crucified body of Jesus surrounded by the moon and sun, or a crucifix made of corn husks, connected

30 |

Altars and Shrines

OUR LADY OF CHARITY SHRINE In 1966, Cuban refugees funded and built a shrine on Biscayne Bay in Miami, Florida, for La Virgen de la Caridad, the Cuban patroness. On September 8, 1961, her feast day, a statue of la Virgen, a replica of the one in Cobre, was smuggled out of Cuba in a suitcase to an awaiting crowd of over 25,000 Cubans congregated at a stadium. The tent-like shrine built to house the statue serves as both a political and sacred space. The shrine is situated with its back toward Cuba so that prayers offered by the faithful face the island. The statue faces the ocean to serve as a beacon for Cubans coming to the United States. Behind the altar is a mural merging religious and patriotic themes. Behind the shrine are the busts of Cuban patriots Jose´ Martı´ and Father Fe´lix Varela. Under the altar is a molded stone composed of the soil of all Cuba’s provinces and the ocean water retrieved from a raft that sailed to the United States, a voyage that claimed 15 lives. The six columns sustaining the mantle and the six-sided golden cone-shaped roof represent the six provinces. The priest’s chair was made from a Cuban palm. —MAD

the Christian deity to the sacred cosmic forces and sacred food of Mesoamerican indigenous religions (Carrasco, 1995). Perhaps, the syncretic image par excellence is that of Our Lady of Guadalupe, as she incorporates the cosmic sacredness of the sun, the moon, and the stars within her Catholic representation of the divine Madonna. Elite Spanish and criollo families constructed home chapels for private worship with elaborate altars dedicated to patron saints or the Madonna. The tradition of altar making and the construction of public shrines at pilgrimage sites had long been a tradition in medieval Catholic Europe. In the ‘‘New World’’ the public display of venerated Catholic icons reinforced a collective religious and emerging national identity. But Spanish and mestizo populations consistently appropriated the traditions and beliefs of local native populations partly to supplant native traditions and partly to acquire the miraculous efficacy of

native knowledge. For example, in the northern frontiers, Spanish and mestizo settlers constructed an adobe church on land held sacred by the Tewa people in the valley of Chimayo, New Mexico. Pilgrimage to the adobe shrine to experience the healing properties of the sacred dirt remains a central Mexican Catholic practice today. Or at Chalma, 115 kilometers from Mexico City, missionaries built a church in 1683 dedicated to Our Lord of Chalma along a riverbank where native pilgrims sought healing from the natural spring water flowing in a nearby cave. There they honored the deity, Ozteotl. Today Chalma is the most visited shrine in Mexico after the shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. The most popular shrine and pilgrimage site appearing during the colonial period remains at Tepeyac in the central valley of Mexico. It is here that the presence of Tonantzin, the revered mother, had long been worshipped by the Nahua people. With the chaos and violence of

Altars and Shrines | 31 the Spanish invasion, a new understanding emerged about the divine female presence at work in the ‘‘New World’’ ensuring the survival of native and mestizo peoples. Out of the colonial chaos appeared the image and story of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the divine mestiza mother. A shrine dedicated to her in 1536 atop the sacred mountain of Tepeyac remains the most visited shrine in all of the Americas. This sacred site includes two other churches, one being the more modern basilica built in 1976 that holds the original image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The curtailment of church authorities in Latin America during periods of revolution and independence from European powers in the nineteenth century increased the importance of domestic shrines where families could continue their prayers and rituals. Legislation often prohibited the display of holy images in public spaces as societies moved toward secularization. As noted by historian William H. Beezley, the solution ‘‘was to move holy images inside churches and other buildings, including homes (1997, 96). Anticlericalism and church-state conflict continued throughout the century, resulting in a decline of clergy and functioning churches. The rezadora or female prayer leader took on a central role in the maintenance and transmission of the faith in the nineteenth century. In rural communities, the virtual absence of clergy made the rezadora and the curanderas/os, or specialized healers, extremely significant. Parteras, or midwives, oftentimes baptized the newborn in the absence of male clergy. These varieties of spiritual work most likely took place around the home altar. In Mexico during the last decade of the nineteenth century a reinstatement

of church vitality occurred with a new cadre of priests inspired by the ideals of social action. The papacy’s approval of Rerum Novarum in 1895, with its concern for action over doctrine, served to increase the number of priests, churches, and church attendance. Yet, the home altar remained a central site for the practice of personal and familial devotions. Developments in printing and lithography, making images and prayer cards readily available, helped to embellish the art and content of home altars. Likewise, public shrines honoring patron saints, the Madonna, and Jesus Christ proliferated. Today, Mexico retains these sacred markers even in urban areas, where religious statues and small shrines can often be found overlooking busy intersections. With the contested annexation of onehalf of Mexico by the United States in 1848, Mexican Catholics became members of the U.S. Roman Catholic Church overnight. Overt discrimination, culturally insensitive European clergy, and bishops allocating unequal monetary resources for new Mexican American dioceses created a distance between Spanish-speaking communities and the institutional church. For example, Bishop Thaddues Amat of the Monterey– Los Angeles diocese published three decrees between 1862 and 1876 prohibiting Mexican popular devotions such as public reenactments of biblical stories, as well as funeral processions. The public display of Mexican Catholicism was found to be offensive to ‘‘clerical sensitivities’’ (Engh 1994, 91). In response, the home altar tradition was again renewed in its importance for the preservation of the faith among Mexican Catholic families. During the midtwentieth century, as part of ecclesial

32 |

Altars and Shrines

efforts to universalize and modernize Catholic worship, Mexican American Catholics often succumbed to the pressure to seize domestic altar making and other popular traditions. Numerous devotees, however, continued the tradition that celebrates spirituality beyond the boundaries of institutionalized religion and signifies a resilient Latina/o spirituality that is usually centered on the divine female. The tradition of home altars is now a widely accepted expression of one’s faith across ethnic and even religious lines. Texts such as Altars and Icons: Sacred Spaces in Everyday Life by Jean McMann and Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars by Kay Turner attest to the multicultural practice of altar or shrine making. As more of the U.S. population finds spirituality important, but church attendance less so, the desire for sacred space in one’s home will inevitably rise.

Constructing Altars Through the arrangement of symbols, photographs, candles, and icons, all imbued with meaning and preserving memory, altars connect the spiritual world with the physical world, the living with the dead, the past with the present, and the altar maker with the viewer. As Ramo´ n Gutie´ rrez writes, ‘‘[On] home altars the photographs, trinkets, and mementos construct family histories that visually record one’s relations to a lineage and clan’’ (1997, 39). Or, altars with a conscious arrangement of meaningful objects, might simply express the altar makers’ spiritual understandings and offer the space that connects the mortal with the immortal. Altars become sites preserving special memories as they invite the viewer to remember and to

simultaneously be mindful of the present. Through the symbols, images, and/or texts arranged on a tabletop, dresser, or simple shelf, altars convey family history, personal, spiritual, and political identities. Altars can take a variety of forms as there are few rules for constructing an altar other than the intentional arrangement of objects, symbols, and/or images imbued with meaning, a sense of balance in the arrangement of the objects, and choosing a privileged space for the altar. The latter can be anywhere from the top of a television set in the main living area to a secluded corner in one’s bedroom. Altars are located not only in living spaces but also in public spaces like businesses, restaurants, grocery stores, bars, and even on the dashboards of vehicles. A central purpose of the altar in a public space is to announce a spiritual presence overseeing the business at hand. The sacred and the secular are fused and joined within the tradition of altar making. Once created, altars or shrines become passive or active expressions. A passive altar is created at one moment in time, but with little subsequent interaction between the altar and the altar maker. Its presence marks the environment as special, but the energy around the altar becomes static. In contrast, an active altar is created and interaction between the altar and the altar maker continues. The space is cleaned regularly, fresh or new flowers are purchased, candles are lit, objects are added, removed, or rearranged, prayers are said, or silent reflections occur. In this manner, the altar emits energy that moves, and over time the altar takes on a life of its own. As one altar maker explains, ‘‘I meditate here in the morning . . . then I bow . . .

Altars and Shrines | 33 and I feel a difference . . . in my being when I do that’’ (cited in McMann 1998, 35). Another altar maker who has maintained her altar for over 50 years states, ‘‘It’s an ancient tradition, and you can’t get away from it, wherever you go . . . mi altarcito helps me to live’’ (cited in Turner 1999, 41). Contemporary altars range from traditional to more abstract expressions, from personal and private creations to public and communal works of art. Because of the lack of rules governing altars, they represent fluid expressions of everchanging personal and social identities. Latinos/as inherit a rich legacy of creating sacred spaces for spiritual and psychic nourishment.

Other Types of Altars For Latino/a Protestants, the construction of home altars with symbols other than a cross and the Bible are rare because Protestant Christianity traditionally prohibits the display of icons or the practice of praying through material objects. Rather, el altar familiar, the family altar, takes the form of time and space set aside for Bible study and prayer. In contrast, Latinos/as practicing Santerı´a or Lucumı´ regularly construct elaborate altars as part of their ritual practices of making oblations to deities and the ancestors. Material religion takes on primary importance in this tradition. Depending on the orisha or sacred spirit being honored, a santerı´a’s altar will contain food and drink offerings, richly colored fabrics designating the orisha, elaborately decorated ceramic pots holding the ashe´ or spiritual power of the orisha, ritual instruments to call forth ancestors and spirits, and images of the orisha, at times a statue of a Christian

saint that conceals the identity of the orisha. Contemporary Chicana artists such as Amalia Mesa-Baines, Ofelia Esparza, and Yreina Cervantez have influenced significantly the reclamation of altar making as a central expression of Chicana and Latina spirituality. For Latinas who have left organized religions, but also for those who remain, altars provide the space for women to create and express what for them has ultimate meaning. For women, the act of altar making reinforces their agency to name the sacred. In religions and cultures that remain male dominant, the act of women deciding for themselves what and who represents the sacred holds revolutionary potential. Ofelia Esparza, who resides in East Los Angeles, is a third-generation altar maker. Learning the tradition from her grandmother, Ofelia now teaches the tradition to students of all ages and she exhibits her altars nationally and internationally. Cultural workers and artists like Ofelia Esparza have tremendously influenced the maintenance of the tradition across the United States and in the process sustain the ‘‘matriarchal core’’ of Latino/a religiosity (Dı´az-Stevens 1994, 245). While men also partake in the creation of shrines or altars, women tend to dominate this aspect of Latino/a religiosity. Young male artists, however, such as Rigo Maldonado of Los Angeles are paving the way for men to participate more publicly in maintaining the tradition. During the height of the Chicano movement in the early 1970s, Chicana artists including Ofelia Esparza, Amalia Mesa-Baines, Linda Vallejo, Esther Hernandez, and many others revived the tradition of altar making among Chicano/a communities. During the political turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s,

34 |

Altars and Shrines

artists understood the dire need to offer strategies of empowerment and healing to Chicano peoples affected by police brutality, inadequate housing, medical care, and poor education. In 1972, the tradition of Dı´as de muertos, with the creation of altars or ofrendas for the dead at its ritual center, was offered to communities in the main urban centers of California: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento. Quickly Chicano communities embraced the tradition of creating sacred space and laying out gifts for the dead. By 1978, the art of altar making and its healing properties was revived in the United States. The tradition of altar making, particularly around Days of the Dead, can now be found throughout the nation, in museums, cultural centers, schools, libraries, homes, and even churches. The power of remembering, of honoring, and of communing through the sacred center of the altar renews relationships between the living and the dead. In the process, the family, the group, and the community are renewed and empowered.

Shrines It is quite common now to see small or large altars or shrines located in popular businesses such as restaurants. In San Antonio, Texas, in the popular restaurant Mi Tierra, a larger than life altar honors the spirit and memory of Selena, the Chicana ‘‘Queen of Tejano music’’ who died tragically in 1995 at the young age of 24. This type of shrine keeps her spirit and accomplishments alive in the public memory and also serves as a teaching tool for those who did not know about this amazing young artist. Similarly, street shrines located near the scene of fatal accidents have become common-

Street shrine on Janitzio Island, Mexico. (William Perry/Dreamstime)

place in the United States. By using candles, flowers, pictures, and even items of affection (stuffed animals), this tradition enables the living to spontaneously create sacred space marking the tragic passing of a soul. Humans have the need to memorialize tragedy as part of the grieving process, and the altar facilitates this innate desire. Shrines constructed at the gravesites of historical healers like Teresa de Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Don Pedro Jaramillo, and El Nin˜o Fidencio offer vivid reminders of the deep spirituality embedded in the history and land along the border regions. All three of these healers played a significant role in the physical and spiritual well-being of Mexican communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The tradition of creating public shrines in their honor not only keeps their memory alive for later generations but also

Altars and Shrines | 35 validates the role of curanderismo, a healing method that emerged from the mixture of cultures and medical practices in colonial Latin America. Teresa de Urrea, born in 1873 in Sinaloa, Mexico, to an indigenous Tehueco mother and a mestizo father, would rise to international fame due to her healing abilities and commitment to serving the poor and marginalized. By the age of 17, Teresa had trained with a traditional healer or curandera in medicinal plants, and then experienced an emotional trauma (possibly an attempted rape), fell into a coma for 12 days only to awaken with extremely powerful healing and psychic abilities. Her profession as a healer and her progressive politics eventually took her into the United States where she was commissioned to tour with a medical company. In 1906, in Clifton, Arizona, Teresa’s own body succumbed to tuberculosis. It is reported that 400 people attended her funeral. Today her unmarked grave in a hilly cemetery in Clifton draws the attention of townsfolk and outsiders who continue to be intrigued by her healing powers. Simple offerings can regularly be found at her gravesite that is marked only with a wrought iron fence, yet the scent of roses emanating from her grave is frequently reported. Don Pedro Jaramillo, who was born in 1829 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, rose to fame for his extraordinary healing powers. Born impoverished, Jaramillo experienced divine intervention for his own health and went on to establish himself as an immensely popular curandero near Falfurrias, Texas, in 1881. It is said that 500 people at a time would camp on his ranch waiting to be healed. Don Pedro would never charge for his work and always found a way to feed the many

people who sought his help. The shrine dedicated to Don Pedro is located in a small cemetery near Falfurrias. Pilgrims find their way to the small brick building painted white that houses his grave, headstone, a small altar, a life-sized statue of the healer, a table for candles, and a bulletin board for the many messages that the faithful leave behind. Weekends are the busiest time at the shrine with pilgrims able to purchase sacred memorabilia of the healer at the nearby Don Pedrito Store. The shrine and pilgrimage site of Nin˜o Fidencio in Espinazo, Nuevo Leo´ n, Mexico, is perhaps the largest of the three shrines briefly discussed here. Jose´ Fidencio Constantino Sı´ntora was born in Iramuco, Guanajuato, in 1898. By the age of eight, he was already known to have set his mother’s arm after she broke it in a fall. He would become a skilled midwife and curandero, using herbal medicine, mud, and at times broken glass in his treatments. He is known to have cured blindness, insanity, and paralysis. Like Jaramillo, he set up his clinic on land that could accommodate hundreds of pilgrims at one time with the apex of his career occurring during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The location of his work was in Espinazo, Nuevo Leo´n, where he was working as a kitchen helper and where he received what he believed to be instructions from God to heal others. His fame as a healer quickly grew with his public career lasting only 10 years. Today, a shrine at Espinazo where he lived, cured, and is buried attracts thousands of devotees from both sides of the border especially on October 17, his birth date, and October 19, his death date, and March 19, the day of Saint Joseph, his patron saint. According to folklorist James S. Griffith, the

36 |

Anonymous Santería

numerous pilgrims ‘‘visit the various sacred sites; the pirulito tree where Fidencio received his defining vision, the hill where he would meditate, the charquito or pond where he would treat lepers. Above all, they visit the hacienda containing the room where he worked, where he saw Jesus walking, and which is the site of his tomb’’ (Griffith 2003, 138). At Espinazo, a powerful healer is remembered, a history is told, and a legacy is passed on through the tradition of shrine making. Lara Medina

References and Further Reading Beezley, William H. ‘‘Home Altars; Private Reflections of Public Life.’’ Home Altars of Mexico, ed. Dana Salvo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). Carrasco, Davı´d. Religions of Mesoamerica: Cosmovision and Ceremonial Centers (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998). ———. ‘‘Jaguar Christians in the Contact Zone.’’ Enigmatic Powers: Syncretism with African and Indigenous Peoples’ Religions Among Latinos, ed. Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo and Andres I. Pe´rez y Mena (New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, 1995). Dı´az-Stevens, Ana Marı´a. ‘‘Latinas and the Church.’’ Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S.: Issues and Concerns, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck, S.J. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). Engh, Michael E., S.J. ‘‘From Frontera Faith to Roman Rubrics: Altering Hispanic Religious Customs in Los Angeles, 1855– 1880.’’ U.S. Catholic Historian 12, no. 4 (1994). Griffith, James S. Folk Saints of the Borderlands: Victims, Bandits, and Healers

(Tucson, AZ: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2003). McMann, Jean. Altars and Icons: Sacred Spaces in Everyday Life (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998). Turner, Kay. Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999).

ANONYMOUS SANTERÍA The term ‘‘anonymous Santerı´a’’ was coined by Miguel A. De La Torre as a response to the earlier theological concept developed by the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner known as ‘‘anonymous Christianity.’’ Rahner attempted to create an ecumenical environment for dialogue between Christians and members of other faiths. Moving beyond the concept that salvation can occur only within the church, specifically the Catholic Church, Rahner makes it possible for other religions to have a salvific quality. For Rahner, believers of non-Christian faiths have not made a self-willed decision to avoid accepting the ‘‘true’’ faith of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Rather, as people of good will, they too could find God because the revelation of God’s work can be found in all non-Christian religions. For Rahner, all religions contain God’s grace, a gratuitous gift on account of Christ. For this reason, all non-Christian religions should be recognized by Christians as a lawful religion without denying the error or depravity which that religion might contain. Those who have never heard of the Gospel or those who have rejected the revelation of Jesus Christ will still be saved. Because salvation can only occur through Christ, Rahner develops the concept of anonymous Christianity to show how Jews, Muslims,

Anonymous Santería Hindus, and others are saved by Christ regardless of their acknowledgement or acceptance of Christ’s grace. This was one of the important theological concepts informing the Second Vatican Council. For those who belong to other faith traditions, for example Santerı´a, the notion that santera/os are saved through Christian theology can be perceived as being somewhat paternalistic and/or presumptuous. In a very real sense, the faith of others is denigrated through the concept that they are really Christians regardless who or what they venerate or regardless whether they know it or not. Although Rahner developed the concept of ‘‘anonymous Christianity’’ to provide a theological understanding that explains how non-Christians are saved through Christ, the idea of anonymous Santerı´a developed to show how believers of this particular religion can worship or participate in other religions absent of inconsistencies. For followers of Santerı´a, there is no such thing as absolute truth. No religion has a monopoly on absolute truth; rather all religions contain truth. When all that is was created, the supreme deity Olodumare distributed the wisdom upon which creation relied for everything. Therefore, the Christian, the Jew, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, in effect every religious person regardless of the faith tradition, contains a piece of the truth in his/ her sacred writings, in his/her worldview, and in his/her holy rituals. Believers of Santerı´a neither condemn nor attempt to evoke the wrath of other religious faiths, but rather attempt to learn from other faiths. What holds all these different faiths together is the concept of ashe´ . Ashe´ can be understood as the substance or cosmic energy undergirding every aspect

| 37

of existence that becomes the power, grace, blood, and life force of all reality. The blood of living creatures, the movement of the wind, and the elements of plants, fire, and moving water expend ashe´. Because everything that exists contains ashe´ and all religions contain truths, certain universality exists within Santerı´a. All of the orishas (the quasi-deities) are manifested in other religions, a type of ‘‘Anonymous Santerı´a.’’ The incorporation and assimilation of new deities is possible and at times necessary within Santerı´a. For example, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God among Catholics, can be understood as being the European manifestation of Obatala´, the creator of the world. Praying before a Catholic statue of the Virgin Mary is understood as praying to the orisha Obatala´ signified by the statue. Catholics who venerate Our Lady of Mercy lack the ‘‘knowledge’’ about the real power behind the Catholic symbol. If the believer were Hindu, then Obatala´ could easily be understood as Brahma the creator. Because of anonymous Santerı´a, worshipers are able to participate in other religious traditions. In fact, on certain occasions Santerı´a requires that their members be baptized within the Catholic Church and attend the masses for the dead. Others attend church to honor the feast days of the Saints worshipped in Santerı´a or to obtain holy water for incarnations. Anonymous Santerı´a allows the follower of Santerı´a to worship in another faith tradition without feeling any incongruency because ashe´ flows through all world religions. In short, anonymous Santerı´a means that every human who worships some deity or cosmic force within their respective religious tradition is in reality worshiping

38 |

Asians

the orisha that particular deity or force signifies. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. Santerı´a: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004). Rahner, Karl. Theological Investigations, trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1973). ———. Foundations of Christian Faith: Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Seabury, 1978).

ASIANS Asian Latino/as are frequently unrecognized and unacknowledged as a cultural and social category in the United States despite the growing number of Latina/os identifying with Asian heritage (2000 U.S. Census). For the first time, the 2000 Census allowed the public to select more than one racial category. The term ‘‘Hispanic’’ is not a racial category but a cultural tie that allows members to choose a racial category (e.g., White, Black, or Asian). In 2000, there were 35,305,818 people who self-identified as Hispanic and then chose a racial category as follows: 16,907,852 White, 710,753 Black, 119,829 Asian, and 45,326 American Indian. From the Asian perspective, 15 percent self-identified as multiracial. When Asians self-identified with their ‘‘other’’ heritage, 52 percent chose White, 6 percent identified with Blacks, 8 percent with Native Hawaiians, and 15 percent with Latina/os and ‘‘other races.’’ Almost 249,000 Asians identified

with Hispanic compared to 119,829 Hispanics who identified with Asian heritage. In order to understand Asian Latina/os mestizaje or miscegenation, we need to examine the historical context in which political and economic factors influenced individuals to immigrate to the United States, by either choice or force.

Japanese Latin Americans In 1895, the Japanese government encouraged and provided legal authorization for Japanese citizens to migrate to the United States and Latin American countries, such as Peru, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina, to serve as a source of labor for economic and political advances. This was done to stimulate the Japanese economy and obtain the social changes that resulted from migration. As early as 1868, the first Japanese emigrants arrived in Hawaii, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. American recruiters were in search of cheap labor between 1890 and 1930 when 273,000 agricultural laborers, students, domestics, and entrepreneurs came to the United States from Japan. Similar emigration patterns began with the first Japanese migration to Peru in 1899 when 790 Japanese emigrants arrived at Callao. The reasons for emigration varied from difficult economic prospects due to the impact of the Sino-Japanese War, to shipping companies and emigration agents seeking to profit from the surplus of skilled farmers. The Peruvian government supported their emigration because workers were needed in cotton and sugar fields. Migration was more attractive to the Japanese laborer since Peru welcomed the skilled

Asians | 39 laborer and opportunities existed for upward mobility in agriculture. The Japanese laborer mastered the Spanish language and Peruvian culture to advance him- or herself. By 1940, approximately 80 percent of the Peruvian Japanese were living in the Lima-Callao metropolitan area. During that time, Japanese numbered 17,598 and represented 28.08 percent of the foreign population living in Peru. In the United States, more than 100,000 Japanese had moved from rural areas to cities and were in commercial enterprises. Similar to other first-generation immigrants arriving in Peru, the Japanese intended to work, save their earnings, and return to Japan. Many Japanese stayed in Peru, as did other immigrants, and created the Central Japanese Association of Peru (CJAP) as well as athletic organizations and other groups. Japanese migration included entire family units as opposed to the Peruvian Chinese colony that was 95 percent male. Typically, Japanese married second-generation Japanese or had a bride sent from Japan to Peru. Local Peruvians criticized them for defying ‘‘Peruvianization’’ because they would not intermarry with the existing population. Japanese community and cultural pride led to establishing the first of 50 Japanese language elementary schools in 1908. The Japanese immigrants retained many facets of their culture, including language, music, games, and dietary preferences. However, there was an immersion in Spanish-Catholic life. In Peru, as in the United States, there was an anti-Japanese sentiment that began to replace the Peruvian dislike of the Chinese. The Japanese had taken control of agricultural zones and urban areas, and this led to protest over

monopoly and unfair competition. In 1934, Peru denounced a four-year treaty of friendship, commerce, and legislation that required 80 percent of any work force be native Peruvians. Quotas were set for imported cotton goods. In 1936, the Peruvian government established immigration quotas and regulations that targeted the Japanese. For example, late birth registrations were quickly annulled. Anti-Japanese sentiment grew and resulted in the Peruvian race riots of 1940. The Japanese Consulate recorded that 620 households and businesses were negatively affected, and a total of $6 million (U.S. dollar value) was lost in Lima. As a result, the Japanese were repatriated to Japan because they were unable to recover. Following the riots, even children would shout at Japanese people and call them ‘‘chino macaco.’’ ‘‘Chino’’ means Chinese and ‘‘macaco’’ was used to indicate a ‘‘slave.’’ This term had been used previously to demean the Chinese people who arrived in Peru as ‘‘semi-slaves’’ from the Portuguese colony of Macao. The Chinese had been sold to Peruvian mine operators and owners of large haciendas. Since then, ‘‘chino’’ has been used as a general term to refer to Asians when differentiation of Chinese from Japanese descent is difficult. The term ‘‘chino macaco’’ was typically used by the uneducated, but following the riots it was used as a racial epithet on a daily basis. Almost a week and a half after the riots, a great earthquake struck Peru. Most of the people who had participated in the riots were devout Catholics. They interpreted the earthquake as an omen or expression of anger on the part of the Lord for their violent behavior, and they began to repent. The earthquake tended to decrease some of the anti-Japanese

40 |

Asians

sentiment that was intensifying in Peru during 1940. On December 7, 1941, Japan was at war with the United States. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Panamanian and American officials agreed to the internment of Japanese people. The Panamanian government allowed for the Panamanian Japanese to be exchanged for citizens of the Western Hemisphere held by Japan. The United States provided a blacklist, also known as the Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals. The list focused on economic strangulation through governmentsponsored boycott of successful business owners or leaders in Italian, German, and Japanese communities in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. Seiichi Higashide, a first-generation Japanese Peruvian recalls that in his group there were 29 Japanese on the list, five or six naturalized Peruvians, and two had been born in Peru. Germans were also detained in the military concentration camp located in Panama. Single Japanese men or married men without their families left Peru and were taken to concentration camps in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Camp Kennedy located in Crystal City, Texas. Some families were split up, some were repatriated to Japan, while others were interned in separate concentration camps and never reunited with their families. The Peruvian government did not allow the return of deported Japanese during the Pacific War. Japanese Americans were detained and placed in 10 relocation centers in California, Oregon, and Washington. Thousands of Japanese Nisei (U.S. citizens) and Issei (first generation) served in the American Armed Forces during World War II to prove their loyalty to the country.

By the end of 1945, 20 to 30 percent of the 112,000 Japanese American internees remained in camps. Peru provided 84 percent of the total number of Japanese internees; other Japanese came from Panama, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Brazil had the largest number of Japanese in South America but did not report any Japanese for deportation. Mexico moved its Japanese to inland areas and did not take a hard policy on deportation. Argentina and Chile remained neutral to the war until the end and did not deport their Japanese to the United States. Japanese families that had been forced illegally by the U.S. government to reside in concentration camps were considered illegal immigrants to the United States post–World War II. Many Japanese were persuaded to return to Japan. With the issuance of Order No. 2663 on September 12, 1945, the U.S. government formally announced that all Japanese were to be removed from the Western Hemisphere. Higashide, an Issei, remembers that Wayne M. Collins, an attorney from San Francisco, was involved in efforts to restore U.S. citizenship to Japanese Americans who had been misled into renouncing their citizenship while detained in the camps. On June 26, 1946, Collins filed a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the 364 Japanese from Peru in the Federal Circuit Court in San Francisco. The court approved a restricted parole while a decision was made for the Japanese from Peru, and a guarantor or sponsor for a provisional release was needed before they could leave the concentration camps. Seabrook Farms, a large food processing company located in southern New Jersey became the guarantor that provided work for many detainees. Many

Asians | 41 Japanese had to start from nothing as a result of this injustice. In 1952, naturalization laws allowed first-generation Asian immigrants to become naturalized U.S. citizens. In 1954, ‘‘illegal entrants’’ from Central and South America were formally given visas and the right to acquire permanent residency in the United States (as were other new immigrants). Immigrants no longer had to face the constant fear of being deported. Higashide shares that his children were involved in the redress movement that fought for numerous resolutions for World War II (WWII) internment of Japanese Americans. In 1970, Japanese American employees of the State of California received retirement credit for time spent in detention camps. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush presented a signed apology to three elderly Japanese Americans for wrongful imprisonment and compensation for pain and suffering during WWII. These el derly Japanese Americans each received a check for $20,000. The Japanese Peruvians continue to negotiate their sense of identity, religion, language, social networks, and politics within the Japanese, Peruvian, and American cultures. Similarly, Japanese Mexican Americans face constant struggles between cultures and within each self-identified ethnic group. For example, consider a Mexican-born second-generation Japanese descendant who lived in the heart and capital of Mexico, and became a resident of California at the age of 12. She remembers her childhood in Mexico and tells her experience as an American citizen proud of her Japanese heritage. She describes her spiritual growth and religious practices:

My grandparents from both sides of my family came from Japan and migrated to Mexico before World War II. Both my mother and father had Japanese parents but were born and raised in Mexico. In Mexico, I felt very Mexican but with an Asian look. I went to a private school, El Liceo Mexicano Japones, which is a Japanese-Mexican integrated school. I was enrolled in the Mexican section, where all classes were in Spanish and 1 class was in Japanese. At that time, I identified more with Mexicans than with Japanese. I felt more racism in Mexico, in the form of people staring and looking at me weird and saying things like, ‘‘Ahi viene la chinita’’ [here comes the little Chinese girl]. The prejudice mostly came from uneducated people. I noticed it more when I was in places like the tiangis [farmer’s market]. Now, living in the United States, I see the prejudice from the other side . . . I now have to prove my identity as a Mexican, to get the same treatment from Mexicans as another Mexican. Mexicans are nice to me when I speak Spanish. People other than Mexican [in the United States] are surprised when I speak Spanish. They are totally accepting and see me with admiration and interest. I still feel very Mexican, but not as strongly as before . . . I like the aspects of Mexican culture but I don’t like the prejudices from Mexicans. It seems that some Mexicans (especially those less educated) feel the need to treat others badly (i.e., the people they perceive as non-Mexicans) as a kind of payback for the bad treatment they themselves may have received in this country because of their Mexican/Latino background. Or perhaps by treating each other better than they treat non-Mexicans (or those whom they think are not Mexican), they somehow feel like they’re ‘‘beating the system’’ or helping society make up for what it hasn’t given them but they feel they deserve. In surveys, I now tend to check

42 |

Asians the Asian or Asian-American boxes more than Hispanic category. In Mexico, I don’t remember seeing many Japanese Mexicans practicing Buddhism. I only remember my uncle praying at his Buddhist altar, bell, and incense at home. In Mexico, Japanese people seemed more Catholic. I did my first communion with other kids that also had both [Japanese and Mexican culture]. Our parents (2nd generation Japanese Mexican) embraced the Mexican culture, but also wanted us to know our own Japanese heritage and culture. When I first moved to California, our family visited the Japanese Buddhist temple. I felt weird . . . we had a double barrier . . . we were new to the community and couldn’t communicate [not yet fully fluent in English]. I thought all Japanese people (at the temple) spoke only Japanese; but now that I have come back to the temple in recent years, I realize that all the people at the temple speak English and hardly any of them speak the Japanese language. It is a close-knit community. I now seek out Buddhist religion more than Catholicism. It seems more true about how I feel about life. I want my daughter to learn about Japanese culture. (Anonymous interview given the author, 2007)

Mexican Filipinos The population of the Philippine Islands has always been diverse with the earliest settlers being dark-skinned Negritos or Aetas. From the 1500s forward, the Chinese have resided in the Philippine Islands as a separate group as well as intermarrying and creating a class of Chinese mestizos (mixed blood). Spain ruled the Philippine Islands for 300 years and converted the majority of the population to Roman Catholicism. Spaniards born in the Islands were called Filipinos, even though there was little intermarrying between Spaniards and

the indigenous population. Filipinos revolted against the Spaniards and declared independence in 1898. But U.S. President William McKinley claimed the Islands instead of supporting the Philippines in their struggle for independence. In 1903, through the pensionado program, the U.S. government provided Filipino students with scholarships for education in the United States. In exchange, they were to work for the government in the Philippines. Pensionado stories became a legend. Large numbers of Filipinos proved their capabilities to Americans and Filipinos, thus countering the notions that Filipinos were savages. During the 1920s and 1930s most Filipinos lived on the West Coast and worked in restaurants, in hotels, in private clubs, and as personal servants. During this time Filipinos faced de facto segregation. They were discriminated against and prevented from entering their professions after completing their education. As a result, many resorted to labor in low working-class jobs. Children born in the United States to Filipino immigrants were U.S. citizens. But before WWII, regardless of the number of years of residency in the United States, Philippine-born Filipinos were ineligible for naturalization. Prior to WWII, many Filipinos enlisted as officers in the U.S. Army and as messmen and musicians in the U.S. Navy. By 1922, there were 5,018 Filipinos that constituted 5 percent of the enlisted force of the navy. The TydingsMcDuffie Act of 1934 promised the Philippines independence after 10 years, but immediately restricted immigration from the Philippines to 50 per quota. The Luce-Celler Bill passed in July 2, 1946, by the U.S. government granted access

Asians | 43 to naturalization for all remaining Filipinos who came before the TydingsMcDuffie Act; thus 10,764 Filipinos became U.S. citizens. Finally, on July 4, 1946, the Philippine independence was celebrated. Under the War Brides Act of 1945 and the Fiance´e Act of 1946, 118,000 Filipina wives and children, as well as fiance´ es of U.S. servicemen, entered the United States without a visa or passport. After the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the purpose for migration was to relieve occupational shortages and achieve family reunification. During the 10 years after the 1965 Act, over 230,000 Filipinos migrated to the United States. By the mid-1970s doctors in the United States were no longer in short supply and the U.S. immigration law no longer welcomed foreign medical graduates from the Philippines. This historical review of immigration and intermarriages that started in the Philippine Islands, and later in Hawaii, shows that most Filipinos ended up residing on the West Coast, where a mestizo identity was formed. Today, border towns between the United States and Mexico, specifically San Diego, have many Mexican Filipino residents. Mexican Filipino identity is thus complex. Many have Spanish surnames as a result of the Spanish conquest and brown complexions as a result of African, Indian, and Chinese roots or intermarriages with other ethnic groups (e.g., Mexicans, Hondurans, Salvadorians). Ethnic studies scholar Rudy Guevarra calls his own identity ‘‘Mexipino’’ or ‘‘Mexipina,’’ a multiethnic identity of people from Mexican and Filipino descent. Other terms have been used in the past by others of this mixed heritage that include Chicapino, Chicaflip, Mexiflip, or Flipsican, Chicano, and

Pinoy. The last two terms refer to a political identity adopted by young Mexican Americans and Filipina/o Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. Contemporary Mexican Filipinos utilize Chicapino, yet Guevarra argues that Mexipino is a more positive and inclusive self-identifying term that represents the generations born in the late 1960s and early 1970s and earlier. Guevarra interviewed Mexipinos and Mexipinas in San Diego who described having the ‘‘best of both worlds,’’ where food, religion, struggles, and prejudices were very similar among Filipinos and Mexicans, which increased tolerance and openmindedness toward other cultures. Some Filipino Mexicans struggle with an ‘‘ambiguous identity,’’ as often they are perceived as Mexican, Hawaiian, Middle Eastern, or Polynesian. Filipinos and Mexicans share histories of colonial conquest by Spain and conversion to Catholicism, de facto segregation, discrimination, and prejudice that continue into the present.

Chinese Cubans Miguel A. De La Torre describes in his work how Asian laborers were brought to Cuba as ‘‘indentured’’ servants during the late nineteenth century. The landowner’s purpose was to obtain domesticated slaves as an alternative to African slaves. Chinese laborers were brought on ships that ironically had previously brought African slaves to Cuba. Many died in the long journey through what he calls ‘‘the Pacific Middle Passage.’’ The Spanish frigate Gravina transported 352 Chinese laborers, of which 82 arrived at La Habana. In 1847, the first 206 Chinese laborers were brought to Cuba and that

44 |

Asians

number grew to 300,000 by 1939. During that time, the word ‘‘coolie’’ was used in a derogatory way to refer to the Chinese laborer and described the social location of oppression. The word coolie is composed of two Chinese characters, Coo and lee meaning ‘‘suffering with pain’’ and ‘‘laborer,’’ and describes the terrible treatment and working conditions that were similar to those experienced by slaves. By 1874, 3 percent of the Cuban population was Chinese. Because of the terrible working conditions, between 1850 and 1860, 340 people per million committed suicide. More specifically, 92.5 percent of suicides were committed by Chinese laborers. The rate of suicide was the highest in the world. The illusion that Chinese were brought as ‘‘indentured’’ servants with a contract to work for eight years is elusive since they were treated worse than slaves. Many Chinese laborers were forced to leave their homes, deceived about the type of contract work they would do and the country to which they would be taken. In many cases, Asian overseers were Black. Chinese laborers viewed Cuban Blacks as intellectually inferior to them due to their illiteracy, since the majority of Chinese were literate. Cuban structures of White supremacy placed the Chinese laborer under the same hierarchy as the African slaves. The sugar fields demanded a male work force; therefore, there were few Chinese women. Social and legal laws were enforced with regard to intermarriages or miscegenation of Africans or Whites with Asians. A large wave of Chinese Cubans, along with other Cubans, fled the Island for the United States after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Many of these immigrants established themselves and

their small businesses and restaurants in Miami and Los Angeles, as well as in New Jersey. Mike Yip, owner of the restaurant La Caridad in New York, was born in Cuba of Chinese parents, and he fluently speaks Spanish, Cantonese, and English. Cristina Garcia, a Cuban American writer, describes in her novel, Monkey Hunting, the multigenerational story of Chen Pan, a Chinese immigrant’s experience as a coolie who develops a relationship with a mulatto former slave. Pan’s great-grandson abandons Cuba after the 1959 socialist uprising and ends up fighting for the United States in the Vietnam War.

Punjabi Mexican Americans The first period of immigration was between 1899 and 1914 when 6,800 Punjabi men, including Hindu and Muslim, but mostly Sikh, arrived in California to work the land. Punjabis primarily migrated to Canada and the United States as a result of increased population pressure, subdivision of land, rural debt, status, and adventure. As Punjabi immigration increased, prejudice arose, and rejection rates increased in Canada and the United States. Before 1907, fewer than 10 percent were rejected, and in 1909, 1911, and 1913 more than 50 percent of applicants were rejected. One strategy that Punjabi men used was to enter through the Philippines legally, for it was a U.S. colony at that time. In 1913, a judge ruled that a man legally admitted through the Philippines could still be detained and deported rather than admitted legally to the United States. The Immigration Act of 1917 ‘‘barred Asiatic Zone,’’ and had literary provisions that excluded many Punjabi due to their illiteracy.

Asians | 45 Initially, Punjabis settled in California, Washington, Texas, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Punjabis helped develop cotton in Cautillo, Texas, but major efforts took place in cultivating cotton in California’s Imperial Valley. By 1919, Punjabis had leased 32,380 acres in the Imperial Valley, which was more than one-third of all California land leased and owned by Punjabis. This was accomplished by utilizing relatives or friends to hold land on a man’s behalf. The earliest Punjabi settlement was in 1909 in the Imperial Valley. This is also where the first Punjabi-Mexican marriage took place in 1913. By 1920, the population in the Imperial Valley was 40 percent female, the minority being immigrant women. During this time, 37 percent of women were foreign born, representing 72 percent born in Mexico and 28 percent in Japan. Forty-three percent were American Black. There were two Chinese female and no Indian female residents. Many men returned to their countries for brides or sent for them (e.g., ‘‘mail order brides’’ and ‘‘picture brides’’). Because of the strict immigration laws prior to 1965, many Punjabi men were unable to bring their wives and children from India. California had antimiscegenation laws prohibiting marriages between people of different races, and Punjabis were classified as non-White. Therefore, a marriage with a White woman had the strongest prejudice. The first intermarriages were between working-class Mexican women and wealthy, prominent Punjabi men. These early marriages caused conflict between the Mexican men and the Punjabis. In spite of rising interracial conflicts, Punjabi-Mexican marriages continued. A positive reason for a Punjabi to marry a Mexican woman was that then matches

could be arranged for Punjabi friends or relatives with female relatives. Not until 1933, with an Imperial Valley County indictment of some Punjabis and Anglos conspiring to evade the Alien Land Laws, did some Punjabi men begin to secure their land by marrying Mexican women to hold land under her name for her husband. In the 1940s, a common strategy used to secure land was to put land under their children’s names as U.S. citizens and use a guardianship to continue controlling the land. As a result, many Punjabi men spent time working the land, while the women were responsible for instilling the language, culture, and religion to their children. Children’s names reflected the dual heritage of Sikh men using ‘‘Singh’’ as a last name combined with Spanish first names, as in Maria Jesusita Singh or Jose Akbar Khan. Children were raised Catholic, spoke Spanish, and followed Indian customs only when men died. Sikh and Hindu men were cremated and all of the appropriate death rituals were performed. A picture was sometimes taken of the dead body of an Indian man in his casket and sent to his family in India. However, many of the pictures did not depict men wearing the customary turbans. Sons typically worked with fathers on the land and learned the Punjabi work language. For the most part, Punjabi Mexican children did not speak Punjabi but understood it. The majority of children self-identified as ‘‘Indian’’ or ‘‘East Indian.’’ Punjabi Mexican American children were segregated from White children and attended different schools with Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Black children. Restaurants were also segregated by groups of immigrants who were also discriminated against. A reaction to this discrimination was that

46 |

Asians

Mexicans, Japanese, and Punjabi opened restaurants and barbershops to serve everyone. The Luce-Celler Bill enabled Punjabi men to become citizens, which in turn brought the connection back to India. In 1965, the Immigration and Naturalization Act enabled families to reunite, but at the same time it brought risks and instability to existing Punjabi Mexican families. Upon arriving in the United States, new Indian immigrants discriminated against and denigrated the Hispanic ancestry within the Punjabi community, thus alienating descendants from Punjabi and the Indian heritage. More recently, few Punjabi Mexicans honor and celebrate their heritage through commemorations and the naming of local roads after prominent people as in ‘‘Singh Road.’’ Compared to the Imperial Valley, Phoenix is a cosmopolitan area that has expanded to an urban and suburban area where others rarely identify Punjabi Mexicans as Hindus or Spanish Pakistanis. The northern Californian descendants of Punjabi pioneers from Yuba City are hesitant to participate in the annual Yuba Sikh Parade, yet they still hold their annual Christmas Dance, which is open to all descendants of Punjabi pioneers. Discrimination exists relating to religious practices involving temple traditions that Punjabi pioneers and second-generation families followed compared to strict traditional Indian customs of new immigrants, which were not practiced or are unfamiliar to previous generations.

Time Line 1798

Alien Enemy Act permitted the apprehension and internment of

1882

1898 1907

1913

1917 1924

1934

1935 1942 1945

nationals of states at war with the United States. Chinese Exclusion Act prohibits the entrance and citizenship of Chinese laborers; intended to last 10 years, it was extended to 1902. The Treaty of Paris ends the SpanishAmerican War and cedes the Philippines to the United States. Gentlemen’s Agreement is issued by Theodore Roosevelt where the Japanese government refuses to issue passports for laborers immigrating to the United States but the agreement allows departure to Hawaii. Alien Land Act is signed into law in California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, Nebraska, Texas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Minnesota. A person is not eligible for U.S. citizenship and prohibited the purchase of land for agricultural purposes but may lease property for no more than three years. Immigration Act or ‘‘barred Asiatic Zone’’ prohibited Asian immigrants and included literary provisions. Immigration Law or National Origins Act excluded immigration of all Asian laborers (including Punjabis and Indians) with the exception of Filipinos, recognized as U.S. nationals. The Tydings-McDuffie Act promised the Philippines independence after 10 years but immediately restricted immigration to 50 per quota. The Repatriation Act allocated funds for transport of Filipinos who chose to return to the Philippines. Internment in concentration camps of Japanese Americans and Japanese residing in Latin America. The War Brides Act allowed for wives and children of U.S. servicemen to enter the United States without a visa or passport.

Assimilation 1946 1946 1952 1965

1965

The Fiance´e Act allowed for fiance´es of U.S. servicemen to enter the United States. The Luce-Celler Bill allowed naturalization of all remaining immigrants before the 1934 Act. The Immigration and Nationality Act granted access to eligible immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship. The Immigration Act (reversed the 1924 act) allowed Asian immigrants into the United States without restrictions or quota. The Great Grape Strike was led by Filipino and Mexican American labor leaders, who fought for higher wages and better working conditions for farm workers in California, among other states.

Sarah J. Rangel-Sanchez

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Guevarra, Rudy P. ‘‘Burritos and Bangoong: Mexipinos and Multiethnic Identity in San Diego, California.’’ Crossing Lines: Race and Mixed Race Across the Geohistorical Divide, ed. Marc Coronado, Rudy P. Guevarra, Jeffrey Moniz, and Laura F. Szanto (Santa Barbara: Multiethnic Student Outreach and Center for Chicano Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2003). Higashide, Seiichi. Adios to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000). Leonard, Karen I. Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

| 47

Min, Pyong Gap, and Jung Ha Kim, eds. Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities (Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002). Oboler, Suzanne, and Deena J. Gonzalez, eds. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

ASSIMILATION The online Encyclopedia Britannica (2007) definition of assimilation is ‘‘the process whereby individuals or groups of differing ethnic heritage are absorbed into the dominant culture of a society. Usually they are immigrants or hitherto isolated minorities who, through contact and participation in the larger culture, gradually give up most of their former culture traits and take on the new traits.’’ In Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921, reprinted 1969), R. E. Park and E. Burgess provide a definition for assimilation that does not assume a majority and minority dichotomy. According to them, assimilation is ‘‘a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life’’ (735). Assimilation is also included in this encyclopedia of Latino/a religious experiences because of issues related to the Hispanic experience in the United States, specifically questions about how they should be a part of this country in the future. A secondary reason for considering assimilation is because of the role religion, particularly Protestantism, has played in Latina/o assimilation patterns.

48 |

Assimilation

LADINO ‘‘Ladino’’ is an ethnic category typically used in contrast with the category of ‘‘Indian’’ that characterizes the Spanish-speaking populations of southern Mexico and Guatemala in particular. In its most popular use, the term refers to persons who abandon their indigenous language, dress, and other cultural practices while assimilating into the dominant Spanish-speaking culture. Both ‘‘Ladino’’ and ‘‘Indian’’ are more correctly understood as cultural rather than racial categories. The process of ‘‘Ladinization’’ can occur in a single generation when rural ‘‘Indian’’ parents move to the city and seek to hasten assimilation into the dominant economic and cultural system by not training their children in their mother tongue and folkways. ‘‘Ladino’’ can be applied to persons from different social classes and can represent different levels of cultural assimilation, ranging from poor Spanish-speaking peasants to wealthy, powerful, small-town merchants to persons that continue to flee rural poverty and seek economic opportunity in marginal urban communities. A similar diversity exists within the ‘‘Indian’’ community. As a dualistic model of ethnic classification, the terms ‘‘Ladino’’ and ‘‘Indian’’ are broadly used in public discourse. But for decades, historians, sociologists, ethnographers, and anthropologists have questioned such reductionist categories since they ignore or hide the rich and complex sociocultural diversity present in Guatemalan society. —FCG

To understand the role assimilation has played in the U.S. Latino/a experience, it is important to review how assimilation has been interpreted and prescribed in discussions about the larger U.S. immigrant experience, paying attention to the role Protestantism has played in that process. This will set the framework for analyzing Latino/a assimilation patterns, understanding the current debate on the role of Hispanics in U.S. society, and considering how the migratory patterns of the globalized environment redefine the issues. In his classic work on the subject, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins, Milton Gordon describes the experience of immigrants in the United States through the middle of the twentieth century. Gordon summarizes his understanding of the development of ethnic identity in the American experience, defines the

concept of assimilation by describing various ‘‘types’’ or stages of assimilation, presents various theories of assimilation in the United States, and then presents his perspective of how various cultural and ethnic groups interact in this country. His work is important here because of the complexity of what is called assimilation and his description of the various theories of how assimilation is happening or should happen in the United States. Gordon describes seven types or stages of assimilation. Cultural assimilation, or acculturation, is the process of adaptation by which one group takes on cultural patterns from another group, usually a group with less power from a more powerful culture. Acculturation has to do with learning how to fit into the other culture and may or may not affect the other stages. This process can go from partial adaptation within the

Assimilation framework of the weaker culture to full adoption of the patterns of the dominant culture. Structural assimilation is the large-scale entrance into the institutions of the dominant culture. The members of the weak group are able to participate in the social, economic, and political structures of the dominant group. Marital assimilation, or amalgamation, is largescale intermarriage. As various cultural groups interact, marriage across cultural and ethnic lines becomes common, unless the process is stigmatized directly or indirectly. Identificational assimilation is the development of a common sense of peoplehood among the various cultural groups based exclusively on the dominant culture. The weak group begins losing its clearly defined sense of separate identity. Attitude receptional assimilation is the absence of prejudice toward the assimilated group. This level of assimilation assumes an attitude shift in the dominant or host culture. The dominant culture no longer encourages separation by putting down the weak group. Behavior receptional assimilation is the absence of discrimination. Not only have attitudes changed, but the actions of the dominant culture no longer create barriers toward the minority culture. Civic assimilation is the absence of value or power conflict. The weak group no longer feels the need to ‘‘defend’’ itself or ‘‘protect’’ its rights. The need for protection of a clearly identifiable group identity has all but disappeared. These various types of assimilation are stages in a process in which assimilation is complete if the weak group goes through all the stages of the process. Gordon states that ‘‘not only is the assimilation process mainly a matter of degree, but, obviously, each of the states or subprocesses distinguished above may take

| 49

place in varying degrees.’’ Throughout the book the author describes ethnic groups that have gone through the entire process, groups that are ‘‘in process,’’ groups that have gone through parts of the process, but not others, and groups that are essentially separated and are not fully ‘‘assimilating’’ into majority culture, though they may be somewhat acculturated. Gordon then describes the three principal goal systems in the U.S. experience. Each of these describes ideological perspectives that are prescriptive, describing how their proponents assume the various cultural groups are, or should be, part of U.S. society. The Anglo conformity model assumes that all people should adopt the culture, language, and institutions that came from England. In this perspective, the United States is a country that was formed with cultural values and norms brought by the English immigrants. It assumes that immigrants from other parts of the world are welcomed if they adopt U.S. Anglo culture. Historically, people who have held this perspective have assumed that only immigrants from ‘‘White’’ Protestant European countries would be able to fully assimilate into U.S. Anglo culture. According to Gordon, this was the majority view held in the United States, particularly during the early years of the country’s history and through most of the nineteenth century. The second perspective, the melting pot, is a more generous and idealistic form of the Anglo conformity model. This view began to take shape as the type of immigrant to the United States began to change in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the national, religious, and cultural backgrounds of the European immigrants began to change, the melting

50 |

Assimilation

pot theory began to take hold of the U.S. imagination. Like the Anglo conformity model, the melting pot perspective also assumes the eventual disappearance of specific ethnic communities. But it proposes that the assimilation process among peoples is creating a new reality where none of the previous groups fully define the new culture, but that all of the groups assimilate into each other, creating a new reality, a U.S. culture. This perspective was popularized in the early twentieth century by Israel Zangwill’s drama, The Melting Pot. This perspective captured the imagination of many people, including U.S. presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Through much of the first half of the twentieth century this perspective competed with the Anglo conformity concept as the principal ideological construct for defining what the United States should look like. According to Gordon, the third major theoretical model, cultural pluralism, has existed early in the U.S. experience. Before it became an explicit theory or perspective for life in the United States, it was either practiced by various ethnic groups or imposed on them. Some European immigrants attempted to both produce cultural enclaves and be a part of the larger civic life of the United States. They established their own schools, churches, and other cultural institutions, even as they identified themselves as citizens of the United States. On the other hand, some ethnic groups like Native Americans, African Americans, and other non-European peoples were not allowed into the ‘‘melting pot’’ and were forced to develop their own separate cultural institutions. This perspective was also defined in the public square at the beginning of the

twentieth century through the work and publications of Horace Kallen. In 1915 he published two articles with the title ‘‘Democracy Versus the Melting Pot’’ in The Nation magazine. He argued against Anglo conformity or the melting pot as useful descriptions of what was happening in the United States or as worthy ideals for the future. In this work, and in his later writings, Kallen argued that cultural pluralism fits the American ideal and enriches U.S. society. Gordon goes on to argue that cultural pluralism is not a sufficient definition of what is happening in U.S. society. In the 1960s, Gordon sees that there is much cultural assimilation in the United States. People tend to adopt U.S. cultural patterns across ethnic, race, and religious lines. Nonetheless, there continues to be profound structural pluralism, defined by religion (Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish) and by race (Black) or what he calls ‘‘quasi-racial’’ groups (Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans). Even though groups tend to acculturate toward common cultural norms, they are not fully assimilating and disappearing as distinct ethnic communities. In summary, he argues that the United States is the following: A multiple melting pot in which acculturation for all groups beyond the first generation of immigrants, without eliminating all value conflict, has been massive and decisive, but in which structural separation on the basis of race and religion—structural pluralism, as we have called it—emerges as the dominant sociological condition. (1964, 234–235)

This statement describes Gordon’s understanding of the situation in the United States. He is concerned that the United States does not have clearly

Assimilation defined guidelines about what it wants as a country or about the implications of following any of the models he describes. From his perspective, intercultural relations in the United States seems like a racehorse with blinders. It has no idea where it is or where it is going, but it is moving very rapidly. Though the book provides a very useful introduction to the issue, it also leaves out some crucial issues related to intercultural relations and assimilation issues within the United States. Gordon does not address the impact of government policies on some of the ethnic minority groups or on current migration patterns. He only describes the current reality that he is experiencing. Therefore, he recognizes that Native Americans are in an ‘‘odd’’ position, yet neglects the fact that U.S. government policies have over the years destroyed native cultures. He also addresses the issues of discrimination against African Americans, but ignores the historical issues of slavery, legal discrimination, and ongoing double standards in education and public services. In relation to Puerto Ricans or Mexican Americans, he does not deal with the conquests of Puerto Rico or of the Southwest, the migratory patterns from Latin America created by U.S. political or economic policies, and the impact of these actions on Latino/as cultures. By not addressing these issues, he recognizes the problem of discrimination, but does not address the crucial structural issues that continue to maintain a relationship where the majority continues to negatively impact, while maintaining separation from, the cultures of the ‘‘racial’’ or quasi-racial minorities in the United States. Religion became an important factor in Hispanic assimilation patterns and

| 51

perspectives during the nineteenth century. Many U.S. Protestants became concerned by the changing immigration patterns, which included a growing number of Catholics from Europe. These Protestants were convinced that these new immigrants would not, or could not, assimilate into the social structures of the young country. They responded to this situation politically, socially, and religiously. On the religious front many Protestant denominations developed missionary strategies to evangelize the new Catholic immigrants from Europe. When the United States conquered the Southwest from Mexico in 1848 some of these same denominations sent missionaries to evangelize the Mexican Catholics who remained in the region and were now legally U.S. citizens. The Protestant missionaries that evangelized the Mexicans of the Southwest closely linked the roles of evangelization and of Americanization. They were convinced that Mexican Catholics could never be good U.S. citizens unless they both became Protestants and adopted U.S. cultural patterns. Throughout the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, the missionaries and mission agencies that worked in the region described their task in terms of making the Mexicans good Christians and good U.S. citizens. The U.S. Protestant churches no longer describe their tasks in these terms. But to this day, many Protestant mission efforts among new Latina/o immigrants begin with issues related to cultural adaptation, such as teaching English or skills specific to the U.S. environment. During the nineteenth century many Catholic immigrants worked very hard to demonstrate that Catholics could be good ‘‘Americans.’’ The Catholic Church

52 |

Assimilation

SECRETARIAT FOR HISPANIC AFFAIRS OF THE UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was created in 1974, although it traces its roots to 1945. Its mission was to aid in the integration rather than the assimilation of Hispanics into the U.S. Catholic Church. The Secretariat had been instrumental in planning and implementing the last five Hispanic national Encuentros, promoting the ‘‘National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic Ministry,’’ and assisting in the New Evangelization and ministry efforts, including the founding of the National Catholic Association of Diocesan Directors for Hispanic Ministry (NCADDHM 1991), which survives it. The executive director of the Secretariat has always been lay and Hispanic, important achievements in a Church still dominated by non-Hispanic, White (mainly clerical) leadership. The two directors have been Pablo Sedillo (1970–1991) and Ronaldo Cruz (1991–2007). The staff has raised millions of dollars for important studies and publications, including their newsletter En Marcha. In 2007 the USCCB reorganized, and the duties of this Secretariat and others were folded into the Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church. Many observers see its closing as extremely unwise, although it reflects a general retreat by the bishops, especially away from extradiocesan structures that serve Hispanics. —KGD

seemed to be working toward the twin tasks of keeping their people in the fold and also proving that they ‘‘fit’’ in U.S. society. This meant that the Catholic Church was often involved in Americanization efforts. When the American Catholic Church took over ecclesiastical jurisdiction for the Catholics of the Southwest, the Church sent priests and nuns who questioned the faith and practices of the Mexicans and sought to get them to accept a form of Catholicism that looked more like the Catholicism practiced by U.S. Catholics. Most Mexican priests were removed and replaced by those more acceptable to the U.S. hierarchy. The Catholic Church also set up schools, like the Protestants, to help ‘‘acculturate’’ and ‘‘Americanize’’ the Mexicans. Because of these actions, many Mexican Catholics in the Southwest felt alienated from the U.S. Catholic Church until well into the twentieth century.

This has created a unique situation for both Latino/a Catholics and Protestants. Some Hispanics assimilated into the larger Catholic or Protestant communities in the United States. But because they are part of both quasi-racial and distinct religious groups, they sometimes seem to fit better in one or the other and sometimes do not clearly seem to fit in either. For example, Latina/o Protestant converts seemed to participate in cultural assimilation by becoming Protestant, but they continue to be structurally separated because they are Latino/as. Also, many new Hispanic immigrants are already Protestants, but they are bringing faith expressions with them that do not easily fit within the U.S. Protestant world. Hispanic Catholics face a similar situation in which they are now almost 40 percent of the total Catholic population in the United States, the largest single ethnic community in the Catholic Church, but

Assimilation they are treated as a ‘‘minority’’ group within the Church and are very underrepresented in church structures and leadership. A 2007 Pew study of religion among Latino/as (Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion) seems to indicate that religious identity is a marker of both acculturation and ethnoreligious identity maintenance. According to the study, Hispanics are more likely to become Protestant the more generations that they have been in the United States. This seems to be a sign of acculturation. But the study also indicated that a large majority of both Catholic and Protestant Latina/os continue to worship in churches that have a clear Latino/a identity even after several generations. These results would seem to indicate that because Hispanics include both religious and quasi-racial differences with the majority, it is possible that Latina/os are remaining structurally separate even if they seem to acculturate religiously. Other studies seem to indicate that Latino/a Protestants are developing and maintaining a clearly defined ethnoreligious identity, even though it is under constant pressure from an assimilating U.S. Protestantism and it has a minority status within the larger U.S. Hispanic community. When Latina/os are measured by Gordon’s seven categories of assimilation, one sees both signs of assimilation and signs of cultural identity maintenance. Latino/as do learn how to function within the cultural norms of the majority. Most learn English and a significant minority no longer speak Spanish. There is a significant level of participation in the structures of majority culture and intermarriage. One can find Hispanics for whom their ethnic background is merely

| 53

part of their history and has no impact on how they live their lives or how they perceive their future in the United States. As individuals they seem to be at the seventh stage in Gordon’s description. They experience no power or value conflict between themselves and majority culture. This is not, however, the experience of Latino/as as a group, or of the vast majority of Hispanics as individuals. For most Latinos cultural adaptation has not necessarily meant full-scale cultural adoption. There are clearly identifiable cultural traits that are Latina/o, but uniquely adapted to the U.S. reality. In many cases Hispanics are now merely adopting the traits of the majority. They also seem to include reworking traditionally Hispanic cultural traits so that they are functional in a different environment. The use of Spanish is growing in the United States, not as a ‘‘foreign’’ language, but as part of the U.S. experience. Spanish language media’s continued reinforcement of the use of Spanish and popular dialects, such as Spanglish or Tex-Mex, reflect not only adaptation but also the development of new forms of communication. Latina/os are intermarrying, but the cultural movement of those marriages is not always toward majority culture. Latino/as from various national and ethnic backgrounds are intermarrying, expanding, and enriching U.S. Hispanic cultural identity. In Gordon’s model all of this is a description of structural pluralism. Latino/as are a quasi-racial community, in that they are considered similar to racial groups (Whites, African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and others), though Latina/os can be a part of any of these ‘‘races.’’ Like other racial groups, they are acculturating but are also

54 |

Assimilation

A parishioner attends services at La Casa del Carpintero Church, with a bilingual Bible on a seat in the foreground, July 2007. The Hispanic church began offering English-language services in an effort to integrate second- and third-generation Hispanics, and keep families together. (AP Photo/ Nam Y. Huh)

developing and maintaining a separate ethnic and cultural identity. This is a reflection of the complexities of intercultural, interethnic, and interracial relations within the racialized reality of the United States. Nonetheless, structural pluralism does not seem to be a sufficient description of the Latina/o experience. Earlier generations of Hispanics maintained a fairly separate cultural and ethnic identity throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century with only limited cultural adaptation. Today Latina/os seem to be both acculturating

and strengthening a separate cultural and ethnic identity. Many Latino/as are clearly bicultural people, living in the midst of both Hispanic and majority cultures, knowing how to shift between them. They are also navigating between these cultures and the other minority cultures in the United States. New waves of immigrants from Latin America are reinforcing this complex intercultural interaction. The cultural influences that impact Latina/os are not unidirectional. Hispanics are drawn toward majority culture, but also toward some of the other minority cultures in the United States. They are impacted by the globalization of Latin American and Spanish cultures. Latina/os are drawn in various directions simultaneously, and many choose to define themselves in the spaces between these influences and not merely in relationship to one cultural ‘‘pole’’ or another. This seems to indicate that Hispanics are developing a polycentric identity; in other words, they are learning to work within more than one cultural reality simultaneously. Whereas Gordon’s model seems to assume unidirectional and inevitable movement, the Latino/a experience seems to be more complex. Latina/os are involved in multifaceted processes in which they are being changed by the U.S. experience, but in which they are also expanding and enriching a distinct identity, even as they are also challenging majority culture to reexamine how it looks at itself and at other cultural minority groups in the United States. Latino/a experiences with assimilation and identity maintenance are occurring within the larger ideological debate about what intercultural relationships in

Assimilation the United States should look like. It is here that Gordon’s analogy of intercultural relations as a racehorse with blinders might need to be updated. It seems as if the horse has been spooked and is not only running faster than in the 1960s but may be trying to run in several directions simultaneously. The issues raised by Gordon’s description are particularly pertinent because of the current debate in the United States about how Latino/as are participating in and being incorporated into U.S. society. The specific discussions and political tensions related to immigration reform and the calls to declare English the official language of the United States both point to uneasiness within majority culture over the growing influence of a distinct Latina/o subculture within the United States. Gordon’s description of the various ideological paradigms (Anglo conformity, melting pot, and cultural pluralism) that has informed the issue is important because much of the current debate assumes that people in the United States have always had a common understanding of the issue and that Hispanics are coming to impose something that has not traditionally been a part of how the United States understands itself. But as Gordon clearly demonstrates, there has never been just one model or prescription for how ethnic groups participate in majority society, even though the Anglo conformity model has been the one with the broader support over the years. One person who has framed the debate for many people is Harvard professor Samuel Huntington. In his book Who Are We? Challenges to America’s National Identity, he argues that ‘‘historically America has thus been a nation of immigration and assimilation, and

| 55

assimilation has meant Americanization’’ (2004, 184). He sees this as the ‘‘great American success story,’’ which is being threatened by Latino/a immigration. Huntington quotes Gordon’s book when addressing the question of cultural assimilation (acculturation) in the United States, and his definition of Americanization seems to fit with Gordon’s understanding of acculturation. But Huntington then jumps over the complexities of full assimilation described by Gordon. He uses the term ‘‘acculturation’’ (stage no. 1 in Gordon’s model) and makes it synonymous to ‘‘full assimilation’’ (all 7 stages). His usage of Gordon’s descriptions is also problematic because Huntington’s description of the American experience is based on a modified version of the Anglo-conformity model. According to Huntington, all previous immigrants have assimilated into the culture established by the original British settlers, including ‘‘the English language, Christianity; religious commitment . . . the rule of law . . . , and the dissenting Protestant values of individualism’’ (Huntington 2004, xvi). Even though AngloAmericans are no longer the principal portion of the U.S. population, ‘‘the Anglo-Protestant culture of their settler forebears [sic] survived for three hundred years as the paramount defining element of American identity’’ (Huntington 2004, 58). Huntington claims that the success of the United States has been based on the fact that all immigrants have assimilated following an Anglo conformity model. Yet Gordon describes a much more complex situation. According to him, there have been three major theories and prescriptions of the American cultural

56 |

Assimilation

experience: the Anglo conformity, melting pot, and cultural pluralism models. All three are ideals that have a long history in the United States. But Gordon demonstrates that none of them are fully descriptive of the American reality and opts for what he calls structural pluralism, a combination of acculturation and the long-term existence of clearly defined quasi-racial groups. Huntington implies that he is building on Gordon’s understanding, but he ignores this crucial part of Gordon’s basic premise. Based on the Anglo-conformity model and prescription for the United States, Samuel Huntington sees Latino/as as a threat to the national identity of the country. The concept of multiculturalism that has developed in the latter part of the twentieth century has encouraged Hispanics to maintain their culture and their language. This tendency has been strengthened by the latest wave of immigrants from Latin America. According to Huntington, Latina/os are not following previous patterns—they are creating a cultural bifurcation in the areas where they are concentrated. He describes the Cuban influence in Miami and the Mexican American influence in the Southwest as examples of places where ‘‘Hispanization’’ is taking place. He ends his chapter on Hispanics with the following warning: The continuation of high levels of Mexican and Hispanic immigration plus the low rates of assimilation of these immigrants into American society and culture could eventually change America into a country of two languages, two cultures, and two peoples. This will not only transform America. It will also have deep consequences for Hispanics, who will be in America but not of it. Lionel Sosa ends his book, The Americano Dream, of advice to aspiring Hispanic entrepreneurs,

with the words: ‘‘The Americano dream! It exists, it is realistic, and it is there for all of us to share.’’ He is wrong. There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an AngloProtestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English. (Huntington 2004, 256)

Linda Chavez in her book Out of the Barrio works from the same assumptions when she calls Latino/as to assimilate into U.S. culture. Chavez assumes that the future success of Hispanics in the United States depends on their willingness to let go of Latina/o culture, acculturating and eventually fully assimilating into majority culture. Based on an Anglo-conformity prescription for the United States and for Latino/as in particular, issues like immigration reform, bilingual education, Spanish language media, and the borderland culture are all interpreted as threats to the national identity of the country. The Hispanic experience is interpreted in light of an Anglo-conformity understanding of European immigration, and Latina/os are found wanting. Neither Huntington nor Chavez acknowledges the long-term existence of different interpretative models of the U.S. intercultural experience. But that is part of the difficulty in the current national debate. If one reads the U.S. experience only through the grid of an Anglo-conformity model (or the melting pot), then the problem and the ‘‘threat’’ lies with those who have not fit in the past and who do not fit today. But if one recognizes that there are other interpretative and prescriptive models, then the debate changes fundamentally. The lingering question is whether there will be

Assimilation room in the debate to recognize the other models or whether Gordon’s racehorse will continue running with blinders. Assimilation, as it is commonly used in popular parlance, seems like an incomplete term to describe the relationship between Latina/os and majority culture in the United States. It describes a part of the story, but leaves out crucial details that affect the discussion. Cultural assimilation (acculturation) may also be insufficient because it does not necessarily distinguish between cultural adaptation and cultural adoption. They are useful terms when used as descriptors the way Gordon uses them. But because their usage is both descriptive and prescriptive and the working definition of these terms tends to vary according to the prescriptive perspective of the user, we need more information than these terms provide if we are to adequately define the U.S. Hispanic experience. First of all, if one only speaks of assimilation or acculturation in relationship to ethnic minorities, one presents an inadequate picture of intercultural relations in the history of the United States. Gordon’s work acknowledges the existence of the minority groups and their continual separate identity, but does not adequately address how the quasiracial groups became a part of the country and why they continue to exist. The U.S. territorial expansion and interventions in Latin America are not seen as factors that influence how minority groups do, or should, participate in U.S. society. There is no questioning of the forced destruction of peoples and cultures, of forced migration, or of the economic and political actions that influence current migratory patterns. By not acknowledging the nonvoluntary or ‘‘semi-voluntary’’ migration or

| 57

participation of many minority groups in the United States, descriptions that only address assimilation patterns do not adequately describe the intercultural relations between majority cultures and minority groups. The terms also tend to be inadequate because they are usually tied to a definition of assimilation that assumes the majority in the United States sets the assumptions and prescriptions for all groups. Intercultural relationships are defined in relationship to the majority culture. The interactions between minority groups, the increasing cultural diversity because of structural pluralism, and the impact of globalization on the survival and growth of minority cultures are not given a significant role in the descriptions or prescriptions of U.S. cultural interaction. Minority groups are merely seen as those that will assimilate and are not given a voice in the decision of how to be a part of the United States. Not only are the prescriptions completely linked to the majority, they are also unidirectional. The assumption is that assimilation works in a single direction (toward the majority) and that it is permanent in that direction. This understanding does not take into account the growing multidirectional influence of globalized culture or the resurgence of localized ethnic identities in the midst of the global village. Globalization and worldwide migration are creating new patterns of intercultural interaction. Cultural movement is going in various directions at the same time. Many Latino/as live out of a polycentric cultural identity in which the various cultural influences are kept in tension. People find ways to negotiate between cultures, to adapt to and not merely adopt cultural influences, and to live various

58 |

Aztlán

cultural identities simultaneously. This way of living intercultural life is not only related to majority culture, but also to other cultural minority groups. It is creating new types of cultural interactions in which the traditional ways of defining assimilation in the United States may not be sufficient to adequately describe what is happening. Clearly individual Hispanics are assimilating and acculturating to majority culture in the United States. But Latino/as continue to develop as a clearly defined quasi-racial group in the country. They are also interacting with majority culture and with other cultural minorities in ways that cannot easily be defined in light of these terms. It is yet to be seen whether any of Gordon’s terms (Anglo conformity, melting pot, cultural pluralism, or structural pluralism) will be completely adequate to define the multifaceted and polycentric reality being lived by millions of Latina/os (and other minority peoples) in the United States. It is even less clear whether any of these interpretative models will ever be accepted as a common framework for intercultural relations in this country. So Gordon’s racehorse keeps galloping, still unable to figure out where it is going. Juan Martinez Guerra

References and Further Reading Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion. A joint survey by the Pew Hispanic Project and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2007. http://pewforum.org/surveys/hispanic/. Chavez, Linda. Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

Gordon Milton M. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). Huntington, Samuel. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). Sa´nchez-Walsh, Arlene. Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

AZTLÁN Aztla´ n has both a symbolic and literal significance. Aztla´n, the land of herons or land of whiteness, is believed to be the place of origin of the Aztecs before traveling south to present-day Mexico. According to the Co´dice Boturini, a collection of Indian documents gathered between 1736 and 1743 by Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci, the Aztecs left Aztla´n and arrived in Chapultepec, but fell under the subjugation of the Culhuacanos. Hernando Alvarado Tezozo´moc also wrote in 1609 a history of the Aztecs in his Cro´ nica Mexica´ yotl. Tezozo´ moc dates the Aztec departure from Aztla´n to 1069 due to a conflict between leaders. Upon some ritual desecration of religious objects that offended individuals within the camp, Chalchiuhtlato´nac, son of the deceased king Moctezuma, along with the Mexica, leaves Aztla´n. The decision to leave was not easy, especially in view of the richness of Aztla´n, which is described in terms reminiscent of the biblical myth of the Garden of Eden or Paradise. Nonetheless, Huitzilopochtli, a deity, instructs and guides the Aztecs on their journey southward to the promised land where the Aztecs will establish an empire and exercise dominion over many people.

Aztlán | 59 From the preceding account one can assume that Aztla´ n exists north of present-day Mexico City. It is sometimes referred to as Chicomo´ztoc, the place of the seven caves, and is described as being surrounded by water. This physical description has led many to deduce the actual location of Aztla´n. Boturini, for example, argues that Aztla´n is located in the Gulf of California. Nineteenthcentury colonial historiographer Jose´ Fernando Ramı´rez states that the region of Lake Chalco in the valley of Mexico is the most probable locale for Aztla´ n. Nineteenth-century biogeographist Alexander von Humboldt, however, asserts that the modern states of Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming are the original location of Aztla´ n. Scholars such as Alfredo Chavero take up the most popular argument that the Pacific coast, the state of Nayarit in Mexico, is the place of origin of the Aztecs. However, there are some scholars such as historian Francesco Saverio Clavijero who maintain that Aztla´n must have been located north of the Colorado River. While questions about the historical Aztla´n abound and the possibilities are numerous, there is no overwhelming evidence to suggest that one or any of the above alternatives is, without a doubt, the actual location of Aztla´ n. Regardless of the unknown location of Aztla´n, there is little doubt as to the symbolic meaning of Aztla´n. It is often maintained that Aztla´ n came into public and political use during the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference that was held in 1969 in Denver, Colorado. However, there is some indication that the notion of Aztla´n had been employed for public and political purposes prior to 1969. With the ending of the Mexican-American War in 1848 much of northern Mexico was ceded to

the United States of America. Included among this land was New Mexico, which would eventually become a state in 1912. According to the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty of 1848, Mexicans who remained in the ceded land for a year following the ratification of the treaty would be considered citizens of the United States of America. Along with their newly given citizenship, Mexicans would maintain control of land they legally received from the Spanish empire in the form of land grants. The predicament for the U.S. government was that there were too many Mexicans in the territory of New Mexico and few immigrants of European descent. If the territory of New Mexico had become a state, then the newly established citizens would be able to exercise political influence in the state. What was needed was the presence of U.S. immigrants to overcome the political sway of those who resided in the territory longer than they. William G. Ritch, secretary of the Territory of New Mexico and president of the New Mexico Bureau of Immigration, provided the means for attracting more people to the territory of New Mexico. In 1885 Ritch published Aztla´n: The History, Resources and Attraction of New Mexico. Ritch maintained that Moctezuma had lived in northern Mexico, or, rather, New Mexico and Arizona, prior to traveling and conquering tribes in southern Mexico. Ritch argued that Pueblo Indian myths mentioned that Moctezuma had been born at the pueblo of Santa Fe. New Mexico, therefore, was part of Aztla´n. The appeal of Aztla´n in Aztla´n: The History, Resources and Attractions of New Mexico was to establish the presence of unlimited resources in the territory of New Mexico. Among these

60 |

Aztlán ´N PLAN ESPIRITUAL DE AZTLA The manifesto articulated at the 1969 Chicano National Liberation Youth Conference, Denver, Colorado, established Aztla´n as the symbolic ‘‘Chicano Nation.’’ The plan declared that ‘‘before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztla´n.’’ It created a geographic allegiance to Aztla´n, a love of being Chicano, loyalty to a people, public spirit, civic engagement and rejection of White society. The articulation embraced anticolonialist thought, appreciation for the pre-Cuauhtemoc, and a separatist discourse. The unity of the ‘‘free pueblos’’ was over and against the exploitive ‘‘gabacho,’’ though it did not account for internal differences of race, economic status, political views, and assimilation within the Mexican community and it was not inclusive of other Latin Americans or of indigenous people outside the Mexica. Eventually these flaws led to the demise of the Chicano movement and the La Raza Unida political party. Currently, the emphasis has shifted to a view that Aztla´n is not a geographic place to be reconquered or the egalitarian, pacifist utopia left behind. Instead, Aztla´n is a symbolic claim for the rights of the disenfranchised and dispossessed, a commitment to the creation of a new social order. —MVS

resources were minerals of all sorts, including, but not limited to, copper, silver, and gold. Ritch also stated that the climate was such that it allowed farming all year, which would yield high profits. Not to exclude personal interest in moving to Aztla´n, Ritch argued that moving to the territory would have positive health benefits. In addition to mentioning the near absence of heart disease, nervous trouble, venereal disease, and asthma, Ritch claimed that individuals with consumption, a pulmonary disease, would become healthy after breathing the air in Santa Fe. The myth of Aztla´n, consequently, became the means for attracting individuals to the territory of New Mexico. Attraction to Aztla´n, however, was limited to the physical land, rather than a psychological fascination. The latter would not take place until 1968, and would reach a pinnacle with the Mexican American civil rights movement. To understand the psychological,

identity, and political impact of Aztla´n, it is necessary to describe the state of confusion that many Mexican Americans experienced prior to the Chicano movement. As stated above, the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty granted American citizenship to all Mexicans who remained in the territory of New Mexico after 1848. The difficulty that would arise with such a treaty is that citizenship was a birthright and was tied to race, which continued until 1940. Prior to 1940 only those individuals who could be classified as White could be considered as citizens. Yet, Mexicans were not White, but they did have citizenship, which was in contrast to Blacks. Mexicans, consequently, did not fit within the Black/ White dichotomy and challenged the accepted inclusive/exclusive tool that benefited both Whites and Blacks. For example, in re Rodriguez, the Texas federal court decided in 1897 that

Aztlán | 61 Mexicans, because of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty, were citizens. However, Mexicans were not to be considered as White from a scientific perspective; nonetheless, the court did establish a basis for considering Mexicans as White. Although Mexicans had a legal right to claim their citizenship in the United States of America, many were unable to exercise their rights as citizens. Groups such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) argued they had experienced discrimination because they were unable to exercise their due rights and benefits of citizens. Confusion concerning their identity would become entrenched with the National Origin Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1924. This act confined immigration to Europeans and resulted in over 500,000 Mexicans being forcibly returned to Mexico. It is estimated that over half of those who were deported were U.S. citizens. Thirty years later in 1954, in order to further expel Mexicans from the United States, Attorney General Herbert Brownell launched ‘‘Operation Wetback.’’ This resulted in over 3.8 million individuals being deported to Mexico. The vast majority did not receive a deportation hearing. Both the National Origin Act and Operation Wetback created doubt in the Mexican mind as to whether they would ever be part of American society. Being neither White nor Black, many Mexicans identified, on a limited basis, with Mexico of old. Pachucos, individuals who rejected any White identity, racial and social assimilation, downplayed the notion that race should be used as the means of identity. For instance, in 1968 following the East Los Angeles student walkouts, 13 individuals were arrested and charged

with conspiracy, a felony charge, to commit the crimes of ‘‘disturbing the peace, failing to disperse, and trespassing on school grounds.’’ These individuals hired Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta, who would later become a prominent Chicano lawyer, to defend in the case known as the ‘‘East L.A. Thirteen.’’ Prior to accepting this case, Acosta had been working for the Black Civil Rights Movement, but left when leaders of the Black Civil Rights Movement failed to see that civil rights also included Mexicans. Mexicans would, then, have to fend for themselves in their plight for justice and identity. However, a platform for justice and identity was needed, which Aztla´ n could provide. Unable to identify with either White or Black, many Mexican Americans began to appeal to Aztla´n as an identity marker. In 1968 the prominent Chicano poet Alurista began appealing to Aztla´n in a class for Chicanos at San Diego State University. Yet, it was not until 1969 when the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference was held in Denver, Colorado, that Aztla´n became a prominent identity symbol for Chicanos and many Mexican Americans. Both Alurista and Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’ Gonzales, prominent leaders of the Chicano movement, developed ‘‘El Plan Espiritual de Aztla´n,’’ which would become the basis for Chicano self-consciousness and selfdetermination. Chicanos will, at times, identify themselves as Aztla´n, but this is mostly done to create a historical consciousness. Differences between the usage of ‘‘Chicano’’ to identify those individuals or group of people who were involved in the struggle for Mexican American rights and ‘‘Aztla´n’’ ought to be maintained as will be shown in the following paragraphs.

62 |

Aztlán

At a time when Mexican Americans were undergoing an identity crisis, Chicano leaders adopted the notion of Aztla´n as the place that Chicanos could identify with and give them a sense of belonging. Identification with Aztla´ n occurs when Chicanos realize they are heirs of a powerful empire that once ruled southern Mexico. Chicanos identify themselves with neither their Mexican heritage nor American society. Instead, ethnic distinctiveness is achieved by identifying with the ancient civilization of the Aztecs. This entails the acceptance of their Indian and indigenous past as a source of pride, dignity, and self-respect. Identity also occurs when Chicanos suppose that the southwestern part of the United States was once the land that belonged to the Aztecs. There is then, a factual and tangible aspect to Aztla´n. Chicanos claim to be living in the same place where the Aztecs once lived. Finally, the Chicano consciousness derived from Aztla´ n moves beyond the psychological arena into the political field. Chicanos claim rights to improved housing, better education, sustainable employment, along with self-determination and self-defense by appealing to Aztla´n. At the core of El Plan Espiritual de Aztla´n is a line of reasoning that appeals to Chicano nationalism as the means for accomplishing political organization and action. The paradox of nationalism in El Plan Espiritual de Aztla´n is the nonexistence of a Chicano nation. However, the genius of making the case for nationalism is that Chicanos are given a politically identifying marker that is in contrast to both Mexicans and Americans. Removed from Mexico by a national border and unable to assimilate into American culture, Chicanos are

united by a common nationalism that is Aztla´n. The notion of Aztla´n is not limited to a particular group of people such as those who belong to a particular religion, political party, and economic class. Chicano nationalism unites all divisions within the Chicano populace because all individuals, regardless of religion, political leanings, and economic status, are Aztla´n. Of course, this is an ideal that is to be striven for and not a reality that existed at the time that El Plan Espiritual de Aztla´n was drafted. The ideological aspect of the hoped for unity found within Chicano nationalism is especially clear from the failure of the Congreso de Aztla´n in 1972, a proposed national Chicano political party that pitted Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’ Gonzales and Jose´ Angel Gutie´rrez, a comparatively new Chicano leader from Texas, against one another. Gutie´rrez defeated Gonzales to become the president of the La Raza Unida Party (LRUP). LRUP had arisen in several states but had no national organization. Gonzales’s hopes were to become the chairman/president of LRUP. Gutie´rrez, recognizing that no one was running against Gonzales, decided to give up his position as moderator of the national LRUP convention held in El Paso, Texas, so he could oppose Gonzales. Following the announcement that Gutie´rrez had defeated Gonzales, the latter made a public address admonishing those present of the importance of unity. However, the desired goal of a national organizational structure failed to become a reality due to the different personalities among the leaders of the Chicano movement. Regardless of the lack of achieving a national Chicano political party, the notion of Aztla´ n remains a prominent

Aztlán | 63 and influential concept for the Chicano movement. For instance, in 1969 at the University of California at Santa Barbara, with the assistance of Alurista, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztla´ n (M.E.Ch.A.) was founded and organized. Among the many goals of M.E.Ch.A. is the education of young people so that they develop selfdetermination, self-consciousness, and political awareness. M.E.Ch.A. also seeks to promote cultural identity that rejects assimilation and advances educational, socioeconomical, and political empowerment. Moving away from the nationalism that is put forward in the El Plan Espiritual de Aztla´ n, M.E.Ch.A. adopts a philosophical stance and seeks to include all people regardless of race. It is possible for an individual to be a Chicano or Chicana and not be a descendant of El Quinto Sol, or, rather, Aztla´n. Nonetheless, the ultimate goal of this organization is being in the service of the people of Aztla´ n through education. Aztla´n, then, has undergone an evolutionary process. Prior to the Chicano movement, Aztla´n was primarily identified with a specific location, even if several scholars ranged in ideas of the exact location. During the Chicano movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Aztla´n took on a psychological dimension when Chicanos identified with the indigenous Aztec race. This is especially evident in Anaya’s text, Heart of Aztla´n. For Anaya, Aztla´n is to be found within the individual who is experiencing oppression and injustice. Aztla´n is found in the heart of the one who seeks to exist in a land that belongs to him, but is a stranger in the culture of that land. There were some, such as Reies Lo´pez Tijerina, a Chicano leader who was

concerned with the land grants in New Mexico, who identified Aztla´ n with a specific location, i.e., New Mexico. Of the four most prominent Chicano leaders, Ce´sar Cha´vez, Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’ Gonzales, Jose´ Angel Gutie´rrez, and Reies Lo´ pez Tijerina, Tijerina was the most militant. This militancy, of course, is in contrast to the nonviolence articulated by Ce´sar Cha´vez. For some, Aztla´ n is the historical reality of a land that the ancient Aztec civilization once inhabited. For others, Aztla´ n is identification with the Aztec people, which is in contrast to both Mexican and American society. Many, however, consider Aztla´n as a means to give a group of people, mostly Chicanas and Chicanos—those who struggle politically for the dignity of Mexican Americans—a sense of belonging, selfdetermination, self-consciousness, and political empowerment.

Dieties Coatlicue Coatlicue, or Snake Skirt, was the Aztec progenitor of celestial bodies and Mother Goddess of warrior god Huitzilopochtli (God of the Sun and War), Coyolxauhqui (Moon Goddess), Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent God), and Xolotl (Lord of the Underworld and the God of Lightning). Coatlicue was the personification of duality. She is visually represented as a fearsome bare-breasted warrior goddess dressed in a netted skirt decorated with rattlesnakes, human hearts, and skulls. She was venerated in two festivals. The spring ritual was called Tozozontli and celebrated the first fruits of the season, which occurred during the rainy season, culminating with sacrificial

64 |

Aztlán

offerings and the flaying of skins to be placed in a cave. The autumn ritual, Quecholli, focused on hunting and culminated with the sacrifice of a woman impersonating Coatlicue. Agriculture, fertility, hunting, and sacrifice played key mythical roles in Coatlicue’s symbolism. Huitzilopochtli was born after she was virginally impregnated when a ball of feathers fell from the sky and landed on her bosom. Her mythology evolved over time and one of her representations is Tonatzin, the Good Mother. After the Spanish conquest, the preHispanic cult of Tonatzin fused with the Catholic veneration of the Virgin de Guadalupe. —FAO

Coyolxauhqui Coyolxauhqui, a principal female deity in the Aztec pantheon and daughter of Coatlicue, the mother of the gods, and the sister of Huitzilopochtli, the central warrior deity. In Aztec mythology, two feathers miraculously impregnated Coatlicue as she swept the temple atop the sacred mountain, Coatepec. Upon hearing of the pregnancy of her aged mother, Coyolxauhqui convinced her 400 brothers, the stars, to kill their mother. As Coatlicue lay dying, she gave birth to a fully grown Huitzilopochtli, who quickly dismembered Coyolxauhqui with a fiery serpent known as Xiuhcoatl and banished her brothers. Coyolxauhqui’s limbs tumbled down the sacred mountain. The Xiuhcoatl wielded by Huitzilopochtli represents the fiery rays of the sun dispelling the forces of darkness. Coyolxauhqui is often identified with the moon overpowered by the solar deity. In the late twentieth century, Chicana feminist writers and artists began reconstructing

this mythology of Coyolxauhqui’s violent murder as it mirrors the misogyny present in patriarchal cultures that seek to obliterate women’s autonomy, intellect, and creativity. Writers, visual artists, and performance artists work to reconstruct a mythology with Coyolxauhqui rising from her ashes and transforming herself into the moon, lighting our way through the darkness of patriarchy, racism, and homophobia. —LM

Huitzilopochtli The most important of the Aztec deities, Huitzilopochtli, is the war deity of the Aztecs, whose name means ‘‘hummingbird of the south’’ honoring warriors who die in battle and women who die in childbirth, returning as hummingbirds from the south. Huitzilopochtli guided the Azteca, now calling themselves Mexica, to Tenochtitlan from their home in Aztlan by looking for the place in Lake Texcoco where he had thrown his nephew Copil’s heart when the boy challenged Huitzilopochtli. From Copil’s heart had grown the prickly pear nopal with its beautiful red fruit, and perched on it was an eagle eating a sacred serpent, an image on the present-day Mexican flag. The Toxcatl Panquetzaliztli, or ‘‘lifting of the banners,’’ ceremony in Huitzilopochtli’s honor is celebrated in contemporary times, without warrior sacrifices, during December by parading the traditional amaranth seed and honey effigy of Huitzilopochtli through the village as people fight to take the effigy away from danzante warriors. Danza Azteca banners are honored with decorations of Cuetlaxochitl, or poinsettias, original Mexica flowers. The celebration ends with eating of the

Aztlán | 65 amaranth effigy. Because of its similarity to Christian mass, the ceremony was banned after European contact until recently and replaced by the Nativity Posadas. —MVS

Mayahuel In the Aztec tradition, Mayahuel is the female deity who represents the maguey cactus. Mayahuel was a sleeping maiden, guarded by her fierce Tzitzimitl grandmother in the sky with the other tzitzimime stars that do battle against the sun and moon every dawn and dusk. Quetzalcoatl persuades Mayahuel to come to Anahuac. Discovering Mayahuel gone, her grandmother descends to Anahuac with all the tzitzimime in search of Mayahuel. The pair hide as a forked tree, each of them one branch. When her grandmother and the tzitzimime recognize Mayahuel, they savagely tear the branch apart, devouring it. Once the tzitzimime return to the sky, Queztalcoatl returns to his actual form and sadly buries the gnawed bones of Mayahuel, from which come the first maguey. Mayahuel is represented as a 400-breasted image who feeds her children, the lunar and terrestrial guardians of plenty and the harvest called Centzon Totochtin, or Four Hundred Rabbits, pulque, the rich nectar of the maguey. Mayahuel became associated with all healing plants through La Virgen de Remedios, when the lost statue left by Cortes at the Temple Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl at Cholula was found under a maguey by Juan Ce Cuautli, bridging European and indigenous faith traditions. —MVS Santiago O. Pin˜o´n

References and Further Reading Alurista. Floricanto en Aztla´n (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center, University of California, 1971). Anaya, Rudolfo A. Heart of Aztla´n (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976). Boturini, Lorenzo Benaduccie. Cro´nica mexicana, Teoamo´xtli, o Libro que contiene todo lo interesante a´ usos, costumbres, religion, polı´tica y literatura de los antiguos indios tultecas y mexicanos, redactado de un antiguo codice inedito del caballero Boturini (Mexico City, Mexico: M. Ontiveros, 1821–1822). Chavero, Alfredo. Las Aztecas O Mexicas: Fundacion de le Ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City, Mexico: Impresa Universitaria, 1955). Elizondo, Virgil. The Future Is Mestizo (Bloomington, IN: Meyer-Stone Books, 1988). Garcia, Juan Ramon. Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980). Guerrero, Andres G. A Chicano Theology (New York: Orbis Books, 1987). Humboldt, Alexander von. Essay on New Spain (Baltimore: Wane & O’Reilly, 1813). Orozco y Berra, Manuel, ed. Codice Ramirez (Mexico City, Mexico: Editorial Leyenda, 1944). ———. Historia Antigua y de La Conquista de Mexico (Mexico City, Mexico: Editorial Porrua, S.A., 1960). Rendon, Armando B. Chicano Manifesto: The History and Aspirations of the Second Largest Minority in America (Berkeley, CA: Ollin and Associates, Inc., 1971). Ritch, William G. Aztla´n: The History, Resources and Attractions of New Mexico (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1885).

66 |

Aztlán

Rosales, F. Arturo. Chicano: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1997). Tezozo´moc, Fernando. Cronica Mexicayotl (Mexico City, Mexico: Imprensa Universitaria, 1949).

Tijerina, Reies. They Called Me ‘‘King Tiger’’: My Struggle for the Land and Our Rights (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2000).

B their biblical concept of the ‘‘Preferential Option for the Poor.’’ In addition, North American and Protestant models of the Hispanic domestic church have also arisen.

BASE COMMUNITIES Base Communities (BCs) denote a domestic model of church that developed in Latin America starting in the 1950s, but that is now practiced around the world under various names, including house churches. Also called Basic Ecclesial Communities from the Spanish term ‘‘Comunidades Eclesiales de Base,’’ the groups are local contextual expressions of the Church, as differentiated from church movements that operate under a specific charism or service. BCs are rooted in home meetings and are led by lay leaders, having in common rituals of shared prayer and reflection on the Word of God. They are generally mission oriented toward active involvement in society so as to transform unjust social structures. The groups have found great success in poor social settings, and it is estimated that there are over 1 million groups active in Latin America alone. It is there that they take on an ecclesiology based primarily on the work of Liberation theologians, especially following

Historical Development The earliest prayer services of Christians were not held in church buildings, since these had not yet been constructed, but were gatherings of the faithful in private homes (1 Corinthians 16:19; Romans 16:3–5). The believers in Jesus Christ came together to pray, share the Eucharist, and support one another while witnessing to the Holy Spirit active in their lives. These household churches were quite vibrant from the beginning of the apostolic period until the fourth century. They would have coexisted together with a developing hierarchically ordered ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons, which was in place by 110 CE, and which was slowly developing into a structured ministry. When the Roman Emperor Constantine proclaimed the Edict of Milan in 67

68 |

Base Communities

313 CE, Christians ceased being persecuted. Confiscated properties were restored and new churches were built upon ruins of old temples. The private home services of the Apostolic period became less familiar as ministers had to cope with large numbers of the converts coming to the basilicas for worship. The parish model of Church began to develop in the latter part of the Patristic era, taking some of its shape from the legal practices of the Roman Empire. The sacramental structures of parish life were in place by the Middle Ages. Parishes came to be identified with the community cared for by a pastor in a specific neighborhood or territory, and dioceses became the larger territory cared for by the local bishop. The communion of local churches was united under the leadership of the Church of Rome. In modern times, the parish model has shown weaknesses, especially in the Church of Latin America, due to the shortage of clergy and also to the huge number of people migrating to cities. Both clergy and lay leaders have been asking themselves how the life-giving spirit of the early Church, so tangibly felt in tightly knit communities, could be recreated in new ecclesial models. It was in this desire for renewal that the grassroots experience of BCs was born. In the late 1950s, the Church of Latin America turned its efforts toward creating smaller and more vibrant groupings of the faithful. The experiments were supported by the updating of ecclesial life and doctrinal formulations called forth by the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). At the meeting of the Latin American Bishops Conference (CELAM) in Medellı´n in 1968, the experience of ‘‘Comunidades Eclesiales de

Base’’ received strong support, being called ‘‘the first and fundamental ecclesiastical nucleus,’’ and ‘‘the initial cell of the ecclesiastical structures.’’ These grassroots ecclesial groupings were also supported by the CELAM meeting in Puebla in 1979, although concern was voiced about the lack of training of lay leaders and the need to incorporate the BCs more closely to diocesan and parish structures. The CELAM meeting in Santo Domingo in 1992 cautioned that BCs should remain in communion with their parish and their bishop, as well as avoid ideological and political manipulation. The Latin American Episcopal Conference continues to give legitimacy to BCs when they are integrated into the parish, the diocese, and the universal Church. They can be especially helpful to the apostolate in areas where priests are few or where parishes are too large to be personable. Many groups are now active in the United States, Africa, Europe, and Asia. In North America BCs have been a key aspect of most Hispanic evangelization efforts, and also in parish RENEW programs. Latino/a Protestant denominations have had great success with this ecclesial model, sometimes calling them ‘‘house churches.’’ While less justice oriented than their Catholic counterparts, Protestant BCs have given a sense of vitality and community to their congregations, especially to denominations that appear to be losing membership. All of these different models of grassroots churches have served to renew and reconceptualize the structures of modern Christianity, calling believers to a closer fidelity to what it means to be baptized, while making their spirituality and ministry more alive and dynamic.

Base Communities | 69

Theological Concepts An important biblical concept for any BC-type ministry is ekklesia, the Greek word for Church. In ancient secular circles it denoted any grouping of people, but in the New Testament it was used to identify the early Christian communities. While the word ekklesia is largely absent from the Gospels, St. Paul used the term about 60 times in his epistles. The word sometimes refers to a community in a specific place (a house church) and sometimes to a group of churches in a region. The house churches of Paul are specifically mentioned in his epistles, such as the church in the house of Aquila and Prisca (1 Corinthians 16:19). They consisted of more than just immediate family members and servants; they included other believers in the area who joined those who worshiped there, such as the house of Gaius, which was in Corinth (Romans 16:23). Because of their small size, the house churches were places for personally focused catechesis and discipleship, where one could experience the liturgy and be educated in the mission of Christ. These types of settings are particularly useful when it comes to supporting the metanoia of the newly converted so that they remain in communion with the Holy Spirit and avoid their old ways (1 Corinthians 6:11). An innovative development of ekklesia is the theological idea of ‘‘Ecclesiogenesis.’’ This ‘‘birthing of a new Church’’ has to do with the structural changes that are inherent when one highlights the BCs as a community of communities that form the parish. Here the laity, who are the leaders of these small church groups, take a role as sharers in Christ’s priestly office (1 Peter 2:9), a service that flows from their baptism. In

areas of priestless parishes, this ‘‘starting the church again’’ is the sign of a shift in ecclesiological models that shows the reception of the teachings of Vatican II. It was at this council that the theological focus turned toward the contemporary understanding of Church as the People of God (1 Peter 2:10). Incorporated within the ordained ministry of the deaconate, presbyterate and episcopate, the grassroots leadership of BCs highlights the lay axis of Church organization, more so than the clerical axis. This genesis of lay leadership, in areas where ministry was once the privilege of the ordained, signifies diverse models of Church. Another important theological concept for BC ministry is koinonia, meaning community of voluntary sharing or partnerships. The early Church gatherings were places for partaking of a sacred meal, where the baptized were characterized by their concern for one another. They sold their possessions, distributing the proceeds as any had need while keeping everything in common (Acts 2:42– 47). These early communities acted as places for religious fellowship with strong temporal and supratemporal senses of meaning. As members of an earthly and a heavenly community, the baptized could proclaim that Christ was the head of both realities. Hispanics have offered considerable contributions to BCs due to their cultural values of community and their interest in close personal groupings. As a people, they are well suited to a koinonia ecclesiological model. Latina/os emphasize sociocentric and organic structures, where the family and the group form the fundamental units of society. Hispanics also mine key aspects of their identity from their memberships. This cultural perspective is markedly different from

70 |

Base Communities

that of mainstream U.S. society, which has been described as egocentric and contractual. Instead of an emphasis on the individual, Latino/a society is more concerned with the communal. Maturity is not so much a process of individuation, where one distances oneself from others, but rather is more a process of accepting interdependence. This cultural fact of Hispanic society in general and Hispanic churches in particular supports the ecclesiology of BCs, which strives to re-create the early Church sociodynamics. For this reason, North American diocesan leaders have used BCs to target and attract Hispanic people to evangelization projects. The BCs draw their strength from Latina/os’ formation of kinships and also their desire to have a sense of community in large anonymous urban centers. The social mission of the Church is also an integral aspect of the practice of BCs. Lay members are empowered to link the Bible to their concrete situation and determine a praxis to undertake. The BCs of Latin America have traditionally shown an emphasis on working for social justice and achieving structural change in secular society. Since the reality of Latin America is represented by a majority of people who are poor, BCs have used ‘‘see, judge, and act’’ methodologies to reflect on their situation and improve social conditions. Following the experience of Liberation theologians, the communities critically examine their own local situations with an eye toward liberating all those burdened by structural sin and injustice. It is to the masses of marginalized people that the theological and biblical concept of the Preferential Option for the Poor can offer some liberation. Throughout the Bible one finds a common theme, which shows the love

that God had for the little ones (Matthew 1:25–30; Luke 6:20–25). The Hebrew term anawim, or the poor of Yahweh, is especially poignant (Zephaniah 2:3; Isaiah 41:17). Official Vatican statements have supported God’s predilection for the poor as consistent with the continuous thread found throughout the social doctrine of the Church. The same documents have criticized the option when it supports the exclusion of the physically nonpoor from ministry, thus leaning toward promoting a Marxist type of class struggle. Nevertheless, the teachings of Christ’s special love for the poor gives the Latin American BCs more than their counterparts in other areas, a unifying concern for social justice. The poor also include the different marginalized groups such as the elderly and the sick, refugees and migrants, etc. This broader vision of pastoral service ensures that the Kingdom of God remains the primary focus of the proclamation of the Good News of Christ (Luke 4:18).

Ritual Structures There are no formal rituals of BCs, yet the gatherings have some structures in common. Under the umbrella of a larger parish, the smaller group BC meetings are almost always held in homes. Times are chosen that are convenient to the participants, which is usually in the evenings. Isolated rural Catholic groups sometimes meet on Sundays when there are no priests available to celebrate the Eucharist. Generally, the people who come together know each other very well and can greet each other by name. These face-to-face interactions are part of the patterns of intimacy that can develop for most groups, giving them a familiar and neighborly feel. Eight to twelve people

Bible Institutes is considered an appropriate size, since larger numbers can lose the faithsharing dynamic so important to the BC. There is usually a coordinator for each group, who has met previously with other coordinators in the parish or deanery to plan future meetings under a larger pastoral plan or theme. The meeting begins with moments for prayer and song. A major part of the evening is dedicated to reflection on Scripture, usually the readings of the following Sunday. Many groups use published lectionary-based guides to explore scripture together. All the attendants have a chance to share what they feel God is saying to them. There is usually time to reflect on another chosen topic or teaching, and some groups have specific questions that have been previously prepared. Depending on the tenor of the group, the reflections can remain at a spiritual level, as they often do in the RENEW and postRENEW programs of North America, or lean toward social justice issues as they often do in less economically developed areas. The meeting ends with time for refreshments and socializing, since fellowship and the nurturing of friendships are so important to the building up of the Church.

Key Figures Important people in the theory and dissemination of BCs include Jose Marins, a Brazilian priest who has written and traveled extensively since the 1970s speaking for and animating groups throughout the world. One of his hallmark concerns is that BCs should be seen and promoted as the Church itself at the smallest level. Leonardo Boff, a former Brazilian priest, has also been a strong proponent of BCs. He envisions them as

| 71

reversing hierarchical structures and rigid clerical versus lay distinctions. Boff sees this rebirthing of the Catholic Church through BCs as a way to replace parishes and reinvent a new ecclesiology from the grassroots. Fr. Bernard J. Lee, S.M., is an important writer on the theology and practice of BCs in the United States. He differentiates Catholic BCs under these headings: General type of small Christian communities, Hispanic/ Latino communities, Charismatic communities, Call to Action communities, and Eucharist-centered communities. Regardless of their typology, he sees BCs as Spirit-led associations that are reshaping the modern parish. Leopoldo Perez

References and Further Reading Boff, Leonardo. Ecclesiologenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986). Lee, Bernard J., William V. D’Antonio, Virgil Elizondo, et al. Catholic Experience of Small Christian Communities (New York: Paulist Press, 2000). Loreto Maniz, Cecilia. Coping with Poverty: Pentecostals and Christian Base Communities in Brazil (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). Marins, Jose, et al. Basic Ecclesial Community: Church from the Roots (Quito: Imprenta Del Colegio Tecnico don Bosco, 1980). Vandenakker, John Paul. Small Christian Communities and the Parish (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1994).

BIBLE INSTITUTES The beginnings of Bible institutes can be traced to what Lawrence A. Cremin

72 |

Bible Institutes

identified as the metropolitan period (1876–1980) of educational developments in the United States. During the earlier part of this period, Protestantism was facing the challenges of addressing modernism and industrialism. Two different Christian views arose to address this challenge. The first was an emergent social Christianity. This perspective saw the church as responsible for bringing Christian values to bear on the industrial order. The second Christian view was a fundamentalist one. It viewed the world as a sinking vessel from which its passengers could be saved only through immediate conversion. Hence, the church’s mission was an evangelistic one with a more personal pietistic focus. It was out of the fundamentalist perspective that the Bible institute movement emerged. Dwight L. Moody pioneered three major educational strategies: the Bible conference, which focused on renewal through Bible study; the Student Volunteer Movement, which recruited college graduates for services as domestic and foreign missionaries; and the Bible institute, which became a training school for persons who would carry out ministries in local congregations and on the urban streets.

The Development of Bible Institutes Bible institutes offered a precollegial education and were not constrained by the traditions of degree-granting institutions. The school was only for older laypersons who had been denied the opportunities of study but who had knowledge of the Scriptures and experience in the areas of gospel music and evangelizing individuals. The school equipped these persons to do ministry in

their churches and in the poorest and forgotten places of the urban areas. Under the leadership of Reuben Torrey, James M. Gray, and Clarence H. Benson, the Bible institute became a major center of orthodox evangelical Christian education. Between the years of 1886 and 1915, 32 Bible institutes were organized. One of the Bible institutes that was organized during this time and that still continues to operate is the Latin American Bible Institute in La Puente, California (www.labi.edu). Alice E. Luce was a missionary of the Church Missionary Society. After working in Texas she launched out on her own to the Pacific coast to take up missionary work among the expatriate Mexicans in Los Angeles, leaving behind the work undertaken by Henry Ball in Texas. As a part of that work, in 1926, she began the Latin American Bible Institute (LABI) in San Diego. She also contributed educational materials and the curriculum to an institute with the same name that Henry Ball had begun at the same time in Texas. Both institutes continue to operate as a part of the Assemblies of God Higher Education Institutions. In 1935 LABI moved to nearby La Mesa, California, in 1941 to East Los Angeles and to its present site in La Puente in 1947. The school offered onsite and correspondence courses. Today the school offers a three-year ordination track and a two-year missionary track. It has a bilingual curriculum and reaches up to four generations of Latino/a leaders. It has many extension programs that reach across the nation. Students have the option of using up to one-third of their credits toward a bachelor’s degree at denominational colleges and universities.

Bible Institutes Some Bible institutes have evolved into evangelical institutions of higher learning, such as Biola University and Gordon College. At the time they were established, their emphasis was the training of laypersons, both men and women, for Christian service. They saw their work as complementary to the seminaries. In 1990 the Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH) was formed to create a network of Hispanic Bible institutes across denominations, their teachers, Hispanic theological programs at seminaries, and Hispanic seminary professors. The organization linked all manner of formal and informal theological education programs across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. It addresses the needs of Bible institutes as its focus and has provided training for its teachers, presidents, deans, and librarians. AETH has offered instruction on fund-raising and other administrative tasks. Most importantly, it has begun to create its own texts in Spanish written by Hispanic scholars. Currently there are several series of texts on the Bible and on other major curricular subject matters that have been published in partnership with publishers that had not previously been supplying these institutions. AETH has served as a way of not only networking the Hispanic Bible institutes but of helping to create partnerships between them and other organizations and institutions that would have otherwise not known how to gain access to the institutes. According to the National Survey of Hispanic/Latino Theological Education, the proportion of Hispanic religious leaders who had attended Bible institutes and lay ministry formation programs is approximately 47 and 53 percent, respectively.

| 73

The Educational Purpose The aim of the institutes is to train consecrated men and women, both lay and clergy, for qualified ministry. Many of the participants are already engaged in ministry. These institutions are affordable, flexible, and efficient. They are therefore accessible as compared to more costly seminaries and divinity schools. Also, they are grassroots institutions headed by leaders indigenous to the community they serve and are typically small and in urban areas. The Bible institute is an adult education model where one works full-time during the day at a secular job and studies in the evening. Classes are structured to accommodate the needs of its participants, many of whom are bivocational pastors pursuing a secular job for financial stability while serving as part-time, oftentimes unpaid ministers in a church. In this setting persons are educated while in the context of their ministry. This model provides theological training for pastors without college education. It does so in Spanish, the first language of the participants. Each of these characteristics makes the institute and lay ministry program the most accessible theological education institutions to Hispanic pastors and lay leaders. Courses are designed for both the clergy and the laity, although sometimes there are courses specifically geared toward the pastors’ needs. This is why the institute model is used by the Hispanic mainline churches as well.

Types of Bible Institutes The Center for Urban Theological Studies (CUTS) in Philadelphia has identified three types of Bible institutes. The first type is the independent Bible institute.

74 |

Bible Institutes

These institutes tend to promote a particular theological or doctrinal perspective, and many are fundamentalist or dispensational. The second type is developed by and connected to church judicatories with the purpose of grounding persons in their faith and preparing them for different areas of ministry in their local congregations. The purpose of these institutes is to inform or indoctrinate students in an understanding of their faith heritage. These are usually a threeto four-year program of study. A third type of Bible institute is that established in a local congregation for its own membership with the purpose of disciplining or training new members and leaders so that they may become involved more fully in the mission of their congregations. An institute may emerge when the mission and theology of the church are being evaluated and revamped. The pastor, usually a charismatic leader, articulates the new vision and prepares leaders for it through the institute. This helps to manage conflict between the old and new visions since those attending the Bible institute are exposed to a new understanding in a positive environment where it can be discussed and eventually appropriated at each one’s pace. The project originates in the personal and ministerial pilgrimage of a visionary pastor whose encounter with the realities of ministering in the Hispanic community drives him/ her to seek ways to contextualize the ministry.

Enrollment Those who enroll in any of these types of Bible institutes need to be members of a local church. It is a provision of the church at large to provide an environ-

ment of nurture for the walk of faith and for ministry involvement. Many are already involved in ministry. Since a large percentage of the Hispanic population is very young, it is not unusual to have teenagers attend Bible institutes. Larger institutes such as LABI provide classes in English to accommodate the second generation who have received all their formal education in English. These young persons must meet the demands of both their public school education as well as the institute.

Cost Institutes are affordable institutions with tuition costs ranging from $25.00 to $250.00 a semester. They are efficient, low-cost operations where most of the staff are volunteers or part-time personnel with very modest stipends who serve local churches in other capacities. Building facilities are supplied by the host church at no cost. There is usually no formal budget.

Teachers Instructors at Bible institutes are many times graduates of institutes who will pass on what they have learned to the next groups. This is in keeping with the biblical principle found in II Timothy 2:2 of faithful persons passing on what they have received to others. This is what makes up the parochial nature of these institutes and would present a challenge if an outside entity were to attempt to make any changes in the structure or curriculum of these institutes since the knowledge continues to be recycled through this means. These characteristics reflect aspects of an oral culture.

Bible Institutes

Pedagogy Institutes use teachers who may or may not have the educational credentials required by accredited schools. Their wisdom is passed on through the sharing of ministerial experiences. It is these experiences coupled with the book knowledge that provide the skills and preparation needed for ministry. It also creates an action or reflection model for learning theology.

Curriculum Curricula at Bible institutes are varied; some follow a generic evangelical template that includes general knowledge of the scriptures and practical skills. In the area of biblical knowledge, one acquires a panoramic view of the Bible that includes archaeology and history with the purpose of seeing the Bible in the light of its historical context. One also studies the relationship between the Old and New Testaments and learns to locate key passages. The study of biblical periods and how the plan of salvation is reflected in each period and in biblical doctrine is also stressed. In the area of skills for ministry, one studies homiletics, pastoral counseling, pedagogy, and evangelism. Other curricula follow a Moody Institute model or come from the Evangelical Training Association (ETA). Bible institute curricula are prepared for a wide audience and are not contextualized for any particular group. They are strong in theological content but lack a ministry reflection learning component. This is where the work of AETH is responding by writing curriculum that is more contextualized. The material assists institutes to develop a philosophy of

| 75

education that helps persons be critical of their theological traditions in light of the realities of the communities where they minister. This is a qualitative change since it integrates the evangelistic church mission with an understanding of the social dimension of sin and therefore a need to acquire skills in addressing the injustices of social structures as a part of the ministry.

A Summary of Pressing Needs Networking meetings among the Bible institutes revealed that Bible institutes need library and information services, coalition building or networking between institutes, and technical and administrative support in areas of computerization of information resources and academic record keeping. This could include the development of a Web site with all of its component parts, faculty enrichment or continuing in-service education, enlarging fund-raising capacity, strengthening institutional identity and standing that includes a clear, well-articulated mission statement, and credit recognition. Currently, some of the institutes related to their judicatories are accredited by an undergraduate institution within the denomination. This means that at graduation from the institute, a person has credits toward an undergraduate degree.

Lay Ministry Formation Programs The Lay Ministry Formation Programs of the Catholic Church could be considered the Catholic counterpart to Bible institutes. In 1980 the pastoral statement Called and Gifted first recognized the increasing number of laymen and laywomen responding as volunteers and

76 |

Bible Institutes

part-time workers to serve on pastoral councils and other advisory boards. Others were undertaking new roles as special ministers of communion, lectors, catechists, pastoral assistants, and missionaries. This group of laity was preparing themselves professionally to work in the Church, and the bishops recognized them by giving them the name ‘‘ecclesial ministers.’’ In 1995, a pastoral statement on the laity entitled Called and Gifted for the New Millennium provided a more complete description of lay ministries. The bishops pledged to do further study of the issues concerning this group and their relationship to the bishops and other ordained ministers and to develop a theology concerning lay ministry in the Church in the United States. In 1997 at the University of Dayton, a theological colloquium was held entitled ‘‘Toward a Theology of Ecclesial Lay Ministry.’’ The goals of the colloquium were threefold. They were as follows: (1) to articulate a theology of ecclesial lay ministry that emerged from the experience of lay ministry, (2) to recommend future action that would foster the development of this ministry, and (3) to model effective collaboration between bishops and academic and pastoral theologians. In the summer of 2001 the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) conducted a comprehensive study of Hispanic ministry at the diocesan level in the United States. Leadership training was one of the issues addressed. One dimension of this is the Lay Ministry Formation Programs. The Secretariat for Laity of the U.S. Catholic Bishops reports that Hispanics comprise 4.4 percent of lay ecclesial students and 23 percent are lay ministry students. This clearly shows a disproportionate representation of Hispanics in this group since

Hispanics are reported to comprise onethird of all U.S. Catholics.

Types of Preparation Programs There are four distinct programs that prepare lay ecclesial ministers: 1. Diocesan formation programs that are multiyear programs and offer certificates. 2. Diocesan formation programs that are affiliated with a college, university, or seminary and offer certificates and degrees, sometimes through distance learning. 3. Academic programs at institutions that offer certificates, undergraduate and graduate degrees, and some ministerial formation. 4. Nondegree programs sponsored by independent Catholic organizations.

In 1998, of the 287 programs reporting the language they used, 41 used English and Spanish, and 12 used Spanish only. The Federation of Pastoral Institutes (Federacio´ n de Institutos Pastorales— FIP) was formed in 1985 at the Mexican American Cultural Center and the Southwest Pastoral Institute in order to create a collaborative system, to design a common vision, and to share experiences with the purpose of enriching each other. The federation currently includes 23 member institutes from different dioceses. They publish the Bilingual Manual Guide and Concepts and Practical Instruments for Pastoral Institutes.

Curriculum The programs have not been standardized. The content and format of the curriculum varies according to the needs of preparation of persons attending the

Bible Institutes program. Usually the program takes three to four years. Besides the course work, there is a practical component overseen by a supervisor of practical ministry. Spiritual direction is also part of the program for a discernment of call period of approximately six months to one year. Retreat experiences may be included in this period of discernment. Courses include the study of the scriptures, church history, pastoral ministry, social justice, liturgy and the sacraments, and morality or ethics. This is designed to provide persons with the skills for analyzing and critiquing economic and political systems and for engaging the world as persons of faith. Critics of the present programs claim that they do not always bring persons to a socially active faith but that the focus is more on evangelization.

Cost The financing of the preparation for lay ministers is one of the challenges facing the Catholic Church. It is particularly difficult for poorer communities with fewer economic resources, where the prospective students enter the programs with greater educational needs.

A Summary of Pressing Needs The Association of Graduate Programs in Ministry (AGPIM) was founded in 1987 as an organization of Roman Catholic graduate programs with focus on the preparation of laypersons for ministry. In 1999 the number of such programs was 104. The AGPIM and the committee of the National Association for Lay Ministry have been in dialogue with the subcommittee on ecclesial lay ministry. The

| 77

issues they have identified for discussion and action are the following: 1. Concern about the financing of ministry education for lay students. 2. Challenges of educating seminarians and lay ministry students together (desirable as a preparation for the practice of collaborative ministry, this sometimes raises concerns about maintaining priestly identity). 3. Necessity of preparing for the entire Church both ordained and lay ministers who are aware and affirming of all cultures. 4. Hope that dioceses might help the graduate schools with spiritual formation and related screening.

The committees have also been working on creating competency standards and a certification process, but these attempts are still relatively new. The training programs that serve the Hispanic constituency of the Catholic Church comprise only 18.5 percent of all the programs. Bible institutes, on the other hand, serve the majority of the training needs of the Protestant context. The issues of cost and curriculum are similar in both traditions as are the needs for certification. The Hispanic programs of both traditions have organized (FIP and AETH) in order to network and provide for themselves a way to share resources and address common concerns. Elizabeth Conde-Frazier

References and Further Reading Conde-Frazier, Elizabeth. Hispanic Bible Institutes: A Community of Theological Construction (Scranton PA: University of Scranton Press, 2004).

78 |

Black Legend

Davis, Kenneth, and Edwin I. Herna´ndez. Reconstructing the Sacred Tower: Challenge and Promise of Latino/a Theological Education (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2003). DeVries, Paul. ‘‘New York . . . The Bible Institute Capitol?’’ Religion and Contemporary New York City, ed. Tony Carnes (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Thigpen, Jonathan N. ‘‘A Brief History of the Bible Institute Movement in America.’’ Journal of Adult Training, no. 1 (1994). Together in God’s Service: Toward a Theology of Ecclesial Lay Ministry (Washington, DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Subcommittee on Lay Ministry, Committee on Lay Ministry, 1998).

BLACK LEGEND After listening to the famous sermon on Job by Fray Antonio de Montesinos on Christmas Day 1511, Bartolome´ de Las Casas underwent a conversion experience. This led to his lifelong work on combating the conditions of slavery being experienced by the indigenous peoples and the violence they underwent at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors. In order to raise the Spanish Crown’s consciousness concerning the atrocities being committed, Las Casas set out to document the kinds of abuses that the indigenous peoples were subjected to by the conquistadors. He published the record of these atrocities under the title A Very Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. In order to illustrate the violence against the indigenous inhabitants, Las Casas used some of the engravings by Theodorus DeBry, even though DeBry never visited the Americas. As a response to many of the complaints by Las Casas, the Spanish

Crown issued the Nuevas Leyes de Espan˜a (the New Laws of Spain), which created important mechanisms that tried to protect the indigenous peoples from being abused. For example, the encomiendas (forced labor) were abolished despite great opposition from the Criollos (children of Spaniards born in the Americas). Las Casas’s record of Spanish atrocities against the indigenous peoples of the Americas would eventually tarnish every Spanish imperial attempt from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and came to be commonly known as the source of the ‘‘Black Legend.’’ Although used in various contexts, the Black Legend was originally used as propaganda by the Protestant Dutch in the sixteenth century. First coined by Julia´n Juderı´as y Loyot, the ‘‘Black Legend’’ is a distortion of Las Casas’s

Bartolome´ de Las Casas, a sixteenthcentury Spanish historian, was the earliest crusader for human rights in the New World. (Library of Congress)

Black Legend | 79 writings by Anglo and Dutch Protestants. Carlos I of Spain (also known as Carlos V) dedicated much of his time and money to combat England, France, Italy, Flanders, Germany, and Hungary. Tired, he abdicated the throne to his son Phillip II, whose government was characterized by sustaining the Spanish (Habsburg Dynasty) Empire against the lower countries of Belgium and Holland. The Dutch rebels contributed intentionally to the creation of the Black Legend in their efforts to discredit the Spanish Crown. The devastation against the indigenous peoples as narrated by Las Casas, they claimed, was comparable to the ravages ´ lvarez de Toledo, third of Fernando A Duke of Alba and his successors, as they suppressed the rebellion in the Netherlands by creating what came to be known as the ‘‘Blood Court.’’ As part of their attempt to free Holland from Spain, the rebels reprinted translated editions of Las Casas’s Very Short Account no less than 33 times between 1578 and 1648, more than all other European countries combined. The suppression of the Dutch rebels was also connected to Spain’s war against Protestantism. In order to counter the spread of Protestantism in Spanish imperial territories, the Catholic inquisition sometimes resorted to violent measures. This provoked the fabrication of the Spanish Inquisition as cruel and bloodthirsty. Images of moats, dungeons, chains, cries, and rooms of torture accompanied such descriptions, creating a sense of extreme fanaticism and evil. This also contributed to the creation of the myth of thousands of Jews, Muslims, Protestants, and non-Catholics being tortured and murdered in the dungeons of the institution by Dominican friars.

These notions of the Spanish as inherently cruel, superstitious, and tyrannical soon became part of the Black Legend. During the sixteenth century, the Black Legend was used by the British to oppose Spanish imperialism in the Americas while justifying their own form of colonialization. They highlighted the cruelty in the ways the Spanish conquered the Americas and defended their territories. They constructed an image of the Spanish as superstitious obscurantists, opposed to spiritual progress and intellectual pursuits. They also accused them of tyranny because of the way they imposed control over the lives of Spaniards in the ‘‘New World.’’ Later in the nineteenth century the Black Legend played an important role in the British attempts at discrediting and delegitimizing the Spanish presence in the Americas. In the twentieth century it has also been part of the Protestant-Catholic tensions created by Anglo North American Protestant missionaries to Latin America. The nineteenth century’s ethos against Spanish imperialism contributed to and fueled the efforts for the independence of the Americas. Simo´n Bolı´var’s famous manifesto for independence drew from the Black Legend in order to find legitimacy in the cause of independence. In his famous Carta de Jamaica (Letter from Jamaica, 1815), Bolı´var argues for the removal of the yoke of the Spanish Crown upon the Americanos (Spanish Criollos). For him, the Americanos were oppressed by the Spanish empire despite their double citizenship. Highlighting the emergence of the conscience of the Criollo, he claimed that such violence against its citizens was similar to the initial violence of the Spanish conquistadors against the indigenous peoples, as

80 |

Border Saints

recorded by Las Casas. As such, the moral responsibility of the Americanos was to rid themselves of Spain and become independent republics. In his attempt at setting the record straight, Ro´mulo Carbia insists that the Black Legend is an exaggeration of Las Casas’s account of the destruction of the indigenous regions by the Spaniards. Accusing Las Casas of being dishonest and providing wrong information, he claims the latter never saw some of the things he wrote but heard them from Montesinos and other friars. His attempt at depicting Spain in a less violent light has given rise to what is commonly known as the ‘‘White Legend,’’ which is an attempt of Spanish authors to paint a more positive picture of Spain’s imperial history. Ne´stor Medina

References and Further Reading Juderias y Loyot, Julia´n. La leyenda negra y la verdad histo´rica, contribucio´n al estudio del concepto de Espan˜a en Europa, de las causas de este concepto y de la tolerancia religiosa y polı´tica en los paı´ses civilizados (Madrid: Rev. de Arch, 1914). Carbia, Ro´mulo D. Historia de la Leyenda Negra Hispanoamericana. Prologue by Rafael Gambra (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Nueva Hispanidad, 2000). Las Casas, Bartolome´ de. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans. Nigel Griffin (New York: Penguin Books, 1992). Reyes Govea, Juan. El mestizo, la nacio´n y el nacionalismo Mexicano (Chihuahua, Me´xico: Ediciones del Gobierno del Estado de Chihuahua, 1992).

BORDER SAINTS The term ‘‘border saints’’ refers to a phenomenon of folk saint devotions that has acquired a distinctive popularity along the U.S.-Mexican border. Traditionally, a saint has been a person whose life of holiness has been celebrated by some faiths, primarily by the Catholic Church. Veneration of unorthodox saints, or ‘‘folk saints,’’ on the other hand, usually emerges from folkloric devotional practices that are not necessarily recognized by the official church. A border saint is an example of a folk saint, whose life is celebrated in the borderlands, a sociopolitical and cultural space of human tensions and struggles, and whose intercessory mediation is widely sought by immigrants and devotees on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. The fame of these popular saints and the faith of their devotees has transcended the borderlands to other Latin American countries. The most popular folk saints are Don Pedro Jaramillo (1829–1907), Jesu´s Malverde (1870–1909), Teresa Urrea (1873– 1906), Pancho Villa (1878–1923), El Nin˜ o Fidencio (1898–1938), and Juan Soldado (1914–1938). Some consider Saint Toribio Romo Gonza´ lez (1900– 1928) the only Catholic orthodox border saint. In a top-down approach, the primary criterion for the orthodox canonization, or official acknowledgement and declaration of someone’s sainthood, is the recognition of someone’s virtuous and exemplary Christian life. In reaction to this perceived exclusivist right to define holiness and elitist notion of sanctity, the populace has defined ‘‘Robin Hood,’’ revolutionary, miraculous, and antiestablishment behaviors as worthy of celebration and veneration, especially

Border Saints | 81

Pancho Villa was one of the great revolutionary heroes of the Americas. A general in the epic struggle of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Villa took on a legendary importance in Mexico for his social ideals and daring military exploits. Today he remains an easily recognizable symbol of Mexican nationalism and social justice. (Library of Congress)

when these are characterized as criminal, deviant, sinful, and superstitious by the powerful elites of police, military, government, medicine, and Church. Don Pedro Jaramillo, also known as Don Pedrito or the Healer of Los Olmos, was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and died at Paisano, Texas. According to legend, when his mother became very ill, Don Pedrito prayed for his mother’s recovery, but when she died he decided to leave Mexico. He crossed the border into Texas in 1881 and settled on Los Olmos (‘‘The Elms’’) ranch, near present-day Falfurrias. He immediately

earned a reputation as a healer. As many as 500 people would come to see him at one time, often camping at Los Olmos Creek, waiting to see him for the miraculous healing of many types of physical ailments. Devotion to Don Pedrito is widely celebrated in northern Mexico and in southern Texas. His shrine is located at a grave site near Falfurrias, Texas. Jesu´ s Jua´ rez Maso, also known as Jesu´ s Malverde, was probably born in the area around Culiaca´ n, Sinaloa. According to some accounts, he was a bandit who helped the poor by robbing the wealthy. Some say that he was betrayed by a close confidant or comrade and allegedly some henchmen cut off his feet and dragged him to collect a monetary reward. After his death, his body was reportedly left hanging from a mesquite tree as a warning to others. His main shrine is located in Culiacan, Sinaloa, and is frequently visited by people who attribute miraculous healings to his intercession. He is known as the patron saint of drug traffickers, especially in the northern region of Mexico. Teresa Urrea, also known as Teresita or La Santa de Cabora, was born in the state of Sinaloa, an area then densely populated by Mexican Indians, during the rule of Mexican dictator Porfirio Dı´az. Protesting the dictatorial mistreatment of Indians by President Dı´az and fearing political persecution, her family had to flee Mexico, and they crossed the border in June 1892 into Nogales, Arizona. Her arrival in the United States attracted a great deal of public attention. Risking deportation, her family unsuccessfully applied for citizenship in Tucson. Teresita earned a reputation as a healer and traveled extensively to other

82 |

Border Saints

U.S. states, including California and Illinois. She earned a reputation as a strong political advocate for the rights of Indians in Mexico. She died in Clifton, Arizona. Doroteo Arango, or Pancho Villa, was born in the Rancho de la Coyotada in Durango. About the age of 16, Doroteo became a bandit and later got involved in the Mexican Revolution. He earned a reputation as a brave revolutionary, and many considered him a friend of the poor and an enemy of the wealthy and powerful. During his life he also gained fame as a great general and fearless warrior. One of the most celebrated events of his life is a military raid he led across the border into Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916. The United States ordered a punitive expedition into Mexico for his capture, and he became an instant hero of the Mexican people. He was assassinated on July 20, 1923, by a group of political enemies. His tomb and shrine are located in the city of Parral, Chihuahua, where one can find numerous petitions on scraps of paper. In his lifetime as a popular revolutionary, he was vilified by his enemies for being a ruthless criminal; as a folk saint, he is now venerated by his devotees for being a compassionate intercessor. Jose´ Fidencio Constantino Sı´ntora, or Nin˜ o Fidencio, was born in Iramuco, Guanajuato. His mother died when he was young, and he was considered by his followers to have been an orphan left to care for himself from a very early age. At five or six years of age, he was living alone in a shack caring for a younger brother when he apparently had an apparition of Jesus Christ who gave him a book that included many cures and recipes to be made from plants and herbs. At

the age of 13, he moved to the family hacienda at Espinazo, Nuevo Leo´ n, where he stayed until his death. He started using herbal remedies and became a famous curandero. The peak of his notoriety as a healer was in the late 1920s and early 1930s when even the Mexican president, Plutarco Elı´as Calles, came to see him for healing. His shrine at Espinazo attracts thousands of devotees every year. Juan Castillo Morales, or Juan Soldado, was originally from Ixtaltepec, Oaxaca. He moved to the border city of Tijuana with his family at an early age. On February 13, 1938, while he was a military recruit at the local garrison, he was implicated in the rape and death of an eight-year-old girl named Olga Consuelo Camacho Martı´nez. He was arrested and shot by the police without a trial. He immediately became a cause ce´le`bre. People reported having visions at the site of his death and erected a shrine at his grave. This has become a place of miraculous healing for devotees. He is considered the patron of border crossers or people who attempt to cross the U.S.-Mexican border without legal documents. Saint Toribio Romo Gonza´ lez was born in Jalisco and was ordained a priest. He was shot to death by federal soldiers during the bloody, anticlerical Cristero War. He was laid to rest in the town of Santa Ana de Guadalupe, which has become one of the fastest growing religious shrines in the country. Many immigrants visit his shrine to thank Saint Toribio for miracles performed on their journey to the United States. He has been called the Patron Saint of Immigrants. Fernando A. Ortiz

Borderlands

References and Further Reading Griffith, James S. Folk Saints of the Borderlands: Victims, Bandits and Healers (Tucson, AZ: Rio Nuevo, 2003). Griffith, James S. Saints of the Southwest (Tucson, AZ: Rio Nuevo, 2000). Macklin, Barbara J., and Ross Crumrine. ‘‘Three North Mexican Folk Saint Movements.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 15 (1973): 89–105. Octavec, Eileen. Answered Prayers. Miracles and Milagros along the Border (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995). Ortiz, Fernando A., and Kenneth G. Davis. ‘‘Latino/a Folk Saints and Marian Devotions: Indigenous Alternative Healing Practices.’’ Mestizo Indigenous Healing Practices: A Handbook, ed. J. Velasquez and Brian M. McNeill (New York: Routledge Publishers, Inc., 2008).

BORDERLANDS ‘‘Borderlands religions’’ refers to the varied religious traditions ranging from the preconquest indigenous practices to Catholicism imposed by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, resulting in the mixture, or mestizaje, of religious expression found at the beginning of the nineteenth century when Mexico got its independence from Spain. When the northern half of Mexico became part of the United States, there was yet another set of religious practices imported by Protestant Euro-American immigrants to the newly acquired Southwest. ‘‘Borderlands religions’’ exists as its own category (rather than, say, Mexican religions or southwestern religions)—a result of at least two sets of conditions: first, sociopolitical and historical realities of the border region; and second,

| 83

philosophical, theoretical, and theological frameworks that emerge from and through those realities. The borderlands are where two or more worlds come together and forge oppressive, violent, and divisive relationships between those who are defined as ‘‘us/insiders’’ versus ‘‘them/outsiders.’’ But borderlands are also a place where intense creativity, fluidity, and empowerment can flourish. In other words, the conditions of the borderlands religions yield neither completely negative nor completely positive results but, rather, a combination of both. Borderlands religions reflect the complex historical, political, economic, and cultural relations of power. Moreover, borderlands religions include traditions ranging from Roman Catholicism, preColumbian indigenous practices, mainline Protestant, Pentecostal, Mormon, as well as variations of the above. The peculiar historical experiences take place in, near, and around the geographic national marker known as the U.S.-Mexican border established with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848. The border dividing the United States from Mexico serves as a reminder of Mexico’s loss of over half of its national territory to the United States. Those who remained on the north side of the border would grapple with issues of national, ethnic, cultural, political, and religious identity that continue to inform their experiences. Those who found themselves south of the Mexican border would be forever inextricably tied to the United States, either by intimate familial bonds or through the political, social, and economic relationship between the two nations. Both religious and nonreligious experiences comprise borderlands characteristics. Results of

84 |

Borderlands

TREATY OF GUADALUPE HIDALGO Signed on February 2, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo officially ended the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. It is named after a city located north of Mexico City where President Antonio Lo´pez de Santa Anna and his government took refuge during the military campaigns of September 1847 when U.S. forces captured their capital. Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory to the United States, including modern-day Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. Although managing people and resources across these vast northern territories was difficult for Mexico’s government, later generations criticized the treaty’s terms as unfair and detrimental to Mexico’s future economic development. The United States paid Mexico $15 million in compensation for war damages. The American negotiators further agreed to protect the property and civil rights of Mexican nationals living within the boundaries of lands ceded to the United States in the treaty, a promise later ignored as land and property disputes swept across the American Southwest. Mexico’s loss of ancestral farming and grazing lands had a profound impact upon Hispanic American religious cultures throughout the southwestern U.S., Hispano-Mexican communities that fought for independence from Spain and then after the Mexican-American War had to live as foreigners in their ancestral lands. —AH

the war included dispossession of Mexican Americans’ land rights, discrimination through legal means such as English language–only forms of communication, and extralegal and vigilante law enforcement. Lynchings of Mexicans (men and women) were not uncommon for actions that threatened the unquestionable power of the White world. Due process and other rights were consistently denied to Mexicans under U.S. control. Imbalance of political and social power between Euro-Americans and Mexicans was virtually always in favor of Euro-Americans, with the few exceptions of Mexican Americans with enough wealth to negotiate for limited power and rights. Since violence is, and has been, part of the daily experience for most Mexicans around the borderlands, it is important to understand the roots of the clashing of worlds and cultures: the conquest of Mexico by Spain.

The tumultuous history of the borderlands does not begin and end with U.S.Mexican relations, however. The first of the historical world clashes took place when the heterogeneous, multilingual, multiethnic populations of Mesoamerica came into contact with Herna´n Cortez in 1512. Since the Spaniards’ arrival to the Americas, there has been a constant negotiation between seemingly incompatible religious practices and worldviews, namely indigenous and European religious practices. One of the most important examples of the contact is epitomized by the apparition of La Virgen de Guadalupe in 1531 to the recently Christianized Nahuatl-speaking man, Juan Diego. In the midst of violent and bloody battles of conquest between the Conquistadores and the native peoples of Mesoamerica, Guadalupe appeared on the hill of Tepeyac, where, for centuries, indigenous peoples had made

Borderlands pilgrimages to honor Tonatzin/Coatlicue, the feminine goddesses of the MexicaAztec pantheon. To some, her appearance served as evidence of Christianity taking hold in the Americas. Yet to others, she served as a symbol of the vanquishing of preColombian religious practices. Yet, typical of borderlands religions, Guadalupe served neither as the complete end of Mexica practices nor as the total takeover by Spanish Christianity. She served as a bridge between two worlds. The fact that indigenous communities bonded with her could signify that they accepted the newly imposed faith and gave up their old ways deemed diabolical and worthy of punishment. Or, they may have accepted her only on the surface to remain safe from punishment, all the while worshipping their own deities in their hearts and minds. Situated within borderlands religions, though, Guadalupe has become a symbol of what is commonly referred to as syncretism, or mestizaje. Syncretism is used to describe the coming together of two distinct religious systems to form a new hybrid, or mixed religiosity. Typically, syncretism is the result of a colonial relationship between a powerful, Christian European tradition and a subjugated population of indigenous peoples. Equally typical is that the religion of the colonizing nation or culture becomes the more commonly practiced at the expense of that of the colonized, or conquered. In other words, the European Christianity is imposed and ultimately defined as superior to any indigenous traditions. Because of this imbalance of power, some scholars have begun to use the term ‘‘nepantla’’ instead of ‘‘syncretism’’ to describe religiosity in the borderlands.

| 85

The term ‘‘nepantla’’ comes from the Nahuatl language meaning ‘‘in the middle, or the middle place.’’ Leading scholar of Mesoamerica Miguel LeonPortilla interprets nepantla as a place of confusion and ambiguity brought on by the violence and chaos of conquest. Chicana scholar Lara Medina suggests that nepantla presumes agency, not confusion. Moreover, there is, according to Medina, ‘‘[a] duality within nepantla, a transparent side where there is clarity and self-determination, and a shadow side, where diversity confuses and creates disorientation’’; in addition, ‘‘nepantla is a multifaceted psychic spiritual space composed of complementary opposites: obscurity and clarity’’ (2006, 253–254). By going beyond the understanding of nepantla as merely ‘‘torn between ways’’ into a place of ‘‘inbetweenness,’’ it becomes a place from which peoples and communities can reconcile fundamentally conflicting cosmologies and epistemologies through spirituality. The continuing importance of La Virgen de Guadalupe reflects the phenomenon of nepantla that began with the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. Daily devotion to the symbol is a reminder of the adaptability and flexibility of a people under centuries of oppression and power negotiations. Nepantla spirituality has continued to inform the beliefs, practices, and survival strategies in the borderlands through today. The appearance of La Virgen and the initial experiences of nepantla occurred during the colonial period in Mexican history. These events, nevertheless, inform the next major sociopolitical event: the U.S.-Mexican War and cessation of the Southwest.

86 |

Borderlands

At least a decade prior to the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States was expanding its national boundaries in all directions. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny provided the social, political, economic, and religious justification for U.S. expansion. Manifest Destiny was the belief that God had granted the United States superior capacity to control the land, its natural resources, and those who resided in it. After the initial choque (crash, clash) of the U.S.Mexican War established the physical border, a series of other borders were established as well. The division between Euro-American Protestants and Mexican Catholics, commonly referred to as ‘‘Romanists,’’ was perhaps one of the most formative divisions between 1848 and 1940. There was a steady influx of Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian missionaries who viewed the region as lost in the old ways of Mexico and who were in need of the enlightened, rational, ‘‘true’’ Word of God through the Bible and through education. For some Mexicans in the border region, their Catholic parishes provided a safe haven or protection from the predominantly EuroAmerican and English-speaking world into which they had just been thrown. Spanish-speaking Catholics found their faith communities to be the last refuge in which there was a sense of common culture remaining intact after the United States took over their land. For others, however, the Protestant missionaries brought a new source of spirituality that was unfulfilled by the Catholic community. Conversion stories focused on the spiritual, God had called them to leave the Catholic Church and join the Protestant mission. Others were exposed to the new faith through

institutions established by the mainline denominations in the region. In New Mexico, for example, very few Hispanos had access to even the most basic educational opportunities. The Catholic Church, when it did provide education, charged exorbitant fees that only the most affluent of society could afford. Many Mexicans who desired to be acknowledged and treated as citizens took advantage of the opportunities presented to them despite the risk of losing ‘‘traditions’’ of Mexican and Catholic culture. Methodists Thomas and Emily Harwood established schools for boys and girls in New Mexico. The Presbyterian Menaul School is still in operation today in Albuquerque. Settlement houses along the U.S. -Mexico border were established to take in recent migrants who needed health care or English language classes. Many of these institutions were also centers in which Americanization programs were taught. Part of the mission of the Protestant work was to instill distinctively American values and habits in conjunction with the religious component. Many Mexicans who relied on the services of the missionaries became deeply committed to the newly imported religious practices and continue to work in and with their Protestant congregations today. Certain parallels can be drawn between the Spaniards’ imposition of Catholicism on indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica. Certainly, the relations between Spaniards and Native peoples were shaped by violence, subjugation, and the forced conversion to Christianity. However, what has emerged from that initial contact is a dynamic and fluid religiosity. Of course, most historians would say it is debatable whether Euro-Americans were as brutal as the

Borderlands Spaniards in their treatment of the conquered population and in their views on the necessity of religious conversion. Definitely, the tactics and strategies were different for Mexican Americans, but the ultimate need for the assertion of power is what drove both Spaniards and EuroAmericans. In the case of the missionary attitudes toward Mexicans in the newly formed Southwest, that assertion of power was identifying and negating the beliefs of the conquered community. U.S. discourse made certain to narrowly define categories that oppose each other, called binary or dichotomous categories. These binaries set up rigid boundaries between categories such as Black-White; malefemale; Catholic-Protestant; and citizenforeigner. Americanization programs along with Protestant sponsored institutions created divisions between themselves as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants believed their mission was to make Mexicans in their own image. Mexicans were assumed to be Catholic and therefore superstitious as well as under the spell of local Catholic priests. So the conversion was not forced by sword, but by converting to Protestantism; Mexicans would ultimately be choosing the superior, more heavenly religious tradition.

Theoretical Foundations A main argument of borderlands theory is that systems of meaning are not closed or fixed but, by nature of existing in the borderlands, are shifting. The physical location of the U.S.-Mexico border informs the theoretical and theological understandings of borderlands. One important contribution by borderlands theory has been its invocation of the border as metaphor. Borderlands theories

| 87

take into account that nobody can be completely one thing or the other, but are inherently variations of the two. Especially in terms of religious practices, there has been a blending of traditions for over 500 years; La Virgen symbolizes both European Christianity and indigenous respect for feminine deities. Then again, when the U.S.-Mexican contact takes place, Mexicans who converted to the quintessentially Euro-American Protestantism held on to language and culture and adapted the new tradition to their own context. Neither group transformed completely, but transformed and coalesced based on their own community’s needs. They were somewhere in between Catholic Mexican and Euro-American, between citizen and foreigner. By looking to the spaces between the categories listed above, borderlands theory provides both a method and a theoretical framework that can potentially decolonize the epistemologies and cosmologies that have undergone silencing and repression under various structures of domination. A borderland is the ‘‘emotional residue’’ caused by an unnatural boundary that defines what is ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them.’’ The border, according to novelist and scholar Gloria Anzaldu´a, is ‘‘una herida abierta,’’ where the ‘‘third world grates up against the first and bleeds.’’ Anzaldu´ a’s work has nevertheless been groundbreaking and invaluable for the theorizing of issues of identity in terms of class, race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and religion. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the reader is confronted with the physical dimensions of life in the geographical space of the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the psychological, emotional, spiritual, and sexual borderlands that emerge as a result of the border. Borderlands theories

88 |

Borderlands

destabilize binary categories such as Mexican-American, Black-White, queer-straight, male-female, sacredprofane, and history-myth. Scholars such as Anzaldu´a and Chela Sandoval make use of their own experiences of discrimination, marginalization, sexism, homophobia, racism, and classism to develop theories and produce works of art and poetry. This method pushes the reader to interrogate the ways in which the divisions have caused harm. Borderlands theory gets deployed in disciplines outside of theology and religion as well. Particularly, the field of Chicano/a studies has been developed by rereading history or, rather, redefining historiographic methodology that has relied on primary documents to tell the ‘‘truth’’ of what happened in the past. Borderlands theory disrupts the notion of a unilinear concept of time, and instead offers readings and interpretations of historical actors in cyclical and relational methods. Borderlands theorist and historian Emma Perez argues that the ‘‘decolonial imaginary’’ can help to disrupt the nationalist historiography of Chicano history by unearthing the ways in which history has been written on the body of Chicanas. The relegation of Chicana stories to the backdrop of men’s lives is not only due to racism of EuroAmerican historical method, but also due to the inability of some Chicano scholars to acknowledge the simultaneity of oppressions, borderlands of experience that shape Chicana lives. Scholar Luis Leo´n’s discussion of the ‘‘religious poetics’’ in the borderlands as being informed by and informing nepantla spirituality is important in highlighting the role of borderlands theory in terms of religious studies. By arguing that culture is religious, not that religion

is cultural, Leo´n’s framing of the practices found in the Victory Outreach communities in Los Angeles, and the performance art of El Vez, points to the varied ways in which religion and culture intersect and operate in borderlands. Borderlands religions in the Latino/a community are a dynamic, fluid, and adaptable set of practices. Their symbols and meanings change over time, depending on the circumstances in which those communities live, pray, eat, and die. The ancestors took what they could use and strategized for survival in a world of violence, oppression, and chaos; they transformed it into something beautiful and a source of strength. Latina/os will continue to do so because we all live in the borderlands. Adriana Pilar Nieto

References and Further Reading Anzaldu´a, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). Barton, Paul. Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). De La Torre, Miguel A. ‘‘Living on the Borders,’’ The Ecumenical Review 59, no. 2–3 (April/July 2007): 214–220. Elizondo, Virgilio. Galilean Journey: The Mexican American Promise (New York: Orbis, 1983, 2000). Leo´n, Luis D. La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Leon-Portilla, Miguel. Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, trans. Jack Emory Davis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971). Medina, Lara. ‘‘Nepantla Spirituality: Negotiating Multiple Religious Identities

Buddhism | 89 among U.S. Latanas.’’ Rethinking Latino (a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´n Espinosa (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2006). Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

communities developed from these influences, and some individuals within contemporary Latino/a communities have practiced Buddhist philosophy and meditation techniques, particularly to manage their own experiences of suffering and marginalization.

BUDDHISM

Development of Hispanic American Buddhist Cultures

Buddhism within Latino/a communities stems from the cross-fertilization between Hispanic and Buddhist cultures, principally due to three modes of transmission: import, export, or baggage. These modes, conceptualized by U.S. Buddhist scholar Jan Nattier, illustrate the varying movements between Buddhist communities and the U.S. culture. The term ‘‘Buddhism’’ is a Western construction used to describe the teachings and practices derived from the life experience of a man born Siddhartha Gautama in the fifth century BCE. His keen observations and rigorous reflections brought him the distinction of becoming ‘‘Awake’’ or ‘‘The Enlightened One’’ (Buddha), claiming complete awareness of reality and truth. Buddhism does not have a centralized system to promulgate and safeguard its teachings, nor does it have a strong sense of orthodoxy. Rather, as the Buddha instructed his disciples in his final moments to ‘‘Be your own lamps,’’ stress is placed on the individual quest for truth. Subsequent to the Buddha’s life, various communities and traditions have developed, stressing particular aspects from his life. Through the immigration of peoples and cross-cultural marriage, particularly among Austronesian, European, and American cultures beginning in the sixteenth century, Hispanic Asian cultures developed. Hispanic Buddhist

The development of Buddhism within the context of the United States includes the conflagration of various cultures, in this case Asian cultures with European and indigenous Mesoamerican cultures. Chinese and Japanese peoples were attracted to the California Gold Rush of 1849 and soon began to settle and develop their own religious communities by bringing their religious practice with them and beginning to root it in American soil. This mode of transmission represents the ‘‘baggage’’ manner through which Buddhism became part of U.S. culture. By the beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of Buddhist centers were established along the western coast of the United States. A second manner through which Buddhism developed in the United States is characterized as the ‘‘import’’ mode, exemplified in two ways. First, in 1893, Theravada Buddhist teachers accepted the invitation of organizers of Chicago’s Parliament of World’s Religions (held concurrently with the World Columbian Exposition to celebrate the United States’ technological expertise in the modern world). Both organizers and participants were impressed with the presentation of Buddhism by the Theravada monks, who articulated a practice of peace, justice, and morality within a doctrine of ‘‘absence,’’ wherein

90 |

Buddhism

impermanence characterized all of reality, even to notions of the individual self and the divine. Through this invitation and reception by U.S. citizens of Theravada Buddhist teachings, the U.S. scholarly community entered into dialogue with Buddhist philosophical concepts. Second, even earlier in the nineteenth century, New England intellectuals discussed the meaning of Asian religious scriptures, including Buddhist texts, and brought Buddhist thought into U.S. intellectual culture, although this was certainly separate from any practice within exclusively Buddhist communities. Both of these instances exemplify Buddhist teaching and practice being invited by interested U.S. parties, ‘‘imported’’ for consumption through either practice or incorporation into intellectual systems— philosophical or political—by academics. The third mode of transmission is exemplified by Nichiren Buddhists, who promulgate a type of Buddhism begun in the thirteenth century and stress practice and study, including sharing of their understandings with others. However, the ‘‘export’’ nature of this Buddhism is disputed among scholars, particularly the degree of this tradition’s ‘‘evangelical’’ practice.

Particular American Hispanic Buddhist Communities Although less than 1 percent of all American Hispanics are Buddhist, Latina/o Buddhists are developing a presence in the United States that engages their Buddhist practice with their experience of suffering and marginalization. A number of Hispanic American Buddhists participate in society while striving

to heal the scars that such marginalization inflicts, managing their mestizo Catholic/Christian origins with their Buddhist practice, and finding an organic partnership between the two traditions with little contradiction. The Shambhala Meditation Center of San Antonio, Texas, began in 1992 through the efforts of interested adherents, led by Elisa Gonzalez. This center has the distinction throughout its history of being led by women directors, with several American Hispanic teachers making efforts to teach this tradition of Buddhism to all economic groups in Spanish and English. A Spanishspeaking Vajrayana study group is presently in existence on the Westside of San Antonio, one of the least economically advantaged of all urban areas in the United States. Raised as a Catholic in San Antonio, Elisa Gonzalez was drawn to raising religious and philosophical questions about reality and meaning. She became interested in the Buddhist tradition because of its encouragement of such questions, a quality she did not find within her practice of Catholicism. Although she found Catholicism to emphasize compassion and service, qualities that she would find resonating with Buddhism as well, her experience of the Catholic tradition discouraged the questioning of its doctrine and tradition. Upon returning from the University of the Americas in Mexico City, she moved to Seattle for work considerations and there began what was to be a 20-year study and exploration period of Buddhism. She was exposed to a variety of teachers, most of whom were from the Western/U.S. culture. There she endeavored to be instructed by an Asian teacher, immersed in the Buddhist culture and sensibilities. Her quest led her

Buddhism | 91 to various Vajradhatus and Dharmadhatus (meditation centers), and finally to Cho¨gyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Buddhist instructor and founder of Shambhala Buddhism. This type of Buddhism had been in development over several years by Trungpa as an effort to make this Buddhist tradition accessible to secular Western students. Elisa Gonzalez entered a three-month training program, equivalent to seminary training in Christian traditions, and returned to San Antonio to offer training. San Antonio proved to be ripe for Buddhist development, as interested study groups began to rise oriented toward a variety of traditions—Theravada, Vajrayana, Tibetan, and Zen Buddhism. Many of these native San Antonians had Christian foundations and understood themselves to be religious individuals. The particular dimension of their religious sensibilities stressed the questioning aspects of their tradition, the impetus to think creatively and question presuppositions and teachings. This sensibility was not encouraged in their experience of Christianity; instead, heavy reliance on doctrine as expressed through their schooling and faith practice discouraged questioning. These religious seekers began to find in Buddhism not only an appreciation for religious questions, but a rigorous standard for seeing reality clearly, without reliance on simplistic answers or appeal to divine mystery. These seekers, American Hispanics among them, found within Buddhism a concerted effort to localize ultimate meaning and truth within the individual, and to laden on this individual responsibility for discerning reality within her/his particular situation. This selfresponsibility refrained from understanding or experiencing the self as

victimized. Instead, Buddhist practitioners accepted the reality of their situation and endeavored to put their awareness into practice. Change is possible in the present moment, particularly if that moment is perceived as painful, by coming to a fuller awareness of the entire situation that is the cause of such pain and suffering. Through the Buddhist perspective, the search for external happiness is not realistic, a search that is itself fraught with pain and anguish. In the particular teaching from the Rinpoche, Elisa Gonzalez understood suffering as the result of confusion stemming from the ‘‘Three Poisons’’: Ignorance, Passion, and Aggression. Through the efforts and development of the San Antonio Meditation Center, it was recognized by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche (firstborn son of Cho¨ gyam Trungpa Rinpoche who had died in 1987) as a Shambhala Center in 1992, based upon teachings of personal enlightenment and societal transformation. A number of lay teachers have developed to the point that they serve as missionaries to South American countries, using their language and cultural skills to develop lay Tibetan Buddhist communities in Chile and Argentina. Because of the diversity among American Hispanics, there is no one model of the American Buddhist experience. This diversity cuts across race, ethnicity, cultural, and economic classifications, including those who embrace the experience of marginalization with the larger American culture and articulate meaning from this place of isolation and pain. It includes those who are not sensitive to this experience, but rather consider their ethnic and cultural heritages complementary, without pain and conflict.

92 |

Buddhism

Jose´ Luis Reissig grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and associated with like-minded young political dissidents, critical of his country’s governmental policies. He was incarcerated periodically, during which time he experienced pain as many of his associates were tortured by the government. His disgust of oppressive military regimes grew more acute. He came to the United States at the age of 19 for study, became aware of Buddhist principles, and subsequently received Buddhist training in England by an English teacher. Through Buddhist dharma, Jose´ came to understand that the world cannot realistically be divided into two classes—those with and those without power—and also that such considerations do not remove individuals from political responsibility. In this Mahayana Buddhist tradition, the concept of karuna (compassion) is developed by practicing a type of compassion foreign to many Judeo-Christian cultures and political analysis. That is, compassion shared toward another is actually compassion extended to one’s self, indeed, the entire world, as all share the same reality in the ever-changing cosmos. Karuna is the practice of an awareness of an interrelatedness of all reality, not an awareness of a constant struggle between two opposing realities. Instead, compassion is shown toward all who have the capacity for pain. Because of the proximity of Mexico and Latin America to the United States, a significant amount of communication has occurred between the various political entities. Since the early 1970s, American Hispanics have imported Buddhist teaching from Mexico, and American Hispanics have exported their Buddhist tradition and practice to Mexican and Latin American communities.

Japanese Zen priest Ejo Takata Roshi instructed a group of young American Hispanic students inclined toward a broad range of spiritual traditions and practice. These instructions included meditation on death, a common practice in Zen Buddhism, calling to the individual’s perception the impermanence of reality, particularly personal existence. This experience resonated with Latino/ as through their own cultural traditions of death, its common presence and inevitability, and helped them conceptualize Buddhist notions of change and reality. Other American Hispanic Buddhists have experienced the life of impoverished Tzeltal communities in Mexico and endeavored to consider impermanence within that context. These American Hispanic Buddhists found it difficult to reconcile the perceptions of their world outside of that community—comfortable, even excessive—with persistent poverty and oppression. In the comfortable, developed world, pain is indeed impermanent; in the oppressive political reality of many impoverished communities, pain has a permanence not experienced by many Latino/a adherents. In addition, the Hispanic experience of that community brought them to an encounter with a fullness and appreciation of life, even within that oppressive political state, that challenged their own experience of life, wherein there are numerous facile attachments, no real physical need or want, and so much unrest. Nichiren Buddhism, another tradition that has found many Hispanic adherents, differentiates itself in many ways. Among these differentiations is the stress placed on recitation of a simple verse, individually and communally, as well as civic and political engagement. There is also an evangelical dimension with

Buddhism | 93 Nichiren Buddhism, wherein adherents are called upon to practice some degree of recruitment of new members by attending Nichiren Buddhist centers and events. A number of small Nichiren Buddhist groups have developed among Hispanics; among the most prominent is Puerto Rican musician Nestor Torres. Oswald John Nira

References and Further Reading Baldoquı´n, Hilda Gutie´rrez, ed. Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2004). Eck, Diana. A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the

World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002). Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching (New York: Broadway Books, 1999). Reissig, Jose´. ‘‘CEMVE: Cı´rculo para la Enzenan˜za de Meditacio´n Vipassana en Espan˜ol: An Association to Promote the Teaching of Vipassana in SpanishSpeaking Communities.’’ Turning Wheel: The Journal of Socially Engaged Buddhism (Summer 2001). Zubizarreta, Rosa. ‘‘El Latinismo y sus Bellos Colores: Voices of Latina and Latino Buddhists.’’ Turning Wheel: The Journal of Socially Engaged Buddhism (Summer 2001).

C CATHOLIC CHARISMATIC MOVEMENT

Latino/a Catholic Charismatics differ from classical Pentecostals in three respects. First, they do not believe that speaking in tongues is the initial, physical evidence of the baptism with the Holy Spirit—also called the Initial Evidence Theory, a view held by the Assemblies of God and other classical Pentecostal denominations. Second, they see themselves in the vanguard of Catholic evangelization and renewal rather than as a Trojan horse for Pentecostalism—a charge that has been leveled at them in the past. They are first and foremost Catholics, who also believe in the practice of the spiritual gifts. Many midweek services are officiated by the parish priest. In many respects, the Catholic Charismatic movement has served as a bulwark against the growth of the Latina/o Protestant Pentecostal movement. And third, their movement tends to be lay driven and led by women. It is a place where women can exercise lay leadership roles in the church and in society

The Catholic Charismatic movement is a transparish and transnational Catholic lay movement where the people believe in the practice of the spiritual gifts listed in Romans 12, Ephesians 4, and I Corinthians 12 and 14. These spiritual gifts (charismata) include pastoring, evangelism, exhortation, giving, leadership, mercy, service, teaching, administration, discernment, faith, healing, helps, knowledge, and others. Catholic Charismatics stress having a personal conversion experience with Jesus Christ as their savior and lord, adhering to the spiritual disciplines, and practicing the spiritual gifts. They believe that the purpose of the spiritual gifts is to build up and edify the Church. For this reason, they are often very involved in lay ministry in the parish, help lead worship and prayer groups, and often assist the priests in other aspects of lay spiritual formation.

95

96 |

Catholic Charismatic Movement

through their outreach programs to the community. The exact origins of the U.S. Latino/a Catholic Charismatic movement are uncertain. The four primary sources appear to be the following: (1) the U.S. Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) in the 1960s; (2) the Catholic Charismatic movement in Columbia and Latin America as early as 1967; (3) Glenn and Marilynn Kramar and their Charisma in Missions movement begun in California in 1972; and (4) Latina/o Catholics who became Pentecostal and eventually returned to Catholicism, but remained Pentecostal in theology and orientation. One of the primary catalysts in the development of the U.S. Latino Catholic Charismatic movement is Marilynn Kramar and the movement she founded called Charisma in Missions. Charisma in Missions is a Catholic Charismatic missionary and evangelization society founded by Marilynn Kramar (1939–) in Los Angeles. A former Assemblies of God missionaryevangelist to Columbia from 1967 to 1972, Kramar converted to Roman Catholicism in 1972 in the wake of Vatican II and a greater openness to the gifts of the Holy Spirit as a result of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. She was licensed as an Assemblies of God missionary-evangelist. She and her husband served as the last non-national superintendents of the Assemblies of God work in Columbia from 1967 to 1970. They returned to California in 1972, where they decided to convert to the Roman Catholic Church. That same year, at the urging to Cardinal Timothy Manning of Los Angeles, Marilynn and Glenn Kramar founded Charisma in Missions, a Catholic international laymissionary evangelization society. Glenn

eventually left the movement and Marilynn assumed leadership. Many women and men, especially Esther Garzo´ n, assisted her. Although international in scope, the three primary goals of Charisma in Missions are to reach alienated Latino/a Catholics, to train evangelizers to work in the Spanish-speaking community, and to bring about ‘‘spiritual renewal’’ and ‘‘reformation’’ within the Catholic Church. Kramar stated that the Bible and Vatican II ‘‘outlined our mission in the church—to rattle new life into dry bones within the household of God. . . . Our job was to evangelize baptized Catholics who either didn’t fully understand or were not actively involved in the life of faith.’’ In 1975, she began leading the International Latin Encounter for Renewal and Evangelization, better known as the Latin Encounter (Encuentro Latino). The annual Encuentro Latino has grown in attendance from 600 in 1975 to an estimated 20,000 in 2003. They have a mailing list of 70,000 Latinos throughout the United States, Mexico, and Latin America. They sponsor Youth Encounters, rallies, and faith campaigns, and a missionary institute of proclaimers (school of evangelism), spiritual growth seminars, women’s ministries, and children’s ministries. At their headquarters in the Los Angeles area, they run various programs and events through venues like CharisBooks, CharisTapes, CharisMedia, and CharisPublications. They also sponsor a television program. They have generated over 2 million cassette tapes related to their ministry. Their international headquarters is named the Porciuncula (after St. Francis) and was founded in 1982 with the pastoral blessing of Cardinal Timothy

Catholic Charismatic Movement | 97

CURSILLO The Cursillo de Cristiandad is a weekend experience meant to evangelize individuals through an affective encounter with Jesus Christ, self, and neighbor. It began in 1944 as a week-long course held by the Catholic Action movement. This short course, or Cursillo in Spanish, was used to prepare lay leaders for pilgrimages to the Shrine of Santiago (St. James) at Compostela, Spain. Now it is used to assist people with the pilgrimage of life. At the age of 26, Eduardo Bonnı´n and a few friends turned the Cursillo for pilgrim leaders into a weekend experience that sought a profound conversion in the cotidiano (day-to-day life) of its participants. The experience soon became a movement of apostolic action and spread to Latin America and then to over 60 nations. The Cursillo is not meant to be either a course or a retreat; rather it is an ‘‘Encounter’’ with the mysteries of the kerygma (core of the Gospel) through a renewal of the sacraments of Christian initiation: Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist. To ensure that this conversion would continue to develop and mature, participants are encouraged to join small communities based on the three pillars of Christian life: prayer, study, and action. —GCG

Manning. Between 2,000 and 3,000 people attend services, programs, workshops, and events every week. Like their Pentecostal brethren, they believe in the practice of the spiritual gifts listed in I Corinthians 12 and 14, such as healing, performing miracles, pastoring, evangelizing, serving, performing works, speaking in tongues, interpreting tongues, prophesying, and helping. They also emphasize personal conversion and spiritual renewal with Jesus Christ, divine healing, and community empowerment and renewal. Despite their emphasis on conversion and the spiritual gifts, they are staunchly Catholic and see themselves in the vanguard of Catholic spiritual renewal. They hold tremendous reverence and respect for Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Virgin Mary in general. They often refer to their meetings as prayer services because prayer is central to the movement. The movement is lay-driven. Their prayer services are often led by women and attended by

younger adults. Their emphasis on enthusiastic worship and music services has contributed to a renewal of Sunday and weekly masses as many members of the movement often serve the priest in other capacities in the parish. Charisma in Missions has been a major catalyst in spreading the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement and spirituality among Latino/a Catholics in the United States, Mexico, and throughout Latin America. They have been joined in their work by other Latino priests and leaders like Emmy Canales and Noel Diaz of El Sembrador, Horacio Trujillo of Arizona, and others have also had a tremendous impact on the U.S. Latina/o Catholic Charismatic community. The movement has witnessed phenomenal growth. The Hispanic Churches in American Public Life national survey, directed by Father Virgilio Elizondo, Jesse Miranda, Gasto´ n Espinosa, and Harry Pachon of the Toma´s Rivera Policy Institute along with several other Pew

98 |

Catholicism

Charitable Trusts, found that over 22 percent of all Latinos (10.1 million in 2008) in the United States self-identified as Catholic Charismatic. In Bishop Gerald R. Barnes’s Hispanic Ministry at the Turn of the Millennium: A Report of the Bishop’s Committee on Hispanic Affairs, they reported that the Charismatic movement was active in 36 percent of all Hispanic-serving parishes, thus making it more common than either the Cursillo (31 percent) or Christian Base Communities (13 percent). Gasto´n Espinosa

References and Further Reading Espinosa, Gasto´n. ‘‘The Pentecostalization of Latin American and U.S. Latino Christianity.’’ Pneuma: The Journal for the Society of Pentecostal Studies 26, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 262–292. Peterson, Anna, and Manuel Vasquez. ‘‘Upwards, Never Down’’: The Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Transnational Perspective.’’ Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas, ed. Anna L. Peterson, Manuel A. Vasquez, and Philip J. Williams (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). Synan, Vinson. The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997).

CATHOLICISM The expression ‘‘Latino/a Catholicism’’ refers to a vast and diverse tradition within the Catholic Church in the United States, with evident roots and plentiful parallels in Latin America. Most demographic projections state that by 2035 Latino/as will be at least half of all

Catholics in the United States. They already are, when added to their Latin American counterparts, the largest cultural group within the world’s entire Catholic population. Latino/a Catholicism, however, is quite different from European and European-American Catholicism.

Clarifying What Is Understood by “Latino/a Catholicism” Latina/o Catholics generally share in a tradition of Catholic Christianity that assumes the following: (1) the normative centrality of the Bible; (2) the acceptance of the doctrinal definitions of the ecumenical councils; (3) the apostolic succession of bishops; (4) the preeminent role of the liturgy and sacraments; and (5) the indispensable hermeneutic and sacramental role of the Church. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the most frequent religious universe among U.S. Latino/as is ‘‘popular Catholicism.’’ This is the case among all of the different cultural communities (Mexican and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, etc.). Certainly, many Latino/ as participate in the ‘‘official’’ tradition, but both numerically and culturally the symbolic universe of the popular version of the religion is by far the more widespread and commanding of the two. It can be argued that, first of all, popular Catholicism is the manner in and through which most Latino/as are Catholic; and second, that this popular Catholicism is a key matrix of all Latina/o cultures. If forced to attempt a nearly impossible general description of such a diverse phenomenon as Latino/a popular Catholicism, we might say that it incorporates at least the following elements: (1) it focuses

Catholicism

Worshipers attend a service at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. (David Butow/Corbis Saba)

and centers on Christ, and especially his humanness; (2) it has great admiration for and devotion to Mary (and secondarily the saints); (3) it is led by the laity (especially older women) and focuses on the faith and life issues of lay Catholics, with little interest in the concerns of the clergy; (4) it is family-centered (hence, not parish-centered or individualistic); (5) it is symbolic, affective, communal, and public in its expressions of faith and of the sacred; (6) it ‘‘performs’’ (rather than ‘‘explains’’) its beliefs and doctrines; (7) it greatly appreciates wisdom, and the role of the sensus fidelium (literally the ‘‘sense of the faithful’’ where the doctrines and church teachings are developed ‘‘from the ground up’’ with the faithful masses guided by the Holy Spirit); (8) it seems to mistrust authoritarian (‘‘clericalized,’’ or ‘‘institutionalized’’) approaches to Christianity; and (9) it distinguishes

communal solidarity and compassion (especially toward the poor) as the two most important Christian virtues and ethical demands. With significant consequences for the interpretation of Christianity, the socioculturally marginalized are by far the majority of Latina/o Catholics. It seems that Latino/a Catholicism cannot be properly understood apart from its history. Its beliefs and practices did not develop only as a result of general inner- or intra-Catholic Christian events, but also shares in worldwide Christian history and basic doctrines. Latino/a Catholicism’s shape and contents are especially the consequence of historical confrontations with the realities of conquest, annexation, marginalization, and religiocultural invasions. This history encompasses the Christianity of what today is Spain, as it uniquely developed in the Iberian

| 99

100 |

Catholicism

Peninsula through the patristic and medieval periods. This earlier Christianity was brought to the Americas after 1492, preached to the natives and the slaves, and survived among the vast majority of people even after reforms of the Council of Trent.

Colonial Heritage Spanish politics (e.g., the ‘‘royal patronage’’ over the Church, etc.) kept most of Trent’s reforms away from most natives, slaves, mulatos, and mestizos. The legal prohibitions against non-White clergy furthered the distance between the reformed Catholicism of Trent (which has come to be identified with modern Roman Catholicism) and the people’s Catholicism (which preceded Trent to the Americas, and which brought with it 1,500 years of earlier Christian tradition). The religion taken to be ‘‘normative’’ Christianity, in the early colonial period, was Catholic Christianity in its medieval, Iberian, pre-Tridentine (pre–Council of Trent), village version. It was this religion that was reinterpreted by the native and slave populations (and later by mestizos and mulatos) in their attempt to make cultural and religious sense out of their conquest and vanquishment. This ‘‘interpreted’’ Catholic Christianity was perceived, late in colonial times, to be in need of reevangelization. Mestizos and mulatos were by then fast becoming the majority of the population, and it was through and to them that the new catechetical efforts were channeled. This allowed for some elements of reevangelization to reach Amerindians and Blacks, but the latter groups’ religion remained basically as it had been. Among Blacks and Amerindians, of course, some non-Christian traditional

religions (or vestiges of these religions) survived and continue today. The late colonial reevangelization mainly reached the mestizos (although by comparison fewer mulatos). This allowed mestizos to further interpret the new messages being presented through the prism of their inherited popular, medieval, pre-Tridentine, village Catholicism (which was still seen by them as normative). This latest reinterpretation slowly became the Catholic norm for the mixed-race majority. It was this religion, for all practical purposes, that was the only Catholicism acceptable by most people during the period of the (nineteenth century) independence movements. A split can be clearly detected at the start of the nineteenth century, which has widened since. The ‘‘official’’ (Tridentine) Christianity of the bishops and of the social elites, presenting itself as the sole valid norm, was distinct from the ‘‘popular’’ Christianity (preTridentine) of the vast majority of the population. This popular Christianity also claimed to be the valid norm, though it acknowledged the existence of what it called the ‘‘clerical’’ version. By the time pro-independence movements broke out in the nineteenth century, the bearers of official Catholicism had become the main pillars of Spain’s colonial rule (and therefore, inimical to the anticolonial forces). The other strand of Catholicism, the popular version that the ecclesiastical and social elites deplored, was the religion of the independentists (or at least openly allied with them). It became commonplace to find the symbols of popular Catholicism used as gathering banners for the people against Spain. The people (and some of the local

Catholicism parish clergy) fighting Spain appealed to God, to the Virgin, to the faith, and to religious symbols of the majority in order to demonstrate that God was indeed on their side. After independence (or after the U.S. occupation in the case of Puerto Rico), what had been official colonial Catholicism soon identified itself with criollo elite interests, while most mestizos and mulatos (and also an increasing number of Amerindians and Blacks) still claimed popular religion as theirs. Therefore, even after Spain’s defeat, the ‘‘duallevel’’ Catholicism of the late colonial period was preserved. And the link between the two versions of the religion was maintained due to the mestizos’ and mulatos’ gift for cultural reinterpretation. After some mestizos and mulatos finally entered the clergy and rose through its ranks, popular Catholicism began to receive partial acceptability from the postindependence ecclesiastical hierarchy. This belated acceptability, however, had its price. During most of the postindependence period in Mexico, and during the colonial nineteenth century in Puerto Rico and in Cuba, the Church hierarchy started participating in some key rites of popular Catholicism. Whether the bishops (and other clergy) suspected these rites to be syncretic or superstitious did not seem as important as the fact that these rituals were ‘‘Catholic.’’ They were a sacred, public link between the hierarchy and the people, recognized as such by all.

19th Century: Independence, Occupation, and Annexation The maintenance of this sacred and public link became very important during the nineteenth century. The institutions of the Church came increasingly under

| 101

attack by growing intellectual elite (criolla, mestiza, and mulata) that was influenced by the European currents of modern thought. The Enlightenment had arrived in the Americas with an antiChurch zeal. The ecclesiastical hierarchy, apparently sensing the danger, saw in popular Catholicism an ally and tool in the Church’s defense strategy. The natives, slaves, mestizos, and mulatos, for centuries marginalized from the official institutions of Catholicism, were now courted and their version of Catholic Christianity blessed. On the other hand, the intellectual elites—in typical nineteenth-century rationalist style—had no use for the Church and its economic and political power, and condemned popular Catholicism as obscurantist ignorance. They thought that popular religion prevented the people from achieving higher levels of educational and material development. Intellectuals of the nineteenth century, in Mexico and the Antilles, in their disdain for Church and ignorance, fomented a strategic alliance (necessarily clothed in ‘‘acceptable’’ theological and pastoral language) between the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the masses of people. Nineteenth-century official and popular Catholicisms (plural!) confronted the same enemy in Mexico and the Antilles, and they joined forces. But by then the official brand of the religion was also imbued with the mentality of the postReformation and of the Enlightenment. It was only a matter of time before the rationalist intellectuals and the Church establishment would discover a sufficiently ‘‘reasonable’’ dialogue, and then turn their respective sights and disdain onto popular Catholicism. The intellectual elites of the nineteenth century have—100 years later—

102 |

Catholicism

SAN FERNANDO CATHEDRAL The San Fernando Cathedral is located in San Antonio, Texas, and is the oldest cathedral sanctuary continuously in use within what is now the continental United States. Established in 1731 as a local parish on the northern frontier of New Spain, San Fernando’s predominantly Hispanic, working-class congregants have worshiped God in the same church sanctuary under the flags of Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, the Confederate States of America, and then the United States again. Pope Pius IX established the Catholic diocese of San Antonio in 1874 and designated San Fernando as its cathedral; Pope Pius XI established the archdiocese of San Antonio in 1926, making San Fernando a metropolitan cathedral and further enhancing its prominence as a center of Hispanic Catholicism. Amidst all the ecclesiastical, political, and social changes in San Antonio, San Fernando parishioners have celebrated the practices of their religious and cultural heritage. Successive generations of parishioners shaped and developed their religious traditions to suit new historical contexts and needs, particularly their public devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe and to Jesus in his birth, passion, and death. This rich heritage has made San Fernando a source for various contemporary studies of Latino theology and religion. —TM

either lost their influence or have (most probably) transformed themselves into other ideological or political shapes and adopted new names. Much of modernday education, business, politics, etc., in Mexico and in the Antilles, as well as among U.S. Latino/as, depend on the new versions of the rationalist mentality. The powerful elites of the Right, as well as most of the Left, share the same basic worldview that sees the people’s religion as an unfortunate (or at best, folkloric) vestige of the past. In their common view, the best use of popular religious symbol is its instrumentalization. Most U.S. Latino/a conservative Protestants typically misunderstand popular Catholicism, or misinterpret it as a proselytizing argument. The nineteenth century saw the U.S. purchase of Florida and the U.S. military conquest and annexation of Mexico’s northern half. Florida’s Latino/a Catholics, mostly gathered in the cities of

St. Augustine and Pensacola, chose one of two paths when the purchase from Spain occurred: a few decided to stay in the new American territory, while most elected to leave Florida and settle in Spanish Cuba. It would not be until several decades later when large communities of Cuban Catholics settled again in the peninsula, fleeing the increasingly repressive Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba. The new settlers established themselves in Tampa and Key West. Smaller groups of Cubans went to Philadelphia and New York. There are indications that in Tampa and Key West there were some forms of Latina/o popular religion during the last decades of the nineteenth century. One must be very careful on this point because of the religious apathy that accompanied much of the Cuban nineteenth century. The Southwest, however, had a different story than Florida. The lands from Texas to California were annexed by the

Catholicism United States after military intervention, and many Mexican towns and villages were occupied. Some of these had been founded three centuries before, and the presence of Catholicism in them was as old. The ‘‘dual-level’’ Christianity of Mexico had also become part of the religious life of the Southwest (these lands were still, after all, part of Mexico). Here, however, popular Catholicism seems to have had so heavy an influence that even the local ecclesiastical establishment—too weak to claim power on its own—had to actively promote it, thereby publicly linking it to the clergy. The same fundamental reasons of defense and buffer, evident in the rest of Mexico at that time, were operative in the northern frontier as the clergy allied itself with the symbols of popular religion. The new American Southwest had been Mexico’s remote northern border outpost. Not many of the Mexican progressive elites of the period would have chosen to leave the big cities in the south and come to settle the northern frontier. Even the few residents who pretended to belong to these elites were numerically insignificant and ultimately powerless. Popular Catholicism remained the de facto religion of the vast majority of the population. Its shape, functions, and sociodoctrinal developmental process paralleled the rest of Mexico. In other words, the popular Christianity that preceded the American annexations was at its core the pre-Tridentine traditio. It was mestizo, but in this case because mestizos were the ones who mainly settled here. This religion assumed as normative the Catholicism that had been interpreted by earlier ‘‘popular’’ generations in southern Mexico. However, the

| 103

reevangelization efforts, so important during much of the late colonial period, had little effect in the lands from Texas to California. But then came the American military conquest and subsequent annexations. For the first time Latino/a Catholicism faced the Reformation and a type of Christianity that was not Catholic. The confrontation happened between, on one side, an anti-Catholic Protestant nation, increasingly aware of its military might and apparently convinced of its moral superiority (its ‘‘Manifest Destiny’’), and, on the other side, a conquered people, suddenly and violently deprived of right and land, whose religion had long roots in the medieval past that the new conquerors loathed. The Catholicism of the people was not the post-Tridentine reformed version, by now common in Catholic Europe and in the eastern American states. The people’s religion and culture had assumed as self-evident that truth was ‘‘Catholic.’’ But after the U.S. territorial annexations, to be Catholic in Florida and the Southwest was to be poor and conquered. Furthermore, the religion of the people was soon going to face another confrontation—the arrival of post-Tridentine reformed Catholics.

After Trent and the Reformation Arrive The implementation of the decrees and doctrines of the Council of Trent had been very selective in Spanish America. Tridentine Catholicism, arriving at least a century after the conquest, became identified mostly with the Spaniards and White criollos, and limited to their social circles. There were so few Protestants in Spain’s colonies that the European

104 |

Catholicism

urgency for reform seemed foreign. One result, as we have seen, was the preservation of pre-Tridentine Christianity in the Western Hemisphere. The ‘‘reevangelization’’ of the late colonial period attempted to bring Tridentine Catholicism to the people, but only with very limited success. By then even the official religion was undergoing a profound change that would eventually lead to the centralizing Romanization started by Pius IX and continued by most of his successors (that would drastically transform the face of worldwide Catholicism). Latino/as were forced to deal with the Church of Trent immediately after the American military occupation and territorial annexation of Florida and of the northern half of Mexico. The people’s Catholicism, fundamentally untouched by the Tridentine reforms, suddenly confronted a new type of Catholic Church that seemed always on the defensive, that emphasized doctrinal knowledge (and guilt) over experience and affect, and that emphatically devalued lay participation. Worst of all, this ‘‘new’’ Church supported the American conquest of the Southwest and treated the majority of Catholics (in the conquered lands) as second-class Catholics and citizens. Therefore, Latina/o Catholicism in the United States at the start of the twenty-first century is displaying the effects and consequences of this first century and a half of confrontations with post-Tridentine Roman Christianity, with the American heirs of the Protestant Reformation, and with the modern world (culturally disseminated mainly by the Calvinist and Roman theological traditions). Today we can understand why the Catholicism of the American eastern

states appeared to be on the defensive. It was. And perhaps this in turn led to American Catholics’ perceiving public, popular Latino/a Catholicism as superstition in need of correction and catechesis. Compounding this perception, however, was the growing influence and control of the Irish in the U.S. Church, especially when we know that many of the Irish became racially motivated opponents of the Mexicans in the annexed lands. The American (specifically Irish) Catholics’ need for acceptance and respect in the wider U.S. society led many to conceive of Latina/o religion as an added weight they did not want to carry, as well as a source of embarrassment for their reformed Tridentine Church. Some of the public social celebrations of popular Catholicism were soon transformed into more private family expressions. The new Church was organized according to the ecclesiastical patterns developed in the eastern states. Although most Catholics in the Southwest were Latino/a, their participation and leadership in the institutions of religion were drastically diminished and often avoided. The people’s alternative seems to have been withdrawal into the universe of popular Catholicism—it was theirs, and it made familiar sense of God and Christianity. By taking refuge in this religious world, Latino/as were also preserving one of the most important roots of their cultural identity as well as their very ancient type of Christianity. However, for the new EuropeanAmerican ecclesiastical establishment in the Southwest, Latina/o flight into traditional religion implied that the new, ‘‘White’’ Catholic elites could ignore Latino/a Christianity and further emphasize, to the Protestant majority, that

Catholicism

| 105

PATRICIO FERNANDEZ FLORES (1929–) Patricio Fernandez Flores was born on July 26, 1929, in Ganado, Texas, the seventh of nine children to Patricio and Trinidad Fernandez de Flores. He dropped out of high school at the age of 14 due to his father’s illness and worked in the cotton fields to help support his family. He returned to high school and graduated at the age of 19 from the Christian Brothers’ Kirwan High School. Patricio Flores was ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Church on May 26, 1956. He became the nation’s first Mexican American bishop on May 5, 1970. This humble bishop greatly lives his motto ‘‘Laborabo non mihi sed omnibus’’—‘‘I will work not for myself but for others.’’ He co-founded both PADRES, an organization of Hispanic priests whose purpose was to call attention to issues concerning Hispanics in the church, and MACC, the Mexican American Cultural Center in San Antonio, Texas. This founder of the National Hispanic Scholarship fund remains the only archbishop to professionally make a record album. The proceeds from the sales were used to raise funds for MACC. In 2003, he was honored by the San Antonio Spurs basketball team with a championship ring. At the time of his retirement in 2005, Patricio Fernandez Flores was the country’s longest-reigning archbishop. —NDA

Latina/o Catholicism was ‘‘not really Catholic’’—only a marginal anachronism from the past in need of instruction. Because of racist and other cultural biases, European American Catholics had, thereby, assumed as true and valid the Protestant Reformation’s premise that pre-Tridentine Christianity was deviant. As long as those dominant in the Catholic Church in the Southwest doctrinally and pastorally ignored Latino/as, and as long as the latter maintained some ritual links with parishes and continued to identify themselves as Catholics, Latina/os could keep their popular Catholicism with only occasional hierarchical interference. Some local Latino/as even joined the ranks of the clergy, but their meager numbers and lack of real institutional influence did not alter the fundamentally ritual (i.e., ‘‘devotional’’) relationship that existed between priests and people since the colonial days.

After the 1960s: the Impacts of Modernity, Vatican II, and Social Movements This uneasy truce between the official European American (mostly Irish) Church and Latino/a popular Catholicism, however, started to unravel with the Second Vatican Council (1963– 1965) and the social and cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The council’s call for increased lay participation and leadership, and its many other reforms of the Church, added to the civil rights, farm labor, and Chicano/ a movements, and helped create a cultural atmosphere in which the dominance and certainties of the White EuropeanAmerican clergy began to be questioned by Latina/o Catholics. Several elements of the contemporary world came together to present a growing challenge to the ecclesiastically

106 |

Catholicism

dominant. There is, for example, the influence that decades of access to European American mass media have had on the sacral worldview underlying and sustaining much of Latino/a Catholicism. There too are the efforts of public education in communicating the values and worldview of modernity. It is difficult to imagine how the long exposure to European American society (heir to the Calvinist religious tradition, imbued of individualism, and increasingly secularized) could not have affected the very foundations and premises of the Latina/ o religious and communal universe. The growth of urbanization and of a citybased job market after World War II began to deeply impact the stable, ruralbased traditional extended family and community relationships so fundamental to Latino/a religion. Finally, the upsurge of immigration (to American cities) from Mexico and the Antilles added huge concentrations of unrelated Latino/a nuclear families in large metropolitan areas. This immigrant wave (which has not ended) brings people who are not accustomed to being treated as foreigners in their societies or Church. The poverty, discrimination, and consequences thereof suffered by so many generations of Latina/os seem to have socially justified, in the eyes of the larger society, the perpetuation of the marginal role of the Latino/a populations. The dominant ideology has long attempted to explain and ‘‘prove’’ the supposed reasons for this marginal status. Needless to say, sadly and precisely as a symptom of their social vulnerability, some Latino/as have internalized the ‘‘proofs’’ put forth by the dominant ideology, thereby becoming willing agents of society’s continued marginalization of their own people.

Regrettably, the European American Catholic Church frequently and uncritically assumed these ideological justifications, thereby reaffirming the ‘‘validity’’ of society’s arguments of prejudice within its own ecclesiastical milieu. The Church and its clergy many times became a willing accomplice in the promotion of Latino/a internalization of the dominant ideology, and in the preservation and justification of the structures of dominance. Demographics (and probably not the evident long-standing pastoral need) have finally begun to make the European American Church take notice. The European American Catholics who have actively and repeatedly, as well as out of conviction, sided with the ecclesial and sociocultural needs of Latino/a Catholics are and have been, unfortunately, only a minority in the Church. Whatever the motive, the alternatives offered today by official Catholicism (‘‘progressive’’ or ‘‘conservative’’) to U.S. Latina/os seem clear and are certainly not new. They become religiously ‘‘Americanized’’ or face the continued onslaught of accusations of ignorance and superstition, followed by pastoral activity geared to ‘‘correctly’’ educate in ‘‘real’’ Roman Christianity. The American Church’s attempts at understanding Latino/a Catholicism have frequently seemed to be motivated by the hope of the early and definitive demise of that which is specifically ‘‘Latina/o’’ in Latino/a Catholicism. The current trend at ‘‘multiculturalizing’’ the American Church perhaps conceals the obvious, and not surprising, fact that those who set the pastoral agendas, determine the doctrinal parameters, and direct the implementation strategies for the so-called ‘‘multicultural’’

Catholicism

| 107

LAS HERMANAS The organization known as Las Hermanas (the sisters) began in 1971 when 50, mainly Latina, religious women and nuns, were gathered by Gloria Gallardo, S.H.G., and Gregoria Ortega, O.L.V.M. These women primarily gathered to discuss how to better serve the needs of Spanish-speaking Catholics in the United States of America. The national organization of Las Hermanas was formed through a charter granted by the state of Texas on February 22, 1972. Four goals were set at the initial meeting. These four goals would direct the organization for over three decades: (1) to activate leadership among themselves and the laity; (2) to effect social change; (3) to contribute to the cultural renewal of La Raza; and (4) to educate their Anglo-dominant congregations on the needs of Spanish-speaking communities. Originally, membership to Las Hermanas was open only to native Spanish-speaking Hispanic sisters. Yet, early in its history, all Latina Catholic women were allowed to join, regardless of country of origin. Las Hermanas has played integral roles in influencing policy decisions for major ecclesial bodies and in establishing the Mexican American Cultural Center in San Antonio, Texas. Las Hermanas published a quarterly newsletter called Informes and has been a strong supporter of the United Farmworkers. —NDA

dioceses and parishes of the future are still the European- American Catholics. Therefore, even this apparently wellintentioned effort at cultural diversity does not question the structures of dominance or the unspoken premise that U.S. Latino/a Catholicism to the degree that it is distinctly Latino/a must be left behind. The U.S. Latina/o responses to the alternatives offered by the European American Church have been creative attempts at religious and cultural survival. There is still, for example, the learned pattern of flight into the traditional religious universe. Some Latino/ as (perhaps the majority among a certain age group, and among many recent immigrants) do choose to perpetuate the forms and vision of pre-Tridentine Catholicism. They are probably not aware of its having been the official religion until a few centuries ago, nor are

they familiar with the long history of Christianity that preceded the Reformation. For them, simply, this is their Catholicism, their way of being Christian, and that reason suffices. There have been other responses to the official Church’s alternatives. These alternatives have been, in different ways and to varying degrees, culturally optimizing paths for preserving traditional religion and its sustaining worldview vis-a`-vis the always encroaching world of modernity and post-Tridentine Catholicism. These newer responses are compromises with a European American reality perceived as, at best, overwhelming or, at worst, dangerously invasive. It may be argued that nonparochial lay movements and associations, such as the Cursillos de Cristiandad or even the traditional cofradı´as and other postVatican II movimientos, have allowed for the formation of an alternative

108 |

Catholicism

ENCUENTROS Encuentros or meetings refer to national consultative gatherings of Hispanic Catholics called by their bishops usually preceded by a previous, grassroots consultation. Each Encuentro sought greater representation so as to make specific recommendations. The first occurred in 1972, the second in 1977, and the third in 1985, which resulted in the ‘‘National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic Ministry.’’ That ‘‘Plan’’ was updated by the document proceeding from the fourth Encuentro (2000), ‘‘Encuentro and Mission.’’ The last Encuentro, held in 2006, was especially for youth and young adults. However, the process itself is more important than the initiatives (usually underfunded) or documents (sometimes disregarded) that they engendered. The consultations provided for a remarkably democratic consultation within a hierarchic church and increased representation of all Hispanic groups, both genders, every age cohort, as well as a wide variety of socioeconomic sectors. This created national networking among Hispanics first begun by groups such as the cursillo, but through the Encuentros much expanded, connected to the bishops, and sustained over time. Thus, many see the Encuentro process as a defining feature of U.S. Hispanic Catholic ministry after the Second Vatican Council. —KGD

Latino/a Church within the broader community of Catholicism. This Latina/o Church has often acted, for all practical purposes, as parallel parish and diocese, permitting a high degree of participation and leadership to Latino/as otherwise marginalized from the European American–controlled parishes and dioceses. Through the acceptance of varying degrees of preferably nonintrusive institutional links to the hierarchy, Latina/os managed to preserve a considerable degree of autonomy within their lay movements. A close examination of the latter would show how deep the influence is of the symbols and the worldview of popular Catholicism on these movements. Acts of public piety, for example, are consistently encouraged, praised, and performed. Some of the associations have been specifically established for the purpose of preserving traditional forms of devotion and communal prayer.

Through this lay-led, parallel Catholicism, Latino/as have managed to preserve and reinterpret significant elements of their shared worldview, together with their emphasis on family and community. The movements have also served as important vehicles for the dissemination of many of the doctrinal contents of popular Catholicism, though sufficiently adapted (and concealed) in forms acceptable to the modern ecclesiastical realities. The European American Church’s reaction to the Latino/a lay movements and associations has been frequently adverse, demanding that local (i.e., mostly White European American) clergy exercise control over the people’s alternative Catholic ‘‘spaces.’’ Increasingly perceived by many Latina/os as the institution’s sociological need to control, the Church’s reactions have at times been understood by the people as one more battle in the European American

Catholicism

| 109

PADRES Priests Associated for Education, Social, and Religious Rights (PADRES) is the English name for the organization known as Padres Asociados para Derechos Religiosos Educativos y Sociales. Founded in February 1970 in Tucson, Arizona, 25 native Chicano priests created PADRES as a specialized organization to maximize their responsibilities in the struggle for social justice. Rapidly growing in membership and importance, PADRES developed a clear set of recommendations for social justice action on behalf of Latino/as. At the same time, it promoted education in church leadership skills that linked this social justice mission with the emerging Theology of Liberation. Finally, it motivated a growing cohort of Latino priests nationwide to support each other in ministry by developing a set of common goals. Evidence that Latino priests were capable leaders encouraged ordinaries to appoint PADRES members as bishops. PADRES contributed to implementing Encuentro decisions by providing progressive church leadership, often receiving substantial grants for its work. At the same time, PADRES altered its rules to allow non-Mexican Latino members. In 1976, the annual meeting was held in New York City with the specific goal of inviting the existing Association of Hispanic Priests (ASH) to join with PADRES, a merger accomplished some 15 years later. —ASA

clergy’s relentless struggle to dismantle Latino/a religion. It is important to note that as Latina/o popular Catholicism attempts to survive by somehow adapting to post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism, it has begun to modify and reinterpret the doctrinal contents and symbols that have traditionally distinguished it. The most telling example of the contemporary reinterpretation of symbols and contents refers to the Bible. It is highly inaccurate to think that western Christianity did not know the Bible before Trent and the Reformation. In the European villages, where most people lived and did not know how to read, and where medieval culture was very much alive, the Bible’s contents were presented graphically through art, autos sacramentales, storytelling, and preaching. The same was true in pre-Tridentine colonial Christianity in the Americas. The Bible was known at the popular level, but

through performed or visual symbol and the spoken word, not through reading the printed page because most Christians were illiterate. In others words, the Bible was known in late medieval Europe and early colonial Americas as it was known in early Christianity. However, as the literacy rate increased, the direct reading of the text of the Bible became widespread. There is no doubt that, after Vatican II, the Church’s insistence on biblical reading was heeded by Latina/o Catholics. The increased numbers of Latino/a Protestants have also been a strong influence. Whatever the reasons for this scriptural awakening, the written text of the Bible has been taken out of the hands and control of the ecclesiastical institution and is now being interpreted by the people. Interestingly, this increase in familiarity with the sacred texts of Christians does not seem to have decidedly contributed

110 |

Catholicism

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HISPANIC PRIESTS OF THE USA Established in 1990, the National Association of Hispanic Priests (ANHS) was founded to provide fraternity and support for the approximately 2,500 Latino Catholic priests within the United States. Known in Spanish as La Asociacio´n Nacional de Sacerdotes Hispanos, EE.UU., ANHS is an organization that collaborates with bishops and the laity to implement the National Plan for Hispanic Ministry and to develop approaches for meaningful ministries among Latino priests. The main activity of the organization is to hold an annual national conference, where a specific aspect of the priestly ministry is studied from a Hispanic perspective. The conference attempts to provide a national forum where the personal experiences of Latino priests are shared in the hope of developing a common vision that will help in understanding and solving the problems that arise in different Latina/o communities and among Hispanic priests. Additionally, the Association stands ready to take official positions on social justice with respect to the problems that affect priests and their Latina/o communities. To this end, ANHS attempts to be the official voice of Latino priests belonging to the organization. —MAD

to the exodus of many Latina/os from Catholic Christianity. Their departure, say most significant studies, can be directly explained by White European American pastoral and institutional disregard of Latino/as in the U.S. Catholic Church. It seems, in fact, that increased familiarity with the Bible among Latina/ o Catholics is strengthening the symbols and fundamental worldview of popular Catholicism through a new process of reinterpretation, this time biblical. There is another common response to the either/or alternatives offered to Latino/a Catholicism. This is Pentecostalism. Latina/o Pentecostalism has shown itself an important, culturally acceptable vehicle for the preservation of the preTridentine and premodern religious worldview. Although obviously and consciously rejecting many medieval and colonial Catholic symbols and practices, Pentecostalism has managed to hold on to the very ‘‘sacramental,’’ symbolic ethos and worldview that made pre-

Reformation Christianity possible. Many of these symbols have been ‘‘reformed’’ and some modern ones added, but the fundamental structures and premises of the traditionally religious Latino/a worldview have basically remained within Pentecostalism. One cannot understand the current popularity of the Catholic charismatic movement among Latina/os, or the ever-increasing number of Pentecostal churches in the barrios, without realizing the seemingly crucial role of cultural and religious preservation that the Pentecostal movement in its Catholic or Protestant versions is playing. It is well documented that the growth of the charismatic or Pentecostal communities is in direct relation to people’s perceived sense of threat or invasion at the hands of modernity. In these studies, the Christian Churches of any denomination that appear more allied to the modern worldview and against the traditional religious and communal relations, will suffer considerable

Catholicism

| 111

UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) traces its roots to World War I. Then called the National Catholic War Council, it secured monies and developed programs for the spiritual and temporal care of the U.S. military. It has since turned its concern toward the general welfare of the country—with particular emphasis on the Catholic Church—and has changed its name periodically to reflect its vision. The USCCB includes over 45 departments, ranging from evangelization, family, social justice, and liturgy, and 16 committees. Bishops chair the committees, and laity staffs the departments. U.S. Bishop’s ministry of Hispanics began through the leadership of San Antonio Archbishop Robert E. Lucey, who organized an office for the Spanishspeaking people in 1945. The National Catholic Welfare Council (a former name of the USCCB) would later include this office within its Social Development department. This office evolved into the Secretariat of Hispanic Affairs in 1974 and would organize three national Encuentros (1972, 1977, 1986) developing pastoral leadership and collaboration between the Hispanic faithful and U.S. bishops. The collaborative discussions from the Encuentros would be the source for the bishops’ ‘‘National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic Ministry’’ in 1987. —OJN

numerical losses. It is, therefore, highly ironic that the Roman Catholic Church, which engaged in the ideological battles that followed the Reformation supposedly on the side of tradition, should now be an uncritical bearer of the Reformation’s and modernity’s theological premises vis-a` -vis pre-Tridentine Latina/o Catholicism. It almost seems that the contemporary confrontation of Latino/a Catholicism with the European American Roman Catholic Church is the modern version of the sixteenth-century Reformation that Latina/o religion never had to face. This time, however, it is official Roman Catholicism that has taken the side of the Protestant reformers, arguing through similar logic and with surprisingly similar doctrinal assumptions. Unfortunately, Latino/a Catholicism had been robbed (by the consequences of military occupation, territorial annexations, prejudice, and poverty) of most

theological and institutional means of defense and self-affirmation needed in this new Reformation. There are, evidently, many Latina/o individuals across the country who participate in the life of the official Roman Catholic Church. There are Latino/a Catholics who are very well educated in theology, who are successful in ministry, ordained or not, and who are respected leaders of their faith communities. There are even a few Latino/a diocesan bishops, and a few auxiliary bishops. But all of these individuals, taken together do not alter the fact that popular Catholicism remains the manner in and through which most Latina/os are Catholic.

The Shape of the Future? Arguably, the day will come when a majority of U.S. Latino/as will be less ‘‘popular’’ in their Catholicism. Will this

112 |

Catholicism

ACHTUS The Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS) was founded in 1988 in Ruidoso, New Mexico. A forum for the distinctive theological scholarship emerging from Latino/as, ACHTUS ensures agency for the growing number of Catholic Latina/o theologians and the Hispanic communities they accompany by promoting research and critical theological reflection within the context of U.S. Hispanic experiences and by privileging teologı´a de conjunto as a method for engagement. Through membership categories and annual colloquia, ACHTUS creates and sustains professional networks of Catholic Latina/o theologians in conversation with nonLatino/a theologians engaged in U.S. Hispanic religious experience, as well as with Latino/a Protestant theologians and Hispanic scholars in other academic disciplines. In response to the marginalization of Latino/a perspectives in the theological mainstream, ACHTUS established the Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology in 1993, with founding editor Orlando Espı´n. After 10 printed volumes of quarterly issues, in 2006, the journal was reconstituted online as the Electronic Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology under the direction of the second editor Jean-Pierre Ruiz. One of the largest Catholic professional theological associations in the world, ACHTUS confers two awards, the Virgilio Elizondo Award and the ACHTUS Award, in recognition of those individuals and institutions that advance the mission of the Academy. —CMN

transformation imply that their Latina/o cultural and religious specificity or identity will be lost? Will the future show that the European American ‘‘religious invasion’’ will have finally succeeded? The answer to these questions is probably ‘‘no,’’ if present trends continue. The demographic growth of Latino/as will make it impossible for the European American Church to remain what it is. It too will be changed. In other words, the future will probably bring a profound and thorough cultural mestizaje or mulataje, and a new style of American Catholicism will develop. It is important to note that there are clear, although mostly local, early indications of what this future Catholic mestizaje or mulataje might look like. There are signs that Latina/os are beginning to take ownership of the U.S. Catholic

Church as their own, as well as to exert pressure on the White dominant structures and demand changes. New organizations have been established that will have, and have begun to have, deep impact on mainstream American Catholicism: the National Catholic Council on Hispanic Ministry, the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States, and the Instituto de Liturgia Hispana, among others. A respected theological quarterly, the Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, founded in 1993, continues to bring Latino/a Catholic scholarship to a growing academic public. The relentless confrontation of Latina/o popular Catholicism with the White U.S. Catholic denominational power structures and policies, plus the equally relentless struggle with and need for

CELAM | 113 understanding Latino/as who have become identified with other forms of Christianity, have impacted and will continue to impact Latina/o Catholicism. Given the current and foreseeable social, cultural, and political U.S. context, the resulting transformations within Latino/a Catholicism will probably lead to the stabilization of the present rates of denominational/religious affiliations among Latina/os but with the ‘‘unchurched,’’ not the ‘‘secular,’’ becoming the unexpected yet fastest growing Latino/a religious group. Latino/a Catholicism will continue because it is too important religiously and culturally. It is the modern heir of the long Christian tradition of Iberia, begun during the apostolic period, developed during the unique medieval history of the peninsula, brought to and planted in the Americas with the establishment of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, surviving mostly unaffected by the Reformation and Trent. However, since the nineteenth-century U.S. military occupation and territorial annexations of Florida and the Southwest, Latina/o Catholicism has been repeatedly confronted by Protestant Christianity and Tridentine Catholicism, thus being forced into a complex process of sociocultural change that is provoking a significant religious transformation. Given current and projected demographic realities, it can be assumed that Latino/a Catholicism will become more intertwined with the American Catholic Church, as the latter discovers among Latina/os its main or only chance of relevant survival while both are changed into an internally diverse complex whose contours are still unclear. Orlando O. Espı´n

References and Further Reading Espı´n, Orlando O. The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). Espı´n, Orlando O. Grace and Humanness: Theological Reflections Because of Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007). Goizueta, Roberto S. Caminemos con Jesu´s: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Matovina, Timothy, and Gary Riebe-Estrella, eds. Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). Nanko-Ferna´ndez, Carmen M. ‘‘¡Cuidado! The Church Who Cares and Pastoral Hostility.’’ New Theology Review 19, no. 1 (2006): 24–33. Nanko-Ferna´ndez, Carmen M. ‘‘We Are Not Your Diversity, We Are the Church!: Ecclesiological Reflections from the Marginalized Many.’’ Perspectivas 10 (2006). Sandoval, Moise´s. On the Move: A History of the Hispanic Church in the United States, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006).

CELAM Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano or Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) was established in 1956 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with statutes approved in 1974, representing 22 Catholic bishops’ conferences of Latin America and the Caribbean. Its aim is to coordinate the work of the Catholic Church in the Americas, focusing on the adaptations of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) to promote creative strategies for spreading the Catholic

114 |

CELAM

faith, as well as the spiritual, social, political, and economic needs of the Latino/a people. General conferences at Medellı´n, Colombia (1968), Puebla, Mexico (1979), Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (1992), and Aparecida, Brazil (2007) resulted in affirming the Church’s ‘‘preferential option for the poor,’’ the concept of ‘‘structural sin,’’ ‘‘ecclesial base communities’’ (comunidades eclesiales de base), and the theological/pastoral method ‘‘to see, to judge, to act.’’ At Medellı´n it was explained that the Church’s preferential option for the poor meant that the Church ‘‘must favor any honest effort to promote the transformation and elevation of the poor and of all those who live in sub-human social conditions.’’ This entails, ‘‘not supporting systems and structures that hide and support serious and oppressive inequalities [structures of sin] between the social classes and the citizens of a country.’’ This is best accomplished through small reflection groups (ecclesial base communities), especially in rural and slum city areas, where the poor can reflect through the method ‘‘see–judge–act’’ on their daily reality in light of the word of God. This will aid them in the process of personal conversion and salvation through a communal living of faith and love as well as empowering them to work for the transformation of the structures of sin into more just and humane structures that promote and support the well-being of all the members of society, especially of the social and material outcasts of society. With CELAM headquartered in Medellı´n there were established departments, publications, and training centers throughout the continent. Research centers and intellectual networking became

common among the different pastoral agents throughout the Americas. Based in Bogota´ (Colombia), CELAM pushed the Second Vatican Council toward a more progressive stance. During the next four years, CELAM prepared the Medellı´n Conference officially supporting the liberation theology founded by Dominican friar Gustavo Gutie´ rrez in his 1972 essay, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation. CELAM support to liberation theology was frowned upon by the Vatican, with Pope Paul VI trying to slow the movement after the 1962-1965 Council. Cardinal Antonio Samore´, in charge of relations between the Roman Curia and the CELAM as the leader of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, was ordered to put an end to this orientation. With Bishop Alfonso Lo´ pez Trujillo’s election in 1972 as general secretary of CELAM, conservatives gained control of this organization, as well as of the Roman Curia. Lo´ pez Trujillo stayed CELAM’s general secretary until 1984. However, at the 1979 CELAM’s Conference of Puebla, conservative reorientation of the CELAM was met by strong opposition from the progressive part of the clergy, which defined the concept of a preferential option for the poor. But with the election of Pope John Paul II, conservatives took control of both the Roman Curia and the CELAM. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was charged with bringing back the Vatican’s authority in the Third World. In 1984 and 1986, the Vatican twice condemned liberation theology, accusing it of Marxist influence. In his travel to Managua, Nicaragua, John Paul II harshly condemned what he called the ‘‘popular Church’’ rooted in the ecclesial base communities and

CELAM | 115 spoke against the Nicaraguan clergy’s tendencies to support the Sandinistas. ´ scar Andre´s Rodrı´guez MaraCardinal O diaga was CELAM’s general secretary from 1995 to 1999, and Cardinal Luis Aponte Martı´nez was general secretary. Bishop Raymundo Damasceno Assis is the current general secretary (2008).

Medellín (1968) When the first sketches of a theology of liberation appeared at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, several ‘‘liberationist’’ options for an urgently needed basic structural change in Latin American society seemed possible. In the meantime, something similar to a coupe within the Latin American Catholic hierarchy was taking place. After CELAM’s conference in Medellı´n in 1968, the new liberationist pastoral and theological ideas quickly spread to the entire Church in Latin American and the Caribbean. Medellı´n ushered in a new spirit directed toward the preferential option of the poor. In essence, this special preference called on the Church to strive for social justice in concert with, and on behalf of, the poverty stricken. Medellı´n called for the defense of the rights of the oppressed; a recognition of the plight of the poorest segments of the population; the development of ecclesial base communities (CEBs); a correction of prices for Third World products to ensure just terms for raw material exports; and a denunciation of the unjust actions of world powers perpetrated against weak nations. This was a radical condemnation of most Latin American governments of the time and the international economic system that had for nearly five centuries been, at the very least, tacitly supported by the traditional

Roman Catholic hierarchy. Every year hundreds of clergy and religious attended the training courses offered by CELAM’s liberationist instructors. However, the general attitude of questioning that followed the Second Vatican Council led to public confrontations between groups of liberationist priests, the religious, and most bishops. The reaction of the hierarchy was inevitable. However, there were contrary movements even with the Vatican. The encyclical Octogesima Adveniens of Pope Paul VI in 1971 reflected the impact of liberation theology on the official social teaching of the Church. Noticing the increasing interest of Catholics in socialism, Paul VI abstained from issuing condemnations and simply urged caution and discernment. That same year a worldwide Synod of Bishops that took place in Rome recognized that the efforts for social justice are a ‘‘constituent dimension’’ of the teaching of the Gospel. That action, which they explicitly called ‘‘liberation,’’ was central and nonperipheral to the mission of the Church. Hence, while liberation theology was provoking controversy within Catholicism, some of its central tenets were becoming official Church positions, especially through the work of certain sectors of CELAM and the documents produced by its general conferences.

Puebla (1979) The gathering of CELAM in Mexico in 1979 can be seen as the struggle between the three different established paradigms among the Latin American and Caribbean bishops. On one side were the ‘‘conservatives,’’ who emphasized hierarchical authority and doctrinal orthodoxy. This group consciously fought

116 |

CELAM

liberation theology because it perceived a blatant Marxism in its theologizing and praxis. On the other end was the liberationist group whose force lay in the ecclesial base communities and who insisted that the Church had to adopt a lifestyle in agreement with its service function. Not only were abuses denounced but also the structures that caused them, and sometimes the capitalist system as a whole. Both groups represented the tendencies of the minorities. To the largest group belonged those who could be called ‘‘centrist,’’ whose main preoccupation was the unity of the Church. With the conservatives, this group shared its preoccupation for ecclesiastical authority, and with the liberationists, a conviction on the necessity to defend human rights, at least in extreme circumstances. These figures played the main role in directing the Puebla conference, while the conservatives and liberationists exercised pressure by changing words, adding some passages, and objecting to others. The extremely long final document that was produced at Puebla was not very convincing. The liberationists congratulated themselves because there were no condemnations included. The document used occasionally strong language to denounce existing injustices. The general tone, however, stayed developmentalist, not liberationist. For example, the bishops frequently requested greater ‘‘participation and communion’’ in the Church and society instead of liberation from unjust ecclesial and political structures. These words composed clearly a new type of terminology to replace the vocabulary of liberation. Each one of the three tendencies could find positive elements. What Puebla called the preference for the poor was probably the most

positive element for the liberationist side. The conservatives could also find many citable phrases and complete subjects, especially the frequent condemnations of Marxism and violence, as well as the affirmation of hierarchical authority. The centrists could indicate the insistence on ‘‘the properly religious’’ role of the Church. Since in the Puebla document three types of analysis and theology coexisted, it was clear that the tensions would continue within the Church.

Santo Domingo (1992) At Santo Domingo, far more than at the preceding CELAM conclaves, the Vatican’s Curia sought to impose its will— an effort that met with considerable, but not total, success. The curial representatives seemed bent on limiting the autonomy of the bishops’ conferences of Latin America and minimizing the kind of collegiality that had been forcefully affirmed by the Second Vatican Council. Yet, the document reaffirmed some of the liberationists’ emphases, particularly ‘‘the preferential option for the poor . . . as solemnly proclaimed at Medellin and Puebla.’’ That option is now described as ‘‘evangelical,’’ no doubt in deference to John Paul II’s call for a new evangelization. But it is also termed ‘‘irrevocable.’’ Breaking little new ground, the document is essentially a holding action. Liberationists can take heart that the document is not retrogressive; it does not betray Medellı´n and Puebla. It reendorses the ecclesial base communities. Above all, it recapitulates the preferential option for the poor—not in the sentimental sense of extending charity to the poor, but in the sense of being in solidarity with them and helping empower them to determine their own destiny. It also

CELAM | 117 singles out for ‘‘special denunciation’’ acts of violence against the rights of children, women, and ‘‘the poorest groups in society—peasants, indigenous people and Afro-Americans.’’

Aparecida (2007) From an historical perspective, one can argue that in the meeting of CELAM that took place in Medellı´n, in 1968, liberation theology made its de´but, that Puebla, in 1979, was its watermark, and Santo Domingo, in 1992, its Waterloo. Aparecida, in 2007, was to a certain extent the separating of liberation theology’s wheat from its chaff. The project of Aparecida is ambitious. It is nothing less than a radical inversion of the ecclesiastical system. In accordance with the Aparecida project, everything is going to be oriented toward the all-encompassing evangelizing mission of the Church. In the first place, Aparecida decided to return to the method of Medellı´n and Puebla, that is, to the scheme see– judge–act of liberation theology abandoned at Santo Domingo. There is a very strong insistence on that continuity. This continuity with Medellı´n and Puebla is especially made manifest in two of its fundamental subjects: the option for the poor and the ecclesial base communities. These were precisely the two subjects that had been attacked or that dealt with indifference, as being things of the past, especially in the years preceding the conference. Aparecida explicitly speaks about the ecclesial base communities recognizing that they were the signal for the option for the poor. There is also recognition that these base communities were not able to develop despite their value, and that several bishops had placed

Pope Benedict XVI presides over Mass at the opening of the fifth general meeting of CELAM (Latin American bishops’ conference) in front of Brazil’s most famous shrine on May 13, 2007, in Aparecida, Brazil. (Getty Images)

restrictions upon them. Now the bishops want to raise those restrictions and give new life to those communities. Aparecida also renews the option for the poor. There is a certain accent of repentance and a consciousness that that option had lost its urgency in the pastoral work of the Church in the Americas: it was no longer lived as a priority. Aparecida enumerates the new categories of the poor that arose or have developed in the past decades: women, youth, the destitute, the unemployed, migrants, displaced peoples, landless farmers, child prostitutes, victims of abortion, drug addicts, the mentally challenged, victims of

118 |

CELAM

incurable diseases, the lonely, the kidnapped, victims of violence, the elderly, and prisoners. In other words, not only those who suffer exploitation and oppression but all those who are socially excluded are now included within the Church’s preferential option for the poor. Finally, Aparecida assumes contemporary challenges: ecology and environmental problems, and the need for an urban pastoral. The program for urban pastoral is quite complete and defines tasks that are going to demand the collaboration of millions of formed people. Hence, this is evident in the document’s heavy emphasis on the disciplemissionary character of all the baptized. Therefore, there are also some calls to change the way the Church is to work for justice. Because of the unprecedented advances as well as setbacks in the post1978 wave of democratization in Latin America, from a region dominated by authoritarian regimes to one in which openly authoritarian regimes are the rare exception, an impetus to the thought that a political solution to the problems beseeching this part of the world became possible. Hence Aparecida makes a special call to those laymen and laywomen in decision-making positions to embrace the cause of the poor and realize their political apostolate based on the principles of the social doctrine of the Church.

CELAM’s Impact on U.S. Hispanics U.S. Latino/a theologians have appropriated many of the key insights of CELAM’s documents as well as liberation theology and transformed them to develop a theology that would sink its

roots in, respond to, and accompany the faith experience of the Hispanic communities in the United States. One of the key concepts that has been appropriated from CELAM and its ecclesial base communities with its theological/pastoral method is the notion of teologı´a de conjunto (collaborative theology). This process implies a method that stresses direct involvement and analysis of reality as necessary first steps to the author’s option to theologize from within the Latina/o social and pastoral context. Pastoral de conjunto (collaborative pastoral ministry) ensures that Hispanic theologizing is grounded in human experience, especially the experience of oppression. U.S. Latino/a theology attempts to give a voice to the voiceless. As members of the community, in the pastoral de conjunto theologians also see themselves as mestizos, as both Americans and Latinos, articulating their own theology, much like CELAM’s attempt to inculturate the adaptations of the Second Vatican Council to the promotion of creative strategies for spreading the faith as well as to the material needs of the Hispanic people in the Americas. Therefore, inspired by CELAM, especially its ecclesial base community model, U.S. Latina/o theologizing aspires to be communal, inclusive, dialogical, and liberating. U.S. Latino/a theology realizes that only through communal dialogue, an inclusive dialogue based on praxis, are persons able to discern and live out—from a grassroots level—what truly foments integral liberation for each participant. This teologı´a de conjunto pays close attention to lo cotidiano (daily living)—the daily experience of hope and suffering in ‘‘human relations lived in the home, in social institutions, at work, in culture, and in religion.’’ Lo cotidiano, in this sense,

Central Americans radically critiques today’s social models, which dehumanize and polarize persons. Hence, U.S. Latino/a theology, influenced by the theology that has arisen from CELAM, seeks not only equality of opportunity (a ‘‘piece of the pie’’) but most importantly an equality of outcome —a new rational daily life. All the baptized, as agents of social justice, are called to guarantee the participation of all members of society, especially the marginalized (preferential option for the poor), in the transformation of the structures of exclusion that daily keep people from actively and communally participating in the common good. This is done by protecting la dignidad (dignity) of all, especially the outcasts, through the daily struggle for human rights and through accompan˜amiento (accompaniment) or solidarity at every momento (moment) or historical experience of mestizaje (cultural/racial mixing)—the daily experience of being a new people (mestizaje), product of a violent past and present—a resurrected body that still bears the marks of the passion. Alejandro Crosthwaite

References and Further Reading Berryman, Phillip. Liberation Theology: The Essential Facts About the Revolutionary Movement in Latin America and Beyond (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). Espı´n, Orlando O., and Miguel H. Dı´az, eds. From the Heart of Our People: Latino/a Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1999). Deck, Allan Figueroa, ed. Frontiers of Hispanic Theology in the United States (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992). Hennelly, Alfred T., ed. Santo Domingo & Beyond: Documents: Documents &

| 119

Commentaries from the Historic Meeting of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1993).

CENTRAL AMERICANS The label ‘‘Central Americans’’ is highly contested for a number of reasons. For some, Central America refers to the short and narrow strip of land uniting North and South America that encompasses the countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. In Central America this is the most generally accepted definition because neither Belize nor Panama existed upon the formation of the ‘‘Federal Republic of Central America,’’ a short-lived union created after most of the region gained independence from Spain in the nineteenth century. For others the label includes the countries of Belize and Panama after these gained their independence from Britain in 1981 and from Colombia in 1903, respectively. And yet for others, who wish to distinguish between the Anglo and Latin American portions of the continent, Central America includes Mexico, or at least the southern regions of Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, and Yucata´ n. For the purpose of this entry, Central Americans will refer to the groups of peoples living in the United States who were born in the countries of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. It also means children whose parents came from those countries and people who selfidentify as Central Americans. Similarly, to speak about the religious expressions and culture of Central Americans is a misnomer, as the population

120 |

Central Americans

encompassed by this label are diverse, culturally and ethnically heterogeneous, with different histories, sociopolitical realities, religious traditions, practices, and customs. Internally, each of these countries are also richly diverse, and populated by peoples with different ethnocultural groups and religious traditions, many of which are represented among the Central American population of the United States. Each of these groups migrated into the United States at different points in the history of their countries and for various reasons. So it is impossible to make generalized statements about such richly diverse populations. Here, the intention is to merely touch the surface of these complex, ethnic, and culturally colorful populations, each of which deserves fuller individual attention.

Immigration Background The Central American populations are recent phenomena in the United States. It is only within the past 40 years that the majority have arrived. While several patterns of migration can be identified with each of these populations, it is impossible to know exactly which country Central Americans came from prior to 1960. Until then the United States kept only general statistical information lumping them together. Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans share some of these patterns as their countries suffered internal armed strife, which resulted in the migration of large numbers of peoples during the 1970s to late 1980s and then the 1990s. Belize, Costa Rica, and Panama share in common the lower numbers of immigrants present in the United States, and, including

Honduras, most have arrived since the late 1980s to the present. Divided by war, some of the first migrants from Guatemala left when the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown by a military coup aided by the CIA in 1954. He was followed by the dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas. His military repressive regime resulted in the renewal of internal armed conflict unseen since the 1940s decade. A second wave of immigrants into the United States took place as a result of the 1976 devastating earthquake that ravaged the country. The number of immigrants to the United States increased dramatically during the decade of the 1980s, which coincided with the worst years of repression during the time when countless Guatemalans left the country. Many of them sought refuge from the war in neighboring Mexico, and many made the journey to the United States. During the 1970s, those emigrating were primarily Ladinos (mestizos/ as), but during the 1980s the majority of those emigrating from Guatemala were indigenous. After the peace accord—that brought to an end over 35 years of civil war—was signed in 1992, many thought that migration of Guatemalans would slow down and even cease, but instead, migration increased to its highest levels during the second half of the 1990s. Different from the migrants of the 1980s, these last waves of migrants left Guatemala for primarily economic reasons. In 2000, it was estimated that 1,811,676 Guatemalans lived in the United States. Salvadorans also experienced their period of military repression and rampant violation of human rights by death squads. The years of repression can be traced as far back as 1932, the year of La matanza (the massacre), which

Central Americans singled out the indigenous population, virtually eradicating it. The rebellions that took place in the following years inaugurated an extended period of civil war between the repressive military governments and the guerrilla forces. By the 1960s, many Salvadorans had moved to Honduras, but after the soccer war with Honduras in 1969, many were forced to return to El Salvador, while others left the country and migrated to the United States. It would not be until the 1980s that immigration into the United States increased dramatically as many Salvadorans fled the country because of the heightened military repression and death squads. Approximately half of the refugees made it to neighboring refugee camps in Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Mexico. The other half left for the United States and Canada. After the signing of the peace accord in 1990, El Salvador’s economy and society was left in shambles. High levels of unemployment, increase in crime, and extreme poverty have been contributing factors in the migration of countless Salvadorans since the 1990s. With the exception of the 1986 ‘‘legalization’’ of refugees who entered the United States in 1982, just like Guatemalans, Salvadorans received little sympathy from the U.S. Reagan administration; most immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala were denied legal status by U.S. immigration. In 1990 the American Baptist Churches (AMS) launched a lawsuit against the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) for biased treatment of Salvadoran refugees during the 1980s. The settlement prompted the reopening of many cases of Salvadoran refugees that had been denied, and to approve new ones in greater number. In 1991 Congress

| 121

awarded Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to those Salvadorans who had been in the United States since 1990. It is estimated that there are well over a million documented Salvadorans in the United States. Distinct from the other Central American people, Nicaraguans tended to migrate in two directions, Costa Rica and the United States. From the midnineteenth century to the 1970s, the exclusive destination of Nicaraguan migrants was Costa Rica. During the 1980s, which is marked by the years of the Contra War, Nicaraguans turned to the United States. Once the war ended, Costa Rica became, once again, the primary destination of Nicaraguans. There are records which document that since the 1890s Nicaraguans have been migrating to the United States, although the numbers are not significant. In the decade 1910–1920 a recorded 17,000 Nicaraguans migrated to the United States because of the demand for labor during World War I. During the decade 1967–1976 a recorded 7,500 Nicaraguans migrated to the United States, most of whom reported to be White, and women outnumbered men almost by one-third. Immigration into the United States increased dramatically immediately after the revolution that ousted the U.S.-backed Dictator Anastasio Somosa. As many as 20,000 Nicaraguans left the country during this period. A second large wave entered the United States during the early 1980s, many of whom were industrialists. But the largest wave, one which accounts for most Nicaraguans in the United States, occurred from 1984 to the present, during the ‘‘Contra War,’’ the open Reagan’s administration financing of the anti-Sandinista insurgency. After signing the peace accord in 1987,

122 |

Central Americans

migration took on a new meaning. During the 1990s, Nicaraguans migrating to the United States because of economic reasons or in search of new work opportunities rose to unprecedented heights. In 2001 many undocumented Nicaraguans were granted TPS as a result of the destructive aftermath of Hurricane Mitch. According to the 2000 Census information, there are as many as 266,848 documented Nicaraguans in the United States. Not characterized by war or armed strife, Hondurans have migrated into the United States since the 1960s, settling mostly in the areas surrounding the city of Chicago. It was not until 1975 that emigration from Honduras to the United States became more pronounced. It was during the period of the 1980s that the United States established a military based in Honduras to support the illegally funded Contra War against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. During the 1980s social unrest, rampant violation of human rights in the country, and extreme levels of poverty forced many Hondurans to migrate to the United States. This number has steadily risen since then. The 1990 Census recorded that most Hondurans were of working age and concentrated in the farming, forestry, and fishing sectors. In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, large numbers of Hondurans migrated to the United States, and in the year 2000 they received TPS scheduled to expire on July 5, 2001. Today, an estimated 600,000 Hondurans live in the United States, most of whom are undocumented. Costa Ricans have not had to flee the political situation in their country, so they do not display the same patterns of migration as Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans. They share

more in common with Belizeans and their neighboring Panamanians. Most Costa Ricans have not left their country because of extreme economic circumstances, and very few have tried to enter the United States without proper documentation. In other words, waves of Costa Rican immigrants are not readily detectable. And they are not present in the United States in large numbers. By the mid-1980s there were only 26,639 Costa Ricans in the United States. Most Costa Ricans migrate because of marriage, study, and jobs and trades for which they were enlisted in their home country. There are also no identifiably large waves of Panamanian immigration into the United States. Different from other Central Americans, Panamanians have a long-standing presence in the United States. Records show that by the 1830s, 44 Panamanians arrived in the United States. By the turn of the twentieth century 1,000 more arrived each year until World War I when it tapered off. By 1940 there were 7,000 Panamanians listed in the U.S. records. A very small number of Panamanians entered the United States during the 1960s, but by the 1970s they constituted one of the largest groups of Central Americans in the United States. Most of them were non-Whites and most were women. By 1990 there were 86,000 Panamanians in the United States. There is very little information about Belizeans in the United States. This may be related to several factors: (1) Belizeans are often considered part of the Caribbean population; (2) the label of Belize was not adopted until 1973—prior to 1973 the country was known as British Honduras and considered a disputed territory between Britain and Guatemala;

Central Americans and (3) it was not until 1981 that Belizeans gained their independence from Britain. These factors help explain why there are no records of Belizean migration prior to the early 1980s. Their numbers are small, but by 1984 there were 55,000 recorded residing in the United States and by 1988 this number had climbed to 65,000. When considering the Central American population, one must note these are fairly young populations, most ranging between 20 and 50 years of age. They tend to gravitate to the urban centers where there are other Latina/o populations, particularly New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, New Jersey, Houston, and Washington. They vary in the ways they settle in the United States and in how they keep ties with their countries of origin. Since the 1990s there has been a steady flow of Central Americans into the United States, and no accurate count can be made because a large portion of these immigrants are undocumented. Their communities continue to grow in numbers not only because of the influx of recent arrivals, but because many are having children so that second and even third generations are emerging.

Culture and Folklore There is great internal ethnic and cultural diversity among the Central American nations and populations in the United States. These communities are not homogeneous. For example, although the large majority of Belizeans are Creole, there are also smaller numbers of Indian and Chinese groups who arrived in the region during the nineteenth century as indentured laborers. There are some Hindi people who migrated into Belize during the 1960s, and some Chinese who

| 123

migrated from Hong Kong and Taiwan during the 1980s. Another large group among Belizeans is the Garinagu, or Garifuna, people (the descendants of the mixture of Caribbean indigenous peoples and Africans who did not want to be slaves and were expulsed from the Island of St. Vincent and arrived to Belize during the 1880s). One can find among Belizeans a good number of Mopan and Q’eqchi’ Mayans who migrated from Mexico during the Caste War in the Yucata´ n Peninsula (1847–1901) and from Guatemala because of the systematic persecution of indigenous peoples during the 1970s and 1980s. Arabs are another group found among Belizeans. Usually identified as Turks, Lebanese, and Syrians, these people are actually Palestinians. This mosaic of ethnic and cultural background contributes to the creation of a multicultural ethos among Belizeans. English is the common language, but with all the immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador, many also speak Spanish. Because of their ethnocultural diversity, it is not uncommon to find Belizean people who speak other languages depending on the region they are from, such as Garinagu, the language of the Garifuna and Mayan languages. Of all the Central American countries, Guatemala has the largest concentrations of Mayans. There are 23 indigenous groups in Guatemala, in addition to the large dominant Ladinos (mestizos/as) population. Among them one can also find Garinagu peoples of the Atlantic coast, the Xinca people (an indigenous group unique to Guatemala), and other small groups such as Palestinians, Jews, Chinese, and Germans. This is clearly reflected in the Guatemalan population in the United States where the Maya

124 |

Central Americans

VIRGEN DE SUYAPA In 1925, Pope Pius XII declared Nuestra Sen ˜ora de Suyapa as the patron saint of Honduras, making February 3 her feast day. A statue of her is kept in Suyapa, a suburb of the capital city Tegucigalpa. Although several versions of the story of the statue’s discovery exist, the most common concerns a laborer named Alejandro Colindres. During the mid-eighteenth century, while returning home after clearing a cornfield, Colindres was overtaken by nightfall. He decided to sleep outside, but when he lay down, he noticed a sharp pain. He reached for the object and tossed it away, but when he lay down again, he again felt the object. He removed it, but this time, instead of tossing it, he stored it. Come morning, he discovered he had been sleeping on a wooden statue of a dark-image Virgin, which stood a little over two inches tall. He took the statue home where it stayed for the next 20 years. By 1768, the statue began to garner public attention and was credited for occurring miracles. By 1777, a chapel was built to house the statue. Today she is venerated by Hondurans in their homeland and in the United States. —MAD

communities are noticeably diverse, including peoples of Quiche´ , Mam, Kaq’chik’el, Chuj, Jacaltec, and Acatec ethnic and cultural roots. The largest numbers of Mayan people among Guatemalans in the United States are the Chujes, Quiche´s, and Kanjobals. For this reason, although Spanish is the official language in the country, among the Guatemalan population residing within the United States, Mayan groups still preserve their indigenous languages. One also encounters the language of the Garifuna population. These indigenous peoples preserve their cultures and traditions, such as the baile de las ma´scaras. The women wear the huipı´l (typical women’s attire) and men wear their traditional costumes. They continue to make many of their traditional dishes such as pepia´n, tamales, and chuchitos. Most of the Salvadorans in the United States are culturally Ladino/as. They identify themselves with the Spanish culture they inherited from their Spanish ancestors. Although there are indigenous

peoples from El Salvador, culturally most of them have been assimilated into the dominant Ladino culture, and for all Spanish is their native language. Small pockets of indigenous peoples that preserve their customs still remain. The most well-known is the community of Panchimalco, just outside of San Salvador, and they are Pupil, a nomadic tribe of the Nahua people from central Mexico. Salvadorans in the United States are an insular group, and because of the ways they organize their communities, often with their own doctors, banks, and social clubs, many do not learn English. One important aspect of Salvadoran culture is its cuisine. It is not difficult to find in the Salvadoran communities in the United States the famous pupusas, along with tortillas, curtido, salpico´n, y chicha. Hondurans in the United States are diverse; although the majority of the population is Ladino/as, there are African descendants, culturally Ladino/as, among them. There are also many of Ch’orti’, Pech, Tolupan, or Xicaque,

Central Americans Lenca, Miskito (Chibchan), and Sumo or Mayangna people (who display more commonalities with indigenous communities of Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia). One also finds Garinagu and West Indian peoples who came as indentured laborers from Jamaica and Haiti, as well as growing Palestinian Arab and Jewish sectors. As a result of the military base that the United States built in Honduras during the 1980s, many Chinese, Ryukyuan Japanese, Filipino, and Vietnamese came as contract laborers and stayed in the country. It does not come as a surprise that, while Spanish is the common spoken language of Hondurans, the people from the island of Bahia, for example, speak Pidgin English. The indigenous and Garinagu languages are also found among the Honduran population of the United States. Among other cultural elements distinct to Honduran people is the Chatuye, the typical music of the Garinagu people characterized by fast drums and percussion beat. Among the distinctive Honduran dishes one finds the tamale, the mondongo, atol, and among the Garinagu fried fish and mashed plantain are popular foods. The Garinagu people can be found among the Nicaraguan population in the United States. The majority of the population is Ladina/o, but other smaller groups such as the Chinese, Palestinian Arabic (who arrived to Honduras during the 1980s), Sumo, Rama, Miskito, and Afro-Caribbean also color the ethnic and cultural landscape of the Nicaraguan people. More than in any other of the Central American peoples, baseball is one of the most popular sports and pastimes played by the population. The tortilla, Nacatamal, tamal, and desserts called almibares represent only a small sample of the rich menu of Nicaraguan delicacies.

| 125

As already indicated, Costa Ricans and Panamanians in the United States do not represent large numbers, and often they tend to disappear in the Englishspeaking dominant culture. Indeed, both groups have indigenous and African presences, but most have been assimilated into the Ladino/a culture, and it is difficult to untangle their unique cultural elements. Some of the cultural distinctions of these communities are the Punto Guanacastero, which is the marimba rhythm original from the province of Guanacaste in Costa Rica, and the Tamborito, the folkloric music of Panama. One can also find blues and jazz among them. Panama distinguishes itself because, as Nicaragua, baseball dominates as the popular national sport. It is not too difficult to find places where one can taste various Panamanian dishes such as sancocho, ceviche, carimanolas, tortillas, and chica fuerte as a favorite beverage. Part of the cultural ethos of Central Americans is a sense of sadness and nostalgia, which is communicated through music. The communities are deeply androcentric, and oftentimes men have the last word in the home. But things are changing because of their new contexts and different laws that help prevent abuse against women, and women are entering the labor force contributing to the well-being of the family. Moreover, for Central Americans food is not just sustenance; it is a sociocultural event. It is an opportunity to share one’s life with relatives and friends. So when Central Americans get together, they must have their typical meals as part of the celebration. Food connects them to the good memories of their birth countries and gives them a sense of identity, so Central American products are imported or made locally in order to supply the demand.

126 |

Central Americans

Contrary to the Anglo emphasis on the nuclear home, great value is given to the extended family. Like many other ethnocultural groups, Central Americans mark the passage of time by way of relationships like compadrazgo, which is established when friends become the godparents of each other’s children. They also celebrate the quincean˜era, which is the celebration of the 15th birthday of one’s daughter, and represents the passage from being a child to becoming a woman. Many Central Americans in the United States still believe their countries’ folklore stories like la Siguanaba, la Siguamonta, la Llorona, el Cadejo, the evil eye spell, and el Cipitio. In many places of the United States they gather together to celebrate the day of independence from Spain, which, with the exception of Belize and Panama, took place the same day on September 15, 1821. Like most ethnic and cultural groups that migrate, Central Americans maintain close ties to their country of origin. Many establish transnational relations traveling back and forth between the United States and their birth countries by way of sending remittances, visiting for extended periods of time, and establishing small businesses. One of the most recent negative sociocultural phenomena is the rapid growth of street gangs that originated in the United States but have spread rapidly in the Central American countries, the most affected of which are Guatemala, Salvador, and Honduras. The Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang are transforming Central American communities as most gang members are from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, with small pockets of other Central Americans. Because many of these young Central Americans were deported

back to their countries as a U.S. strategic fight against gang-related crimes, these gangs have shown extraordinary resilience as they have imported into their birth countries the U.S. style of gang crime, and maintain close ties to their U.S. counterparts. These gangs are the latest expression in the increasing phenomenon of Central American transnationalism.

Religion Central Americans are profoundly religious and spiritual people. Their entire lives are permeated by religious symbols and practices. It is difficult to know the distribution of religious allegiances among them. In studying them, one must keep in mind that while a majority of the population is of Catholic background, followed by significant Protestant and evangelical presences, a number of other religious traditions are taking hold of the Central American population. Evangelicals does not refer to the type of evangelicalism as practiced in the United States. While there is great influence because of historical missionary activity and socioreligious impact, Central American evangelicals refer to nondenominational congregations that share more in common with Pentecostals. Despite the small size of the Belizean enclaves, one can find Baha’i, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, and Rastafarian believers among them. In the Creole of Belize one can find practitioners of Obeah (a type of folk ritual that resembles Palo, Voodoo, and Santerı´a). The majority of the people are Catholics, and the Protestants are largely United Methodists and Anglicans, as a result of the British influence in the region. There are small numbers of Baptists, Salvation Army,

Central Americans

| 127

Elementary school students with paper crowns march in the annual Three Kings Day Parade (Dia de los Reyes) on January 5, 2006, in East Harlem, New York City. (AFP/Getty Images)

German and Swiss Mennonites, and growing Pentecostal groups as a result of large missionary activity from the United States during the 1980s. Also, because of recent missionary activity, there are some Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). The small communities of Panamanians are quite diverse. Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-day Adventists are growing among them. There are Jews and Muslims, as well as Baha’i, and Chinese practicing Buddhism. Again the majority identify themselves with Catholicism. Protestants are very diverse and can be traced to direct U.S. presence in Panama for almost 100 years since the original leasing of

the Panama Canal area in 1903. Among Protestants one can find Lutherans, Southern Methodists, United Methodists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians. The Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas (MCCA) is also present. A number of Baptist and Evangelical churches—the latter among the people of lower social and economic stratum— are making ground. Among Costa Ricans, many claim to have no religion. Although largely Catholic, there is a growing Protestant population of Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Evangelicals. The Unification Church, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons are also present. Among other religions one encounters are Judaism, Islam, Taoism,

128 |

Central Americans

Baha’i, Scientology, Hare Krishna, and Tenrikyo. Although there are pockets of Beechy Amish communities and Quakers who migrated into Costa Rica as Conscientious Objectors, there is little trace they can be found among the Costa Rican people in the United States. In Nicaragua, three-quarters of the population is Catholic. This is reflected among the Nicaraguans in the United States. There are also contingents of Protestant people such as Moravian, Episcopalian, Amish-Mennonites, Evangelicals, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as some who claim to have no religious affiliation. The Baha’i faith is present, along with Muslims, Jews, the church of Scientology, and some syncretistic Garinagu religious expressions like Obeah. Among the Garinagu of Honduras, Obeah and African folk religions honoring their ancestors are practiced. A significant portion of Hondurans in the United States are evangelicals. Growing rapidly, most Evangelical converts are ex-Catholics. Other Protestants among them are the Episcopalians and Lutherans. Few belong to the Greek Orthodox tradition. One can also find Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and small concentrations of Muslims and Jewish peoples. Although Catholicism is the predominant religious expression among Salvadorans, Protestantism has been present among them since the turn of the twentieth century, by way of the Central American Mission (CAM) that arrived in 1896. Not much later the Seventh-day Adventists and the Assemblies of God began doing missionary work. During the times of the economic depression of the 1930s growth dropped, but since 1960-1970, the years of heaviest military repression in El Salvador, Protestants

grew exponentially. Thus, among Salvadorans, Catholics and Protestants are the largest groups, but there are other religions expressed such as Hare Krishna, Mormons, Jews, and Muslims, which constitute sizable minorities. Guatemalans in the United States are not any less diverse than other Central American groups. The unique characteristic of Guatemalans is that a large percentage of them are of Evangelical background. The largest Evangelical churches are Prince of Peace, Assemblies of God, Elim, and a myriad of independent churches. Protestantism became possible in Guatemala because of antiCatholic sentiments during the tenure of Rafael Cabrera (1844–1848), which limited the political and economic influence of the Catholic Church, and the connections made by the liberal dictator Justo Rufino Barrios, who opened the door for the Presbyterian Church to enter Guatemala in 1871. Presbyterianism did not succeed among the Ladino/a population and by the 1930s it was hardly popular. Among the Mayans, because of the Q’eqchi’ and Kaq’chik’el translations of the Bible by the middle of the twentieth century, Presbyterians started to multiply. By 1945 Presbyterian churches had their own indigenous leaders. The Nazarene churches started to advance among the Q’eqchi’ and Kaq’chik’el communities and by 1977, three out of every four ascribed to the Nazarene church. Another reason Protestants have grown relates to the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala, during which time the membership jumped 14 percent in the Protestant churches that provided food, furnished temporary housing, and helped reestablish the communities. Despite its large Protestant and Catholic sectors, among Guatemalans one will also find Mormons, Muslims,

Central Americans Jews, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Based on the 1995 ‘‘Agreement on the Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples,’’ which has not yet been fully implemented in Guatemala, the indigenous religious ancestral practices, and syncretistic expressions are once again emerging. These religious traditions are found among the various Guatemalan communities in the United States. The majority of the Central American population in the United States identifies with the Catholic tradition, and there are large sectors of Protestants, mainly Evangelicals, among them. Christianity continues to be the prevalent religious expression attested to in some of the celebrations and holidays like Christmas and Easter week. Even more noticeable are the celebrations of the patron saint feasts like La purı´sima among Nicaraguans, celebrated from the last day of November to December 7, and concludes with one night of shouting (noche de griterı´a). Costa Ricans celebrate La Virgen de los A´ngeles, and el rosario del nin˜o on December 25. The indigenous communities from Totonicapa´n, Guatemala, often travel from the United States to San Cristobal, to celebrate la fiesta de Santiago, the patron saint of the region. Kanjobal Mayans from Los Angeles and southern Florida celebrate the feast of the patron saint of San Miguel Acata´ n on September 29 every year. The first week of August of every year is the most important national and religious festival for Salvadorans. During this time they honor Christ the Savior, El Salvador’s namesake and patron savior of the world. Salvadoran communities in the United States celebrate this day with processions, fireworks, and communityoriented activities like sports and carnival rides.

| 129

Other religious celebrations relate more directly to the ancestral indigenous practices and religious feasts such as Los hombres de maı´z. This is connected to the Popol Vuh, the Mayan sacred book narrating the creation of humanity out of corn. Particularly among the communities with a greater amount of indigenous people, there are tensions between indigenous religious practices and Christian ones. Traditionally Protestants, and more specifically Evangelicals, have been extremely intolerant of any type of syncretic religious expression claiming that the indigenous religious practices are some kind of witchcraft or devil worship. But even among Evangelicals and Catholics many Mayan believers secretly practice Mayan rituals. It is worth noting that among Catholics issues of social justice are of major importance, a shift in the attitude of the Central American Catholic churches that can be traced back to the resolutions by the Second Vatican Council. In some of the mainstream Protestant religions, issues of social justice also play an important role. But among the recent Evangelical communities, the message of an afterlife salvation, packaged with a middle-class cultural ethos and work ethic, which minimizes the role and responsibilities of the state for its citizens is a perfect recipe for supporting conservative governments, as well as for adopting a gospel of prosperity by which financial wealth is seen as the result of one’s good relationship with God. It is in this way that Central American Evangelicals in the United States, with the exception of some pockets of Nicaraguans, do not engage in direct political activity such as participating in political parties. Moreover, despite the large numbers of Protestants and Evangelicals

130 |

Chávez, César

among Central Americans in the United States, ecumenical conversations are rare, as people are also committed to the national expressions of the denomination to which they belong. Ne´stor Medina

References and Further Reading Berryman, Phillip. Stubborn Hope: Religion, Politics, and Revolution in Central America (New York: Orbis Books, 1994). Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. Living in the New Jerusalem: Protestantism in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). Medina, Andre´s, ed. La etnografı´a de Mesoame´rica meridional y el a´rea circuncaribe (Mexico City, Me´xico: Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropolo´gicas, 1996). Nepstad, Sharon Erickson. Convictions of the Soul: Religion, Culture, and Agency in the Central America Solidarity Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Samandu´, Luis E. Protestantismos y procesos sociales en Centro Ame´rica (San Jose´, Costa Rica: Editorial Universidad Centroamericana, 1991). Stoll, David. Is Latin America Turning Protestant? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

CHÁVEZ, CÉSAR (1927–1993) Ce´sar Cha´vez is widely acknowledged as the most important Mexican American civil rights activist of the twentieth century. His efforts to improve the lives of migrant farmworkers were guided by a religious and moral vision that was shaped by a variety of influences: the

Ce´sar Cha´vez organized the first effective migrant worker union in the United States. His political skill and his unswerving dedication to one of society’s most unprotected sectors made him a popular hero. (Library of Congress)

popular religion of his forebearers, his formal engagement with Catholicism and its social teachings, the Ghandian principle of nonviolence, and a preferential option for the poor. The son of Mexican immigrants, Cha´vez was born on a small farm outside Yuma, Arizona. His family lost their farm during the Depression, compelling them to move to California in search of work as migrant farmworkers. Because of his family’s ongoing search for work, Cha´vez reportedly attended 65 different elementary schools, and he never graduated from high school. His lack of formal education did not, however, lessen his desire to assist people like his parents and fellow farmworkers. In the early 1950s, Cha´ vez joined forces with labor organizers Fred Ross

Chávez, César | 131

UNITED FARM WORKERS UNION (UFW) The United Farm Workers Union was established by Filipino and Mexican agricultural workers in California to confront the agribusiness power hold in the rural areas of that state. The union, while led by Ce´sar Cha´vez, organized a successful international grape boycott in 1965. A major reason for the success of UFW was due to Cha´vez’s ability to merge religious themes and symbols. Cha´vez used religious symbols like la Virgen de Guadalupe and religious acts like fasting to bring unity to the union. The grape boycott was able to reduce the international consumption of grapes by almost 25 percent, thus placing enough pressure on California grape growers to enter into collective bargaining. But by 1973, a massive campaign was launched against UFW by the Teamsters, agribusiness, and the Nixon administration. Violence was used to try to break UFW. Over 3,600 UFW members and supporters were arrested, many were beaten, and at least two were killed. Influenced by Ghandi’s nonviolence religious movement, UFW refused to answer in like-kind. —MAD

and Saul Alinsky through his involvement with the Community Service Organization (CSO). Cha´vez registered Mexican Americans to vote and helped them interact with government agencies. He rose to prominence within the organization, becoming its national director. After 10 years of a stable salary with the CSO, Cha´ vez resigned in order to form the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later became the United Farm Workers of America (UFW). For three decades, Cha´vez committed his life to the plight of impoverished laborers. He paid himself a salary of $5 a week. The UFW came to national prominence in 1965 when Cha´vez led the first of many strikes against growers. In 1968, he championed the UFW’s most successful campaign, urging Americans not to buy California table grapes until growers agreed to union contracts. Within this three-year period, Cha´vez helped transform a local coalition of 1,700 farmworking families into a

national grape boycott observed by some 17 million Americans. Cha´ vez ’s political activism owed much to his personal piety, but his religious and moral vision extended far beyond his own sacrificial action. He was particularly dedicated to the practice of nonviolence, as demonstrated by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. In 1968, the UFW commitment to nonviolence was challenged from within, and some members began to advocate violent tactics as they grew increasingly impatient with growers and the government. When faced with this dissension among the ranks, Cha´ vez remained steadfast. ‘‘You cannot justify what you want for La Raza, for the people,’’ he said, ‘‘and in the same breath destroy one life.’’ Furthermore, knowing the commitment to nonviolence had been violated, Cha´vez undertook a penitential fast for 25 days to help restore the integrity of the movement. Cha´vez’s fast— the first of three major ones—represented a turning point for the union and the

132 |

Chávez, César

movement. It marked an important political and spiritual crossroads for Cha´vez and for the proponents of la causa (‘‘the struggle’’). Fasting was just one element of popular religious practice utilized by Cha´vez. Cha´vez and the UFW mobilized several other popular religious practices and symbols of the community in the service of defending worker dignity. Other examples include the symbol of La Virgen de Guadalupe, often carried during marches; a 300-mile penitential pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento; prayer vigils along the picket line; and political and comedic skits performed by El Teatro Campesino, the union theater troop, that emphasized the innate dignity of the farmworkers. The union of the spiritual and the political is also seen in the fact that Cha´vez fostered a ‘‘community of inclusion.’’ The range of people who participated in la causa was impressive and included Catholics and Protestants, Mexicans and Anglos, Filipinos and African Americans, Jews and Muslims, the working poor and the middle class, intellectuals and the unlettered, secular humanists and committed Christians. Cha´ vez’s commitment to an inclusive community is captured, for example, by his willingness to welcome students active in the Free Speech and Civil Rights movements. ‘‘At the beginning, I was warned not to take the volunteers, but I was never afraid of the students,’’ Cha´vez recounts. ‘‘If it were nothing but farmworkers, we’d only have about 30 percent of all the ideas that we have. There would be no cross-fertilization, no growing. It’s beautiful to work with other groups, other ideas, and other customs. It’s like the wood is laminated.’’

Arguably more than any other Latino/ a figure of the twentieth century, Cha´vez embodied the spiritual and political vision of a people. Cha´vez’s life, according to scholar Frederick Dalton, was ‘‘liberation theology embodied, a life of sacrificial service and nonviolent action for the sake of human dignity and justice in solidarity with the poor.’’ This commitment to human dignity and justice is nowhere better seen than in Cha´ vez’s famous ‘‘Letter from Delano,’’ written in 1969 on Good Friday. The letter, which was reprinted in the National Catholic Reporter and the Christian Century, is addressed to the president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League, Mr. E. L. Barr. Cha´vez writes: You must understand—I must make you understand—that our membership and the hopes and aspirations of the hundreds of thousands of the poor and dispossessed that have been raised on our account are, above all, human beings, no better and no worse than any other cross-section of human society; we are not saints because we are poor, but by the same measure neither are we immoral. We are men and women who have suffered and endured much, and not only because of our abject poverty but because we have been kept poor. The colors of our skins, the languages of our cultural and native origins, the lack of formal education, the exclusion from the democratic process, the numbers of our men slain in recent wars—all these burdens generation after generation have sought to demoralize us, to break our human spirit. But God knows that we are not beasts of burden, agricultural implements or rented slaves; we are men. And mark this well, Mr. Barr, we are men locked in a death struggle against man’s inhumanity to man in the industry that you represent. And this struggle itself

Chicano Theology gives meaning to our life and ennobles our dying. (Dalton 1993, 78–79)

Christopher Tirres

References and Further Reading Dalton, Frederick John. The Moral Vision of Ce´sar Cha´vez (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003). Ferriss, Susan, and Ricardo Sandoval. The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement, ed. Diana Hembree (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997). Griswold del Castillo, Richard, and Richard A. Garcı´a. Ce´sar Cha´vez: A Triumph of Spirit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). Leo´n, Luis. ‘‘Ce´sar Cha´vez and Mexican American Civil Religion.’’ Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States, ed. Gasto´n Espinosa, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Lloyd-Moffett, Stephen R. ‘‘The Mysticism and Social Action of Ce´sar Cha´vez.’’ Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States, ed. Gasto´n Espinosa, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

CHICANO THEOLOGY Chicano Theology is a theology that emerges from the experience of Mexican Americans who are born and raised in the United States. For Chicana/os, it becomes a theological response to what they consider to be an occupied America. Reies Lo´pez Tijerina, Episcopalian minister and Chicano land-rights activist of the 1960s in New Mexico, summed up the sentiments of many Chicana/os when

| 133

he stated that for Chicano/as, the United States is their Babylon. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which brought an end to the Mexican-American War, was supposed to guarantee and secure the rights of Mexicans who discovered that the borders crossed them. Twelve years after signing the treaty, the United States violated its terms, just as the United States unilaterally voided earlier treaties signed with Native Americans. Both Native Americans and the Chicano/as were treated similar to the Israelites under Babylon’s aggression. Corky Gonza´lez, who founded the Crusade for Justice in Denver, Colorado, captured this sentiment when he said that as Chicana/os living in the United States: ‘‘We have gone everywhere to windup nowhere.’’ Chicana/o Theology can be understood as a theology of captivity. Because Chicano/as are not treated as equals by the dominant Euro-American culture, oppressive structures are formed in their churches, their schools, their jobs, and their jails and prisons. Chicana/o Theology believes that those in power within the United States, as well as other industrialized nations, are not ignorant of the reality suffered by the dispossessed. Rather, they are aware of the existing imperialistic structures but choose not to change the prevailing systems because of the benefits and privilege derived from them. Chicano/a Theology has many elements that are not germane to other theologies developed throughout the Third World. It is a synthesis of the world of affluence and the world of poverty with a corazo´ n (heart) Latina/o. This heart identifies with the struggles of the Third World, but their presence within the United States provides understanding

134 |

Chicano Theology

for the oppressive acts committed by the First World. Another element that Chicano/a Theology confesses is a maternal understanding of God. The Lady of Guadalupe appeared to Saint Juan Diego, a poor Native American in Mexico, rather than a rich Spaniard. Because she appeared as a poor indigenous woman, many Mexicans hold a special place in their hearts for her, especially because of the important role played by mothers within Chicano/a culture. As a symbol of identity, the Virgin of Guadalupe becomes an important ingredient to Chicana/o consciousness. A third element of Chicana/o Theology is that it outlines the identity of Chicana/os. The lure to assimilate into the dominant culture is powerful. This assimilation process has wreaked havoc among Chicana/os because it divides them from their identity. Advocates of a Chicano/a Theology believe that this process of assimilation has been the goal implemented by the dominant culture through the religious institutions and secular schools that service Chicano/as. The danger of assimilation is that it attempts to erase the collective memory of Aztla´n. The ancestors of the Chicana/os have always inhabited the lands that would come to be known as the Southwestern United States. They did not come to the United States; the United States came to Aztla´n only to hold the descendants of the original inhabitants, today’s Chicana/os, captives on their own land. As dangerous as colonizing the taken land is, more so is colonizing the Chicana/o’s mind. Though their response to the Euro-American seizing of another’s land, Chicano/a Theology offers the world a different paradigm, specifically, not to hoard material things, but rather to share

them. In this sense it becomes a prophetic theology that condemns private property as constructed by Western imperialism. In essence, a Chicano/a Theology is a theology that attempts to dismantle the present social structures based on land ownership. A fourth element of a Chicano/a theology is the concept of leadership and organization. Chicana/o Theology insists that the leadership of the Chicano/a movement can never compromise the struggles and hopes of its people, not just for their sake but also the sake of their oppressors. It is within the organizations created by the oppressed that oppressors find liberation from Mammon. It is important that Chicana/os teach unconditional self-love in order that the oppressed can learn to love themselves and others unconditionally. Love of enemies becomes the ultimate expression of unconditional self-love. Chicana/o Theology directs leaders to empower their constituents to organize themselves for justice and peace at whatever cost, even to the point of death. Ideally, the leadership of the Chicano/a Movement in the United States understands both the world of the oppressor and the world of the oppressed. Having a fuller grasp of reality provides greater insight into the problems and challenges faced by Chicana/os. Thus they are in a better position to develop possible solutions. Chicano/a Theology maintains that the problems faced by the oppressed were created by the structures fostered by oppressors for the purpose of maintaining and advancing their power and privilege. Seldom are Chicano/as consulted prior to implementing social or economic policies that directly affect them. Ironically, it is the powerless that can offer the dominant culture liberation

Chicano/a Movement from having to live up to a false conscience of superiority. Another concept of Chicana/o Theology resides in the coexistence of the person and the community. The focus of Chicano/a thought is the person, not material—‘‘person’’ here understood as an extension of community. Rugged individualism is rejected as part of the assimilation process that subordinates the community to the individual. As important as the individual is, the community comes first. Finally, Chicano/a Theology is centered on needs of the oppressed. As Jesus would say, the last shall be first, and the one losing his/her life will win it. It is from this perspective that the wider world is understood. Andre´s Quetzalco´atl Gonzale´s Guerrero

References and Further Reading Acun˜a, Rodolfo. Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle Toward Liberation (San Francisco: Cantfield Press, 1972). Elizondo, Virgilio. La Morenita: Evangelizer of the Americas (San Antonio: Mexican American Cultural Center, 1980). Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Seabury Press, 1974). Guerrero, Andre´s Gonzale´s, Jr. A Chicano Theology (New York: Orbis Press, 1987).

CHICANO/A MOVEMENT The Chicano Movement emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s on college and high school campuses, in urban barrios, and in rural communities across the Southwest United States, coalescing a new generation of activism. Inspired by the influence of an emergent youth culture and the turbulent voices of social

| 135

change reflected in the free speech movement, Black Civil Rights Movement, Antiwar Movement, and an emerging feminist movement, young Mexican Americans sought to confront the racism of the dominant culture. They chose new organizing strategies, articulated their own vision, and confronted the ‘‘Establishment’’ of both an older generation of Mexican Americans and the Anglo power structure. The term ‘‘Chicano/a’’ identifies people of Mexican heritage in the United States. As the term adopted by the Movement, it represented a political consciousness that asserted the right to full participation in U.S. society without surrendering their Mexican heritage and identity, rejecting what they saw as the more assimilationist identity reflected in the usage of the term ‘‘Mexican American.’’ Additionally, the terms ‘‘Hispanic’’ and ‘‘Latina/o’’ both refer collectively to peoples from all Latin American heritages. While these terms are sometimes used interchangeably with the term ‘‘Chicana/o’’ or any other specific ethnic identity, this is grossly inaccurate. Most people who identify as Latino/a or Hispanic would usually first identify themselves by their particular ethnicity or national heritage. The War on Poverty and the Vietnam Era GI Bill begun in 1966 helped to create a significant Mexican American presence on college campuses in the mid-1960s, especially in California. Mexican American college enrollment surged just as student activity on campuses across the country radicalized. Mexican American campus activists, many of whom came from poverty, began to make connections between the Civil Rights Movement and the Antiwar Movement and the poverty, social

136 |

Chicano/a Movement

´ PEZ TIJERINA (1926–) REIES LO Along with Ce´sar Cha´vez, Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’ Gonzales, and Jose´ Angel Gutie´rrez, Reies Lo´pez Tijerina is considered one of the four founding fathers of the Chicano movement. Tijerina is the most militant of the four, interested mainly in land grants of New Mexico. On September 10, 1926, in Fall City, Texas, Tijerina was born to a farmworking family. As an ordained minister of the Assemblies of God, Tijerina used his oratorical skills as a preacher to become a popular voice in New Mexico during the 1960s. Tijerina helped establish La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (The Federal Land-Grant Alliance) to address land-grant questions. In 1967, Tijerina called his group to convene at the town of Coyote to make plans to reinhabit the Republic of San Joaquin del Rio Chama—Echo Amphitheater in Kit Carson National Forest, which they had done the previous year. Eventually, Tijerina and his group would raid the courthouse in search of the county attorney who violated the civil rights of the Alianza. Two police officers were shot and two hostages were taken, albeit the latter without Tijerina’s knowledge. Although becoming nonmilitant in his later years, Tijerina and his group demonstrated that Chicanos were willing to resort to violence if forced. —SOP

isolation, and political marginalization of their own communities. Leaders as diverse as Ce´ sar Cha´vez (United Farm Workers, UFW), Reies Lo´pez Tijerina (Alianza Federal de Mercedes), Rudolfo ‘‘Corky’’ Gonza´ les (Crusade for Justice), and Jose´ Angel Gutie´rrez (Raza Unida Party) organized local communities around a broad agenda of issues, including labor, land, education, economic development, and voting rights. Student walkouts on high school campuses in cities like Los Angeles, Denver, and Tempe (Arizona), and emerging student organizations on college campuses spread the grassroots movement. Chicano/a activists disagreed on priorities and strategies, but were unified in seeking radical social change. They rejected the accommodationist and assimilationist politics of earlier generations, asserting claims for a distinct identity in U.S. politics and culture.

The militancy of movimiento rhetoric met resistance within the Mexican American community, where established leaders critiqued the strategies and ideology, including use of the term ‘‘Chicano/ a.’’ They also met forceful opposition from law enforcement that often resulted in violent encounters from riots to rural gun battles. The death of Ruben Salazar, a Los Angeles journalist, in the aftermath of the Chicano Moratorium was a galvanizing moment. The August 1970 national day of protest, following two earlier actions in Los Angeles, drew an estimated 30,000 protestors to Laguna Park in East Los Angeles. Violence erupted when police decided to put an early end to the rally and tried to force the crowd to leave. Salazar was one of three people killed by police. His reporting of police brutality and support for the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles led many to suspect he had been targeted.

Chicano/a Movement

| 137

TEATRO CAMPESINO El Teatro Campesino was founded by Luis Valdez in 1965 as an organizing tool of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and contributed significantly to the development of the nationalist Chicana/o identity of the movement. The ensemble theater drew on the rich oral tradition of Mexican and Chicana/o culture. A collective development process and improvisation created short actos (acts) to dramatize the themes of the union struggle, often with a dramatic humor that reflected the influence of the comedic style of Cantı´nflas. Laughter became a powerful political tool, proclaiming the worker’s truth and making oppressive bosses, politicians, and other symbols of authority laughable. In the 1970s, El Teatro Campesino left its affiliation with the UFW and became an active voice of the Chicano Movement, expressing the Chicana/o critique of cultural assimilation and political accommodation. It contributed to the strong identity of Chicanisma/o with its indigenous, non-European roots and working-class culture, and employed the bilingualism of Chicana/o youth. It also reflected the male dominance of the movement. Women’s roles in Teatro productions were typically very traditional. Female members of the ensemble, like women in many parts of the movement, subverted their feminist critique to the seemingly more pressing goals of the cause. —TCS

The movement grew out of disparate roots and never agreed on a common agenda or ideology, yet it gave birth to a new sense of identity that empowered the Mexican American community, asserting the fundamental claim that one did not have to surrender language, heritage, or culture to claim the rights of citizenship, to participate in the economic and political life of the nation. Ce´ sar Cha´ vez, for example, never identified the UFW with the Chicano Movement, but young Chicanas/os were inspired by the UFW to believe change was possible. El Movimiento confronted racism and racial self-hate, asserting pride in the Indian-mestizo physical features and cultural roots. The Chicana/os of the 1960s proclaimed ‘‘brown is beautiful’’ and advocated a strong sense of cultural nationalism. Chicanos asserted pride in the very things that made them suspect in a racialized culture—claiming not only the beauty and strength of

Chicanisma/o over and against the prejudices of the dominant White culture but also claiming their right to belong. The use of Spanish in the context of English emerged as an intentional statement of mestizo/a identity and sense of place in the dominant culture. The early movement was extremely male dominated. The leaders of the movement had been socialized in a very patriarchal and homophobic culture. As they asserted the right to express their own identity from within that culture in the public arena, they did not critique those values. Yet the movement gave impetus to a generation of Chicana feminist activists and writers, such as Marta Cotera, Anna Nieto-Go´ mez, Norma Alarco´n, Gloria Anzaldu´a, and Cherrı´e Moraga. Marta Cotera organized the first national Chicana conference in Houston in 1971, but it would be a second generation of Chicana students on college campuses in the late 1970s who would speak

138 |

Chicano/a Movement

to the issues of Chicana feminism and demand change to include their perspective in Chicano Studies programs. Leadership of El Movimiento emerged from different streams: labor and community organizers, many working through agencies and programs of the War on Poverty, voting rights, and student activists. Some had first organized with Black civil rights groups. Maria Varela joined the National Student Association, working alongside the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She would later join the Alianza in New Mexico. Carlos Mun˜ oz joined SNCC as a student at California State University at Los Angeles and would later become a major figure in the student movement. Ce´sar Cha´vez learned from and modeled the strategies of the UFW on the nonviolent model of Martin Luther King Jr.

From Local Organizing to National Movement, Leaders of El Movimiento Ce´ sar Cha´ vez gained national prominence as a union organizer. He remained focused on the UFW, not attending any of the national Chicano/a conferences or protests, nor linking the farmworker struggle to a larger Chicano cause. Still, he was an inspiration for the movement. Many of the students on college campuses had come from farmworker families who represented the poorest and most vulnerable of the Chicano community. Cha´ vez expressed a demand for justice and goals for a better future that transcended the immediate goals of union organizing. Cha´vez trained in grassroots organizing with the Industrial Areas Foundation

(IAF), led by populist Saul Alinsky, and was inspired by the social justice teachings of the Roman Catholic tradition. Gil Padilla and Dolores Huerta joined the effort early and were key organizers. All three began their careers working to improve conditions for migrant workers through the Community Services Organization (CSO). Dolores Huerta had lobbied in Sacramento for legislative reform. All three became convinced that a union was needed to effect real change. A strike in 1965 and the march to Sacramento in 1966 brought national attention to the growing union. Without a strike fund, the UFW turned to outside sources for aid. One of the first organizations to respond was the California Migrant Ministry. Union leadership intentionally employed religious symbols, in large part to stave off the potential for violence that historically plagued union organizing. Workers were admonished in strike meetings that anyone who used violence would have to leave the strike. Although local clergy in Delano were not supportive at first, the union actively sought church involvement, building a strong interdenominational coalition of supporters. Mass or prayer services were held before strike activities. ‘‘De Colores,’’ the theme song of the Roman Catholic Cursillo program, became a theme song of the union. Strikers displayed banners of La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Huelga flag. Reies Lo´ pez Tijerina, a Pentecostal preacher, organized hispanos in northern New Mexico to reclaim lands lost to the Anglo occupation. He articulated the rationale for Chicano nationalism, grounded in the experience of conquest and the broken promises of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This treaty guaranteed Mexicans north of the Rio

Chicano/a Movement

| 139

Reies Lo´pez Tijerina gestures during a speech in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1972. Tijerina and the Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres, the organization he founded in 1963, demanded that the U.S. government recognize the provisions of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. They contend the government reneged on the treaty, which settled the U.S.-Mexican War and, in essence, stole nearly 100 million acres of land from Chicano ancestors from Texas and California. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Grande all the rights of citizens of the United States, including the right to their property, the right to maintain the Spanish language, and the right to practice their own religious traditions. The Alianza Federal de Mercedes’s (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) stated objective of regaining land grant properties for the descendents of the Spanish and Mexican colonists was doomed to fail, but in its short-lived rise to national prominence it spotlighted the severe poverty of northern New Mexico and the Hispano communities in particular. Land once held in common by villagers for farming and ranching, now controlled by the U.S. Forest Service, was the

primary target of Alianza efforts. In the mid-1960s the Forest Service enacted greater restrictions, banning access for grazing milk cows and draft horses needed by small Hispano farmers. The Alianza began by seeking remedy through the courts and governmental actions. In July 1966, the group marched from Abiquiu to the capitol in Santa Fe to demand an investigation of their claims that the Treaty of Guadalupe had been abrogated, calling for a commission to investigate their claims. Met with resistance, the Alianza moved to more direct action and began plans to occupy a campground in the Kit Carson National Forest. This action

140 |

Chicano/a Movement

was largely ignored by government officials. Eventually, five Aliancistas were arrested. The confrontational rhetoric provoked open hostility from Anglos in the region, even though then Governor David Cargo expressed sympathy with their cause. High emotions and media frenzy helped to escalate events. Alianza organizers were accused of being communist. The movement ultimately was short-lived, its energy dissipated by legal charges and court cases, but it inspired Chicano/a activists’ appeal to nationalist/ separatist notions of an historical homeland—Atzla´n. Rudolfo ‘‘Corky’’ Gonzales, a Democratic Party leader heavily involved in the Denver War on Poverty, co-chaired the Mexican American contingent of the Poor People’s March with Reies Lo´pez Tijerina in 1968. He became disenchanted with local party politics as indifferent to Mexican American poverty and formed the Crusade for Justice as a grassroots organization. Author of the epic poem, ‘‘Yo Soy Joaquin,’’ which became an anthem of the movement, he helped define cultural nationalism and articulated a vision of liberation rooted in the mythic return to Atzla´n. His ‘‘El Plan de Barrio’’ proposed a self-sufficient economically developed barrio, with public housing for Chicano/as only, bilingual education, barrio economic development, and restitution of land to descendants of Hispana/o colonists in Colorado and New Mexico. Gonza´les connected with the emerging youth movement in Denver, where high school students walked out in 1968 after a teacher made derogatory statements in class. Their action grew to a three-day protest. Twenty-five people were arrested, including Gonzalez, who told rallying students they were the

leaders of the revolution; they were making history. The Denver protests drew national headlines. Gonzales called for the National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference in March 1969. More than 1,000 people from across the country gathered in Denver. The largest contingent came from California. Participants described the conference as an intense celebration of Chicanisma/o. It produced El Plan Espiritual de Atzla´n—a separatist response to ‘‘Gringo’’ occupation and oppression—and gave birth to the idea of a national day of protest against the Vietnam War—what would become the 1970 Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles. The conference also sparked one of the earliest expressions of Chicana feminism. Women at the conference organized their own workshop. They condemned the sexism of the movement and asserted that women’s liberation would have to follow the men. Male speakers at the conference attributed feminism to the CIA—a scheme to undermine the movement—or simply attributed it to the incursion of Anglo culture and refused the report from the women’s workshop. Although the male leadership of the crusade hushed up the women’s criticism at the conference, they did not silence the emerging feminist voice of El Movimiento. Women took the ideas from the women’s workshop back to their communities. Marta Cotera, for example, went from Denver to organize in Texas. A Raza Unida Party activist, she organized Chicana feminist meetings in Houston in 1971 and 1972. Shortly after the Denver conference, students from California met at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where they called for college

Chicano/a Movement curricula that served the community. They outlined a design for implementing Chicano Studies programs throughout the UC system. This meeting also led to the organization of MECHA (El Movimiento Estudiantil de Atzla´ n). ‘‘Chicano’’ became ‘‘canonized’’ at this meeting as the term identifying the movement. The term has had varied popularity in the Mexican American community, but has remained in use by political activists, in academia, in Ethnic Studies programs, and in student organizations. Jose´ Angel Gutie´rrez was one of the founders of MAYO, the Mexican American Youth Organization. Organized in San Antonio in 1967, it was the precursor of La Raza Unida Party (LRUP). Gutie´ rrez was a driving force behind the organizing in Crystal City, which galvanized support for LRUP. Impatient with the slow and costly process of seeking redress through the courts, MAYO made significant strides organizing student walkouts and boycotts across Texas to protest segregation and advocate for bilingual education in public schools. Crystal City typified many communities in South Texas—Mexican Americans were 80 percent of the population, yet most lived in extreme poverty. A very small percentage of middle-class Mexican Americans owned small businesses or worked in civil service. An Anglodominant power structure excluded Mexican Americans from political power and controlled the local economy. Organizing began in the high school where Chicana/o students protested their exclusion in extracurricular activities. Their efforts grew, gaining community-wide support and advocates from across the

| 141

state. In January 1970, the school board conceded to many of their demands. This success launched the development of La Raza Unida, a significant third-party movement, as the Chicano/a community organized through LRUP to gain political control of local government in Crystal City also. Early success in Texas led to chapters of LRUP across the Southwest and California. Although most local chapters were not successful in getting candidates elected, LRUP brought greater visibility to the issues of the Chicano Movement —the need for education reform, the need for economic development, and the reality of racism toward Mexican Americans. The growth of LRUP would give the Chicano Movement a national voice on the political scene and give Chicano/ as greater bargaining power within both traditional political parties. The increased participation and representation of Mexican Americans in state and local government is one of the legacies of the Chicano Movement. The Chicano Movement helped change the way U.S. history is written in textbooks across the country. It created new directions in scholarship and saw a growing Mexican American middle class emerge, able to take advantage of opportunities created by Affirmative Action. It has also seen the backlash in the English-Only Movement and the aggressive anti-immigrant politics of the 1990s and 2000s. The legacy of the movement may also be seen in the incursion of Chicana/o identity and culture in the larger cultural landscape and consciousness—from popular music and media to the contributions of Chicana/o artists, poets, scholars, and theologians. Teresa Cha´vez Sauceda

142 |

Comunidad

References and Further Reading Broyles-Gonza´lez, Yolanda. El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). De La Torre, Adela, and Beatrı´z M. Pesquera. Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). Mun˜oz, Carlos. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (New York: Verso, 2007). Noriega, Chon A., Eric R. Avila, Karen Mary Davalos, Chela Sandoval, and Rafael Pe´rez-Torres, eds. The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztla´n, 1970– 2000 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001). Rosales, F. Arturo. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, 2nd ed. (Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, University of Houston, 1997).

COMUNIDAD Comunidad is the Spanish word for community, derived from the Latin communis, which refers to ‘‘common sharing.’’ This entry considers comunidad, understood as a unique theological term that cannot simply be interchanged with its seeming English equivalent ‘‘community.’’ The term ‘‘comunidad’’ refers to the experience of Latino/as religious sharing that embodies their history and culture and considers their vibrant spirituality. Both of the terms, ‘‘community’’ and ‘‘comunidad,’’ emerge from and embody the same classic theological principles. This entry explores this foundational theology of community, but primarily highlights comunidad as manifested in the mid-twentieth century to

the present and in Latin America and the United States. A secular understanding of community refers to multifaceted relations of people who share common values, beliefs, and responsibilities in any number of human structures and relationships such as family, neighborhood, or country. Depending on the level of personal commitment, these relations determine the level of engagement. Consider that in a single day a person may relate to a marriage partner, family members, coworkers, bowling team members, and parishioners they pray with at a local church. These various and multifaceted relationships help form identity and provide meaning to the individual as well as the group. Theologically, all Christian communities are recognized by their shared belief in Jesus Christ. The early Christian communities were also known by their sharing of a common life and efforts toward mutual love. Thus charity remains at the heart of any authentic and vibrant Christian community. Theologian Roberto Goizueta theologizes about the meaning and implications of comunidad for Latina/os. He recalls the history of oppression endured by Hispanics that has forged a shared communal experience of suffering. This oppression continues in the present, in Central and Latin America, and in the United States, particularly with the immigrant community. This comunidad is inclusive of all who participate in acts of Christian charity as well as spiritual solidarity with compassion for the poor and suffering. The term ‘‘accompaniment’’ articulates this experience of a Latino/a shared journey. Goizueta understands communal accompaniment to be ‘‘an active solidarity with the poor.

Comunidad In the face of intransigent political obstacles to liberation, the process of accompanying the poor in their everyday struggles is seen as the foundation of more expressly or overtly sociopolitical forms of liberation.’’ Moreover, comunidad is the Christian experience of a grassroots faith journey lived out day by day (lo cotidiano). Accompaniment is ‘‘walking with’’ the others in all the joys and sorrows of daily life. It is a moving blend of both the spiritual and the cultural expressions of the Latino/a’s inclination for communal sharing. The tragedy of one family, such as the death of a family member, is transformed into a collective experience when an entire comunidad shares the burden of suffering as well as assisting one another. Such experiences express the significance of all accompaniment, which is the implicated understanding as well as the living reality of Christ’s passion in comunidad. The suffering of Christ and that of the comunidad are one. Latino/a scholars also apply ‘‘accompaniment’’ to the common experience of celebration at the Liturgy and expression of popular religiosity. For the Latino/a comunidad Holy Week Liturgies with their processions and feast days, like the Day of the Dead and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, are cultural and spiritual experiences, shared and passionately celebrated by all with music and food. Goizueta makes these observations. Most Hispanics would tend to identify comunidad less with the institutional and hierarchical Church than with their local parish. The Latina/o finds her/his identity and home within this comunidad in relationship with those she or he finds there. The comunidad is the extension of the family, a place of warmth and safety. Traditionally, Latino/a

| 143

communities consist of immigrants and the children of immigrants bonded not only by faith but by common language and their shared immigrant experience. The dynamic flux of these communities gathers together Latino/as of various cultural traditions at varying stages of their acculturation. The inherent sense of accompaniment that is central to Hispanic culture exists in contrast to the individualistic anthropology that is dominant in U.S. culture. In the broader theology spectrum, community as fundamental to Christianity possesses a complexity of meanings and encompasses overlapping theological arenas. These theological disciplines all systematically reflect upon and enrich the Church’s understanding of community. For example, biblical theology considers the origin and nature of the first Christian communities; ecclesiology understands both the universal Church as well as the local community as base ecclesial communities; ecumenism envisions a theological reality where all Christians join in full communion; spirituality theology articulates the praxis of the Christian life. The biblical understanding of community begins in the Hebrew Scripture and has its roots in the nature of God’s relationship with the Hebrew people. Many individuals were bonded together as one people by way of their ‘‘covenant’’ with God. The Hebrews’ relationship with God was a collective covenant, or, as theologian Bernard J. Lee. clarifies, ‘‘There were no private covenants with Yahweh.’’ He also explains that in the Christian Scripture it is important to distinguish between Church and community. In the Act of the Apostles the term ekkle¯sia is used, which comes from the Greek verb

144 |

Comunidad

Cristina Vazquez celebrates her fifteenth birthday with a lavish celebration called a Quinceanera. The custom is a celebration of the young girl (la Quinceanera), and a recognition of her journey from childhood to maturity. The celebration highlights God, family, friends, music, food, and dance. (Najlah Feanny/Corbis)

kalio meaning ‘‘to call’’ or ‘‘convoke.’’ In classical usage, ekkle¯sia refers to the assembly of the people, called together to deliberate on a problem of a public nature (Acts 19:29–40). The gatherings of Christians took place in private houses until the fourth century, meaning that the term ekkle¯sia referred to a gathering of people and not to a church building (domus ecclesiae). This clearly differs from the common notion of church today as either a building or an institution. In the Gospels, Jesus forms a community of 12 apostles, whom he loves, instructs, and patiently mentors into future pastors of the first primitive Christian communities. Moreover, Jesus’ ministry is founded upon his efforts to form an extended community of disciples.

These members included rich and poor, men and women, Jews and Greeks. Some of these first communities’ members shared a common life, offering their possessions for the good of the community. Certainly there were also more generic Christian communities, where members retained their possessions and homes and continued living their respective lives. All early community members were spiritually transformed in their way, sharing a common faith that bonded them together in the person of Jesus. From John’s Gospel a theology of community emerges as Jesus gathers his flock through self-sacrifice (John 10:1– 15). Various Johnanne theological allegories suggest the importance of community, for example, the allegory of the vine

Comunidad and the branches (John 15:15). These allegories correspond theologically to the Pauline teaching that Church is the Body of Christ. Pauline theology depicts Christians as part of the Body of Christ, each with her/his specific role, working in harmony with one another. No part or member can exist without the other; all work together to form the Body of Christ. Religion scholar R. E. Whitson recalls the two doctrinal theological principles that define and affirm Christian community. First, the Trinity is the primary and perfect community. God is a dynamic community of three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit, united as One. Thus, implicit in the principle of humans as ‘‘created in God’s image and likeness’’ emerges a theological anthropology of the human person as relational in character—as God exists in community, so too human existence necessitates relationships with others. Though the Father, Son, and Spirit exist in perfect communion, they also retain their individual personhood. Likewise, people have innate individuality essential to their personhood. A healthy community affirms and cultivates both the individual and collective identity. Thus Trinitarian doctrine establishes a community as a complex dynamic that is relational and individual in nature. The second doctrinal premise is the incarnation. In the person of Jesus Christ, divinity and humanity are joined, thus establishing a unique communion between God and humankind. Jesus Christ is the unifying center of all creation. In Jesus Christ, salvation is extended to all through the miracle of this union of divinity and humanity. No other experience of comunidad has had more impact than the Latin American manifestation of Christian Base

| 145

Communities. Marcello de C. Azevedo traces the origin of these communities not to Latin America, as one would suppose, but to the 1950s and 1960s in Europe, especially in France and Italy. Initially these communities were attempts to establish an alternate model of church that was neither hierarchically nor institutionally centered. Distinctive forms of these communities developed apart from Latin America in other Third World countries such as the Philippines, Zaire, and Mozambique. Efforts were made in the late 1970s and 1980s to establish these communities among Latino/as in southern California, Texas, and New Mexico. Originally these communal initiatives were called ‘‘basic ecclesial communities,’’ ‘‘CEBs,’’ or ‘‘comunidades de base.’’ ‘‘Base’’ refers to the communities’ place at the bottom of both ecclesial and social structures. After the General Assembly of Latin American bishops met in Medellı´n, Colombia, in 1968, these communities began to consolidate. Presently there are thousands of these groups in Latin America, though exact numbers remain undetermined. Azevedo notes that in Brazil alone, which has the largest number of CEBs, it is estimated that in 2007 there were as many as 70,000 or 80,000. Various factors gave rise to the emergence of these CEBs. The theological movements and new methodologies of the twentieth century came to fruition in the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. Rather than solely reflecting upon doctrinal principle, the Council considered ‘‘the signs of the times.’’ Thus the Council engaged the vital concerns of the laity with a newfound theological anthropology that emphasized social and economic justice in a modern world.

146 |

Comunidad

These movements brought fresh and pertinent meaning to what the Council now understood as contemporary evangelization. For the poor in Latin America, modernization was simply an extension of their long history of oppression that had now taken the form of political and social injustice and economic dominance by the first world powers. The modern oppression that continued in Latin America meant ongoing discrimination, marginalization, and poverty. Liberation Theology employed the Council’s methodology and applied its rearticulated evangelism to the Latin American people. It boldly placed the suffering of the poor at the center of its reflection. Thus Liberation Theology emerged as a font of original and relevant theology empowering the poor, for the most part, at a distance from the institutional church. Ordinary people formed small communities and found themselves empowered not only by one another but by ongoing reflection on scripture. These groups identified their oppressive condition with biblical narratives, such as the Hebrew enslavement in the book of Exodus. Furthermore, these groups naturally cultivated lay leadership and the importance of the immediacy of their individual and communal needs. This communal empowerment was a radical shift from traditional privatized or devotional spiritualities of the past. Azevedo writes of his experiences in Brazil: ‘‘These are communities. They want to recover the Judeo-Christian tradition of living faith in a public way, not a privatized way; of defying, through solidarity, the individualist and competitive character imposed by the contemporary culture; of transcending the privatistic spiritually centered solely on the individual person

that has prevailed for the past five centuries.’’ Other important and timely theological contributions to the CEBs came from bishops’ conferences held in Latin America. This entry can offer only a listing of these important conferences: Medellı´n (1968) and Puebla (1979), as well as the Protestant assemblies of CLAI (Latin American Council of Churches) in Lima (1982), Sao Paulo (1988), and Concepcı´on (1995). If CEBs offer the most original contemporary expression of community, ecumenism advances a visionary union of presently divided Christian traditions. The premise of ecumenism comes from John’s Gospels, where Jesus instructs ‘‘that they [my disciples] may be one just as we are’’ (John 17:11). Perhaps even more compelling is Jesus’ explanation that the unity of Jesus Christ’s disciples gives witness that He is the savior of the world. In contradistinction, the greatest scandal of Christianity is its disaccord. Though ecumenical efforts began in the first part of the twentieth century, for Roman Catholics the Second Vatican Council initiated the importance of ecumenical relationships. The Council offered a new understanding that Christian unity was not an appendage but an essential to Roman Catholic ecclesiology. Ecumenism envisions ‘‘full communion’’ between major Christian traditions, though it is impossible at this time to articulate how this might come about or what it might look like. Thus, ecumenism is a theology as well as a practice of communal hope, Christians of various traditions compelled by their common faith in Jesus Christ to courageously engage in dialogue that advances their unity. Theological dialogue between various Christian traditions is

Conquistadores the means employed by ecumenists. Formal theological dialogues are conducted on a local, national, and international level. They engage in discourse to understand and advance not only theological accord between these traditions, but meaningful relations between Christian traditions that are still divided by significant theological, historical, and practical differences. Scholar Jeffrey Gross clarifies that ‘‘This [dialogue] is effected not by compromise, but by common biblical and historical study.’’ The goal, he writes, is to ‘‘find a ground of truth which transcends historical division.’’ With regard to the ecumenical movement in Latin America, Gross makes this observation: ‘‘The ecumenical movement in Latin America is complicated by a preponderance of evangelical and Pentecostal Christians there who are more dominant and less ecumenical than the historical churches with whom the Church is in dialogue.’’ It is important to consider the emergence of Latino/a theologians from various Protestant as well as Catholic traditions who work together in an academic context to articulate a shared Hispanic theology. More notable has been the cooperative theological reflection of Hispanic Christian traditions, Catholic and Protestant, in the work of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians (ACTUS). The Asociacı´on para la Educacı´on Teolo´gica Hispana (AETH) carries out a similar theological mission in the Protestant tradition and has always been open to Catholic participation and membership. Joint theological mentoring has been sponsored by Hispanic Theological Initiatives (HTI). Rafael Lue´vano

| 147

References and Further Reading Azevedo, Marcello. ‘‘Base Communities.’’ The Dictionary of Catholic Social Thought, ed. Judith A. Dwyer (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1994). ———. Basic Ecclesial Communities in Brazil: The Challenge of a New Way of Being Church (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1987). Boff, Leonardo. Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986). Goizueta, Roberto. ‘‘Accompaniment.’’ Dictionary of Third World Theologies, ed. Virginaa Fabella and R. S. Sugirtharajah (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000). ———. Caminemos Con Jesu´s: Towards a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005). Gross, Jeff. ‘‘Ecumenism.’’ The Dictionary of Theology (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1987). Whiteson, R. E. ‘‘Community.’’ The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Gale, MI: The Catholic University of America, 2003).

CONQUISTADORES The Castilian term Conquistadores signifies the ‘‘conquerors’’ that sailed from Spain to the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific in search of land and wealth. The term originated in Spain during the Middle Ages to identify the knights, mercenaries, and soldiers who fought against the Moors in the Spanish Reconquest (Reconquista) from the late 700s to the defeat of the Islamic Caliphate of Granada by the unified monarchy of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen

148 |

Conquistadores

LA MALINCHE (1498?–1540?) La Malinche was the indigenous woman who became Herna´n Corte´s’s interpreter, local guide, and mistress who bore him a son during the Spanish conquest of Mexico from 1519 to 1525. Her Nahuatl birth name was probably ‘‘Malintzin’’ or ‘‘Malinal.’’ She is also known by her Christian baptismal name, Don ˜a Marina. After her father died, her mother remarried and had a son. Malinche was given away as a slave by her stepfather who favored her half-brother as heir. The Cacique of Tabasco gave her along with 19 other slave girls to Corte´s. Her knowledge of Nahuatl, and the Mayan languages of Yucatan, as well as a rapid mastery of Castilian allowed Corte´s to build the alliances he needed with other local tribes before invading the Aztec capital at Tenochtitlan. She is revered as the mother of the first mestizo of Spanish and Aztec blood, yet vilified as the traitor who helped Corte´s and the Conquistadors. Malinche’s life yields two highly contested stories: an archetypal tale as one of the first indigenous converts to Christianity and mother of the Mexican people, and a painfully ambiguous story of betrayal resulting from her collaboration with the Spanish forces who destroyed the Aztec civilization and enslaved its people. —AH

Isabel I of Castile on January 2, 1492. Throughout the Spanish Reconquest, knightly ‘‘conquerors,’’ much like the Conquistadors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became the subject of heroic tales portraying their romanticized chivalry and service to the nation. Ironically, 1492 was also the year Christopher Columbus journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a westward trade route to Japan, China, and India. Although he mistook the continents of North America and South America for Asia and the East Indies, these previously unknown lands became the stage on which the Conquistadors played out their quest for gold and power. Among the peoples of Latin America, the Caribbean and Philippine Islands, and the Hispanic American Southwest, the men known as Conquistadores represent Spain’s exploration and exploitation of the Western Hemisphere, as well as the ambivalence with which many people from these

regions still regard the legacies of Spanish conquest and colonization. The myth of the Spanish Conquistadors is inextricably tied to the chivalric militancy and territorial ambitions of feudalism, which was the political system that governed territorial, social, and military relations in Medieval Europe. As ‘‘soldiers for hire’’ such men found ample opportunity for collecting the ‘‘spoils-of-war’’ amidst the land disputes that were common in Europe before the rise of modern nation-states like Spain, France, and England. Within the prescriptions of the ‘‘feudal contract,’’ relations between high ranking nobles (lords) and the lower nobility (vassals) were based on the exchange of surplus land for armed service and protection by the lesser nobles and their sons, who, in turn, benefited greatly from the fertile lands and resources they received from their upper-class patrons and allies. Kinship ties also figured prominently in this

Conquistadores

| 149

REQUERIMIENTO The Castilian term ‘‘requerimiento’’ means ‘‘requirement.’’ It also signified Spain’s imperial ‘‘demand’’ for control of the territories, resources, and labor of indigenous peoples. It originated in a legal document written in 1510 by Spanish jurist and royal advisor Juan Lo´pez de Palacios Rubios of the Council of Castile, who argued for Spain’s and Rome’s political and religious dominion over all indigenous lands and peoples. Designed to be read to native leaders before conquest or battle, the document claimed universal rule for St. Peter’s successors as ‘‘heads of the entire human race’’ who, by the will of God, governed the spiritual realm until the end of the world. It then alluded to a Papal Bull, signed by Alexander VI in 1493, giving the monarchs of Castile and Aragon control of all islands and lands across the world’s oceans. This was followed by strict orders to convert to Christianity, or suffer the penalties of war, enslavement, and total loss of sovereignty for resistance, thus blaming the natives for the violence of their impending Spanish conquest. Very few indigenous tribes accepted the document’s terms when read to them before battle. Requerimiento was severely criticized by Bartolome´ de las Casas as illegal and immoral according to Christian ideals. —AH

system, which led to frequent ‘‘feuds’’ over disputed lands, entangling alliances, and inheritance rights. As Spain became modern Europe’s earliest unified nation-state between 1474 and 1492, a surplus of Spanish males trained in the arts of war and the politics of the feudal system became problematic for the new nation. Reports of unknown lands discovered by Columbus and tales of vast wealth and resources waiting to be claimed in the Americas inspired many older and younger men across Spain to transfer their feudal and militaristic concerns to the lands across the Atlantic. In 1493, the Spanish monarchy established the encomienda system on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, and the following year received papal approval for this forced labor policy, which was basically a modification of the old feudal system of lordship over a specified area of land and over the peasants living on the property. In this case,

the recently conquered indigenous tribes were treated as the new peasant class and forced into slave labor. Unlike earlier feudal arrangements, the Spanish Crown retained strict ownership rights over the new land and its native laborers through the encomienda system, but granted rights of ‘‘trusteeship’’ for these properties to Conquistadors and colonists. The earliest Conquistador leaders were known as Adelantados, a term denoting ‘‘one who pushes forward’’ or the ‘‘advance man’’ who arrives in the name of the monarchy. This term originated in the frontier wars of the Spanish Reconquest when the territories of the Iberian Peninsula often changed hands between Muslim and Christian overlords. ‘‘Adelantado’’ also served as the official title of the first military governors in many of the Spanish colonies. The conquest of the ‘‘New World’’ provided these men and their families, who knew no way of life outside these outdated

150 |

Conquistadores

MANIFEST DESTINY The notion of ‘‘Manifest Destiny’’ first appeared in John L. O’Sullivan’s 1839 newspaper essay, ‘‘The Great Nation of Futurity.’’ Fusing romantic nationalism with ideas of unlimited economic progress, he set the tone for an increasingly captivating national myth that influenced American politics from 1840 to the early 1900s. Proponents believed the Anglo-Saxon races that founded the American colonies were destined by God to settle the entire continent, developing its natural resources and spreading liberty, democracy, and Protestant Christianity. The 1840s were the myth’s defining moment when the United States confronted Great Britain over the disputed Oregon Territory, and then ignited the Mexican-American War by annexing Texas and later gaining 55 percent of Mexico’s territory through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Besides westward expansionism, the doctrine’s racial overtones influenced the conquest and removal of Native Americans from their lands. Pundits were declaring the frontier closed when Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition opened. The fair, which celebrated American progress alongside the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyages, generated a reassessment of America’s destiny in the world. This growing global view of Manifest Destiny culminated with the seizure of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines during the 1898 Spanish-American War. Today ‘‘Manifest Destiny’’ is understood as the ideology behind U.S. imperialism. —AH

feudalistic and military traditions, with renewed possibilities for territorial and economic expansion while serving under the banner of the Spanish Crown and sharing the spoils of conquest with their royal landlords back in Spain. Conquistadors were especially motivated by the promise of accumulating wealth, such as gold, silver, trade goods, and spices, and also by the power and prestige that came with military success in the service of the Spanish Crown and building an empire. Spreading the Christian faith among the natives was also an integral aspect of the Spanish colonial enterprise. The exploits of the Conquistadors made Spain the most powerful and richest nation in European history.

Key Figures While hundreds of commanders and soldiers participated in Spain’s conquest of

the Americas from 1492 to the subjugation of Upper and Lower California in the late 1700s, some figures amassed such enormous wealth and power that their exploits stand out among all the others. The four Conquistadores best known among scholars and the general public are Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), Herna´ n Corte´ s (1485– 1547), Francisco Pizarro (ca. 1471– 1541), and Francisco de Orellana (1511–1546). After setting sail from the port of Palos in southern Spain on August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus’s beleaguered flotilla of three small ships made landfall somewhere in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, at a place the natives called Guanahani, which he renamed San Salvador. Columbus visited and named about four more islands after Guanahani. The expedition arrived in

Conquistadores

| 151

After the first transatlantic crossing, Christopher Columbus lands in the Caribbean. In contracting with Christopher Columbus, the Spanish crown authorized Columbus to discover and conquer non-Christian lands. (National Archives)

Cuba by October 28 and then moved on to the neighboring island of Hispaniola in November. On Christmas Eve Columbus lost his flagship on a reef off the coast of Cuba and ordered his men to build a fort with the wooden remains of the ship. Columbus and his men were awestruck at the natural beauty and pristine conditions of the islands they renamed, charted, and claimed for Spain. By January 1493, it was clear to him and his fellow commanders that they needed to get back to Spain in order to realize their hope of returning with a much larger and well-equipped expedition. On March 15, 1493, Columbus and his two remaining ships returned to their home port of Palos. Columbus led three more voyages to the Caribbean and Central

America over the next ten years before returning to Spain severely ill and nearly blind. He died convinced that he had found a sea route to Asia. As news of Columbus’s Atlantic crossing spread quickly around Spain and beyond, it became clear that the European world, and the lives of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, would never be the same again. Some historians interpret Columbus’s voyages from 1492 to 1504 as the beginning of the ‘‘Age of the Conquistadors,’’ while other scholars place that responsibility in the hands of Herna´n Corte´s who conquered the Aztec Empire of Mexico in 1521. Francisco Pizarro, who in 1533 conquered the Inca Empire that once spanned the areas of modern Peru,

152 |

Conquistadores

VIRGEN DE LOS REMEDIOS Mayahuel became associated with healing plants through La Virgen de Remedios, for the statue Corte´s left behind after pillaging the Temple Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl at Cholula, Puebla, Mexico, where a mural depicts pulque drinkers. Spaniards escaped a night attack by inhabitants, attributing their escape to the Virgen, La Conquistadora, building a church to the Virgen de Los Remedios over the temple. The statue was lost for 20 years until the Virgen appeared to Juan Ce Cuautli, One Eagle, as he walked along the road, recognizing her as the Virgen who fought alongside the Spanish on La Noche Triste. He finally went to the place she instructed, finding the lost statue under a maguey cactus. The statue returned repeatedly to the maguey until he built a hermitage to her in Michoacan. La Virgen was used again by the Royalist troops in the Mexican War for Independence. Between September 1 and 8, thousands make an annual pilgrimage to the basilica of the Virgen, in San Bartolo Naucalpan, enjoying fireworks, dances, food, and elaborate church and indigenous ceremonies, while in San Francisco, California, Xiuhcoatl Danza Azteca sponsors a velacio´n and danza, honoring Mayahuel, La Virgen de Los Remedios. —MVS

Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador, had sailed from Panama several times since the 1520s in search of the legendary city of gold known as El Dorado. The quest for this mythical city motivated a considerable number of the expeditions and campaigns led by the Conquistadors. El Dorado was made famous by Pizarro’s cousin and top lieutenant, Francisco de Orellana, who explored the Amazon River from the interior all the way to the Atlantic Ocean in search of gold and new territories. Despite his vast wealth and influence with the Spanish Crown, Pizarro had to fight a disastrous civil war against his own people, and he was assassinated in July 1541 by rival Conquistador Diego de Almagro. Since the 1992 Quincentenary of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, the motivations and violent deeds of the Conquistadors have been interpreted very differently outside of Spain. In many parts of Latin America today the

Conquistadors are viewed as invaders and criminals, while in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado reside Hispano families who still remember their Conquistador origins by celebrating this heritage each year in local festivals honoring their Spanish ancestors and Roman Catholic traditions.

Time Line The following time line summarizes some of the major Conquistador figures and events relating to the Hispanic American religious cultures and regions covered throughout this encyclopedia. 1492 1496

1509

Christopher Columbus’s first voyage. Columbus’s brother, Diego, establishes first permanent Spanish colony at Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola. Juan Ponce de Leon, who fought in the overthrow of the Muslim Caliphate of Granada in 1492 and

Conquistadores

| 153

SAN MIGUEL COLONY In 1523, King Carlos V of Spain granted permission to Lucas Va´squez de Ayllo´n to establish a settlement on the North American coast for the express purpose of bringing the Catholic faith to the inhabitants of the land. In 1526, Ayllo´n set out from Hispaniola and founded the colony of San Miguel de Guadalupe, the first European colony in North America. San Miguel, which was settled with about 600 individuals, was located near the vicinity of Jamestown, the English colony that would be founded nearly a century later. Here, for the first time on what was to become the United States, a chapel was built, a Spanish Mass given, and the first Thanksgiving dinner shared. But life in San Miguel was difficult, claiming the lives of many, including Ayllo´n. The colony finally failed after a cold winter marked by slave revolts, Indian attacks, and mutiny. San Miguel was eventually abandoned and the surviving 150 people returned to Hispaniola. —MAD

accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, conquers the island of Puerto Rico and becomes its first governor. In 1513 he explores the coast of Florida in search of further conquest and the mythical ‘‘Fountain of Youth.’’ He dies in Cuba in 1521 from wounds received while fighting against the Indians in Florida. 1510–1513 Vasco Nun˜ez de Balboa reaches the Pacific Ocean, claims it for Spain, and establishes the first Spanish colony in Panama. 1511 Father Bartolome´ de Las Casas begins preaching in Santo Domingo against the abuses of Spain’s colonial administration, and he teaches that the Christian faith is incompatible with the cruelty and violence inflicted on the Indians. 1511–1515 Diego Vela´zquez de Cue´llar conquers Cuba, becomes its first governor, and establishes the city of Havana as a base of operations for future Spanish expansion campaigns to North America, the Caribbean, and Central America.

1517

Francisco Herna´ ndez de Co´ rdoba explores the Yucatan Peninsula and begins the conquest of the coastal Mayan cities whose pyramids remind him of the ‘‘wonders of Egypt.’’ 1519–1521 Corte´ s conquers Aztec Empire in Mexico. 1521 Ferdinand Magellan claims the Philippine Islands for Spain. 1526 Lucas Va´squez de Ayllo´n sails from Santo Domingo and founds the colony of San Miguel on the coast of South Carolina, near the site where the English would found the Jamestown colony 100 years later. His expedition included about 600 colonists, and the first ever use of African slave labor in North America. He explores the coastlines of Georgia, the Carolinas, and discovers Chesapeake Bay. The expedition ends in total failure when a mere 150 surviving colonists return to Santo Domingo after Ayllon’s death. 1528 Panfilo de Narvaez and Alvar Nun˜ez Cabeza de Vaca land in Florida with the intention of exploring and conquering what is now the southwestern

154 |

Conquistadores

United States. The expedition falls apart after a series of misfortunes and battles with Indians. Cabeza de Vaca and a few others survive by living among various indigenous tribes while wandering through the Southwest until reaching a Spanish outpost in Mexico by 1536. 1533 Pizarro conquers Inca Empire in South America. 1535 Antonio de Mendoza appointed first Viceroy of New Spain by King Charles V of Spain. Mexico becomes center of Spanish colonial rule in the Western Hemisphere. 1537–1542 Hernando De Soto, who served with Pizarro in the conquest of Peru, is named governor of Cuba and later granted a contract by King Charles V to conquer, pacify, and colonize North America. The expedition costs De Soto his reputation and his life, and ends in total failure in 1543. 1539–1540 Inspired by wealth looted from the Aztecs and Incas, Francisco Va´squez de Coronado explores the American Southwest in search of the legendary ‘‘Seven Cities of Gold,’’ also known as Cibola. 1541–1542 Coronado explores New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Texas, and the Grand Canyon in search of Quivira, another legendary city believed to have been as wealthy as those of the Aztecs and Incas. 1542 Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo explores the coast of California and claims the region for Spain. He dies of an infection before returning to Mexico and the expedition records are lost. 1544 Coronado is found guilty of atrocities against the Indians and of misrepresenting the wealth of the American Southwest, and he is removed from

his post as governor of New Galicia in northern Mexico. 1552 Father Bartolome´ de Las Casas publishes A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies. The book angers many among the Spanish colonial leaders and the Conquistador ranks, but the Spanish monarchy ignores the book. 1565 King Philip II of Spain orders the conquest of the islands discovered by Magellan in 1521. The Conquistador and Adelantado, Miguel Lo´pez de Legazpi, invades and colonizes the Philippine Islands, which he names in honor of the king, and, which Spain controls until the conclusion of the Spanish-American War of 1898. 1565 Pedro Mene´ ndez de Aviles founds the city of Saint Augustine in Florida, as a Spanish fortress guarding the sea lanes against pirates and European rivals disrupting annual convoys of Spanish galleons transporting gold and silver from the Aztec and Inca Empires and from the mining operations in Mexico, Peru, and Chile. Saint Augustine becomes the oldest permanent European settlement in North America and the oldest city in the United States. 1595 King Phillip II of Spain authorizes Juan de On˜ate to conquer and colonize the upper Rio Grande region and the territory of New Mexico. 1598 On˜ ate claims all of New Mexico beyond the Rio Grande for Spain and serves as the first governor of the Province of New Mexico, establishing his capital city at San Juan de Los Caballeros, near present-day Santa Fe. 1606–1613 King Phillip III of Spain accuses On˜ate of atrocities against the Acoma Indians and of exaggerating the

Conquistadores

| 155

JUNI´PERO SERRA (1713–1784) Born Miguel Jose´ Serra in 1713 on Spain’s island of Mallorca, Serra joined the Franciscan Order at age 16 and took the name of St. Francis’s companion, Junı´pero. He taught philosophy until age 36, when he left Spain for missionary work in Mexico. Serra arrived at Vera Cruz in 1750 and traveled by foot to Mexico City to fulfill a religious vow at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. For 17 years he preached and converted Indians along Mexico’s Sierra Gorda and in the coastal villages and mining camps. Following the expulsion of the Jesuits from New Spain, Serra was appointed ‘‘Father President’’ of the Baja California missions in 1767, a post that later included the nine Franciscan missions he founded across Alta California. In 1769 Serra joined Governor Gaspar de Portola´’s expedition to colonize New California, the last Conquistador campaign. In July Serra founded the first Franciscan mission at San Diego on the Camino Real road connecting the Spanish settlements along California’s coast. Native Americans and some U.S. historians remain critical of Serra’s complicity in Spain’s conquest of California’s Indian peoples. Serra died in 1784 and was beatified in 1988 by Pope John Paul II. —AH

1610

1680

1692

1727

wealth of New Mexico. He is recalled to Mexico City and then banished from the colonies. Pedro de Peralta founds the city of Santa Fe in New Mexico, which then becomes the administrative, military, and missionary capital of Spain’s colonial efforts in the American Southwest until Mexican independence from Spain in 1821. Harsh and oppressive living conditions provoke a native uprising that expels Spanish colonists from Santa Fe during the Pueblo Indian Revolt. Calling upon the old themes of the Spanish Reconquest, Don Diego de Vargas recaptures Santa Fe and restores Spanish colonial rule in New Mexico. Pedro de Rivera dispatched by the king of Spain to investigate fiscal abuse and waste in New Spain, Texas, and the American Southwest. His report recommends a shift from imperial expansion to the consolidation of lands and peoples already under Spanish rule. Given the

1769

growing world power of England and France, the Crown implements Rivera’s recommendations. The last Conquistador campaign, led by Governor Gaspar de Portola´ and the Franciscan Father Junı´pero Serra, sets off to colonize Nueva California and founds a series of Catholic Missions along the Camino Real beginning at San Diego Bay and continuing northward to San Francisco Bay.

Although praised through the centuries for their bravery and fantastic discoveries, posterity has recorded and judged the actions of the Conquistadors, and the Spanish monarchs who hired and empowered them to undertake these military campaigns, with a mixture of fame and infamy. Alongside the old naı¨ve themes of ‘‘exploration,’’ ‘‘discovery,’’ and ‘‘adventure,’’ a new generation of historical studies and educational materials on the ‘‘Age of the Conquistadors’’ today emphasizes themes of ‘‘liberation’’

156 |

Conversion

and ‘‘justice’’ for the indigenous peoples and former colonial nations that were enslaved and exploited during the ‘‘Conquest of the Americas,’’ cultures and nations that in complex ways still struggle with the legacies of colonialism. Albert Herna´ndez

References and Further Reading Diaz del Castillo, Bernal. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico: 1517–1521 (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003). Can˜izares-Esguerra, Jorge. Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550– 1700 (Stanford University Press, 2006). Chavez, Thomas E. Quest for Quivira: Spanish Explorers on the Great Plains, 1540– 1821 (Tucson, AZ: Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, 1992). Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Wood, Michael. Conquistadors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

CONVERSION Conversion is the religious process of exchanging one’s beliefs system for another. Usually, it encompasses the movement away from one’s faith tradition and embraces the beliefs and doctrine of a different group. Although most Hispanics, according to a 2007 study conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, continue to practice and participate within the same faith tradition of

their birth (82 percent), a growing minority, almost one out of every five Latina/os (18 percent), has changed faith affiliation or has ceased identifying with any faith tradition. Many factors are in play when a person changes religious affiliation. The primary reason given among Hispanics was a desire to experience a closer relationship with God (83 percent). Inspiration of a certain pastor (35 percent), a response to a deep personal crisis (26 percent), and a result of marriage (14 percent) are the other reasons most often given for Hispanic conversions. Because most Latina/o Christians are Catholic (70 percent), it should not be surprising that a large number of converts were former Catholics. As the Pew study shows, for every Latina/o who converts to Catholicism, four leave it. However, this does not necessarily mean that the numbers of Hispanic Catholics are decreasing—quite the contrary. If the conversion rate over the past quarter century continues, the overall Catholic population will decline from 68 percent in 2006 to 61 percent in 2030. Yet, over that same period, the proportion of Catholics who are Latina/o will increase from 33 percent to 41 percent. Of the 18 percent of all Hispanics who converted, 13 of the 18 percent were former Catholics and 3 percent were former Protestants (the remaining 2 percent indicated no religious affiliation or were from a non-Christian tradition). For Hispanic evangelical converts from Catholicism, one in three stated a lack of excitement with the Catholic Mass as a primary motivation. While almost half of all converts from Catholicism were at odds with the Church’s teaching on divorce and on whether women or married men could be priests, only 7 percent

Conversion

| 157

CONVERSOS In 1391, Spain engaged in the first mass conversion of Jews. Many converted to Christianity, others simply fled. By 1492, Jews, as well as Muslims, were expelled from Spain. Those who stayed and converted, along with their descendants, were collectively called converses (converts). Pejoratively they were referred to as marranos. Among those who were converses were Christopher Columbus (suspected), several of his crew, the ´ vila, and the cleric Bartolome´ de las Casas. While some conquistador Pedrarias de A converses embraced their new faith, others continued to secretly practice their former faith under the veneer of Christianity. They were called crypto-Jews or secret Jews. The expulsion of Jews and the start of Spain’s colonial project in the Americas coincided. Many converses immigrated to the so-called New World seeking safer havens. Even those who sincerely converted still feared the Inquisition quest and punishment of crypto-Jews. Those who immigrated to Mexico still thought it would be safer to be as far as possible from the imperial center. Many migrated to the farthest reaches of the empire, far from the reaches of the Catholic Church and the Mexican Inquisition. Specifically, they migrated to the lands that would become Texas and New Mexico. Understanding the Southwestern Hispanic culture requires a serious consideration of Jewish influences. Since the 1960s, many Latina/os have rediscovered their Jewish roots with some returning to the faith of their ancestors. —MAD

listed these disagreements as reasons for their conversion. It is important to note that Hispanics are not necessarily leaving Catholicism to become Protestants. According to research conducted by Gasto´n Espinosa, a substantial number are converting to Jehovah’s Witness and Mormon traditions. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon, but rather has its roots in the 1920s. Today, Jehovah’s Witness have more than 2,200 Spanish-speaking congregations, making them the largest non-Catholic Christian tradition among Hispanics. They have the highest conversion rate among Latina/o immigrants compared to any other non-Catholic tradition. Meanwhile, Mormons rank eighth among the Hispanic’s largest religious traditions. The decision to convert encompasses many reasons, making it impossible to

pinpoint the determining factor. Nevertheless, it appears that conversion occurs more frequently among Latina/os born in the United States and among those who are more fluent in English. The 2007 Pew study shows that 14 percent of those whose primary language was Spanish converted, 20 percent of those who were bilingual converted, and 26 percent of those whose primary language was English converted. It appears that assimilation plays a role. Moving to the United States and learning English is somewhat associated with changes in religious affiliation. Although national origins do not seem to influence conversions, there exists one noteworthy exception. Puerto Ricans have a higher disproportionate number of converts (31 percent). It is important to note that 28 percent of converts, according to the Pew study,

158 |

Lo Cotidiano

moved away from all religious affiliation. Most of those who moved toward secularism were Catholics (39 percent of all Hispanics who claim to be secular). Latina/o seculars who were former Protestants represented 15 percent of those self-identifying as such. Those who converted to secularism had several characteristics in common. Most notable is that they are economically better off than the rest of the Hispanic population. About a third of them earned in excess of $50,000 annually, compared with only 17 percent of all Latino/as. Also, about 20 percent of them had a college diploma, compared with 10 percent of all Hispanics. Finally, more than half of them are U.S. born (54 percent) and the dominant language they speak is English or they are bilingual (68 percent). Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading Espinosa, Gasto´n. ‘‘Methodological Reflections on Latino Social Science Research.’’ Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´n Espinosa (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2006). Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007).

LO COTIDIANO Daily lived experience, lo cotidiano, is a privileged source or locus theologicus in the scholarship of a number of U.S. Latino/a theologians. In general, the term refers to the ordinary, in all its particularities, and for Latina/o theologians it invites critical analysis of the multiple

factors that impact and shape daily living. The complexity of lo cotidiano as a site of both sin and grace is explored from a variety of perspectives and serves as ground for liberative praxis. Attention to the daily is focused through various concrete lenses, including but not limited to mestizaje/mulatez; diasporas/migrations; las luchas/struggles endemic to poverty, oppression, injustice, colonization; experiences of women; popular religion and liturgy; spirituality; popular culture. While this category is prevalent in a number of Latino/a theologians, it is worth noting its development in seminal and influential scholarship by Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az, Marı´a Pilar Aquino, Orlando Espı´n, and Roberto Goizueta. The significance of vida cotidiana, the everyday life, is especially evident in the works of Latina theologians. For Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az, lo cotidiano is central to mujerista theology. She finds the daily to be descriptively, hermeneutically, and epistemologically significant as it pertains to the lived experience of grassroots Latinas. Descriptively, lo cotidiano entails such factors as race, class, and gender, as well as relational interactions, faith expressions, and experiences of authority. Hermeneutically, lo cotidiano serves as an interpretive lens through which reality, in terms of actions, relationships, discourses, norms, and social roles are perceived and evaluated. Epistemologically, lo cotidiano gives credence to the ways of knowing and expressing rooted in Latinas’ efforts to make sense out of their living and circumstances. For Isasi-Dı´az, the use of lo cotidiano as a theological source exposes knowledge in general and theological knowledge in particular as being fragmentary, biased, and provisional, and this affirms its use as an act of subversion. However she

Lo Cotidiano

| 159

LOCUS THEOLOGICUS The term locus theologicus means a source for theology that includes but is not limited to the sociopolitical, cultural, economic, and gender contexts taken into account in theological tasks. The term is based upon Aristotlian topoi introduced by the Spanish Dominican Melchior Cano (1509?–1560) in De locis theologicis. As Meza states, Cano adopted the locus tradition to give further authority to Catholic doctrine over three other schools of thought: reformers like Martin Luther and their scripturally based assertions; mystics like Teresa of Avila and their subjective religious experience; and humanists like Lorenzo Valla and their academic skepticism. Liberation Theologies introduced the primacy of the life of the poor as sources for theologies. Both Protestant and Catholic Hispanic Theologies add a mutual accountability between theologian and community in theologizing. The primary place for these theologies comes from lo cotidiano, daily lived experiences of Latino/a communities in the United States of America. In using lo cotidiano as a primary source for theological tasks, theologians are not to speak for others but rather to listen and rearticulate theologically the lived experiences of communities of accountability. Whenever possible a theologian should allow community members to articulate their own theologies based upon various contexts. —NDA

contends that lo cotidiano must also function as a catalyst for structural change in the face of all that is contrary to the kinship constitutive of the Reign or kin-dom of God. Marı´a Pilar Aquino asserts that Latina thought is explicitly theological when it focuses critical reflection on daily practices as sustained by liberating visions and Christian tradition. She attributes salvific value to daily life, in so much as the presence of God is experienced through the struggles of the people for justice, humanization, and a better quality of life. At the same time lo cotidiano encourages participation in a transformation with eschatological significance. For Orlando Espı´n, the birthing place of an authentically Latino/a theology of grace is the foundational experience of daily life, as it exists and is lived. Espı´n is careful not to reduce lo cotidiano to living that occurs primarily within the private or domestic sphere and

acknowledges the impact on daily life of such macro factors as violence, poverty, global economics, information technology, politics, education, and media. For Espı´n, popular religion is a key hermeneut of daily experience. The scholarship of Roberto Goizueta continues in this vein, in his development of the metaphor of accompaniment to describe the interactive relationship between human and divine as expressed through popular religious practices. In these ritualized moments daily living is affirmed as the locus of divine presence, and all that denies life is resisted. Latino/a theologies are part of a greater stream of scholarship that attends to critical analysis of the daily. Among some of the pioneering influences in this area are the works of Agnes Heller, Historia y vida cotidiana (1972), Sociologı´a de la vida cotidiana (1977), La revolucı´on de la vida cotidiana (1982); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday

160 |

Cuban Americans

Life (1984); and Teresa de Barbieri, Mujeres y vida cotidiana (1984). Carmen M. Nanko-Ferna´ndez

References and Further Reading Aquino, Marı´a Pilar. Our Cry for Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). ———. ‘‘The Collective ‘Discovery of Our Own Power.’’ Hispanic Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise, ed. Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az and Fernando F. Segovia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996). Goizueta, Roberto. Caminemos con Jesu´s: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Cavazos-Gonza´lez, Gilberto. ‘‘La Cotidianidad Divina: A Latin@ Method for Spirituality.’’ Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology. http://www.latinotheology.org/. Espı´n, Orlando O., and Miguel Dı´az, eds. From the Heart of Our People: Latino/a Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. ‘‘Lo Cotidiano: A Key Element of Mujerista Theology.’’ Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 10, no. 1 (August 2002): 5–17. ———. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-first Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996). Martell-Otero, Loida I. ‘‘Lo Cotidiano: Finding God in the Spaces of the Everyday.’’ http://www.thewitness.org/archive/ dec2000/locotid.html.

CUBAN AMERICANS Cuban Americans account for approximately 1.3 million U.S. residents who trace their ethnic and cultural origins back to the island of Cuba. Cubans migrated intermittently to the South-

eastern United States as political and economic conditions fluctuated throughout the nineteenth century. Although American presidents from Thomas Jefferson to James Buchanan entertained dreams of either annexing Cuba or purchasing it from Spain, the Cuban Revolution of January 1959 motivated thousands of Cubans to leave their homeland and seek asylum in the United States as political exiles. Today Cuban Americans comprise the third largest group of Hispanics living in the United States after Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, who, respectively, rank first and second among Latino/a demographic patterns. The highest concentrations of Cuban American residents are in the urban areas surrounding Union City, New Jersey, and Miami, Florida. As a result of Cuba’s strategic location between Latin America and North America, and the economic and political successes of exilic Cubans and their American-born offspring, Cuban Americans are an important and vibrant community within the context of Hispanic American religious cultures.

Historical Development During his first voyage, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) landed somewhere along the northeast coast of Cuba on October 28, 1492. He was seeking a sea route to China and new territories for the Spanish Crown. In 1494, during his second voyage, Columbus explored Cuba’s southeastern and western coasts while still searching for mainland China. The Native inhabitants, known as Taı´nos and Siboneyes, told Columbus that Cuba was the largest ‘‘island’’ in the area, but he persisted in his misguided hunch that it was the coast of China. The Natives also informed him their homeland lacked

Cuban Americans

| 161

HATUEY Hatuey is a sixteenth-century cacique (chieftain) whose resistance to the Spanish colonizers made him a modern symbol of Cuban resistance, specifically against foreign powers—first Spain, then after the Revolution for Independence, the United States. He created in eastern Cuba a loose confederation of Native Americans whose military objective was to resist the invading colonizers. For three months he carried out a style of guerrilla warfare against the Spaniards. By 1511, Cuba’s first Spanish governor, Diego Vela´zquez, led an expedition intent on capturing the renegade chieftain and pacifying the island. Once in custody, Hatuey was condemned to death so as to serve as an example for others. Before Hatuey was to be burned at the stake, a Franciscan friar attempted to convert him to the Christian faith with the promise of heaven and the threat of hell. Hatuey is reported to have asked if Christians went to heaven. When the friar answered in the affirmative, Hatuey rejected Christianity, retorting that he had no desire to go to a heaven where he would see such cruel people. —MAD

the riches of other nearby islands. Mesmerized by Cuba’s pristine magnificence, a Cuban legend claims Columbus said that this was the most beautiful land human eyes had ever seen. Soon other Spanish navigators explored the Cuban coastline and confirmed it was an island. As news of its natural beauty and protected harbors reached Spain, Cuba caught the attention of Conquistadors and Adelantados seeking ever-increasing personal wealth while expanding the Spanish Empire. Surviving copies of an early sixteenth-century Royal Charter, signed by King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabel of Castile, decrees the island’s name as Fernandina, but the newcomers preferred the Native name for the island, Cubanacan, which they shortened to Cuba. Motivated by exaggerated reports of the island’s wealth and resources, the Spanish Monarchy issued orders for the conquest and colonization of Cuba in May 1509. Cuba’s first Spanish governor, Diego Vela´ zquez de Cue´ llar (1465–

1524), arrived in 1511. Cuba remained under Spanish domination for almost four centuries until the end of the Spanish-American War. In the process of looking for the gold exaggeratedly attributed to both Cuba’s natural resources and its Native peoples, the Spaniards attacked, enslaved, and exploited the Indians until violence and disease nearly wiped out their presence throughout the island. Vela´ zquez established Santiago de Cuba as his capital city on the island’s southeast coast, and established the main Roman Catholic Bishopric for the growing Spanish Empire of the Caribbean at Baracoa. He also founded the cities of Bayamo, Santiago de Cuba, Sancti Spiritus, Trinidad, and the famous naval port at San Cristobal de La Habana, which would one day become the island’s capital city. Given its strategic location in the Caribbean Sea, Cuba served for centuries as the Spanish Empire’s forward base of operations for colonial military deployment to the Americas. It was from here that

162 |

Cuban Americans

Spain, under Vela´ zquez’s leadership, launched its Conquistador explorations and invasions of Mexico, Florida, Central America, the Southeastern United States, and finally Peru. During the first several decades of the sixteenth century, and before the establishment of the viceroy of New Spain, Cuba’s governor was the most powerful Spanish colonial leader in the Western Hemisphere. However, Cuba’s importance in the region diminished after the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru dominated the transfer of plundered wealth and the flow of trade goods from the colonies back to Spain. As colonial competition between Spain and its western European rivals increased, Cuba’s strategic position as the gateway to the Americas became a handicap for Spain. From 1538 to about 1796 France, England, and Holland provoked naval confrontations aimed at disrupting Spanish shipping, which included invading or briefly occupying Cuba. In the 1600s corsairs, pirates, and buccaneers repeatedly attacked Cuban ports until naval stability and the protection of trade routes were restored in the Caribbean and Central Atlantic regions by the early 1700s. Spanish colonists and their Cubanborn offspring, known as criollos or Creoles, felt abandoned and isolated from Spain during the two centuries of piracy and foreign naval interference in Cuba. Despite lingering territorial conflicts with England and France, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the largest colonial population increases in Cuba. By 1700, however, less than 3,000 Natives survived in Cuba. In the late 1500s large numbers of African slaves were brought to the island to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations. As the balance of population in Cuba

between ‘‘Whites’’ and ‘‘Blacks’’ shifted over time, the Spanish Crown and the governor of Cuba often enticed new waves of ‘‘White’’ Spanish settlers from the Canary Islands, Andalucı´a, Galicia, and Catalonia to settle in Cuba. The Islen˜os (Islanders) from the Canaries and the Galicians from northern Spain accounted for the largest percentages among these settlers. Hence, Cuba’s racial demographics became predominantly White versus ‘‘mulatto’’ or Black as in other Spanish colonies, a demographic trait that persists among Cuban Americans living in the United States as well as among the population of today’s Cuban nationals. This racialized colonial policy, known as blanqueamiento (whitening), alleviated economic pressures back in Spain and the Canaries by providing new land and employment opportunities for farmers, laborers, and families willing to migrate to Cuba. However, while most of Spain’s colonies in Central and South America were in open revolt during the early 1800s, the constant influx of new settlers arriving in Cuba from Spain and its territories generated a relatively loyal colonial populace. Hence, the idea of a Cuban independence movement emerged gradually after the Enlightenment among Creole intellectuals, teachers, literary writers, and statesmen like Father Felix Varela (1788–1853), Jose´ Antonio Saco (1797– 1879), Jose´ de La Luz y Caballero (1800–1862), and Narciso Lo´pez (1797– 1851). Several of these individuals were graduates of the Royal College and Seminary of San Carlos in Havana, which was founded in 1773 after the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish colonies. Felix Varela was a Roman Catholic priest and renowned university professor

Cuban Americans who embraced liberalism and advocated for Cuba’s complete separation from Spain. When colonial authorities ordered his arrest for fomenting revolt, Varela left Cuba for the United States and founded a newspaper in New York City, El Habanero, which he secretly distributed in Cuba, and which became both a forum and a vehicle for spreading the ideals of Cuban independence among those living on the island as well as abroad. Contemporary Cuban Roman Catholics, living in Cuba and the United States, have suggested that Father Felix Varela’s extraordinary life of ministry, teaching, and service against despotism and oppression is worthy of being considered for canonization. The final break among the Cubanborn Creole class erupted on October 10, 1868, when Carlos Manuel de Ce´spedes proclaimed and led the Grito de Yara, meaning the rallying ‘‘Cry of Yara,’’ which launched the so-called ‘‘Ten Years’ War’’ against Spanish domination. For his efforts on behalf of liberty and the rule of law, he became known in Cuban history as the ‘‘Father of the Nation.’’ Unfortunately, Spain responded with about 200,000 troops and a naval blockade of the island until the war ended in 1878. On the other hand, some historians interpret the struggle for Cuban independence as a war that lasted for over 30 years because revolutionary movements and Spain’s oppression of democratic partisans did not cease until after the 1898 Spanish-American War. During the 1800s and early 1900s Cubans experienced a fascination with the United States at the imaginative intersection of democratic idealism and economic opportunity. Cuban Americans are fiercely independent and entrepreneurial, an economic and sociopolitical

| 163

characteristic forged through Cuba’s protracted nineteenth-century independence struggles and the people’s fascination with their large and powerful northern neighbor. Nineteenth-century Cuban intellectuals, whose colonial ancestors were self-reliant farmers, laborers, and plantation owners disturbed by the increasing abuses of Spain’s colonial administration of their homeland, were also influenced by the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy and Abraham Lincoln. Freedom (libertad), personal integrity and self-determination, and valor against tyranny are central themes in the writings of the Cuban ‘‘Apostle of Independence,’’ Jose´ Martı´. Many Cuban Americans also have nineteenth-century roots in southeastern U.S. cities, like Tampa, Key West, or Saint Augustine, dating back to the era when Florida was still a Spanish possession. Some Cuban Americans claim ancestry in New Orleans originating in the years when trade between Cuba and Louisiana was essential for French interests in North America. When Vicente Martinez Ybor founded a cigar company in the late 1800s near Tampa, Florida, the area became the site of a thriving Cuban American immigrant community. Today Ybor City claims many fourth- and fifth-generation Cuban Americans. Some Cuban Americans also have greatgrandparents who for business reasons lived temporarily as far north as New York City and Philadelphia during the mid-1800s. Many nineteenth-century Cuban visionaries of liberty, like Fe´lix Varela and Narciso Lo´pez, sought refuge in the United States after Spanish colonial authorities ordered their incarceration or execution. Among the most illustrious figures in Cuban history is the poet, journalist, and

164 |

Cuban Americans

Considered by many Cubans to be their national hero, Jose´ Martı´ led the fight for independence from Spain. He was killed in battle with Spanish troops in 1895. (Library of Congress)

revolutionary leader Jose´ Martı´ (1853– 1895). Martı´ was a first-generation Cuban Creole whose father was from Catalonia, Spain, and whose mother was from the Canary Islands. He is highly revered among both contemporary Cuban Americans in the United States and Cuban nationals back on the island. At 16 years of age he published a revolutionary newspaper, La Patria Libre (The Free Nation). Before reaching the age of 20, Martı´ already had been arrested for anti-Spanish activities, and in 1871 he was deported to Spain for his public efforts on behalf of Cuban independence. He lived much of his adult life as an exile who passionately loved his homeland and advocated for improved living conditions and justice throughout Latin America. In 1881 Martı´ settled in New York City, among a growing

community of Cuban exiles and firstgeneration Cuban Americans, where he wrote some of his major essays, books, and poems. By 1892 Martı´ was convinced that Cuba’s only hope of gaining independence from Spain, and avoiding annexation through rising U.S. imperial ambitions, was to accelerate the planning and implementation of an open revolt in Cuba against Spain. He soon formed the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York City, which mobilized anti-Spanish leaders and forces back on the island for a revolt that began on February 24, 1895. Martı´ was tragically killed at the Battle of Dos Rio on May 19, 1895, but the War of Independence he inspired achieved numerous victories before the intervention of U.S. forces in Cuba three years after his death in the SpanishAmerican War. After several years of American military occupation, Washington conceded Cuban independence. Unfortunately, the ratification of the infamous Platt Amendment to the Cuban Constitution of 1901 by both the U.S. Congress and the Cuban Senate, gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs as deemed necessary. On May 20, 1902, General Leonard Wood handed control of the island over to Cuba’s first president, Toma´s Estrada Palma (1832–1908), who had succeeded Jose´ Martı´ in 1895 as leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Despite the general mood of optimism throughout Cuba, many former leaders and soldiers who had fought in the War of Independence saw the Platt Amendment as an undermining of Cuban political and economic autonomy. Cuba was the last of the Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere to gain independence, and then remained under the influence of U.S. foreign policy and

Cuban Americans economic development interests from the early 1900s until the Cuban Revolution of Fidel Castro ousted President Fulgencio Batista from power on January 1, 1959. Cuban American ambivalence toward the United States, the use of the English language, and adoption of U.S. citizenship produce a complex web of regret for allowing repeated American interference in Cuban affairs during the twentieth century juxtaposed with genuine appreciation for the nation and people who welcomed Cubans with open arms throughout the 1960s as Fidel Castro moved his people toward Communism and an alliance with the Soviet Union (USSR). Castro’s move toward the Russians during the Cold War resulted in decades of Cuban economic and military dependence on Soviet bloc countries until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Although there were small communities of Cuban Americans living in Tampa, Key West, New Orleans, and New York City before 1959, the vast majority of Cuban Americans trace their U.S. residency or birth to four successive waves of immigration after 1960. The first wave began when Castro seized power on New Year’s Day of 1959 and lasted until shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. With the United States and the USSR pushing each other to the brink of nuclear war over Cuba, tensions between Havana and Washington led to the cancellation of all cultural exchange visits, exit visas, and the imposition of travel restrictions to and from the island. When it was over, the first wave of the exodus accounted for over 280,000 residents leaving Cuba from 1959 to 1962. The second wave began in 1965 and ended in 1973. It was the result of Washington and the Castro

| 165

regime negotiating a temporary airlift of people from Cuba to Florida, which at one point transported about 1,000 people per week to Miami International Airport and over 273,000 Cubans of all ages by the time the flights concluded. Not all of the Cubans in this second wave decided to live in South Florida. Some settled in Union City, New Jersey, others went to Chicago, and some became residents of New York City or its surrounding districts. Finally, the third wave of Cuban immigration was the result of an incident at the Peruvian Embassy in Havana when about 10,000 people stormed the embassy on Easter Sunday in April 1980 and asked for political asylum. After several very tense days, the Cuban government gave permission for those staying at the Peruvian Embassy to leave Cuba, along with anyone else who wanted to leave the country permanently. For Cuban exiles on the U.S. mainland this was, at first, like a gift from heaven. From April 15 to October 31, 1980, over 125,000 Cubans were picked up in boats by relatives, or by opportunistic private ferrymen, who crossed the 90 miles of open seas separating Key West, Florida, from the Port of Mariel in Cuba. The migration came to be known as the ‘‘Mariel Boatlift’’ or the ‘‘Mariel Exodus,’’ and had both positive and negative repercussions for Cuban Americans already living in the United States. Finally, the ‘‘Balsero (Cuban Rafters) Crisis of 1994’’ almost became a repeat of the 1980 Mariel Exodus as some people stormed foreign embassies in Cuba, while thousands of others attempted to flee the island on makeshift rafts and unsafe boats in desperate hopes that either the Gulf Stream current would carry them to Florida’s shores, or that the U.S. Coast Guard might rescue them

166 |

Cuban Americans

FE´LIX VARELA Y MORALES (1788–1853) Fe´lix Varela y Morales was beatified by Pope John Paul II, who referred to Father Varela as ‘‘the foundation-stone of the Cuban national identity . . . the best synthesis one could find of Christian faith and Cuban culture.’’ If canonized, he will be the first Cuban-born saint. Varela was ordained a priest by his 23rd birth date and elected as a delegate to the Spanish Parliament in 1822. He proposed two bills, the first abolishing slavery and the second calling for an autonomous Cuba. He became the first person of importance to make a serious call for Cuban independence while a delegate. These political views endangered his life, forcing him to seek exile in the United States in 1823. There he worked with the poor and published a paper dedicated to science, literature, politics, and faith. He published many articles dealing with human rights, religious tolerance, the importance of education, and the need for cooperation between English and Spanish speaking communities. By 1837, he was named vicar general of the New York Diocese. He spent the majority of his life in the United States, dying in Saint Augustine, Florida. In 1997 the U.S. Postal Service issued a 32-cent stamp honoring Varela. —MAD

before being lost at sea. That summer, over a four-day period in late August, a fleet of 16 Coast Guard cutters picked up over 8,000 Cuban rafters. The single day rescue record for that year was 3,253 people. Some scholars identify this crisis as the fourth wave of Cuban immigration to the United States, while others interpret it as part of the smaller scale post-1980 Cuban migration pattern. Although the Cuban Rafter Crisis of 1994 was settled by an agreement between Fidel Castro and President William Clinton, the balsero phenomenon has not entirely ceased even as foreign economic investment and development in Cuba increased during the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. The balseros’ dream of finding a better life in the United States is not just about economic and political hope, but indicates an integral characteristic of Cuban American spirituality founded on the principles of human dignity and personal liberty reminiscent of how Cuba’s ‘‘Apostle of Independence,’’ Jose´ Martı´,

believed very passionately that people simply love liberty and were intended by their Creator to live free of oppression and exploitation. This sentiment is also echoed in Roman Catholic social justice and liberation teachings about ‘‘human flourishing,’’ for in order to become all that God’s love and mercy intended for each person, then personal liberty and dignity is a vital aspect of one’s relationship with his or her Creator. Ideals of liberty along with spiritualized sentiments about life in the United States versus the effects of Communism on individuals, children, families, and society were at the root of the international custody battle over Elia´n Gonzalez, the six-year-old boy who became the most famous Cuban rafter ever found drifting along the Florida coast. He was found by fishermen on Thanksgiving Day 1999 while hanging on to an inner tube after his mother and ten others had drowned at sea attempting the crossing from Cuba through the Florida Straits. The fishermen turned him over to the

Cuban Americans U.S. Coast Guard who then handed him over to officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Relatives of Elia´n’s mother from Miami’s Cuban community claimed the boy and took him into their home, but his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez-Quintana, soon contacted the family and informed them that the boy was taken from Cuba without his knowledge or consent. The Cuban American side of the family in Miami refused to let Elia´n return to Cuba. They argued that Elia´ n would have a much better life in the United States without the propaganda and indoctrination of Communism. This set off a five-month custody struggle that eventually involved both sides of the family along with the Clinton administration, the Castro regime, and leaders of the Cuban American community in Miami. Elia´n’s Miami relatives applied on his behalf to the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta for political asylum, but were turned down because he was just six years old and required his father’s approval. Attorney General Janet Reno ordered Elia´n’s return to his father and family in Cuba and set a firm deadline for his Miami relatives to obey the order. When the deadline passed without compliance, a team of armed officers from the U.S. Border Patrol stormed the house in Miami and seized Elia´n during Easter weekend on April 22, 2000. After Elia´n was reunited with his father and grandparents in Cuba, he became a symbol of nationalism for Fidel Castro, who attended the boy’s birthday each year until stepping down from power due to declining health on February 24, 2008. In June 2008 Elia´ n Gonzalez officially joined the Cuban Communist Party and acknowledged his continued appreciation for Fidel Castro’s support on his behalf, while Cuban Americans in the

| 167

United States responded sternly to the contrived and propagandistic tone of such reports from Cuba’s news agency. Elia´ n’s dramatic rescue on Thanksgiving Day 1999, and his mother’s courageous sacrifice of her own life at sea to save her son, together with the tense events of Holy Week 2000 that culminated in the boy’s return to Cuba, heightened the religious idealization and spiritual themes of the entire incident among the Cuban American exile community. Some compared Elia´ n’s inner tube experience to the infant Moses being set adrift on the Nile in a basket and suggested that Elia´n’s story would somehow bring down Castro’s regime just as Moses had freed the Hebrews from the bondage of Pharaoh. For some Cuban Americans the incident reactivated memories of their own childhood departures from Cuba without their parents during the 1960s, or through the U.S. government and Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami sponsored Operation Pedro Pan (Peter Pan), which transferred over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children on freedom flights to the United States from December 1960 through late October 1962. Liberty and spirituality are inextricably bound in the conscience of Cuban Americans in ways that transcend their particular denominational affiliation, whether Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Pentecostal, as well as transcending the generational categories of the exilic versus Americanborn members of their community.

Key Concepts, Ritual Structures, and Institutions Cuban Americans identify predominantly as Roman Catholic. However, as exemplified by historic assimilation

168 |

Cuban Americans

VIRGEN DEL COBRE In 1971, the Cuban community of Miami had a chapel consecrated to the memory of la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, an image of Marı´a that had been exiled from Cuba in 1961. This image remembers the Mother of Christ as the Virgin of Charity from the town of Cobre, Cuba. The original image was discovered in the sixteenth century by an African child, Juan Moreno, and two indigenous children, Juan and Rodrigo de Hoyos. They are remembered as los tres Juanes (the three Johns). Their story relates that after a storm, the image was found floating on a wooden plank at sea. The plank contained the inscription ‘‘I am the Virgin of Charity,’’ and the cloth dress worn by the small statue was completely dry. A chapel was built for the statue near the site of its recovery, but eventually the statue began to disappear at night, indicating that it wanted to be moved to Cobre. Another chapel was built for it in Cobre but again it kept disappearing at night, until it appeared to a little girl atop a nearby mountain (Sierra Maestra). Another chapel was built, and the statue finally found a home in Cuba and the hearts of the Cuban people. —GCG

patterns among numerous U.S. immigrant groups, a growing number of Cuban Americans are finding faith and fellowship in other Christian denominations such as Southern Baptists, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, and Pentecostalism. There is also a percentage of Jewish Cuban Americans known among the South Florida community by their ethnic nickname, Jewbans. Given the historic syncretism of racial, cultural, and religious beliefs fostered throughout the Spanish colonies, many Cuban Americans, regardless of their Christian denominational affiliations, honor and practice the traditions of Santerı´a, which originated in Cuba, other Caribbean colonies, and Brazil as a mixture of West African traditional Yoruba religion with the worship of Catholic saints and spiritual beings known as orisha. Also known as the ‘‘Rule of Lukumi,’’ or ‘‘The Way of the Saints,’’ Santerı´a influenced the Creole class in colonial Cuba and became an

important part of both Cuban and AfroCaribbean religious culture. Since certain rituals involve animal sacrifice, Cuban American practitioners of Santerı´a were often accused of health code and animal rights violations until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that a law passed by the City of Hialeah, Florida, restricting the practices of Santerı´a and its animal sacrifice rituals was unconstitutional. One of the most beloved religious traditions among Cuban Americans is their historic veneration of Nuestra Sen˜ora de La Caridad de El Cobre (Our Lady of Charity), Cuba’s patroness whose legendary story dates back to the early 1600s. According to the story two Native brothers of Taino ancestry, Rodrigo and Diego de Hoyos accompanied by a Black slave boy, Juan Moreno, were searching for salt in a boat on the Bay of Nipe, near the island’s northwestern tip, when a statue of the Virgin Mary miraculously floating on a piece of wood appeared to

Cuban Americans them. They were amazed that despite the rough seas, the Virgin’s feet and robes were dry. Upon hearing of this apparition, the Spanish Captain of the Mines of El Cobre, Francisco Sanchez de Moya, ordered the construction of a shrine to Our Lady of Charity, which sparked a wave of pilgrimage to the site. The region’s prosperity increased to the point that the Captain relaxed certain policies toward the Native and African slaves under his charge, which led to the Virgin’s legendary association with both charity and freedom. Over the next three centuries Cuba’s Virgin patroness became a symbol of the motherland, as well as of benevolence and liberty. By 1968 Miami’s Cuban exile community began raising funds to build the presentday Shrine of Our Lady of Charity at a waterfront site on Biscayne Bay facing out toward the Atlantic. Contemporary Cuban Americans have interpreted the Virgin of Charity’s story as that of the first Cuban rafter, and as a symbol of hope against tyranny and liberty for all Cubans. Biblical themes have also functioned as an integral and sustaining aspect of the Cuban American exile and immigration experience. While Cuban American families have embraced typical U.S. holidays like the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving Day in November, the most revered day on the calendar for Cuban Americans is the annual Christmas Eve feast, known as Noche Buena (The Good Night), consisting of a traditional meal of roasted pork marinated in a special sauce, called mojo, served alongside yucca and plantains, and different variations of rice and black beans. Throughout the Cuban migration waves, and in recognition of solemn hopes for returning to their homeland, Cuban

| 169

American exiles and their American born offspring began the tradition of offering a short prayer, or a toast of sangria wine, with the words, ‘‘Next Year in Cuba,’’ derived from the biblical story of Passover and traditional sayings during the Hebrew Diaspora experience, ‘‘Next Year in Jerusalem.’’ Indeed, biblical themes of exile, such as allusions to the ‘‘Babylonian Captivity’’ as a metaphor for the plight of the Cuban people or references to biblical ideals about hospitality to strangers, are derived from the lessons of the Jewish Diaspora, on which Spain also left its mark in the same year as Columbus discovered Cuba. Many older Cuban Americans, who arrived in the United States during the first and second waves of the Cuban exodus, have fond memories of the support and compassion they received as new arrivals from Jewish Americans, and still appreciate how these gestures fostered healthy relationships between Cuban exiles and Jewish American communities in urban areas like New York City and Miami Beach. In the Iberian-Spanish tradition Christmas is not the day set aside for exchanging gifts. Instead, this celebratory role is assigned to the visit of the Three Wise Kings, who brought gifts to the infant Jesus on January 6 of the Christian liturgical calendar, which became the feast day for gift giving and family celebration. When Fidel Castro banned Cubans from celebrating the feast day in 1971, Miami’s Cuban American exile community responded by founding the annual Parada y Festival de Los Reyes Magos (Three Kings Day Parade and Festival), which draws over 500,000 people each January along Miami’s ‘‘Little Havana’’ parade route, and has become one of the top Hispanic

170 |

Cuban Americans

American religious celebrations in the United States. The political circumstances that led to the establishment of this parade and festival in 1971 further exemplify the characteristic mentioned above about the comingling of religious traditions with both personal and spiritual aspirations for the liberty and dignity of the Cuban people. The foremost Cuban exile organization in the United States is the Miamibased Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), whose Web site describes its mission statement as conducting and supporting the scores of activities aimed at advancing human rights in Cuba, educating public opinion on the plight of the Cuban people, dispelling prejudice and intolerance against Cuban Americans, and promoting culture and creative achievement among the Cuban people. CANF has worked since its founding in the 1970s fostering national and international dialogue about Cuban concerns and influencing the executive and legislative branches of government in Washington on behalf of Cuban American concerns. Despite complaints from some sectors of the U.S. government and corporate America seeking normalized relations with Cuba for economic gain, the organization’s emphasis on humanitarian assistance, educational programs, and legal support of Cuban religious and dissident leaders earned CANF the widespread support of the Cuban American community. One of the most significant yet little known aspects of the Cuban American community is the vital role played by Cuban exile private schools and professional educators from the mid-1960s to the present. Many of these Cuban private schools began operating in the United States after their founders either

migrated to Miami or were expelled from Cuba by the Communists. Among these schools we find institutions like Dr. Gil Beltran’s La Luz School, or the highly successful chain of day-care centers and schools founded by Demetrio Perez Jr., the Lincoln-Marti Schools. Cuba’s famous all-male Roman Catholic, Jesuit institution, Colegio de Belen (Belen School), was founded in 1854 in Havana by a Royal Charter from the Spanish Crown. Although among its high school alumni we find Fidel Castro, the Jesuit Fathers fled the religious oppression of Cuban Communism and relocated the school to Miami in 1961 as the Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, which today has an enrollment exceeding 1,200 students in grades 6 through 12. Hard work, scholarship, good conduct and citizenship, and religious values form the core of the curriculum at each of these schools. By providing standard and affordable K-through-12 educational programs for South Florida’s Cuban and Latin American immigrant families, these Cuban American private schools have served as vehicles for assimilation and acculturation into U.S. society while instilling a sense of shared memory and deep respect for their Cuban cultural or religious roots among Cuban American, and other Hispanic American, youths residing in South Florida. While Cuban American communities existed in several U.S. cities prior to 1959, it is estimated that these Cuban enclaves in New York City, Tampa, Key West, Miami, and New Orleans totaled less than 40,000 residents. Hence the post-1959 migration waves of Cubans moving to the United States account for the vast majority of Cubans who either became naturalized U.S. citizens or were born in this country after their parents’

Cuban Revolution arrival in the United States. Transitioning from their native island to the United States in the aftermath of a revolutionary crisis, and then living through the Cuban Missile Crisis, first-generation Cubans faced the challenge of rebuilding their financial and professional lives while redefining their religious and cultural identities. Second-generation Cuban Americans have struggled with identity in the context of what it means to be a fully bicultural American while honoring the memories, assumptions, and hopes of their parents and raising their own much more assimilated families. As the third generation of Cuban Americans reaches adulthood, it will be interesting to witness how they deal with the pressures of continued assimilation to White, North American identity roles, personal religiosity and denominational affiliation, and the cultural memories of first- or second-generation Cuban Americans. Albert Herna´ndez

References and Further Reading Anto´n, Alex, and Roger E. Herna´ndez. Cubans in America: A Vibrant History of a People in Exile (New York: Kensington Books, 2003). Conde, Yvonne. Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children (New York: Routledge, 1999). De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). De La Torre, Miguel A. Santeria: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004). De La Torre, Miguel A. The Quest for the Cuban Christ: A Historical Search

| 171

(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). Diaz, Guarione M. The Cuban American Experience: Issues, Perceptions, and Realities (St. Louis: Reedy Press, 2007). Ferna´ndez, Alfredo. Adrift: The Cuban Raft People (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2000). Ferna´ndez Soneira, Teresa. Cuba: Historia de la Educacio´n Cato´lica, 1582–1961. 2 vols. (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1997). Firmat, Gustavo Perez. Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming of Age in America (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1995). Firmat, Gustavo Perez. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). Grenier, Guillermo J., and Lisandro Perez. The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003). Herrera, Andrea O. Remembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). Llanes, Jose´. Cuban Americans: Masters of Survival (Cambridge, MA: Abt Books, 1982). Poyo, Gerald E. Cuban Catholics in the United States, 1960–1980 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

CUBAN REVOLUTION For Cuban Americans, specifically those living in Miami, Florida, the 1959 Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro was a traumatic experience that contributed to a collective identity. The underlying impulse of this revolution was not fidelity to some Marxist ideology; rather, the Cuban Revolution was a response to the radical economic and political changes that occurred on the island of Cuba

172 |

Cuban Revolution

throughout the twentieth century— changes that affected all aspects of Cuban culture. How Christianity came to be understood and portrayed also underwent several transformations throughout and since the revolution, impacting the religiosity of those Cubans who stayed on the island and those who came to the United States as refugees. Probably the most significant event of the Revolution, which began the merging of the political with the sacred, occurred on January 8, 1959. Just seven days after the triumph of the Revolution, Fidel Castro gave his first national speech from Camp Columbia. At the moment Castro called for unity and peace, a white dove landed on his shoulder. For Christians, it was as if Castro assumed the role of Jesus, who also underwent a similar experience of a descending dove shortly after his baptism. But this religiously charged symbolism did not just start with Castro’s speech calling for unity; during the Revolution, both Catholic and Protestant chaplains and leaders actively served with the guerilla forces. It is important to note that two early martyrs of the Revolution were Frank and Josue´ Pais, Baptists who were killed by Batista’s soldiers for leading an uprising in Santiago. Also, individuals like Esteban Hernandez, a Presbyterian, were tortured and killed by Batista’s police. These religious leaders were targeted because the houses of several Protestant leaders served as underground headquarters for the Revolution. Catholic leaders also took part in the insurrection, most evident in the activities of Father Sardin˜ as who served as chaplain to the rebel army and was promoted to the rank of comandante. Also, Father Madrigal served as treasurer for the July 26 Movement, and Father

Chabebe would relay coded messages to the rebel forces through his religious radio program. Although the church hierarchy remained silent during the insurgence, a significantly large percentage of Catholics, like the martyred Catholic student leader Jose´ Antonio Echevarrı´a, participated in the uprising. While some Protestants and Catholics chose to live out their faith through the Revolution, others, specifically foreign U.S. missionaries, saw the Revolution as a threat to the basic teachings of Christianity. While at first pleased with the new government’s initiatives to end gambling, prostitution, and political corruption, early optimism gave way to disillusionment as the new regime took a more leftist tilt. Months after the 1959 Revolution, these missionaries returned to the United States, followed by many Cuban pastors and their middle-class congregations. The departure of these Christians almost brought the Protestant church to extinction. Although entire congregations disappeared, finding salvation in U.S. exile, those who stayed tended to reject the Revolution, becoming a social space for political resistance. Catholics, as well as Protestants, became engaged in counterrevolutionary activities, openly supporting and praising the United States, the hegemonic power intent on ending the Revolution and reestablishing its authority on the island. For many Christians, Cuba needed to be ‘‘saved’’ from godless communism. On Christmas 1960, Archbishop Pe´ rez Serantes (a critic of the former Batista regime) wrote a pastoral letter that presented Cubans with an ultimatum, titled ‘‘With Christ or Against Christ.’’ In his letter, the archbishop laid out the existing dichotomy in eschatological tones, ‘‘The battle is to wrestle between Christ and

Cuban Revolution the Anti-Christ. Choose, then, each to who they prefer to have as Chief.’’ Shortly after the failed U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Castro regime nationalized all church schools and declared most foreign clergy persona non grata. These drastic actions were taken in response to three Spanish priests and at least one minister (Methodist) who participated as chaplains during the April 1961 invasion. One of the priests, Father Ismael de Lugo, was to read a communique´ to the Cuban population: ‘‘The liberating forces have disembarked on Cuba’s beaches. We come in the name of God. . . . The assault brigade is made up of thousands of Cubans who are all Christians and Catholics. Our struggle is that of those who believe in God against the atheists. . . . Have faith, since the victory is ours, because God is with us and the Virgin of Charity cannot abandon her children. . . . Long live Christ the King! Long live our glorious Patron Saint!’’ Several months after the failed invasion, on September 8 (the day of La Virgen del Cobre), 1961, the most notable protest against the Revolution occurred. An anticommunist march (riot) began at the Cathedral of La Habana, by the auxiliary archbishop, Eduardo Boza Masvidal, the Revolution’s most outspoken critic. About 4,000 faithful participated in the march. Church forces clashed with revolutionary supporters, resulting in several injuries and the death of a passing 17-year-old. Within two days, priests were rounded up, and on September 17, 135 priests, along with Monsignor Boza Masvidal were expelled from the country (he went on to form the ‘‘Unio´n de Cubanos en el Exilio’’—Union of Cubans in Exile). Additionally, all religious acts outside of the church became illegal.

| 173

At the end of that momentous year, on December 1, 1961, Castro declared himself to be a Marxist-Leninist, sending further shock waves throughout churches in Cuba, as well as the rest of Latin America. It was now official: a supposedly Catholic nation had fallen into the hands of an atheist communist regime. Because Catholics viewed communism as incongruent with Christianity, due mainly to the encyclical Divini Redemptoris, no room existed for dialogue. Cubans were forced to choose between ‘‘Roma o Moscu´.’’ To remain in power, Castro had to decisively deal with these nonconforming Christians. The proclamation that was supposed to be read by the priest involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the participation of churches in protests against the Revolution, led Castro to believe that an organized strategy existed among Christians to overthrow the Revolution. In his speech concerning the September 8 showdown between the government and the church, Castro laid out his argument. [The counterrevolutionaries] want to paint the Revolution as an enemy of religion, as if that had anything to do with the things that interest the Revolution. . . . The doctrine of Christ was a doctrine that found an echo among the slaves, among the humble people. It was persecuted by the aristocracy, by the dominant classes. These gentlemen, in contemporary times, completely abandoned the essence of the Christian doctrine, dedicated themselves to taking religion as an instrument to hide all the vices and all the defects of the present dominant classes, forgetting about the slaves of today, the workers, the peasants without land. These gentlemen separated themselves from the interests of

174 |

Cuban Revolution the exploited masses, and from the humble masses, in order to carry religion on a silver platter to the great exploiters, to the dominant classes. They divorced themselves from the people, and they prostituted the essence of primitive Christianity.

Those Christian leaders who refused to conform to the Revolution faced expulsion. They were denied the right to run religious-based schools, thus deeply cutting into their ability to raise funds. Also, the churches’ formerly private media became nationalized. Church members were routinely watched by the government, and many bishops, priests, and ministers were placed under house arrest. It was illegal for Christians to be members of the Communist Party, the only route to economic advancement. Furthermore, they were denied highlevel government and university positions. No sociopolitical or economic reason existed to remain a Christian. Many, mostly the middle class, chose flight, rather than fight, creating a braindrain on the island and further weakening the churches’ power bases. Those who neither left nor forsook their faith faced persecution. Between 1965 and 1968, thousands of artists, intellectuals, hippies, university students, and homosexuals were abducted by the State Secret Police and interned, without trial, in Military Units for Assistance to Production (UMAP), reeducation labor camps. Also interned were Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gideonists, and Catholic or Protestant activists. Even the Nicaraguan priest, Ernest Cardenal, who had been friendly to the Castro regime, criticized the Cuban government in its treatment of Christians in his book En Cuba. With churches decimated, silence became

essential to self-preservation. Thus began an era of ‘‘internal exile.’’ With time, tensions between the church and government subsided. As the church ceased to challenge Castro’s authority, tolerance for religion reemerged. The Catholic Church in particular began the reconciliation process under the leadership of Cesare Zacchi, the Vatican’s emissary appointed in 1962. He was quick to criticize prerevolutionary Cuba and the clergy who abandoned Cuba while praising Castro’s social reforms. By April 10, 1969, a decisive break with the past occurred when the Catholic Church published the Cuban bishop’s letter denouncing the U.S. embargo. Influenced by the theological developments occurring elsewhere in Latin America, specifically liberation theology, the Catholic Church, for the first time, committed itself to work for the development of Cuba without condemning the ideology of the regime. Castro reciprocated by establishing a Christian-Marxist dialogue. Castro was influenced by priests such as Camilio Torres, who in 1966 ceased to say the mass to join the peoples’ struggle in carrying out a revolution in Columbia. The 1979 success of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution, where Catholic clerics partook in the struggle against Somoza and assumed governmental positions, further impacted Castro’s attitudes toward religion. Protestants also sought a rapprochement. In 1977 the Confession of Faith of the Presbyterian-Reformed Church declared, ‘‘The Church lives joyfully in the midst of the socialist revolution.’’ Baptist minister Jesse Jackson visited Cuba in 1984, at which time Fidel Castro gave a televised speech from the pulpit of a Protestant church flanked by church

Cuban Revolution

| 175

Pastoral visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba on January 24, 1998. (Gianni Giansanti/Sygma/ Corbis)

leaders. Additionally, the 1985 publication of Castro’s bestseller Fidel y la religio´n (Fidel and Religion) began a public dialogue concerning areas of cooperation between Marxist and what Castro called ‘‘honest’’ Christians. Today, Cuba is experiencing a spiritual revival. The fastest-growing churches (excluding those that practice Santerı´a) are Pentecostal. The Bible has become the top seller, and seminaries like the one in Mantanzas have seen an increase in enrollment. Catholic churches have witnessed a renewal in popularity as thousands attend open-air masses inspired by the pope’s 1998 visit. As Cuba entered the negative economic period known as the ‘‘special period,’’ caused by the collapse of world communism, church pews are beginning to fill. After years of absence, Christians are

returning, bringing with them the experience of secularism. Some are Marxists who have never been churched. These new parishioners are more critical, more questioning, and more demanding. This revival has created a meeting ground for those who have been opposed to the Revolution and those who have served it. Since the Revolution, Cuba’s churches have evolved into an indigenous expression of faith. The breakage with the United States and the effects of the embargo have isolated the Cuban Christian community, forcing it to find its own expression of religiosity. Regardless of these churches’ political views, ranging from accommodation to aloofness toward the Revolution, the Cubanization of church has been a century-long process. Miguel A. De La Torre

176 |

Cultural Anthropology

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). ———. The Quest for the Cuban Christ: A Historical Search (Tampa: University Press of Florida, 2002). Kirk, John M. Between God and the Party: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1988). Maza, Manuel P. The Cuban Catholic Church: True Struggles and False Dilemmas (master’s diss., Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 1982).

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY Anthropology is generally divided into four fields: archaeological, physical or biological, linguistic, and sociocultural. Cultural anthropology falls in the last category and studies all aspects of human behavior and thought. Most cultural anthropologists carry out fieldwork and write ethnographies about a particular culture. The modern concept of a distinct discipline of cultural anthropology did not emerge until after the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment when the social sciences were separated from the natural sciences. Some scholars in France and England suggested that society should be considered its own natural system with its own laws. Charles Montesquieu (1669-1755) attempted to discover the laws of social life in eighteenth-century France by comparing political institutions and religious beliefs as social behavior. The school of moral philosophers, Adam Smith (1723–1790) and

Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), argued that ‘‘primitive’’ societies could offer clues about the history of ‘‘higher’’ societies. While Adam Smith argued that capitalism improved people’s wealth, a nineteenth-century German theorist, Karl Marx (1818–1883), argued that the market created inequalities and that social systems were inherently unstable. These two positions were reflected in the foundational work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and German sociologist Max Weber (1864– 1920). While Durkheim’s social theory emphasizes stability or the maintenance of society, Karl Marx and Max Weber’s ideas explore the stratification of society (between the bourgeoisie and proletariat classes) and the process of how a society changes. In other words, Durkheim focused on a stable social structure within society, while Marx and Weber examined social process. The field of anthropology was dominated by Europeans and North Americans who traveled to observe indigenous cultures. In one of the early ethnographic studies of the poor in Latin America, Oscar Lewis follows one family’s migration from a rural village into Mexico City in his classic work: The Children of Sanchez. Appropriating Sigmund Freud, Lewis offers a psychosocial view into the violent world of suffering, deprivation, infidelity, delinquency, corruption, police brutality, and cruelty of the poor to the poor. Through a series of in-depth interviews, Lewis also captures intense feelings of human warmth, joy, individuality, love, and hope for a better life among the urban poor. Another important work, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, by Michael Taussig, applies Marxist Theory to analyze the

Cultural Anthropology

| 177

PERSONALISMO Personalismo is a Spanish term from persona (person) and the suffix -ismo (-ism), which linguistically refers to a distinctive interpersonal style that places a unique emphasis on the human person. Other examples of interpersonal ‘‘isms’’ are familism and altruism. It is considered a core value dimension of Latino/a cultures and it is conceptualized affectively, cognitively, and behaviorally. It affectively prescribes for people to be interpersonally warm and affectionate. Cultural anthropologists note that this ‘‘cultural script’’ is part of a cultural worldview characteristic of highly collectivistic and relational cultures that value people over tasks, things, and time. Latina/os engage in several verbal and nonverbal behaviors to show personable traits. They prefer face-to-face contact, personal close and informal attention, shaking hands when greeting someone, and hugging to express closeness and rapport, and formal and informal forms of address (usted versus tu´, respectively). As part of the cultural interpersonal ethos, personalismo is crosssituational and expressed in a variety of settings. A Spanish-speaking religious minister would express personalismo by exhibiting simpatı´a (friendly affection) and inspiring confianza (trust) and respecto (respect). The religious audience, in turn, would demonstrate personalismo by addressing the religious leader as usted and demonstrating culturally appropriate manners (bien educado). —FAO

introduction of capitalism into native Bolivian culture. When colonialism enslaved the indigenous as plantation workers and miners, and converted land into a commodity, Taussig argues that the locals fetishized nature to understand why so many lives are being taken by the new system. Taussig concluded that working in the mountain mines becomes tantamount to selling one’s soul to the devil. In another historical study, Ruth Burns researched the archives of a Roman Catholic convent in Cuzco, Peru, at the time of the conquest to determine what role it played in introducing colonialism. She found that the orphanage raised the mixed-race offspring of Spanish encomenderos and Inca princesses with a Spanish mentality—thus training the new meztizo elite. The convent introduced the capitalistic values of private

property, commodification, and banking with interest, and became the largest financial institution in colonial Peru. In spite of these sympathetic ethnographies, the field was largely dominated by anthropologists of European descent. In the 1970s Octavio Romano (1923– 2005), a native of Mexico City, became a pioneer Chicano anthropologist who claimed that social scientists were not immune from the general American pattern of blaming the victim. He criticized ethnographies that reinforced the stereotypes of the Latino/a people as being underachievers, fatalistic, traditional, and emotional. He challenged the social scientist notions developed in the 1950s and 1960s as reflecting the institutional racism and domination of society at large. Romano began a journal entitled ‘‘El Grito,’’ which gave voice to emerging Chicana/o social

178 |

Cultural Anthropology

scientists who advocated a decolonialized, antiracist anthropology and opened the door for research on contemporary Latino/a concerns such as health care, education, criminalization, identity, and immigration. A. Paredes also criticized Anglo anthropologists, but took a more moderate and more constructive view. He argued that ethnographies about Hispanics were not overtly prejudiced; rather they perpetuated subtle unconscious stereotypes through some mistranslations and by taking literally what people mean figuratively. Paredes urges ethnographers to move beyond stereotypes by acquiring a deep knowledge of the language, social relations, and the context. Appropriating the work of postcolonial studies, Renato Rosaldo critiqued the rigid ‘‘us and them’’ separation between the ethnographer and the native, noting the significant interpretative power involved in writing about another people (Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis 1989). Jose´ David Saldivar also emphasized the importance of native participation in his research along the Texas-Mexico border (Border Matters 1997). Rodolfo Torres, Louis Miron, and Jonathan Xavier Inda have examined the differences between being a citizen and respecting one’s culture as a Hispanic American in the Cultural Citizen Project (Race, Identity and Citizenship 1999). Cultural anthropology has historically been understood as an objective social science, but more recently anthropologists have acknowledged the subjective nature of the discipline. A researcher often cannot remain neutral and can

impact the very same conditions that one is studying, thus giving birth to the field of applied anthropology. The field of applied anthropology does not simply observe phenomena from an objective distance, but rather seeks to educate the public through publications and documentaries to address the problem at hand. Philip Wingeier-Rayo

References and Further Reading Burns, Ruth. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzcu, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Hendry, Joy. Other People’s Worlds: An Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Layton, Robert. An Introduction to Theory in Anthropology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Lewis, Oscar. The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). Paredes, A. A Texas-Mexicano Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (May 2007). http:// pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php? ReportID=75 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Torres, Rodolfo, ed. Race, Identity and Citizenship, The Cultural Citizen Project (Boston: Blackwell Publishing, 1999). Taussig, Michael. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

Curanderismo

CURANDERISMO Curanderismo is a therapeutic approach to healthful living and healing, particularly common among Hispanic Christians of indigenous and mestizo ancestry. Contemporary interest has been influenced by the modern cultural anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and medicine, as well as changing multicultural demographics. There are at least four historical sources in the development of curanderismo: (1) The Judeo-Christian belief recorded in the Bible (Numbers 21:9; 2 Kings 5:10–14; James 5:14) attesting to God’s power to heal, as well as God’s use of chosen people as instruments of such supernatural cures. Apparently, believers also used certain natural remedies, such as the Balm of Gilead (Jeremiah 8:22; 46:11), the fig poultice prescribed by Isaiah to cure Hezekiah’s boil (Isaiah 38:21), and the oil and wine of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). (2) Christian Europeans, particularly the Spaniards, who came to the Americas with medical beliefs that had also been influenced by the Hippocratic theory of the four humors of the body (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile balanced correctly between hot, cold, wet, and dry); such had been inherited from the Greeks, and preserved and added to by the Arabs (including Avenzoar and Averroes who built on the work of the Persian Avicenna). (3) Indigenous peoples of the Americas contributed their own extensive knowledge of local herbs and their medicinal applications through brews and poultices, as well as surgical techniques using obsidian and thorns. (4) Curanderismo developed alongside witchcraft (which seeks to exert human control over the supernatural), Santerı´a

| 179

(which performs possession of practitioners by spirits), and later Spiritism (whose mediums communicate with spirits such as famed healers), as well as the modern Christian charismatic/ Pentecostal movements. All these belief systems have exerted a conceptual and practical influence on curanderismo. Contemporary bota´nicas, for instance, often stock supplies, equipment, and books used by all these approaches to healing. Curanderismo, therefore, is a venerable, but evolving, healing tradition rather than a modern health fad with quack claims. There are practitioners (called curanderos or curanderas, male and female healers, respectively) who are quacks, just as there are ministers and medical doctors who are charlatans. While effective and ethically responsible curandera/os do not usually have diplomas or belong to professional organizations, there are indicators of their credibility and healing competence. The most effective curandera/os are not ill-intentioned in their practice. They do not charge a fixed fee, but accept freewill offerings. They demonstrate considerable dedication to their profession, even when this requires sacrifice and/or defying traditional gender roles. They attribute their supernatural abilities and magico-religious interventions to God. They usually recount how they received their gift of healing. They also strive for a therapeutic alliance with patients by being accessible and collaborative with the family of the patient throughout the healing process, from diagnosis through termination. Finally, they are profoundly knowledgeable of, and widely admired by, the community they serve. Patients and practitioners in curanderismo access modern medicine and use it

180 |

Curanderismo

´ NICA BOTA Bota´nica is an herb store, also known as yerberı´a, that offers a wide variety of medicinal remedies that include herbal extracts, vitamins, and potions, alongside folk religious items such as rosaries, cards, crucifixes, amulets, statues, and cards with incantations to Catholic saints and other folk. An herbal vender at this store is called a yerbero or yerbatero and may be considered a folk healer by the community or simply a provider of medicinal products for other curanderos. In Latino folk healing, a bota´nica is part of an ancient herbolary tradition that attributes curative powers to herbs. The natives of the Americas cultivated vast gardens of medicinal plants. The Aztec manuscript Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (Little Book of the Medicinal Herbs of the Indians), for example, is a classic ancient pre-Hispanic herbal codex that describes the medicinal use of 150 indigenous herbs in Mexico used by Mesoamerican populations. In folk indigenous traditions, disease is often seen as an imbalance in the physical and spiritual realms, and herbs are believed to restore health. Hispanics often resort to herb shops because they often trust natural remedies as well as conventional medicine, and bota´nicas offer culturally meaningful items with attributed curative and spiritual powers. —NSM

in an alternative or complementary manner. Curanderismo survives in part because so many Hispanics cannot access the modern medical system. Many lack the financial means or insurance necessary to meet its high and everrising costs. Others find language barriers. Transportation and child care are often obstacles. Another difficulty, however, is the clash of cultures. Science by definition is universal but often, therefore, impersonal. Medical practitioners, for example, may operate from a specific cultural frame of reference that can be ethnocentric, biased, and insensitive. When the ethnicity of a medical professional is very different from that of its patient, such differences might lead to resistance and mistrust by the patient; hence, a visit to a neighborhood curandero/a may be experienced as therapeutic, while the experience at the distant and impersonal hospital may be traumatic.

Healing is often attributed to the curandera/o’s ability to effectively deal with subjectively expressed symptoms, especially when such symptoms are framed in layman’s terms. Note the distinction some cross-cultural psychiatrists have made between illness and disease. Whereas illness refers to the subjective experience of being sick (symptoms, suffering, help seeking, side effects of treatment, social stigma, explanations of causes), disease refers to the diagnosis given by the doctor or healer. Westerntrained doctors focus primarily on diagnosing and alleviating symptoms, whereas a curandera/o’s approach is more holistic and culturally sensitive, paying special attention to the subjectively expressed symptoms. Curandera/os usually practice in the community they serve and thus are typically well integrated into their patients’ neighborhood. Therefore, curandero/as generally share the client’s cultural

Curanderismo

| 181

˜ O FIDENCIO (1898–1938) EL NIN Jose´ Fidencio Constantino Sı´ntora began life as a conventional Catholic in Guanajuato, Mexico. During the Mexican Revolution his fame as a healer spread, especially after reportedly gaining the support of President Calles. Although many Catholics still venerate him, during his life he was in conflict with Church leaders as well as medical doctors. But as his standing with such authorities decreased, his popularity with the subaltern increased. People knew him to live simply, even sacrificially, and devote himself totally to healing. Certainly typological, he exemplifies the way curanderos cross religious, class, and gender lines. Although some curanderos do not marry, Fidencio appears to have been celibate, perhaps transgender, almost asexual. The designation ‘‘el Nin ˜o’’ connotes prepubescent innocence as well as his childlike demeanor. El Nin ˜o did not practice espiritismo and, although he gathered disciples, it does not appear that he intended to found a church, much less a personality cult although both developed. His decade-long public career ended with his death after which a cult developed with strong Spiritist tendencies now recognized as a religion by the Mexican government and located in Espinazo. —FAO & KGD

experiences, geographic location, socioeconomic status, class, language, religion, and beliefs regarding the causes of symptoms. The place of healing is usually a private home, which often includes a waiting area and a room for private consultation. This is mirrored in popular movies such as La Bamba, Mi Familia, El Norte, and Tortillas Again, which portray these characteristics of curanderismo. In these movies, healers usually share wisdom with their clients and perform rituals to protect them from evil spirits, to cleanse them from harmful influences, and to heal them from unknown maladies. These movies demonstrate that both Hispanic patients and curandera/os value the benefits and contributions of conventional scientific medicine. However, they often also experience a medical culture of clinical coldness, bureaucracy, and exclusive dependence on technology with little respect for communal or

spiritual values, as well as an emphasis on individual patient rights to the exclusion of family. Medical practices and models are closely monitored by costeffective managed care and the concepts of efficiency. When supposedly informed by objectivity, such medical interventions can reduce people to just their symptoms and ignore important cultural clues. Too often these medical practices and models complicate and aggravate, rather than improve, Hispanics’ health concerns. Frequently, modern health care appears to mirror only the prosperitydriven, individualistic, self-interested, even self-isolation aspects of U.S. culture. Such a medical system is one that Hispanics may find physiologically healthful but also experience as culturally unhelpful. Hence, many Hispanics may use a continuum of care. The range of healthseeking behaviors may begin with a family member (usually female) diagnosing

182 |

Curanderismo

DON PEDRITO JARAMILLO (1829–1907) Don Pedrito Jaramillo was known as the healer of Los Olmos, Texas, from 1881 to 1907, and was probably the most orthodox of the famous curanderos. He has never been the object of ecclesiastical censure or even much clergy criticism. Likewise, the medical profession did not oppose him. His appellation helps explain why. ‘‘Don’’ is an honorific title expressing respect while Pedrito is the affectionate diminutive of Pedro. Hence ‘‘Don Pedrito’’ expresses both the love and honor this humble man gained by his selfless service in the name of God. A shrine and store near Falfurrias, Texas, help maintain and perpetuate veneration through candles, prayer cards, poems, prints, and statues not unlike more conventional Catholic pilgrimage sites. Although there are numerous versions of his reception of the healing gift as well as many stories of its efficacy, they follow the conventions of curanderos. The gift came from God rather than through study, and since it was freely given, it was shared without fixed charge. Healing was holistic: Don Pedrito prescribed prayer and penance as well as plants and poultices. And he both suffered the common doubts about his healing gift and enjoyed the grateful respect of admirers. —FAO & KGD

a disease or injury and assessing her ability to treat it. Normally, her attention, advice, home remedies, or over-thecounter medicines are sufficient. However, if she decides that the illness or injury is beyond her ability to treat, she may consult family and friends. As the circle widens, concerns about the medical health care system arise, and also causes and cures might be discussed. Culturally specific syndromes such as fright (susto), impacted bowels (empacho), excessive bile (bilis), extreme jealousy (envidia), the evil eye (mal de ojo), or suspicion of hexes (hechizo) might lead the family to consult a curandero/a first. Alternately, patients may attempt to access modern medicine first, and if it is found wanting or frustrating, then a curandera/o might also be consulted. As with medical doctors, some curandera/os are generalists. Others claim to follow in the healing tradition of a particularly famous past curandero, such as

Don Pedrito Jaramillo or el Nin˜o Fidencio. Still others specialize in a particular area, for instance, herbalists, midwives, and those who set bones or massage muscles. But all share certain cultural beliefs and attitudes toward health and life that are holistic, ecological, and natural. Health is not understood in purely organic or biological terms. Rather, well-being is considered a balance among and between the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of the human. These might be considered the four cardinal points that interact to bring about harmony and health, which constitute central tenets in the healing worldview of curandero/as. The physical dimensions of health are addressed through proper hygiene, rest, diet, and exercise, as well as purges, massages, and herbs. These therapeutic recommendations usually have psychological as well as physical implications, and they opt for the integration of body

Curanderismo

| 183

TERESA URREA (1873–1906) Teresa Urrea, also known as Teresita or La Santa de Cabora, was born on October 15, 1873, in a hacienda, located in a Tehueco Indian village in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. She was baptized under the name of Maria Rebecca Cha´vez and was the illegitimate daughter of Toma´s Urrea (Don Toma´s), a wealthy hacienda owner and Cayetana Cha´vez, a 14-year-old Tehuecan Indian. The Tehueco, Yaqui, and Mayo refer to Mexican indigenous tribes inhabiting the coastal states of Sonora and Sinaloa. At 16, her father invited her to live with him at his hacienda where she came under the apprenticeship of an Indian woman named Huila, a curandera and servant of Don Toma´s, from whom she learned the use of herbs and other healing rituals. In 1880 Don Toma´s moved to Cabora, Sonora, with his family to escape political reprisals from the Mexican dictator Porfirio Dı´az. During the first months at Cabora, Teresa fell into a cataleptic state. After recovery she began performing healings by laying her hands on the sick and earned a reputation as a prodigious healer and revolutionary advocate for Indian rights. She died in 1906 at the age of 33 in Clifton, Arizona. —FAO

with mind. Cleansing rituals (limpias) are often performed to restore the body’s balance and to remove unwanted supernatural influences. Certain emotions are often proscribed, such as worry, ambition, and envy. Other emotions are prescribed, including honor, modesty, respect, and dignity. Balanced, complementary, and harmonious social relationships are encouraged; therefore, questions concerning family and community are often part of the curandero’s diagnostic interview with patients. Of course, prayer, penance, and amends are ways of maintaining or restoring spiritual, as well as emotional and social, wholeness; they are often part of any cure. To the patient and the curandero/a, their practices are considered a seamless and integrated approach to health care. They understand the continuum they use, from home care and curandera/os to medical doctors, clinics, and hospitals. However, too many doctors and pharma-

cists do not appreciate these alternative treatments their patients might be practicing with whatever medicine or therapy such health professionals have approved. Medical professional resistance to others’ healing practices may result from limited knowledge, biased attitudes, perceived incompatibilities, misinformed opinions, and lack of exposure to nonWestern modalities of healing and treatment. This limitation in professional medical knowledge and practice may lead to counterproductive outcomes. For these reasons, more and more professionals now study curanderismo, and some attempt to learn from its ritual structure, such as the four health management patterns suggested below. First, a culturally sensitive environment might relieve patient anxiety and facilitate therapeutic rapport. Instead of a stark office, a calming space with nondenominational Christian imagery (e.g., angels rather than saints), candles, incense, flowers, and fountain might be

184 |

Curanderismo

Curandero ‘‘Don Pedrito’’ seated outside a frame building, San Antonio, Texas, 1894. (University of Texas, Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio)

used. Family and curandero/a altars usually include such religious imagery, as well as symbols for earth, wind, fire, and water. Second, a professional must gain cultural entree. Like priests, psychologists, and medical doctors, curandera/os must undergo lengthy training and experiential practice that includes understanding both indigenous and religious beliefs. Knowing the language and its nuances for respect with intimacy, as well as speaking the idiom of dedication and compassion, is essential. Self-confidence without arrogance and a willingness to speak of her or his healing vocation in a respectful tone are culturally congruent ways of gaining wisdom credentials. A ceremony of greeting and small talk, questions about family and friends, all build bridges of confidence. Comfort

with silence, closed eyes, even manipulating cultural props such as lighting incense help create an invitation to active speaking and listening. If typical herbs or oils are present, verbal suggestions that the patient touch and discuss them may lead to helpful information, reassure the patient, or aid her or him to externalize and articulate fears. All these rites of introduction allow for a culturally congruent diagnosis leading to a holistic or organic treatment of the person, not just the disease. Third, diagnosis and treatment plans must include more than just the assessment of physiological symptoms reported by the individual patient, but rather also address how the patient’s condition has affected her or his family and community. What emotions does illness, loss, or injury evoke? What are the customary ways in which an extended family and community help restore members to health? Here questions of finances may arise, and social workers might prove helpful. All these dimensions are critical to holistic health care, and proper attention to them reinforces treatment. These therapeutic interventions highlight the importance of the family and the community, which often provide considerable emotional support and facilitate healing, as well as the role of faith in treatment. Fourth, one might ask how the patient could reinterpret this new situation through religious narrative. People construct their experiences of illness in certain ways based on their religious and cultural learning. Through ritualized practices, clients may be able to reconstruct their subjective experiences of symptoms and conceptualizations of illness. What rituals (psychodrama) is the patient using to restore spiritual

Curanderismo harmony? So long as they are practical, proportionate, and unlikely to cause harm, they may be encouraged. Competent clergy could be recommended. This ritual structure paralleling curanderismo or even in concert with curandero and curanderas reverently approaches the patient not as an individual with a problem, but as a person who initiates or accelerates the social, emotional, and spiritual forces of a cultural community in ways that promote the health and harmony of everyone involved. The patient is a change agent, not just the object of others’ interventions. This approach to healing, like the holistic approach to health, is empowering. The ritual structures of curanderismo provide culturally congruent observances that bring meaning to confusion, thus promoting psycho-

| 185

somatic health; proffers emotional coherence to frightening anomie, thus helping the weak feel capable; marshals the power of social solidarity, thus averting debilitating isolation; and brings spiritual balance to a life on the edge, thus snatching hope from despair. In any language, this may prove curative, but in Spanish it is called ‘‘curanderismo.’’ Fernando A. Ortiz and Kenneth G. Davis

References and Further Reading Kieve, Ari. Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Psychiatry (New York: Free Press, 1968). Trotter, Robert T., and Juan Antonio Chavira. Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing (Athens and London, GE: University of Georgia Press, 1997).

D ing increasingly denominationally and religiously pluralistic. The day has long since passed when one could assume that to be Latina/o was to be Roman Catholic. The findings in this entry are based on the Hispanic Churches in American Public Life research project directed and managed by Virgilio Elizondo of the University of Notre Dame, Jesse Miranda of Vanguard University, and Gasto´ n Espinosa of Claremont McKenna College. This three-year study (1999–2002) was funded by a $1.3 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. It fielded the HCAPL National Survey in the fall of 2000, one of the largest (n = 2,060) and most comprehensive bilingual surveys in history on U.S. Latina/o religions and politics.

DEMOGRAPHICS The demographic shifts occurring within Latino/a religious affiliation in the United States are at the root of a major debate. Sociologist Andrew Greeley of the University of Chicago has argued that the Catholic Church is experiencing mass defections of Latina/o Catholics to Evangelical and Mainline Protestantism. The Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL) National Survey refined and revised this finding and argued that although Roman Catholicism is witnessing mass defections, it is still nonetheless experiencing unprecedented numerical growth and has remained relatively stable over the past two decades. Catholic defections are not only benefiting Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants, but also Pentecostals, Alternative Christian groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Seventh-day Adventists, world religions, and metaphysical traditions. In short, the U.S. Latino/a religious marketplace, while predominantly Christian, is also becom-

Latino/a Catholic Religious Switching Andrew Greeley ignited the public crisis over what he called ‘‘mass defections’’ when he wrote in America in 1989 that 60,000 Latino/as were defecting every 187

188 |

Demographics

year from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism. Drawing upon the General Social Survey (GSS) at the University of Chicago, he estimated that 1 million Latina/os had left the Catholic Church in the United States between 1972 and 1989. Nine years later he wrote in the same periodical that these defections had only grown worse, with as many as 600,000 Latinos leaving the Church annually. These defections resulted in the U.S. Latino/a Catholic population declining from 77 percent in 1972–1974 to 70 percent by the mid-1990s, he reported. Greeley lamented that one out of seven Hispanics had left Catholicism in less than a quarter of a century and that if this ‘‘hemorrhaging’’ continued half of all American Hispanics would not be Catholic in 25 years. Far from being a sporadic episode in the story of American Catholicism, he warned that he saw no reason why these defections would not continue. He called these mass defections ‘‘an ecclesiastical failure of unprecedented proportions’’ and the ‘‘worst defection in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.’’ He ended his lament by chastising the Catholic hierarchy for its ‘‘dereliction of duty’’ and for its inability or unwillingness to stem the tide of these ‘‘cataclysmic’’ defections. Greeley’s trumpet blast announcing the mass defections did not attract a single public response or an outcry from a single cardinal, archbishop, bishop, priest, or clergyman working with Hispanics, he claimed. He found this remarkable and indicative of the deep-seated problem facing American Catholicism. The HCAPL national survey confirmed and refined some of Greeley’s findings. The survey found that 70 percent of all U.S. Latino/a adults self-

identified as Roman Catholic—the exact figure that Greeley found in 1997. However, it would be inaccurate to conclude that the U.S. Latina/o Catholic population has remained completely stable because the GSS survey only captured the attitudes of second- and thirdgeneration English-speaking Latino/as— those most likely to be Protestant. The actual percentage of U.S. Latina/os that were Roman Catholic in 1997 was probably around 74 percent—the percent of immigrants that self-identified as Roman Catholic in the HCAPL national survey. Further evidence for mass defections include the fact that the percentage of Latino/a Catholics drops from 74 percent among the first generation to 62 percent by the third. At the same time, the percentage of Latina/o Protestants and other Christians simultaneously increases from one in six (15 percent) among the first generation to almost one in three (29 percent) by the third generation. Furthermore, although 800,000 U.S. Latino/as indicated that they ‘‘recently converted’’ or returned to Catholicism from another non-Catholic tradition, over 3.9 million Latina/os recently converted away from Catholicism. Thus for every one Latino/a that returned to Catholicism, four left it. Contrary to popular perception that vulnerable immigrants were falling prey to proselytizers, the HCAPL survey found that a clear majority of Latina/o converts were second- or thirdgeneration U.S. citizens (57 percent).

Pentecostalization of U.S. Latino/a Christianity Who benefited from the mass defections? Andrew Greeley argued Evangelical and Mainline Protestants were benefiting.

Demographics He went so far as to state that almost half of all Latino/a Protestants ‘‘belong to moderate or even liberal Protestant denominations.’’ The HCAPL survey found that they were not the only traditions benefiting. The major surprise was that the Pentecostals were benefiting the most from these mass defections. In fact, we are witnessing the Pentecostalization of U.S. Latina/o Christianity. This may seem contrary to the findings of many other studies such as the Latino National Survey (LNS) and American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS), both of which argue that the percentage of Pentecostal Christians is relatively small. However, they make two serious methodological oversights. First, they do not include Charismatics in their totals of Pentecostals. Second, they restrict Pentecostal identity only to those who self-identify as such or who attend a classical Pentecostal denomination like the Assemblies of God, the Foursquare, the Church of God, Cleveland, and the Church of God of Prophecy. They overlook the fact that the Pentecostal experience has entered into non-Pentecostal traditions and denominations of the Roman Catholic Church, Mainline Protestant traditions, and non-Pentecostal Evangelical traditions. They also overlook the fact that there are a very large number of Pentecostals who do not like the term ‘‘Pentecostal’’ because of the negative stereotype associated with the term (i.e., holy rollers) and that many prefer to be called ‘‘Charismatic,’’ or just ‘‘Christian.’’ The evidence for the growth of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement in Latino/a Protestantism is borne out in the HCAPL survey, which found that 64 percent of all U.S. Latina/o Protestants self-identified as Pentecostal or

| 189

Charismatic or with a Pentecostal tradition. The Pentecostal movement has entered into non-Pentecostal traditions and is contributing to the Pentecostalization of U.S. Latino/a Christianity. The HCAPL survey found that 22 percent of U.S. Latina/o Catholics, 21 percent of U.S. Latino/a Mainline Protestants, and 51 percent of U.S. Latina/o evangelicals not attending a Pentecostal denomination self-identified as Pentecostal, Charismatic, or Spirit-filled. Thus the Pentecostal movement has moved outside the confines of the Pentecostal tradition and into other segments on Latino/a Christianity. The Pentecostal movement has a number of distinctive teachings. For example, it teaches that people should be baptized in the Holy Spirit as evidenced by speaking in unknown tongues and they also affirm the practice of all of the spiritual sign gifts listed in I Corinthians 12 and 14. They are much closer to the African American rather than Euro-American Pentecostal experience because of their emphases on direct unmediated experience with God, prayer for divine healing, the practice of speaking and singing in tongues (aka singing in the Spirit), and their rather lengthy worship services, which can run two or three hours in duration. Many Latina/o Pentecostal traditions such as the Assemblies of God, Foursquare, Church of God of Prophecy, and others also allow women to go into the ordained and/or lay ministry. Charismatics are those individuals who affirm and/or practice the spiritual gifts but choose to remain within their non-Pentecostal traditions to bring about spiritual renewal. The growth of the La tino/a Charismatic movement within the Catholic Church was confirmed in Bishop Gerald R. Barnes’s Hispanic

190 |

Demographics

Ministry at the Turn of the Millennium: A Report of the Bishop’s Committee on Hispanic Affairs, which found that the Charismatic movement was active in 36 percent of all Hispanic-serving parishes, thus making it more common than either the Cursillo (31 percent) or Christian Base Communities (13 percent). The Pentecostal movement has contributed to the growth of Latino/a Evangelicalism across denominations. Having a personal born-again experience with Jesus Christ is arguably the single most important distinction of Evangelical identity—especially in the U.S. Latina/o community. The growth of the Pentecostal experience is also contributing to the growth of born-again Christianity in non-Pentecostal and non-Evangelical traditions. The HCAPL survey found that 88 percent of U.S. Latino/a Protestants, 43 percent of Latina/o Mainline Protestants, and 26 percent of Latino/a Catholics chose to self-identify as ‘‘born-again’’ Christian. The growth of Protestantism was noted in Barnes’s Report, which found that the percentage of diocesan directors who said that Protestant groups were affecting Hispanics to a ‘‘great extent’’ had increased from 12 percent in 1990 to 52 percent in 1998. The report also noted that Protestants were most effective with both the newest and poorest immigrants and middle-class Hispanics. All of these findings refine Andrew Greeley’s claim that half of all Latino/a Protestants ‘‘belong to moderate or even liberal Protestant denominations.’’ In fact, the HCAPL survey found that Latina/o Mainline Protestants make up 14.8 percent of all Latino/a Protestants. This figure includes those who are also born again (43 percent) and Pentecostal, Charismatic, or Spirit-filled (21 percent).

All combined and across all religious traditions, 37 percent of all U.S. Latina/os reported being born-again Christian and 28 percent reported being Pentecostal, Charismatic, or Spirit-filled. These figures are much higher than those given in past national surveys because most surveyors do not take into account that (a) the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement is a transdenominational phenomenon, (b) the proliferation of independent and nondenominational churches are more often than not either Evangelical/born-again and/or Pentecostal or Charismatic, and (c) that a significant percentage, if not a majority, of those Latino/as that self-identify as ‘‘other Christian,’’ independent/nondenominational, something else, other religious tradition, no religious preference, and other religion actually self-identify as born-again Christian and/or as Pentecostal, Charismatic, or Spirit-filled. Challenging the general perception that movement away from denominational Christianity signals secularization or decline in spirituality and confirming the trend in the growth of nondenominational Protestantism, we also found that the vast majority of those who did not self-identify with a particular denomination also self-identified as born again. This was true for those who self-identified as ‘‘other Christian’’ (77 percent), ‘‘independent/nondenominational’’ (75 percent), ‘‘something else’’ (52 percent), ‘‘other religious tradition or denomination’’ (52 percent), and even ‘‘other religion’’ (50 percent), and do not know/unspecified (48 percent). This finding was further confirmed by unusually high levels of church attendance (almost every week or more) for ‘‘other Christian’’ (71 percent), ‘‘independent/ nondenominational’’ (67 percent),

Demographics ‘‘other religious tradition or denomination’’ (60 percent), ‘‘something else’’ (52 percent), ‘‘other religion’’ (40 percent), and do not know/unspecified (48 percent). Given that being born again is one of the defining marks of both Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity, these data suggest that many Latina/o Evangelicals and Pentecostals are being inadvertently misclassified in other national surveys (both for Latino/as and for the general U.S. population) as practicing another religion or having no religious preference.

Explaining Latina/o Catholic Switching How do we explain Latino/a Catholic defections? There are four factors that contribute to the mass defections. First, there are simply not enough parishes to effectively minister to the nation’s 30 million Latino/a Catholics. Mary Gautier at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) noted in 2003 that only 22 percent (4,224) of the nation’s 47,511 Catholic parishes in the United States have an identified ministry to Latina/os. This means that 78 percent of all Catholic parishes do not have an identified ministry to Hispanics, despite the fact that they now constitute an estimated 40 percent of the U.S. Catholic Church. Second, there are simply not enough Latino and Spanish-speaking priests to minister to the nation’s 32 million Latina/o Catholics. According to Gautier, U.S. Latino/as make up 4 percent of all Catholic women religious, 5 percent of all priests, and 9 percent of all bishops, even though Latina/os make up almost 40 percent of the U.S. Church. Of the 47,511 priests in the United States in 2003, only 2,175 were Latino and of the

| 191

85,000 women religious, only 3,400 were Latina. There is only one Latino Catholic priest for every 11,500 Latinos in the United States, a rate that is actually higher in the United States than in Latin America where Brian H. Smith has noted the ratio is one priest for every 10,000 Catholics. The shortage of priests is further complicated by the fact that more than twothirds of all Latino priests were born and raised outside of the United States, such as Latin America or Spain. Many of them come from different cultural, class, and socioeconomic backgrounds than their U.S. parishioners. This has contributed to an often unspoken chasm between some foreign-born priests and their working-class U.S.-born parishioners. These factors have made it particularly difficult for Latin American–born priests to work with second- and thirdgeneration inner-city Latino/a youth, influenced by hip-hop, rap music, and gang life. The clergy shortages and difficulties are not likely to go away anytime soon, as there were only 511 U.S. Latinos nationwide seeking vocations and attending Catholic seminaries. The numbers have since picked up a little, but not much. These factors along with reports that non-Hispanic priests are not prepared to work effectively with Hispanics and that continuing clergy education in Hispanic ministry for non-Hispanic priests and sisters is actually declining, make the low number of U.S.-born Latino clergy all the more acute. Third, there has been a steady decline in the number of faith-based sociopolitical movements like Liberation Theology and Christian Base Communities (CBCs), despite interest in Catholic seminaries and universities. The Gerald Barnes’s Bishop’s Report found that only

192 |

Demographics

13 percent of U.S. Catholic Hispanicserving parishes sponsor CBCs and that their numbers appear to be declining. This is an important development because the CBCs have been some of the most vocal groups pressing the Church for more native clergy and Hispanic ministries. Fourth, the most important external reason for the mass defections and religious switching is proselytism. As already noted, more than 3.9 million Latino/as had recently left the Catholic Church. At the local parish level, the Bishop’s Report found that the percentage of diocesan directors who said that Protestant groups were affecting Hispanics to a ‘‘great extent’’ had increased from 12 percent in 1990 to 52 percent in 1998.

Alternative and Nondenominational Christianity, World Religions, and Metaphysical Traditions The HCAPL survey found that Alternative Christians make up 3 percent of all U.S. Latino/as (44 million), 10 percent of all non-Catholics, and 13 percent of all non-Catholic Christians. The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons ranked as the first and eighth largest Christian traditions in the U.S. Latina/o community. There are more than 1 million Latino/a Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons in the United States. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are the largest single selfidentified Non-Catholic Christian tradition in the United States, followed by three Pentecostal traditions—the Assemblies of God, the Pentecostal Church of God, and the Assembly of Christian Churches.

The impact of Alternative Christian traditions is not only evident with the growth of Latino/a Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, but also with other traditions such as the Seventh-day Adventists and the Oneness Pentecostals—the latter of which reject the doctrine of the Trinity and insist that true Christians must be baptized in Jesus’ name only for salvation. Regardless of the ‘‘orthodoxy’’ of their theology, together Adventists and Oneness Pentecostals number approximately half a million people. These traditions not only represent the first, seventh, eighth, and ninth largest non-Catholic self-identified Christian religious traditions in the United States, but all combined they are more numerous than all Latino/a Mainline Protestants combined. They make up 15 percent of all nonCatholics and 20 percent of all nonCatholic Christians. Another equally surprising finding was the number of Latina/os that identified with world religions, with metaphysical/occult traditions, and as nondenominational Protestants. The HCAPL survey found that only 1 percent of all U.S. Latinos are affiliated exclusively with a world religion or a non-Christian tradition. In fact, 93 percent of Latinos self-identify as Christian, when both denominational affiliation and born-again experience are used to mark religious identity. Although many have suggested that the lack of attraction to Judaism and Islam is due to an historic antiMuslim and anti-Jewish apologetic birthed during Ferdinand and Isabella’s Reconquista of Spain in the sixteenth century and brought over to Latin America by the Spanish conquistadores and Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian, and Jesuit missionaries, the HCAPL survey found that some Latino/as are in

Demographics fact embracing Islam, Judaism, and other Eastern religions. In fact, the most popular world religion among Latina/os is Buddhism, not Islam or Judaism. The HCAPL survey found that almost 1 percent of all U.S. Latino/a non-Catholics (10.6 million) self-identify as Buddhist. There are almost three times more Latino/a Buddhists than Latino Muslims or Jews. This may be largely due to the meditative and contemplative nature of Buddhism. Although Latino/a interest in Islam was catapulted into the national spotlight with the arrest of Al Qaeda sympathizer Jose´ Padilla, Latino/a Muslims represent a comparatively small tradition. The HCAPL study found that 32,000 Latina/ os self-identified as Muslim and another 21,000 self-identified as Jewish. While too few in number to make statistical generalizations, Latino/as also mentioned practicing Hinduism, Taoism, Paganism, Satanism, Spiritualism, Deism, mixed traditions, and Native American spiritual traditions. Despite their relatively small numbers, there are almost more Latino/a practitioners of world religions than all Latina/o Methodists, Presbyterians, and Disciples of Christ combined. These numbers may not appear significant, but they represent real (if modest) movement toward religious pluralism in the Latino/a community. As significant as they are, they do not fully capture the growing diversity and pluralism. The HCAPL survey found that a significant number of Latina/os believe in the practice of metaphysical traditions like spiritism, brujerı´a (witchcraft), and combinative popular Catholic healing traditions like curanderismo. The survey found that 17.1 percent of all U.S. Latinos believe in the practice of Spiritism,

| 193

curanderismo, brujerı´a, or all of the above. When broken down individually, 2.5 percent of all Latinos said they believe in the practice of Spiritism, 1.7 percent believe in the practice of brujerı´a, 1.3 percent believe in the practice of curanderismo, and 11.7 percent believe in the practice of all of the above. To put these numbers in comparative perspective, there are more Latino/as who believe in the practice of Spiritism than Jehovah’s Witnesses or Assemblies of God practitioners and more people who believe in the practice of witchcraft than Latina/o Southern Baptists. All combined, 15.9 percent of the U.S. Latino/a national population indicated that they believe in the practice of one or more of these metaphysical traditions (excluding curanderismo), thus making them more numerous than all U.S. Latina/o Pentecostals and Evangelicals (excluding Protestant and Catholic Charismatics) at 15.4 percent. Whether or not this is simply an acknowledgement that these traditions exist, or is in fact an actual affirmation that they personally practice these traditions, is uncertain. The growth of Protestantism, nonChristian traditions, and pluralism are contributing to an increasing number of Latino/as choosing to self-identify as nondenominational, as other, as something else, or as having no religious preference. For example, our survey found that almost 20 percent of Latina/o non-Catholics said they were ‘‘other Christian,’’ ‘‘independent/nondenominational,’’ ‘‘something else,’’ ‘‘other religious tradition,’’ ‘‘other religion,’’ and ‘‘do not know/unspecified,’’ had no religious preference, or were atheist or agnostic (only 0.37 percent). This may indicate a growing dissatisfaction with organized religion, diminishing status

194 |

Demographics

differences between denominations, high rates of religious mobility, increasingly porous denominational boundaries, or more than likely some combination of factors. However, it may also reveal the rise of nondenominational Evangelical Christianity because most of the people in this category also self-identified as born-again Christian. As noted in Chapter One of my co-edited book with Miguel A. De La Torre entitled Rethinking Latino Religion and Identity (Pilgrim Press 2006), the HCAPL survey found that the majority of those who reported being ‘‘other Christian’’ (77 percent), ‘‘independent/nondenominational’’ (75 percent), ‘‘something else’’ (52 percent), ‘‘other religious tradition’’ (52 percent), ‘‘other religion’’ (50 percent), and ‘‘do not know/unspecified’’ (48 percent) also stated that they were born-again Christian. This finding was further confirmed by high church attendance (almost every week or more) for those respondents that self-identified as ‘‘other Christian’’ (71 percent), ‘‘independent/ nondenominational’’ (67 percent), ‘‘other religious tradition’’ (60 percent), ‘‘something else’’ (52 percent), ‘‘do not know/unspecified’’ (48 percent), and even ‘‘other religion’’ (50 percent). Given that being born again is one of the defining marks of both Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity and that high church attendance is often related to participating in these religious traditions, these data may suggest that much of this growth does not indicate a movement away from religion at all but rather toward new kinds of independent and interdenominational religious traditions and transdenominational movements that have not yet been carefully tracked by scholars of religion.

All of these demographic shifts are contributing to a growing level of denominational and religious pluralism in the United States. Although the number of Catholics is at an all-time high, its market share of the U.S. Latina/o religious community is declining despite high Catholic birthrates and massive Catholic immigration from Latin America. If the border remains as porous as it is today, it is likely that the percentage of U.S. Latino/a Catholics may remain around 68 percent, while the number of Latina/o Catholics that defect to other religious traditions continues to grow. Regardless of the dynamics within the U.S. Latino/a community, there is little reason to doubt that the percentage of Latina/os that make up the U.S. Catholic Church will only continue to grow due to high birth and immigration rates. The day is not far off when Latino/as will hold a 51 percent majority of the American Catholic Church. While this will be a transformative moment for the U.S. Church, imagine what the future of American Catholicism would look like if 51 percent of all U.S. priests, bishops, and archbishops were Latino—that would be a truly revolutionary moment indeed. If the trends taking place today hold steady, then we are going to see not only the Latinization of the Roman Catholic Church in the twenty-first century but also the Latinization of American Christianity and U.S. society. Gasto´n Espinosa

References and Further Reading Espinosa, Gasto´n. ‘‘The Pentecostalization of Latin American and U.S. Latino Christianity.’’ Pneuma: The Journal for the

Día de los Muertos Society of Pentecostal Studies 26, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 262–292. ———. ‘‘Methodological Reflections on Social Science Research on Latino Religions.’’ Rethinking Latino/a Religions and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´n Espinosa (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2006). ———. ‘‘History and Theory in the Study of Mexican American Religions.’’ Rethinking Latino/a Religions and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´n Espinosa (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2006). Greeley, Andrew M. ‘‘Defection Among Hispanics,’’ America (July 30, 1988): 61–62. ———. ‘‘Defection Among Hispanics (Updated), America 27 (September 1997): 12–13.

DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS Dı´a de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is a day of commemoration of family and friends who have died. In contemporary times, this commemoration takes place on November 2, to coincide with the Christian holy day of All Soul’s Day. And yet, the commemoration is separate and distinct from the Christian holy day. The origin of the commemoration is sometimes attributed to Aztec or Nahuatl tradition, sometimes to postcolonial syncretism or a mixture of the indigenous Aztec/Nahuatl tradition with Christianity, and, in a more contemporary understanding, as a sign of Mexican national pride and as a Chicano sign of resistance, as well as indigenous precolonial pride. For some observers of the tradition, the commemoration remains a religious one, for others merely a cultural expression of identity, and for outsiders a kind of political recognition or even kitsch.

| 195

Prior to European contact, the Nahuatl-speaking people in the area now known as southern Texas, Mexico, and Central America as far south as Nicaragua marked the end of a temporal cycle beginning the 13th month of the Aztec solar calendar. Offerings to the dead were made between May and August, taking place between two zenith passages when the sun’s shadow pointed north. Records of these traditions were written by postcolonial ethnographers who both interviewed indigenous people and interpreted glyphs and other records. In one commemoration during Atemoztli, the 16th month, the Aztecs made wooden images of the rain god, Tlaloc, which they covered with tzoalli, or amaranth seed dough, shaped in human form— with hearts, eyes, and teeth. The images were worshipped with music and then their breasts were opened with a tzotzopaztli or weaving sword and worshippers removed the hearts and struck off the heads. The body of seed dough was then divided up among the worshippers who ate the body with the words: ‘‘The god is eaten.’’ Those who ate it were said to ‘‘keep the god.’’ Whether Christian tradition had influenced or transformed these Nahuatl traditions by the time ethnographers recorded some of this information is not clear. In postcolonial times, common food customs from Europe associated with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day commemorations were common among the Pueblo and Zuni Nations in what became the southwestern United States, the Nahuatl Nation of what became parts of Mexico, and the Aymara Nation of the Andes. Whether this was merely a coinciding of similar traditions into an easy syncretism in which Nahuatl

196 |

Día de los Muertos

tradition of offerings to the dead during one time of year were combined with Christian holy days in another time of the year or whether this was a way of preserving indigenous tradition in the face of overwhelming European contact is not known with any certainty. Other elements of the commemorations such as public begging, food distribution, and noise making seem common to both European and indigenous practices. Again, which tradition influenced the other cannot be confirmed. Today, Dı´a de los Muertos is viewed as a commemoration beginning at sundown on November 1 and lasting until the dawn of November 2. During this time, the belief is that the spirits of those family members and friends who have died are able to visit the earth, enjoy the sight and scent of their favorite foods, drink, and other sensual pleasures such as cigarettes and cigars. Sometimes these spirits are said to communicate with the living. The Aztec teachings about death and the afterlife are grounded in the tradition of Mictlan. According to the tradition, Mictlan or Chicunauhmictlan is the ninth level of the Aztec underworld. All souls of the dead are required to make this downward journey that takes four years and is an arduous one. The only ones who are not required to make this journey are those who die as warriors, women who die in childbirth, and those who die after being struck by lightening. The god of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli, and his spouse, Mictecacihuatl, live in a windowless house in this northernmost part of the underworld. Here they wait for the souls of the dead to return to them. The journey is a difficult one. First the dead have to cross the river Apanohuaya. The dead are buried with the dog

Techichi, who had to help them swim across the river. They emerge naked and then must pass between a pair of mountains, the Tepetl Monamictia, that crash into each other. The dead then must climb the mountain Iztepetl, which has a surface made of razor-sharp obsidian fragments. Each day contains a new test. Next, the dead must cross the Cehuecayan, eight freezing gorges with constant snowfall and the Itzehecayan, eight valleys with cutting winds. The dead then walk down a path where they are exposed to a flurry of arrows, the Temiminaloyan. Here they realize a jaguar has eaten their hearts. Finally, they come to a place ‘‘where the flags wave’’ where they would find Xochitonatl, a lizard who symbolized Tonantzin, the Earth that lets them know they are near the end and soon would return to the Earth, to become one again with Tonantzin, the Mother Earth where they began life and where they will become once again part of life energy. The dead must make this journey to Mictlan because of the sacrifice made by the gods. Queztalcoatl, the feathered serpent, symbol of the sun, traveled to Mictlan to rescue the precious jade bones of the humans of previous ages to give life to a new era, the Fifth Sun, which is the era of contemporary times. The jade bones are the seed of new life. Mictlantecuhtli tested Quetzalcoatl by requiring Quetzalcoatl to parade four times around Mictlantecuhtl’s throne of spiders and owls, blowing a conch shell that had no finger holes. Queztalcoatl was able to secure the aid of worms to bore the finger holes and bees to make the sound. Still, Mictlantecuhtli laid a trap for Queztzalcoatl into which he fell, shattering the jade bones into the different sizes of human beings. Yet he prevailed and with

Día de los Muertos the other gods sprinkled the bones with blood to give them life. Because humans were born from the penance of the gods, they must endure the tests of Mictlan before returning again to give life. For those who continue to practice the Aztec or Nahuatl tradition, the ritual practices of Dı´a de los Muertos are an opportunity to assist the dead in this terrible journey, replacing the amaranth seed dough effigies and related ceremony once used to commemorate the dead. Because this commemoration occurs close to the Western and European holiday of Halloween, the Hallowed Eve on October 31 when the veil between the worlds was traditionally thought to be the thinnest, the move from a sacred tradition to a holiday tradition is also a coinciding event. The celebration of Halloween in Mexico and Central America has been met with mixed reception. For some, it is welcomed as simply one fiesta or festivity that gives honor to the dead or even a status symbol for those able to afford store-bought costumes. For others, it is seen as an intrusive, foreign, and even colonizing custom. In the United States, some immigrants refuse to adopt the custom of Halloween, just as some longtime U.S. resident Latino/as reject the celebration as a sign of resistance to a history of U.S. domination. For them, Dı´a de los Muertos is a symbol of the cultural borderland in which they live that transforms their indigenous past and provides a postcolonial ‘‘border crossing’’ into the future. Adopting the commemoration intentionally is used to define and unite a community divided by a history of oppression, exploitation, and colonial domination. The commemoration becomes a cultural symbol of identity and, in some cases, radical Chicano activism.

| 197

Ritual Structures Celebration of Dı´a de los Muertos reflects the variations in its origins, religious tradition, and cultural symbolism. In most Christian communities, the commemoration and celebration is accepted as a part of popular religiosity—not part of the institutional church and thus not in conflict with it but, in fact, helpful to the prayer of the faithful. However, some Christian communities view the nonChristian origins of the tradition as problematic. For most Christian church communities, the commemorations take a form outside the established liturgical requirements of masses or prayers for the departed commemorating All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day during the month of November. Primarily, Dı´a de los Muertos is a private or family tradition featuring home altars or, in some cases, altars at the cemetery gravestones of the departed. Some churches welcome altars on church grounds, usually not in the house of worship, and sponsor community days of fiesta. Some church communities embrace the range of syncretism and permit traditional Nahuatl ceremonies—including all-night vigils and danza at dawn on their premises. Where the tradition is primarily one of cultural identity, community centers, museums, and other public places sponsor altars together with storytelling, traditional Danza Azteca, food, and community-building events. The altar is the focus of the commemoration whether located at home or in a public place. The ritual symbols express the coming together of indigenous and Christian elements of tradition, the mestizaje. The altar is covered with a white cloth symbolizing Christian baptism. Fragrant marigolds or

198 |

Día de los Muertos

zempoalxochitl, the indigenous symbol of truth, wisdom, beauty, and eternity adorn the altar, together with votive candles. The pictures, or if not available, favorite objects, of beloved family members and friends who have died are placed on the altar so that each one is unobstructed. Around these pictures and objects the family and friends place favorite foods, drink, or other favorite items that the dead might take pleasure in seeing again. The preferred ofrendas, or offerings, are those with scent to them because the sense of smell, together with sight, is a pleasure the dead are traditionally thought to be able to enjoy. Additional ofrendas of sugar skulls and pan de muertos, a bread made especially for the commemoration, are also placed on the altar. These traditions are thought to be

postcolonial adaptations of Nahuatl customs although no clear lines as to the time and space of these traditions is established. Sugar as a source of postcolonial industry is thought to be a replacement for the amaranth seed and dough effigies. The skull symbols seem related to iconography found among indigenous glyphs, although this iconography seems removed in time and place from traditions related to the known indigenous commemoration of the dead. On the most traditional altars, a sauhmador, or clay incense holder, is placed in the center, burning fragrant copal incense, to please the spirits of the dead and the living. Some traditional commemorations follow the sacred tradition by a journey to the cemetery to place flowers, food and drink ofrendas on the places of the dead. This is done so no one is forgotten. Some

Dancers dressed as skeletons perform at a Day of the Dead Festival (Dı´a de los Muertos) in Hollywood, California. (Jose Gil/Dreamstime)

Día de los Muertos Christian churches will incorporate the journey to the cemetery or the altar into its All Souls’ Day worship, sometimes following or preceding the church liturgy as a way to encourage the prayer of the community throughout the month of November. If the altar is part of a traditional Danza Azteca ceremony, it will be used during an all-night velacio´n, a vigil, of singing in Nahuatl and Spanish—including songs about both Aztec traditional stories and Christian narratives. Songs are led by mandolins, the instrument used to preserve many indigenous songs and drumbeats during postcolonial times when drums were banned. Families or Danza circles take turns choosing songs and leading a call-response round. The velacio´n begins at sundown. Shortly after midnight, the participants take a break to enjoy food and drink. In some celebrations, tequila is passed around as homage to the maguey plant. Tobacco is also smoked ceremoniously. After the break, the participants continue singing as the flowers are prepared for a flower limpia that happens just before dawn. At dawn, the danzantes pray in danza form for the spirits as they depart back on their journey to Mictlan. When the ceremony ends, the altar is taken down. All candles and flowers are distributed to be used on home altars throughout the month of November until the candles are burned down, a resonance perhaps with the ‘‘keeping of the god’’ when the amaranth seed dough effigies were eaten in the past. If the altar is one used in a community or public commemoration in a cultural way, these altars are usually adorned with marigolds, candles, and ofrendas that are pleasing. If the altar is in a place of business or school, it might include

| 199

pictures of family and friends of that community. The altar will be set up sometime around November 1 and remain for the month of November. Cultural events, community education, and other events of the month would be centered around the altar. Despite the ambiguity regarding the origin, perhaps because of it, and the multivalent purposes of Dı´a de los Muertos, its commemoration is a unifying experience for U.S. Latino/as that sometimes bridges time and space. Marta Vides Saade

References and Further Reading Aguilar-Moreno, Manuel. Handbook to Life in the Aztec World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Brandes, Stanley H. ‘‘Sugar, Colonialism, and Death: On the Origins of Mexico’s Day of the Dead.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 2 (April 1997): 270–299. Brandes, Stanley H. ‘‘Iconography in Mexico’s Day of the Dean: Origins and Meaning.’’ Ethnohistory 45, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 181–218. Brandes, Stanley H. Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond (Boston: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). Carrasco, David, and Scott Sessions. Daily Life of the Aztecs: People of the Sun and Earth (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998). Empereur, James L., and Eduardo Ferna´ndez. La Vida Sacra: Contemporary Hispanic Sacramental Theology (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Leon, Luis D. La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

200 |

Diaspora Theology

Medina, Lara, and Gilbert R. Cadena. ‘‘Dia de los Muertos: Public Ritual, Community Renewal, and Popular Religion in Los Angeles.’’ Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism, ed. Timothy Matovina and Gary RiebeEstrella (New York: Cornell Press, 2002).

DIASPORA THEOLOGY The word ‘‘diaspora’’ means dispersion, and it refers to the migration of people from a homeland and their resettlement in one or several host countries. One of the outcomes of migratory processes is the formation and development of diaspora people and communities in receiving countries. A diasporic person is anyone who left his/her native country and settled down provisionally or permanently in another country. This person: (a) claims some form of membership to

the country of origin; (b) maintains a feeling of loyalty to the homeland; (c) reproduces cultural practices and identities related to the sending country; and (d) engages in some kind of transnational exchanges across borders. He/she might aspire or not to return to his/her homelands. Diasporic people carry with them their cultural traditions, including their religions. They live out their religion in their homes, communities, and congregations. Diaspora congregations are religious communities of migrant peoples and their descendants who gather and organize to practice their religion and culture. These congregations foster religious and ethnic identities in continuity with the religious and cultural traditions of their countries of origin. Apart from the religious functions, these congregations provide important

Mural of Our Lady of Guadalupe on a building in Santa Fe, New Mexico. (Louise Roach/ Dreamstime)

Diaspora Theology cultural and social services. They help migrants to maintain their cultural traditions and at the same time acculturate to the new country and its culture. Diaspora congregations provide informal and formal social and advocacy services, as well as engage in local and international practices of family support, community development, and human relief. They also can generate strategies of compliance or defiance in relation to social, economic, and political conditions and processes that might affect diaspora communities and congregations in the receiving country. Diasporic religious people practice, adapt, and interpret their religious faith and traditions in light of the experiences of becoming immigrant and minority groups in host countries. Diaspora theology is the process and product of interpreting a religious faith that takes into account the social situation, experiences, needs, and interests of diasporic people, communities, and congregations. Diaspora theologians seek to discern the religious meaning and ethical guidelines of life in diaspora and for religious life in diaspora. Diaspora theologies express the religious vision, beliefs, values, and commitments that guide and sustain religious people and congregations living in diaspora. Diaspora theologians explore and interpret the doctrinal and ethical beliefs and the spiritual practices of their religions in connection with the challenges, conflicts, and opportunities present in the diasporic context. They make proposals on how the divine is present and active on behalf of the diaspora community and in the life of the diasporic community of faith. They present religious visions on how to think and celebrate the faith, live morally, and act civically. Diaspora theologies are generated by

| 201

common faithful people, religious leaders, and professional theologians committed to the spiritual, cultural, and sociopolitical survival and development of their diasporic communities and congregations. Hispanic Christians are major contributors to the presence of Christian diaspora theologies in the United States. Hispanic Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal theologians formulate interpretations of the Christian faith and lifestyle focusing on the way the Latino/a people experience their lives and faith as members of migrant and minority communities and congregations in the United States. They develop versions of the Christian faith and mission that address the spiritual, cultural, moral, political, and economic issues and struggles of Hispanic migrant communities and congregations. Latina/o diaspora theologies incorporate the religious insights coming from grassroots popular religion, the church theological and social doctrines, as well as the reflection of Hispanic professional theologians in the academy. Latino/a diaspora theologies are developed mainly by first and 1.5 generation theologians (those who immigrated before or during their early teens) of the different communities of Latin American descent in the United States. These theologians are found among different Hispanic groups in the United States: Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Argentineans, and Venezuelans. For these theologians the experience and awareness of being a diasporic person and a member of a diaspora community and congregation become the focus of their theological and ethical reflection. The theological work of these diaspora theologians tends to follow two perspectives. One is a panethnic

202 |

Diaspora Theology

perspective in which they join their voices in solidarity with Hispanics of other migrant groups and place the emphasis on common characteristics and aspirations across the diverse Latino/a communities. In this sense, diaspora theology is one form or expression of Hispanic theology. The other trend is more specific to the national and cultural group of origin. In this other sense, some of these theologies can also be classified as expressions of Cuban American, Puerto Rican, Mexican, etc., diaspora theologies. Justo L. Gonza´ lez and Fernando F. Segovia have made important and sophisticated contributions to a general understanding of Hispanic diaspora theology and hermeneutics. Both were born in Cuba and became U.S. naturalized citizens after exile. Gonza´lez is a Methodist church historian and theologian. Fernando Segovia is a Catholic New Testament scholar. Both are major contributors and interpreters to both Hispanic theology and Cuban American diaspora theology in the United States. Their writings give insight into the key themes of Hispanic diaspora theology. Gonza´ lez has identified five key themes in the theological reflection and biblical hermeneutics of Hispanic diaspora theology. The five ‘‘paradigms’’ that Hispanic theologians employ to describe the social and theological situation of Hispanics are the following: marginality; poverty; mestizaje and mulatez; exile and aliens; and solidarity. Gonza´lez explores three aspects for each of these topics. First, each of these themes points to a negative dimension in the social situation and human condition of Hispanics as migrant and minority

people in the United States. For example, they point to experiences such as the following: (a) exclusion from the centers of power; (b) high levels of poverty and under- and unemployment; (c) the rejection of mixed people of color in a White racist society; (d) the political and cultural subordination of foreigners; (e) the sense of homelessness and uprootedness. Second, these themes are also interpreted in a positive dimension. For example, they speak of the options of Hispanics as follows: (a) to stand on the sidelines of dominant society in order to affirm and promote their cultural traditions; (b) to practice love, hospitality, and solidarity with the poor; (c) to produce and celebrate their racial and cultural hybridities; (d) to contribute to the economic, social, and cultural life in a multicultural society; and (e) to provide hospitality and care to new migrants. Finally, each of these topics is interpreted theologically to reveal something about the presence, action, and demands of the divine in the experience and struggles of Latino/a diaspora communities and congregations. The God of the Christian gospel is a God who reveals and redeems in the marginal person of Jesus who lived and ministered among the poor for their spiritual and social liberation. God announces a preferential option for the poor in the Law and through the prophets, and demands love, hospitality, and justice for the poor and the stranger. This is a God who created a diverse cultural humanity and affirmed hybrid people in the incarnation of the Galilean Jesus, the ministry and message of the cultural mestizo apostle Paul, and the formation of a multicultural church and kingdom with people from all countries and cultures. God calls churches and

Diaspora Theology nations to become inclusive, diverse, and hospitable communities that provide refuge, home, care, justice, and community for the poor, the stranger, and the destitute. In several of his essays, the New Testament scholar Segovia has developed a ‘‘hermeneutics and theology of the Diaspora’’ or a ‘‘hermeneutics and theology of otherness and mescolanza (racial and cultural mixture).’’ According to Segovia, Hispanic Americans are members of diverse diaspora communities of Latin American and Caribbean descent whose migrations are partially the result of the imperial politics and economics of the United States in the American continent. The Hispanic experience in the United States is characterized by four dimensions: (a) otherness; (b) mixture or hybridity; (c) passion for life (commitment to a dream of freedom, life, dignity, and opportunity in a new home); and (d) struggle for freedom and justice (against discrimination, political powerlessness, economic deprivation, and educational marginalization). At the center of the Hispanic social situation are the experiences of otherness and mixture. Hispanics become others in the United States because they are different in terms of cultural, national, and racial origins and in terms of power differential from the national majority group. By coming to the United States, diasporic Hispanics start living in between two sociocultural worlds: the worlds of the host land and the homeland. They are able to live and navigate between two worlds they know but belong only partially because they are considered strangers or others. At the same time, they experience ‘‘alienation’’ from these two worlds because they have

| 203

different experiences, status, and identities from the majority groups in each context. Hispanics also come from countries with a history of racial and cultural mixtures of Amerindian, European, African, and Asian populations. Because of this otherness and mixture, Hispanic diasporic people live in two worlds at the same time and in neither of those worlds completely. This experience makes them permanent strangers or others in their home and host lands. This ‘‘otherness’’ is construed negatively (indicated by the use of the quotation marks) by majority groups in the United States. Hispanics are called by names (Hispanic, Hispanic Americans) that they did not invent. Hispanics are also represented and treated negatively in both the United States and in many of their homelands. They become undesirable aliens or diminished ‘‘others.’’ Segovia’s hermeneutics of otherness and mixture is geared to critique and challenge the ideologies and practices that make Hispanic Americans ‘‘others’’ in the United States and to advance a process of self-affirmation and liberation for Hispanics and for all. The key to reverse this negative ‘‘otherness’’ is to understand that this is a construct that can be reconstructed in a positive way. Segovia calls Hispanics to appropriate the status of being aliens or others and make it an identity and vocation for the liberation of all. Turning this negative ‘‘otherness’’ into a positive otherness is what Segovia calls engagement and it involves three tasks. First, in the task of selfappropriation Hispanics revise and write their history from their own perspective, challenging the imperial versions of that history. Second, in an act of self-

204 |

Diaspora Theology

definition they challenge the negative ‘‘otherness’’ imposed on them and articulate positively and militantly their aspirations, values, contributions, interests, and needs. Finally, Hispanics will engage in self-direction by developing visions and dreams for a just, inclusive, democratic, and liberating society for all. In doing all this, Hispanic Americans claim their mission or ‘‘manifest destiny’’ to embrace, speak out, and struggle out of their status as aliens (others and strangers) for the liberation of all. Segovia’s diaspora theology is geared to critique the United States for the following: (a) its imperial ideology of manifest destiny; (b) its ethnic-racial stratification system; (c) its Americanizing policy toward immigrants and conquered communities; and (d) the colonized mentality in minorities that consent with the bifurcated system of imperial center and margins. On the other hand, diaspora theology affirms the distinct presence and positive contributions of the diverse Latino/a communities in the United States. Segovia’s diaspora theology demands respect for the recognition of different identities among Hispanic Americans and respect for the identities of other groups in the nation. Diaspora theology should assist Hispanic Americans in struggling to survive and claim their political membership and rights in the new country. Latina/os should declare their manifest destiny as aliens who wish to be strangers no longer. Segovia classifies his theology as an exercise in liberation theology for several reasons. First, it is concerned with the sociopolitical, racial, and economic liberation of all marginalized people, but in particular U.S. Hispanics. Second, as

a postcolonial theology, it critiques the empire and its imperial theology and social and religious institutions. Instead, it argues for the freedom and rights of the margins for self-affirmation, selfdefinition, and self-direction in politics and theology (decolonization). Third, diaspora theology critiques as oppressive the Western and modern ideology and project of homogeneity, universality, objectivity, and essentialism. Instead, it affirms diversity and plurality as liberating ideals and goals for society, church, and theology. Hispanic diaspora theologies share theological themes, hermeneutical strategies, and political goals with Asian American and African American diaspora theologies in the United States. All of these diaspora theologies are committed, in their own way and according to their historical experience, to struggle for the spiritual and cultural survival, the material and moral well-being, the economic and social development, and the advocacy for civil and human rights for their diasporic people, communities, and congregations and for the rest of the nation. They are convinced that their diaspora experience is not only a sociocultural condition. It is also a spiritual journey, an ethical vocation, and a cultural gift that can contribute to the formation and transformation of their new country into a more inclusive, just, free, and democratic society. Luis Rivera-Rodriguez

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of

Dominican Americans Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Gonza´lez, Justo L. Santa Biblia: The Bible through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996). Rivera, Luis R. ‘‘Towards a Diaspora Hermeneutics.’’ Character Ethics and the Old Testament: Moral Dimensions of Scripture, ed. M. Daniel Carroll R. and Jacqueline E. Lapsley (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). Segovia, Fernando F. Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000). ———, ed. Interpreting Beyond Borders (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). Warner, Stephen, and Judith G. Wittner, eds. Gatherings in Diaspora. Religious Communities and the New Immigration (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

DOMINICAN AMERICANS The first great wave of Dominican immigrants to the United States took place in the 1960s and 1970s, as a result of the assassination of the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. These were years of political turmoil. The 1980s marked the beginning of the second wave of Dominicans to the United States. Economics, however, was the primary reason for this exodus. The large number of Dominicans who immigrated to the United States was concentrated mostly in New York City. Among the top 20 nations with immigrants in the City (1980-1989), the Dominican Republic was the highest. This continued for the next decade. Today, there are Dominican communities in almost every region of the country. Nationwide, the Dominican population in the United States rose from 520,121 in 1990 to 1,041,910 in 2000, making

| 205

this group the fourth largest Hispanic group in the United States, after Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans. At the current pace, it is estimated that prior to the year 2010, the Dominican population will overtake the Cuban population, making it the third largest Latina/o group in the country. As economic migrants, Dominicans faced the same struggles that new immigrants often face: unemployment, formal educational and health access problems, fair housing, and societal discrimination. During the late 1980s in New York City, political gains were evident as new school board members were elected. In 1991, Guillermo Linares was elected to the City Council in New York City, becoming the first Dominican elected official in the United States. Today there are 23 Dominicans holding elected positions in the United States and Puerto Rico, including State Assembly, City Council, County legislator, State Representative, State Delegate, and County Commissioner titles. In 1997, the Dominican American National Round Table was established to advocate for the empowerment of Dominicans in the United States, Puerto Rico, and U.S. territories. Economically, Dominicans in the United States are a heterogeneous group that represents low-wage blue-collar jobs as well as high-level professionals. In addition, the Dominican community has adopted an entrepreneurial spirit, generating jobs for new arrivals (bodegas, beauty parlors, restaurants, travel agencies, and supermarkets). In New York City, Dominican students constitute a vast majority in the City University system where the Dominican Studies Institute was established for the study of

206 |

Dominican Americans

The Dominican Day parade is held in New York City each August. The Alianza Dominicana, with more than 350 employees, is the largest Dominican-directed service organization in the United States. (Pedro Antonio Tavarez)

issues, problems, and research efforts related to the Dominican experience in the United States and abroad. Dominicans maintain close relations with their native land. For example, monies sent back to the Dominican Republic by Dominican immigrants represent the second highest source of external funds for the nation after tourism income. Over three-quarters of these monies come from the United States and Puerto Rico. In what some scholars refer to as double loyalty, Dominicans in the United States are active participants in the political, social, and cultural life of their homeland. There is a constant transnational mobility in which Dominicans send their children to the island for vacations, visit periodically for family, cultural, and religious celebrations, and

participate in business ventures. Dominican families on the island also send relatives to the United States for periodic vacations, educational opportunities, and the seeking of citizenship status or economic gain. It is also established that in New York and other major cities, there are specific chapters of national political parties where political candidates seek support during national elections. Binational status (double citizenship) today allows Dominicans to vote abroad as well as in the United States. The official religion of the Dominican Republic is Roman Catholicism, established by a concordat with the Vatican. It is estimated that more than 90 percent profess this faith. Recent surveys, however, indicate that 39.8 percent identify themselves as practicing. Upon

Dominican Americans

| 207

˜ ORA DE LA ALTAGRACIA NUESTRA SEN Nuestra Sen ˜ora de la Altagracia, Our Lady of High Grace, is the patroness of the Dominican Republic. She is referred to by Dominicans as ‘‘Tatica from Higuey.’’ The portrait of Altagracia was brought from Spain by the brothers Trejo at the beginning of the colonization process. They offered the icon to the parish church when they moved to Higuey where a shrine was erected in 1572. The portrait, which is only 33 centimeters wide by 45 centimeters high, is said to be a primitive work of the Spanish school. Experts date it to the end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth. The original icon was conspicuous for its simplicity, but in 1708 it was restored and embellished. The icon as it appears today is a depiction of the holy family and Jesus’ birth. At the center of the picture is Mary, in a prayerful attitude, hands brought together, looking down on the child who lies asleep and naked on the straws. Altagracia’s original feast day was August 15, but was changed on account of a victorious battle fought on January 21, 1691. The latter day is the one celebrated at present by the Dominican Community both on the Island and in the United States. —ASD

immigration, Dominicans appear to continue this trend, and as in their native land a high percent practice popular religiosity, including Dominican Voodoo, Santerı´a, or other African-based religious expressions. A common feature in Dominican neighborhoods is the Bota´nica—an alternative folk medicine retail store with spiritual emphases on healing remedies and religious healthcare products. Dominicans are also present in mainline denominational churches; however, it is within the Pentecostal movement where there appears to be rapid and exponential growth. An important feature that touches the identity of Dominicans in both the Caribbean and the United States is the game of baseball. This sport has become a significant economic gateway for young Dominicans. In 2007 in the United States, there were 77 professional players in both leagues and close to 50 percent or more of the rosters were composed of

Dominicans for 11 of the teams. After the United States, the Dominican Republic produces more players than Puerto Rico, Cuba, or Venezuela. Arelis M. Figueroa

References and Further Reading Department of Planning. The Newest New Yorkers 2000 (New York: Department of Planning, 2004). Guarnizo, Luis E. ‘‘Los Dominicanyorks: The Making of a Binational Society.’’ The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 533, (1994): 70–86. Hernandez, Ramona, and Francisco L. Rivera-Batiz. Dominicans in the United States: A Socioeconomic Profile, 2000. Dominican Research Monographs (New York: The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, October 6, 2003). Hernandez, Ramona. The Mobility of Workers under Advanced Capitalism.

208 |

Dominican Americans

Dominican Migration to the United States. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Torres-Saillant, Silvio, and Ramona Hernandez. The Dominican Americans (Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).

U.S. Department of State. ‘‘Dominican Republic.’’ http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/ irf/2007/90251.htm.

E Americans have the lowest poverty rate (14.3 percent) among Hispanics. A lack of English proficiency, lower skill levels, and low levels of human capital (i.e., education) contribute to the low income levels and the high poverty rates among Latina/os. Within the Latino/a community, those who identify as Roman Catholics have the lowest socioeconomic status among all Christian religious traditions. According to a 2007 survey conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, almost half (46 percent) of all Catholics have a household income under $30,000 a year, and only 14 percent have household incomes that exceed $50,000. Those who claim to be Evangelicals have a higher socioeconomic status than Catholics with 39 percent having household incomes that fall below $30,000 and 21 percent with household incomes over $50,000. Mainline Christians have the highest socioeconomic status with only 29 percent having a household income less than $30,000 and 24 percent with household incomes higher than $50,000. Those who claim

ECONOMICS In the year 2000, the accumulated buying power of the Latino/a community was estimated to be $440 billion. By 2008, the purchasing power was expected to surpass $1 trillion. As impressive as these figures are, they mask the levels of poverty and inequality existing within the Hispanic community. Latina/os are 11 times more likely to live in poverty than Euro-Americans. They are also more likely to lack health insurance and pension plans. Hispanics’ poverty rates are over twice the 2000 national rate of 11.9 percent. A poverty rate of 22.3 percent means that one out of every five Hispanics lives below the poverty level. This is substantially higher than the EuroAmerican poverty rate of 7.9 percent. In 2000, the Euro-American median household income of $44,232 was substantially higher than that of Hispanics at $33,455. Dominicans have the highest poverty rate (27.4 percent), followed by Puerto Ricans (24.8 percent), and Mexican Americans (23.3 percent). Cuban 209

210 |

Economics

BARRIO The Spanish word ‘‘barrio’’ means ‘‘neighborhood,’’ ‘‘district,’’ or ‘‘quarter.’’ Linguistically, it is derived from the Arabic barri (outside, open country), referring to the Moorish quarters outside fortified cities. Urban terms such as barrio colonia (suburb) and pueblo (town) were brought to Latin American and other colonized countries by Spain. In the United States, the first barrios formed after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), usually in the center of former Mexican pueblos and mission towns, where Mexicans were able to retain some land after the war. In the early 1900s, the two main Mexican American urban centers were El Paso and San Antonio, with the largest urban barrios in the Southwest. Other cities that developed large barrios are Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Las Vegas in New Mexico, and Durango, Pueblo, and Denver in Colorado. The barrio served as a social, cultural, political, and religious space for Latino/as to create networks of solidarity, support, and self-determination. However, the formation of barrios was often based on poor infrastructure in highly populated areas, usually on the periphery of downtowns and manufacturing zones. Home ownership was low due to poor wages, coupled with overcrowding and sanitation problems. —FAO

to belong to another Christian tradition seem to be at a socioeconomic status that is closest to Catholics with 45 percent falling below $30,000 and only 11 percent of households earning in excess of $50,000. Hispanics who comprise the most recent immigrants and have less proficiency in English represent the poorest segments of the community. They also tend to be more conservative on social issues. Nevertheless, Hispanics appear to take a more liberal view on economic issues, regardless of whether they are conservative on social issues or not. For example, 69 percent of all Latina/os, regardless of economic status, support publicly financed health insurance even if it means higher taxes. Nearly twothirds of all Latino/as believe that poverty exists because government benefits and services are insufficient. Because poverty is a major component of the Hispanic social location, a religious response to poverty exists.

Although there are multiple theological approaches to the poverty experienced by Hispanics, probably the two extreme points on the continuum are the prosperity gospel and liberation theology. The prosperity gospel relies more on selfreliance to reach God’s desired blessing and plan for one’s life. The liberationist approach attempts to dismantle existing social structures designed to enrich the dominant culture at the expense of Hispanics (and other peoples of color). Those who advocate a prosperity gospel tend to be theologically more conservative while liberationists tend to be theologically more liberal.

Prosperity Gospel Among many Latino/as, specifically those who are either Pentecostal or charismatic, there is a belief that God’s will is for believers to be blessed with health and wealth. The Pew Hispanic 2007 survey showed that 73 percent of all

Economics Hispanics believe in the prosperity gospel, the highest among them being Protestant Pentecostals (86 percent), Protestant charismatics (73 percent), and Catholic charismatics (79 percent). The only thing preventing God’s children from receiving these presents is their lack of faith. They simply do not believe strongly enough. This theological position is usually referred to as the Prosperity Gospel. Wealth indicates closeness to God, while poverty demonstrates a lack of faith. These Hispanic Christians adopt the tenet that they have a right to their riches, which represents a blessing from God. Yet critics insist that poverty among people of color, including Latina/os, is one of the major consequences of a society designed to privilege those within the dominant culture. This form of theology assumes that anyone can ‘‘make it’’ in this country, regardless of race or ethnicity. The poor, those who fail, have no one to blame but themselves. Their poverty becomes a divine manifestation of God’s rejection of them. In short, you can tell we are Christians by our blessings of health and wealth. The emphasis, then, is on assimilating to Eurocentric economic patterns in the hope that imitation will lead to greater financial security. Once again, critics dismiss prosperity theology because they claim it ignores how poverty is caused, specifically, how the racism and classism of the dominant culture must keep a segment of the population (usually of color) poor so that their culture can benefit and maintain its level of economic privilege.

Liberationist Theology Those Latino/as who advocate a liberationist theology place oppression,

| 211

including economic oppression, as central to Christian theological thought. In many respects, liberation theology is considered to be a theology of and from the poor. They insist that the wealth of some is directly related to the poverty of many. The present U.S. economic structures ensure that a disproportionate segment of the Latina/o population (as well other groups composed of people of color) do society’s undesirable work, work that is usually dirty and/or dangerous. Within the United States, disproportionate numbers of Hispanics occupy menial, deadend, underpaid jobs. But this labor pool of undereducated Hispanics is crucial because they provide profits for the industries that employ them, specifically agriculture and segments of the garment industry—industries whose profits are dependent on the economic exploitation of the poor. Second, the low wages paid to Hispanics subsidize Euro-American middle- and upper-class lifestyles by providing cheap labor in the form of domestic help such as nannies, gardeners, and maids. Additionally, because our present U.S. tax code is designed so that the poor pay a higher proportion of income and property taxes, Hispanics subsidize local and state government services that usually go to the more affluent White neighborhoods. Third, poverty creates jobs— not just dysfunctional jobs like drug dealers, production and sale of cheap liquor, pawn shops, and prostitutes—but respectable professional jobs in penology, criminology, public health work, social work, or the social sciences. Fourth, because Latino/as living in poverty can seldom afford new products, they extend the economic usefulness of goods by buying what others do not want—not just secondhand clothes and merchandise, but also expired food.

212 |

Economics

Migrant farmworkers pick strawberries along the coast of central California. (Heather Craig/Dreamstime)

Conclusion Regardless of whether Latino/as believe in a prosperity gospel, or if they take a liberationist stance, or if they fall somewhere in between these two extremes, all agree that poverty is a major concern of the community. Poverty’s impact upon the Hispanic community surpasses the basic need for finances. Poverty’s definition can never be limited to simply a lack of money. The multiple consequences of poverty include, but are not limited to the greater likelihood of failed marriages; a higher susceptibility to illness, disease, and sickness because of the lack of adequate health care; a greater likelihood of physical and sexual abuse; a greater likelihood of having children who will neither go to college nor complete high school; a higher probability of conflict with law enforcement agencies; a greater chance of being a victim of a crime; a

greater chance of living in ecologically hazardous areas; and, of course, a shorter life expectancy. Because poverty contributes to a debilitating lifestyle, robbing Latina/os of dignity and personhood, a religious response to economics exists. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading Da´vila, Alberto, Marie T. Mora, and Alma D. Hales. ‘‘Income, Earnings, and Poverty: A Portrait of Inequality Among Latinos/as in the United States.’’ Latinas/os in the United States: Changing the Face of Ame´rica, ed. Havida´n Rodrı´guez, Rogelio Sa´enz, and Cecilia Menjı´var (New York: Springer, 2008). Gans, Herbert J. ‘‘The Uses of Poverty: The Poor Pay All.’’ Down to Earth Sociology, 3rd ed., ed. James M. Henslin (New York: The Free Press, 1991).

Ecumenism

| 213

MEXICAN AMERICAN CULTURAL CENTER The Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC) is a national pastoral and language institute for Hispanic and multicultural ministry in San Antonio, Texas. The dream of establishing a pastoral center for Mexican Americans emerged at a February 1971 PADRES retreat and workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. PADRES member Virgilio Elizondo served as MACC’s founding president from 1972 to 1987; Las Hermanas and lay leaders joined Elizondo and other PADRES in establishing the Center. Elizondo’s successors as MACC president were Father Rosendo Urrabazo, C.M.F. (1987–1993) and Sister Marı´a Elena Gonza´lez, R.S.M. (1993–2007), whose vision, leadership, and organizational skills enabled MACC to construct and dedicate a new facility. Though primarily focused on Mexican American Catholics, since its founding the faculty and staff at MACC have engaged in an ongoing ecumenical, interethnic effort to train leaders for cross-cultural work in a variety of contexts. MACC has played a leading role in advocating for Hispanic ministry and rights and publishing groundbreaking research about Latino liturgy, faith expressions, history, and theology. The Center’s most far-reaching influence is the numerous participants formed and trained in MACC programs over the years, encompassing literally thousands of Catholic and Protestant leaders in Hispanic ministry at the parish, diocesan, regional, and national levels. Since 2007, the Center began evolving into the Mexican American Catholic College under the leadership of its new president, Arturo Cha´vez. —TM

Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007).

ECUMENISM Hispanics come from many cultural, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. Religion historian Justo L. Gonza´lez speaks of ‘‘mixtures of cultures,’’ race, language, and traditions with a common Latina/o cultural heritage. Priest and scholar Virgil Elizondo stresses the mestizo element as a hermeneutical tool to understand a history of colonization and a future of liberation. Mestizo is a concept originally imposed by the colonial discourse and used to justify racial discrimination. The term gradually moved from a pejorative usage to an affirming

principle that values the formation of a new identity. It aims at constructing new racial and cultural exchanges for the Hispanic diaspora in the United States. The Latino/a label, as a visual way to convey both diversity and commonalities of Hispanic culture, reflects the richness and complexities of this situation. Those who come from Central America have a strong indigenous heritage, which explains the ‘‘Maize culture’’ that is so pervasive in the region. The Caribbean people for the most part, have an indigenous Afro-Antillean and Spanish-Creole mixture. Mexicans and South Americans come from a strong indigenous heritage, mixed with European ancestry. Those who were born in the United States have Native American blood mixed with European and in many cases African American blood. A

214 |

Ecumenism

common denominator is the colonial history of conquest and colonization. It is a history of oppression and violence. These differences are, with all its colonial and neocolonial influences, in a contradictory way, a blessing and a promise. A ‘‘Hispanic culture’’ that has both a colonial component and the blend of a new mestizo race and culture provides a hermeneutical principle to understand the historical roots of oppression and the eschatological dimension of liberation. This interconnection of race and culture is a key element in developing Latino/a theologies in the United States. In fact, the entire discussion on modernity and postmodernity in Latin America and the Caribbean relates to this colonial history. The same applies to the Mexican American experience in the Southwest of the United States. Additionally, many Hispanics are pilgrims in a strange land, in a diaspora, defending their identities, reclaiming their place as ‘‘Hispanos and Hispanas,’’ but discerning a political and social context, many times hostile. The United States is the new locus of their daily lives, transforming their cultural and religious experiences and providing new realities with new components, in language and educational models, in a searching and affirming process as people. Latino/as must recreate and reconstruct, in a different context, a new community with old and new components. In many communities this is the real tension: How can the barrio be recreated in a hostile and racist, excluding society? How can lives be reconstructed after torture, repression, and marginalization in their countries of origin? How can the immediate family and the extended family be maintained in a

communal experience when individualism is so dominant in society at large? These are both problems and challenges. The barrio can be a creative space in larger cities of the United States, but also a repressive ghetto that marginalizes. The next relevant issue is mission and unity. The ecumenical movement of the twentieth century and its predecessor, the missionary movement of the nineteenth century, has a long history in dealing with these two principles. Mission and unity are so intimately related that they constitute a paradigm for any ecumenical theology. The church is mission. Unity is God’s mission to create a new humanity out of the division, barriers, and prejudices of the existing structures of church life and in society. Mission and unity need to be understood as part of a historical conflict and a search for an eschatological reconciliation in God’s reign. In that tension, Latina/o churches struggle for peace, justice, and the integrity of creation, as a Christian fellowship, a sign of the salvation still to come, in real koinonia and diakonia. But Hispanic believers also stress the church as an apostolic community of faith, witnessing a visible unity in solidarity: A unity in diversity through a koinonia of mutual commitment. Hispanic theologians Justo L. Gonza´lez, Virgil Elizondo, Ismael Garcı´a, and Luis G. Pedraja emphasize this growing sense of unity as a process of social and cultural awareness, a common goal for justice. Religion scholars Edwin D. Aponte and Miguel A. De La Torre point to what they call a ‘‘New Ecumenism’’ where they claim that a productive theological discussion and a crossfertilization of perceptions and ideas is already taking place among Hispanic

Encomienda religion scholars in spite of the checkered history of contacts between Catholics and Protestants. A testament to this New Ecumenism exists in the number of collaborative institutions (i.e., Hispanic Summer Program or the Hispanic Theological Initiative) and book projects where formal and informal dialogue on common matters of theology and pastoral concerns occur. The reality of oppression, racial prejudice, economic marginalization, and the lack of educational opportunities are some of the issues that challenge Latino/ as to political and social involvement. Here the growing sense of unity is seen as a search for a common vision that respects doctrinal differences in an ongoing ecumenical dialogue, particularly between Catholic and Protestant theologians and pastors. The church is experienced as a new extended family, struggling against brokenness and alienation, sharing in concrete solidarity, and affirming human dignity and ethical values. The growing sense of unity is also seen as a unity to resist, to promote solidarity with other minorities, and to provide a new sense of identity that includes the Spanish language and a dignity that affirms the hope for a better future in the midst of a dominant culture that marginalizes and excludes, searching for real reconciliation. Hispanic Christians are challenged as a growing minority in the United States to continue witnessing in the public arena with an ecumenical spirit that promotes unity and affirms diversity. A real commitment to reconciliation will constitute a valuable contribution toward a new ecumenism in a divided society. Carmelo E. A´lvarez

| 215

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel, and Edwin David Aponte. Introducing Latino/a Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). Elizondo, Virgil. The Future is Mestizo: Life When Cultures Meet (Bloomington, IN: Meyer-Stone Books, 1988). Gonza´lez, Justo L. Man˜ana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990).

ENCOMIENDA The Encomienda system in Spanish America was a structure theoretically based on the cooperation of the encomendero and of the doctrinero. The encomendero, usually a conquistador or his descendant, was entrusted (encomendado) with the integration of his Amerindian wards into the social and economic life of the Spanish Empire and helped the doctrinero (teacher) establish the cultural, moral, and religious patterns of Catholicism. This feudal social, political, economic, and religious system, as far as scholars know today, was created in May 1493, by the Crown of Castile who reserved the right to grant and remove the encomiendas as seen fit. It first appeared in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico) in the 1520s. The encomienda system is deeply entrenched in the history and culture of Latin America, and it is one of the most damaging institutions that the Spanish colonists implemented in the New World. The system came to signify the oppression and exploitation of Amerindians, although its originators did not set out with such intent, and it can be argued that it is at

216 |

Encomienda BARTOLOME´ DE LAS CASAS (1474–1566) A Dominican priest, considered the earliest European advocate for indigenous rights, Father De Las Casas was also the first Catholic priest ordained in the Spanish colonies of the Americas. Born in Seville in 1474, his father served on Columbus’s second voyage and brought him an Indian boy as a servant, a relationship that deepened his compassion for the natives. His father’s earnings allowed him to study law at the prestigious University of Salamanca. Following Columbus’s expulsion, Las Casas was legal advisor to Hispaniola’s first two governors, Ovando and Velazquez. By 1511 Las Casas was preaching in Santo Domingo against the encomienda and repartimiento systems, and teaching that the Christian faith was incompatible with the exploitation and cruelty being unleashed upon the Indians. Critics argue that he offset colonial pressures on the Indian population by advocating the introduction of African slaves into Cuba and Hispaniola. He was appointed first bishop of Chiapas in southern Mexico, but returned to Spain permanently after clashing with the encomenderos. His Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) angered many conquistadors and colonial entrepreneurs. He died in 1566 at age 93 after many years of lobbying the Spanish monarchy in Madrid for Indian’s rights through the New Laws of the Indies. —AH

the origin of much of the social, political, and economic injustices of the continent. At the start of the system, the sole justification for the Spanish dominion over the Amerindians was to convert the natives to the Catholic faith. However, it quickly became an opportunity for the encomenderos to exploit and utilize the natives to their own greedy ends. This was because the Amerindians were required to pay the encomendero a tribute in return for protection and religious instruction. The encomienda system did not entail any land tenure by the encomendero; in fact, the land of the Amerindians was to remain in their possession, a right that was formally protected by the Crown. However, the encomenderos did often own land nearby their encomiendas and had natives working on plantations as well as at the local mines. Another interesting point is that the encomienda grant did not give the Spaniard the right

to exercise any political authority or jurisdiction over the natives. However, these distinctions were very difficult to enforce because there was an ocean between the rulers making the laws and the colonists in charge of the natives. As time passed, the conquerors of New Spain came to expect the encomiendas as their reward, so the practice became an institution and it eventually became tradition to divide newly conquered territories among the conquerors. The necessity for the encomiendas arose out of the condition of the Amerindians when the Spanish first made contact with them. In essence, the Spanish believed the native population to be savage and pagan, so the major aim of the encomienda was to look after the welfare of the natives, as well as to educate and teach them about the Catholic faith and integrate them into society. The encomenderos were not allowed to mistreat

Encomienda the natives in any way, but at the same time, the natives were to be persuaded to abandon their ancient ways. Although the encomenderos were responsible for them, the Amerindians were not granted to the Spaniard for life, but only for two to three years at a time. It was during that time they were to be educated and protected by the encomendero. Furthermore, the local natives were not supposed to work for nothing; in fact, they were to be paid and supplied with the provisions they needed to live. At one point, the Crown even encouraged the Amerindians and Spanish to intermarry, so that they could ‘‘tame’’ the natives through constant and direct contact with the colonists. They also hoped this would help in their efforts to convert the natives to Christianity. However, what the encomienda actually accomplished was to ensure the colonists a large indentured work force. Among all those preoccupied with the exploitation of the natives, there were also men who defended the Amerindians. One of the most prominent of those men working to better the lives of the native population was Dominican Bishop Bartolome´ de Las Casas. Las Casas was a secular Catholic priest living in Cuba, with an encomienda of his own. However, he came to see the evils of the encomienda after hearing a sermon preached by Dominican Friar Antonio de Montesinos. Las Casas was sickened by what he heard and saw and soon repented. He then decided to dedicate the rest of his life to righting the wrongs committed against the natives as a Dominican friar. Las Casas also took to documenting the problems, and in his work, A Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, he detailed the extent of the abuses committed against the natives. Shortly,

| 217

because of Las Casas’s persistence, his message about the terrible conditions in which the Amerindians lived reached the Crown’s officials. The Crown stepped in and began regulating the situation through legislation, particularly the New Laws of 1542. However, upholding the New Laws that protected the Amerindians was a nearly impossible task in the Spanish colonies that was never quite mastered. Therefore, it could be said that the encomienda system was formalized under the New Laws, rather than abolished by it. So, although not everyone was blind to the transgressions against the indigenous population, these men were in the small minority and even the Audiencia, which was in place to correct the ills committed against the Amerindians, soon became filled with encomenderos, thus making the protection of the Amerindian population from exploitation and abuse an almost impossible task. The encomienda was generally replaced by the repartimiento throughout Spanish America after mid-sixteenth century. At one point Las Casas claimed that some 15–20 million natives perished at the hands of the encomenderos. Now, these numbers have been disputed, and they may very well be off the mark, but historians have agreed upon Las Casas’s other major claims on the mistreatment and abuse of the conquered indigenous population. The system set a precedent for the treatment and esteem for the indigenous population in the Americas, and the fight against it was an uphill battle that was never quite won. In fact, one could argue that the encomienda system never died off, that it merely evolved and took on new forms of oppression, exploitation, and injustice in the continent. Alejandro Crosthwaite

218 |

Environmentalism

References and Further Reading Himmerich y Valencia, Robert. The Encomenderos of New Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). Simpson, Lesley Byrd. The Encomienda in New Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950). Thomas, Hugh. Rivers of Gold (New York: Random House, 2004). Tindall, George Brown, and David E. Shi, eds. America: A Narrative History, 6th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1984).

ENVIRONMENTALISM Environmentalism is a political, ethical, and social movement that endeavors to develop and defend the planet through changes to environmentally destructive human behavior, such as air pollutants, downstream dam impacts, mining operations, oil spills, and power plant wastes. ‘‘Environment’’ and ‘‘environmentalism’’ are now popular terms compared to a decade ago. ‘‘Go Green,’’ ‘‘All Things Green,’’ ‘‘Greening the Earth,’’ and ‘‘Green Cars’’ exemplify the present trend. The ‘‘Green’’ phenomenon originated with the U.S. environmental movement of the 1800s. From the 1880s to the 1950s, most ecologists concentrated on the natural world (conservation and preservation of wildlife) without considering the extensive influences of human settlement and commerce. In the 1960s, the modern environmental movement emerged alongside the civil rights, women’s, antiwar, and democracy movements. During this period environmentalists became concerned about air and water pollution, so they widened their vision to include all landscapes and

human activities. The environmental movement has evolved into the current diverse national and international organizations that are inclusive of the urban environment. These nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) differ in political ideology and efforts to influence environmental policy in the United States and other countries. Hispanics have joined the ranks of the environmental movement. As of 2001 the figures of the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrate that Hispanics have surpassed African Americans as the largest ethnic group; therefore, Latinas/os (U.S.-born and foreign-born) are important stakeholders in the future management of natural resources. Latina/o environmentalism manifested through Hispanic religious beliefs, attitudes, and activism, serve as predictors of their environmental ethos.

Environmental Belief and Behavior With the exponential increase of Hispanics in the United States, the majority of these being immigrants from Latin America, Latino/a environmentalism has been the focus of quantitative and qualitative research measuring ethnic variation, regional attitudinal results, and the interplay of religion and politics. The New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) is a tool that assesses environmental behaviors such as environmental reading, household recycling, environmental group joining, and participation in nature-based outdoor recreation. Although the empirical analyses of Hispanic social practices at times conforms with the majority culture’s (White) perceptions and interactions with the environment (e.g., outdoor recreation for U.S.-born Hispanics is more like Whites

Environmentalism

| 219

than other minorities), others argue that Anglo conformity is dependent on the level of Latina/o acculturation to White, middle-class values. Yet, foreign-born Hispanics embrace a different view of the natural world than Whites (nature separate individual and community); Latino/as see humanity as intimately connected to nature; absent are the romantic preservationist and humannature dichotomy in their nature myths. Results have shown that Hispanics who are educated, are younger, and hold a liberal position or ideology tend to be more environmentally concerned than other Latina/os.

Civic Environmentalism Although federal research (the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency convened two scientific panels in 1987 and 1990) ascertains the environmental health status of Hispanics (who fare worst or face significant threats in ambient air pollutions, worker exposure to chemicals, pollution indoors, and pollutants in drinking water), the lack of government funding in the end minimizes regulatory efforts. The considerable deficiency of political support and federal subsidies for environmental regulations has resulted in civic environmentalism—partnerships between local place-based communities who collaborate in innovative ways to develop modes of consensus and understanding to reach solutions. Latino/a communities have contributed across the country to civic responsibility to assist in ‘‘new modes of land use regulation,’’ ‘‘regional planning for urban density,’’ ‘‘neighborhood preservation,’’ and ‘‘environmentally sustainable agriculture.’’ In the early

Dolores Heurta, vice president of United Farm Workers, during a grape pickers’ strike in 1968. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

1960s, Hispanics like Ce´sar Cha´vez and Dolores Huerta in California founded the United Farm Workers movement and Ernesto Cortes organized Latino/a groups in the Southwest (Texas and California) for the Industrial Areas Foundation. These community organizations exemplify not only civic responsibility, but also express the relationship between Latina/o spirituality and political socioeconomic activism. In Cha´vez’s case, the influence of Catholic spirituality is explicit. The UFW under his leadership used methods of boycotts, pilgrimages, and fasts all as part of the nonviolent protest tradition and Catholic social teaching and spirituality. Most of these groups work with mainly poor underprivileged church and religious communities to empower them to become active participants in decision-making forums to impact their communities.

220 |

Espiritismo

Environmental Racism In the 1980s, the environmental justice movement began in the United States in order to end environmental racism—it is common to find minorities living near waste centers, industrial plants, and highways, where exposure to large amounts of pollutants and environmental health hazards prevail compared to the rest of the privileged populace. In 1993, 80 percent of Hispanics lived in areas where one standard of air quality was unmet while 60 percent (two standards), 31 percent (three standards), and 15 percent (four standards) were unmet. The pollutants were ozone, carbon monoxide, suspended particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, lead, and nitrogen oxide known to cause lung damage, bronchitis, cancer, brain damage, asthma, respiratory tract problems, and damage to the cardiovascular, nervous, and pulmonary systems. Workers’ exposure to chemicals and pesticides is another environmental issue and concern. In 1992, Latino/as comprised 71 percent of the agricultural workforce, while in the same year 11 percent of all occupational fatalities occurred among farm workers. Environmental racism is also seen clearly on the U.S.-Mexico border. The U.S. energy companies are an example of ‘‘environmental imperialists’’ who have found cheap labor and are EPA/OSHA regulation-free on the ‘‘borderlands.’’ In 2002, across the California border into Mexicali, InterGen (owned by Shell Oil) built one of two large power plants where millions of Californians receive energy while Mexicans receive more pollution and experience more economic exploitation. Eloy H. Nolivos

References and Further Reading Hispanics and the Environment: Key Indicators (Washington, DC: National Coalition of Hispanic Health and Human Services Organizations, 1994). Anderson, Joan B., and James Gerber. Fifty Years of Change on the U.S.-Mexico Border: Growth, Development, and Quality of Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). Anzaldua, Gloria. Boderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987). Burke, John Francis. Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2002). De La Torre, Miguel A. Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2004).

ESPIRITISMO Espiritismo (Spiritism), also known as Kardecism, originated in France during the mid-nineteenth century, when an educator named Hippolyte Le´on Denizard Rivail became interested in psychical and other supernatural phenomenon. Through mediums, he questioned the spirits and codified their answers in a series of books (Spiritist Codification), which he wrote under the pseudonym Allan Kardec. According to Rivail, spiritism is a collection of principles based on every aspect of human knowledge, and, as such, it is applicable to philosophy, religion, science, ethics, and the social life. Rivail introduced the movement as a positive science that combined mysticism with Christian morality, scientism, and progressivist ideology. The spiritists adhere to a scientific philosophy that

Espiritismo produces moral consequences. They do not conceive nor perceive their movement to be a religion. The movement’s anticlerical views attracted many disenfranchised Catholics who held reservations toward institutionalized Christianity and the political power held by the Church. Many activists within radical social movements of the time, i.e., abolitionists and women suffragists, were attracted to spiritism for its progressive and individualist underpinnings. As a result, the initial adherents to the movement were from the middle and upper economic classes. Spiritists believed that when God, the supreme intelligence and primary cause of all things, created the universe, God composed it of spirit and matter. Two worlds exist, one that is visible (the physical) and one that is invisible (the spiritual). Within the created universe, the living within the physical world can have contact with the dead and others within the realm of the spirit world. As humans, we have a physical body and a soul (or spirit). Thus we subsist in a reality composed of two planes of existence, a material world and the spiritual world that are continuously interacting. Humans can learn to communicate with spirits and to give and receive spiritual energies in order to achieve spiritual and physical health. To this end, spiritists employ human observation and experimentation in order to subject and explain the spiritual world. Communicating with the spirits of the dead is not considered to be the product of magic or the supernatural. The spiritual world is a reality that can become subject to a rigorous scientific experimentation and observation. Spiritism belief in reincarnation can explain human suffering or happiness as the

| 221

consequences of previous lives due to a cause and effect, or karma. All humans upon death, that is the moment they cease being material entities and become spirits, seek advancement in the hierarchy of perfection in which they now exist. This process toward perfection is accomplished through light (enlightenment), which facilitates their reincarnation on this planet, as well as in other worlds. The spiritualist is able to provide light, helping the spirit of the dead move onto the next higher spiritual level of existence. Christ, who achieved the highest level of spiritual incarnation, becomes the model for the supreme virtue of love. To practice a Christianity based on love can ensure the individual a higher spiritual level of incarnation after he/she departs from this physical world. Spiritism’s teachings quickly became popular throughout all of Europe, eventually making a presence in Latin America during the 1850s. It took root in the Caribbean and Brazil under the name ‘‘espiritismo,’’ the Spanish word for ‘‘spiritism.’’ Although similar to the Mexican version, espiritualismo (spiritualism), there remain differences. Like their European counterparts, the original participants were intellectuals or from the middle and upper economic classes. As espiritismo spread throughout the Caribbean and Brazil, espiritistas gathered in small groups where they were assisted by a medium who was able to communicate with the spirits of the dead. The participants of these se´ances would usually sit around a table waiting for the spirits. A bridge from the physical world to the spirit world was established once the medium fell into a trance. At this point, solutions to whatever ailed the participants were communicated by the

222 |

Espiritismo

Brazilian spiritist Osvaldo de Azeredo Coutinho performs a ritual with spirit-possessed girls. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

spirits through the medium. Through these practices, the practitioners were able to find a connection to their preChristian past of ancestral ghosts that encouraged different religious practices historically repressed by the official Catholic Church. Throughout the Caribbean, specifically in Cuba and Puerto Rico, which were still colonies of the Spanish empire, freedom fighters found espiritismo to be

an attractive alternative to the Catholic Church that remained loyal to the Spanish monarchy. Because political organizations that could challenge Spain’s rule of the islands were suppressed, espiritismo provided a political space, as well as a spiritual space, for progressive liberal ideas to flourish. Intellectuals and revolutionaries discovered a pseudoreligious ideology that was based on and advocated science, modernity, and democracy.

Espiritismo Eventually, espiritismo made its way to urban groups that possessed lesser power and privilege. These marginalized communities turned to espiritismo for help and guidance with the daily struggles of life. Representing lower economic classes, Blacks, and the rural poor, they considered themselves Catholic even though they seldom visited a church or a priest. The practice of espiritismo did not seem to conflict with their Christian worldview. Devotees of African-based religious beliefs with long-standing practices of spiritual (orisha) possessions and ancestor worship found residence with espiritistas’ practices. In most cases, espiritismo absorbed into its practices elements of Spanish folk religion, specifically herbalism, African religious practices, and Amerindian healing practices. Espiritismo also influenced African-based religious expressions like Candomble´, Umbanda, or Macumba in Brazil and Santerı´a, Mayombe, or Palo in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Espiritismo came to believe that there are good and evil spirits that can affect a person’s health, wealth, love life, or luck. These spirits were believed to work under a specific saint or orisha to whom they belonged when they were alive. The roles of these saints or orishas became more prominent. The se´ ances came to be called misas (masses), incorporating magic-based elements that were originally foreign to the spiritualism practiced by the middle and upper Eurocentric economic classes. These misas centered on an altar called a boveda espiritual or mesa blanca (white table). This simple altar or table with a white linen would have anywhere from one to nine glasses filled with cool water,

| 223

flowers with some sweet basil, a crucifix, incense and/or perfume, Kardec’s book of prayers, and a lit candle. Home-based bovedas usually have a statue of a saint or saints (orishas) along with a talisman sacred to saint(s). Offerings are also usually left for the dead, i.e., food, candy, rum, cigars, etc. Each glass of water represents an ancestor and/or a spirit guide. By gazing at the water glasses and reciting certain prayers, the se´ance’s medium can create an environment where he or she can be possessed by the dead. Espiritismo became an important component of Santerı´a. By the time espiritismo was introduced in the Caribbean, ancestor worship among the Cuban and Puerto Rican African slaves came to an end. Ancestor worship, as the name implies, is usually conducted within a particular extended family; however, slavery destroyed the family units, making it impossible to continue the veneration of the ancestors. Families fragmented due to slavery were unable to gather to carry out the rituals required for the reverence and respect due to the family ancestors. The introduction of espiritismo in the Spanish Caribbean made it possible to reintroduce ancestral worship to the African slaves, even though these new practices were Eurocentricly based. Nevertheless, the Spanish Caribbean–based manifestation of espiritismo differed from its European counterparts. The mediums who would now enter into their trances would rely on spirit guides who were African born but died during their enslavement. Some of these guides were among the original indigenous natives of the island, the Taı´nos people. This explains why many homes of devotees of Santerı´a usually display a statue of a Native American

224 |

Espiritualismo

(usually a U.S. Plains Indian) or of el negrito Jose (the little Black man Jose) somewhere in the santero/a’s home, usually close to the family altar. With time, all devotees of Africanbased religions throughout the Spanish Caribbean became espiritistas, even though not all spiritualists are devotees of the orishas. Worshippers of the orishas became dependent on several of the practices of espiritismo, augmenting their African-based rituals. Within Santerı´a many of the invocations, prayers, paraphernalia, and rituals of espiritismo were appropriated, even though spiritualism’s scientific and philosophical claims were either ignored or discarded. For example, when a member of the Santerı´a community dies, a shrine is erected. Like the boveda espiritual or mesa blanca, it contains seven glasses of water with a cross and/or rosary beads inserted in the largest goblet. The water for these glasses can consist of herbal water, holy water from the Catholic Church, and/or a cologne known as Florida water (agua de florida). A photograph of the deceased, with fresh flowers, is prominently displayed on the table. With the migration of Cubans and Puerto Ricans to the United States, so came the practices of espiritismo. For poor migrants trying to survive in a new country, espiritismo became the poor person’s physical and mental health plan. Many go to a espiritista’s misa as if they were going to a doctor or psychiatrist seeking a cure. Even today, espiritistas in the United States focus on the needs of the devotees, specifically in areas of love, work, and health. They attempt to deal proactively with the immediate concerns of the Hispanics seeking help. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. Santerı´a the Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004). Kardec, Allan. ¿Que´ es espiritismo? (Madrid, Espan˜a: EDAF, 1986). Morales Dorta, Jose. Puerto Rican Espiritismo: Religion and Psychotherapy (New York: Vantage, 1976).

ESPIRITUALISMO There are several formative characteristics of Mexican spiritualism. First, though texts exist for its basis, it is mostly an oral tradition filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. Second, it is based in Mexico City, though it has spread throughout the United States. Third, and perhaps most importantly, while men are also devotees of the tradition, it is primarily in the hands of women. The Espiritualistas are members of churches or temples dedicated to the worship of God and the ancestral spirits who they believe exist in a loose hierarchy. Spiritualists believe they have received the gift of healing and therefore are obliged to heal others by acting as mediums for the intercession of the spirits. In this sense, all priests and ‘‘guides’’ or guias are also spiritual healers, a tradition known throughout Latin America and especially Mexico as curanderismo. The term ‘‘curanderismo’’ comes from the Spanish verb ‘‘curar,’’ which means to heal or to cure. Healers are called curanderas and curanderos and operate mostly as community-based individuals. Most curanderas identify as Catholic; however, there is also a

Espiritualismo

A spiritual healer treats a believer in a candlelit room, Santa Ana, California. (National Geographic/Getty Images)

spiritual healing movement within Latina/o Protestant churches, especially among the Pentecostal. Espiritualismo is institutionalized curanderismo that emphasizes the spiritual role in physical healing, but it also seeks to alleviate social disease and illness of many kinds. Espiritualistas generally do not identify as Christian, though some might: they call themselves Spiritualists. However, there is a distinct and grand role for Jesus Christ within their spiritual hierarchy, and many of the Catholic saints exact devotion within the tradition and manifest themselves in the bodies of believers to heal and speak prophecy like Aztec deities and ancestors. The Virgin of Guadalupe is regularly celebrated in Espiritualista temples, especially on her feast day,

| 225

December 12. Espiritualistas hold religious ceremonies called ‘‘catedras,’’ resembling a Catholic mass, and some temples follow the Catholic liturgy—a sharp contrast from their North American counterparts who replicate the Protestant congregational model of local control. Yet, Espiritualismo’s emphasis on moral ‘‘purity’’ suggests an association with the Holiness movements of the early twentieth century. Popular healing practices involving channeling spirits, divine healing, and clairvoyance, are common in many traditions throughout Latin America such as Pentecostalism, Santerı´a, Candomble´ , and Espiritismo (Spiritism). Espiritualismo is most closely related to Espiritistas. The two traditions developed simultaneously during the nineteenth century throughout Europe and the Americas. Distinctive to espiritualismo, however, are its prophetic founders, particularly Roque Rojas Esparza (1812–1879), also known as Father Elias, and Damiana Oviedo, one of his first followers, who died in 1920 and about whom less is known. Espiritistas trace their origins to the French medium and teacher Le´on Denizard Hippolyte Rivail, who published under the name Allan Kardec (1804–1869). Though both are mediumship-based traditions organized into churches, the two movements also differ for their teaching on reincarnation. Rojas condemned reincarnation and denounced espiritistas for teaching it. However, continuing revelation and religious poetics have amended that proscription in some espiritualista denominations, which now teach reincarnation. Mexican spiritualism also differs from American spiritualism, in that the former is hierarchical and resembles the structure of the Catholic Church.

226 |

Espiritualismo

In 1977, there were an estimated 8 million followers of espiritualismo, which does not include devotees in the United States. In 1981, ethnographers reported that there were over 1,000 espiritualista temples in Mexico and throughout Mexican American communities in the United States. Subsequent reports consistently indicate that the movement is growing, although exact numbers are unavailable. A 1996 film documentary produced for Mexican television claimed that there are ‘‘thousands’’ of temples in Mexico —at least one temple in every pueblo throughout the nation, and at least one in every colonia in Mexico City. Francisco I. Madero, president of Mexico (1911–1913), was an avowed espiritista. It is impossible to calculate the number precisely because the temples are largely hidden. There are at least three highly public espiritualista temples, each with several hundred members and many more ‘‘visitors’’ in East Los Angeles alone. There are numerous temples in Southern California and in Mexican American communities throughout the Southwestern United States. While the majority of Mexican spiritualists hail from the working classes, middle- and even upper-class individuals can be counted among espiritualista devotees. While a survey of the foundational espiritualista texts reveals considerable linguistic patriarchy, women are the primary espiritualista agents, adopting its flexible spiritual revelations to serve their own needs. The Mexican scholarly literature, published mostly in Spanish, agrees that espiritualismo developed to empower women. Anthropologist Sylvia Echaniz estimates that in Mexico City nearly 80 percent of espiritualistas are women. Echaniz claims that espiritistas come from higher economic classes than

do the espiritualistas, who draw from the most economically impoverished social population. The largest espiritualista denomination is called Mediodia. Its main church in Mexico City boasts 10,000 members alone; however, based on my field work, this number seems exaggerated. On any typical Sunday, there are nearly 2,000 members attending the ceremony. Mediodia’s leader is a woman. Mediodia has produced its own liturgy and texts, and all espiritualista movements adhere to Mediodia’s Bible: The Final Testament: Given by God to his Divine Chosen One the True Mexican Messiah Roque Rojas. Rojas’s Final Testament claims to have been revealed during the years 1861–1869, in Mexico City—the city that espiritualistas expressly hold as their sacred center. The text contains Rojas’s foundational teachings on the organization of temples, hierarchical structures, and eschatological predictions. It also contains the ‘‘Twenty-Two Precepts of Rojas,’’ which constitute the basis of espiritualista theology. The precepts, including the preamble, read as follows: IN MEXICO, SINCE THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER OF 1866, THE WORD OF THE DIVINE LORD ‘‘JESUS OF NAZARETH’’ IS MANIFESTING BY WAY OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE [CEREBRO], AS THE HOLY SPIRIT AND HE HAS ORDERED THAT WE MUST KNOW ALL OF THE COUNTRY’S VISITORS; THE LAW OF GOD AMPLIFIED IN THE 22 PRECEPTS AND PRACTICING THEM WILL BE AS AN ANTIDOTE TO THE TIMES THAT ARE GETTING CLOSER, THAT WILL BE A SCOURGE FOR HUMANITY, IN THE FORM OF GREAT WARS, PLAGUES, DROUGHTS, AND

Espiritualismo EPIDEMICS. FOR THE TIME OF COMPLIANCE TO THE PROPHECIES OF SAINT JOHN, OF HIS BOOK OF REVELATIONS, THAT MARKS THIS ERA, HAS ARRIVED. THE LAW IS THE FOLLOWING: THE PRECEPTS OF MOSES, OF JESUS, AND OF THE SON OF MAN 1 SEPTEMBER 1866 1. Love God above everything created. 2. Do not judge your brother but ask him for justice. 3. Do not belong to, or love, a religion that does not practice love for God, charity for His sons, and the purity of Mary. 4. Love your parents next to God and your sons in the same manner; for the first, veneration and respect, and for the second, love and a good example, above all. If you do the contrary, you will be judged with vigor as authors of evil. 5. Do not judge or criticize anyone or testify falsely; if you do the Holy Spirit will judge you, because He will defend your cause only if it is just. 6. Do not work for money on Sunday; should you do so, repent, for this day belongs to God. 7. Do not possess the wife of another as your wife, or harm anyone. 8. Do not take what does not belong to you without permission of the owner, or practice usury. You are only permitted to gain an honest and legal interest on loans. 9. Do not drink intoxicating liquors. 10. Do not follow an occupation that will ruin you, or lower your morality and lead you into vice. 11. Do not enlist in a civil war dividing your brothers. You are only permitted to enlist in a foreign war when your government demands, and then you

| 227

will act with the best of good will, because we are all brothers, sons of God. 12. Do not commit infanticide. If you do, you will be punished by God’s law. 13. Do not abuse the poor or overwork them. 14. Do not curse anything created. 15. Do not treat with repulsion anyone suffering from a repugnant disease. 16. Do not judge or criticize any human being in public or private, which would cause their dishonor. 17. Do not leave your sons in strange hands, or do this only of necessity, and be sure the benefactors are well known for moral conduct and will take good care of the children. 18. Do not force children to work in places where they may learn of vices. 19. Do not relate to anyone any history or story of the following nature: devils; the condemned; witches; gnomes; evil spirits; miracles which are merely phenomena, astral occurrences which are not real, appearances of images that have no truth; false punishment; materialization; all of which is superficial and bad. 20. Do not rob, or keep stolen goods in your power. 21. Visit and console the sick whenever you can. 22. Do not kill your brother in thought, word, deed, or in civil war, or take his life in any manner.

Our guide Elias and spiritual Pastor Elias said: ‘‘My children, fulfill these 22 precepts and see my Father in all His splendor. Have charity and more charity for your brother, and give testimony of my Father.’’ The precepts are supplemented by Mediodia with the following narrative, written onto a pamphlet and distributed

228 |

Espiritualismo

free of cost and without specific publication information: WHEN ASKED: WHO ARE THE ESPIRITUALISTAS: WE ARE TRINITARIAN BECAUSE WE BELIEVE IN THE HOLY TRINITY: GOD THE FATHER, GOD THE SON, AND GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT. . . . WE ARE MARIAN [MARIANOS] BECAUSE WE BELIEVE IN THE PURITY OF HOLY MARIA, MOTHER OF GOD, AND OUR MOTHER. . . . SPIRITUALISM MEANS THAT WE OPPOSE MATERIALISM AND THAT WITH OUR ACTS AND THOUGHTS WE ARE PREPARING THE PATH WHEREBY THOSE WHO WILL COMMUNICATE SPIRIT TO SPIRIT WITH GOD OUR FATHER MUST PASS. . . . GOD OUR FATHER IS INDOCTRINATING US BY WAY OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.

Additionally, when asked: ‘‘Who is God?’’ espiritualistas are instructed to respond that ‘‘GOD IS REASON, LOVE, CHARITY, AND FORGIVENESS.’’ And finally, when asked what is the purpose of espiritualismo, the answer is ‘‘TO BENEFIT HUMAN KIND, STOP PRIDE, AND REJECT FANATICISM.’’ These explanatory narratives do not appear in the Final Testament. However, espiritualista leaders I spoke with agreed on these broad prescriptions—with the exception that some non-Mediodia temples (hereafter referred to as ‘‘independent’’ churches) place greater importance on the Virgin of Guadalupe. One anthropologist surmises that Guadalupe is not named by Mediodia specifically because the Catholic Church claims ownership of her. The female leader of an independent Mexico City congregation maintained that ‘‘Trinitarian

Marian’’ refers to God, the Holy Spirit, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Espiritualismo is closely related to Mexican nationalism; each temple marks and commemorates Mexican Independence, September 16, with religious ceremony. Roque Rojas, founder of Espiritualismo, is said to be of Otomi Yaqui Indian heritage on his mother’s side and is descended from Spanish Jews on his father’s side. In his autobiography, Rojas identifies his parents by full name and identifies himself as a ‘‘legitimate son.’’ He boasts that he was born in the ‘‘noble’’ and ‘‘faithful’’ city of Mexico, on August 16, 1812. He was also baptized a Catholic in Mexico City. When he was 11 his mother died, and he was placed in the care of the Mexico City Seminary, where for three years he studied to become a priest—a course he never completed. He reports having two children, a boy and a girl. The boy, he tells us, died while an infant, and he provides no further information on the girl. Rojas creates nonetheless a genealogy, much like those found in the Bible. There is no question that the texts attributed to Rojas and collected and published as the Final Testament are meant to reproduce or mimic Jewish and Christian scriptures. In this case, text is mimetic; it is performative. After he was married, Rojas very likely worked as a low-level civil servant until the economy worsened and he lost his job. As a result, he and Guadalupe moved in with her parents—her father was a medical doctor in the colonia of Ixtapalapa, on the edge of Mexico City. Ixtapalapa is famous for its spectacular annual reenactment of Christ’s passion. While living there, Rojas miraculously landed a job as a

Espiritualismo civil magistrate. The opportunity came as a result of a chance meeting on December 12 during a pilgrimage to the Guadalupe basilica and shrine church. Rojas claims to have become the judge of the Civil Registry of Ixtapalapa. It was in Ixtapalapa on the night of St. John, June 23, 1861, that, according to Rojas, God began to reveal to him that he was the Promised Elias of the Third Age. The revelations continued until ‘‘Resurrection Sunday,’’ 1869. The ‘‘mystery’’ of his ‘‘church’’ was revealed as the central structure for the spiritual architecture of this new Third Age. Rojas appointed 12 women and 12 men whom he called guias, or guides, as curators of his newly established 12 churches. Padre Elias’s revelation, and the founding of the temples, are said to have initiated a new age, a Third Era that unfolds a millennial prophecy. Padre Elias taught that the history of the world is divided into three dispensations: The First Age (tiempo), the Mosaic Era, began with the Mosaic covenant, when Moses was harbinger of the divine word as established in the Old Testament. The Second Age began when Jesus Christ, Divine Teacher, accepted a covenant with his Father to redeem humanity, as described in the New Testament. The Third Age began with the full revelation of Roque Rojas in 1861, and it marks the arrival of God among humanity to ‘‘destroy idolatry, fanaticism, mysticism, and materialism.’’ This age is called the Mexican Patriarchal Age of Elias, or the Age of Elias. The Third Era will last 2,000 years. Its end will mark the arrival of the New Era, or Age, and with it, a complete transformation of the world. This fourth and final era will begin in 3861, with Mexico City restored as the

| 229

sacred center of the world. The world’s population will congregate in Mexico City, and Roque Rojas will sit in judgment and governance over the totality. Most converts to Espiritualismo had been initially attracted to churches for a physical healing. After receiving the gift of healing, they would return. Some espiritualistas also expressed disenchantment with the Catholic Church of their original baptism. They believed that the church was out of touch with the ‘‘real’’ issues affecting the people and was interested mostly in collecting money. As remarkable as it may seem, espiritualismo is a product of modern urban culture. It also contains key teachings found in parallel nineteenth-century contexts of rapid industrial growth, urbanization, and socioeconomic marginalization, most notably, a ban on alcohol and an admonishment toward ‘‘holiness.’’ But it is also much more than that, and, in fact, because of its poetic theological character, its possibilities seem unlimited. However, one of espiritualismo’s central discourses involves dispersion and reunification. Espiritualismo is intimately tied to the Mexican diaspora in the United States, to the healing of present-day troubles, and to the hope for a better time. All these beliefs are confirmed through a technology of the body. The body is the register for knowing the world, for confirming truth and goodness. Mostly, however, Espiritualismo is a product of a postcolonial reality. Espiritualismo is a borderlands tradition inasmuch as it blends Native myth and ritual with Catholic symbols, time, and other forms and sounds. Luis D. Leo´n

230 |

Evangélico/a

References and Further Reading Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in NineteenthCentury America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). Echaniz, Sylvia Ortiz. Una religiosidad popular: El espiritualismo trinitario mariano (Mexico, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, 1990). Finkler, Kaja. Spiritualist Healers in Mexico: Successes and Failures of Alternative Therapeutics (Salem, WI: Sheffield Publishing, 1994).

EVANGÉLICO/A Evange´lica/os consider themselves to be Protestants, and, in fact, within most mainline Protestant denominations there is an evangelical wing. But not all Protestants are evange´lico/as. In a similar way, almost all Pentecostals consider themselves to be evange´lico/as, even though not all evange´ lica/os are Pentecostals. Furthermore, evange´lico/a is not simply the Spanish translation of the word ‘‘evangelical,’’ for while similarities exist between Hispanic evange´ lica/os and Euro-American evangelicals, there are also divergences. Ergo, the term ‘‘evange´ lico/a’’ is a slippery one that may have different meanings depending on who is using it. Like their Euro-American evangelical counterparts, Hispanic evange´ lica/os place an emphasis on being born again. To be born again, a term found in the biblical text (John 3:7), means that a public commitment to Jesus Christ is made. Neither good works nor church participation is enough to be saved from the penalty of sin, which is death. Usually the person seeking salvation will recite

what has come to be called a ‘‘sinner’s prayer.’’ In the sinner’s prayer, the person confesses his/her sins and his/her inability to bring about his/her own salvation. Each person recognizes that he/she is destined to remain lost in this life and destined for Hell in the next life. The only hope rests upon the mercies of God. For this reason, as per John 3:16, ‘‘God so loved the world that God gave God’s only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.’’ Only by asking Jesus to enter into his/her life and heart, can he/she be born into a new life where past sins are forgotten and forgiven as he/she becomes a new creature in Christ. In short, only Jesus saves. All other religions or philosophies that refuse to recognize the Lordship of Christ are false paths that lead people to death and destruction. To be saved, and to care enough about the salvation of others who remain lost within this sinful world, propels the new believer to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with those still destined to spend an eternity in Hell. This Good News or Gospel is derived from the Greek word ‘‘euangelion,’’ from which the term ‘‘evange´ lico/a’’ is derived. To be an evange´lica/o is to be a believer in, and preacher of, the Gospel. It also requires the believer to live a life that is holy and pleasing to God, not that the believer is able to live a pious life through his/her own ability or will. After all, nothing good dwells among the sinful, even though the sinner may be forgiven. Only through Christ who lives in them can they live a life that brings honor to God. Usually, such a life is demonstrated by outward acts like being a teetotaler, abstaining from sex except in marriage, wearing conservative nonrevealing clothing, and not participating in

Evangélico/a

| 231

AMEN AMEN stands for Alianza de Ministerios Evange´licos Nacionales or National Alliance of Evangelical Ministries. This Hispanic Protestant national organization was founded in 1994 when Jesse Miranda gathered 350 Hispanic leaders at Long Beach, California, under the financial support of the Pew Charitable Trusts. The organization claims to represent lay and clerical leaders from 27 denominations and 22 nationalities, as well as 77 religious ministries within the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. The primary goal of this grassroots ecumenical organization is to promote unity among Hispanic Protestant churches and parachurch agencies and provide the central voice of Hispanic evangelicals in North America that can speak to the larger faith community. They speak out on issues that are considered important to the growing Latina/o evangelical community. AMEN was among the few Hispanic Christian organizations to have access to the George W. Bush administration. —MAD

carnal activities like dancing. Bible reading and prayer, which bring the believer closer to God, become the new joyful activities in which to engage.

Historical Roots U.S. Latino/as can trace their roots to Latin America where Roman Catholicism has historically been the official religion. During Spanish colonial venture, church and state, for all practical purposes, were united. The Church’s allegiance was to the Spanish crown. Concern for the spread of Protestantism in Europe, and in an attempt to prevent its spread in Latin America, the Catholic Church and the Spanish colonial authorities banned the Bible throughout the colonies—a ban that lasted until the late 1700s. By the early 1800s, British and U.S. groups began sending Bibles to Latin America. European Protestant immigrants followed these Bibles and began to settle throughout Latin America during the early 1800s. As they made new homes for themselves, they brought

their customs and traditions with them, including their religious beliefs and practices. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that these new settlers were less concerned with proselytizing than they were with making new lives for themselves. However, to be an evangelical is to go out into all the world and preach the gospel (euangelion) to every creature, as per the Great Commission of Mark 16:15. Originally, Euro-American evangelicals saw Asia and Africa as the mission fields that needed cultivation. Latin America garnered little attention. As missionary possibilities closed for them in these areas, they turned an eye toward Latin America. Although Latin America was technically Christian, albeit Catholic, many evangelicals did not then consider Catholics to be Christians, a bias that still exists among some evangelicals today. For some of those who felt a call to Latin America, they saw this calling as a holy mission to save Latin Americans from what they perceived to be the false religion of Roman Catholicism.

232 |

Evangélico/a

NUEVA ESPERANZA In 1987 the Hispanic Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity (an organization of pastors and ministers founded in 1982) under the leadership of the Reverend Luis Corte´ s Jr. established Nueva Esperanza. This faith-based community development agency addressed various unmet needs of the Latino/a community of Philadelphia, especially as they were overlooked by local governmental and ecclesiastical entities. In 2002 Nueva Esperanza established Esperanza USA as its national subsidiary, complementing its local initiatives with national concerns and serving as an intermediary between government agencies and Hispanic faith- and community-based organizations. In 2007, both the Philadelphia initiatives of Nueva Esperanza and the national initiatives of Esperanza USA merged, creating Esperanza, possibly the most comprehensive Hispanic faith-based nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation and development organization in the United States. Esperanza also describes itself as the largest Hispanic Evangelical network in the country. By nurturing Hispanic owned and operated institutions, Esperanza seeks to strengthen the familial, economic, and spiritual dimensions of Latino/a communities, specifically through community development (including assisting individuals and families to become homeowners), capacity building, workforce development, education (including Esperanza Academy Charter High School and Esperanza College of Eastern University), and public advocacy. Esperanza is the primary organizer and sponsor of the annual National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and Conference. —EDA

Because Roman Catholicism was loyal to the Spanish Empire and derived its political power from it, for Latin Americans to become Protestants was not only to reject the official state religion but also to reject the state. Not surprisingly, these missionary endeavors were supported by anticolonial revolutionary leaders who saw Protestantism as a progressive, capitalist alternative to Spanish rule. With time, the new Protestant religions proved to be as oppressive and as imperialistic as the former Catholic religion. This reality makes it difficult to pigeonhole evange´lico/as into any one political camp. In some cases, Protestants pushed for revolutionary change, as in the case of Castro’s Cuban Revolution that was supported by many evange´ lico ministers. At other times,

evange´lico ministers supported a return to conservative authoritarian structures, as in their support to overthrow Salvador Allende in Chile. The reasons for converting to a new faith, or a new way of practicing one’s faith, are complex. Some convert out of a sense of religious fervor. For them, a conversion experience is very real and life changing. For others, conversion can be for the sake of self-interest. For some, the appeal of the evange´lica/o lay in the array of social services they provided, especially in the neglected rural areas of Latin America. Evange´ lico/as started orphanages, created grade schools, distributed food and clothing, dispensed agricultural equipment and tools, established clinics, provided free vocational classes, and gave English-language

Evangélico/a instruction. Besides the material sustenance, evange´ lica/os offered an alternative moral system that implied modernity, prosperity, progress, and above all Americanism. Still, it has been argued that missionary work was the vanguard of U.S. military activities; in effect, it was the spiritual dimension to Manifest Destiny. For example, the first Euro-American Protestant worship service held on the island of Cuba (excluding the brief English occupation in the 1700s) occurred on a U.S. gunboat in 1871 in La Habana Harbor, officiated by Bishop Benjamin Whipple, an Episcopalian. Sword and cross were merged as Euro-Americans attempted to save Latin Americans from their political and religious practices. These missionaries saw their role as agents for civilization, perceiving the Cuban as morally deficient and intellectually backward. Yet, on that same island of Cuba, the first evange´lica/o missionaries were not Euro-Americans, but fellow Cubans who were converted while living in the United States, mainly in Tampa and Key West, Florida. They returned to the island to partake in its struggle for autonomy from Spanish rule. In their return to Cuba, they brought their new faith with them. Thus Cuba, along with other Latin American countries, had two types of missionary activities—those orchestrated by Euro-American Mission Boards, and the returning natives who converted while away. With time, these Latin American evange´lico/as came to the United States. Some never left (original Mexican inhabitants of the southwestern United States), others were pushed here because of economic crises caused in their homelands due to U.S. foreign policies (Central

| 233

Americans), others as a result of revolution (Cuba), and still others migrated as U.S. citizens (Puerto Ricans). Regardless of why a Hispanic U.S. presence exists, many brought the evange´lica/o faith with them. Today, according to the 2007 study conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, those who convert to an evange´lico/a are more than likely to be Catholics. The reason for conversion has little to do with any negative views they may hold toward the Catholic Church, although a majority (61 percent) says they did not find the typical Mass to be lively or exciting. The reasons most given for becoming an evange´ lica/o are the following: (1) a desire to have a more direct and personal experience with God (90 percent); (2) inspiration by a certain pastor (42 percent); or (3) relief while undergoing a deep personal crisis (31 percent).

Demographics There exists among Hispanics a difficulty in actually defining who is and who can be called an evange´lico/a. This is evident in the 2007 Pew Hispanic Center survey, which revealed that among all Latina/o Christians, 39 percent self-identified as an evange´ lica/o or as being ‘‘born again.’’ For those who are Protestants, 70 percent used these terms to describe themselves. Not surprisingly, many Hispanics use the terms ‘‘protestante’’ and ‘‘evange´lico/a’’ interchangeably. But this is problematized when we note that the Pew survey also showed that among Catholics, 28 percent used the labels ‘‘born again’’ and ‘‘evange´lica/o’’ for self-identification. While the term ‘‘evangelical’’ has historically been used to describe one type of Protestant, among Latino/as the terms ‘‘evange´ lico/a’’ and ‘‘born again’’ appear to be more

234 |

Evangélico/a LUIS CORTE´S The Reverend Luis Corte´s Jr. is founder and president of Nueva Esperanza and Esperanza USA, faith-based organizations based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Corte´s is a nationally known Latino religious and social leader. A Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem in New York City, Corte´s attended City College and earned a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York, and a Master of Science in economic development from New Hampshire College. Corte´s was awarded honorary doctorates of divinity from Moravian Theological Seminary and Palmer Theological Seminary. Both Nueva Esperanza and Esperanza USA emerged from the Hispanic Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity, which was founded in 1982 as a support group for Hispanic/Latino/a Protestant ministers in the Philadelphia area. In 2002, Nueva Esperanza, led by Corte´s, established Esperanza USA as its national subsidiary at the first annual National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast. Esperanza USA seeks to strengthen Hispanic faith-based organizations through capacity-building, national programs addressing need, works as an intermediary with government agencies, and has provided over $10 million in grants and assistance nationally. Also through his initiative Esperanza College was established as a branch campus of Eastern University in partnership with Nueva Esperanza. In 2005 Time magazine named Corte´s as one of the ‘‘25 Most Influential Evangelicals.’’ —EDA

inclusive. Both Protestants and Catholics seem to claim these titles, indicating that a lack of universal agreement exists as to what the term means and thus the difficult task of classification. Nevertheless, if we were to solely define evange´lica/os as Protestants who identify themselves as evangelical or born again, then only one in six (15 percent) Hispanics would consider themselves an evange´lico/a. This 15 percent of the Hispanic population comprises 6 percent of the entire U.S. evangelical Protestant population. Of these evange´lia/os, more than half are foreign born (55 percent); almost two-thirds use English as their primary language or are bilingual (63 percent); nearly two-thirds completed high school (64 percent); and only about 39 percent have a household income that falls below $30,000 per year (a slightly higher income than Hispanic Catholics). Of these evange´lico/as, half

of all evange´lica/os have Mexican roots (50 percent), followed by Puerto Ricans (16 percent), Central Americans (6 percent), and Cubans (6 percent). Because those with Mexican origins represent the majority of all U.S. Latino/as (63 percent), they hold a majority in all the different religious groupings. Still, Mexicans are more likely to be Catholic (74 percent), and Puerto Ricans, more so than any other Hispanic nationality, are more likely to be evange´lica/os. If we look at the breakdown of evange´lica/ os along countries of origins, then 27 percent of all Puerto Ricans are evange´lica/ os, followed by Central Americans (22 percent), Cubans (14 percent), and Mexicans (12 percent).

Religious Activities Evange´lica/os, defined as Hispanic Protestants who self-identify as evangelical

Evangélico/a or born again, are more likely, according to the Pew Hispanic Center study, to say that religion is more important to them (85 percent) than Catholics (68 percent) or Mainline Protestants (65 percent). They are also more likely to attend weekly service (70 percent) and accept the Bible as God’s literal word (76 percent) compared to Catholics (42 and 49 percent, respectively) or Mainline Protestants (36 and 44 percent, respectively). Evange´lico/as are more likely to participate in monthly prayer groups (75 percent), read scripture weekly (78 percent), and share their faith with others at least once a month (79 percent). Catholics (31, 27, and 32 percent, respectively) and Mainline Protestants (47, 38, and 53 percent, respectively) are less likely to engage in these types of religious activities.

Political Views The Pew study also discovered that evange´ lica/os are more likely (46 percent) than any other Hispanic religious group to describe themselves as conservatives. Yet when it comes to voting, 40 percent of evange´lico/as are registered Republicans, while 41 percent are registered Democrats (5 percent Independent, 12 percent neither, and 3 percent both). To be a Hispanic conservative does not mean the same thing as being a EuroAmerican conservative. It is true that evange´ lica/os are overwhelmingly opposed to gay marriage (86 percent) and to abortion (77 percent), more so than Catholics. Still, unlike their EuroAmerican evangelical counterparts, evange´lico/as are more liberal on economic issues. They favor governmentguaranteed health care (70 percent vs 58 percent among Euro-American

| 235

evangelicals); and they believe the poor have a hard life due to a lack of government services (57 percent vs 42 percent among Euro-American evangelicals). They are also more liberal concerning the justice system, with only 46 percent favoring the death penalty as opposed to 73 percent among EuroAmerican evangelicals. Even though there may historically have existed a link between U.S. imperialism and evangelical movements throughout Latin America, it would be a mistake to simply assume that evange´lica/os have culturally capitulated to Eurocentricism. There seems to be a progressive and revolutionary dimension to Hispanic evangelism that promotes radical social change and justice. The Good News is more than just eternal life; it also includes an abundant life in the here and now—a life free from the sins of ethnic discrimination and economic exploitation. It is therefore not surprising to find ‘‘conservative’’ evange´lico/as at the forefront of fighting for immigration reform, universal health care, antidiscriminatory policies, just distribution of resources, and workers’ rights.

Conclusion The divine mission of evange´ lico/as is the proclamation of the Gospel message of salvation, which can only be found in Christ Jesus. The one who believes and is baptized will be saved, but the one who does not believe will be condemned for all eternity. Because eternal life and eternal death hang on the balance, the Christian discipleship of evange´lica/os encompasses the responsibility of witnessing the message of salvation to the unbeliever so that they too, can hear,

236 |

Evangélico/a

NATIONAL HISPANIC CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE In 1995, the Reverend Samuel Rodriguez, the Reverend Nick Garza, the Reverend Charlie Rivera, and others attempted to mobilize Latino/a evangelical church leaders in the various parts of the country with the hope of creating and coordinating a national Hispanic Evangelical ethos. Their efforts evolved along the model of the National Association of Evangelicals. The organization they founded, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) was organized to provide a unified voice for Latina/o born-again Christians of all Christian faith traditions within the United States. Today NHCLC is a board-governed association of Latina/o evangelical church leaders. They are committed to serving the Hispanic born-again Christian community within the United States and Puerto Rico across generational, country of origin, and denominational lines on issues pertaining to the family, immigration, economic mobility, education, political empowerment, social justice, and societal transformation. Their mission statement is as follows: ‘‘To lead the Hispanic born-again community in America for the purpose of transforming our culture, preserving our Judeo Christian Value System and building the spiritual, intellectual and social/political capital within the Hispanic American Community.’’ —MAD

be converted, and gain eternal life. Evange´ lico/as, like their Euro-American counterparts, understand the Great Commission to be Christ’s calling of all believers, not just the professional ministers, to go and convert the world to the message and lordship of Christ. Ironically, evange´lica/os, like all other Hispanics, exist on the margins of the U.S. religiosity and are aware of the historical pressure placed on them to assimilate to an Euro-American evangelical norm. Much effort has been exerted by Euro-American evangelicals, especially within the political realm, for evange´lica/os to fall in line and follow Euro-American evangelicals’ lead on social issues. Yet Hispanic evange´lico/ as, like all other Latina/os, understand what it means to be seen as the ones who must convert from understanding the gospel through their own cultural symbols to the usage of what Euro-

Americans consider to be their ‘‘superior and purer’’ cultural symbols. Thus, while similarities exist between the Euro-American evangelical and the Hispanic evange´lico/a, especially on the literal interpretation of the Bible, there are also differences. Because evange´ lica/os are part of a U.S.-marginalized ethnic community, they, unlike their Euro-American evangelical counterparts, are more receptive to some of the concepts that emerge from theologies of liberation. They may be among the more conservative religious groups when it comes to ‘‘moral’’ social issues, but they are as liberal, if not radical and revolutionary, on political and economic issues. You will find evange´lica/os standing in solidarity with the poor and oppressed in the struggle for liberation advocating personal and social conversion to Christ. Miguel A. De La Torre

Exilio

References and Further Reading Berryman, Philip. Religion in the Megacity: Catholic and Protestant Portraits from Latin America (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996). Costas, Orlando E. Liberating News: A Theology of Contextual Evangelization (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishers, 1989). Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007). Traverzo Galarza, David. ‘‘Evange´licos/as.’’ Handbook of Latina/o Theologies, ed. Edwin David Aponte and Miguel A. De La Torre (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006).

EXILIO Exilio, or exile, is a frame for both the historical and lived experience of exile, as well as a biblical interpretation constructed by Latin Americans living in their country of origin or as part of a migration to the United States. This interpretation is used to explain and contextualize their experience. While the interpretation of the biblical narratives of exodus and exile were already part of theological and religious studies, the interpretation of biblical narratives in light of lived experience, and especially the social and historical experience of persons living outside the dominant social structure, is the contribution of Latin American Liberation Theology. The concept was introduced beginning in 1964 and developed by Latin American liberation theologians, notably Gustavo Gutie´rrez of Peru. This methodology of Liberation Theology, which emphasizes the idea that a Christian

| 237

community decides what action must be taken based on the lived experience of the poor, uses theology as critical reflection to ascertain the guidance scripture provides. The formulation of a theology based on the historical and liberating experience and narrative of exodus and exile began at a meeting of Latin American theologians in 1964 at Petro´polis, Brazil, and in subsequent meetings in Havana, Cuba, Bogota´, Bolivia, and Cuernavaca, Mexico leading up to the Medellı´n Conference of 1968 in Colombia. The metaphor of exilio was initially used to describe the plight of poor, rural workers arising out of the economic and social concerns in Latin America excluded from the successes of the populist movements of the 1950s and 1960s that had improved the standard of living for middle class and urban workers, but had the effect of marginalizing or constructively exiling rural workers. The term was later adopted by Cuban exiles as a model to describe their experience upon arriving in the United States in successive and distinct waves commencing in 1959. Other immigrant waves, from Mexico in the late 1960s and Central America in the 1980s and 1990s, also considered themselves outsiders in a new land. By the early 1990s, even the Hispanic of the Southwest was described as ‘‘an exile who never left home.’’ The lived experience of exilio is not homogeneous. For Latin Americans in their home countries in Mexico and Central America, those who were unable to participate in the economic move to the middle class were constructively exiled from meaningful participation in the life of their home countries. For the indigenous population in parts of Mexico, as well as countries such as Nicaragua and

238 |

Exilio

El Salvador, the obstacles were political, primarily due to ongoing decades of armed conflict. Immigrants from both Nicaragua and El Salvador included persons from different ideological perspectives, some of whom received political asylum or protected status in the United States. The Nicaraguan conservatives who supported the Somoza regime that lost the war in 1979 as well as earlier political refugees who were persecuted by the regime were included. Similarly, the Salvadoran refugees included political refugees who fled the repressive tactics of the government regime during a 20-year conflict that ended with peace accords in 1993, as well as a displaced middle class that could not sustain economic stability due to the conflicts. For the Cubans who migrated to the United States, the experience of exile is also complex. It varied by waves that differed both in how people could leave Cuba or enter the United States and in the economic and ideological perspective of the migrating Cubans. Four waves came beginning in 1959 that add to the variation: the first wave was typically socially and fiscally conservative, educated, business leaders; the second wave was part of the Freedom Flights supported by the United States from 1965, and these were typically immediate or extended family of the first wave immigrants; the third wave, in 1980, was persons who were allowed to leave Cuba by boat, and at will, because the government considered them politically undesirable and generally less wealthy or educated, primarily working-class people with no family to assist them upon arrival; the fourth wave includes people who waited to migrate for various reasons and either have visas that became available in 1994 or came in boats that

made it to dry land in the United States and were allowed to stay. El exilio is not merely an experience of geographic landlessness, but includes disconnectedness and displacement. It becomes an in-between place to wait and hope for something better. That ‘‘something better’’ may shift. It can be a return to a paradise lost, or forward to connectedness to a promised land. In either case the experience of exilio preserves a separateness of history, culture, values, and experience. The variations within the exilio experience resonate in the richness of the exodus and exile metaphor.

Major Doctrinal Points Rigorous analysis of the biblical narrative of the Exodus, including both exodus and exile is provocatively multivalent. The turn to the text by Gustavo Gutie´rrez and others generated the attention of biblical scholars who provide a rich analysis of the scripture as literary source, on the textual level and of its social horizon. In reflecting critically on the lived experience of exilio, the biblical narrative of Exodus resonates with political liberation. Still, mere political liberation is not sufficient for the Christian community so the exile narrative becomes the metaphor for an internal morality. For Gutie´ rrez, the Exodus is both a historical and liberating experience that is the basis of the link between creation and salvation. Creation is the work of God who saves and acts in history. Because humankind is the center of this creation story, the work of God is integrated into history being built by human efforts. The liberation from Egypt in the Exodus narrative is a historical fact that

Exilio links the biblical theme of liberation with human effort. It becomes a human act of self-creation first through self-liberation in the exodus. Then subsequently, the gradual series of successes and failures during the exile ultimately raise the awareness of the Jewish people to recognize the internal roots of their oppression, to struggle against it and to perceive the profound sense of the liberation to which they were called. While liberation is a certainty, the end of the journey is to an unknown land. It is not a return to regain what was lost, but a moving forward within the spiritual impulse of the Covenant that occurred in a moment of disruption. Biblical interpretation of the Exodus narrative, including the exile event, became an important spiritual center of Ecclesial Base Communities that arose in Latin America to respond to the spiritual needs of the poor and give them voice. To be authentic to the richness of the text requires attention both to the events of exodus and exile and to its literary character. The event is historical to the extent that something happened that resulted in the reality that Israel sprang to birth in Canaan out of bondage, by resistance to state oppression and a bold bid for self-determination. The story of this break for freedom is told from at least four successive perspectives. When these views are considered as a nuanced explanation of the process, the resonance of the exile metaphor with the various lived experiences of exilio by Latin Americans becomes clear. Biblical scholar Norman Gottwald synthesizes the widely scattered commentaries in an effort to create a robust understanding of the biblical text for those using it. The first horizon is the one reported by the hypothetical participants of the

| 239

events, though no one source is recoverable. The voices are several probably because the narrative was shaped by liturgical tradition. While this does not allow for a historically verified exodus, it does present the strong possibility, based on what is known about the historical time, that the ‘‘historical kernel’’ of the exodus traditions was a motley group of state slaves who employed stealth and cunning, along with stolen and captured weapons, and the assistance of nature’s elements to make their break for freedom. The second horizon is that of the similarly discontinuous accounts of the Israelite social revolutionaries and religious confederates in the highlands of Canaan in the twelfth and eleventh centuries. The importance of these accounts is the idea of the struggle as being a holy war, although the portrayal differs in style: a quietest account in which the agency of God in the exodus out of Egypt is heightened to the point that the people’s participation is merely passive; or the holy war traditions of Joshua and Judges that place the Israelites squarely in the battlefield upon entrance into Canaan and victory over the Canaanites. The third horizon is that of the Israelite tradition in monarchic times, which conceives the Israel of the exodus as a national entity in transit toward a secure state elsewhere in Canaan. The emphasis on God’s deliverance and de-emphasis on the instrumental actions of the people are most likely due to the tradition’s purpose in creating a liturgical mode that emphasized stability and order under a protective God, more suited to the ideological needs of a new state just as Israel entered that new rule. And finally, horizon four is that of the late exilic and postexilic restorers of Judah as a religious

240 |

Exilio

and cultural community that had lost its political independence. The priestly tradition emphasizes the transcendent source and empowerment of Israel with its distinctive unity. The purpose of the separation of religion and politics is to shape a Jewish identity that will outlive the loss of statehood. The lived experience of exilio is understood and actualized more fully within the spectrum of these biblical social horizons. The danger of overemphasis of the exodus narrative to the exclusion of the exile narrative is contained in the difference of exegetical preferences of Protestants and Roman Catholic interpreters, that is, their choice of texts and commentary to use as authoritative text. For Protestants, the victory of the exodus without consideration of the exile during which the Israelites realized the need to be free from their own infidelities to God and God’s law is a temptation to triumphalism, understood as a bias that the view of the people to be liberated is superior and to be regarded above all other interests, values, or beliefs. The danger of triumphalism’s temptation in Latin America is a pragmatic justification for revolutionary violence as means to achieve the ends of freedom. Although the use of incendiary threats is a last resort threat by liberationists, the threat is real in Latin America and carries a high human cost. From outside the liberation movement, this violence may be indistinguishable from the terrorism that uses violence as a first resort. The danger in the United States is more subtle. Protestant churches questioned the triumphalism of civil religion in the United States during the 1930s Great Depression, which institutionalized a set of sacred beliefs about the nation that made ethical issues subordinate

to the interests of the nation. In the radical 1960s, the mainline Protestant churches adopted progressive stances on civil rights issues and opened the way for a generation of Latin American leaders. The Roman Catholic Church took an immigrant approach to recently arrived Latin Americans characterized by ‘‘national parishes’’ organized by identity, such as Mexican and Puerto Rican, and thought to be temporary until the English language and North American customs displaced those of countries of origin. Instead, these parishes became permanent because the identity of these Latin Americans was not that of immigrants but of Latin Americans in exilio, a colonized people entitled to cultural rights allowing them to maintain their heritage and sustain their culture. This resulted in an ecclesiastical form of Jim Crow when new churches were built for English speakers. As in the postexilic Exodus tradition, the hope of exilio included the ability to maintain unity even without statehood. The liberation of the exodus is certain, but the outcome of the hope in exilio is not so certain. The hope transforms from the demand for equal standards of living of the Peruvians to political enfranchisement sufficient to change how people are governed; from the return home of the Cuban to creation of a stable political and economic foundation within the United States where Cuban identity can be preserved; from the repatriation of land of the Mexican indigenous or Central Americans to advocacy of a culture of reconciliation. Exilio has taken what some would describe as a postmodern turn in which exilio is that sacred hope and waiting within the separateness of a particular history, culture, values, and

Exilio experience that transcends place, yet contains the surprise of the prophetic.

Ritual Structures The ritual structures of exilio are those that maintain a distinctive religious identity apart from the loss of statehood or place such as the mestizaje resonance of Jesus as Galilean being from two places and having none on which to stand, similar to Mexican borderland experience and Amerindian experience with European contact familiar to so many living in exilio. Within this liturgical need for an identity that outlives loss of place, come traditions such as the December 12 celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is also Tonantzin, the Nahuatlspeaking lady who appeared to Juan Diego; or the Quincen˜era, celebrating a young girl’s coming of age at 15 years of age by a mass in many Mexican parishes, but nowhere in the Rites of the Catholic Church, and yet reminds one of the Xilonen, a Mexica coming-of-age ceremony celebrating the young girl’s passage to womanhood with honor to the corn deity and likening the worth of the young woman to that of Xilonen.

Key Figures Gustavo Gutie´rrez is a Peruvian Roman Catholic who articulated the metaphors of exodus and exile in 1964 as a result of the collaborative efforts between Latin American theologians that began that year in Petro´ polis, Brazil, and culminated in the Medellı´n Conference of 1968. Other contributors to this effort included Roman Catholic theologians such as Segundo Galilea, Juan Luis Segundo, and Lucio Gera, together with Protestant theologians such as Emilio

| 241

Castro, Julio de Santa Ana, Rubem Alves, and Jose´ Mı´guez Bonino. The ideas from this work are most fully developed in Gutie´ rrez’s 1971 book, A Theology of Liberation, still considered a key doctrinal text. Rubem Alves is a Presbyterian from Brazil who early on articulated the dangers of exodus without exile. Alves’s work in A Theology of Human Hope (1969) and later in Tomorrow’s Child (1972) includes his articulation of a ‘‘community of hope’’ necessary to maintain an alternative construction of the future more consistent with the prophetic character of scripture in the face of the inadequacy of liberal or Marxist solutions. Eminent biblical scholar Norman K. Gottwald noted the need for a robust scriptural interpretation of exodus and exile texts sufficient to support praxis methodology. His contributions to the dialogue making the Bible authentically relevant began with an edited volume in 1983, The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics, which contains essays setting forth various approaches to Scripture from Asia, Latin America, South Africa, and North America. His own critical scholarly reflections in light of pastoral needs for interpretation are succinctly summarized in his article ‘‘The Exodus as Event and Process.’’ Contemporary reflections on exile as relevant for Latin American theological reflection include several notable examples of pastoral applications as well as critiques. In 1983, Virgilio Elizondo, a Mexican American, offered his concept of mestizaje in Galilean Journey: The MexicanAmerican Promise as an interpretation of the indigenous-European, mixed-race otherness of his lived experience on the Texas-Mexico border as being analogous to the outsider experience of Jesus of

242 |

Exilio

Sign at a Boston pro-immigration rally reads ‘‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matthew 25:35).’’ (Jorge Salcedo/Dreamstime)

Nazareth, a Galilean held in contempt by the Jews of Jerusalem. Roman Catholic Fernando F. Segovia explains this otherness in terms of place and journey in his early Listening article, ‘‘Two Places and No Place on Which to Stand: Mixture and Otherness in Hispanic American Theology,’’ and more fully in his 1995 article, ‘‘Toward a Hermeneutics of the Diaspora: A Hermeneutics of Otherness and Engagement’’ in Readings from This Place. In 1995, Cuban Roberto Goizueta, offers a Roman Catholic pastoral theology of accompaniment as a comfort to the isolation and experience of division between culture and lands and even within the immigrant waves experienced by those living the exilio to the United States in his book, Caminemos Con Jesu´ s. A Roman Catholic religious scholar, Cuban Ada Maria Isasi Dı´az,

uses the experience of exile to critique the absence of women’s experiences in Latin American liberation theology, as well as North American feminist theology in 1994, articulating a mujerista theology. In her 1996 book, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty First Century, she describes exile as a way of life that includes injustice and oppression and demands the hope offered by a mujerista vision. Continuing this tradition of a hermeneutic of suspicion, in 2003, Cuban Miguel A. De La Torre coined the term ‘‘exilio’’ as a sacred space of waiting and hope. This place is not tied to the return to the promised land of the Cuba de ayer. Instead De La Torre offers an ajiaco Christianity of reconciliation that acknowledges the varied class and ethnic texture of Cubans in el exilio, including both elite and poor, as

Exilio well as indigenous, Spanish, African, and Chinese Cubans. His reflections on imago Dei of Genesis, as countering the notion of the gods of the Babylonian exile who would hold people as subservient, indict the libertarian society of the exiled Cuban elite. He proposed the need to find reconciliation of the needs of Cubans in exilio that honors the imago Dei in all persons. The particularity of this history, this culture, these values, and this experience becomes prophetic and transcendent. Marta Vides Saade

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. ‘‘Cubans in Babylon: Exodus and Exile.’’ Religion, Culture, and

Tradition in the Caribbean, ed. N. S. Murrell and H. Gossai (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Goizueta, Roberto. Caminemos Con Jesu´s: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Gottwald, Norman K. ‘‘The Exodus as Event and Process: A Test Case in the Biblical Grounding of Liberation Theology.’’ The Future of Liberation Theology: Essays in Honor of Gustavo Gutie´rrez, ed. Marc H. Ellis and Otto Maduro (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989). Gutie´rrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation— 15th Anniversary Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Maria. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996).

| 243

F a household, close enough to nurture the relationships, or even at distant geographic locations, especially those who still live in the countries of familial origin. The Latina/o familia could also affiliate individuals who have significant roles in the socializing activities of the nuclear family. Nonblood relatives who play a caring role for children can become tios or tias (uncles or aunts) and elderly people respected and appreciated by the nuclear family can turn into abuelitos (grandparents) by virtue of meaningful relationships. Nonrelatives are also incorporated into the social configuration of la familia through compadrazgo (godparentship) when they take upon themselves the responsibility to bear witness to a socioreligious rite of passage such as a baptism, a wedding, or a quincean˜era (sweet 15). Godparents are considered part of la familia, and their deliberate participation within the family’s life and the rearing of a child or adolescent is expected. Whether members of la familia are in close proximity to the

FAMILIA Two sets of literature yield contrasting understandings of the Latino/a familia. On one side, a long tradition of Hispanic fictional literature is centered in the life of Latina/o families within the framework of paradigmatic personalities and shared traditional values. Sociological and anthropological literature, on the other hand, has cast a more complex and mutable understanding of the composition and nature of Latino/a households and its members. The ideational concept of la familia (familism) that has emerged from fictional literature conveys the idea that Hispanic families are essentially affiliate, extending the nuclear family through a set of relationships that are maintained across generations and geographic locations. Therefore, la familia is composed of parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and other relatives within an extended network of genetic kinship termed parentesco. The notion of ‘‘familia’’ is retained whether those relatives live within 245

246 |

Familia

COMPADRAZGO The Spanish term ‘‘compadrazgo’’ (godparenthood) refers to a system of fictive kinship resulting from ritual and contractual sponsorship. The structure of this cultural and religious institution consists of the godparents (padrinos), or sponsors, and the godchild (ahijado/a). The relationship between parents and godparents is very important (known as ‘‘padrinazgo’’), and the participants usually address each other formally as compadre (male coparent) or comadre (female coparent), using the formal pronoun usted (you). Compadrazgo is found in many cultures, in both religious and secular forms. The Spanish system of godparenthood was introduced in Latin America and the Philippines by mendicant friars, who began the task of converting indigenous populations to Catholicism shortly after the conquest. The ideological and prescriptive components of Spanish godparenthood were established at the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Though theological and doctrinal aspects had been previously developed, with Tertullian using the word ‘‘sponsor’’ for the first time (second century) and the first recorded use of the term patrinus (godfather) in 752. In his Summa, Saint Thomas Aquinas explained the reasons for having sponsors and provided a summary of their duties. Compadrazgo can be sacramental and nonsacramental. Sacramental results from ritual and spiritual sponsorship at Baptism, Confirmation, First Communion, and Marriage. Nonsacramental forms of sponsorship are also varied and include special nonreligious occasions (graduations). —FAO & KGD

nuclear family or far from it, the sense of familia is retained through high levels of communicative exchange and contact. Family orientation and strong affective commitments to family life are part of the familial archetype that nurtures much of Latino/a literary fictional works and oral traditions. The archetype has also shaped the realm of values that define the social relations practiced within la familia. Some of the most prominent values are associated with gender roles and the preeminent issue of machismo. The traditional model situates women in the private sphere of the home assuming domestic responsibilities as the man is portrayed as the primary provider of financial support and family safety. Since women are particularly responsible for domestic affairs according to the traditional archetype, the roles accentuated are those of mother, teacher, caregiver,

and helpmate. In turn, men are represented as particularly responsible for sustenance and safety affairs, thus their role as household administrators, overseers, protectors, and disciplinarians. Women, however, occupy the public space that constitutes the extended ecology of their domestic roles: the market, the school, the park, the health clinic, the church, government agencies offering social services, etc. Such public participation allows Latina women to exercise a great deal of decision making and influence in household matters. Because of the burden of balancing domestic work and public representation, women are acknowledged as central to the permanence of the household, especially as they grow older and those efforts are validated, by extension, in the achievements of family members. Although men and women share an expectation

Familia for improving the well-being of the family and its future prosperity, women are particularly expected to put family before their own needs and concerns. The fact that many literary works center in female characters and the history of their families shows the values associated with a ‘‘matristic’’ model of Hispanic households within a patriarchal family structure. These values are also derived from a strong devotion in Catholic Latino/a families to the Virgin Mary as Madre de Dios. Paradoxically, these Latina/o households maintain the tension between a matristic domestic model and one that encourages machista attitudes within gender relations. Machista attitudes are transmitted not only from man to man through role modeling but, interestingly enough, from mother to son. This places women in the position of reaffirming, at least symbolically, male role prerogatives. However, this tension should suffice to challenge the stereotype that Latinas are simply subservient and deferent to male members of the household. Gender roles attributed to Latino/a households also vary according to the country of origin with a more marked difference between Central American or Mexican women (lesser level of gender assertiveness) and Caribbean women (greater level of gender assertiveness). Another value associated with the traditional notion of ‘‘la familia’’ is religious faith. While institutionalized religion and active participation in faith communities has always been part of the Hispanic family experience, la familia is seen as the primary place of religious nurture and formation. This is reinforced not only in household religious practices, such as table prayer, moral instruction, storytelling, and regulated behavior associated with belief and/or superstition, but

| 247

also in the concrete display of religious symbols as part of the spatial representation of family values. It is common to find religious iconography in Latino/a Catholic households and some of this imagery is attached to family devotions. Most common representations are the Last Supper, Jesus’ Crucifixion, the Sacred Heart, the Blessed Virgin in all its iconographic variations, and La Sagrada Familia, a depiction of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary that stresses the religious commitment to family. Although Hispanic Protestants have rejected the placement of religious iconography at home, they seek to represent their faith and its influence upon the household by a highly visible display of a Bible or even decorative objects with biblical verses inscribed in them. For a Latino/a family the home constitutes a sacred space but not a private and closed one. Unexpected and unannounced visits are accommodated, participation of visitors in the family experience is expected, free movement throughout the house is allowed, and counsel from extended members of the family or neighbors on matters related to household management and child rearing are welcomed, as long as the sacredness of the space is acknowledged and respected. Religious sentiment is evident in the day-to-day interactions of Hispanic families that still hold some traditional religious expressions to communicate among their members. Children and young people will regularly ask for blessings while approaching older relatives (la bendicio´n). Adult relatives will respond to this request saying ‘‘Dios te bendiga’’ (May God bless you). In many households, the inability or refusal of children and youth to ask for a blessing from older relatives is considered bad

248 |

Familia

manners. Other common expressions demonstrate how deeply ingrained religious faith is within the fabric of Latino/a family life: ‘‘Gracias a Dios’’ (Thanks be to God), ‘‘Si Dios y la Virgen lo permiten’’ (If it is the will of God and the Virgin), ‘‘Ave Maria Santı´sima’’ (Holy Blessed Mary), ‘‘Como Dios Manda’’ (as God allows), ‘‘Alabado sea Dios’’ (May God be praised). As the case of blessing requests makes evident, children should act in a deferential manner toward adults and show respect to all elders. This familiar attitude of respeto is carried out into other social organizations like the school and the church where children are expected to behave in a culturally prescribed manner. Children do not actively participate in family decision making, and their input in matters relating to the household and their own upbringing is rarely sought. Children, however, especially those of more recent immigrants, become social brokers between parents and the public sphere as they possess the capacities for both linguistic and cultural translation in the context of North American U.S. society. If lack of participation in household decision making places children in the periphery of the familiar unit, through education the immigrant children move into the center of the family unit as partners in the collective enterprise of acculturation. Hispanic children who are already acculturated and belong to families whose origins are within the continental United States will either stay in the periphery if the family has decided to hold to traditional parent-children values or will move to the center of participation according to the level of cultural assimilation attained by family members.

Another central value fostered by the family is that of confianza (trust), which allows nuclear families to extend the network of relationships beyond the nuclear family and direct blood relatives with ease. ‘‘Confianza’’ goes beyond relationships between individuals and forms the basis of reciprocity among Latino/a people and many social institutions. To have confianza means to approach social relations with the presupposition that if you foster respect, intimacy, and commitment toward other people and organizations, you can expect, in return, the support of these people and organizations. Reciprocated confianza can turn into friendship and friendship into compadrazgo, making confianza the basis upon which a person is incorporated into the extended family networks. In turn, confianza in social institutions and government organizations allows Latino/as to reach out with the expectation that they can reciprocate with loyalty and commitment (i.e., churches, schools, and work sites), obedient citizenship, and conformity to social norms. The value of confianza becomes an asset for new immigrant Hispanic families who need to respond to multiple institutions and organizations under the premise that many will hold more than one job and move from place to place, thus interacting with new neighbors, schools, and faith communities. In the eye of the non-Latino/a observer, such presumed confianza could be interpreted as naivete´, yet it is the core value that allows families to navigate effectively the ever-increasing relations of a family circle extended in time and space, as well as a diversified public sphere. The fact that literary fiction about Latino/as can portray such a generalized and consistent understanding of

Familia traditional family values demonstrates that such literature is framed by the imaginary of familism that considers la familia to be the most important institution in the social organization of Hispanics. It is through la familia that a viable subsistence as a racialized minority within the U.S. context is guaranteed through household practices that allow Latina/os to connect to a familial support system transnationally and cross-generationally and to communicate effectively with the larger society. The generalization, however, stops there, and the task to unravel the heterogeneity of Latino/a family systems lies on the extensive literature of sociological analysis and field work. It is expected from those working within the social scientific disciplines to see family systems reconstituted due to socioeconomic circumstances. Because of the newness of the receiving culture in the case of Latino/a immigrant families, or the shifts in racial relations in the case of U.S. ‘‘native’’ Hispanics, families encounter the challenge of adaptability, transiency, and flexibility. This challenge causes disruptions and reconstitutions of family structures even when some durable networks of relationships are kept. Economic demands upon the family produce a change in family expectations and challenges tight conceptions of gender relations as women are placed in the position of being coproviders or, in some cases, the sole providers of households. In turn, the level of acculturation of family members, and especially the generational gap that results from that acculturation, can fragment the venues of communication that are assumed to be part of the effective functioning of a family system. Other aspects adding to the diversification of Latino/a family structures and values are

| 249

intermarriage trends between Latina/os and members of other U.S. ethnic groups, social stratification and the place of Hispanic families in the class system, and education. As a result of these realities impinging upon the life of Latino/a families, sociologists have noted a shift from traditional nuclear and extended families to families with one parent, couples living in cohabitation, and single older people. An increase of single women heading families with children has become a tendency in Latina/o communities, and this has been attributed to divorce, single pregnancy, or the absence of the husband due to seasonal work far from home. The family has also changed in terms of number of children per household since there is an increasing need to adapt family size to available financial resources and to the constraints of living space, which decreases once families move toward urban areas where the majority of jobs are to be found. There seems to be a consensus among social scientists that economic stressors could have an effect on the decline of the two parents and multiple children nuclear family and may also contribute to the poverty of some sectors of the Latino/a population. As a result of economic stressors, the Hispanic family will confront a serious decline of educational opportunity, communal social organization, and the well-being of children. In addition, social scientists have underlined the fact that the family structure we call the Latina/o ‘‘familia’’ is affected by the patterns of emigration and acculturation of the diverse national and cultural groups that compose the socially labeled category of ‘‘Hispanics.’’ Overall, Latino/as have been an economically disadvantaged community in

250 |

Familia

the United States, although there has been improvement in social status over time due to increasing levels of education and occupational status. Cubans, for example, have posited high value on the education of family members, and for that reason are distinctive from Mexicans and Puerto Ricans who statistically hold lower educational levels than other racial groups, including African Americans and Native Americans. In contrast, Mexican and Puerto Rican men and women have comparable levels of education, while Cuban men have a slightly higher educational level than Cuban women. Demands for the education of Mexican and Puerto Rican women is similar to that of men in these groups as labor force participation of these women increased sharply between 1960 and 2000. Generally, labor force participation of women increases in single-headed households with children. As unmarried women with children face the economic challenges of family support, working outside home becomes a primary necessity. Although both married and unmarried Latinas with children work outside home, the most salient pattern is for Cuban and Mexican unmarried women to work at a higher rate than their married counterparts. The exception to this pattern is Puerto Rican and Dominican married women with children who are more likely to enter into the labor force than their unmarried counterparts. One reason for this exception is that Puerto Rican and Dominican women are likely to reside in the U.S. East Coast and in the Midwest where lower skilled jobs are declining. The difficulty of finding adequate jobs in this highly skilled market produces two household phenomena: husbands who cannot support families on their own and reduced employment opportunities

that discourage single mothers from job seeking. No doubt, these economic and job factors impinge upon the way the family acculturates to the U.S. context and requires the reevaluation of traditional values including child care (who raises the children), family headship (who makes decisions at home while the spouse works), gender roles (how household roles are divided among men and women, both children and adults), and the overall quality of family relationships. Another issue that sociologists take into account when describing the complexities of the Hispanic familia is the effect of family values on nonimmigrant Latino/as who are fully assimilated into the U.S. culture and subsequent generations of immigrants who have acculturated positively into the cultural mainstream (although research with immigrant groups still dominate the sociological agenda). Those Latina/os who are assimilated by birth and acculturated through generations are likely to redefine the notion of ‘‘la familia’’ and its values by changing the trends of social stratification, gender role statuses, racial intermarriage, fertility, language use, and social commitments. However, a strong ethnic loyalty remains with an awareness of ethnic identification and the particular place of ‘‘la familia’’ as a centering institution and a relational metaphor within that identity. Jose´ Irizarry

References and Further Reading Caputo, Richard K., Daniel Hank, and Marvin B. Sussman. Families on the Move: Migration, Emigration and Mobility (New York: Routledge, 1994).

Feminism | 251 Crane, Ken. Latino Churches: Faith, Family, and Ethnicity in the Second Generation (El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2003). Zambrana, Ruth E., ed. Understanding Latino Families: Scholarship, Policy, and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995).

FEMINISM The growth and development of contemporary Latina (women from Latin America or of Latin American ancestry) feminist theories and Latina feminist theology is part of the larger history of Latinas/Chicanas (Mexican American women) in the United States and Latino/a social and political movements. Movements generally occur within particular time periods when large groups join forces on behalf of particular issues, i.e., civil rights movement, women’s movement, etc. These movements are part of the history of political and social thought and have been the bases for some of the differences within feminism, liberation theology, Latino/a theology, and Latina feminist theology. In the United States, Latina and Chicana feminists have challenged the use of the term ‘‘feminism’’ as it is explained by European and EuroAmerican women. ‘‘Feminism’’ is often described as the advocacy for equality and ending exclusion or limitations for women in society. For Latinas, their experiences of exclusion based on sex (also known as gender discrimination), class (based on their lower levels of income), and ethnicity/race require that they are advocates for more than gender equality. These distinctions are the bases of their separation from White feminists. The term ‘‘feminism’’ has come to refer

to a largely Euro-American middle-class approach to the issues of gender/sexual equality. Latin American liberation theology and Latino/a theology also have a certain shared history—the Spanish conquest and Native American heritage—as well as common approaches to the study of these fields, such as belief in the option for the poor. Theologies are philosophical explanations of how God is active within humanity and the world. Although similar, these two theologies are not versions of the same theology, as some scholars assume when they include only Latin American liberation theology in their historical surveys. While these theological differences are more than can be explained here, some mention of key points of difference is in order. What it means to be U.S. Latino/a is quite different from what it means to be a Latin American living in Latin America. For many individuals who describe themselves as Latino or Latina (or Mexican American, Cuban American, Puerto Rican American, etc.) means they do not feel a part of mainstream U.S. culture. Some Latino/as do not speak English, so that the experience of being an outsider is an important part of their daily life. Being Latina/o means one has to identify one’s or one’s family’s country of origin. Although the majority of Hispanics are native-born U.S. citizens, they often are treated as if they are immigrants. Being on the margins of U.S. society, the historical experience of the Spanish conquest and U.S. reconquest (of the Southwest), and the experience of being separated from their homeland (as in the case of Cuban Americans) are some of the reasons why Latino/a theology differs from Latin American liberation theology.

252 |

Feminism

Along with these issues of cultural identity, certain aspects of feminist theology are part of the Latina/o theological approach, such as lo cotidiano (seeing God’s activities within daily life), a hermeneutics of suspicion (shared with feminist theology and refers to reading the scriptures and writing theology with an awareness of the exclusion of women’s experiences), the preferential option for the poor (shared with Latin American theology), and praxis methodology (also shared with Latin American liberation theology and refers to being in dialogue and committed to social justice action within local church communities). These similarities reveal the important role that being an outsider plays within the development of these theologies. Therefore, these elements of shared method are also of particular importance for Latina feminist theology. They validate Latinas’ selfunderstanding and experiences as an important part of their ‘‘voice,’’ which is their particular contribution within theology in general, and as an important critique within Latino/a theology. The mere presence of Latinas among the scholars of the academy of theologians does not necessarily address the important role that feminist thinking needs to play within scholarship or writing of theology. While some Latino male theologians acknowledge the importance of Latina feminism, this does not mean that Latino theologians have engaged in the critical reading of feminist theories or feminist theologies. One distinction among Latina feminist theologians Marı´a Pilar Aquino and Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az is the difference in their approach to the term ‘‘feminist.’’ In Mujerista Theology, Cuban American

Isasi-Dı´az describes her involvement with Euro-American feminists and the challenges she faced when she first voiced the experiences of Latinas. Her marginalization within the movement is why she chose not to name her theology ‘‘feminist.’’ Coming from a different experience, Aquino was born and lived the first part of her life in Mexico. She, however, notes her experience of Latin American feminism and chooses to call herself a Latina feminist theologian. She argues that Latinas have the authority to claim the term ‘‘feminist’’ on the bases of their Latin American and Latina experiences. Aquino’s experience of feminism arises out of Latin America and U.S. sociopolitical and ecclesial developments of feminism. She also challenges use of the term mujerista on the basis that there are no mujerista social, political, and/or church movements and active participants. Aquino’s point is that the term ‘‘mujerista’’ implies that in the United States there are mujerista social, political, and/or church movements or active participants of these movements. Similarly, Latina feminist theologian Michelle Gonzalez responds to Aquino’s point by noting there are no Latina feminist social, political, and/or church movements and active participants of these movements outside of the academia. Currently, beyond the question of the appropriate name for Latina feminist theology, they have not discussed any of the other differences in their theologies. This question is based on Aquino and IsasiDı´az’s similar, yet diverse, backgrounds and experiences, as well as their understanding of feminism and the important role of speaking with and for various ethnic or racial groups.

Feminism | 253

SOR JUANA INE´S DE LA CRUZ (1648–1695) Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz is a prominent, complex, and fascinating figure in Mexican history. She was a nun, scholar, theologian, writer, poet, and defender of women’s rights in a patriarchal society that limited women’s development. Sor Juana had a brilliant mind. By age three, she knew how to read, and at seven years old, aware that only males had access to education, she wanted to attend the university dressed as a man. Instead, she had to stay home where fortunately she still acquired knowledge due to her grandfather’s private library. As a teenager she went to live at the palace where the vicereine supported her writing career, and some years later she entered the convent. Although her motivations to enter the convent remain unclear, the religious life was compatible with her interest in learning and knowledge. During her years at the convent, she became a public figure recognized by her knowledge in religious and secular areas. The last years of her life were marked by a controversy with some members of the church’s hierarchy when one of her writings was published without her authorization, and her position and right to knowledge came under attack. In response, she wrote a letter in which she defended vigorously women’s right to intellectual pursuits. —NOL

Latina/Chicana Feminism and Euro-American Feminists Few Latinas were present in the early twentieth-century feminist movements. The reason for their limited participation is due, in part, to the suffragists’ (early feminist equal rights leaders) antagonism toward the African American, Latina, and immigrant voting rights. Some suffragist leaders argued that only EuroAmerican women should be allowed to vote since they did not want African Americans and lower classes to have the right to govern them. Suffragists also rejected socialist causes out of fear that labor rights and socialism would hurt their push for women’s right to vote. Their rejection of the concerns of women labor leaders and working-class women meant they did not include the poor, many of whom were Latinas and African American women. Although in 1920 women were granted the right to vote,

many Latinas and African American women were not excluded on the basis of discrimination. They were unable to pay the poll tax, could not register to vote since registration was held in private homes where African Americans and Latino/as were not allowed, and were intimidated verbally and physically to register and vote. In 1974, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which established their voting rights. These tensions and differences within the feminist movement among EuroAmericans and women of color prevented a number of early Chicana leaders from identifying with the term ‘‘feminism.’’ Chicanas and African American women disagreed with the feminist movement during the 1960s and 1970s, arguing that it was mainly designed to help Euro-American middle-class women who were seeking higher social status. Chicana feminists focused on

254 |

Feminism

class discrimination since the majority of Chicano/as were working-class or poor. They also identified with their brother Chicanos in a shared common ethnic identity. In general, the early ethnic minority women leaders had different cultural, social, and economic experiences than Euro-American women; therefore, they differed from early feminist thinkers in their understanding of the issues and the reasons for change. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chicana writers Gloria Anzaldu´ a, Ana Castillo, Norma Alarco´n, Marta Cotera, Cherrı´e Moraga, among others, developed some of the earliest writings of Chicana/Latina feminist thought. The early Chicana feminists were part of a larger movement who worked for the liberation and dreams of working-class and underrepresented groups of immigrants, Mexican Americans, and other Latino/as. While they believed their concerns were best expressed within the Chicano/a movement, many of them soon recognized the difficulties within this movement. Chicanos often relegated the women and their issues to second-class status. Chicanas noted the role of gender inequality and challenged the inequality of women within Chicano culture. The importance of a separate political struggle for change became a necessary aspect that established a Chicana movement. While many Chicanas have maintained their identity and thinking within a Chicano/a framework, others have joined with Latinas from various Latin American heritages and nationalities to develop a Latina feminist theory. The development of a Latina identity, one that is not connected to a specific nationality, is growing stronger among second, third, and subsequent generations in the United States. For some of these women

who express their identity with reference to their regional differences, such as in the Southwest where the majority of Latino/as are from Mexico, Chicano/a studies and identity are often the most preferred identity and framework. The majority of Latino/a studies academics select broader terms, ‘‘Latino’’ or ‘‘Latino/a,’’ to identify their works while also defining their identity according to nationality. They describe their experience within the context of their ancestry and generation in the United States. Many Chicano/as explain their identity is connected to Mexico. They and their ancestors did not cross a border; rather, the border crossed them. While Chicano/as may identify and connect with the broader Latino/a perspective and academics, they choose to identify as Chicano/a to maintain their unique position in U.S. history.

A Latina Feminist Epistemology The issue of difference, based on the intersection of gender, class, and ethnicity, is an important feature in a feminist epistemology, which is how one comes to interpret and understand the world and knowledge. This feminist way of coming to knowledge is one that is inclusive of Latinas’ perspectives and voice. Latina feminist theologian Nancy Pineda-Madrid explains that a Latina feminist epistemology allows Latinas the opportunity to employ their own way of knowing or self-understanding, which ultimately supports their sense of dignity. In other words, unless people are empowered to employ their own epistemology—way of interpreting and understanding their world through their creation of knowledge—they will find themselves being defined by others and

Feminism | 255

CENTER FOR EMERGING FEMALE LEADERSHIP In 1994, the Latino Pastoral Action Center (LPAC) introduced Latinas in Ministry (LIM) to the public via a small conference that was held for mostly Spanish dominant women in ministry. Some Latina progressive Pentecostals were honored at this event, including Pastor Aimee Cortese and Mama Leo. In its initial stages, the conference targeted only Latinas and the group was guided by Dr. Maria Perez y Gonzalez. LIM was an offshoot of a Black Women in Ministry project headed by the New York Mission Society, the oldest social service agency in New York. In 1996, when Rev. Dr. Elizabeth D. Rios started working for LPAC and due to the decline of participation from the initial parties involved with Latinas in Ministry, she began reorganizing the effort. In 1999, she renamed it the Center for Emerging Female Leadership (CEFL). The name CEFL emerged when after many conferences, and in an attempt to be more inclusive, Dr. Rios and her team noticed that most of the conference attendees were women of color. CEFL was created to discover and to give voice and visibility to emerging female leaders in church and society, particularly Latina women. —EDR

easily used for the benefit of others, which ultimately could harm them. The acknowledgment of Latinas’ experiences of discrimination is an important part of any inclusive and liberating epistemology. A Latina epistemology contributes to the overall development of Latinas because it promotes their voice, agency, resistance, and survival. Therefore, Latina feminist epistemology addresses the issues that are relevant not only for Latinas’ self-understanding but also for developing Latino/a theology, because theology needs to be grounded in the experience of the individuals and not merely based on abstract theories or church teachings. Latina feminist epistemology includes the analysis of both gender roles and class, as they are important in the development of women’s power. Latina feminist epistemology includes the insights of European and Euro-American feminist interpretations that recognize the importance of women’s experience as a

basis of knowledge. Feminists also analyze the patterns of male control within society and academia. While Latina feminists, Alarco´n, Anzaldu´a, Castillo, and Moraga, accept feminist analysis, they also challenge Euro-American feminists who avoid discussions regarding issue differences. The feminist melting pot approach assumes that any position that supports Euro-American women automatically promotes the well-being of all women. This assumption is faulty since they do not see the concrete factors of race, class, sexual preference, etc., that affect women’s status, particularly status for women of color. Alarco´n notes the harm that feminist theories do that treat race and class as secondary to the analysis of female subordination. She challenges feminist analysis that does not address the gender inequalities of race and class due to lack of information and/or the feminist approach to race and class as an addition to their theories but is not included in their analyses since

256 |

Feminism

MUXERISTA ‘‘Muxerista’’ is a term that was used by Anita Tijerina Revilla to describe the ideology of Raza Womyn, a student organization at the University of California. In her book, Muxerista Pedagogy: Raza Womyn Teaching Social Justice through Student Activism, Revilla attempts to illustrate how Chicanas and Latinas struggle against racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia from the social location of being activist educators. They employ a methodology called Muxerista pedagogy that moves beyond Latina feminism and mujerista theology. Muxerista is a Latina/Raza-centered womanism where the ‘‘x’’ signifies an indigenous stance. Through student activism and leadership a Muxerista pedagogy provides a means of negotiating their cultural, gendered, and sexual identities in hopes of achieving transformational resistance to an environment hostile to their existence and presence. An attempt is made by Muxerista to expand, rather than limit, sexual identities. Rather than referring to themselves as lesbians or straight, the mostly undergraduate students of Raza Womyn prefer to self-identify themselves as ‘‘queer,’’ ‘‘xueer,’’ ‘‘bicurious,’’ or ‘‘straight for now.’’ In essence, they refuse to fit or be defined by one category. Rather than an either/or they prefer to encompass everything at once, including the good and the bad. —MAD

they do not challenge the reasons for these inequalities. Furthermore, a Latina feminist epistemology challenges the primary focus within Euro-American feminism that questions male dominance but does not apply their approach to changing the ways that knowledge and power exist within society and academia. EuroAmerican feminism merely replaces male dominance with Euro-American female dominance. This way societal structures function is not questioned nor do they address the multiple ways women remain oppressed, i.e., lower wages, sexual harassment, domestic violence, etc. Pineda-Madrid persuasively argues that those approaches that promote societal change by merely adding more feminist women and issues into academic research are ignoring the heart of the problem. The prejudice within the academic world in the development of

research and writing are not addressed and, therefore, remain unchallenged. Latina feminist epistemology, the way of understanding, necessarily focuses on the multiple aspects of Latinas’ lives— gender, race, class, etc.—and analyzes those epistemologies that do not acknowledge the complexities of women’s lives.

Latina Theology: Rooted in the Ordinary Latina theologians—Aquino, Isasi-Dı´az, and Jeanette Rodriguez (from the first generation)—argue that Latina theology must speak about the lives of ordinary Latinas if it is to have any meaning for Latinas. Being a woman of Latin American descent does not necessarily mean that she is a Latina theologian. Only those Latinas who employ insights and experiences of Latinas and are connected

Feminism | 257 to lo cotidiano (daily lives) and the popular expressions of faith of Latino/as are able to claim the title of Latina theologian. Popular expressions of faith, also known as popular religion, are those practices that are home and/or culturally based traditions, which are sometimes but not necessarily accepted by religious leaders, pastors, priests, etc. These religious expressions, i.e., quincean˜ eras (Latina 15 birthday celebration), novenas to their patron saints such as novena to Our Lady of Guadalupe, La Posada, which is a Christmas novena, are an essential part of Latina theology, since they are rooted at the center of the people’s lives and spirituality. Latino/a theology, in general, recognizes the value and importance of popular expressions of faith that reside at the crossroads of public and private experience. Isasi-Dı´az argues that the development of theology, which until recently was written by White males, is based on their experience. This long history of theology has silenced women’s expression of their faith, wisdom, and experiences, and in particular the contributions from women of color. Therefore, she offers a creative method that combines feminist analysis, liberation praxis, and anthropology. While most theology is dependent on the insights of individual theologians, Isasi-Dı´az’s theological method builds upon the wisdom of Latinas, whom she studied through interviews about their spiritual and daily lives. Isasi-Dı´az argues that theologians need to be a part of the community in which they study. Through their experiences women express their wisdom and define their own understanding of themselves and their world. These experiences are the bases for challenging those ideas that come from Christian tradition

and society that are not relevant to their lives. Recognizing the lived reality of women, Isasi-Dı´az explains the importance of popular religions, lo cotidiano (everyday life), la lucha (the struggle for justice), permı´tanme hablar (claiming their own voices), and argues that these are critical sources for theology.

A Hermeneutics of Suspicion Upholding the importance of women’s voices and the need to seek justice, Latino/a theologians, in general, promote a hermeneutic of suspicion, which is a healthy skepticism that always asks who benefits from this theology and/or institution, such as the church. Unlike Latin American liberation theologians, Catholic Latino/a theologians have tried to incorporate a Latina feminist perspective within their methodology from the beginning of the Association of Catholic Hispanic Theologians (ACHTUS) of the United States. Beginning with the initial years of ACHTUS, Aquino, Isasi-Dı´az, and Rodriguez have been instrumental in promoting the inclusion of a hermeneutic of suspicion from a Latina feminist understanding. Nevertheless, these discussions do not mean that Latino/a theology is necessarily inclusive and that sexism, gender discrimination, is eliminated from the Latino/a theology and academia. One disadvantage for Latino/a theology is the small numbers of Latina theologians, both Catholic and Protestant. Women find that getting a doctorate is a financial, psychological, and spiritual drain on their resources. Because of their few numbers, these Latina theologians carry added burdens because they must not only hold onto their positions in the university or seminary, they also are

258 |

Feminism

called upon to do additional work within academia to carry forward the voices of women. Hence, additional responsibilities of research, writing, presenting, and participation in community and educational committees are required of these already overworked women. As a pioneer in constructing Latina feminist theology, mujerista theologian Isasi-Dı´az has a distinctive method that uses a feminist hermeneutic of suspicion in the analysis of scripture, tradition, and ethical concepts. Isasi-Dı´az coined the term ‘‘mujerista’’ and developed its meaning jointly with some of the Latinas whom she interviewed. Mujerista theology is inclusive of Latinas’ voices as a means of empowerment so that the development of theology is not only based upon Latinas’ lives, it also is the praxis of liberation from oppression. Isasi-Dı´az argues that the purpose of this theology is to empower Latinas in their own lives to liberate them from the forces of economic, political, sexual, racial, and religious oppression. Recognizing that women’s voices, particularly Latinas’ voices, have and continue to be silenced in the development of theology, Isasi-Dı´az offers a creative method that combines feminist analysis, liberation praxis, and anthropology. Since most systematic theology is dependent upon the insights of individual theologians, Isasi-Dı´az successfully claims—as shown through her use of ethnographic interviews—that her theology is not done in isolation but is built upon the wisdom of Latinas. Latina feminist Aquino also writes feminist and liberation theology in solidarity with Latinas. Taking a hermeneutic of suspicion, Aquino addresses the sexism within scripture, tradition, theology, and the Catholic Church. Although she

began her writing as a Latin American feminist theologian, Aquino explains in From the Heart of the People that Latin American liberation theology has not questioned the sexism that exists within liberation theology. Likewise, Aquino challenges Latin American theologians for their dismissive approach to Latino/a theology. Aquino notes that Latino/a theologians argue that their theology is different from Latin American theology because Latino/a theologians analyze not only economic and political dimensions but also racial, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions. Aquino is both a feminist and a liberation theologian because her theology analyzes the sexism in the Catholic Church as a means of liberating the voices of women and their lives of oppression. Aquino stresses the importance of being connected to the lives of the poor as part of a theologian’s responsibility to work for social justice. She explains that her theological principles are inclusive and promote equality. She sees that sexuality is a source of liberation, the daily experiences of life are a source of strength, and women’s voices are the important sources and unique contributions of women. Aquino argues for a theological method that includes the primacy of desire, which is the expression of passion and life, an option for women and the poor. She argues that women will reclaim their voices, history, and place within the development of a theology that addresses the problems of oppression at all levels. Aquino has begun to describe the implications of this theology in her development of a Latina feminist theology of the Trinity, Christology, the Church, and Mary. Latina theologian Rodrı´guez also explains that her theology is dependent

Feminism | 259 on Latina’s experience and she uses an interdisciplinary approach for understanding these experiences. In her book Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women she employs psychology and religious approaches based on the works of psychology by Jerome Frank, religious studies by William James, faith development by James Fowler, women studies by Carol Gilligan, and Chicano studies by Anzaldu´a. Her most recent book, Cultural Memory: Resistance, Faith, Identity, was co-authored with anthropologist Ted Fortier. In this book the authors discuss cases of cultural memory, Mexican Americans, Yaqui Indians of Arizona, San Salvadoran church of the poor and martyrs, and Tzeltal Mayans of Chiapas, Mexico. Rodriguez’s ongoing work with Latinas and Latina groups as a clinical psychologist as well as a nationally recognized speaker on Latina feminist and liberation issues places her in contact with a variety of groups, which enables her writing and speaking to come from the voices of the women with whom she is in collaboration. She believes that Latinas have a common ground of understanding that is inclusive of their cultural heritage, i.e., language, customs, and ways of viewing and interacting in the world. Ultimately, in developing a theological method—as Isasi-Dı´az explains in mujerista theology and Pineda-Madrid, Aquino, and Rodriguez in Latina feminist theology—as one claims her voice, a Latina theologian either takes a stance for the liberation of her community or becomes a voice that is outside and separate from other Latinas. Therefore, the development of a theological method, as shown through this survey of these

women’s methods, is a stance that has significant implications for potential good and harm that come in the development of one’s method and voice. Thus, Latina feminist and mujerista theologians employ a feminist hermeneutic in their theological method and have contributed to the use of a hermeneutic of suspicion in Latino/a theology in general. The importance of their insights and contributions are part of their leadership in ACHTUS and in their ongoing publications. They utilize a hermeneutic of suspicion that is critical of institutions and traditions that foster the dehumanizing effects of silence, poverty, and racism. These effects limit the lives of Latinas, within both church and society. Subsequently, the opportunity to articulate a theology that reflects these women’s voices is an occasion for empowerment as an additional outcome of the women’s faith practices, although empowerment is not the sole purpose of their beliefs and actions.

Praxis Methodology and Option for the Poor Latino/a theology’s emphasis on praxis methodology comes from its early relationship with Latin American liberation theology. The term ‘‘praxis’’ refers to actions on behalf of justice and liberation based on a preferential option for the poor and oppressed. In their critique of other theologies, Latin American liberation theologians and their colleagues, Latino/a theologians, and Latina feminist and mujerista theologians stress the importance of praxis. Their approach rejects the belief that faith is essentially an acceptance of church teachings and creeds. Rather, liberation theologians argue that true faith is focused on

260 |

Feminism

‘‘knowledge and seeking to understand,’’ yet this definition does not include living a Christian lifestyle. To be a follower of Christ is to love your neighbor as yourself and to seek justice. Thus, liberation and Latino/a theologians promote the importance of a praxis theology that is rooted in faith and one that reflects the daily faith practices of the Christian community, while seeking to live according to the scriptures. Aquino argues for the necessity of a praxis-oriented theology. She maintains the need for a close relationship between theology and action for justice. Aquino also believes in the importance of seeking justice through the process of theology. In describing Latina feminist theology, Aquino believes that it is from the perspective of the poor and suffering that theology needs to work for the liberation of the poor and the emancipation of oppressed women. Seeking true liberation, she argues, means that Latina theologians advance a liberating action that encourages solidarity and community among women in order to promote a process for world peace and justice. Recognizing the importance of a praxis methodology, mujerista theologian IsasiDı´az has a distinctive method. She locates mujerista theology within liberation theology, believing that mujerista theologians must be active members of the Latino/a community. Isasi-Dı´az has a four-step praxis method of mujerista theology: telling the women’s stories, analyzing the women’s reality, creating new ways of prayer and worship (liturgizing) to express their experiences as a means for empowerment, and defining ways to deal with oppression. Isasi-Dı´az argues that the purpose of this theology is to empower Latinas in their own voices and to

liberate them from the forces of economic, political, sexual, racial, and religious oppression. Liturgizing these experiences among mujerista grassroots theologians is an important part of Isasi-Dı´az’s theology, and she is not alone. Rodriguez also employs rituals within her work with Latinas. Both of them see these expressions of prayer as an important part of empowerment of women. The value of ritual is the healing presence of sharing and naming their experiences within a space that is collaborative and spiritual. Praying together is important for the women as they bond together and share faith. This empowerment of women builds a sense of community and healing. Latina feminism is often described as an outgrowth of European and EuroAmerican feminist movement within society and academia. The similarity of purpose and approach among Latinas/ Chicanas with these feminists on issues has been the basis for some feminists to downplay the distinctive features of Latinas/Chicanas. Likewise, many in the academia assume that Latina/Chicana feminism comes directly from the larger feminist movement and relegates the Latina/Chicana experience as merely one example of the larger experience of women in general due to their secondclass status in society. Reading the works of Latinas/Chicanas challenges these assumptions and the rush to a false sense of solidarity. Latina feminism and Latina feminist theology does have similarities of approach with feminism, but the assumption that no differences exist among them is the reason that Latina feminists and theologians strongly explain their position and challenge Euro-American feminists. Theresa L. Torres

Fiesta

References and Further Reading Alarco´n, Norma. ‘‘Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Called My Back and AngloAmerican Feminism.’’ Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, ed. Gloria Anzaldu´a (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990). Anzaldu´a, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999). Aquino, Marı´a Pilar. Our Cry for Life: Feminist Theology from Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). ———. ‘‘Theological Method in U.S. Latino/a Theology.’’ From the Heart of the People, ed. Orlando O. Espı´n and Miguel H. Dı´az (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999). Aquino, Marı´a Pilar, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodriguez, eds. A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). Garcı´a, Alma M. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings (New York: Routledge, 1997). Gonzalez, Michelle. ‘‘Rethinking Latina Feminist Theologian.’’ Rethinking Latino (a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´n Espinosa (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2006). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. En la Lucha/In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). ———. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1996). Martell-Otero, Loida. ‘‘Women Doing Theology: Una Perspectiva Evange´lica.’’ Apuntes 14, no. 3 (1994): 67–85. Pen˜a, Milagros. ‘‘Border Crossings: Sociological Analysis and the Latina and Latino Religious Experience.’’ Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 4, no. 3 (February 1997): 13–27.

| 261

Rodrı´guez, Jeannette. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). ———. Cultural Memory: Resistance, Faith, and Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).

FIESTA Understanding the concept of Fiesta is decisively important to understanding how Hispanics worship. Though centered on Latino/a liturgical celebrations in a parish setting or home worship, it is not confined to either place, but encompasses both the community and the home life of the people. Fiesta is a celebration of the relationship with God whose confinement to the private realm, as practiced in much of Western society, is resisted and rejected by Hispanics. The unabashedly public nature of Latina/o popular religiosity centers on the Fiesta, where God’s revelatory presence in Hispanic worship spills out of the church and the home, and transforms public spaces, encompassing public squares, whole towns, and city neighborhoods. This most public and elaborate expression of how people understand themselves in relationship to God makes the Fiesta an outstanding example of the sensus fidelium (sense of the faithful) of the Christian faithful. The Latino/a Fiesta is an amalgamation of Spanish, Indian, and African elements, all with long histories. Pedrito Maynard-Reid points out that the Fiesta directly benefits from the fact that these three cultures are cultures of passion, and that quality is intensified by their amalgamation into a public religiosity marked by passionate responses to the

262 |

Fiesta

SAN JUAN BAUTISTA FIESTA The feast of Saint John the Baptist is June 24. In the Hispanic world it is celebrated with revelry as well as liturgical and popular religious rituals often lasting for a week. In Puerto Rico, where Saint John the Baptist is the patron saint of the island, it is observed in churches and with public celebrations in the town plazas. Thousands flock to the beaches to bathe and ask the patron for favors and good health. Because John was the baptizer of Jesus, it is believed that on his day all waters, especially sea water, are endowed with healing power. On June 29, 1950, the American Puerto Rican Saint John Day Observance was first celebrated in the Bronx. In 1953 the Archdiocese of New York adopted the already existing San Juan Fiesta as part of the pastoral outreach to the Hispanic community. The Fiesta came to symbolize both the faith and culture of the Puerto Rican in New York. Although it does not hold the popular appeal of the early years, the Fiesta continues to be celebrated in New York City on the closest Sunday to June 24. —ASD

presence of God (2000, 179 and 181). This encounter of Spanish, Indian, and African cultures, while certainly not without conflict considering it occurred within a context of conquest and enslavement, nonetheless yielded surprising points of compatibility among the three groups that produced Hispanic religious practice, including the Fiesta. It is typical to begin to trace the history of Fiesta with Spain because it was and remains an integral feature of Spanish religious and cultural life. Below the surface, the Latin American Fiesta is a product of a medieval, pre-Tridentine Spanish Christianity brought to America by the Spanish and untouched by the challenges brought by the reforms of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation. The Spanish Conquest and the Protestant Reformation began at the same time. Protestants could not mount any significant challenge to Spanish America’s allegiance to the Catholic faith because the Spanish ironically used Trent’s reforms for the sole purpose of keeping out Protestant ideas, thus

maintaining (and never bothering to reform) the pre-Tridentine status quo. Orlando Espı´n argues that the preTridentine religious world of the Spaniards ‘‘communicated their faith through symbol and rite, through devotions and liturgical practices,’’ which encompassed daily life to the point ‘‘that the cycles and components of village life became fundamental transmitters of the Gospel message.’’ Religious practice and the normative behavior expected of the Spaniard were one and the same so that ‘‘every dimension of daily life participated (or could participate) in the transmission and sustenance of Christianity’’ (1994, 317). Hispanic American culture is characterized still by many of these qualities, the most public of them being the Fiesta. The Indian civilizations encountered and conquered by the Spanish were decimated, with some driven to extinction, but their influence nonetheless pervades Latino/a popular religion and the Fiesta itself. Maynard-Reid identifies two major influences. First, the Latina/o receives

Fiesta

| 263

VEJIGANTES Vejigantes are colorful clown-like characters who for centuries have participated in Puerto Rico’s carnivals. The term is derived from the Spanish word vejiga, which means bladder. Originally, a blown-up cow’s bladder would be left to dry, then painted, and then filled with pebbles to make a rattling noise when shaken. While wearing this over the head, the Vejigante would chase children and women during the carnival, attempting to scare them. This practice is so old that it is mentioned in the 1605 classic Don Quixote. Today, rather than a dried cow’s bladder, the mask is usually made of papierˆ che´, complete with horns and fangs. Various Puerto Rican towns construct and adorn ma the Vejigante’s masks differently. The custom’s roots can be traced to the holy wars of Spain between the Christians and the Moors, with the Moors being represented by the Vejigantes. Saint James the Apostle is credited with leading the Spaniard Christians to victory. With the Spanish conquest of Puerto Rico, the custom was transformed by the African slaves brought to the island. Not allowed to pray to their own deities, slaves outwardly prayed to Saint James while inwardly praying to the African deity Saint James symbolized. Saint James came to be associated with the African deity Ogun, the Yoruban God of war, while the Vejigantes became the Christians. —MAD

from the Indian a worldview that is wholly spiritual. All creation is suffused with divine presence. Second, the Western conception of community, understood as something formed by a collection of individuals coming together, is turned on its head. The individual received no identity apart from the community because the latter is entirely responsible for having brought the former into existence. A communal consciousness pervaded Indian life and a communal orientation directed all activities. Today, the Fiesta reveals these influences through its recognition of the all-pervasive and potent presence of God throughout creation and the life of the community. Of course, Hispanics do not reject individual identity and initiative (as demonstrated by their entrepreneurial acumen), but neither is the family nor the community impoverished by it. The Fiesta, with its curious mixture

of group planning and individual spontaneous behavior, and the communal celebration of individual milestones achieved in life by individual members of the community, all show how the individual and the community mutually maintain and strengthen the identity of each other. Africans brought over as slaves by the Spanish and Portuguese to replace the labor lost by the decimated Indian population struggled to maintain their identity far from their native lands and under the worst conditions of forced labor. Music, dance, folklore, and the syncretism of Christianity with Yoruba religious beliefs found in much Hispanic religious practice, all carry an African pedigree. This last feature of African religious influence is controversial. Hispanic practice ranges from those who incorporate the African belief that spirits play a major role in life, but limit its influence to a belief in the

264 |

Fiesta

active presence of the Holy Spirit alone, to others who freely and openly syncretize worship of African gods with Christian faith. Santerı´a worship of African gods under the guise of Christian saints is perhaps the most prominent example of the latter. Despite criticisms leveled by many Christians against syncretistic practices, Latina/os incorporate these influences into the Fiesta nonetheless, celebrating the fact that they live in a spirit and/or Holy Spirit–filled world. To understand the qualities of the Fiesta itself, one can begin with the fact that it is arguably the outstanding example of popular religion. The people put on the Fiesta by creating the ambiente (environment) for their praise and worship of God as a community. Establishing the proper ambiente, understood in this context as a worship environment, is of particular importance for the Fiesta. Ricardo Ramı´rez describes ambiente as a ‘‘human, deeply personal situation characterized by a hospitality, warmth and joy genuinely experienced . . . a festive setting in conjunction with a significant event.’’ This significant event is the community’s desire to worship God, which allows for the Fiesta to happen because it arises as ‘‘an extension of the ambiente of la familia, el barrio [the neighborhood] and the extended relationships of compadrazgo ([the] relationship between parents and their children’s godparents) celebrated in sacrament’’ (1981, 33). Fixed barriers between private devotion and public praise and worship are nonexistent. By virtue of its being a product of popular religion, the Fiesta discloses the fact that Latino/as hold a sacramental view of life. Miguel Dı´az argues that Hispanic popular religion is populated with numerous symbols (the liturgy with its

symbols, statues of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and other saints, religious processions, etc.) all of which serve to enable the people to encounter the divine reality made present by them (2001, 64– 65). The plurality of popular expressions of religiosity erupts from the people themselves, contributing to the Fiesta. Through worship and praise of God’s active participation in the life of the community and concern for each of its members, the Fiesta enables the community to construct a unique mode of encounter and communion with God. Fiesta, as an example of popular religion, asserts the humanity of the Hispanic people. By extension it can serve also as a locus for resistance against attempts to dehumanize Latina/os through marginalization. Orlando Espı´n argues how popular religion is a locus for the most authentic expressions of Latino/a cultural identity and selfunderstanding as a people. Consequently, popular religious events like the Fiesta serve as a public display of the essentials of Hispanic cultural identity, which is not limited to the celebration of its many virtues but also the honest display of its vices. It also broadcasts a categorical rejection of attempts by those in the church and society who want to marginalize Hispanics as integral participants in the life of both (1992, 148–151). Virgil Elizondo’s argument that the Fiesta contains an eschatological dimension may come to some as a surprise, considering how, at first blush, the Fiesta celebrates the existing relationship between God and the community. The eschatological qualities of the Fiesta are decisively important because, in general, it reminds all involved of the irruption of God’s presence and action in human history and that God’s Kingdom is

Fiesta

| 265

TRES REYES MAGOS In Hispanic tradition, the Three Kings are known as Melchor, Gaspar, and Baltasar. These are the names that Christian tradition has given to the astrologers mentioned in Matthew’s Infancy Narrative. The Evangelist never mentions how many magi actually visited the baby Jesus; however, according to Matthew 2:1–12, the wise men from the East brought with them gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Over the years the number of magi varied, but in the seventh-century Christian tradition parceled out each gift to an individual wise man—three gifts, three magi. These magi came looking for a king, therefore tradition made them kings. Melchor (king of light) who brought gold was an old man and the Sultan of Arabia. Gaspar (treasurer) who brought frankincense was a youth and the Emperor of the Orient. Baltasar (God protect the king) was the middle-aged king of Ethiopia and he brought the myrrh. In the Middle Ages, the Three Magi Kings came to represent Europe, Asia, and Africa as well as the three ages of humanity: youth, adulthood, and old age. Instead of gold, incense, and myrrh, they bring toys and new clothes to good children. Their feast day was set for January 6 and is celebrated through gift giving within the Latino/a culture. In Miami, Florida, a large parade is held in the Cuban American community. —GCG

coming into existence now and will attain complete fulfillment in the future. The specific eschatological message found in the Fiesta is twofold: first it is prophetic in that the Fiesta declares that the daily challenges and misery of life will not have the last word, but the maintenance of Latino/a identity as a people beloved of God will. In response to this prophetic message, the people are motivated to rally and begin anew the effort to cooperate with God’s project in history. This project is the second aspect of the eschatological dimension of the Fiesta. It presents a foretaste of the world God will bring about, a world where the unique differences found among peoples will contribute to their unity as God’s people instead of being marks of division (1992, 122–123). Hispanics, by virtue of their encompassing every racial category, possess a unique ability to communicate this eschatological message of human

unity in God through their public celebrations of worship. Roberto Goizueta argues that the Fiesta represents a theological anthropology with a decidedly different set of priorities from the dominant modern human anthropology. Modernity views human beings as agents who act to make something of their lives. The consequence is alienation from the life human beings make because it becomes a mere object for endless manipulation, instead of something that should be lived. Fiesta presents an alternative vision where human beings receive life as a gift from God. This gift is not meant to be an object of human manipulation, but something that motivates a human response of gratitude to God who, out of love, freely gave this gift of life (1999, 85–86, 90–91). Goizueta warns that this idea of life lived as a gift from God must not be

266 |

Fiesta

allowed to slip into sentimentality, in other words something akin to the experience of a simple exchange of presents. Being a gift from God, life possesses an irreducible, ontological value. Life is not something that human beings possess in order to do, make, or achieve something. The whole of life, by virtue of it being given to us by God encompasses human existence and activity. Human work, play, and identity are all grounded ‘‘in the prior constitutive relationship with the One who has loved us first’’ (1999, 95). God alone gives humanity the life that makes our work, our play, and our very existence possible. This is why the Fiesta, observes Goizueta, is deliberately ambiguous. A common misconception of the Fiesta made by non-Hispanics is that it is solely a party, an event designed to escape temporarily from the daily duties and burdens of life. Certainly, the Fiesta does incorporate elements typically found in a party: food, drink, music, companionship, dancing, conversations, storytelling, joking about, and raucous laughter. However, the Fiesta is not designed to escape from the daily duties, burdens, and milestones of life. To the contrary, it remembers and incorporates into its proceedings the celebration of life, the play through which human beings enjoy life, and the commemoration of the work of life, reminding all gathered that it is a gift from God. The community is reminded that in response, the gift of life must be lived out with responsibility and joy, both in equal measure (1999, 90–91). Manifold examples of the Fiesta exist. They include, but are not limited to, the Mexican Advent tradition of the Posada, which reenacts the pilgrimage of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, inviting the community to join in the pilgrimage and

await the birth of Christ; the quincean˜era, which honors the life and life experiences of young women passing from childhood to potential motherhood, without which the community cannot survive nor thrive; holidays such as the Feast of the Three Kings where the family, in its role as domestic church, commemorates that all life belongs to God; the Dia de los Muertos held on All Saints’ Day (November 1), when living family members honor their ancestors; Holy Week liturgies and processions; pastorelas, which are plays commemorating God’s salvific activity in human history; the administering of sacraments like baptism, Eucharist, and the anointing of the sick, whose ceremonies spill out from their core liturgical setting and encompass the community as a whole; and the veneration of saints. Fiestas that honor Mary merit special attention, in particular the Fiesta of Our Lady of Guadalupe, because her appearance is a clarion call from God that Hispanics are a new creation, a mestizo culture that unites the Spanish with the Indians (and by extension the other peoples they encountered) without destroying the identity of any group. Latino/a identity in all its rich variety is signified, through Mary, as being both a gift from God and a symbol of reconciliation of all peoples. Fiesta is an activity of unity, which rejects as false dichotomies those persons or things that ought to be united as one. It unites private and public expressions of religion; it unites individuals with their communities; it unites the serious work of commemorating life in all its dimensions lived in God’s presence with the celebration of the same; it is an expression of a Hispanic culture that, by its internal diversity, unites human cultures; it unites the present day with God’s

Fiesta promised future; and through its sacramental vision and religiosity, it unites humanity with God. Ramo´n Luza´rraga

References and Further Reading Dı´az, Miguel H. On Being Human: U.S. Hispanic and Rahnerian Perspectives (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). Elizondo, Virgil P. ‘‘Mestizaje as a Locus of Theological Reflection.’’ Frontiers of Hispanic Theology in the United States, ed. Alan Figueroa Deck, S.J. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992). Espı´n, Orlando O. ‘‘Grace and Humanness: A Hispanic Perspective.’’ We Are a People! Initiatives in Hispanic American Theology, ed. Roberto S. Goizueta (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992).

| 267

———. ‘‘Popular Catholicism among Latinos.’’ Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S.: Issues and Concerns, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Alan Figueroa Deck, S.J. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). Goizueta, Roberto S. ‘‘Fiesta: Life in the Subjunctive.’’ From the Heart of Our People, ed. Orlando O. Espı´n and Miguel H. Dı´az (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999). Maynard-Reid, Pedrito U. Diverse Worship: African-American, Caribbean & Hispanic Perspectives (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000). Ramirez, Ricardo. Fiesta, Worship, and Family: Essays on Mexican-American Perception of Liturgy and Family Life (San Antonio: Mexican-American Cultural Center, 1981).

G Religion at large may be hostile toward gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) individuals; however, some religious communities welcome and celebrate gay identity. For instance, Espiritı´smo, Santerı´a, and other indigenous religious/spiritual practices are more open and accepting of homosexuality. Some denominations have GLBT organizations and openly welcome these individuals, such as the Other Sheep Multicultural Ministries, an organization founded in 1992 that has over 60 centers across six continents. Latina/os in general, including Hispanic GLBT, consider religion/spirituality an essential part of their lives and identity. Latino/as have historically been heavily influenced by Roman Catholic beliefs and, more recently, also by Protestantism. Religion has greatly influenced Hispanic culture and the Latino/a notion of homosexuality. Traditional Hispanics hold rigid moral standards, strict gender roles, and fixed familial expectations. These expectations include getting

GLBT Following the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Americans felt more comfortable in openly discussing issues of sexuality. This, however, has not been true in every community. Among Latino/as, certain topics continue to be unmentionable, particularly the topic of homosexuality and religion. Although today homosexuality is no longer criminalized in Latin American countries, it is still perceived as unnatural by many religious groups. Silence prevails around the subject of homosexuals of faith, particularly in Hispanic religious communities. In recent years, organizations, including the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Hispanic American Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion, and the Hispanic Theological Initiative, have provided platforms for discussion of the topic. To date, though, few open discussions about the topic among religious leaders have taken place.

269

270 |

GLBT

ELIAS GABRIEL GALVAN (1938–) Born in San Juan Acozac, Puebla, Mexico, Elias Gabriel Galvan was the first U.S. Hispanic bishop elected in the United Methodist Church. He was also the first Hispanic president of the United Methodist Council of Bishops. Galvan received his higher education at California State University (B.A.) and the School of Theology at Claremont (Rel.D). He was elected to the episcopacy in 1984 by the Western Jurisdiction. While presiding over the Seattle Episcopal Area, he was involved in a controversy involving the removal and trial of an openly gay pastor, Rev. Karen Dammen. She was acquitted by an ecclesiastical jury of her peers on March 20, 2004. Shortly afterwards, Bishop Galvan published an open letter to the church opposing homophobia and urging reconciliation. He was assigned to the newly formed Desert Southwest Conference, Phoenix Episcopal Area. During his tenure, he was active in the formation of the National Plan for Hispanic Ministries and Methodists Associated to Represent the Cause of Hispanic Americans (MARCHA). He retired from the Episcopacy in 2004. He is currently serving as executive director of MARCHA. —DFF

married, procreating, and continuing the family. Since homosexuality may disrupt the fulfillment of such expectations, it is often perceived as a threat to the core cultural values of the Latina/o community. Similarly, the Catholic Church and most organized religions support traditional family dynamics, promote sexuality in the service of procreation, and condemn homosexuality, considering it unnatural and its acts sinful. In addition to procreation, other important values in the Latino/a culture are gender roles and machismo. For that reason, stigma accrues to a feminine man and a masculine woman, as they do not conform to gender expectations. Such strict gender guidelines lead to the use of terms such as ‘‘men who have sex with men,’’ since men who engage in sexual behavior with other men may not consider themselves homosexuals or bisexuals, especially if they take the active role during sexual intercourse.

In general, Hispanic GLBT individuals find organized religion to be an oppressing factor in their coming out process, causing delays in the process or even in the decision to come out. Moreover, Latino/a communities seldom provide protection from homophobic prejudice to GLBT individuals. This is true in part because homosexuality may be perceived as a sin and their sexual acts interpreted as weakness of character that could or should be prevented. Overall, regardless of their religious affiliation, those individuals who believe homosexuality is a choice tend to be less tolerant of homosexuality. Catholics and Protestants have been consistently identified as the faiths that are least tolerant of homosexuality, and who tend to hold negative attitudes toward homosexuality, more specifically toward sexual acts between individuals of the same gender. For instance, the Vatican has actively condemned homosexuality, considers

GLBT homosexuality immoral and against the natural law, and prohibits those who practice or support homosexuality from attending or teaching in a seminary. These beliefs are in part based on the literal interpretation of some biblical passages and the idea that sexual activity should only occur between a husband and a wife, and should be open to conception. Tolerance of GLBT individuals in the Hispanic community may be granted as long as sexual identity remains invisible. For that reason many Hispanic GLBT men and women, specifically priests, ministers, and religious scholars, opt to keep their sexual identity a secret, in order to avoid the outcast status that would result from open acknowledgment of it. Such conflicting loyalties to both of their minority communities may cause Latina/o GLBT individuals to feel marginalized in both groups, leading them to compartmentalize themselves into two independent identities: the gay and the religious Latino/a. Feeling that they need to choose one or the other as these cannot coexist, GLBT Hispanics are faced with significant difficulties reconciling their religious (and therefore ethnic) identity with their sexual identity. Many live a life where they accept their homosexuality but at the same time believe it is a sin. Those who do achieve reconciliation seem to be able to achieve it through direct communication with God and not through organized religion. At times, choosing to follow a conservative religion, such as Catholicism, involves not disclosing their sexual orientation, as well as dealing with the disparity between religious teaching and their lives, abstaining from sexual activity, and attempting to live a heterosexual

| 271

life. The prohibitions of the church are a source of alienation that also separates them from their families. Religion is intrinsic to Hispanic family and community life, and therefore loss of religious support may result in the loss of family and community support. Given that Latino/as hold a collective worldview and heavily rely on external sources of support, such loss can often be a traumatic experience and affect the individual’s sense of self. Strong ties with the family, culture, and the community support the Hispanic’s healthy cultural and religious identification. Hence, such strong ties can provide Latina/o GLBTs with benefits such as a sense of belonging, heritage, values, and a strong sense of self. In spite of the negative messages that most organized religions transmit to Hispanic GLBTs, there are potential benefits for these individuals in belonging to a religious group. Positive religious experiences may provide necessary support and encourage positive psychological wellbeing. Many Latino/a GBLT individuals find strength in religion/spirituality and employ prayers and other spiritual rituals to cope with difficult situations, including the coming out process. Hector Luis Torres

References and Further Reading Conner, Randy P. Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trangender Participation in AfricanInspired Traditions in the Americas (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004). De La Torre, Miguel A. ‘‘Beyond Machismo: A Cuban Case Study.’’ Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 19 (1999): 213–233.

272 |

GLBT

———, ed. Out of the Shadows into the Light: Christianity and Homosexuality (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2009).

Lumsden, Ian. Machos, Maricones and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).

H HEALTH CARE

Historical Impulses in the Study of Hispanic Health Care

The role of religion in health care among people who became known as Latina/os can be traced back to first encounters between the Spaniards and indigenous peoples in the Americas. Some of the Spanish chroniclers were interested in discovering new medicines, and so they collected as much information as possible about health practices. In general, health care and medicine were intertwined with an imperialistic study of subject peoples. This entry treats health care as a result of the triadic interactions of European, indigenous, and African traditions that are still being experienced among the pan-ethnic group we call Latino/as, and that includes Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans. Much of what will be discussed falls into the category of folk medicine that is derived from historical and traditional practices within Hispanic communities rather than from modern scientific methods of diagnosis and healing.

As the United States acquired formerly Spanish territories, there was an interest in knowing as much as possible about America’s new imperial subjects. This is quite evident in the person of John G. Bourke, a captain in the United States Army who published in the 1890s some of the first formal studies of Mexican American health care practices and ‘‘superstitions’’ while stationed at Fort Ringgold, Texas. Bourke provided a catalogue of herbs and remedies along with the classification of illnesses such as susto, empacho, and caida de mollera, which are too often described without nuance by many researchers who study Mexican American health practices. Bourke’s studies also influenced the selection of the Lower Rio Grande of Texas as a primary laboratory for the study of Mexican American health practices. Bourke, as well as modern scholars, notes that at least six major traditions can be detected in Mexican 273

274 |

Health Care

American curanderismo (folk healing), and these include Judeo-Christian, Arabic medicine, medieval and later European witchcraft, and Native American traditions. Given such disparate sources, it is difficult to speak of simply ‘‘indigenous’’ medicine. Within the broader context of American society, the study of Latina/o health care has been included in studies of religious alternatives to conventional health care. Health care concerns have always shaped religion and vice versa. Some religious groups such as Seventh-day Adventists and Christian Science, may be seen, in part, as health care reform movements. As usual, whenever conventional health care is perceived to be deficient, new alternatives are proposed, and many of them are religious in nature. Another impulse is more practical. Latinas/os have become a significant group in America, and modern medical personnel realize the importance of knowing the health care practices of their patients. This concern began in the late nineteenth century with Bourke, but since that time the Latina/o population has grown to over 40 million. Many doctors and nurses realize they must be educated in the role of religion in health care among Latina/os. Indeed, Latino/as can bring a host of illness classifications and ideas that are not familiar to Anglo practitioners. A more recent impulse derives from efforts to show scientifically that religious factors can have positive effects on therapy. Some of the foremost representatives of this effort include D. B. Larson and Harold Koenig. These authors seek to reverse a disjunction between health care and religion that came into full force with the advent of ‘‘Germ theory’’ and powerful new scientific

therapies that made religion seemingly irrelevant. As we shall see, many of these studies of the effect of religion on health have bypassed Hispanic populations.

Explaining Illness All health care systems usually include ‘‘etiology,’’ the general name for ideas about the cause of illness. Here we distinguish between ‘‘disease,’’ which refers to any modern biomedical classification, and ‘‘illness,’’ which is any condition that a culture defines as abnormal. Thus, many ‘‘illnesses’’ among Mexican Americans are not recognized as ‘‘diseases’’ by a modern medical system. Likewise, many diseases are not recognized as illnesses by many Mexican Americans. For example, arteriosclerosis, when exhibiting no symptoms, may not even be acknowledged as an illness by Mexican Americans. Among Mexican Americans, some of the best-known illnesses are mostly of ‘‘natural origin,’’ especially as classified by Euro-American anthropologists. For example, some scholars note illnesses relating to dislocated organs (fallen fontanelle) or illnesses of emotional origin (susto). ‘‘Caı´da de mollera’’ (fallen fontanelle) is often manifested by an inability of a baby to breast-feed properly. ‘‘Empacho’’ refers to a wide variety of indigestive ailments, but often a bolus of food attached to the stomach walls is believed to be responsible for the illness. In part due to overemphasis on studying Mexican American folk traditions in South Texas, many anthropologists have missed the regional and sociolinguistic variation in the use of these terms. Witchcraft (brujerı´a) and magic are believed to cause illness. In the 1890s, John G. Bourke records this belief

Health Care among the inhabitants of the Rio Grande Valley. One of the more common diagnoses attributed to witchcraft is mal de ojo (evil eye), which can be found in many cultures, ancient and modern. Belief that one is the victim of ‘‘bad magic’’ can help outline the moral and personal conflicts that explain why the patient, rather than someone else, has become ill. Demons and gods can also cause illness. The biblical God, for example, is often seen as both the sender and healer of illnesses (Job 5:18). In Santerı´a, fevers (and mishaps with fire) can be associated with Chango´, the orisha associated with lightning and fire. In Pentecostal traditions, which we will discuss further below, what are otherwise perceived as natural diseases can also be attributed to demons. For example, it has been a common Pentecostal belief that demons are responsible for schizophrenia or psychosis, illnesses that modern medicine attributes to brain disorders. Scientific medicine regards the issue of sin as irrelevant in etiology. However, sin and illness have been linked at least as far back as the third millennium BCE, judging by Mesopotamian sources. The biblical book of Deuteronomy (e.g., Chapter 28) makes a systematic link that may be reduced to two relationships: (1) Illness = sin; and (2) Sin = illness. That is to say, if one is sick, then one must have sinned. If one sins, then expect illness to occur. This sort of etiology was juxtaposed to that found in the biblical book of Job, in which illnesses can be caused by mysterious, yet divine factors other than sinning. In the New Testament, Jesus specifically disputes that sin is always related to illness (John 9:2), even if elsewhere he is portrayed as accepting this relationship (Mark 2:5–10).

| 275

Among Latina/os, the same tension exists in these opposing etiologies. Sins may be minimal social slights to more severe breaches of moral codes. Thus, Lydia Cabrera, the noted scholar of Santerı´a, reports the case of a babalawo (a Santerı´a priest) who was believed to be sick because he stole a peacock dedicated to Oshun, the orisha associated with love (1975, 45). Different folk healers may recognize an overlap between the Christian concept of sin and more ‘‘natural’’ factors (e.g., an imbalance of humors or disharmony with nature) in diagnosing an illness. As in the case of biblical stories, therapy may include seeking forgiveness from God or redressing perceived wrongs. As such, therapy serves social needs and may be subject to social controls.

Therapeutic Strategies ‘‘Therapeutic strategies’’ refer to the concerted actions taken by a patient in order to receive healing. Such actions depend on religious presuppositions, economics, and other factors. Most health care systems develop a hierarchy of options. The first option is usually the least expensive and simplest remedy. If this option does not provide results, then more expensive or complicated treatments may be sought. In modern America, for example, one’s first option for a headache may be to take the aspirin that sits on the nightstand. If headaches persist or become severe, then one may seek the help of a general doctor, and then a specialist. In Latina/o subcultures, home remedies and self-help may include prayers and homemade remedies. Personal gardens may have yerba buena (mint), which is thought to cure a variety of

276 |

Health Care

Vitamins, homeopathic medicines, and other products line the shelves at the shop of a curandero, or healer. (Stephanie Maze/Corbis)

ailments. Latino/as in the United States are just as likely as Anglos to have aspirin and other medicines bought over the counter at a local Anglo-owned pharmacy. After simple self-help, the next step, especially among older or immigrant generations, may be to visit with a folk healer, usually called curanderos/ curanderas among Mexican Americans. Determining the degree of utilization of these curanderos has been fraught with controversy. Some researchers have been criticized for regarding curanderos as characteristically widespread among Mexican Americans and/or for seeing them as the continuation of ‘‘primitive’’ superstition. Yet, one important survey completed in Southern California reports that less than 1 percent of 500 Mexican American households mentioned the use of folk healers. Indeed, one must heed

generational and regional differences more than earlier researchers tended to do. Curanderas/os have a range of skills and usually charge few, if any, fees. Some authors note that curanderas/os often resemble psychiatrists more than medical physicians. Mexican American curanderas/os can provide advice on everything from marital problems to preventive care. Giving advice on social and emotional problems is also common among consultants associated with ‘‘Spiritism’’ (see below) among Puerto Ricans in New York. Similar observations may be made about priests (babalawos) in Santerı´a. The most accomplished folk healers know plants very well. This was already reported by Bourke in the 1890s for Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley. The ‘‘herbalist’’ tradition can also

Health Care

| 277

YERBEROS Yerberos (herbalists) are specialists who have learned the secrets of the herbs by which diseases and illnesses can be cured and evil diverted. Although most curandero/as and santera/os are yerberos, not all yerberos are religious faith leaders. Those who are not belong to a lower tier of folk healers. Nevertheless, the healing powers of yerberos are considered to be a gift from God. These yerberos understand herbs to be the most important ingredients within religious ritual, more important than sacrificial animals. Every plant is alive, infused with a magical force and protected by spiritual entities. As such, herbs and plants are able to heal body and/or soul. While a medical doctor might prescribe medicine that cures the physical, the yerbero also attempts to bring healing with the spiritual world. Yerberos can trace their roots to the ancient fusion of indigenous herbal medicine techniques (Native American in Central and South America and African in the Caribbean) and religious rituals. Still, not every yerbero is a practitioner of a religious tradition. Their approach to healing serves as an alternative to unaffordable conventional medical care. Because of the difficulty of obtaining wild plants and herbs in major industrial cities, the number of plants and herbs used has been greatly reduced. Yerberos participating in these forms of Hispanic folk medicine usually turn to the botan´icas to obtain what is needed. —MAD

be found among Afro-Caribbean traditions in Puerto Rican and Cuban American communities. At the same time, some older traditional specialties (e.g., hueseros/bone specialists) may be dying, according to surveys done by some medical anthropologists. Therapy itself can take a wide range of forms. Curanderas/os can combine Christian prayer with nonofficial rituals, such as the Mexican American barrida (‘‘sweeping’’). The sweeping action of a broom, often made of special materials, is thought to act as a magnet that carries away any malady. It can also be seen as a form of sympathetic magic in which an action works by virtue of its imitation of the intended result. In Santerı´a, one can combine more elaborate rituals, which may involve music, herbs, and the sacrifice of small animals. Another aspect of therapy that is often overlooked by researchers is the role of

art in healing. In cases of illness, many Mexican Americans paint special ‘‘retablos,’’ or wooden boards. These retablos can be used in the petition for healing or as a thanksgiving offering after healing. Retablos characteristically include a picture of the patient along with an inscription detailing the scene or medical problem. Likewise, many crafted figurines may be used in Santerı´a healing rituals. One may see that Santerı´a healing rituals also have aesthetic dimensions that range from the placement of objects within the sacred space to the crafting of representations of the orishas. Modern medical science may provide the next series of options, and economics is one of the most important factors in this selection. The relationship between folk healing and modern medical science is an uneasy one. Modern biomedicine is often viewed by religious believers to emphasize the physical at the expense of

278 |

Health Care

the spiritual dimensions of the human experience. The response of medical science toward folk healing may range from indifference to hostility. Recently, however, there are complementarian models that acknowledge that indigenous traditions have some merit.

Healer Cults As has been the case through much of recorded history, many individuals rise to prominence as healers. U.S. Hispanics may have more than their fair share of such prominent miracle healers, and these include Don Pedro Jaramillo (d. 1907), who has been called the most famous healer in southwestern Mexican American history. Born in Mexico, he gained prominence when he moved to the Los Olmos Ranch in what is now Brooks County, Texas. Jaramillo also used a mixture of indigenous and Christian religious rituals. Teresa Urrea was a woman whose fame as a healer at the turn of the century led to her being viewed as a political threat by many in U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Urrea also illustrates the extent to which gender is a crucial aspect of folk healing. Women form a relatively large proportion of folk healers among Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans. This occupation can provide women with prestige and power that they may otherwise lack. The healer who has inspired the most persistent new religious movement among some Mexican Americans is probably El Nin˜o Fidencio, whose full name was Jose´ Fidencio Constantino Sı´ntora. Reportedly born in 1898 in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, he became renowned in the 1920s and 1930s for his reported healings in Espinazo, Nuevo

Leo´n (Mexico). By the time of his death in 1938, El Nin˜o (‘‘The Child’’) spawned a whole ‘‘Fidencista’’ movement, part of which eventually became an official church in Mexico in 1993. Fidencista influence reaches into the United States, especially among Mexican Americans in the Southwest. As Mexican Americans and other Latina/os grow and interact with Anglo culture, the traditions of Latino/a folk healers have lost some ground or have been recontextualized. Indeed, U.S. Hispanics may now be just as familiar with someone like James Van Praagh, the Anglo spiritist, or Deepak Chopra, who espouses Ayurvedic medical traditions of India. On the other hand, there is still much to be investigated. There may be dozens of healers who may be well known in smaller Latina/o communities, but unknown to a modern media that can create and market renowned healers on a massive scale.

Pentecostalism as a Health Care System Pentecostalism, from its very beginnings, viewed healing as a central part of its mission. The history of this Americanborn movement is quite complex. The movement had at least two embryonic foci—one in the mountains of Appalachia, and the other in the urban landscapes of Los Angeles. Pentecostalism began as a sort of apocalyptic movement dissatisfied with the modernism that was perceived to be infecting mainstream churches. The apocalyptic nature of Pentecostalism was also tied to the healing aspect, something illustrated by Acts 2:17–18 and Mark 16:17–18. Armed with such

Health Care passages, Pentecostals emphasized that miraculous healings confirmed that the end of time was near, though eventually the apocalyptic aspect ceded to the idea that healing was simply a normal part of the Christian life. This attitude contrasted with many major Protestant churches, which saw miracles as restricted to the earliest ‘‘Apostolic Age.’’ One of the earliest organized Pentecostal churches, the Church of God, had health care as part of its rationale for prohibiting the use of tobacco. Many of the first Pentecostals among Spanish speakers certainly promoted healing as a central part of their message. For example, Marı´a Atkinson (1879– 1963), who founded the Mexican branch of the Church of God, promoted the value of Pentecostal health care in a systematic manner. This was evident not only in her sermons but also in the banner that included the words ‘‘Jesus Heals’’ (Jesu´s sana) displayed at the altar in many of her services. Many of her early converts first visited her church, in part, because of their search for healing.

Spiritism as a Health Care System Some scholars distinguish between ‘‘Spiritualism’’ and ‘‘Spiritism.’’ The former is a general practice centered on a medium’s ability to communicate with the dead for the benefit of paying clients. Spiritism is a specific movement that syncretizes Spiritualism, African, and Catholic traditions with the work of a Frenchman named Allan Kardec (1804– 1865). Born Hippolyte Le´ on Denizard Rivail, Kardec was the author of influential spiritism treatises, including The Book of Spirits (1857) and The Book of Mediums (1861).

| 279

Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland, particularly in New York, are very familiar with Spiritism. Kardec’s philosophy, which was brought to Puerto Rico by the 1890s, resonated at first with the White upper-income stratum in Puerto Rico. The upper classes turned to the French Spiritist beliefs, not wanting to identify themselves with the African and jı´baro (peasant) elements within their society. By practicing Spiritism, the elite legitimated the ancestor worship already thriving in Puerto Rico. Indeed, the idea of communicating with the dead existed among the indigenous Taı´no, and in traditions brought from Africa. In New York, Puerto Rican Spiritism began to mix with Cuban Santerı´a. Much of the mixing took place through the interaction of Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians. Spiritism now provides a serious alternative to Protestant and Catholic traditions among New York Puerto Ricans. In New York City there are centros (‘‘centers’’), where practitioners gather. Sometimes these centros become the target of protests by Puerto Rican evangelicals who see them as centers for witchcraft. Pentecostalism and AfroCaribbean Spiritism, in addition to being religious rivals sometimes, are also rivals in health care clienteles.

Santería as a Health Care System Healing is a major concern of Santerı´a. Santerı´a is an adaptation of the religion of the Yoruba slaves, whose ancestors had a highly organized urban culture that can be traced back at least 1,000 years in Nigeria. The worship of African deities in the guise (or as equivalent to) Catholic saints (‘‘santos’’) by the African slaves resulted in the word ‘‘Santerı´a’’ being

280 |

Health Care

applied to the newly emerging religious tradition. It is too simple to call the Yoruba religion polytheistic, as eventually all of the transcendent entities, called orishas, are but an aspect of the supreme God named Olodumare (‘‘the Lord of all destinies’’). The orishas may specialize in different illnesses. Babalu Aye´ (identified with Saint Lazarus) is perhaps the orisha best known for specializing in the curing of diseases. But other orishas also have their roles in health care. The year 1959 marked a turning point for Santerı´a. Although Cubans had been coming to America since the nineteenth century, it was the Cuban revolution that resulted in hundreds of thousands of new Cuban immigrants to the United States, and particularly to South Florida. Santerı´a thereby entered a new phase in a relatively new environment. In America, Santerı´a was ‘‘desyncretized,’’ meaning that it sought to reclaim its African origins. Animal sacrifice, which has been a part of many health care traditions since ancient times (see Leviticus 14:4–5) still plays a role in health care in Santerı´a. Perhaps the most important public gateway to the world of Santerı´a in the United States is the bota´nica, a sort of Santerı´a supermarket, which usually stocks the herbs and paraphernalia needed by practitioners. One may find cans of aerosol sprays marketed for their efficacy in love or other aspects important to everyday life. As such, the bota´nica represents the use of capitalistic marketing techniques by Santerı´a. The multiplication of bota´nicas, especially in Miami and New York, reflects a more accessible attitude toward Santerı´a in the United States.

Divination is probably one of the most recurrent services that a babalawo performs for his patients. Ifa´, which relies on the casting of palm nuts or the reading of a necklace, is perhaps the most prominent form of divination. The procedures of Ifa´ aim to create a dialogue between the various configurations of the divining instruments and the client. Any conflict between Afro-Caribbean religious traditions can also be seen, at least in part, as a conflict between health care systems. The competition may be economic, especially if practitioners in one system derive part of their livelihood from such consultations. The competition may also be for power, especially if one group deems their ideology as more ‘‘true’’ or the one that should have dominance. Indeed, many espirista consultations expend part of the time instructing patients not to go to an alternative system. Likewise, one often sees competition between scientific medicine and alternative health care, including that of Pentecostalism and Santerı´a.

Science and Religion Some medical researchers are renewing the study of the role of religion in health care. Some of these studies are practical attempts to see whether some religions create a healthier lifestyle. Other studies are motivated by the attempt to validate the efficacy of supernatural claims of specific religions. The scientific merits of such endeavors have been criticized by many scientists and scholars of religion. Nonetheless, the study of how religion can influence health is important regardless of whether one accepts supernatural assumptions or not. Are adherents of some religions healthier than

Health Care adherents of other religions? If so, why? And, it is in this context that Latino/a health care is relevant. Such researchers have, by and large, neglected Latina/o populations. For example, the landmark tome published by Oxford Press, Handbook of Religion and Health (2001) bears only scant references to studies involving Hispanic religious traditions. Many researchers who see the value of faith in health often cite studies that conclude churchgoers are healthier than nonchurchgoers. For example, some report that churchgoers have an average lower blood pressure (about 5 mm lower) than nonchurchgoers. Yet, in such studies ‘‘churchgoers’’ is a selective category that may reflect differences in socioeconomic status rather than church attendance. We can also ask if churches that emphasize healing attract the sicker individuals. If so, there would be a negative correlation between religion and health. These are the types of questions that still need to be answered in an exploration of the role of religion in health care among Hispanics. Another problem is that the set of churches selected might not place much demand on members. Accordingly, it would be difficult to use such a set to generalize about the good effects of faith and ‘‘churchgoing.’’ The churches used in these studies may indeed provide emotional support that may be regarded as positive. However, there are many other churches that can place demands on members that can cause emotional problems. By omitting such churches, researchers may be unscientifically selective in their samples. Indeed, Koenig, who is otherwise an advocate of the positive effects of religion on health, notes that groups that believe in suicide

| 281

(e.g., Jim Jones temple, Heaven’s Gate cult) suffer obviously negative consequences to health. Other scholars note that groups in which alternative therapies predominate over the use of conventional medical means suffer disproportionate mortality rates from diseases that are otherwise very treatable. Even some scholars generally positive toward African traditional health care reported that some Yoruba healers may use herbs that make mental illness worse. In short, much more comparative study needs to be done on religion and health. Other writers would add that the efficacy of religion in curing disease may not be the most important role of religion. For example, some medical anthropologists have reported that the presence of symptoms can persist even among those reporting healing in Seattle, Washington. That is to say, patients would report being healed regardless of the status of their symptoms. Others also received conventional treatment along with religious therapy, and so it was not scientifically possible to eliminate the possibility that conventional treatment had brought about any healing. Accordingly, there must be factors other than actual healing that attract patients to Pentecostalism and other alternative health care systems. Faith healing, even if it does not always produce desired effects, at least does not cost anything, or not as much as a conventional system that may be equally ineffective. Patients may perceive faith healing as an advantage simply because it is not as economically burdensome as conventional health care. In addition, a Pentecostal congregation may provide other means of emotional and social

282 |

Health Care

support that conventional health clinics or other denominations do not, at least from a patient’s perception.

Conclusion As is the case in many places and cultures, it is useful to think of health care among U.S. Latinas/os in terms of overlapping systems. Each system may stand alone. For example, Pentecostalism theoretically can stand alone as a complete health care system. Some Pentecostals may believe that they need not avail themselves of scientific health care if God can cure all illnesses without medical help. But, the majority of Pentecostals do not function in this manner, nor do believers in Cuban American Santerı´a or Puerto Rican Spiritism. Most negotiate and interact with different health care systems to the point that we probably have to think of a larger super– health care system that encompasses both scientific medicine and folk medicine. This sort of interaction has been the case throughout history. The need for an alternative health care system has never died out. We can see competing and/or overlapping systems from the dawn of writing until today. Certainly, scientific medicine has become more acceptable than ever. As Mexican Americans become more urbanized and move into higher income brackets, the old curanderismo has apparently yielded to more visits to conventional physicians. However, alternative medicine has not died completely; it has only taken new forms. In many communities, there may still be some links with traditional practices, but they are reinterpreted and recontextualized. There are a number of trends that may intensify in the near future. One is a

continued interaction in the health care systems of Hispanic subgroups in the United States. We already see that happening between Puerto Ricans and Cubans in New York City. The more Latina/o subgroups interact with each other, then the more Latino/as of one subgroup may feel comfortable using traditional healing traditions predominant in other subgroups. Many Hispanics are already clients of healing systems that are originally drawn from other parts of the globe (e.g., Ayurvedic medicine). Certain forms of folk healing may decline among more prosperous and assimilated Latina/ os, though new forms will probably develop, especially as Central and South American groups become more prominent in the U.S. Latino/a religious experience. In any event, the complex configurations of etiologies and therapeutic strategies that are still evolving among Hispanics form a new and dynamic episode in the long history of the interaction of religion and health care. Hector Avalos

References and Further Reading Bourke, John G. ‘‘Popular Medicine, Customs, and Superstitions of the Rio Grande.’’ The Journal of American Folklore 7 (1894): 119–146. ———. ‘‘Notes on the Language and FolkUsage of the Rio Grande Valley.’’ The Journal of American Folklore 9 (1896): 81–116. Cabrera, Lydia. El Monte (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1975). Curry, Mary Cuthrell. ‘‘The Yoruba Religion in New York.’’ New York Glory: Religions in the City, ed. Tony Carnes and Anna Karpathakis (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

Hermeneutical Circle | 283 De La Torre, Miguel. Santerı´a: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004). Edgerton, Robert. Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (New York: Free Press, 1992). Gardner, Dore, and Kay Turner. Nin˜o Fidencio: A Heart Thrown Open (Albuquerque: Museum of New Mexico Museum Press, 1992). Koenig, Harold, Michael E. McCullough, and David B. Larson, Handbook of Religion and Health (New York: Oxford, 2001). Larson, D. B., H. Koenig, B. H. Kaplan, R. S. Greenberg, E. Logue, and H. A. Tyroler. ‘‘The Impact of Religion on Men’s Blood Pressure.’’ Journal of Religion and Health 28 (1989): 265–278. Pattison, E. Mansell. ‘‘Ideological Support for the Marginal Middle Class: Faith Healing and Glossolalia.’’ Religious Movements in Contemporary America, ed. Irving I. Zaretsky and Mark P. Leone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974). Perez y Mena, Andre´s Isidoro. Speaking with the Dead: Development of Afro-Latin Religion Among Puerto Ricans in the United States (New York: AMS Press, 1991). Roeder, Beatrice A. Chicano Folk Medicine from Los Angeles, California (Berkeley: University of California, 1988). Trotter, Robert T., and Juan Antonio Chavira. Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997). Wedel, Johan. Santerı´a Healing: A Journey into the Afro-Cuban World of Divinities, Spirits, and Sorcery (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004).

HERMENEUTICAL CIRCLE The hermeneutical circle has become the focus of contemporary issues regarding

interpretation of Scripture, especially as a methodology for theologies of liberation. It was initially used to describe the idea that any text must be understood as a whole by reference to its individual parts and also that each individual part must be understood by reference to the whole. The circle was to be found within the text and the tradition of which it was a part—its cultural, historical, and literary perspectives. Later philosophers emphasized existential understanding, that is, the interplay between our self-understanding and our understanding of the world. Sometimes discussed as the fusion of horizons of the text and the interpreter, the focus is on the understanding the interpreter brings to the text from his/her perspective. At first, fusion of horizons included the concept that the perspective of text and interpreter, when brought together, would represent a fixed reality. Later, as critical philosophers of certain schools such as the Frankfurt school and poststructuralist philosophers questioned the idea of reality as fixed, the fusion of horizons was also viewed by some as the place where the interpreter was altered by the experience of the text, just as the text was altered by the interpreter’s perspective. Critics of some of the versions of hermeneutics challenged the idea that the text and interpreter could be altered without some mooring to a fixed reality. The theological emphasis is on the prophetic nature of the revelation made possible through the perspective of the interpreter and his/her lived experience. For Liberation Theologians, the emphasis is on those possibilities for liberation that the hermeneutical circle allows. For them, debates about the adequacy of the method used for interpretation of texts

284 |

Hermeneutical Circle

frame the debates about the meaning of liberation. Here lies the particular contribution of Hispanic American interpretation. For liberation theologians, to do theology in a new way, a new method was also needed. Juan Luis Segundo, an Uruguayan Jesuit, is regarded as the first to articulate the need for rigor in the method of scriptural interpretation for the liberation movement. He synthesized the long-standing debates regarding interpretation in service of Liberation Theology. His insistence challenged the content of Latin American Liberation theology by its examination of interpretive method in reading the text. For Segundo, the hermeneutical circle begins first with the interpreter’s experience of reality, an experience that leads the interpreter to ideological suspicion —that is, a questioning of whether a view that permits persons to remain complacent in the face of human suffering is an adequate view of Scripture. Second, the interpreter takes his/her questions or suspicions, that is, the hermeneutical suspicions about interpretation, and applies them to scripture and understandings of theology as he/she knows them. Third, the combined new experience of lived reality and what must be the theological demand for justice brings the interpreter to a new perspective about the dominant interpretation that scripture or theological teachings must have left out. Liberation Theologians sometimes refer to this as the action of God in history because the interpreter is moved to some action as a result of this new understanding. Fourth, the interpreter creates a new interpretation consistent with his/her lived experience and the teachings of faith (Segundo 1976, 9).

This circle is open-ended and neverending. It goes from self to text to self again, from lived experience of present history, including the action or praxis, inspired by reflection on the scripture and justice demands of theology, to past historical context. Jose´ Mı´guez Bonino describes this movement as one ‘‘between the text in its historicity and our own historical reading of it in obedience’’ (Mı´guez Bonino 1975: 102). Gustavo Gutie´rrez describes the circle as from humanity to God and from God to humanity; from history to faith and from faith to history; from the human word to the word of the Lord and from the word of the Lord to the human word; from human love to the love of God and from the love of God to human love; from human justice to the holiness of God and from the holiness of God to human justice; from the poor to God and from God to the poor. (Gutie´rrez 1977, 44)

The order in which the movement of the hermeneutical circle is described bears a relationship to the concern of the different theologians with assuring that some normative principles are present. For example, Bonino, Segundo, and others have been criticized because their movement permits violence in order to stop the suffering of some persons oppressed by others. Theologian Robert McAfee Brown cautions that the circle can be undermined by the following: (1) dehistoricizing the text so it becomes a ‘‘timeless truth’’ instead of a ‘‘timely perception’’—thus permits complacency; (2) emphasis on the text’s historical context to the extent that its contemporary impact is lost; (3) distortion of the text by reading in a contemporary historical situation anachronistically

Hip-Hop and Graffiti (Brown 1978, 86). So he cautions that interpreters need to first, ‘‘keep alive back-and-forth tension between the text and ourselves, and second, to do so as communally as possible, since improbable individual interpretations can sometimes be corrected under the discipline of community judgment.’’ Base Ecclesial Communities arose as the ritual way to realize this community judgment. Ethicist Miguel De La Torre developed an ethical methodology for U.S. marginalized communities, especially Latina/os, based on the model of the hermeneutical circle. Moving beyond the traditional ‘‘seeing–judging–acting’’ circular framework, De La Torre expands the circle for the purpose of serving as a framework by which disenfranchised groups can engage in the doing of ethics. The first step in the hermeneutical circle De La Torre provides for ethics is observing. To observe is to conduct a historical analysis of the existing oppressive situation through the eyes of the disenfranchised to discover the causes of oppression. The next step is reflecting, which means applying whatever social analysis or critical theories can help provide insight as to the reasons for the existing oppressive structures. The third step is prayer. By prayer De La Torre means to communally apply theological and biblical principles for understanding the situation and discovering possible courses of action. The fourth step is to act, to implement praxis. The last and final step of the hermeneutical circle for ethics is reassessing. The new situation created by the praxis employed is observed, and thus begins again the circular progression. Marta Vides Saade

| 285

References and Further Reading Brown, Robert McAfee. Theology in a New Key: Responding to Liberation Themes (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1978). De La Torre, Miguel A. Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004). Gutie´rrez, Gustavo. Praxis of Liberation and Human Faith (San Antonio: n.p., 1977). Gutie´rrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation— 15th Anniversary Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994). Mı´guez Bonino, Jose´. Revolutionary Theology Comes of Age (London: S.P.C.K., University of Michigan, 1975). Mı´guez Bonino, Jose´. Towards a Christian Political Ethics (London: SCM, 1983). Moylan, Tom. ‘‘Denunciation/Annunciation: The Radical Methodology of Liberation Theology.’’ Cultural Critique, no. 20 (Winter 1991–1992): 33–64. Schubeck, Thomas Louis, S.J. Liberation Ethics: Sources, Models and Norms (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). Segundo, Juan Luis, S.J. The Liberation of Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1976).

HIP-HOP AND GRAFFITI The seven elements of deejaying (playing records on turntables, cutting, scratching, sampling, etc.), breaking (bboying, dancing), emceeing (rapping), graffiti (a form of inscription), street knowledge, street fashion, and street entrepreneurialism constitute hip-hop culture. These elements enable unique modes of expressions urban youth use to voice their life experiences. Religious

286 |

Hip-Hop and Graffiti

imagery and themes appropriated in hiphop culture add dimensions of depth to the search of meaning amidst the constant turmoil of inner-city life. The association of hip-hop culture with licentious lifestyles, misogynistic attitudes, drug use, and violence, expressed through rap lyrics, with vandalism and/ or turf gang markings of graffiti, obscure the existential force driving these arts. Beyond the glamorization of violence, licentiousness, or vandalism of private or public property, these arts express the challenges, vicissitudes, values, rituals, and hopes experienced by people, especially youth, living in urban centers often facing great odds. Since the 1970s, Latino/as living in urban centers have made numerous contributions to the development of hip-hop culture. These contributions have gone unnoticed largely as a result of the racialization of these cultural and artistic performances as African American, thus relegating Latino/a rappers and graffiti artists to the margins, facing the pressure to adopt a Black identity. Recent attention to the role Latina/os play in the hiphop culture promises to uncover their contributions to the development of this culture; specifically, an opportunity to assess the ways in which Latino/a religiosity has been appropriated by these art forms. The significance of hip-hop and graffiti for the study of Hispanic religion is a complex one. Because of their content and their vehicles of expressions, these art forms blur the line between the secular and sacred through the indiscriminate inclusion of religious symbolism and ideas. The memorial aspects of graffiti murals offer a poignant example of how religious symbols are used in hip-hop culture. Through murals depicting the

deceased in poses reminiscent of saints, Christ, and other biblical images, but with the inclusion of personal items like jerseys and hats, graffiti murals sacralize the life of those deceased and place them in a sacred story of death and resurrection. The religious meaning of graffiti could be illuminated if compared to how cuadros and retablos function to express religious meaning and devotions. Rapping as a form of musical expression may play a prophetic function within the Latino/a community. As a form of expression, rappers, through verbal sophistication and rhymes criticize the injustice they see in society with particular impact in urban settings and Latina/o daily living. Rappers often compare their words to prophetic speech that names the forces that oppress their community and speak words of the eventual defeat of the powerful. The rhymed construction of rap verses allows easy memorization potentially playing a didactic role much like evangelical coritos (praise songs) play a didactic role aiding scriptural memorization. It is this blending of the secular with the religious in hip-hop culture that calls for sustained attention from the religious scholars. Hispanic religiosity’s willingness to engage lo popular (the popular) could sustain the study of the ways in which the secular tone of hip-hop culture comes to be sacralized in the hands of their performers, and they serve as a mirror reflecting lives of our Latino/a innercity community. Elias Ortega-Aponte

References and Further Reading Flores, Juan. From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity

Hip-Hop and Graffiti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Lao´-Montes, Agustı´n, ed. Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

Rivera, Raquel. New York Ricans from the Hip-Hop Zone (New York: Palgrave, 2003).

| 287

I Portuguese), the conquered (native peoples), and those brought as slaves by the conquerors (Africans). Some of these peoples became a part of the United States because of the complex relationship between the United States and Latin America. Those called Hispanic or Latino/a are part of the United States because of the conquest of the Southwest (1848), the war with Spain (1898) that brought Puerto Rico and Cuba under U.S. influence or control, and the multiple twentieth-century political and economic interventions in Latin America. U.S. economic growth and influence in the region created and strengthened migratory labor patterns between the United States and Latin America, which resulted in changes in immigration laws in the United States, particularly in 1965 and 1986. Today’s globalized economy has created new ‘‘pushes and pulls’’ in the region, broadening the circle of people who are migrating, temporarily or permanently, to the United States from Latin America.

IDENTITY (LATINO/A VS. HISPANIC) Any attempt to define the common identity of those grouped under the terms ‘‘Latina/o’’ or ‘‘Hispanic’’ raises a series of crucial issues. There are historical concerns related to how this group of people came into being, how they have sought to identify themselves, and how they became a part of the United States. There are political issues tied to the Hispanic experience, to race and ethnicity in the United States, and to how Latino/ as should participate in broader U.S. society. There are questions related to the definition and popular use of the terms ‘‘Hispanic’’ and ‘‘Latino/a.’’ All of these issues point to the complex process of identity formation among those who are called, or who call themselves, Latina/os or Hispanics. Historically, the European conquest of what is now called Latin America sets the stage for the formation of a new people who carry in their veins the blood of the conquerors (Spanish or 289

290 |

Identity (Latino/a vs. Hispanic)

LATINIDAD Since the 1970s, Hispanic religious specialists have used ‘‘latinidad’’ in reference to their own Latino/a-ness. The term points to the cultural Latino/a essence out of which patterned expressions emerge as forms of life that are embodied, socially co-constructed, and transmitted in a given context. Thus latinidad is intrinsically tied to the understanding of cultural identity. What then is that Hispanic essence one is supposed to transmit? Latino/a religious specialists who subscribe to modern anthropology see latinidad as a concept that assumes that there is a universal core of unchanging characteristics that forms the essence of being Hispanic (e.g., language, land, race/ethnicity in correlation with religion). More recently, perspectives treat latinidad in relationship to cultural hybridity, which sees cultural matter as embodying historical-social consciousness but not fixating there, rather moving along to construct and negotiate meaning and identity as it encounters other distinct-cultural realities. Latinidad points to a style of engaging or a style of dancing with other cultural partners rather than a cultural essence. From this understanding, one can experience and express latinidad without being geographically connected to Latin America or speaking Spanish fluently but by being relationally connected with the Latin American consciousness, perhaps in the form of living as an exile or in a diaspora. —OGJ

Before 1970 the various communities that today fall under the ‘‘Hispanic/Latino/a’’ umbrella in the United States self-identified based on their national heritage, i.e., Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or other. By 1970 many Mexican Americans adopted the term ‘‘Chicano’’ to differentiate between people from Mexico and those born and/or raised in the United States with historical links to Mexico and/or the pre-U.S. Southwest. The year 1970 is important because the U.S. Census Bureau first used the term ‘‘Hispanic’’ in the census as an ‘‘umbrella’’ term for all of the peoples that had links to Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. This decision raised many questions for those who were Hispanics. Some accepted the joint identity and began to point to the commonalities among Hispanics. For others the term was an outside imposition that

should be rejected. Some rejected it because they felt that they needed to name themselves, giving rise to the use of the term ‘‘Latino/a’’ as a selfidentifier. Others rejected both terms and insisted that ‘‘Hispanic’’ (or ‘‘Latina/o’’) was an attempt to erase the national distinctions or the selfidentifications that were developing (i.e., ‘‘I am Chicano, not Hispanic’’). Both ‘‘Hispanic’’ and ‘‘Latino/a’’ are terms linked to the European conquest of the Americas and to the continuing European influence in the region. Both terms have been used to impose an identity, but both have also been part of the process of self-identification. This process recognizes a common history among Hispanics and Latino/as, but also seeks to address current issues. Both terms have a history that is both acceptable and questioned. Part of that history goes

Identity (Latino/a vs. Hispanic)

| 291

TEJANO/AS ‘‘Tejano’’ is the Spanish translation of Texan, one who is from the state of Texas. Different Tejanos, however, have different interpretations of what it means to be Tejano or Tejana. Tejanos are Hispanics born and raised in Texas. Some Tejana/o families have been in Texas prior to the arrival of the Europeans. Others came with the Spanish conquest. Other families migrated to Texas when it was still a part of Mexico, and still other Tejano/as are recent arrivals from various Hispanic countries. In any case, Tejana/os distinguish themselves from their non-Hispanic counterparts, the Texans. In 1835–1836 both Tejana/os and Texans fought for Independence from Mexico. Yet by 1845 the Tejano/as felt betrayed by the Texans when Texas was annexed by the United States. As a result the Tejano/a has a history of being doubly conquered, first by Spain and then by the United States. The Tejano is also a product of a double mestizaje (mixture): the Spanish-Native mestizaje and a cultural mestizaje that produces a variety of Tejano/as from the Chicano to the Mexican American to the Latina/o agringado. Tejana/os have their own variety of Mexican food and music, giving both their own Tejano/a flavor. —GCG

back to 1492; others are tied to 1848 or to the U.S. Census Bureau decision to begin using the term ‘‘Hispanic’’ in 1970. The terms ‘‘Hispanic’’ and ‘‘Latino/a’’ are also tied to issues of immigration, the role of Spanish in the United States, and assimilation. These words are often connected with political preferences. Without an understanding of this complex set of issues, it becomes impossible to decide whether Latina/o or Hispanic best identifies the community or if neither of these terms is adequate to the task. Over the last few years Latino/as have struggled with the issue of identity formation and the specific reasons for using either ‘‘Hispanic’’ or ‘‘Latino/a.’’ Most published documents focus on the process of identity formation and touch on the specific issue of which term to use as part of their larger discussion. In Hispanic Nation Culture, Politics, and the Construction of Identity Geoffrey Fox argues for ‘‘Hispanic.’’ He sees it as the less confrontational term, one favored

by the ‘‘right’’ market-oriented wing of the broader pan-Hispanic movement. It is politically and racially neutral. From Fox’s perspective, ‘‘Latina/o’’ is a more confrontational term used by the ‘‘left’’ as a challenge to the dominant U.S. cultural structure. ‘‘Latino/a’’ also offends some Hispanics because it seems like a bad dialect joke, because it is not ‘‘real’’ Spanish, nor ‘‘real’’ English. David Abalos, in Latinos in the United States: The Sacred and the Political, advocates for ‘‘Latino/a’’ because ‘‘Hispanic’’ has been tied to the elitist preference for those with lighter skin, those who can demonstrate ‘‘pure’’ European blood. Latina/o is a broader term that recognizes the movement of peoples and the intermarriage between those of many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds (mestizaje) in the formation of those called Latino/as. From his perspective ‘‘Latina/o’’ also represents a growing political consciousness that has evolved from individual national identities to

292 |

Identity (Latino/a vs. Hispanic)

Hispanic, and now to Latina/o. They were named by the Census Bureau in 1970, but now they are seeking to name themselves in a way that recognizes that they are not just descendants of White Europeans (Hispanics), but also of peoples of indigenous and African descent, and of peoples who have migrated to Latin America from other parts of the world. Writers such as Arlene Da´vila in Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People and Juan Gonza´lez in Harvest of Empire a History of Latinos in America, use Latino in the title of their books, though both treat Latino/a and Hispanic as interchangeable. They wonder whether too much energy is being used in trying to define one term as better than the other. Ilan Stavans has used both in the titles of books he has written, The Hispanic Condition and Latino USA: A Cartoon History. Ed Morales in Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America prefers ‘‘Latino/a’’ over ‘‘Hispanic’’ because the latter is tied to assimilationists and the former to the reality of the mixed race heritage of Latino/as. His concern is that Latina/o is a static term and that the community needs a term that describes the dynamic linguistic, cultural, and ‘‘racial’’ movement that is the Latino/a community. He proposes Spanglish as the term that captures that movement. Jorge Gracia has written a complete work on the subject. Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective approaches the question by defining the terms in their historical contexts. Gracia draws from the historical usage of each term and from the philosophical issues related to the efforts to develop a common identity among the peoples of Latin America. He addresses the larger

processes of identity formation on the Iberian Peninsula, in Latin America, and among Hispanics in the United States. He sees these three efforts as intertwined because of common Spanish historical legacy, be it good or bad. Given this frame of reference, Gracia concludes that ‘‘Hispanic’’ is the appropriate term that unites each of these groups, which in fact share a common history and legacy. Gracia himself acknowledges some people will tend to reject the term ‘‘Hispanic,’’ in part, because of the historical ‘‘baggage’’ it carries. ‘‘Hispanic’’ is clearly representative of the Spanish conquest. Therefore, a different term, linked only to the American experience, should be used. ‘‘Latino/a’’ seems appropriate, except for the fact that it is also a term imposed by a European imperial power. France began talking about Amerique Latine during the rule of Napoleon III as a way of distinguishing between those areas of the Americas originally colonized by Europeans of Latin descent and those colonized by peoples from northern Europe. But the term was used to justify French intervention in the young republics of Latin America. Even though Latino/a refers to the American continent, its original referent is the ‘‘Latin’’ parts of Europe, not the Americas. Therefore, it is also a term that comes out of the conquest, though it is not as directly tied to Spain. All of the authors mentioned point to the struggles faced in the process of Latino/a identity formation. Those under the Latino/a or Hispanic ‘‘umbrella’’ recognize a great amount of commonality, but find it difficult to decide which aspects of identity are most crucial. There are very real differences that further complicate any attempt to define this group as a homogeneous whole.

Identity (Latino/a vs. Hispanic) ‘‘Hispanic’’ places more of the emphasis on Spanish history. Latina/os began to exist as a people after the arrival of the Spaniards in the Americas and most of them now speak Spanish, or have ancestors who spoke Spanish. It is also true that some members of the community are relatively recent immigrants from Spain or are descendants of people who have not intermarried with native peoples or those of African background. ‘‘Hispanic’’ is also usually identified with those in the community who assume that they should seek to assimilate into U.S. society. Yet the fact that members of the community use ‘‘Hispanic’’ is recognition that there are things that differentiate them from others and commonalities that unite them, and these things deserve to be named and defined. ‘‘Latino/a’’ is usually linked to more activist members of the community. Those who call themselves ‘‘Latina/o’’ feel that the community needs to name itself. This term clearly links the community to Latin America and, only indirectly, to Spain. Because ‘‘Latina/o’’ is most commonly linked to Latin America, and not the Latin regions of Europe, it seems better suited to identify the racial and ethnic mixes forged in the five centuries since the Europeans arrived in the Americas. Also, since the term as it is used today becomes a mixture of English and Spanish, it is uniquely ‘‘equipped’’ to define the bilingual, and multicultural U.S. Latino/a population. Those who use either or both terms must recognize when they use them, they pick and choose their meanings. As they use ‘‘Latino/a’’ or ‘‘Hispanic’’ they often choose to downplay or ignore that both words carry the realities of European imperialism and a history of imposition. Each of these words carries a very

| 293

negative connotation for some members of the community. Nonetheless, those negative realities are a crucial part of their formation as a people. Both terms have histories and implications for the present and the future. As those who were named by U.S. government structures, they need to understand that their ‘‘naming’’ occurred within the larger issue of ‘‘race’’ in the United States. As they continued to form their own identity, they needed to recognize the role that ethnicity played in the question of the ‘‘American’’ identity and how ethnic minorities related and connected to each other pertaining to questions of assimilation and cultural pluralism. Because neither ‘‘Hispanic’’ nor ‘‘Latino/a’’ is a racial term, they are caught within the larger U.S. race question. Should they define their experience more like ‘‘European Whites’’ or more like African Americans? Because of their various backgrounds, some of them fit into one category more than in the other. Many more seem to be in a status somewhere between the U.S. definitions of ‘‘White’’ and ‘‘Black,’’ which makes it difficult to clearly ‘‘fit’’ within either category. Hispanic ethnicity also raises the question of which model of cultural interaction they should follow in this country. Both those who call themselves Hispanic or Latina/o and take the time to defend these identity markers seem to point to a clearly identifiable group identity. But how should this ethnic minority group interact with the majority and with other ethnic minorities? Those who strongly insist on using one term or the other usually have a clearly defined vision of the community and its future. That choice is an ideological decision, but is not one that can easily

294 |

Immigration

unite Hispanics. It is a sign of the strength of the Hispanic community that it can continue developing its identity without a name common to all. Some argue for the use of Latino/Hispanic (or Hispanic/Latino) or the interchangeable use of both as a way forward. The goal of this usage is to focus on what unites the community, instead of on the differences. It is yet to be seen whether enough people will use the terms in this way or whether the exclusive uses are an inevitable part of the identity formation process. Others will continue to argue for new terms as a way to move into the future. Given the polycentric identities that most Latino/as carry, it is unlikely that one term will ever satisfy everyone. Yet as they seek to identify themselves, they need the voices of all those who see themselves as a part of the community. This process could lead in many different directions. It may be possible, to some extent, to arrive at a common term or a combination of terms they all accept. The process could lead Hispanics to conclude that one single term cannot identify all of them. Latino/a understanding of their histories and visions of the future might be so different that other terms will be chosen to focus on their differences. Hispanics might conclude that their identity is so complex that they need several terms to describe the various aspects of their common identity. In all likelihood identity formation will be part of a continuing conversation in which various members of the community participate at different levels, even as their identities continue to be reshaped by their new ethnic and cultural interactions in the globalized intercultural reality of the United States. Juan Francisco Martinez

References and Further Reading Abalos, David. Latinos in the United States: The Sacred and the Political (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Da´vila, Arlene. Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Fox, Geoffrey. Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics, and the Construction of Identity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996). Gonza´lez, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York: Viking Press, 2001). Gracia, Jorge. Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Boston: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Morales, Ed. Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (Los Angelos, CA: Weekly Books, 2002). Stavans, Ilan. Hispanic Condition: The Power of a People (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001). Stavans, Ilan, and Lalo Alcaraz. Latino USA: A Cartoon History (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

IMMIGRATION As social institutions, communities of faith serve preserving, integrative, and bridge-building roles vis-a`-vis new and recent immigrants to the United States. Religious groups function as safe places that foster the preservation and expression of immigrants’ religious traditions and practices from their countries of origin and in their own languages. Rites of passage, such as quincean˜eras and presentation of children, or dramas, such as posadas and passion stories, are examples of Hispanic religious cultures that are safeguarded and passed on from one

Immigration generation of immigrants to the next through church networks. Religious groups also aid immigrants to navigate through, survive, and advance in the new cultural, political, and economic climate of the adoptive nation. Through English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, immigration law services, job information, and educational opportunities, houses of worship play a public role in the transition and/or integration of immigrants into U.S. society. Although contemporary voices increasingly speak of the role of religion in fostering a two-way bridge between immigrant and nonimmigrant groups where cultural exchange and networking leads to mutual learning, transformation, and enrichment, the language of integration from a historical perspective has been interpreted through a narrative of assimilation. In U.S. religious historiography, Daisy Machado has shown that the almost forgotten history of Mexican internal migration and dispersion in the Southwest through U.S. expansionist wars and treaties went hand in hand with the geographical and social marginalization of Mexicans but also with an Anglo Protestant missionary policy of assimilation of Mexicans through ‘‘Americanization.’’ The Anglos’ attitude of cultural and racial superiority vis-a`-vis Mexicans, along with their religious selfunderstanding as a nation favored by God through the eschatological and political language of ‘‘manifest destiny,’’ made Mexicans ‘‘strangers in their own lands’’ and also resulted in what is today a Mexican church with a ‘‘dearth of ministerial leadership, poor funding, and haphazard and uneven growth.’’ Immigration provides a lens for understanding and negotiating Hispanic American social location and identity in

| 295

terms of resistance and engagement. Cuban American biblical and cultural critic Fernando Segovia has advanced the term ‘‘exile’’ as a category in U.S. Hispanic American theology to describe the social location of ‘‘otherness’’ immigrants experience in the adoptive nation. Although the word ‘‘exile’’ can be applied metaphorically to peoples colonized by the United States (i.e., Mexicans and Puerto Ricans) or minoritized by U.S. mainstream society (i.e., Latinos/as born in the United States), Segovia reserves the literal use for firstgeneration immigrants whose ‘‘diaspora’’ identity is one of ‘‘living in two worlds and no world at the same time.’’ Instead of reading the Hispanic American experience of diaspora as an ‘‘allegorical antitype’’ of biblical themes such as the pilgrim people of God or the wandering followers of Jesus, the task of a ‘‘diaspora theology’’ demands unpacking what it means to be ‘‘in the world but not of it’’ through an ongoing deconstruction and construction regarding the world, the otherworld, and human-divine relations. Accordingly, diaspora theology can see the world as unjust but also as a potentially more just place; it sees the otherworld as bringing into question God’s justice in the face of suffering, but without losing confidence that God hears and delivers the marginalized; therefore, a diasporic social location allows one to see divine-human relations in terms of the paradoxical character of the human religious experience of God as absence/presence, uncertainty/certainty, and limitation/power. The experiences of marginality and questions of identity that immigrants face in a new nation, as well as the oppressive political conditions and socioeconomic factors that force them to

296 |

Immigration

Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1940s. (Utah History Research Center)

migrate in the first place, have shaped reflection on what it means to be a church in the United States. In the vein of cultural criticism, Professor of modern language Mark Griffin and Episcopal pastor Theron Walker use Richard Rodrı´guez’s arguments in favor of the privatization of Latino cultures and their assimilation into a homogeneous or public U.S. ‘‘melting pot’’ as a metaphor and blueprint for the North American Christian church’s caution against the increasing privatization of their faith and assimilation into ‘‘a uniform national culture in which communal traditions are exchanged for consumer choices.’’ In contrast to ethnic immigrants’ and churches’ capitulations, respectively, to the U.S. melting pot and consumerist culture, the authors point to some Miami Cuban American discourses that propose ‘‘hyphenated identities.’’ Yet these

hybrid identities, in a sort of convenience arrangement, can lead to a withdrawal of the immigrant to ancestral ethnic roots (or ‘‘ghettoization’’) while paradoxically retaining consumerist values. Taking as a model Mexican American theologian Virgilio Elizondo’s identification of Mexican Americans with Jesus’ Galilean borderlands location, Griffin and Walker argue that the Christian church in the United States should become instead a ‘‘rooted diaspora’’ or ‘‘borderlands culture.’’ Such an identity allows the church to best bridge the space between a merely privatized faith and an unacceptable absorption into the McWorld by taking up her prophetic denunciation of the hegemonic consumerism of U.S. society while doing so from a nonhegemonic stance as a ‘‘resident alien’’ church, which is never quite at home with the state of this world.

Immigration From a liberationist perspective informed in part by Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino’s ecclesiology, Harold Recinos reflects upon the painful experience and memory of Salvadoran refugees as ‘‘crucified peoples’’ and argues that their marginalized presence in the U.S. barrio serves as a locus from which the church can be reborn to become a vehicle for socioeconomic liberation. Traditional images of Christ as one who consoles those who suffer and as one who saves from sin and death justify models of being church that are only concerned with individual faith and personal salvation. A robust concern for the church’s denunciation of the unjust social order and its transformation through bonds of fellowship arises out of insignificant places of divine revelation such as Israel and Galilee where God takes the side of the poor and from which God calls for a new social order. Recinos argues that, as a barrio people, Salvadoran Christians (and others like them) are in a divinely favored social location to lead the whole church in a rebirth so that her faith might rediscover or reacquaint itself with ‘‘the liberating historical consciousness it lacked.’’ Through their active memory of Salvadoran ‘‘social martyrs’’—their ‘‘religion of martyrology’’—and its accompanying ‘‘ritualized symbols’’ such as Archbishop Oscar Romero, Jesuit priests, and the thousands of peoples killed during the civil wars in El Salvador, the barrio people can contribute to a ‘‘new church’’ characterized by a bond of solidarity with the poor, a prophetic and sacrificial love that unmasks oppressive social structures, and a responsible faith that leads to social transformation. Orlando Espı´n looks at the global experience of immigration as a fundamental dogmatic category for the

| 297

elaboration of a constructive contemporary Catholic ecclesiology. Taking as his point of departure the inescapable permeability of geographical political borders in an era of globalization characterized by the deterritorialization of capital, open labor markets, and the free exchange of goods, cultures, and ideas across borders, Espı´n argues that the church’s ‘‘catholicity’’ can serve a prophetic role both in her affirmation and critique of globalization as a driving factor in the migration of peoples. Insofar as the labor and training demands of globalization create poverty and unjust social relations, catholicity upholds the Godgiven dignity and equality of humans who are excluded. When deterritorialization in a globalized economy homogenizes diverse peoples and cultures into a uniform market culture, catholicity affirms the value of all human cultures and envisions borders as social spaces of ‘‘exchange and encounter’’ where no culture is superior to the other and all can bear witness to the Gospel. The semantic field of the Nahuatl (Aztec) word nepantlah (literally, ‘‘in the middle’’), with its connotations of ‘‘mutuality’’ and ‘‘reciprocity,’’ serves to complement the language of catholicity with a more robust ‘‘welcoming’’ and ‘‘dialogical’’ orientation akin to the Hebrew Scriptures’ call to welcome the stranger (alien or immigrant), the New Testament’s witness to the love of the neediest neighbor ‘‘regardless of his/her virtues or lack thereof,’’ and Catholic social teaching on the God-given moral right of people to migrate to take care of their needy families. Immigrants are suggestively portrayed as the privileged ‘‘sacrament’’ of the church’s catholicity today through which God gives all Christians access to their catholic identity and, therefore, to

298 |

Immigration

what it means to be a pilgrim (migrant) church that is always on the move in this world and puts into question the world’s ultimate claims. In the area of textual studies, strategies for engaging in conversation on immigration from a biblical-theological framework or for reading biblical texts from an immigrant location and hermeneutical stance have been proposed. Biblical scholar Daniel Carroll R. shows that the Old Testament’s teachings on the image of God in humans and on God’s call for Israel to show openness to sojourners provide a biblical basis for a compassionate Christian attitude toward all immigrants. Although there is a diverse complexity and ambiguity in Old Testament texts dealing with sojourners or aliens, which requires an understanding of these texts’ religious and sociological functions, biblical scholar Luis Rivera Rodrı´guez argues that through a ‘‘political hermeneutics’’ a number of Deuteronomist ‘‘values’’ can be gathered to affirm ‘‘the struggles and aspirations for justice and human rights of migrant workers around the world and in the U.S.A.’’ Such values include judging rightly between peoples and giving a fair hearing to both citizen and resident aliens in the community, as well as refraining from depriving the resident alien of justice or from withholding fair wages from poor migrant workers. God calls Israel to love the stranger because they too were strangers in Egypt and curses those who oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow. Carroll R. gathers from the ministry of Jesus— especially his unusually inclusive treatment of the Samaritan woman for a Jew of his time—an ethic of ‘‘compassion toward the outsider’’ for the church. There is a warning against uncritical

readings of Romans 13 (on submission to government authorities) that do not recognize the need and right to change laws that Christians believe might not deal fairly with their immigrant neighbors. In the field of reader-oriented text criticism, and applying a hermeneutics of suspicion to the idea of an unbiased or neutral reader or text, Fernando Segovia calls for a ‘‘hermeneutics of the Diaspora’’ that takes seriously the immigrant bicultural location or ‘‘double otherness’’ of Hispanic American readers as they engage biblical texts. Although diaspora peoples fit neither in their country of origin nor in their adoptive one, and consequently are deprived of ‘‘selfdefinition,’’ ‘‘self-appropriation,’’ and ‘‘self-direction,’’ they also inhabit a space of hybridity or mezcolanza (‘‘hodgepodge’’) that enables them to be critical of both worlds and engage constructively their cultures, traditions, and values. A hermeneutics of ‘‘otherness’’ assumes an intercultural reading of texts that recognizes the need for readers not only to see themselves as ‘‘other’’ but also to distance themselves from the text in order to let it speak as ‘‘other’’ according to its own contexts and agendas. In the process, such hermeneutics becomes one of self-reflective ‘‘engagement’’ in which readers see themselves honestly as living texts who bring their own cultural matrixes into the biblical text even as they are shaped by it. An intercultural ‘‘filtering’’ or construction of reality moving back and forth from reader to text and vice versa fosters liberating dialogue with other interpreters of texts and openness to critical evaluations of readings. The goal of a hermeneutics of the diaspora that arises out of a Hispanic immigrant social location is to trade

Immigration

| 299

SAN TORIBIO In 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized Toribio Romo Gonzalez, a priest who was martyred by Mexican federal troops during the Cristero Wars. He was born on April 16, 1900, in Santa Ana de Guadalupe in the region of Jalisco. He was ordained a priest with a dispensation in 1921 because of his young age. During the uprising against Mexico’s anti-Catholic government, he hid at a ranch, saying the Mass for local peasants. He was known for his sensitivity toward the poor. Betrayed by an informer, he was shot in the back on February 25, 1928. Since canonization, some immigrants crossing the Sonoran Desert to get to the United States have claimed that San Toribio has appeared to them, guiding their journey north. As a result, the Shrine of Saint Toribio, in Santa Ana de Guadalupe, draws many pilgrims from throughout Mexico who are preparing to make the hazardous crossing into the United States and are in need of spiritual protection. He has quickly become the patron saint of immigrants. In response to some of the harshest anti-immigrant laws in the nation, a second shrine is being built for him in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is expected to be finished by 2009. —MAD

oppressive universalizing metanarratives for ‘‘a manifest destiny of liberation and decolonization,’’ which is characterized by a radical ‘‘contextualization’’ of all readers and texts that acknowledges their otherness and the possibility of their dialogical engagement with one another. Immigration and immigrants call for a rethinking of approaches to pastoral theology (and praxis) and religious pedagogy. Catholic pastoral theologian Carmen Nanko-Ferna´ ndez argues that immigrants challenge the church to think of its ministry as a form of ‘‘prophetic invitation’’ that fosters solidarity with immigrants by recovering the stories of their struggles. Typically such stories are either forgotten through a prevaling U.S. historical amnesia regarding its immigrant past or romanticized through cultural assimilation into the U.S. mainstream. The ‘‘prophetic invitation’’ also promotes solidarity with immigrants by bringing the U.S. mainstream church closer to the ‘‘edge’’ through exposure to the often unknown social teachings of

the Catholic church on the rights of migrants. Politicized rhetoric used commonly to refer to migrants as ‘‘aliens’’ or ‘‘illegals,’’ as well as spiritualized or allegorical language used at times to speak of migration across borders as ‘‘passion/resurrection narratives,’’ must undergo a process of humanization that bestows dignity upon migrants and does not relativize their concrete fleshand-blood struggles. Drawing upon her teaching experience in Bible institutes serving immigrant populations, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier argues for a ‘‘culturally responsible’’ pedagogy that fosters partnerships between teacher and student through learning strategies of ‘‘intuitive reflection’’ that ultimately lead to concrete action in the interest of social justice. Religious education shaped after the immigrant experience of survival and invisibility in a new location should lead to collaborative and dialogical models of teaching and learning where participants think in a ‘‘conjunctive’’ way and are not mere receivers of knowledge but

300 |

Immigration

a living ‘‘theological resource.’’ These pedagogical goals are mediated through an intentional process of critical appropriation of theological traditions in which the teacher serves as a facilitator of knowledge more than as ‘‘the interpreter or keeper of the doctrine or the tradition.’’ Conde-Frazier’s theological pedagogy as ‘‘an open-ended dialogical’’ process in which the Spirit always leads into all truth and as an emerging product of the community are, respectively, the pneumatological and epistemological underpinnings of her proposal. As loci of poverty and marginality, immigrant communities also bring to the classroom their suffering as a ‘‘hermeneutical insight’’ that challenges facilitators to allow participants not only to speak of the spiritual dimensions of their journeys but also of their sociopolitical dimensions. Drawing from Puerto-Rican theologian Samuel Solivan’s language of orthopathos (right suffering), CondeFrazier conceives religious education as the integration of critically appropriated theological knowledge or tradition that flows out especially from concrete suffering in life (orthopathos) and leads to concrete pastoral action in the interest of social transformation (orthopraxis). Immigration promises a reshaping of the field of religious studies. Religion scholar Manuel Va´squez has argued that the diversity and fast growth of post1965 migration to the United States has moved the study of religion from its privileged methodological foci on the hermeneutics of sacred texts and phenomenology of interiority (and subjectivity) toward a more historical and material approach that accounts fully for the social, political, economic, architectural, and technological aspects of ‘‘lived

religion’’ as a legitimate source of religion. The study of post-1965 migration in the broader context of globalization and transnational networks where spaces across geographical borders are hyperfluid, cross-pollinated, reconfigured, and reimagined (also known as ‘‘de-territorialization’’ and ‘‘re-territorialization’’), puts into question the field’s assumptions supporting the denial of the ‘‘coevalness’’ (or common sharing of space and time) of immigrant societies of origin vis-a` -vis the United States. A denial of coevalness supports disjunctive space discourses of margins versus center, readings of religion through a hermeneutics of impermeable ‘‘difference’’ from the ‘‘other,’’ studies of religion that only see the religious in congregational structures but not outside of them, or one-size-fits-all or universalizing definitions of ‘‘religion.’’ In contrast to these options, migration studies in a globalized world necessitate a thorough rehistoricizing and rematerializing of the traditional Eurocentric hermeneutical and phenomenological emphases in religion studies. This refocusing moves religious discourse toward a hermeneutics of ‘‘hybridity’’ (‘‘border-crossing’’ and ‘‘transculturality’’) and a focus on lived religion in and outside of congregational networks. Leopoldo A. Sa´nchez M.

References and Further Reading Carroll R., M. Daniel. Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church, and the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008). Conde-Frazier, Elizabeth. ‘‘Religious Education in an Immigrant Community: A Case

Institutionalized Violence Study.’’ Hispanic Christian Thought at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Apuntes in Honor of Justo L. Gonza´lez, ed. Alvin Padilla, Roberto Goizueta, and Eldin Villafan˜e (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005). De La Torre, Miguel. Trails of Hope and Terror: Testimonies on Immigration (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009). Espı´n, Orlando O. ‘‘Immigration, Territory, and Globalization: Theological Reflections.’’ Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 7, no. 3 (2000): 46–59. Griffin, Mark, and Theron Walker. Living on the Borders: What the Church Can Learn from Ethnic Immigrant Cultures (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2004). Machado, Daisy L. ‘‘Kingdom Building in the Borderlands: The Church and Manifest Destiny.’’ Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise, ed. Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az and Fernando F. Segovia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996). Nanko-Ferna´ndez, Carmen M. ‘‘Beyond Hospitality: Implications of Im/migration for Teologı´a y Pastoral de Conjunto.’’ Perspectivas 10 (2006): 51–62. Recinos, Harold J. ‘‘The Barrio as the Locus of a New Church.’’ Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise, ed. Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az and Fernando F. Segovia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996). Rivera Rodrı´guez, Luis R. ‘‘Immigration and the Bible: Comments by a Diasporic Theologian.’’ Perspectivas 10 (2006): 23–36. Segovia, Fernando F. ‘‘In the World but Not of It: Exile as Locus for a Theology of the Diaspora.’’ Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise, ed. Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az and Fernando F. Segovia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996). Va´squez, Manuel A. ‘‘Historicizing and Materializing the Study of Religion: The Contribution of Migration Studies.’’ Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America, ed. Karen I. Leonard, Alex Stepick, and Manuel A. Va´squez (Landham, MD: Altamira, 2005).

| 301

INSTITUTIONALIZED VIOLENCE In recent decades Christian ethics has moved from an individualistic framework that emphasizes the subjective aspects of ethical problems to a social and political framework that stresses the institutional and collective aspects. Because of new theories related to socialization, the role of cultural expectations in the formation of the individual, gender and feminist theories, and ecological awareness—just to name a few —Christian ethics has moved from an individual realm to a social, cultural, and political one. This new understanding of human relations maintains that every individual is born within a social, communal, cultural, racial, familial, ecological, and sociopolitical environment to which he or she interacts and relates. What the individual does as a person relates closely to his or her surroundings and thus no action can be taken as isolated or detached from its context and reality. This move from an individualistic to a communal ethics has emphasized the social as well as the personal dimensions of violence. Christian movements such as liberation theologies, feminists, environmentalists, and Latino/a theology in the United States are calling for both a change of hearts and minds of individuals and a transformation of the socioeconomic, cultural, and institutionalized causes of violence. They contend that the daily experience of violence in many societies, which affects their most vulnerable members, is closely related to the reality of socioeconomic injustice, ecological destruction, militarization of society, uneven distribution of wealth,

302 |

Institutionalized Violence

poor access to education and health, poverty, unemployment, racism, gender inequality, and global economic policies that benefit only a small portion of the world’s population. For all these reasons, they have approached violence both from the personal dimension as well as from socioeconomic and political dimension. They are criticizing and taking a stand not only against the persons committing violence, but also against the society and socioeconomic system that drive them to recurring violence.

The Medellín Conference The Latin American Bishops Conference (CELAM) meeting in Medellı´n, Colombia, in 1968, made evident this shift in Christian theology for Latin America. While the conference was exclusively Catholic, its contribution to the debate on violence reached beyond Catholic theology. In its section on peace, the Medellı´n Conference recognized that violence is one of the gravest problems in the region. After reaffirming the church’s commitment to peace, the document acknowledged that many regions in Latin America lived under a situation of institutionalized violence, created by agricultural and industrial business, national and international economic enterprises, and political and cultural domination. The Conference affirmed that as a result of this institutionalized violence entire populations lacked the basic human necessities and lived in a condition of dependency that impeded their social, cultural, and political participation, thus violating their most fundamental human rights. For this reason, the document maintained that underdevelopment and its sequels of marginalization, socioeconomic inequality,

oppression, armamentism, and neocolonial relations between poor and rich countries, was an unjust situation that conspired against peaceful alternatives. For the Medellı´n Conference, this situation of institutionalized violence required urgent and audacious transformations. The Conference demanded from wealthy elites to accept and lead profound and necessary socioeconomic transformations in order to avoid violent revolutions and confrontations. It also called for peaceful resistance and citizen activism among the poor and the dispossessed. Finally, it reminded revolutionary groups that turning to violence created new injustices, engendered new inequalities, and economically ruined poor countries. The Medellı´n Conference has transformed the ethical and theological approach to the phenomenon of violence on many fronts. First, it shifted the emphasis from an individual and subjective framework to a collective and social one. Violence in the household and in communities is related to violence perpetrated by corporations, governments, and global military agencies as they create social dislocation with their meager wages, reinforce the climate of social inequality and corruption in a nation, and set in motion cycles of violence by providing weapons to governments and belligerent groups. Second, the Medellı´n Conference identified violence not as an isolated and random phenomenon but as part of a cycle. This cycle originates in the institutions and structures of society that, although operating in a legal framework, maintain an unjust order that creates the conditions for social dislocation and human alienation. In response, citizens recur to both social and political violence

Institutionalized Violence in the forms of crime, theft, gangs, guerrilla warfare, terrorist groups, domestic violence, and so forth, thus feeding the cycle of violence originating in these institutions. Third, the Medellı´n Conference connected violence with injustice, stressing that peaceful societies are possible only when based on justice and equality. For this reason it stressed not only a change of hearts and minds of individuals, but also of institutions and structures that promote unjust relationships in society. Closely connected to this is its call for the political activism of religious groups to transform the sociopolitical and economics structure of society. The Conference sees as positive the religious involvement in political and economic actions in favor of the socially excluded such as education, political organization, citizen advocacy, peaceful and nonviolent protests, and socioeconomic alternatives. Subsequent theological debates related to violence have approached this phenomenon utilizing the conceptual framework provided by Medellı´n, thus denouncing the personal as well as the institutional and structural dimension of the problem. The Puebla Conference of 1979 maintained that the violence in the region was generated and fomented by both the institutionalized violence of socioeconomic and political systems and the ideologies that utilize violence as a way of conquering power. The Santo Domingo Conference of 1992 denounced violence against children, women, and the poorest communities in the region: peasants, indigenous, and AfroAmericans. It also warned of a rising culture of death and violence that reaches families and societies through the media and television.

| 303

In the United States, Latina/o theologians have utilized the Medellı´n approach and have stressed institutional, racial, gender, and cultural aspects of the phenomenon. They have denounced racist discourses that promote violence against people of color, machista and male-chauvinistic practices that assume and promote male domination over women, and economic policies that affect the development of the poor and disposed within and outside the United States’ border. They have also maintained a critical stand against the imperial, militaristic, and neocolonial practices of U.S. policies, and have critically engaged in solidarity with oppressed communities from around the world. In all, U.S. Latino/a theologies have criticized the racist history of violence in the United States while denouncing the neocolonial violent practices in American policies.

Defining Institutionalized Violence Institutional violence is violence that is created, supported, and rooted in institutions and powerful groups to maintain an unequal, unjust, and repressive sociopolitical order that blocks the human development of its citizens, especially those considered as inferior, anormal, or threatening to the given order. Institutional violence is more than the inadequate distribution of a country’s or community’s resources. It presupposes an organization, justification, and normalization of unjust socioeconomic relationships in a given society through a legal and cultural framework that supports the mechanisms of justice and establishes a coercive force to maintain an unjust established order. This form of

304 |

Institutionalized Violence

violence is maintained through a repressive framework that justifies its existence and incorporates its premises into the cultural, educational, and daily experiences of a given society. In this way, the system justifies the cycle of violence protecting the structures and the social groups that most benefit from it. Four venues to understand institutionalized violence are the following. (1) Institutionalized violence and socioeconomic structures. It is important to take into account socioeconomic structures and political systems when approaching the issue of violence. Sociopolitical and economic structures are violent when they selectively fulfill the human necessities of a given group of citizens at the expense of the majority of the population. When this occurs, the state becomes the original generator of violence in a given society, as it blocks its citizens from obtaining the basic social programs and political exercises to guarantee the fulfillment of their basic human necessities such as health, education, security, and employment. The sequels of violence in forms of petty crime, domestic violence, gangs, arms groups, violation of the basic laws, and other phenomena common in many areas of the world mirror an economic system that impedes the human development of the majority of its citizens and that often represses them when they claim constitutional and human rights. (2) Institutionalized violence and culture. When approaching the phenomenon of violence, one must take into account its cultural aspects, as culture provides the material, spiritual, and intellectual elements of identity of a given society. Institutional violence has the danger of being transformed into a culture of

violence when society promotes values and attitudes that allow, empower, and even stimulate the use of violence as part of its cultural, material, and spiritual identity. When this occurs, societies celebrate and accept openly the use of violence to solve their daily conflicts and to provide a way of relating to themselves and to others. As a result, violence becomes a code of conduct that allows them to explain and make sense of their daily reality. More than a way of acting or a phenomenon, violence becomes a cultural point of reference that validates citizen’s personal and social existence. (3) Institutionalized violence and history. Institutional violence is in many ways the result of historical violence, for it is built upon historical dynamics of power exercised through its use. When violence has become part of the historical making of a given society, then that society’s historical identity and institutions are violent. When approaching a violent phenomenon in a given society, it is important to study its historical roots as well as the historic dynamics that created and sustained it in the first place. (4) The role of ideologies and institutionalized violence. Societies and human groups create ideological discourses that offer coherent explanations through concepts, symbols, images, and references necessary for the survival and organization of human groups. If culture gives humans a sense of belonging, ideologies provide them with the rational tools to explain their actions and behaviors. Yet many times ideologies are utilized to cover up group interests and particular policies, aiming toward benefiting a few and disregarding the well-being of the rest of society. When this occurs, social phenomena such as poverty, crime,

Institutionalized Violence and human rights violations can be covered up by the subjective message of ideological discourses defending the status quo. It is important to stress that societies with high levels of crime tend to utilize ideologies to defend and make sense of their situation. Violence, including noninstitutionalized violence, is part of a social structure configured by social, economic, and political interests that builds upon ideological discourses to justify its existence. Many times these ideologies legitimize the use of force as a way to defend and maintain the position of powerful groups in society. These groups construct ideological discourses that dehumanize and almost bestialize the criminal and the outlaw, while avoiding any exploration of the socioeconomic, political, cultural, and environmental conditions that allow people to commit crime. Central American–based gang members in large U.S. cities, to cite an example, are blamed for most of the crime in the region, while the government ignores the conditions of poverty and cultural alienation these youths experience. Likewise, violence against suspected terrorists in the form of torture, annihilation, selective killings, and illegal detentions, in the United States and abroad, are often framed within discourses that defend these actions as necessary for the survival of the community or the interest of a given country.

Blind Spots of Institutional Violence While the institutional approach to violence has contributed greatly to the interpretation of this phenomenon, the

| 305

premises upon which this is built present some limitations. First, this approach relies on a socioeconomic and political analysis that is informed and built upon Marxist and post-Marxist theories. In this understanding, violence is the reflection of unjust economic structures, colonial relationships between poor and rich countries, social dislocation, lack of employment and education among the population, and so forth. To transform it and change the dynamics of violence in a given society, one has to change the socioeconomic realities that maintain it. The problem, however, is that a transformation of the socioeconomic realities does not entirely result in an automatic transformation of the realities of violence affecting societies. While a reduction of poverty affects the levels of crime in a given society, such correlation is not automatic, as the reality of crime in rich countries, such as the United States, points toward other complexities such as culture, race, sexual orientation, psychological conditions, and so forth. Approaching violence only from the institutional and socioeconomic lens risks the possibility of overlooking other analyses to understand the complexities behind the phenomenon. Many times violence against women, nonheterosexual communities, people of color, to name a few, are subsumed under the categories of socioeconomic repression, and this, in turn, diminishes the possibilities of approaching all the layers related to the issue. For this reason, it is important to take into account not only the socioeconomic analysis, but also other cultural, gender, racial, and environmental frameworks to better understand the different levels and complexities of violent societies and actions.

306 |

Islam

Conclusion Violence, in its social, political, and cultural forms, is a constant challenge to religious communities across the world. Civil wars, genocide, and refugee crises leave legacies of violence in societies that suffer from this phenomenon. Approaching it from an institutional point of view helps clarify the correlation and dialectic relationship between violence at home and violence in society. The daily experience of violence in many societies, which affects mostly the poor and oppressed, cannot be separated from socioeconomic and political structures that promote unequal distribution of wealth, militarization of society, poor access to education and health, poverty, and an uneven distribution of power among citizens. To promote peace, it is important to maintain an ethical stand that criticizes not only individual actions and subjective norms but also structural and socioeconomic realities that provide the material, historical, ideological, and cultural frameworks to exercise it. Salvador A. Leavitt-Alca´ntara

References and Further Reading Alvarenga, Patricia. Cultura y etica de la violencia: El Salvador, 1880-1932 (San Jose, Costa Rica: EDUCA, 1996). Conferencia General del Episcopado Latinoamericano. Los Textos de Medellı´n y el proceso de cambio en America Latina: los documentos del CELAM, con las aprobaciones del Vaticano, ed. UCA editors (San Salvador: UCA editores, 1971). Dumas, F. Dabezies, ed. Teologı´a de la violencia (Salamanca, Espan˜a: Ediciones Sigueme, 1971).

Hinkelammert, Franz J. The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of Capitalism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986). Mananzan, Mary John, ed. Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996).

ISLAM Within the Latino/a community, there are Hispanic Muslims. Although figures are obscure, and while some estimates range from a low of 20,000 to a high of 200,000, the latest and most conservative estimates by Islamic groups and leaders state that there are between 50,000 and 75,000 Latina/o Muslims in the United States. As of 2002, the Council on American-Islamic Relations established that Latina/o reversions constituted 6 percent of all Muslim conversion in this country. Most members of the Hispanic Islamic community are located, but not limited to, major metropolitan areas with large Latino/a populations, like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. While some reversions took place in the 1970s with the exposition of U.S. Latina/os to the Nation of Islam, the process of reversion among U.S. Latina/os at a larger scale is a recent phenomenon, specifically since September 11, 2001. The majority of U.S. Latina/os who have reverted are women and men between the ages of 15 and 35, most of whom have a college degree. Many of these reversions happened in school settings, work conversations, or through friendships. Most U.S. Latina/o Muslims described their reversion as a process or a search, an intellectual and spiritual journey that in some cases takes years, rather than an emotional conversion

Islam moment typified among Protestants and Pentecostals. Multiple explanations for the growth of Islam among Latina/os during the past decade exist. Many express dissatisfaction and disillusionment with Christianity, specifically with the Catholic Church, for what they perceive to be a rigid hierarchical structure with what appears to be a polytheistic nature (concept of the Trinity). U.S. Latina/os who reverted to Islam claim that their new religion provides better explanations to the mysteries of God, as well as a closer and more direct contact with the Deity. For others, the aftermath of 9/11 spotlighted Islam, leading some U.S. Latina/ os to search and research this religion that they found attractive. Some U.S. Latina/os saw in Islam a marginalized religion, and compared that marginalization to their own reality in the United States. This social commonality facilitated the process of reversion. Thus, the process of reversion among U.S. Latina/ os should not only be understood as a religious process, but also as a social transformation. As mentioned above, the growth of Islam among U.S. Latina/os is a fairly recent phenomenon; however, it has roots in Medieval Spain. U.S. Latina/os Muslims who have recently reverted, can claim a connection with over 700 years of Muslim (Moorish) rule in Spain (711–1492). This connection to the past helps explain and defend their reversion process as being neither new nor outside of the historical story of the Latino/a culture. However, some tend to romanticize the Moorish culture, not in its European and Western sense, but by tracing it back to northern Africa. The term ‘‘reversion’’ is specifically used by most U.S. Latina/o Muslims to focus on the aspect of ‘‘going

| 307

back’’ to their roots, not only religiously but also historically and culturally. Consequently, many do not see Islam as being outside of Latina/o culture, but rather as an intrinsic aspect of Hispanic heritage. Still, such explanations of reversion are viewed with suspicion and skepticism by the non-Muslim U.S. Latino community and by non-Hispanic Muslims. The relationship between U.S. Latina/ o Muslims and U.S. Latina/os and Muslims, in general, creates a sense of loss of identity and an anomie for the former. There are no specific masjids (mosques) just for Latina/os, compared to Latina/o churches within Christian groups. Hence, U.S. Latina/o Muslims attend the mosque with other Muslims, not taking into consideration their ethnicity or nationality, and the issues of language and culture become points of contention, even when there are multiple similarities. Because of this sense of anomie, U.S. Latina/o Muslims have been creating organizations in order to foster support groups. These organizations also bolster the spread of Islam among other U.S. Latina/ os by producing Spanish translations of Islamic literature and work toward ensuring that language does not become an issue in the process of the Dawah (invitation to, sharing of Islam). These different organizations meet for social contact and educational purposes, engaging in their faith in both English and Spanish. For many participants of these activities, the group has become a family, since their own family does not necessarily share their religious experience. Some have even been marginalized and alienated for their reversion, specifically their turning away from Christianity. For women, it is more difficult because of wearing the hijab (women’s head and body covering),

308 |

Islam

LADO Latino American Dawah Organization (LADO) was founded in September 1997 by a handful of U.S. Latina/o Muslims in New York. Since then, LADO has become one of the most important and influential organizations among Latina/o Muslims in the United States. Created as a grassroots organization to promote Islam among Latina/os in the United States, it has developed into a national group with regional leadership. The group’s mission is ‘‘to promote Islam among the Latino community within the United States by becoming better-educated Muslims and by working with like-minded Muslims.’’ To fulfill this mission, LADO, during the past five years, has been at the forefront of education, support, and promotion by writing articles, giving presentations, translating materials, creating an online newsletter, and developing a Web site. The organization has also encouraged the establishment of local organizations in different cities across the United States. Through these initiatives, LADO has not only become a network among Latina/o Muslims in the United States, but also a liaison between the Latina/o Muslims and the general Muslim community. LADO promotes the education of Islam among Latina/os in the United States and educates the Muslim community regarding the perspective U.S. Latina/o reverts bring to Islam. —HMV

as this piece of clothing becomes an obvious expression of their religion. Although their family members question their decision, U.S. Latina Muslims assert that they find in Islam more respect, rights, and privileges, even though some would accuse the religion of still being patriarchal. U.S. Latinas have expressed greater decision-making freedoms within Islam, especially regarding their clothing, which they see as being decided by women rather than imposed by men. As of 2007, there are no major academic publications regarding this community, yet the presence of U.S. Latina/o Muslim organizations and groups are evident by their growth. There are local organizations in many cities across the United States, like the Los Angeles Latino Muslim Association, Latino Muslim of the Bay Area, California Latino Muslim Association, Chicago Association of Latino-American Muslims, Alianza Isla´ mica (in New York) and PIEDAD

(Propagacio´n Isla´mica para la Educacio´n de devocio´ n a Ala’ el Divino), which have Web sites with information and personal reversion stories. The largest and most recognized organization is LADO (Latino American Dawah Organization), founded in September 1997. LADO maintains a Web site, an online newsletter, and has regional chapters. Two of its founders, Juan Galva´ n and Samantha Sa´nchez, are working on a book that will include reversion stories from Latina/o Muslims from across the United States. This recent, growing presence of U.S. Latina/o Muslim is generating interest and concern, not only within the U.S. Latino/a community but also within the Muslim community in the United States, as both of these communities struggle to address the needs of this growing group among them. Meanwhile, U.S. Latina/o Muslims are striving to find their own space within both communities. Hjamil A. Martı´nez-Va´zquez

Islam

References and Further Reading Cesari, Jocelyne. When Islam and Democracy Meet: Muslim in Europe and in the United States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Lo, Mbaye. Muslims in America: Race, Politics, and Community Building, Amana Islam in America Series (Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 2004).

| 309

Martı´nez-Va´zquez, Hjamil. ‘‘Finding Enlightenment: U.S. Latino/a’s Journey to Islam.’’ The Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies 3, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 57–71. Sa´nchez, Samantha, and Juan Galva´n. ‘‘Latino Muslims: The Changing Face of Islam in America.’’ Islamic Horizons (July/August 2002): 22–30.

J largest non-Catholic Christian tradition among Hispanics in the United States, with the highest conversion rate among Hispanic immigrants than any other Latino/a non-Catholic tradition. Their religious work is centered on sharing their beliefs through Bible studies and the teaching of basic principles of their faith through which they promote a strict code of unity in each of the countries evangelized. They consider themselves to possess a unique idea and revolutionary action when comparing themselves to other religious groups and when referring to their ideas, teachings, activities, practices, or personal conduct. They stress to maintain the same ethical code and Bible-centered message because of its universal message. They motivate members, both in Latin America and the world, to lead a moral and theocentric life as an answer to everything. The Kingdom of God is their solution, and each member is responsible before God for his/her actions. While they trace their faith’s roots to early Christian evangelists, the apostles,

JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES Jehovah’s Witnesses are a religious organization founded in the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century, reaching a diversity of ethnic groups in more than 236 countries. Although many Christian groups consider Jehovah’s Witnesses to be a sect, leading them to be classified as a ‘‘Para-Christian’’ group, their legal claims have helped them be recognized as a religious confession. They have been categorized as proselytes because of their aggressive style of evangelization: traveling from house to house, relating person to person, organizing themselves as a religious hierarchy, claiming to have a God-centered government. In terms of Hispanic involvement, in 2007 there was an estimated 2 million members from Spanish-speaking nations, exceeding Anglo-Saxons. Within the United States, there are more than 800,000 Latina/o adherents worshipping in more than 2,200 Spanish-speaking congregations. This makes Jehovah’s Witnesses the 311

312 |

Jehovah’s Witnesses

Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall in Carpinteria, California. (Cynthia Odell)

most experts date the origin to 1870 in the United States, when Charles Taze Russell, son of a Presbyterian family, formed a Bible study group in Allegheny, Pittsburgh. His most predominant theme was the unfulfilled prophetic predictions of the end of the world, emphasizing the imminent war of Armageddon and coming of Christ. The Watchtower, originally known as Zion’s Watchtower and Herald of Christ’s Presence, was first published in July 1879. Today, there are 28,578,000 copies distributed monthly in 158 languages. Russell, founder and first president (1870–1916), helped legally establish what is known today as ‘‘The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.’’ This organization grew to obtain worldwide recognition by

spreading its doctrine and beliefs, originally influenced by prophetic leaders of the Seventh-day Adventist. Russell copied their beliefs: the rejection of hell, an interest in apocalyptical prophecies, belief in the invisible return of Christ in 1874, and the destruction of the world in 1914, always emphasizing the war of Armageddon. The next leaders, Judge Rutherford (1916–1942), Nathan H. Knorr (1942–1977), Frederick Franz (1978–1992), Milton Henschel (1992– 2000), and Don Adams (2000–present), gave continuity to Russell’s work from their central offices located in Brooklyn, New York. Other than language and climate differences, the Jehovah’s Witnesses expansion within the Hispanic community is basically the same. Twenty-seven

Jehovah’s Witnesses | 313 translators, based in Puerto Rico, representing 10 nationalities, mainly from Latin America and Spain, translate all the literature that is distributed worldwide from English to Spanish, even though there has never been a Hispanic representative in the Governing Body. They are represented in different committees through 114 branches around the world. The Hispanic community has weekly services at a meeting place called ‘‘Kingdom Hall,’’ which is roughly equivalent to a Christian temple. Their leaders, referred to as elders, do not receive any special titles or monetary compensation. They go from house to house spreading their beliefs, such as the following: God is the Supreme Being, named Jehovah; the trinity is rejected as a pagan belief; Jesus is the first and greatest of God’s creation and the human representation of the archangel Michael and is not the son of God, but he is the messiah and died for our sins. Christ’s invisible second coming was in 1874 (later revised to 1914); the Holy Spirit is an active force associated with God; Jesus was not resurrected in body, but in spiritual essence, after establishing the Kingdom of God in Heaven, entrusted the ‘‘Watchtower’’ to administer the affairs of God on earth; the number of those going to heaven was 144,000. As their global membership grew, their belief changed to state that these ‘‘anointed ones’’ were going to heaven, including the main leaders. The rest of the membership is referred to as ‘‘The Great Crowd,’’ the earthly class that must work with the 144,000 in order to be saved and live in paradise. There is no eternal hell. They prohibit practices that connote nationalism such as saluting the flag and military service, common celebrations such as birthdays, and religious or

national holidays. Christmas and Easter are considered pagan practices that are also prohibited. There are specific differences based on the reality and needs of the people being evangelized. In the Hispanic communities in the United States, there are testimonies of immigrant families being reached and added to their membership. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are helping people throughout Latin America and hundreds of immigrant families arriving in the United States, especially along the southwest border. In the Caribbean, the offices in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic have been important. The work of the Kingdom in Puerto Rico began in 1932, when John Wahlberg, the only Witness living on the island, received a married couple from the United States to help him. The first Puerto Rican reached was Ambrosio Rosa in 1938. By 1944, the work gained intensity and spread to the U.S. Virgin Islands (1947) and the British Virgin Islands (1952) under the supervision of the Puerto Rico branch office. Four international assemblies have been celebrated in Puerto Rico (1967, 1973, 1978, and 1998). There is an estimated 28,000 witnesses who are supervised by the Puerto Rico branch office. Virginia Loubriel-Che´vere

References and Further Reading Espinosa, Gasto´n. ‘‘Methodological Reflections on Latino Social Science Research.’’ Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´n Espinosa (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2006). Mansferrer-Ken, Elio. Sectas o Iglesias (San Rafael, Me´xico, D.F.: Plaza y Valde´s, 2000).

314 |

Jews

MARRANOS The word ‘‘Marranos’’ is a derogatory term applied in medieval and early modern Spain and Portugal to Jewish converts to Christianity (conversos). These ‘‘New Christians’’ were believed to be living as Secret Jews (crypto-Jews), practicing their faith behind closed doors while receiving the Catholic sacraments. The origin of the word remains uncertain, but as used in Spain usually meant ‘‘pig’’ or ‘‘filthy’’ or ‘‘hypocrite.’’ This abusive labeling increased across Spain after the mass conversions, anti-Semitic riots, and trials of Sephardic leaders in 1391 and 1481. King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabel of Castile signed the infamous 1492 Edict of Expulsion demanding that all Spanish Jews convert to Christianity or leave Spain without their possessions. Forced and clandestine departures became a frequent feature of Spanish Jewish life in the 1500s and 1600s. Marranos found better conditions among North Africa’s Muslim nations and Turkey, while Protestant nations like England and the Netherlands became safe havens for Marrano and converso families fleeing the Inquisition. Conditions in Spain’s colonies offered these New Christians a measure of independence far from the persecuting authorities of the mother country, and Marranos became part of the Hispanic American religious story by moving to places like New Spain (Central America), New Mexico, and California. —AH

Moore, Donald T. Las Doctrinas Sanas y las Sectas Malsanas, I, II y IV (San Juan, PR: ABPR, 1986–1992; 1993–1996; 2000– 2002). Peters, Shawn F. Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2000). Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York. Los Testigos de Jehova´: Proclamadores del Reino de Dios (Brooklyn, NY: WBTS, 1993).

JEWS Hispanic Jews represent approximately 100,000 people in the United States, emigrating primarily from Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America since the late nineteenth century to the present. Hispanic Jewry is diverse in terms of origins (Sephardic or Ashkenazi), religious

affiliation (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform), and nationality. Most Latin American Jews come from Argentina and Mexico. While there are thousands of Jewish people of Latin American descent in the United States, there are practically no Hispanic Jewish communities, and there is virtually no scholarly work on this subject. Latino/a scholars who study religion write about Catholicism or other Christian religions. Jewish scholars would have little reason to examine Hispanic populations. Most of the existing literature on Hispanic Jewry in the United States examines Sephardic Jewish communities and ‘‘crypto’’ Jews. Sephardic Jews were Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. They settled in Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. Many migrated to North and South America in the early twentieth century for political and economic

Jews

| 315

ANOUSIM ‘‘Anous’’ is the Hebrew word for converts and their descendants forced into a different religious faith. ‘‘Anousim’’ refers to those born in Christian families, mainly Catholic, who rediscovered their Jewish identity. Anousim base their sense of identity on how their families practiced and preserved their Christian faith. For example, some of the basic tenets of Christianity (i.e., the Trinity or the Messiahship of Jesus) were rejected. Others noticed that their families followed certain customs and traditions (i.e., lighting candles on the Sabbath or following kosher dietary practices). Still others point to a family elder who reportedly has kept the family secrets alive, passing to the next generation their Jewish past, usually when on their deathbeds. Today, a large number of Hispanics from the Southwest, especially from New Mexico, believe that they are descendants of Jews forced to convert. But Jewish communities do not necessarily welcome the anousim. They require conversion if these Hispanics want to join their faith community. While some have formally converted, others are insulted at the request. For them, their families have maintained their Jewishness for centuries. In 1991, New Mexico’s state historian, Stanley Hordes, founded the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies to study and explore this phenomenon. —MAD

reasons, and to the United States from Latin America in the twentieth century for similar reasons. Throughout their Diaspora, many have continued to speak their fifteenth-century Spanish, known as Ladino. Of the 4 million Jews in the United States, 40,000 are Sephardim. Many ‘‘crypto Jews’’ live in the southwestern United States. They are descendants of Spanish Jews who converted to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century, but who maintained certain customs, such as lighting candles on Friday nights and not eating pork, not always realizing that those traditions were based in Judaism. Their descendants settled in the hinterland of the Spanish empire in today’s Southwest during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a result of various studies conducted in observance of the Quincentenary in 1992, many families, who had lived as Catholics for generations, learned of their Jewish roots.

The first Jews in the United States were 23 Sephardic refugees from Catholic Brazil who came to New York in 1654. Anecdotal information suggests that most Jews who have come to the United States from Latin America selfidentify as Jewish rather than Hispanic and are more likely to be involved in a Jewish community than in a Hispanic community. Even though most large U.S. cities have populations of Jews from Latin America, there are few Jewish Hispanic organizations. In Chicago, those who attend synagogue belong to various English-speaking congregations. Some get together over a specific issue, such as the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, or to help needy Jews in Latin America. Some are active in the equal rights struggles of Latino/a communities. In Los Angeles, 95 percent of Hispanic Jews self-identify as White/ Caucasian and 1 percent as Hispanic; 90 percent marry into their faith. As in

316 |

Jews

JUBAN The ‘‘Jubans’’ are the approximately 15,000 Cuban Jews of Miami whose families fled there in 1960 after the Cuban Revolution. Convinced that their stay would be a matter of weeks or months, they called their temporary setting Hotel Miami. After realizing that they would be there for a while, most settled in Miami Beach where Miami’s Jews lived, not in the non-Jewish Cuban areas of Calle Ocho and Coral Gables. As Spanishspeaking refugees, they were not accepted by the established Miami Jewish community. Only one Miami rabbi offered assistance to the new arrivals. In 1961, they formed the Cı´rculo cubano-hebreo, and in 1976, they built the Cuban Hebrew Congregation of Miami—Temple Beth Shmuel. In 1980, the Cuban Sephardim founded their own temple. The Cuban Jews continue to worship and socialize within the traditions they brought with them. Today they are a tricultural and trilingual community of Spanish, English, and Yiddish speakers. The oldest generation was born in Eastern Europe (Ashkenazi) or the Mediterranean (Sephardic), the second generation was born in Cuba, and the third in the United States. —AA

other cities, they neither organize as a group nor gather when in the same organizations. It is not surprising that Jews who come from Latin America identify as Jews, given the history of the lack of religious tolerance in Latin America, and the comparatively small size of the Latin American Jewish population. Between 1840 and 1942, 2,801,890 Jews came to the United States, while only 376,227 immigrated to all the countries in Latin America where the unity of church and state had existed since the fifteenth century. In contrast, in the United States, Jews enjoyed legal equality in a secular society. In Latin America, due to official religious intolerance, the Jewish population was small, but determined to maintain its Jewish identity. They did not assimilate to the national culture as easily as Jews in the United States. In Mexico, for example, there are 40,000 to 50,000 Jews, 95 percent of whom go to synagogue, 80–90 percent of their

children attend Jewish schools, and only one in ten marries a non-Jew. On the other hand, many European Jews went to Latin America in the late 1930s after they were turned away by the United States. In the United States today, there is one identifiable Jewish Hispanic community. The ‘‘Jewbans’’ are the approximately 15,000 Cuban Jews of Miami who settled there after the Cuban Revolution. As Spanish-speaking refugees, they were not accepted by the Miami Jewish community. In 1961, they formed the Cı´rculo cubano-hebreo, and, in 1976, they built the Cuban Hebrew Congregation of Miami. The Cuban Jews continue to worship and socialize within their traditions. Anthropologist Ruth Behar jokes that all Jewbans have a relative named Moise´ s, eat Goya and Manischewitz products, and dance salsa at Bar Mitzvahs. Some writers, such as Marjorie Agosı´n, Ilan Stavans, Ruth Behar, and Aurora

Justice | 317 Levins Morales, treat the theme of their Latino Jewishness in their works. The songs of the Los Angeles rock group Los Hoodios reflect their Jewish/Latino heritage. The Jewish Identity Project in Los Angeles featured photographs that investigate the experiences of being Jewish and Latino, as well as Jewish and Black, and asks who is a Jew? Carlos Martini’s documentary film, Latino Jews: Journey to the Americas, presents interviews with Latino Jews from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Chile, and Argentina. There have been recent efforts to make connections between Latino and Jewish communities. For example, the American Jewish Committee recently named a director of Latino affairs. In her inauguration speech, Diana Siegel Vann, who is herself a Jewish Latina, stated: ‘‘Latino Jews such as myself can act as interpreters between both communities, both literally and figuratively, and hope to jointly identify venues for cooperation.’’ Anna Adams

References and Further Reading Bettinger-Lopez, Caroline. Cuban Jewish Journeys: Searching for Identity, Home and History in Miami (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000). Cohen, Martin, and Abraham J. Peck, eds. The Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993). Elkin, Judith Laikin. The Jews of Latin America (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1998). Jacobs, Janet Liebman. Hidden Heritage: The Legacy of the Crypto Jews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Jenik, Ariel, and Judith Cichowolski de Jenik. Jewish Spanglish: The Latin American

Jewish Community of Los Angeles (M.A. thesis, Hebrew Union College, 2005).

JUSTICE Since the election of President Ronald Reagan, every subsequent administration, Democratic and Republican alike, has sought to reduce government costs by either privatizing or limiting state services such as welfare, public health, social security, and prisons. These new policies renewed a more intense debate about social justice in our society. Christian churches have been proactive in this conversation, and like their secular counterparts they are not of one mind. The Roman Catholic Church and most mainline denominations have expressed strong opposition to the new policies. Their claim is that the proposed cuts in programs and services will unjustifiably increase human suffering, particularly among the poor, and as such they are unjust. They base their claim on the religious convictions that in the poor we find indications of our faithfulness to God’s justice and that justice must be measured by how well the poorest members of society are doing. These Churches acknowledge their own responsibility for justice and express it through programs that provide generous assistance to the needy. However, they argue that charity is no substitute for justice and that Churches do not have either the material resources or the organizational capacity to effectively provide assistance to the poor. The resources and coordination provided by the state is indispensable for such assistance to be affective and just. Evangelicals are divided on this issue. The evangelical Right have expressed support for the new policies. They

318 |

Justice

encourage individuals to exercise more self-discipline and assume greater responsibility for their economic wellbeing. The state ought to get out of the business of social welfare and allow churches to provide such services through their different charitable organizations. Other Evangelicals assume a less legalistic attitude and want to coordinate efforts with the state to attend to the needs of citizens, which by no fault of their own had fallen into bad times. In their view, Jesus’ compassion for the poor is the normative biblical mandate, placing all the faithful under the obligation to serve those in need. Racial ethnic communities, while not of one mind as to what justice demands in our situation, do share a common concern about the economic burdens the proposed cuts in funding and services impose of their communities. They see how they negatively affect the life possibilities of their communities and how they significantly limit fair opportunities for them and their families to improve their lot. As a people who have suffered much, Hispanics have much to contribute to the justice debate. Their experiences as native people during the formation and expansion of the country and their continued experiences as a migrant people seeking refuge from dehumanizing poverty, from political oppression and civil wars, and ecological degradation give them unique insights as to what constitutes a just and good society. Differences in social status and economic class, in residential status and their experience of immigration, cultural expression, and political and religious convictions, make it impossible to articulate the Hispanic view on justice. However, when one analyzes the language and the images used

by most Hispanics when they address justice issues, one notices shared motifs that, in spite of their differences, are essential to their sense of justice. The dominant notion of social justice within our society is predominantly utilitarian and defined in narrowly economic distributive terms. The debate on migration, for example, focuses on whether migrants represent a social gain or a social cost. If the former, they are welcomed; if the latter, they are to be refused entrance. Consideration of their human rights, the reunification of families, and hospitality to strangers at best take a second place. When Hispanics engage in justice talk, however, one notices a significant shift and enlargement of the scope of justice. While matters of economic distribution are important, justice considerations are expanded to include issues dealing with the following: (a) power and decision making, (b) cultural identity, and (c) the social division of labor. The language of domination, exploitation, and liberation is ever present in Hispanic justice talk. Exploitation and domination point to the absence of justice; liberation points to the proactive pursuit of justice. Domination makes reference to those constraints that deny one’s freedom and capacity to act in socially recognized settings. To be dominated is to be ruled by others without one’s explicit consent whether within politics or at the work place. Exploitation entails being deprived of basic goods and services, as well as the education and/or training needed to acquire the knowledge and skills to fulfill ones self-realization. Domination and exploitation point to the fact that social reciprocity and mutuality are lacking in our society. It points to the unjust state of affairs where one

Justice | 319 social group disproportionately contributes to the freedom, well-being, power, and self-realization of another social group. Liberation expresses the vision that justice goes beyond social reforms and necessitates a fundamental restructuring of society. It is the quest for all members of society to: (a) participate in the decision-making centers that establish the laws and procedures by which we organize our mutual dealings; (b) be actively included in the productive process, to have a say in the way labor is compensated; (c) have a fair opportunity to develop skills and talents so as to be recognized as a contributing member of society; and (d) be free to live in light of one’s cultural heritage, which gives identity, meaning, and purpose. Inclusiveness, empowerment, and mutuality are the marks of a liberated society.

Dominant Motifs of the Hispanic Vision of Justice Economic Justice. Hispanics experience oppression and domination most vividly through their marginal status within the social process of production and consumption. Being locked into the lowest economic strata of our society, deprived of work, continuously underemployed, and/or poorly remunerated for their work is the most obvious experience of injustice. The poverty and deprivation that results from this state of affairs is deeply rooted in the present social structure. Attempts to fix this condition by enacting a fairer distribution of goods and services has proven to be insufficient as well as a lost cause. The reformist policies that have led to the present cuts in goods and services enacted by conservative and liberal politicians have not forwarded

social equality. In fact, as everyone recognizes, the gap between the rich and the poor has significantly widened. Of greater consequence is that the sought-after minimalist state, in its attempt to reduce social cost, has deprived people not only of access to basic goods and services, but also has limited their political access and possibilities. The distributive-reformist approach reduces citizens into depoliticized consumers, into a people incapable of questioning the economic process under which they live. The minimalist state assumes that as long as it delivers the consumer goods and services that most citizens crave, citizens are bound to be loyal and society will remain stable. Latinos/as argue that when we look at the system from the margin, justice entails fundamental changes to the social structure. It must begin with the political empowerment of the poor and marginal, with the active participation of all citizens in the restructuring of the economic sphere. Welfare grants, even generous ones, will not solve the basic problems of the poor. The material goods and services received, while necessary, do not compensate for the loss of essential freedoms and rights. The real problem is not only the passivity, boredom, and sense of uselessness that comes from not having meaningful and well-remunerated work, but mostly the deprivation of the experience of being political agents. This is a violation of the democratic way of life. It deprives citizens of the experience of self-respect and recognition that comes from acting within publicly recognized settings. It also undermines the sense of self-worth that comes from assuming responsibilities for meaningful social tasks. Justice is a great challenge precisely because those in power are

320 |

Justice

ultimately more willing to share their wealth and resources than to share their power. It is not that the better off are willing to readily share their wealth. Their ‘‘generosity’’ never takes place in the absence of significant struggle. However, dominant groups hold on much more tightly and struggle harder to oppose all efforts to restructure the configuration of power that cements their privileged position. In the Hispanic vision of justice, the goal is for all social members to be more not just to have more. Clearly, one must have in order to be; however, our present consumerist culture, supported by the power of media, is making it harder for many to avoid making having the purpose of being. Justice seeks the formation of a community that relegates consumption to the purpose of creating citizens acting collectively and cooperatively for the obtainment of shared goals and the fulfillment and development of new talents and skills necessary to accomplish this task. Justice as ‘‘economic liberation’’ gives priority to the political. It seeks the right of all members of society to participate in those private and public centers of decision making that affect their lives in significant ways. Social Justice. Hispanics, together with other racial ethnic minorities, are overrepresented in social tasks that, while socially necessary and useful, are neither desirable nor well remunerated. Most of the work they do is simple, overly repetitive, boring, dirty and brutish, and not conducive to nor require the development of diversified skills and talents. While at work they experience that they ‘‘belong to another,’’ that they are followers of another’s visions and commands. They are hardly ever consulted, much less granted the power of

decision making in matters regarding the various tasks they perform. They experience their work as contributing to the well-being of others more than contributing to their own self-development. This is what Hispanics mean when they say they are socially dominated and powerless. Latinas/os argue that justice within a democratic society requires not only political democracy but also greater economic democracy. In as much as the workplace is organized by a system of rules used to discipline the behavior of producers, workers ought to have a say in the determination of these rules. This form of social democracy can only enhance the skills citizens need for political democracy. It is a way of creating more spaces and opportunities for self-determination, more spaces in which to be recognized as fellow citizens and as contributing members of the community. Hispanic justice is particularly concerned with the systematic exclusion of racial ethnic people from those few privileged, high-paying, and socially recognized positions within our society. Latino/as are suspect of the claim that these privileged positions are distributed on the basis of merit. The dominant prejudicial and negative social attitudes toward Hispanics, together with the fact that they have not been consulted as to what constitutes merit, makes Hispanics distrust the specific criteria of merit being used to distribute those desirable social positions. Furthermore, the fact that most of these positions are overwhelmingly held by White males makes one suspect that there has been fair opportunity to compete for them. When a social procedure shows such a consistent imbalanced outcome, it reveals that there is something inadequate regarding

Justice | 321 the procedure itself; i.e., equality of opportunity is missing and the criteria of merit is biased. Under this state of affairs, it should not come as a surprise that most Hispanics support Affirmative Action programs. They have no illusions that these programs will forward justice. Still, without Affirmative Action programs the condition of racial ethnic groups would be worse off than what it is presently. Ultimately these programs represent a minimalist approach that powerful conservative groups, in order to keep hold of their power and privilege, have been willing to grant those who have traditionally been excluded from equal opportunity. Racial ethnic groups accept them as a necessary evil, as the best they can do for the time being. At their best, Affirmative Action is necessary not so much to compensate for past discriminations but primordially to allow talented racial ethnic candidates to have an opportunity to show their skill and talents. It helps counteract the conscious and unconscious prejudices and biases of decision makers. The real challenge for minority groups and women is to continue their coordinated efforts, through coalition building and other political strategies, and remain vigilant and committed to the struggle to keep desirable social positions open for those who have traditionally been locked out. The Cultural Dimension of Justice. The Latinos/as’ vision of justice must create a space for the preservation of cultural values that provide a meaningful way of life for a given social group. Justice entails overcoming cultural imperialism and its attempts to devalue, make invisible, ridicule, and, if possible, eradicate the culture of the dominated social group. The struggle for cultural

affirmation is not reactive to the entrenched resistance and prejudice that Euro-Americans have shown toward Hispanics. Hispanics tenaciously hold on to their cultural heritage and resist the ideology and politics of the melting pot because it has provided rich and abundant resources not just to survive but to thrive in the new land. It is not enough for them to limit their cultural expressions to the private sphere. They want to act privately and publicly in light of their cultural world views. To do anything else would be an act of self-denial. They are not persuaded by the claim that in order to succeed, all citizens have to assimilate to the Euro-American way of life. Many have done so and their lot is not much improved. In place of the ideology of the melting pot, many Hispanics argue for the promotion and preservation of the unique cultural identities of different subgroups within society. Group solidarity and loyalty, more than conversion to individualism and abstract notions of human rights, continue to be, for Hispanics, the basis of what little empowerment they can achieve. Latinos/as recognize that their social advancement is dependent on their capacity to negotiate a common life with the dominant culture. There are levels of integration, acculturation, and assimilation that are inevitable. As people who participate in two cultural systems, Hispanics will develop a new identity shaped by various forms of double consciousness. This is particularly true for future generations. What is not acceptable as a matter of justice are the demeaning stereotypes and overall negative images and attitudes propagated through the media and presented in the educational system, law enforcement agencies, and other governmental

322 |

Justice

agencies that represent a form of domination through the misuse of power. These negative images result in attitudes of self-denial and of self-loathing that particularly affect Hispanic youth, and among Euro-Americans it promotes the kind of fear and aversion that nourishes attitudes and practices that are fundamentally cruel and unjust. Political Justice. While many Hispanics make the cultural/identity dimension the center of their view of justice, there are others that give a priority to political justice. Politics takes priority because of how the economy and society is organized and because how multiculturalism and pluralism is structured is mostly a political decision. Just politics is democratic. Democracy provides the best means for individuals and groups to voice their needs, interests, and uniqueness. More importantly it enables citizens to develop habits of solidarity and the habit of thinking about their needs and interests in relation to the interests and the needs of others. Sadly our society reduces politics to the private bargaining of interest groups and political bureaucrats. Those social groups with more economic resources have unequal access to those who wield political power and are better able to influence their policy options. Large sectors of society have limited capacity and occasions to present their views and interests, much less to have them acted upon. Interest group politics are inevitable, unduly favor the well-to-do, and disregard and ultimately undermine the rights of the oppressed. Even worse, interest group politics discourages public participation, generating within the larger community attitudes of cynical indifference.

Hispanics, with few significant exceptions, have not been able to invest their political capital and energy into national issues. Migration legislation has done much to encourage more attention to national issues and to motivate their participation. Still, most Latino/a politics focuses on pressing local concerns: jobs, housing, health care, better schools, voting registration, and the like. Latina/o politics is more a politics of resistance than a politics of seeking control over the main centers of decision making. It is a politics based more on community organizing, which aims at making the state and big businesses more accountable to the needs and concerns of the local community. A just politics is democratic, and democracy entails among other things the empowerment, active participation, and recognition of the different social groups. The best way to foster justice within a society increasingly shaped by a plurality of social groups is to assure each social group representation in the process of decision making. This commitment to preserve group differences makes the Hispanic vision of justice somewhat incongruent with our society’s interpretation of justice. The prevailing liberal notion of justice claims that no rights, benefits, nor special treatment ought to be connected to one’s class, race, or gender. In fact, group differences are intrinsically prejudicial to those who do not belong to the group, and they limit the self-realization of individuals who belong to the group. The just and good society, therefore, is one in which all individuals are treated by the same standards, principles, and rules. Latinos/as, on the contrary, claim that our society is, in fact, group structured

Justice | 323 and that, given the irreversible process of globalization under which we presently live, group affirmation is inevitable and will continue to increase. In this pluralistic group context, it is the lack of recognition of cultural differences that constitutes a violation of the principle of equal treatment. The claim is that affirming group differences does not in itself violate democracy. Democracy is diminished by the fact that within our society some groups are privileged and dominant over others. Hispanics, like other minority groups, have learned the hard way that to disregard group differences ultimately hurts the oppressed group and favors the dominant group. Formal claims of impartiality and equality sustain those complex social blinders that keep both the oppressed and the oppressor unaware of the concrete manifestations of group privilege. It shields the structure of privileges from critical public scrutiny. It is neither by surrendering one’s cultural identity nor by striving for value commonness, but rather by group survival and empowerment, that more impartial and equal justice will be obtained. Social groups, contrary to the liberal view, are not something we contract into or can arbitrarily dismiss. Group membership is much more than an association for the sake of the satisfaction of needs, it is character forming. To a great extent they define who we are and provide our source of meaning and purpose. It makes no sense that justice calls us to neutralize these communal loyalties. Justice is more than individual rights, it is also being in solidarity with one’s main community. Justice requires commitment to the common good. The common good, from this perspective, is neither tyrannically substantive (all committed to the same

end) nor purely individualistic and procedural (each individual doing what he or she thinks is good). The good we hold in common is the commitment that no one will be made marginal from the centers of decision making, nor forced to accept the ways of another group. It is a commitment to equal respect and inclusivity of the different groups. The common good entails a commitment to create more spaces and more occasions for this diversity of people to intermingle with each other without being coerced into a homogeneous pattern or whole. Within these spaces, social groups aim not only to affirm their interests but also to seek to engage with others, to mutually understand each other, and to form coalitions that are mutually beneficial and that enable them to find ways to share life together. When no one is left out or deprived of representation, and when all are empowered, group differences can be positive and liberating.

Concluding Remarks ‘‘Hispanic’’ and ‘‘Latino/a’’ are the terms used by Spanish-speaking people from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Central America to describe the new identity being forged by people of these nations who have made the United States their permanent home. This new identity is not defined by their being oppressed, but by their struggle, in solidarity with others, to strive to overcome that which threatens their economic cultural, social, and political well-being. In this sense, the struggle for justice is an intrinsic dimension of the creation of that unique and original identity called Hispanic or Latino/a. The formation and consolidation of this new identity is perceived most

324 |

Justice

clearly in the urban centers of our nation where a plurality of Spanish-speaking people dwell together. The social and political realities of urban life have made them aware that only by creating coalitions and solidarity groups between themselves will they be successful in solving the challenges and concerns they confront. Living close to each other has facilitated the awareness of how they need and depend on each other to survive and to thrive. Shared experiences and proximity have created favorable conditions to transcend, without denying, national identity and to develop an awareness, sensitivity, and responsiveness to each other’s needs. Their vision of justice has been derived not only from the dynamics of their relationship with the dominant culture but also from the internal dynamics of the Hispanic community itself. While Hispanics see value in unity, they affirm the reality of group differences among themselves. They negotiate a common political struggle in pursuit of common goals without aiming at value and cultural commonness. ‘‘Hispanic’’ is a term that emphasizes solidarity, not uniformity. The continuing struggle for the creation of a plurality of spaces for the

affirmation of differences within a framework of equal rights shared by all is the vision of justice that integrates the larger historical project that feeds a new Hispanic identity and the contribution Hispanics can make to the national conversation about justice. Ismael Garcia´

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004). Du Bois, W. E. B. The Soul of Black Folk (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1961). Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria. En la Lucha: A Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Disuniting of America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992). Segovia, Fernando. ‘‘Two Places and No Place in Which to Stand: Mixture and Otherness in Hispanic American Theology.’’ Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture 27, no. 1 (1991). West, Cornel. Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).

L Language is more than a collection of words, it is a conveyor of concepts. For many Latino/as, identity is tied into speaking Spanish. To a certain extent, it holds together the Hispanic community, a community that encompasses many ethic groups and individuals whose residency in the United States dates back generations or just a few years. A Cuban, a Chicano/a, a Chilean, and a Costa Rican may trace their roots to different countries with a different racial, social, and political milieu, but more than likely they have one thing in common that allows them to be bounded together, their language. While other ethnic groups have consciously attempted to replace their native tongue with English, Hispanics have attempted to hold on to Spanish, passing it down to the next generation. The reality of life in the United States is creating an environment where a new form of communication among Hispanics is developing—one that is neither Spanish nor English, yet is both Spanish and English. Hispanics are fragmented

LANGUAGE It is common to hear Spanish spoken throughout the United States. According to the 2005 census, of the estimated 268 million people age five and over, about 52 million (19 percent), or one in five, spoke a language other than English at home. Of this, over 32 million (12 percent) spoke Spanish. Over half of those who speak Spanish at home reported speaking English ‘‘very well.’’ The West and South combined had about three times the number of Spanish speakers as the Northeast and Midwest combined. Many Latina/os speak a ‘‘pure’’ Spanish, some are bilingual, others speak Spanglish, while still others speak only English. In addition, caution must be taken that these are the only four choices available to Hispanics. There are those who are proficient in neither English nor Spanish, but rather converse in Cholo, Mayan, Na´huatl, or Pocho. Nevertheless, the prominence of Spanish to Latino/a identity has historically been and remains strong. 325

326 |

Language

based on the length of time living in the United States and the degree of acculturation to the norms of the American culture. Latina/os, specifically the youth, who are caught in an in-between space between their parent’s Hispanic worldview and that of the dominant EuroAmerican culture have developed their own language, which reflects the internal dialectic of these two cultures. Fragmented identity has led to a fragmented language. ‘‘Spanglish’’ becomes the verbal expression of a U.S. Hispanic space and expresses the attempt to mestizar the dominant Euro-American culture with the oppressed Hispanic reality. To an older generation of Latina/os, Spanglish becomes a corrupt vernacular of their mother tongue. In appearance, Spanglish seems to demonstrate neglectfulness, in effect a rejection of the Hispanic culture by Americanizing Spanish. But to the dominant culture, Spanglish is simply another example of linguistic deficiency, a humorous attempt to imitate the legitimate language of the land. In effect, both cultures rebuff their mutual product. When a people are denied economic and cultural capital, a new way of expression is devised in the diverse setting of everyday life. Spanglish reflects the reality that forces Hispanics to live with one foot in the Latino/a world of their parents and the other foot in the present physical country where they reside. Rather than a rejection of both the Spanish and English cultures, an attempt is made to carve out a social space where Latina/os are distinguished both from their parents and from the dominant culture. The construction of Spanglish becomes a sociopolitical project toward the unification of ‘‘who they are’’ with ‘‘where they live.’’ Spanglish represents the irremediable ‘‘two-

ness’’ of cultures that dwells among Hispanics. The ability to speak English, Spanish, or Spanglish seems to have an affect on Latino/a spirituality. According to a 2007 study conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, a majority of Latino/a Catholics (55 percent) say that Spanish is their primary language, while a majority of evangelicals (63 percent) and mainline Protestants (73 percent) say that English is their primary language or that they are bilingual. Additionally, a majority of those who belong to other Christian faiths (61 percent) or are secular (63 percent) also said that English is their primary language or that they are bilingual. It is interesting to note that conversion from one faith tradition to another is higher among English-speaking Latina/ os than it is among Spanish speakers (and foreign born). Twenty-six percent of all Hispanics whose primary language is English converted. The conversion of those who are bilingual (20 percent) and those whose primary language is Spanish (14 percent) were lower. Even when other variables such as gender, generation, and education were taken into consideration, these rates of conversion persisted. The largest conversion rate among Latina/os who are Englishdominant speakers occurred among those who converted to secularism. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of those who said that they became secular either are bilingual or have English as their primary language. Among those who say that their primary language is Spanish, 75 percent also say that their religion is very important to them. Compare this to those whose primary language is English. For them, 59 percent said that religion is very important to them in their daily lives.

Latina Evangélica Theology Likewise, for those with Spanish as their primary language, the vast majority, 83 percent, believe in a ‘‘prosperity gospel,’’ which holds that God will bless them with financial rewards or with good health. But for those with English as their primary language, the majority is smaller, with only 54 percent believing in the prosperity gospel. Finally, those for whom Spanish is the primary language are more likely (60 percent) to believe in Jesus’ Second Coming (his return to earth in their lifetime), than those for whom English is the primary language (43 percent). It may appear obvious that foreignborn Hispanics and those for whom Spanish is the primary language would attend distinctly Latino/a churches with distinctive ethnic characteristics. But surprisingly, 70 percent of Hispanics who speak little or no Spanish also report attending such churches. Ergo, the Latino/a ethnic church phenomenon is not limited to those who speak only Spanish. Among Latina/o Catholics a majority reported that they prefer to attend a Mass in Spanish. In fact, 91 percent of Hispanic Catholic churchgoers state they attend Spanish language services. The numbers are also high for evangelicals (81 percent), mainline Protestants (67 percent), and other Christian traditions (86 percent). In short, language is an important factor in determining Latina/o religiosity; nevertheless, for the majority of Hispanics, regardless of language proficiency, God is worshipped in Spanish. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American

| 327

Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007). U.S. Census Bureau. http://www.census.gov/.

LATINA EVANGÉLICA THEOLOGY Latina evange´lica theology is a collaborative, incarnational, and constructive theological reflection done from the particular perspective of Latina Protestant women. As Latinas, they are part of the almost 47 million people who are of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American, and South American descent currently residing in the continental United States. ‘‘Latina’’ is not synonymous with ‘‘Latin American’’—those who continue to reside in their countries of origin. To be Latina implies that one is adversely affected by sexism as well as the marginalization, cultural and linguistic discrimination, racism, colonialism, poverty, and adverse effects of globalization experienced by Latinos. First-generation Latinas and Latinos have further experienced the traumatic effects of im/migration, described by some scholars as a ‘‘Diaspora experience.’’ Latinas and Latinos are often called mestiza/o (hybridity), nepantla (literally, ‘‘the place in-between’’), or sata/o (in Puerto Rico, refers to mixed-breed animals) to describe their distinctiveness as a people arising from the encounter of two or more cultural, biological, and/or religious groups. In the Americas, the encounter of European conquistadores —primarily from Spain and Portugal— with indigenous and African people resulted in a biological and cultural mestizaje that produced a particular religious worldview and spirituality: a popular

328 |

Latina Evangélica Theology

Catholicism that is foundationally Iberian Catholicism with Amerindian and African beliefs. This worldview retains an understanding that God is truly present in all things and all places in the daily (cotidiano) spaces of life. At the beginning of the twentieth century and continuing through the present, European and U.S. Protestantism underwent the same process of mestizaje with the prevalent popular religious practices they encountered in the Spanish Americas and Caribbean. Native populations adopted the new faith in such a way that beliefs were either reinterpreted or transmuted to allow the new to coexist with older valued traditions. For example, new converts continued to use crucifixes or to exclaim ‘‘Ave Marı´a Purı´sima’’ (Hail Mary, most Pure), while allegedly eschewing all belief in the Virgin. Latinas and Latinos embraced their new faith with vigor, becoming ardent evangelizers of the Good News (el evangelio), and thus eventually identified themselves as people of this Good News—evange´lica/os. Protestants in many countries of the Spanish-speaking Americas to this day usually do not self-identify as Protestantes, since their goal is not to protest but rather to share el evangelio. Their Protestant foundation is evident in the evange´lica affirmation of such important Reformation principles as sola Scriptura. They also agree with evangelicals that conversion is a ‘‘necessary’’ result of any real encounter with Jesus Christ. In particular, evange´ lica/os tend to stress the central role of the Holy Spirit for transformation and the importance of the community of faith as a base from which to carry out prophetic ministries ‘‘in the world.’’ However, it is incorrect to translate the Spanish word as an

English equivalent of ‘‘evangelical,’’ since evange´lica does not have the same associated theological and sociopolitical implications. Furthermore, while evangelicals consider themselves distinct from ‘‘mainline’’ or ‘‘historic’’ Protestant denominations, evange´lica/os apply the term solely to distinguish themselves from Roman Catholics. ‘‘Evange´ lica’’ can be defined as the lived faith of a popular Protestantism that distinctively retains elements of Latin American popular Catholicism, including indigenous and African spiritualities, as essential dimensions of its cultural and religious formation. It is a group that is fast becoming an important part of the larger U.S. Protestant Church. Latina evange´ licas are women who, conscious of their religious and cultural roots, construct new theological paradigms that contribute to the transformation of their communities and the liberation of Latinas and other oppressed women. They are an integral part of the grassroots church and other communities that nourish their faith and reflect in dialogue with those communities. They maintain a vital tension between affirming the life-giving aspects of evange´lica beliefs and offering a prophetic critique of the traditions that contribute to the injustice against women in particular, and to oppressed communities in general. Insofar as they are rooted in the theological legacy they inherited from their abuelas and abuelos, theirs is not a ‘‘new’’ theology in academic or ecclesial circles. Rather, they represent a constructive and therefore distinctive perspective (Lozano-Dı´az 2003, 38). Evange´ lica theologians are just as diverse as the Latina community at large. They represent a variety of cultural, denominational, and professional

Latina Evangélica Theology backgrounds. They have contributed individually and collaboratively to a significant and growing corpus of scholarly work. The following is a brief description of some of the ‘‘first generation’’ evange´lica scholars and their contributions. The first evange´lica in the United States to graduate with a doctoral degree in theological studies, Cuban-born Daisy L. Machado, is a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) ordained minister and church historian. She is also the first Latina evange´ lica to serve as dean of an Association of Theological Schools (ATS) accredited institution in the United States. She has written about Latinas and Latinos, particularly those located in the borderlands of the Southwest, who are often ignored in hegemonic historical narratives reflecting dominant perspectives. Elizabeth Conde-Frazier is a New York Puerto Rican evange´ lica and an American Baptist Churches/USA ordained minister. She completed her doctoral degree in practical theology and religious education. She has written extensively on the role of Bible institutes as a vehicle for training evange´lica lay and pastoral leadership, and explored themes in spirituality and testimonios (witnessing). Zaida Maldonado Pe´rez is a Puerto Rican historical theologian raised in Pentecostal church traditions, but is presently a leader in the United Church of Christ. She has written on the Trinity as familia, the importance of the legacy of the early church for evange´licas/os, and the subversive role of martyrs in early Christianity. Mexican-born Nora Lozano-Dı´az is a systematic theologian and member of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. She has constructed a Christology that seeks to counter the traditional views of passive suffering prevalent in Mexican and Mexican American

| 329

women, and she has revisited the importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe from an evange´ lica perspective. Loida I. Martell-Otero is a bicoastal Puerto Rican constructive theologian and an ordained American Baptist minister. One of the earliest contributors about the importance of evange´ lica theology, she has explored the incarnational dimensions of soteriology and Christology, and suggested sata/o as a more culturally appropriate metaphor for mestizaje from a Puerto Rican perspective. These are not the only evange´ lica scholars who have made important contributions. Aida Besancon-Spencer, Esther Dı´az-Bolet, Theresa Chavez Sauceda, Leticia Guardiola, and Awilda Gonza´ lez-Tejera are just a few of the many women whose contributions are considered invaluable to evange´lica constructive and liberative theologies. As more Latina evange´licas enter the ranks of professional academic pursuits, and their contributions continue to enrich the theological discourse, they will be an increasingly important voice in the Latino/a church, as well as in the larger ecclesial and academic community. Loida I. Martell-Otero

References and Further Reading Lozano-Dı´az, Nora O. Confronting Suffering: An Evange´lica Theological Approach (PhD diss., Drew University, 2003). Maduro, Otto. ‘‘Notes Toward a Sociology of Latina/o Religious Empowerment.’’ Hispanic/ Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise, ed. Ada Maria Isasi-Dı´az and Fernando F. Segovia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). Martell-Otero, Loida I. ‘‘Women Doing Theology: Una Perspectiva Evange´lica.’’ Apuntes 14, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 67–85.

330 |

Literature

Martell-Otero, Loida I. Liberating News: An Emerging U.S. Hispanic/Latina Soteriology of the Crossroads (PhD diss., Fordham University, 2005). Rodrı´guez, Jose´ David, and Loida I. MartellOtero, eds. Teologı´a en Conjunto: A Collaborative Hispanic Protestant Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997).

LITERATURE As has been the case from the dawn of writing, U.S. Latino/a authors often express religious themes and attitudes in their literature. Although some scholars begin the history of U.S. Latino/a literature with the arrival of the Spaniards, we draw some very clear boundaries as follows: 1848 for Mexican American literature; 1898 for Puerto Rican literature; 1959 for Cuban American literature; and later for other groups. Overall, U.S. Latino/a literature reflects a triadic interaction among indigenous, Christian, and African religious traditions. The Christian tradition has been predominantly Catholic, with Protestant writers becoming a more recent phenomenon.

Mexican American Literature Insofar as religious expression is concerned, three periods of Mexican American literature may be tentatively identified: ‘‘The Normative Religious’’ period (1848–1959) where most literary works still revered or supported the Catholic Church; ‘‘The Reactionary Religious’’ period (1959–1972), in which works began actively to criticize the Catholic Church; and ‘‘The Alternative Religious’’ period, (1972–present), wherein writers have consciously constructed alternative and systematic

traditions that draw consciously from non-Christian religions. The literature of Mexican Americans from our Normative Religious period (1848–1959) is still being recovered and categorized. Genres include corridos (short narrative poems set to music), and assorted devotional poetry and short stories. One of the exemplars of this period would be Fray Ange´lico Cha´vez (1910– 1996), whose poetry and short stories (e.g., New Mexico Triptych 1940) portray the advent of Catholicism to the Americas and the Southwest as one of the greatest achievements of Christendom. The Reactionary Religious period in Mexican American literature had a definite beginning with Jose Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959), which is often acknowledged as the first Chicano novel. The open criticism of the Catholic Church and its espousal of frank atheism by its protagonist were unprecedented in Mexican American literature. After the significant changes in Catholic policy promulgated by Vatican II (1962–1965), many more Mexican American authors became quite critical of the Church. One of the most militant was the mysterious Oscar Zeta Acosta (1935–1974?), who assumed the alter ego of Buffalo Z. Brown in various novels, including his Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and its sequel, The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), which discuss his rejection of Christianity and religion altogether. The early 1970s mark a sort of golden age in Mexican American literature. Presses such as Quinto Sol were established to publish works by Mexican Americans. Especially notable is Toma´s Rivera’s . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971), which tells a Joblike story of the miserable existence of

Literature Chicanos in the fields, and the silence of God regarding their plight. However, for all of the criticism of Catholicism or religion, authors in this period usually do not construct alternative religious visions. This changed with the publication of Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, a native of New Mexico. From its publication in 1972, we mark the beginning of the Alternative Religious period in which authors went beyond criticizing traditional Catholicism and began a systematic exploration and active construction of alternative religious traditions. In Bless Me Ultima, Tony Mare´z, the main character, opts for a pantheistic religion that can mediate between a strict Catholicism represented by his mother, a skepticism represented by his father, and an indigenous tradition represented by Ultima, a curandera who lives with Tony’s family. The floruit of the Alternative Religious period in Mexican American literature may be seen in Borderlands (1987) by Gloria Anzaldu´ a (1942–2004), who constructs a woman-centered religion based on Nahuatl traditions. Another example is found in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God (1993), which centers on a systematic critique of androcentric religions. For Castillo, religions must be judged according to how they serve the needs of women. Some authors concentrated on how ordinary women navigated their Latino/ a spirituality in American urban environments. John Rechy, an openly gay Mexican-American author, published The Miraculous Day of Ama´lia Gome´ z (1991), which is about woman who struggles to find God in the midst of an urban life in Hollywood. Similarly, Maria Amparo Escando´n’s Esperanza’s Box of Saints (1999) examines the life

| 331

of a woman who struggles to adjust Catholic theology to the realities she encounters as she moves from Mexico to the United States. Indeed, the religious lives of women were a hallmark of the religious themes in the Latino/a literature of the 1980s and 1990s. Of course, not all books in this Alternative Religious period were intent on creating alternative systematic theologies. In Alejandro Morales’ Rag Doll Plagues (1992) we find a science fiction genre used to express religious themes. Others concentrated on showing how religion helped maintain cohesive bonds in a Mexican Diaspora. For example, Victor Villasen˜or’s sprawling epic, Rain of Gold (1991), tells the story of the two sides of the author’s semi-fictional family and its journey from Mexico to the United States.

Puerto Rican Literature For the purposes of our survey, the Puerto Rican literature that is most significant was that published from 1898 to the present. It was in 1898 that the United States acquired Puerto Rico as one of its territories. In the U.S. mainland, Puerto Rican literati have mainly concentrated in the New York area and reflect closely the immigration patterns of most Puerto Ricans of the post–World War II era. Thus, our treatment of religion concentrates on the works published in the mainland since World War II. As in the case of Mexican American literature, there is a mass of folk genres (e.g., boleros, plenas) of lyric poetry and song that have yet to be systematically categorized in terms of religious content. Although not published until 1977, Memorias de Bernardo Vega (Memoirs of Bernardo Vega), written originally in

332 |

Literature

the late 1940s, has come to represent the period between World War I and World War II in the United States. Its attitude toward Catholicism does not seem to be very strong, but it is not hostile. With Jesu´s Colo´n (1901–1974), however, we find a more nonreligious and openly Marxist approach in A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (1961). One of the most prominent differences of Mexican American literature is the prevalence of African religious traditions in Puerto Rican literature. Often this acceptance of African religious traditions is juxtaposed with a criticism of the Catholic Church, as in the work of Tato Laviera, reputed to be the best-selling Latino/a poet in America. His work La Carreta Made a U-Turn (1992) is a powerful jeremiad against organized Catholicism juxtaposed with a call to acknowledge African traditions. Some of the poems, in fact, form substitute African rituals for Catholic liturgical traditions. Relations between Puerto Rican and Irish Catholics in New York have been a point of contention. One expression of these tense relations is found in Edward Rivera’s ‘‘First Communion,’’ a story that is part of a larger work, Family Installments (1982). ‘‘First Communion’’ is about a boy, Santos Malangue´ z, and his transition from Puerto Rico to New York, where he learns about the various ways in which Puerto Ricans maintained their identity in an Irish-dominated parish. It is to be expected that Jews and Puerto Ricans would interact in New York City in a manner that may not happen in many other places in the United States. Nicholasa Mohr has explored these relationships in a number of stories featured in her book El Bronx

Remembered (1986). Piri Thomas, one of the most salient of Nuyorican authors, exemplifies the experimentation of Latino/as with Islam in Down These Mean Streets (1967), while his later book Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (1973) details his disillusionment with Pentecostalism. The difficulty in finding books written by Protestants attests to the position of Protestantism in Puerto Rican culture (and in Latino/a culture). And although nearly a third of Puerto Ricans are now Protestant, one finds very few positive depictions of Protestantism. In fact, we find that Protestants are largely missing from the canon of U.S. Latino/a literature found in most anthologies of Latino/a literature. One omission is Nicky Cruz, whose book, Run, Baby, Run (1968), differs very little, on formal and content grounds, from what Piri Thomas writes. Despite the fact that Cruz probably outsells Piri Thomas, Cruz, who is vocally evangelical and criticizes non-Protestant religions, is not normally viewed as part of the canon in academia. Ed Vega represents a more secularist approach in his writings. His book The Comeback (1985) is perhaps one of the most intricate and sardonic works in all of U.S. Latino/a literature. Vega’s The Comeback is a literary expression of the idea that God and religion are products of the human imagination. In many ways, The Comeback mirrors Vega’s rejection of his religious upbringing. Puerto Rican literature also seems to have had more women writers earlier than Mexican American literature. These women include Julia de Burgos, Sandra Marı´a Este´vez, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Aurora Levins Morales, and Esmeralda Santiago. Often, these women also comment on religion. For example, Judith Ortiz Cofer’s poem, ‘‘Cada Dia’’ [Each

Literature

| 333

Day] in Terms of Survival (1976) offers a feminist and somewhat satirical version of the Lord’s Prayer. In Terms of Survival one finds another poem, ‘‘Costumbre’’ [Custom], wherein she comments on how piety and hypocrisy mix in Puerto Rican culture. Aurora Levins Morales has alluded to the issues and problems of being Puerto Rican and Jewish in works such as Getting Home Alive (1986) and Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity (1998).

Cuban American Literature For Cuban American history, 1959 is a crucial date. In that year, Fidel Castro created a communist dictatorship, which led to the emigration of thousands of Cubans to the United States. Cuban American literature may be periodized easily into at least two phases: (1) the immigrant adult generation; and (2) younger immigrant and Americanborn generations. It is the second group that has produced the bulk of what is called Cuban American literature. A major theme involves the interplay between life and religion in Cuba and America. Also important is the role of race relations, a subject often suppressed in Cuba, but given new vigor by the role of race in the United States. Most Cuban American literature has been the domain of White Cubans. One of the works that integrates these themes is Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), which presents a multivalent view of Santerı´a, one of the main African traditions brought to, and transformed in, Cuba. But not all Cuban American literary attitudes toward religion are negative. The attitudes found in Mr. Ives’ Christmas (1995) are quite positive toward the

Writer Oscar Hijuelos displays his new book, A Simple Habana Melody, on June 18, 2002, in West Hollywood, California. Hijuelos won the Pulitzer Prize for the book Mambo Kings. (Getty Images)

Catholic Church. Mr. Ives’ Christmas was authored by Oscar Hijuelos, who was the first U.S. Latina/o author to have garnered a Pulitzer Prize (1990) for literature. Furthermore, Achy Obejas has opened up new paths in exploring a Latino/Cuban Jewish identity (e.g., Days of Awe, 2001). A more eclectic approach to religion is found in the works of Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nilo Cruz.

Dominican Literature and Other Groups Authors from other Latino/a subgroups, while still a minority, are increasingly producing significant works. The themes are quite similar to those found in

334 |

Literature

Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American literature. For example, in How the Garcı´a Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), Julia Alvarez, the Dominican American writer, illustrates how American consumerism replaces their Dominican Catholic traditions. Central and South Americans still do not have a significant voice in Latino/a literature. In fact, some of the bestknown works involving Central American characters are authored by Mexican American authors. One illustration is In Search of Bernabe´ (1993) written by Graciela Limo´n, a native of Los Angeles who worked in El Salvador. The plot of the book centers on a Salvadoran woman who seeks a son who was lost amidst the chaos that resulted from the assassination of Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of El Salvador. The book focuses on the political struggles of El Salvador, but alludes frequently to the Catholic milieu of Salvadoran culture. Similarly, in Mother Tongue (1994), Demetria Martinez, a Mexican American author, voices the real-life struggles of Salvadorans who are involved in the American church sanctuary movement for undocumented persons.

Conclusion Latina/o literature reflects the religious experience of Latinas/os only partially. One significant reflection is the role of Catholicism in the U.S. Latino/a experience. Cultural differences are also reflected in literature as we compare Caribbean with Mexican American authors. Certainly, we find more evidence of the influence of African traditions in the works of Puerto Rican and Cuban writers. We find many allusions to Aztec

religious traditions in Mexican American literature. However, many authors are part of the elite educated strata of Anglo-American society who hold PhDs. Many are academics. These are not the experiences of most Latinas/os. Nor is the general religious profile like that of most Latinas/os now. Although perhaps over 25 percent of Puerto Ricans are Protestant (and positive toward Protestantism), one will not find a quarter of all Puerto Rican authors writing positively about Protestantism. From at least 1959 onward, we see in most Mexican American writers an antipathy toward organized religion. At the same time, many of these writers have emphasized individualism. This individualism is consistent with AngloAmerican religious traditions. We also see a marked increase in tolerance toward non-Christian traditions, especially since Vatican II. The works of Laviera and Garcı´a exemplify some of the diverse attitudes that Latinas/os have toward African religions. There are still many areas unexplored in Latina/o religion and literature. There needs to be a more systematic study that integrates different genres (including folk songs, corridos, etc.) into a more synthetic study of religion and literature. Our periodizations need to be refined and perhaps even abandoned when more systematic study of all literary genres is completed. And, of course, we need more reliable demographic data on Latino/a religion so that we can gauge how Latinos compare with Latino/a authors. The future is difficult to predict, but certainly we can expect Central and South Americans to make their voices heard in U.S. Latino/a literature. Eclectic forms of religious literary expression, drawn

La Lucha from traditions all over the globe, may be the dominant trend for the foreseeable future. Hector Avalos

References and Further Reading Avalos, Hector. Strangers in our Own Land: Religion in U.S. Latina/o Literature (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005). Borland, Isabel Alvarez. Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Personas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). Christian, B. Marie. Belief in Dialogue: U.S. Latina Writers Confront Their Religious Heritage (New York: Other Press, 2005). Dalleo, Raphael, and Elena Machado. The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Kevane, Bridget. Profane and Sacred: Latino/a American Writers Reveal the Interplay of the Secular and the Religious (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Menes, Orlando Ricardo. Renaming Ecstasy: Latino/a Writing on the Sacred (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2004).

LA LUCHA La lucha (the struggle) is an intrinsic element of Latina/o culture, influencing the way Latina/os learn, look at life, face life, and think about themselves. La lucha is a fundamental concept that captures and synthesizes a variety of Latina/o cultural insights, values, and ways of dealing with life. This dynamic, foundational concept is expressed in a variety of words and expressions, among them bregar for Puerto Ricans; sı´ se puede for Chicanas/os and Mexican Americans; and resolver for Cubans. La lucha takes

| 335

on a particular meaning for Latina/os in the United States who historically have been and continue to be minoritized, marginalized, and exploited by the dominant group. Given the social, economic, political, and religious context of oppression in which the majority of Latina/os in the United States live, la lucha takes on a particular meaning, concerned not just with the efforts all living entails, but particularly with the struggle for liberation/ fullness of life. La lucha, in this sense of struggle for liberation/fullness of life, is a concrete reality in the life of Latina/os in the United States, a first horizon in the way life is experienced and engaged. La lucha is an element of the way Latina/os understand themselves—as social beings who struggle—not as an individualistic act but as a family affair, a community enterprise, a societal endeavor. La lucha is very much part of the way Latina/os come to know reality, being central to Latina/o experiences, and at the heart of the three-pronged process for acquiring knowledge: immersion in the material mediations of the reality one is learning; apprehending it, that is, grasping it as fully as possible; and, in the process of apprehending it, changing it. La lucha makes clear that to know reality is to change reality. La lucha also identifies the perspective from which Latina/os look at life; it is the grounding point of view of the perennial search for ways to struggle because not to struggle is to perish. La lucha likewise refers to reflective action on behalf of liberation/ fullness of life, negating the erroneous idea that the oppressed do not have anything to contribute in the creation of a just world order. La lucha as a liberative praxis is not just any action, but one grounded in rational analysis and passionate intentionality, manifested in

336 |

La Lucha

Demonstrators in Washington, D.C., protest bill HR 4437, which blocks immigration from Latin American countries. (Richard Gunion/Dreamstime)

bodily exertion and desire for fullness of life. La lucha is a defining element of the historical project of all oppressed people in general and of Latina/os specifically: struggling for liberation/fullness of life. Taking into account the deep sense of Latina/o communities in the United States that la vida es la lucha (to struggle is to live) mujerista/Latina/o theology has elaborated the different aspects of la lucha as a category that impinges on being, knowledge/meaning, perspective, and reflective action, proceeding then to develop ethical and theological perspectives grounded in such understandings. From a mujerista/Latina/o ethical perspective, la lucha is a value, an option, and a virtue. As a value it is for Latina/

os a face of ‘‘the good.’’ To be involved in la lucha gives valuable meaning to Latina/os’ everyday reality, which is why the elders in Latina/o communities insist that one must not reject la lucha, but rather gratefully embrace it. La lucha is also an ethical option: the oppressed are self-defining human agents deciding whether to engage in la lucha or to accommodate to oppression, succumbing to mere survival or choosing instead to struggle for fuller life. As a virtue la lucha is a habitual act, a daily way of living and understanding life. Because it is a central element of ‘‘the good’’ at the personal, communal, and societal level, Latina/os exert themselves to have la lucha at the center of their lives, guiding them every day.

La Lucha From a mujerista/Latina/o Christian theological perspective, God is not removed from human reality but rather listens to the cries of the poor and the oppressed and contributes effectively to la lucha, to their struggle to escape captivity and slavery (i.e., Exodus) and oppressive human-made laws (i.e., Jesus’ struggles with the Pharisees). In popular religious practices—a central element of Latina/o culture—God, as well as saints and ancestors, who are considered to be very close to the divine, join la lucha of the people to change oppressive structures that squelch fullness of life. Theologically, la lucha makes concrete the ‘‘love one another’’ Gospel message, the command to ‘‘go into all nations’’ to proclaim justice, love, and peace—fullness of life for all. From a religious-theological perspective la lucha is the Christian endeavor to create the conditions needed for the fullness of redemption to become a reality in the world. In this sense la lucha incarnates the eschatological tension between the

| 337

‘‘yet, but not yet’’ of the fullness of Jesus’ salvific life and message. It is through la lucha for fullness of life that Christians become full members of the kin-dom of God—of the family of God —for la lucha incarnates the Gospel command to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit those in prison and the sick, and welcome the foreigner. Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az

References and Further Reading Dı´az Quin˜ones, Arcadio. El arte de bregar: ensayos (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejo´n, 2000). Burke, Kevin. The Ground Beneath the Cross —The Theology of Ignacio Ellacurı´a (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. La Lucha Continues— Mujerista Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004).

M As a male ideology, machismo has existed in many cultures, with special salience in traditional Mediterranean cultures, especially in Spain from where derived the legend of Don Juan. In the legal system of Roman law in Latin Mediterranean societies, women were under one of the following three types of legal authority: patria potestas (paternal power), manus (subordination to a husband’s legal power), or tutela (guardianship). Patria potestas is still prevalent in some Latin American countries where the men are considered as masters or heads of the households (paterfamilias) and have absolute authority and superiority over wife and children in virtually all legal and social situations. The sociocultural lineage of Latin American machismo is from Andalusian Spain and partly from the Saracen Moors who ruled southern Spain from 711 to 1492 CE. The confluence of Iberian, Roman, and Islamic cultures that merged in Spain evolved into a complicated code of chivalry and male honor with the rise of knighthood.

MACHISMO The Spanish term ‘‘machismo’’ connotes emphatic masculinity, particularly in males, though it can also be applied to women (e.g., marimacha). Some sources trace its semantic roots to the Vulgar Latin masclu, masculu, or masculus, from where we derived ‘‘masculine,’’ particularly as applied to animals and husbandry. An etymological hypothesis posits that it came from the arcane Portuguese muacho, from mulus, mule, with semantic emphasis on stubbornness and foolishness. The word entered English in the 1920s. It has also been introduced into other languages with the primary meaning of exaggerated masculinity (French machisme, Italian maschilismo). In Costa Rica and other parts of Central America, macho can also mean blond or light skinned. Some linguists in Nicaragua note that macho proceeds from the verbs machar and machacar, meaning ‘‘to pound, break, crush, hammer, beat, bruise, screw.’’ 339

340 |

Machismo

Spanish conquistadors introduced machismo through cultural and interracial interaction with American indigenous populations. The indigenous gender ideology was primarily based on a militaristic and patriarchal society where men were socialized to be warriors and women to be caretakers of the home subordinate to men. In the case of the Aztecs, for instance, the Spanish male ideology, especially in donjuanismo, the quintessence of Spanish machismo who was not interested in indigenous women per se, but only as tokens of his social and military dominance or conquering virility, reinforced Aztec warrior bravado. As a stereotype, machismo has had a negative connotation, especially in the American popular culture, meaning, aggressive hypermasculinity, an obsession with status, power, and control at any cost, rigid self-sufficiency, misogynistic and domineering attitudes typically ascribed to authoritative husbands, patriarchal fathers, paternalistic landlords, and abusive womanizers. A traditional Hispanic saying embodying some of these attitudes is La mujer en la casa, el hombre en la calle (Woman in the home, man in the street), suggesting a strict differentiation of roles assigned by gender. Mexican folkloric glamorizing of machismo is often found in corridos (ballads) and rancheras (Mexican polkas) where vengeance, drinking, womanizing, banditry, and glorification of male sexual prowess are extolled. Hispanic popular images of this typical macho are personified in the Spanish matador (bullfighter), Mexican charro or cowboy, the Argentinean gaucho, often portrayed as tough (meaning unafraid and unemotional) and full of strength and virility, and the caudillos (military dictators)

with their bold and authoritarian presidential machismo, willing to use violence and oppression to achieve their ends. A form of machismo some consider to be positive denotes a man as head of the household for an entire extended family, and this includes responsible and protective roles as well as the instillment of cultural values of familismo, respeto (respect), dignidad (dignity), simpatia (niceness), confianza (trust), and personalismo. Familismo refers to strong traditional family values that emphasize interdependence, affiliation, cooperation, reciprocity, and loyalty. Simpatia requires social politeness and smooth relations, which considers confrontations offensive and improper. Proper respect is due to all authority, and it is also displayed in relations with elders (e.g., parents). ‘‘Personalismo’’ refers to the trust and rapport that is established with others by developing warm, friendly, and personal relationships. Latino fathers often pride themselves on children who have developed these cultural values, which make them bien educados (welleducated). In this concept, being good providers, being hard workers, and silently suffering the consequences of both are part of being macho. Chingo´n, mandilo´n, and marico´n are three other important constructs in machismo discourse. The Chingo´n, from the verb chingar, which means to rape or to screw, is a macho type described by Octavio Paz in the Labyrinth of Solitude, and typifies the negative connotations of machismo. Some of the traits include a paternalistic attitude toward family and friends. The chingo´ n does not show his emotions and uses his sexuality to feel virile and alive, thus acquiring manhood through sexual performance. The mandilo´ n, on the other

Marian Devotions hand, is a male who wears the apron (mandil) instead of the pants, and it suggests a passive man dominated by his wife who has taken his wife’s role. ‘‘Marico´ n’’ is a pejorative term used to describe the effeminate man or presumed homosexual. Also, the failure of men to perform such acts as drinking, fighting, assertiveness, and heterosexual promiscuity earns the label of marico´n. Marianismo is a female corollary to machismo, and it is a cultural or religious description of the ideal woman as selfabnegating mother. This concept is explained by the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the ideal symbol of virgin and mother, and it presumes that since women are spiritually superior to men, they are capable of enduring all suffering inflicted by macho men. It exalts femininity and childbearing capacity by emphasizing women’s fated longsuffering or hembrismo, as well as the qualities of obedience, submission, fidelity, meekness, and humility. In traditional Latino societies, the macho is given the responsibility of defending family honor by protecting the virginity of wives, daughters, or sisters. These two polarities, machismo and marianismo, along with religion and traditional values have helped shape traditional gender role socialization in Latin America. There is some evidence that secularization, new Catholic movements (such as Charismatics), as well as Protestantism are quite influential on contemporary gender roles. Since in almost any religion, gender roles and family are vital to its propagation, many scholars look especially to the role of men in family and society as a bellwether of current and future denominational affiliation. Fernando A. Ortiz and Kenneth G. Davis

| 341

References and Further Reading Aquino, Maria Pilar, Daisy Machado, and Jeanette Rodrı´guez, eds. A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). De La Torre, Miguel A. ‘‘Beyond Machismo: A Cuban Case Study.’’ The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 19 (1999a): 213–233. Gilmore, David. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

MARIAN DEVOTIONS Devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus, is historically attested in Christianity from around the second century CE. Devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus, has been explained and justified on the grounds that she is the mother of the Savior. Devotion to Mary remains important in at least three main Christian traditions: Catholic (East and West), Orthodox, and Anglican. Other Christian traditions (since the sixteenth century) have accentuated either a disdain for such devotion or a discreet tolerance toward it. In no Christian church (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or Anglican) is Marian devotion regarded as necessary to the church’s self-understanding or its definition of Christianity. Doctrines regarding Mary cannot be confused with devotion to Mary. It is impossible to study any U.S. Latino/a cultural community and not encounter Marian devotion in one form or another. Since at least the second century, prayers were directed to Mary asking for her intercession with God (and/or

342 |

Marian Devotions

Annual pilgrimage in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe, from South San Francisco’s All Souls Church to the preeminent sanctuary of San Francisco Catholicism at St. Mary’s Cathedral. (Lonny Shavelson/Zuma/Corbis)

her Son). Devotion to her among Christians was very widespread by the time the Council of Ephesus (431 CE) taught that Mary was indeed the Theotokos (the ‘‘mother of God’’). It seems that popular Marian devotion was a significant element in this Council’s doctrinal discussions. After Ephesus there was an extraordinary increase in references to Mary in the (Eastern and Western) Christian Church’s official liturgies and in popular prayers. In Western Christianity the devotion to Mary spread through the liturgies. The feast of the Assumption of Mary (called the ‘‘Dormition’’ in Eastern Christianity) has by far been the most popular Marian liturgical celebration during Christian history. This liturgical feast developed from an earlier, more general celebration of Mary during the

Christmas season. However, popular Marian devotions, although influenced by official liturgies (and vice versa), have historically been mostly local or regional. During the Western Middle Ages there was a significant increase in Marian pious practices after the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with claims of miracles and apparitions increasing as well. There had been references to apparitions of Mary since the third century, but the second half of the Middle Ages saw growth in the number of such claims. Miracles attributed to Mary, or miraculous discoveries of her images, seemed to abound after the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Arguably, a number of social, cultural, and economic reasons helped shape this development—the eleventh and twelfth

Marian Devotions

| 343

JUAN DIEGO (1474–1548) The figure of Juan Diego was declared a fabrication in 1996 by William Schulenburg, the Abbot of the Basilica of Nuestra Sen ˜ ora de Guadalupe in Mexico City. Because of this, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Saints did a thorough investigation to verify his existence. The investigations revealed that he was born in 1474. His name was Cuatitlatoatzin (Eagle that speaks). He was a farmer and weaver of straw mats. He was married and may have had children. He and his wife (Marı´a Lucia) were among the very few natives who accepted Christianity. He was baptized in 1524 with the name Juan Diego, perhaps in honor of San Juan the evangelist whose symbol is the eagle and San Diego who was the first to proclaim the Gospel in Spain. In 1531, at age 57, he saw the Virgin Mary on the hill of Tepeyac and received her miraculous image in his tilma. He spent the rest of his life as sacristan at Guadalupe’s Shrine where he would speak Guadalupe’s message to visitors. More than 100,000 Nahuatls were baptized Christians because of Juan Diego’s testimony. He died on May 30, 1548. Canonized in 2002, he is revered as the first Amerindian saint and lay evangelizer. —GCG

centuries brought a critically important set of profound changes to Western Christianity. Religious reasons alone do not seem sufficient explanation, although these too played their part, as well as credulity and insufficient catechesis. Exaggerated claims, fabulous stories, and impossible miracles were common during the medieval period. Although sixteenth-century Protestant reformers opposed all forms of Marian devotions, the (Catholic) Council of Trent began a process of purification of Marian piety that was very much needed at the time. It took longer than most Council participants expected, but Marian devotional practices were ‘‘cleaned up’’ in most places, and most of the exaggerated claims contained. At the popular level, however, some fabulous stories and expectations continued (sometimes fueled by powerful social or ecclesiastical interests). Exaggerated Marian claims and practices are today not acceptable within mainstream Catholicism. In a

parallel manner, exaggerated disdain for all Marian devotion is equally not acceptable today among most other Christian denominations (although sometimes the exaggerated disdain is fueled by powerful social or ecclesiastical interests). During the period that immediately preceded the Catholic and Protestant Reformations, and historically coinciding with these, European Catholics discovered and conquered the Americas. With and after the conquest came the missionaries, who brought with them the usual Marian devotions from Europe. The specific practices that came to this side of the Atlantic often depended on the origins (home village, region) of the missionaries and colonizers. However, the most important Marian devotions in the Americas began here, such as Guadalupe in Mexico and Caridad in Cuba. It is well documented that Mary became popular and well accepted among the native populations and the African slaves during the centuries of Spanish and

344 |

Marian Devotions

GUADALUPANAS The Guadalupanas are members of an association that promotes the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Made up primarily of Latinas, the groups form within parishes, particularly in Latin America and the United States. The origins and history of this grassroots organization began in 1531 after the apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As early as 1578, Pope Gregory XIII granted indulgences to the Confraternity of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyac. Guadalupanas play a role in preserving Latino/a traditions of popular piety and teaching them to their children and the larger parish community. Their expression of popular religiosity takes many forms: the rosary, devotional altars to the Virgin, dramatic reenactment of the apparitions at Tepeyac, religious processions, and other public displays of devotion. There is a liturgical rite of initiation, in which new members are presented with special metals signifying their commitment to the Virgin and her cult. The central calendar event for Guadalupanas is December 12, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Members meet throughout the year for prayer and the planning of this celebration. Generally, groups raise money for the festivities through bake sales and meals where Latino/a foods are served. In many parishes these meals have become important community socials events held after the Sunday Liturgies. —RL

Portuguese rule. It is also clear that Marian devotional practices were instrumental in expanding colonial Christianity in the Americas. These devotions are still popular in Latin America and among U.S. Latino/as, and have become increasingly important to serious theological reflection on the sensus fidelium, on tradition, and on the poor’s image of themselves and of God. Some (mostly U.S. Latino/a) theologians have begun to raise pneumatological questions as well. Mary has become a symbol and instrument of empowerment for the poor in many places of Latin America and among many U.S. Latino/as. In many contexts Mary is deeply tied to issues of cultural identity and dignity, and to struggles for liberation. Although Marian piety and symbols have been used and abused by both church authorities and governments with serious alienating results, Mary does not seem to have lost a certain subversive character and role

among the poor or disenfranchised. She has been and is, for the poor, a bearer of their culture, justice, and identity—to the extent that many Marian devotions could not be explained or understood otherwise (e.g., Guadalupe, Caridad, San Juan de los Lagos, etc.). Claims of apparitions have continued in Catholic contexts throughout the world. Recent ones that have become popular are those that have centered on events at Fatima (in Portugal), Lourdes (in France), La Salette (also in France), Medjugorje (in Croatia), and others. However, apparitions or claims of apparitions occur on all continents. Apparitions and their ‘‘messages’’ have never been (and can never be) understood in Catholicism as necessary or as being anything but ‘‘private, pious recommendations’’ without any revelatory or obligatory character for the church or its members. No ‘‘message’’ could claim to bring a new revelation or anything that could be

Marian Devotions understood beyond the strictly pious. There is no obligation for Catholics to believe in apparitions or the possibility of apparitions (not even in those that church authorities might endorse). Sometimes Catholic church authorities may accept some devotional practices that could result from a claimed apparition (e.g., Lourdes); but other times church authorities can publicly reject the validity of all practices and claims made regarding an apparition (e.g., the Virgen del Pozo of Puerto Rico). When Catholics refer to devotional Marian titles or names (i.e., ‘‘Our Lady of . . .’’), they are usually referring to devotions that were established either because of a claimed apparition or miracle (e.g., Fatima, Guadalupe), or because of a certain Christian virtue that Mary is said to exemplify (e.g., Charity, Mercy), or because of a specific devotional practice (e.g., the Rosary). Were this entry to conclude here, the reader might think that Latino/a reflections on the history, development, and justifications of Marian devotions, or of the lack thereof, are still within the ‘‘expected’’ denominational bounds. However, a new current of discussion among Latino/a theologians has the potential for transforming what all Christians (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican) think about Marian devotions. This new current can make significant potential contributions to ecumenical dialogues. Some Latino/a theologians today have begun to raise possible connections between Mary of Nazareth and the Holy Spirit. More specifically: Is the focus of apparently Marian devotions really Mary, the mother of Jesus? The theological argument first acknowledges that the historical and sociological location of

| 345

Marian devotions have typically been among the poorer members of society, and thus among the most vulnerable and powerless. In other words, the more frequently ‘‘devout’’ have been those whose cultures and symbols have been more generally oppressed, more silenced, and more culturally invaded and persecuted. The theological argument further acknowledges that it is impossible to ignore the current powerful critique of most Christian evangelization and theology—for their historically androcentric (‘‘male-centered’’) bias. It is further impossible to ignore the historically attested role played by generations of denominational leadership in shaping, justifying, and conforming the churches’ assumptions and practices to the dominant culture’s androcentric (and many other) biases. Therefore, is it not possible for us today (asks the theological argument) to interpret Marian devotion as a historically ‘‘counter-androcentric’’ affirmation of the Holy Spirit, in and through subaltern cultural categories and symbols that the (denominationally and socially) dominant refused to associate with God? In other words, is it possible for us today to think that who has been and is being venerated in and through so-called ‘‘Marian’’ devotions is really not Mary of Nazareth but a Person of the Trinity —the Holy Spirit? Given the character, type, and texture of the devotion, and the expectations of the ‘‘devout’’ relationship with the One addressed in the devotion, is it possible to ask if this ‘‘One’’ is really Mary of Nazareth, or rather and more accurately the Holy Spirit (culturally portrayed in originally ‘‘Marian’’ cultural garb)? Understandably, many ministers and theologians (often still saturated by lingering

346 |

Marianismo

androcentric biases) might rush to claim that the focus of these devotions is and must remain Mary of Nazareth—in their view ‘‘marianization’’ must remain because it justifies their support or disdain for the devotion. But the ministerial and theological attempts at ‘‘marianizing’’ the devotions cannot escape or dismiss the serious issues raised by some contemporary theologians. Why could the symbols and cultural categories historically associated with Mary in European Christianity not become associated with the Holy Spirit in the Americas? Why are the poor (among whom these devotions have traditionally thrived) bound to use or follow the dominant religious languages, symbols, explanations, or cultural categories? Because all human speech and claims about God are invariably and inescapably culturally bound (and, therefore, limited, imperfect, and created tools that will always fail to capture what is ultimately beyond all human understanding), it is necessary to conclude that it is possible to use feminine cultural categories and symbols (in this case those historically originating in devotions to Mary) for speech and claims about the Holy Spirit. Orlando O. Espı´n

References and Further Reading Espin, Orlando O. The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). Johnson, Elizabeth A. Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (New York: Continuum, 2006). Tavard, George A. The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996).

MARIANISMO Because marianismo idealizes the social conditions Latinas find themselves in as normal, natural, and legitimate, it becomes a sexist paradigm based on a quasi-religious ideology by which Latin American women and U.S. Latinas have been denied their full humanity for generations. The introduction of Christianity within the Americas was a colonial project that maintained its structures of domination through the construction of gender roles. A dichotomy was introduced that divided labor along gender lines where men were defined as inhabiting the public sphere of economic and political production, while women inhabited the domestic sphere of household reproduction. To counter the aggressive and competitive immoral public sphere where men are required to operate, women provide a spiritual equilibrium within the serenity and security of the household. Spanish Catholicism’s emphasis on family unity and its communal ties to hierarchical structures helped create a spiritually based patriarchy. Catholicism contributed to the definition of what role women were to play within society through an idealized image of the Virgin Mary, hence the term ‘‘marianismo.’’ Mary is presented as the best representation of the nature of women, and as such becomes the perfect role model for all women. Marianismo became the polar opposite of machismo. Through negative definition, machismo becomes what marianismo is not. Essentializing femaleness to the realm of passivity, chastity, and self-sacrifice meant that maleness must be understood as assertive, virile, and selfcentered. Nevertheless, the male remains

Marianismo

| 347

ABUELITA THEOLOGY Abuelita (little grandmother) theology, also known as ‘‘kitchen theology,’’ refers to the transmission of religious beliefs, practices, and spirituality within the Hispanic family mainly through the women of the household. This theological expression looks toward the values of grandparents, specifically grandmothers, to confirm a present trajectory that is rooted in the past. The role of ‘‘abuelitas’’ preserves the religious practices of the family, such as preparing home altars, encouraging pilgrimages, celebrating the virgin or saint days, and spiritually cleansing, along with a host of other practices. Through the informal conversation that occurs within the space where women are usually relegated, the kitchen, a popular religious expression emerges and is preserved. The informal transmission of religious understandings to the next generation of mainly Latinas, who in turn teach the rest of the household, have led scholars to propose that Hispanic popular religiosity has a matriarchal core. There are some Latina religious scholars who would argue that abuelita theology is somewhat romanticized, masking the sexism within a Hispanic theology that relegates any contributions by Latinas both to the kitchen and to the abuelas, the grandmothers. In other words, can a young Latina at the university also make a contribution to Hispanic religious thought? —MAD

responsible for providing and protecting his family. It would be an error to limit marianismo to Catholic families; as a sociopolitical phenomena within the Hispanic community, marianismo is also present within Protestant families, communities, and churches. Proper female behavior is epitomized by a Virgin Mary mystique. Hispanic women are forced to choose one of two extremes. She exists within the dichotomy of virgin or whore—there exists no ambiguous space between these two extremes. As the ideal virgin, women are to be chaste, pure, and docile. Just as Mary submitted to God’s will, and just as she was pure as signified by her virginity, so too are Latin American women and U.S. Latinas to accept God’s will to be wives and mothers, living humble lives and always being willing to suffer for the sake of their families. The Latin American woman and the U.S. Latina exist for the sole purpose of

supporting their husbands and raising their children. She is the giver of care and pleasure, never the receiver. Although the husband is the absolute head of the household whose decisions are to be obeyed, she remains the sole nurturer of the children and the guardian of morality within the household. Her duty is to maintain and secure the honor and unity of her family. To work outside the home puts into question either her virtues or her husband’s ability to be a man and provide for her, or both. Through her indiscretions, shame can be brought upon her husband and his family name. In effect, marianismo reduces women to an object of male gallantry—an extension of the male ego. But even when husbands are callous, physically abusive, or engaged in extramarital affairs, marianismo provides women with the model of Mary who silently accepted her fate and suffering. Regardless of male

348 |

Matachines

behavior, women discover their value and purpose in being virgins, wives, or mothers. No other role or identity exists for her. To be or aspire to be independently minded, to be self-supporting, or to develop self-esteem is to forsake her traditional role. Sex for women is for reproduction, not enjoyment. Because men desire to marry a ‘‘virgin Marı´a,’’ who remains unsullied until he impregnates her, he needs and requires other sexual liaisons to satisfy his sexual appetite and prove his machismo. In a sense, rather than establishing strong families, marianismo encourages domination, aggressiveness, and a ‘‘cult of virility’’ that reinforces a machista culture detrimental to all women. Political scientist Evelyn Stevens wrote in 1973 a groundbreaking essay where she coined the term ‘‘marianismo.’’ For Stevens, marianismo ‘‘teaches that women are semi divine, morally superior to and spiritually stronger than men.’’ The force behind marianismo lies behind centuries of fertility goddesses who signified the ability of women to produce life. Although the social consequences of marianismo, according to Stevens, may have proven to be negative in the lives of women, women were still able to demonstrate spiritual authority in the home and society by emulating the characteristics of the Virgin Mary. In this fashion, women knew their place and role within society and were less prone to suffer identity crises. But the rise of Latina feminism in the late 1970s challenged Stevens’s positive understanding of marianismo by emphasizing its structural patriarchy over the centuries through the use of sociological and anthropological analysis. Even though few today would insist on or advocate for structuring Hispanic

society around the concept of marianismo, its consequences and worldviews are still present within the Latina/o community. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading Aquino, Marı´a Pilar, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodrı´guez. A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). Gil, Rosa Marı´a, and Carmen Inoa Va´zquez. The Marı´a Paradox: How Lantinas Can Merge Old World Traditions with New World Self-Esteem (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996). Morales-Gumundsson, Lourdes E., and Caleb Rosado. ‘‘Machismo, Marianismo and the SDA Church.’’ Spectrum Magazine 25, no. 2 (December 1995): 19–28. Stevens, Evelyn P. ‘‘Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo in Latin America.’’ Female and Male in Latin America, ed. Ann Pescatelo (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973).

MATACHINES The religious dance-drama of Los Matachines is an ancient tradition within the southwestern United States. These dances are shared by Latina/os and Native peoples. The influences of these dances can be traced to the European Middle Ages, specifically the Iberian Peninsular and the indigenous cultures of the Americas. Just as the sites where the religious dance-drama is produced are different, the 44 catalogued versions in the Americas also span diverse places from Pueblo, Colorado, to the deep rainforests of Belize.

Matachines Originally, the dance celebrated the conquest of the Moors who occupied the Iberian Peninsula between the years 711 and 1492. The influence of the Moors is evident from the costumes worn by the dance participants. Each dancer is appropriately masked with scarves that hide the lower part of their faces, as well as foreheads and eyes, called fleco. Upon the heads of the Matachines are mounted tall headdresses made of costly fabrics such as velvet and silk. These cupiles are decorated with silk ruffle borders, jeweled trinkets, and symbols. From the back of the headdresses hang long silk ribbons arranged in patterns that are pleasing to the eye. The masking of the hand is continued with many scarves that bedeck the dancers. Held within the right hand is a three-pronged wand called a palma. The palma represents the Trinitarian belief that God is one and three at the same time. In Europe, Saint Patrick

| 349

explained the Trinity by holding the triple-leafed shamrock out to the Druids. In the Americas, this concept was reflected as the triune god Quetzalcoatl of Mexico who is lord of the air, lord of the land, and lord of the water at the same time. In Europe, Los Matachines are reflected in the Italian commedia dell’arte as mattachinos. The people of England would certainly recognize their own beribboned ‘‘Morris Dancers’’ as ‘‘Moorish Dancers.’’ As Los Matachines became an increasingly popular dance, much symbolism was attributed to them. They were figures to be seen only during feast days or during mid-winter mumming rituals. The dance was introduced to the native peoples in the hope of converting them to Christianity. It was changed and reinterpreted to incorporate local indigenous customs. As missionaries moved north toward what would

Matachines dance at San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico. (Danny Lehman/Corbis)

350 |

Matachines

become the United States, they brought the dance with them. The first documentation of the dance in what would be the United States occurred in San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico, in 1598. New Mexico scholars such as the late Fray Ange´ lico Cha´ vez asked if it was possible that Los Matachines was originally only a form of social dance. Regardless, it is known that the oldest unbroken tradition of Los Matachines dancing that exists can be traced to the town of Bernalillo, New Mexico, where the dance has been performed for 315 straight years. The citizens of Bernalillo made a promise when they returned to their homes after the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680, that if their patron saint San Lorenzo were to keep them safe, they would dance in his honor every year. Other scholars who have studied the dance have suggested that Los Matachines is a homoerotic dance, that is, a dance done by men for men, since female figures were not originally part of the dance. Just as female societies guarded their secrets, so did men’s secret societies. The only female figure in the dance, an ogress called La Pirojundia, was always played by a man dressed as a woman. The word ‘‘pirojo’’ or ‘‘piroja’’ is an ancient word that refers to one having both male and female attributes. In this way the figure was assured of having both the strength of a man and the power of a woman. As the history of the dance unfolded among the indigenous Native nations, more symbolism was added to it. The ancient ogres called Abuelos, were brought in to keep order in the dance as well as to call out the movements to the dancers. They played the role of dance monitors and were called bastoneros. Part of their duties included keeping the

dancers’ ribbons arranged and keeping the spectators out of the arena. As the Abuelos took on the traits of trickster figures, they also teased the sacrificial bull of the dance. The bull is called El Toro while he is dancing and El Capeo whenever he is ritually castrated. He must bow low before the chief dancer called ‘‘Monarca’’ among the Spanish and ‘‘Monanca’’ among the Tiwa Natives. Monarca is easily recognized for he is the only dancer who wears solid white. It is only after the bull is felled that the ogress Pirojundia falls on the floor at his side and gives birth to a newborn abuelito who will become the spirit of the dance the following year. This action has been interpreted as a fertility rite. Native influences on the Dance of Los Matachines also exist. For example, the participants, whose numbers vary according to their interpretations, carry masked rattles in their left hands. These rattles are highly decorated gourds. Also, they gird their waists with loincloths called tapa-rabos. The loincloths are decorated with ritual symbols known only to the dancers. Around their lower shins, they wear fancy leggings. The newest addition to the religious dance-drama is the little girl figure called La Malinche. Her name stems from the ancient records that say she was the paramour of the conquistador Herna´n Cortez. In fact, in Belize, Los Matachines is known as ‘‘The Dance of Cortez’’ according to Maya Native Victor Choc. Again, the symbolism attached to La Malinche depends on who is doing the interpretation. In Belize there are four Malinches who dance. In Bernalillo there are three. In Je´ mez there are two. In Arroyo Seco, there is only one. Depending on how she is seen, she can represent the waxing, full, and waning moon of the

Mestizaje dawn, the full day, and the dusk. In the village of Tortugas she is the spirit of purity and she often wears attributes belonging to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The music of Los Matachines also varies in tenor and speed. It is usually played with guitar and violin among the Spanish villages and with ritual drum and rattle in Native villages. Today, Los Matachines dancers usually perform for free at local church fiestas paying homage to the church’s particular patron saint. Larry Torres

References and Further Reading Rodriguez, Silvia. The Matachines Dance, Ritual Symbolism and Interethnic Relations in the Upper Rio Grande Valley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). Romero, Brenda M. ‘‘Fariseos y Matachines en la Sierra Tarahumara: Entre la Pasio´n de Cristo, la Transgresio´n co´mico-sexual y las Danzas de Conquista by Carlo Bonfiglioli,’’ Ethnomusicology 44, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 527–528. Torres, Larry. Six New Mexico Folkplays for the Advent Season (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).

MESTIZAJE The term ‘‘mestizaje’’ generally refers to the process of biological and cultural mixing that occurs ‘‘after the violent and unequal encounter between cultures’’ (Garcia-Rivera 1995, 40). It is more commonly and specifically used, however, to refer to the mixture of Spanish and American Indian ancestry and cultures that marks Latin American and Latino/a history and identity, as a result

| 351

of the arrival of Spanish colonizers in the Americas in the fifteenth century. The origins of this Spanish and American Indian convergence can be traced back to the Spanish exploration and colonization of the Americas, beginning with Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1492. Columbus’s discovery of a route from Europe to the Americas took place at a time when Spain was seeking to exploit resources from other lands in order to expand its colonial borders and to strengthen a faltering economy, and thus it served to open the way for other Spanish explorers and colonizers to sail to these areas. As a result of this deliberate takeover of these lands and of the subjugation of the native peoples that inhabited them, a good part of the territory that comprises the Americas, including much of Central and South America, Mexico, large segments of the Caribbean, and most of what is now the southern and western United States, eventually came to be claimed for Spain. Among other effects, the Spanish colonial presence in these parts occasioned the appearance of people of mixed parentage and cultural heritage, and more specifically of Spanish and American Indian descent. Sexual encounters, both forced and consensual, between male Spanish colonizers and Native American women resulted in the births of large numbers of children with a Spanish father and a Native American mother. These children came to be known as mestizos. The truth is, however, that the Spanish colonial system generated other complex relationships—it occasioned the intermingling and fusion of at least three general and distinct groups of peoples and cultures in the Americas (i.e., the Spanish, Amerindian or Native

352 |

Mestizaje

American, and African peoples and cultures). A full discussion of the Spanish colonial period and of the ‘‘making’’ or reinvention of the Americas is beyond the scope of this entry. However, it is both safe and necessary to say that what occurred over this period of American history was a violent and unequal encounter of peoples and cultures that was fundamentally motivated by imperial and socioeconomic interests. Historians of the Spanish colonial period have established that much of the early Spanish interest in the ‘‘New World of the Americas’’ centered on mining and the profits that it could generate. The problem was, however, that development of these mines required a larger supply of labor than the Spanish colonizers were willing or able to provide on their own. For this reason, the conquered indigenous populations were generally forced into mining labor. But the oppressive labor conditions, meager diet, broken family life, and disease that were part of this harsh life of indenture under Spanish rule combined over time to bring about a significant decline in the native populations. And so, in order to replace or supplement the decreasing indigenous labor force, the Spaniards took to forcibly introducing large numbers of African slaves from the western coast of Africa to the Americas. The proximities of these groups of people in the Americas occasioned the emergence of a new cultural and even racial context as the Spanish, Native American, and African populations increasingly intermingled over time, creating large populations of peoples of mixed ancestry. In this forced encounter of peoples and cultures, three distinct groups of mixed populations came into being: first, the mestizos, who were persons of Spanish or Iberian and

American Indian parentage; second, the mulattos, who were persons of Spanish or Iberian and African descent; and third, the zambo, who were persons of African and indigenous or Native American derivation. Evidence of this blending of peoples and cultures in the Americas abounds. Present-day Latin American and U.S. Latino/a populations have been especially marked by this history of biological and cultural fusion, however, and particularly by the reality or process of mestizaje and mulatez. Latino/a culture and identity does, in fact, often show itself to be the result of the blending of Spanish, Amerindian, and African lineages and cultures. Practically every dimension of the lives of present-day Latin Americans and U.S. Hispanics/ Latinos shows a hint of this complex and syncretistic fusion in some way or another, from broad issues of race and religion to specifics of food, language, music, and most everything else in between. Although it was originally coined to specify the blending of Spanish and Native American derivation and thus to denote the children of Spanish and American Indian parents, the term ‘‘mestizaje’’ has taken on a wider meaning in more recent usage. It is at times openly used to refer to the process of biological and cultural fusion itself, and is, therefore, sometimes used indiscriminately to speak of all forms of mixed parentage and cultural heritage that can be found within the Latin American and Latino/a population. In addition, the term has come to be used as a sort of philosophical and ideological or political concept in more recent Latin American and Latino/ a literature. In this sense it has been used to contest racist Western notions of pure

Mestizaje race and ethnic absolutism, to retrieve the indigenous element of Latin American and Latino/a cultural identity, to reclaim the mixed-race or mixedcultural constituent of Latin American and Latino/a identity, or to open wider possibilities for the forging of new and potentially affirmative multiethnic identities. An early move in the direction of the use of the idea of mestizaje as a broader philosophical and political construct can be found in the work of the Mexican philosopher, educator, and politician Jose´ Vasconcelos. In 1925 he wrote a treatise, La Raza Cosmica/The Cosmic Race, in which he gave an affirming and even celebratory reading of Mexican and Latin American mestizaje and used it to challenge Western theories of racial superiority and purity. To be sure, Vasconcelos was unable to break completely from the kind of Eurocentrism or Western elitism that he attempted to challenge, as he still tended to give priority to Iberian culture and to connect it too romantically or uncritically with modernization and the attainment of progress. Thus, it can be said that, even as he sought to reclaim the mixed-race and mixed-cultural identity of Mexicans as a unique source of creativity, he tended to look to Europe for inspiration and unintentionally to downgrade the aboriginal past or the indigenous component of Mexican and Latin American history and identity. Nevertheless, Vasconcelos’s early work at least served to point up the possibilities of a more positive and expansive interpretation of the historical process and concept of mestizaje, moving the term away from the negative connotations it had elicited previously, for example, as a synonym for illegitimacy, half-breeds, mongrelization, and so on.

| 353

Interest in the idea of mestizaje has traveled north in recent years, gaining newfound recognition and reformulation in the writings of U.S. Chicano/a and Latino/a scholars and cultural critics such as Daniel Cooper Alarcon, Norma Alarcon, Guillermo Go´mez Pen˜a, Cherrie Moraga, Chon A. Noriega, Emma Perez, Chela Sandoval, and especially Gloria Anzaldu´ a. These writers and activists have both expanded and complicated the meanings and uses of the idea, by pointing variously to its potential usefulness in the demystification of boundaries and territorial borders, the accentuation of the fluidity and adaptability of cultures and identities, the complications of difference, the critique of essentialism, the countering of ethnic absolutism, and the conceptualization of multicultural convergence, as well as for the reclamation of hybridity or hybrid personal identities, nonlinear thought, and syncretistic constructs, among other things. The concept of mestizaje has been of special interest to Latino/a religious scholars, and particularly to U.S. Hispanic theologians. Indeed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a work in Latina/o theology that does not refer to or make use of this concept in some way or another. Mexican American theologian Virgilio Elizondo was the first to attempt a theological interpretation of the lived mestizaje found among Mexican Americans and other Latino/as. In his two most renowned works to date, Galilean Journey and The Future Is Mestizo, he puts forward first a brief historical overview of the Mexican American experience, which he sees as being a product of two conquests—a Spanish conquest and later on a U.S. conquest; second, an affirmative rendering of the

354 |

Mestizaje

racial and cultural hybridity that constitutes the historical and cultural reality of Mexican Americans and the majority of U.S. Latino/as; and third, a comparison of the historical Jesus’ marginal status, as a result of his coming from an out-ofthe way and undistinguished Galilean rural town named Nazareth in firstcentury Palestine, and the experience of marginality that many Mexican Americans experience today. Elizondo suggests that persons of mixed heritage or culture have historically experienced a sense of cultural marginalization, not being accepted totally by either of the parent cultures that make up their identity. This was the case for Jesus, he intimates: Jesus was possibly not accepted totally by many Jews of his time, due to his origins from Galilee, nor by Gentiles, due to his Jewish lineage. Similarly, many Mexican Americans today feel that, as a result of their biculturality, they are neither totally a part of the dominant Anglo-American culture of the United States nor of the Mexican culture of Mexico. Yet just as the historical Jesus was able to come to terms with his status as a bicultural person, and just as he was able to generate new life for himself and others from the margins, Elizondo believes that similarly, Mexican Americans now find themselves in a unique position to advance a liberating mission not only for their own well-being but also for that of others. As he puts it, ‘‘as mestizos of the borderland between Anglo America and Latin America, Mexican Americans can be instrumental in bringing greater appreciation and unity between the peoples of the two Americas’’ (Elizondo 1983, 100). In short, as Elizondo sees it, the multivalent racial, cultural, and historical hybridity that characterizes the mestizo identity of

Mexican Americans and other Latino/as admits for much more than just pain and dislocation: It can also be a source of creativity, survival, and triumph, or, to put it in theological terms, of ‘‘redemption.’’ As the last few paragraphs demonstrate, the concept of mestizaje has found expanded use as both a celebratory and a critical construct in the works of varied recent Latin American and Latino/a and/ or Chicana/o scholars, cultural analysts and critics, and activists. The interest in this concept attests to an emerging Latino/a sensibility that is willing to explore anew the phenomenon of pluralism in Latin America and in the U.S. Latino/a communities, and the significance of cultural hybridity or intercultural mixing both within the Latin American/ Latino/a community and in the broader continental context. And the result of this sensible exploration has been the realization that the idea of mestizaje holds both resistive and liberatory possibilities: it can be invoked to resist purist and static ways of thinking about race, ethnicity, and identity; and to make known, uplift, or advance different forms of cultural mixing and interactive exchange. Although the recent reformulations of mestizaje proffered by Latin American, Chicano/a, and Latina/o cultural analysts and critics carry great potential for the struggle against different kinds of injustice that are traceable to culture, it is possible to point to some problematic issues in regard to its recent use as a ubiquitous descriptive and strategic concept. Four points in particular are noteworthy. The first problem involves the use of the term ‘‘mestizaje’’ in a universalistic way or, in other words, in a way that refers to all modes of intercultural mixing. As noted earlier, the term ‘‘mestizaje’’ technically denotes the mixture of Amerindian and

Mestizaje Spanish lineage and culture. But at times one can note in some writings a tendency to use it in reference to the whole Latin American and Latino/a population or, in other words, to refer comprehensively to the different kinds of intercultural mixture that can be found among Latin Americans and U.S. Latino/as. The problem is that this penchant tends to brush aside and to cover up the African element that is to be found in the Latin American and Latino/a heritage. Latin Americans and Hispanics are more than just descendants of the Spanish conquistadores that colonized the Americas, and more than just descendants of the Native American/Amerindian peoples who had already been living in the Americas; they are often also the descendants of the peoples whom the Spanish brought from Africa to the Americas as slaves. Among certain groups of Latin Americans and U.S. Latino/as such as the Columbians, Venezuelans, Panamanians, and Caribbean Latino/as such as the Cubans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans, among others, the African component of the racial and cultural me´lange fostered during the Spanish colonial period prevails. Thus, the use of the term mestizaje to refer indiscriminately to the ancestral and intercultural mixture that marks Latin American and Latino/a identity is at least shortsighted, and at worst exclusionary or racist. At the very least, the term mulatez should also be employed when referring to the phenomenon of intercultural mixture that is to be found in Latin America and among U.S. Latino/as. A second potential issue is that the use of the concept of mestizaje may unintentionally bring with it assimilating, homogenizing, or unifying tendencies that can serve to whitewash the

| 355

indigenous past and present that constitutes the Latin American and Latino/a reality, rather than helping us to acknowledge, retrieve, or uplift it. The point at issue is that the idea of mestizaje operates as an umbrella term—as a linguistic and representational construct that inherently tries to incorporate or lump together the histories, experiences, and idiosyncrasies of different groups of peoples. The problem that may arise with the prolonged and undifferentiating use of a concept such as mestizaje is that it could divert attention away from the varied realities, traditions, and/or populations to which it refers. It is in recognizing the actual specificity of the diverse identities, histories, experiences, and cultures of the population of peoples that encountered each other during the colonial period that we can begin to better understand our historical Latin American heritage. To accomplish this, it might be necessary to move away from homogenizing designators such as mestizaje, at least from time to time, in order to more seriously engage with and reexamine the specific character of the populations and cultures that have marked and continue to mark our Latin American and Latino/a actuality. In short, if Hispanics really do want to retrieve, reclaim, and honor the indigenous side of their heritage, they would do well from time to time to move beyond the cursory reach of homogenizing designators such as mestizaje to study the lives and ways, for example, of the Aztec, Inca, Purepecha, Mixtec, Zapotec, Huastecan, Mayan, and the many other indigenous peoples and societies that it subsumes. A third issue concerns the possible use of the idea of mestizaje to conceal the reality of racism in the Latina/o past and

356 |

Mestizaje

present history. The notion that all share in the same mestizo/a ancestry or descent can be used by individuals and by state apparatuses, not so much to contest racist ways of thinking but rather to prop up the idea that racism does not or cannot abide in our midst because pure races do not even exist. And so, rather than serve as a critical device that aims to remedy racism and social inequality, the idea of mestizaje can in the hands of some serve to obscure the ugly history and reality of racism in our lands. The historical reality is that miscegenation in Latin America did not transpire in the context of nor did it result in the attainment of a level social and racial order. As Ilan Stavans puts it, ‘‘during the colonial period the racial hierarchy in the Americas was quite clear: Spaniards were at the top, Creoles (American-born, ‘pure-blood’ Spaniards) came second, with mestizos in third place, Indians in fourth, and blacks at the bottom’’ (Stavans 2007, 12). And it is unfortunate but true that remnants of this racialist hierarchical arrangement are still in evidence in Latin American and Latino/a communities today. It is important that the theorizing and deployment of the idea of mestizaje be done in the light of the social and racial hierarchies that shaped colonial society and that continue to exist today. Finally, a fourth issue concerns a possible incongruence or paradox that surrounds the interpretation and deployment of the idea of mestizaje. It is notable that in some works the idea of mestizaje, and the intercultural mixture that it points to or represents, is set forth and celebrated as a process, occasion, realization, or form of identity that is unique to certain historical moments, cultural situations, and peoples, and, for this reason, is distinctively or potentially

significant. Moreover, it is assumed that the notion of mestizaje represents a liberatory source for good and change, and can or will only be invoked to offer a strategy of resistance and liberation. But some analysts of culture have found that mixture and combination is part and parcel of any cultural formation, and that it can be and has been produced in distinct ways (e.g., by way of the mingling of different cultures and the formation of new ones over time, by the history of conquest, by oppression and/or assimilatory pressures, by travel or migration, and so on). As noted before, the idea of mestizaje has, in fact, had pernicious connotations before and has also been used by state or governmental agencies and elites to cover up racism and inequality and, thus, to impede the furthering of justice. Rather than assuming its uniqueness and inevitable political or transgressive effect, theorists of mestizaje need to closely examine the specific historical and geographical situations in which it is historically produced and ideationally utilized, all the while allowing for the possibility of different types, views, and meanings of mestizaje. Benjamin Valentin

References and Further Reading Elizondo, Virgilio. Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983). ———. The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet (Bloomington, IN: Meyer Stone Books, 1988). Garcia-Rivera, Alex. St. Martin de Porres: The ‘‘Little Stories’’ and the Semiotics of Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Gibson, Charles. Spain in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

Mexican Americans Stavans, Ilan. Latino History and Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). Vasconcelos, Jose´. The Cosmic Race/La Raza Cosmica (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

MEXICAN AMERICANS Mexican Americans of the twenty-first century, specifically their sociohistorical and cultural context, can be understood if we consider the impact of the conquest and colonization of the Southwest by the United States. Similarly, in order to understand the socioeconomic status of the Mexican Americans today, we must understand the legacy and effects of discrimination and cultural conflict that is part of the shared memory of Mexicandescent Latino/as. Unlike other immigrant groups from Europe and Asia who entered the United States by leaving an ‘‘old country’’ and crossing oceans, Mexican Americans did not become a part of American society through ‘‘voluntary immigration.’’ Rather, like American Indians, Mexican Americans became an American ethnic minority through the direct conquest of their homelands in the Southwest. Chicano historians argue that this fact is of utmost importance in any effort to understand the contemporary status of Mexican Americans within American society. The period that brought the northern territories of Mexico under U.S. control begins in 1836 with the independence of Texas. It ends in 1853 with the Gadsden Purchase, which was negotiated five years after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, marking the end of the Mexican-American War. By 1853 Mexico had lost more than half of its territory but remarkably less than

| 357

1 percent of its population. The United States, by adding over a million square miles, increased its territory by a third.

Dispossession and Occupational Dislocation of Mexican Americans, 1848–1900 Chicano historians have successfully argued that the decades following the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were formative in the history of Mexican Americans. This period is characterized as one of political, economic, and social marginalization. During the war and the decades that followed, a pattern of Mexican-Anglo relations was established characterized by racial hostility and violence. Anglo-Americans typically viewed Mexicans as inferior, as aliens whom they had beaten in a just war. The loss of political influence by the Mexican population throughout the Southwest resulted in Anglo control of the judicial system, law enforcement agencies, elected political positions, and virtually all decision-making bodies. Mexicans also experienced economic and occupational displacement resulting from American attempts to divest them of their lands. The loss of their ranches and pueblo communal lands altered the nature of the economy, radically changed the land tenure system, and resulted in the economic exploitation of the Mexican people. Dispossessed and occupationally dislocated, by the late 1850s Mexicans began a steady migration to towns where they became landless laborers in the American capitalist economy and occupied a socioeconomic underclass.

358 |

Mexican Americans

VIRGEN DE GUADALUPE Many people do not realize that there are two commemorations of Mary bearing the name of Guadalupe. The most famous is in Tepeyac in Mexico City and the other is in Guadalupe in Extremadura, Spain. Guadalupe de Tepeyac is a painting of Marı´a left miraculously on the tilma of a native Mesoamerican called Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in 1531, during the time of the Spanish conquest of America. Marı´a reportedly called herself Coatlalopeuh (she who conquers the snake) but to the Spanish Bishop the Nahuatl name sounded like Guadalupe. To the Spaniards, Guadalupe is a statue said to have been carved by St. Luke the Evangelist. It was found in Palestine, moved to Constantinople and eventually taken to Rome. From Rome it went to Sevilla as a gift to the Bishop by Pope Gregory the Great. When the Moors invaded Spain in 711, the statue was hidden along with proper documentation near the Guadalupe Rriver. It remained hidden until 1252, when Mary appeared to Gil Cordero and revealed her statue’s location. Both of these images of Marı´a show her to be morena (dark skinned) and present the Mother of God as manifesting her Son’s love and protection to oppressed peoples. —GCG

As Anglo-Americans gained political and economic control of the Southwest, the Mexican pueblos were transformed into American cities where the earlier pastoral economy was replaced by an American capitalist economy. One important consequence of Americanization was the initiation of a process that has been described as the barrioization of the Mexican community, which entailed the formation of residentially and socially segregated Mexican barrios or neighborhoods. The process of barrioization of the Mexican community was more than simple segregation and intertwined economic, social, and demographic forces. Barrioization meant the virtual elimination of the Mexican from the social and political life of the community at large. On the other hand, barrios offered Mexicans security and insulation from American influence and the forces of assimilation.

After the Southwest was acquired by the United States in the war with Mexico, the American Catholic Church assumed responsibility for the spiritual wellbeing of the newly created Mexican Americans. In Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900–1965, co-editor Gilberto Hinojosa observes that during the final half of the nineteenth century when Mexicans were being stripped of their lands, politically disenfranchised, and socially and economically marginalized, American ecclesiastical leaders offered little or no public protest. Driven by its desire to escape Anglo-Protestant anti-Catholic prejudice, the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Southwest chose to cast its future with the new American political and economic system. In its desire to reap the benefits of joining the Anglo-American mainstream, the Roman Catholic Church in the Southwest became an active participant in the process of establishing

Mexican Americans Anglo-American political and socioeconomic control over the Mexicans. To the conquered and marginalized Mexicans it appeared that their ancestral church was more concerned with gaining acceptability in mainstream American society than with serving or defending them, thereby appearing indifferent to the social and economic challenges facing the Mexican American community. Church leaders who demonstrated little sympathy for Mexican Catholicism prohibited many traditional Mexican religious fiestas. They believed that the ceremonies, cults, and devotions of the unofficial, popular Catholicism of the Mexicans would tarnish the church’s image in the eyes of the increasingly predominant Anglo-American society. The neglect of Mexican American Catholics was further evidenced by the church’s preference for establishing strongholds in the newly developing urban areas of the Southwest where she was committed to serving mostly American and European immigrants, even though these were not the districts with the largest number of Catholics. An historical legacy was thereby established that downplayed the cultural and religious commitments and idiosyncrasies of the Mexican Catholic communities. In self-defense, the Roman Catholic Church argues that difficulties with the language barrier, the mobility of the Mexican immigrant, deeply imbedded societal racism, the poverty of the Mexican worker, and a lack of Mexican or Spanish-speaking clergy generated innumerable pastoral problems. But historians insist that the so-called ‘‘Mexican problem’’ reflected the institutionalized racism experienced by Mexicans in a church that reinforced the marginalized

| 359

and segregated position Mexicans occupied in American society. In ‘‘The Mexican Catholic Community in California,’’ Jeffrey Burns argues that in its ministry to Mexicans during the late nineteenth century, and among immigrants from Mexico in the early twentieth century, the church took as one of its duties the responsibility of ushering the Mexican-descent Catholic into mainstream American life. This was often done without a sufficiently critical attitude toward the Anglo-American society to which the church hoped the Mexican would assimilate, and without a sufficiently appreciative attitude toward the cultural and religious heritage of the Mexican immigrant. Church leaders believed the Mexican-descent Catholic needed to be assimilated to both the American way of life and the American Catholic way of life. In an era in which Americanism went unquestioned, the goal of Americanizing the Mexican was perceived as a positive good, the White Man’s Burden. Assimilating and Americanizing the Mexican-descent Catholic was not an easy task for several reasons, not the least of which was the ambivalent attitude of Mexican Americans regarding Americanization. Other obstacles to acculturation and assimilation included proximity to the Mexican border, the demand for cheap exploitable Mexican labor, and the lack of immigration quotas, all of which contributed to a growing number of Mexican-American Catholics.

The Legacy of the Immigrant Generation, 1900–1940 As a result of the dispossession and occupational dislocation of Mexicans in the Southwest, Mexican immigration during

360 |

Mexican Americans

the second half of the nineteenth century was modest in scale when compared to the twentieth century. However, economic and political pressures in Mexico exacerbated by a lengthy and bloody civil war (1910–1917) prompted many Mexicanos to migrate to ‘‘El Norte.’’ At the same time, U.S. demands for cheap labor were growing, particularly for agriculture and related industries but also in mining and railroad related industries. The net result was that the economic interests in the Southwest found an abundant source of cheap and exploitable labor. Consequently, during the first three decades of the 20th Century more than 700,000 documented immigrants entered the United States from Mexico. These figures do not include the number of undocumented immigrants which some estimate was between 50,000 to 100,000 annually. By the early 1920s Mexicans began to settle outside of the Southwest. Many were recruited by northern manufacturing interests: meat-packing plants and steel mills in the Chicago area; automobile assembly lines in Detroit; the steel industry in Ohio and Pennsylvania; and meatpacking plants in Kansas City. Others following the crops eventually arrived in the Northwest, the Mountain states, and even in the Southeast. By 1930 about 15 percent of the nation’s Mexicans were living outside the Southwest. Especially in the Southwest, immigration reinforced and underscored the existing Mexican American culture and gave it much of its specific shape and present-day content. Not only did the process of barrioization continue but so did the economic exploitation of the Mexican worker. The contract labor system, racial and gender wage differentials, and labor conflicts kept Mexican Americans underpaid and racially segregated

as an economic underclass with little hope of improvement. The Great Depression of the 1930s was another defining moment for Mexican Americans. During the Depression, prejudices and social discrimination against Mexican Americans became more pronounced as a result of the economic competition between poor White migrants from the Dust Bowl and Mexican Americans in California. The Great Depression also engendered a collective social atmosphere of insecurity and fear as Mexican Americans were made to bear the guilt for many of the social and economic ills of the period. One creative response to the socioeconomic crisis was the demand for large-scale repatriation of Mexicans. The repatriation of more than 400,000 Mexicans, nearly half of whom were U.S. citizens, emphasized to Mexicans just how vulnerable they were to the actions of local, state, and federal officials. They were welcomed when there was a shortage of cheap labor, but when economic times were bad they were told to go back to Mexico.

The Legacy of the Mexican American Generation, 1940–1965 The Depression, Repatriation Program, and World War II revolutionized many aspects of social and economic life for Mexican Americans, especially in the Southwest. In his book Becoming Mexican American, George Sa´ nchez notes that one major outcome of the Depression and repatriation programs of the 1930s was the rapid transformation of the barrio from a community dominated by the foreign-born Mexicanos to one centered around the native-born Mexican

Mexican Americans Americans who were oriented toward greater participation in the American political and social scene. This orientation toward greater participation and integration was nurtured by American involvement in World War II. In 1942 a manpower shortage created by the expansion of the U.S. armed forces and war-related industries prompted the United States and Mexico to initiate an informal program to allow manual laborers, known as braceros, to enter the United States to work. They labored in railroad construction and maintenance and in agriculture, two industries hardest hit by labor shortages. However, the Bracero Program and legal immigration did not meet all the manpower needs in the United States. As a result of these shortages, another group of Mexican workers, referred to as undocumented workers, as illegal immigrants or, metaphorically and pejoratively, as mojados (wetbacks), began to flow into the United States. The Bracero Program and the steady flow of illegal immigrants were a mixed blessing for the Mexican American community in the two decades after World War II. On one hand they helped to reinforce and strengthen the traditional culture, but on the other hand they increased competition for jobs. The discrimination generated by the braceros and illegal aliens had negative effects on all Mexican-descent Latina/os, not the least of which included growing racial tensions with the dominant group. Two incidents that illustrate the growing racial tension in Los Angeles include the sensationalized ‘‘Sleepy Lagoon Case’’ of 1942 and the so-called ‘‘zoot-suit riots’’ of June 1943. The wartime experiences of Mexican Americans profoundly altered their

| 361

perspective and expectations. Because they fought and died as equals in disproportionately high numbers, Mexican Americans felt they were entitled to equal opportunities as loyal American citizens in civilian life. The G.I. Bill of Rights gave all veterans benefits such as educational subsidies and loans for businesses and housing, which highlighted discriminatory practices in education, labor, and housing. Veterans were instrumental in the founding and growth of a variety of Mexican American political organizations including the American G.I. Forum and the Mexican American Political Organization (MAPA). These organizations promoted civic and political action, helped to elect Mexicans to city councils throughout the Southwest, conducted voter registration drives, and fought against racial discrimination in schooling, police-community relations, housing, and employment. As Mexican Americans moved into the cities in unprecedented numbers during the postwar years, and as more became middle class, they became increasingly dissatisfied with the limited and inferior roles assigned to them in American society. Incentive and strategies for expressing their dissatisfaction with institutional racism, discrimination, and inequality of opportunities in education, housing, and employment came from developments in the Black Civil Rights Movement during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Chicano and New Immigrant Generation, 1965–1985 In the late 1960s members of new organizations, including the Mexican American Youth Organization and el Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de

362 |

Mexican Americans

Aztlan (MEChA), began to refer to themselves as ‘‘Chicanos’’ and formed part of a broad social movement variously described as La Causa or El Movimiento. The so-called Chicano generation came to realize that while it was even more acculturated than previous generations, it did not have any real prospects of escaping its virtually complete lowerand working-class status. Unity and cohesiveness of otherwise diverse elements within the Mexican American community was increased by employing the use of such politically charged terms as ‘‘Chicano’’ and La Raza as well as by emphasizing the distinctiveness of Chicano culture, norms, and values. The steady flow of Mexican immigrants was a critical factor in the mobilization of La Raza in the 1960s and 1970s. One result of continued immigration was constant reinforcement of the traditional cultural patterns of their ancestral homeland. Continued reinforcement by newcomers from Mexico made it easier for Chicanos to exercise a choice concerning whether to embrace Anglo values and modes of behavior or to strengthen their ties to Chicano culture. Conversely, the constant flow of Mexican immigrants helped to perpetuate ethnic characteristics, which made Mexican Americans a highly visible minority. As a result, many Chicanos felt socially, as well as economically threatened by the influx of Mexican immigrants. The small but growing number of upwardly mobile middle-class Mexican Americans saw the newcomers as a threat to their hard-won prestige in the mainstream of American society where few in the dominant culture readily distinguished between ‘‘wetbacks’’ and middle-class Mexican Americans. Lower and working-class Mexican Americans

saw the new wave of immigrants from Mexico and other Latin America countries as a threat to their economic stability as unskilled and semiskilled laborers in a postindustrial U.S. economy. The Chicano movement of the late 1960s and 1970s facilitated a number of important concessions from the Anglo mainstream. Concessions such as bilingual education, Chicano studies programs, and affirmative action programs in higher education and employment practices created a setting from which a viable Mexican middle class could rise to local prominence. Another important concession was won in the Cisneros case of 1970, when the federal courts finally classified Mexican Americans as ‘‘an identifiable ethnic minority with a pattern of discrimination.’’ The political and social energy produced by the Chicano movement also inspired a generation of artists who would forever change the way mainstream America would perceive Mexican Americans. Chicano artists filled theatre, film, murals, paintings, and sculpture with social and political meanings, while dance, music, and literature celebrated the cultural heritage of El Movimiento. Thanks to the contributions of Chicano artists and victories won by Chicano political activists, Mexican Americans were able to maintain a high profile in American society throughout the 1970s. Scholars observe that the Chicano movement also revitalized Mexican identity and culture, helping Mexican Americans redefine themselves in relation to both U.S. and Mexican societies. As the Civil Rights Movement and Antiwar Movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s gradually lost momentum, the Chicano movement also waned, but not before winning acceptance in many

Mexican Americans mainstream institutions and by making it possible for younger generations of Mexican Americans to enjoy the American dream. In the 1960s and 1970s the Catholic Church experienced many significant changes resulting from the growing discontent among militant Chicanos and intensive proselytizing by Protestant groups, especially Evangelicals and Pentecostals. Important changes included the appointment of the first Mexican American bishops, the use of Spanish in mass, and a greater sensitivity to social issues of concern to Mexican Americans. There are several examples of the growing solidarity between the Catholic Church and the Chicano movement and Mexican American community during this period. Some priests and nuns openly supported United Farm Worker activities during the Delano grape strike. In an effort to raise awareness of the social problems facing Mexican Americans, a group of Chicano priests formed an organization named Padres Asociados Para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales (PADRES), which was committed to bringing about social and economic changes in the barrio. An organization with similar goals and objectives named Las Hermanas (The Sisters) was started for nuns and laywomen in the Catholic Church.

The Mexican American Religious Experience since 1980 Just as the Chicano movement was beginning to lose momentum in the late 1970s, unprecedented numbers of immigrants from Mexico, but also from South America and especially Central America, began to flood into and beyond the Southwest. This dramatically affected

| 363

the cultural and economic context of Mexican Americans in the final decades of the twentieth century. One of the most significant cultural developments of the past three decades has been the dramatic rise of the Hispanic, especially Mexican American, presence in evangelical and Protestant churches. According to figures published in 2007 by the Pew Hispanic Center in a study entitled ‘‘Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion,’’ 68 percent of all Hispanics, including 74 percent of all Mexican-descent Latino/as identify themselves as Roman Catholic, representing approximately 33 percent of all Catholics in the United States. The same study found that 20 percent of all Latina/os, including 16 percent of all Mexican-descent Latino/as identify themselves as either evangelical or mainline Protestant (15 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Approximately 3 percent identified themselves as ‘‘other Christians,’’ including Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, while 8 percent identified themselves as secular. The 2007 Pew study also found that differences in religious identification among Latino/as coincide with important demographic characteristics, especially with nativity and country of origin. For example, foreign-born Hispanics are more likely than native-born Hispanics to be Roman Catholics (74 percent to 58 percent, respectively), and Mexicans were much more likely than other Latino/as to be Roman Catholic. In their study of Hispanics adults, the 2007 Pew study found that 18 percent of Latino/as say they have converted from one religion either to another or to no religion at all. Given the fact that most Hispanics are Catholic, it is not surprising that 70 percent of all Hispanic converts are

364 |

Mexican Americans

Mexican immigrants light votive candles during prayers at San Juan Basilica in McAllen, Texas. (Alison Wright/Corbis)

former Catholics. These figures are consistent with earlier studies. In 1988, figures reported by the Catholic Church suggested that between 1972 and 1987 more than 1 million Hispanics left their ancestral church to join Protestant denominations. Another study three years later suggested that more than 60,000 Hispanics were leaving the Catholic Church every year for Protestant denominations. Catholic scholars maintain that a principal cause for the defection of Hispanics from the Catholic Church is that the church is not equipped or structured to meet the diverse needs of the growing number of Hispanic believers. They insist that the church lacks sufficient numbers of Spanish-speaking clergy who understand and appreciate the Latino/a community’s diverse cultural and religious idiosyncrasies. Consequently,

Hispanic Catholics do not always find secure, inviting places of worship in their ancestral church. Experts also observe that the prevailing ministry paradigm places great emphasis on priestly office at the expense of an approach to ministry that stresses the call to equip and empower all believers for ministry. They argue that conservative Protestant groups that equip and empower Latina/os to assume real responsibility for a wide range of ministries are attracting large numbers of Hispanics. Additionally, Catholic scholars observe that as a general rule the Catholic Church does not offer the small, receptive, faith-sharing community context found elsewhere. More militant Chicanos argue that the Catholic Church, historically preoccupied with either Americanizing the Mexican Americans or defending them against Protestant proselytism, has been

Mexican Americans insensitive to the need for social action on behalf of Mexican Americans. On the other hand, some church leaders point to the church’s failure to acknowledge the diversity of persons of Latin American descent in the United States. They note that there is a lack of awareness of ethnic and social class distinctions. Instead, an undifferentiated ‘‘option for the poor’’ on the part of socially active clergy reveals a tendency to conceive of Hispanics only in terms of deficits or dysfunctions, which can lead Hispanics who happen to be upwardly mobile to regard themselves as outside the church’s pastoral concerns. In an article entitled ‘‘The Challenge of Evangelical/Pentecostal Christianity to Hispanic Catholicism,’’ Allan Figueroa Deck, a Jesuit priest, traces the exodus of Hispanics from the Catholic Church since the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, mainline Protestant churches attracted the greatest numbers of Hispanics. But since the turn of the last century, conservative Protestant groups, especially evangelical and Pentecostal churches have attracted the largest number of Hispanic converts. History reveals that while there have been priests sympathetic to Hispanic Catholics and their culture, the ecclesiastical hierarchy has historically chosen to defend the cause of the powerful, supporting the sociopolitical status quo. When Mexican American Catholics were not being marginalized or discriminated against in their ancestral church as the ‘‘White man’s burden,’’ they were the target of Americanization. Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, on the other hand, have historically appealed to the working class, the poor, and the marginalized segments of the Hispanic community.

| 365

Today when one speaks of Hispanic Protestantism, one is not usually talking about mainline Protestant churches, but, rather, about some strain of evangelicalism and especially Pentecostalism. Hispanics, more than any other U.S. minority, are contributing to its revival and making evangelicalism, particularly in its Pentecostal manifestations, the fastest growing and arguably the most dynamic division of Christianity in the United States and in the world today. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches that attract growing numbers of Mexican Americans and other Latino/as are usually led by gifted, charismatic leaders from the community who seldom question the need to use Spanish in their ministry. They are also characterized by a respect for important idiosyncrasies of the local community and its natural, indigenous leadership. The success of evangelicals and Pentecostals is also credited to their insights into the diverse Hispanic presence and their willingness to respond creatively and energetically to that diverse presence. Careful observers within the Catholic Church note that the ‘‘sects,’’ as they are often referred to, do not only appeal to the poor, oppressed, and marginalized. They also appeal to the emerging Mexican American and Latino/a middle class. The sects appeal to the upwardly mobile because they provide a means of becoming responsible and respectable members of the American middle class without severing ties with their Latina/o roots and heritage. The Catholic Church’s failure in this area has been to provide community and respectability for the upwardly mobile Hispanics. In other words, defection to the sects has social as well as economic payoffs for the Latina/o Catholics.

366 |

Mexican Americans

The affinity between Hispanic popular Catholicism and evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity is another characteristic that attracts a larger number of Latino/as. Catholic scholars affirm that popular Catholicism is the deeply rooted norm for most Hispanics. It is the existential Catholicism of most Latina/os, including Mexican Americans. It is mediated especially by grandmothers, mothers, and women in general. It is communicated orally and shuns the cognitive in its effort to appeal to the senses and the feelings. It does this through symbol and rite. The main qualities of popular Catholicism are the following: a concern for an immediate experience with God, a strong orientation toward the transcendent, an implicit belief in miracles, a practical orientation toward healing, and a tendency to personalize or individualize one’s relationship with the divine. These qualities are notably absent in American Catholicism and mainline Protestantism. This is due to the antagonism between popular religion and modern rationality. Historically, Anglo-American Catholics have seen Hispanic popular religion as a problem to be uprooted, not a strength upon which to build. Furthermore, the emphasis placed upon a direct and personal relationship with God is available in evangelical and Pentecostal churches in small faith-sharing contexts that affirm the communal thrust of Hispanic popular Catholicism while at the same time orienting Latino/as toward more selfdetermination. By providing the experiences described above, evangelical and Pentecostal churches become an effective bridge for Latin American Christianity, which is shaken to its core by the challenges of modernity. In other words,

these new faith communities provide a new orientation for ordinary people seeking to deal with the stresses involved in the rapid changes brought about by immigration, urbanization, and secularization. The preceding observations may leave the reader with the impression that most Hispanics have already or will soon abandon their ancestral church. This is certainly not the case. The majority of Latino/as, including 74 percent of Mexican-decent Latina/os, remain loyal Catholics, which raises a final question: Why do many Hispanics, especially Mexican Americans resist evangelical proselytizing efforts? Catholic scholars have identified three main sources of resistance. The principal source of resistance to evangelical Protestantism has to do with its intimate connection with the North American cultural ethos, especially the perceived individualism and consumerism. Furthermore, the more democratic, egalitarian ethos of Evangelicalism is somehow foreign to the hierarchical configuration of both the Hispanic family and society. Finally, profound cultural, social, and familial ruptures take place when a family member becomes a Protestant. To say that most Mexican Americans are Catholic is not to describe a religious ‘‘preference’’; it is a designation of cultural orientation. Especially in its popular form, Roman Catholicism is a symbol of ethnic solidarity. Yet Catholic scholars remind us that the main characteristic and appeal of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity is its affinity with popular Catholicism. Mexican Americans respond favorably to a faith that is characterized by a clear affirmation of God’s transcendence, strong convictions about God’s will in matters of morality founded

Mission System on biblical teaching, a confidence in God’s power to work miracles and especially heal, and the possibility of establishing a personal relationship with God appropriate for a highly individualized modern world. Before being conquered, colonized, and marginalized by the dominant group in the United States and before being overwhelmed with the pressures of our modern, postindustrial urban society, these social and spiritual needs were met by popular Hispanic Catholicism. At the turn of the twenty-first century growing numbers of Mexican Americans and other Latino/as are now finding those needs met by evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. Daniel A. Rodriguez

References and Further Reading Acun˜a, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). Burns, Jeffrey M. ‘‘The Mexican Catholic Community in California.’’ Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900–1965, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Gilberto M. Hinojosa (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1994). Camarillo, Albert. Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1979). Deck, Allan Figueroa. ‘‘The Challenge of Evangelical/Pentecostal Christianity to Hispanic Catholicism.’’ Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U. S.: Issues and Concerns, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1995). Griswold del Castillo, Richard, and Arnoldo de Leo´n. North to Aztla´n: A History of

| 367

Mexican Americans in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996). Hinojosa, Gilberto M. ‘‘Mexican American Faith Communities in the Southwest.’’ Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900–1965, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Gilberto M. Hinojosa (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1992). McLemore, S. Dale, and Ricardo Romo. ‘‘The Origins and Development of the Mexican American People.’’ The Mexican American Experience: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. Rodolfo O. de la Garza, F. D. Bean, C. M. Bobjean, R. Romo, and R. Alvarez (Austin: University of Texas, 1985). Meier, Matt S., and Feliciano Ribera. Mexican Americans-American Mexicans: From Conquistadores to Chicanos (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989). Mirande´, Alfredo. The Chicano Experience: An Alternate Perspective (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1985). Pew Hispanic Center and Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, ‘‘Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion.’’ Available at http:// pewforum.org/surveys/hispanic/ (April 25, 2007). Sa´nchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American (New York: Oxford University, 1993).

MISSION SYSTEM Within the Hispanic context, the mission system began with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores to the Americas. On January 2, 1492, the Catholic reconquista in Spain finally recovered Granada from the Muslims. On March 31 of the same year, ‘‘The Decree of Expulsion’’ was signed, forcing the Jews to leave or renounce their faith. Although some historians argue that Granada was the final

368 |

Mission System

crusade, the Spanish conquest of the socalled New World, in many ways, follows the continual pattern of violent expansionism to fulfill a religious mission. On August 3 Christopher Columbus’s fleet sought closer passage to India under the sponsorship of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. On October 12, 1492, Columbus spotted the Caribbean island of Guanahani thinking that this was a western island of India. The island was renamed San Salvador (Saint Savior) as an indication of the religious implications of his discovery. Columbus’s main goal was the search for riches, but the Spanish crown felt a missionary obligation, so a priest was sent along during his second voyage. The pope granted the Spanish a right already bestowed on the Portuguese un derecho y el jus patronatus or possession over newly discovered lands with the obligation to propagate the faith. It was the first time in history that the pope gave the double power to colonize and missionize to a state, thus mixing the temporal and the supernatural, the political and the ecclesial realms. In May 1493 the pope issued two bulls, Inter Coetera and Eximiae Devotionis, granting the rights of the newly discovered lands and their inhabitants to participate as members of the church in the benefits of the gospel. These bulls were part of Christendom— believing that the governors of a given conquered territory (kingdom) have the authority to convert their subjects. Spanish explorers such as Juan Ponce de Leon and Vasco Nu´ n˜ ez de Balboa continued to conquer the territories of Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Florida, and Panama early in the sixteenth century. These explorers reported back to Spain the sighting of riches. In response, the Spanish crown established the system

of encomiendas to settle conquered territories. The prerequisite for settlement was the reading of the ‘‘Requirement,’’ which stated that local people must acknowledge the dominion of the Catholic Church, the pope, and the king and permit the teaching of Christianity. Not always read in good faith, the Requirement was used to justify the seizure of property and the forcible conquest and the enslavement of women and children—citing the biblical example of the Israelite conquest of Jericho for justification. Specifically, the encomiendas were land grants given in exchange for the Christianizing of the residents. Franciscan, Dominican, and the newly formed Jesuit Order often accompanied the settlers with the goal of converting the native inhabitants to Christianity, often with the sincere belief that participation in the Catholic sacraments—especially baptism—saved ‘‘heathens’’ from hell’s torment. Already having established colonies on the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba, Spaniard Herna´ n Cortez organized an expedition further west landing in Veracruz, Mexico, on Holy Thursday, 1521. Cortez’s arrival coincided with the legend of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god who was believed would return shortly. Moctezuma sent a gift of gold to appease the expected gods—sparking Cortez’s interest in visiting Tenochtitlan. More gold in the Aztec capital increased Cortez’s insatiable desire to return and complete the conquest. Human sacrifices convinced the Spanish that the Aztecs were savages and must be ‘‘Christianized.’’ The last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtemoc, surrendered at Tlatelolco, an Aztec holy site, on August 13, 1521. As a sign of domination, the same stones of the

Mission System Aztec pyramids were used to build the Santiago de Tlatelolco Catholic Church on top of the holy site. The Plaza of Tlatelolco, also known in Mexico City as the Plaza of Three Cultures, remains a symbol of the intersection of the Spanish and Aztec cultures and the birth of the mestizo (mixed) race. A young lawyer, Cristobal de las Casas (1484–1566), accompanied Columbus on his third journey to the Americas and witnessed many atrocities committed by the Spanish against the native peoples. Shortly after coming to the so-called New World, he completed his studies to become a Dominican priest. Later, he was named bishop of southern Mexico. Fearing God’s judgment against the Spanish, de las Casas wrote A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies to King Philip II. The book recorded the enslavement, cruel treatment, diseases, and death to which the native peoples were subjected. Some scholars estimate a decline from an original 16 million to about 1 million. In general de las Casas objected to the system of encomiendas, which assumed that the indigenous did not possess a rational soul, and thus had to be Christianized by force instead of convinced by reason. The encomienda system was temporarily suspended in 1550–1551 when the King of Spain, Charles V, ordered a junta, a group of jurists and theologians, to examine whether or not the native peoples possessed a rational soul. De las Casas forced the issue to trial in what is known as the ‘‘Las Casas-Sepu´ lveda Controversy.’’ Juan Gine´s de Sepu´lveda, a prominent humanist and Greek scholar, defended the encomienda system justifying violent means of evangelization. Despite losing the case, de las Casas raised important issues in Europe and

| 369

the so-called New World about the interplay between missions, race, and colonialism. As a tribute to his struggle for human rights, de las Casas was named ‘‘Protectorate of the Indians.’’ He was successful in shedding light on the Spaniards’ cruel practices; nevertheless, he reportedly recommended that Africans were better suited as slaves—a position he later regretted. As the Spanish colonialization expanded, explorers traveled from the early strongholds of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Mexico City to points north and south. Hernando de Soto sponsored an excursion by Francisco Pizarro from Panama to South America in 1531. There he found gold among the Inca civilization in what is today Peru. De Soto instantly became wealthy and was named ruler of Florida and Cuba in 1536; meanwhile Pizarro went on to have a career and success similar to Herna´n Cortez, founding the new capital of Lima and conquering the Inca capital of Cuzco. In conjunction with the military expansion, the newly established Jesuit Order sent missionaries, establishing a mission in Cuzco. In addition to teaching the Christian faith, the mission acquired large tracts of land and introduced the concepts of private ownership, commodification, and banking. The mission housed an orphanage that raised the children of Spanish fathers and Inca princesses with Catholic teaching and a European mind-set. This new Creole class became the next ruling elites. Not surprisingly, the Indians were at the bottom of the new caste system. Although the conquests in Mexico and South America brought immediate gold and silver to Spain, the expeditions in northern Mexico were not immediately successful. Juan de Grijalva explored the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico

370 |

Mission System

in 1518 and 10 years later Alvar Nun˜ez Cabeza de Vaca, en route from Tampa Bay, was shipwrecked on the upper Texas coast. In 1540 Francisco Vasquez de Coronado explored further north through the Pueblo territories of Cibola, the Grand Canyon all the way to the Great Plains, finding small villages of nomadic tribes and buffalo, but no gold. Removed from the conquest of the central plateau, the northern region of New Spain was sparsely populated and apparently lacked the precious metals attracting European settlers further south. Simultaneous to Herna´n Cortez’s conquest of Mexico was the start of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. On April 2, 1521, Martin Luther defended his 95 Theses against the Roman Catholic practice of indulgences at the Imperial Diet in Worms, Germany. Seemingly a world apart, these events would soon become entwined, as the Roman Catholic Church felt threatened by Luther’s Sola Scritura doctrine and initiated a counterReformation campaign. These two competing beliefs soon encountered each other in the so-called New World with a German Lutheran settlement in Venezuela in 1532 and brief French Huguenot settlements in Brazil and Fort Caroline, Florida, in the 1550s and 1560s. Spanish captain Pedro Menendez de Avila momentarily eradicated the ‘‘Lutheran heresy’’ in Florida in 1556 by slitting the throat of a thousand ‘‘infidels’’ who did not confess the Catholic faith. Hearing reports of French settlements further north and Protestant beliefs from Europe, the Spanish moved to defend their territory and the Catholic faith with the establishment of a chain of mission systems during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in what is today Texas,

New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Seeing that it did not have enough Spanish soldiers or resources to secure such a vast region, mission systems seemed to be an ideal church-state partnership. The Crown decided to govern the region as a missionary province supporting the missions with an annual subsidy—a tithe of the taxes charged to the residents of the region. Although many priests shared a genuine desire to convert the Indians away from their indigenous beliefs to Christianity, the Spanish government supported this mission as a means of introducing Western civilization and bringing the native peoples under submission as subjects. In addition to teaching the tenets of the Christian faith, the missions served to teach the Spanish language, crafts, agriculture, law, and eventually European warfare. The mission system is made up of three major institutions: the mission, the presidio, and the pueblo. The mission was the main institution consisting of the friars and the native population. The mission was within the fortified walls, but depended on the second institution, the presidio, for protection. The fort was located nearby and protected the mission from hostile groups such as noncooperative Indians or European rivals. The soldiers taught some defensive skills to cooperative residents while applying Spanish law to runaways and heretics. The third institution was the pueblo or civil community—made up of the surrounding residents. Many of the residents were ranchers or tradesman who did business with the mission. Much more than a chapel, the mission system was a self-sufficient economic and military enterprise surrounded by fortified walls and gates. Inside the walls were the educational buildings, mills,

Mission System

| 371

SAN DIEGO REVOLT Christianity came to the U.S. West Coast in 1769 with the founding of a mission in what would be known as San Diego, California. Missionaries immediately began both the physical and the spiritual conquest of the indigenous people known as the Kumeyaay. By 1775, they baptized about 500 new converts. The Kumeyaay soon resented the presence of Spaniards for their conversion efforts, as well as the practice of the Spaniards to graze cattle on Indian lands, thus harming the Indian’s agricultural activities. Accusations of rape of Indian women were also made. On November 5, 1775, a well-organized revolt against the mission took place, symbolizing the indigenous people’s resistance to Spaniards and their religion. The mission was burned and the priest, Father Luis Jayme, and two others were killed. The revolt stopped missionary activities for at least a year and a half. But by 1777, with the arrival of Father Junı´pero Serra who rebuilt the mission, the missionary project was again reinstated. By 1797 the mission controlled over 50,000 acres and claim ‘‘winning’’ over 1,400 souls. —MAD

storage buildings, trade shops, housing units for friars and Indians, and, of course, a chapel. Outside the walls were thousands of acres of land—that often was acquired from locals when loans could not be repaid—owned by the mission for cultivating and grazing cattle. The friars governed the mission with a work ethic imported from the European monastical movement. A typical day started at 5:00 a.m. for morning worship, breakfast between 6:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m., followed by four hours of manual labor, a midday meal, and rest. The afternoon consisted of another four hours of work, the evening meal, a period of religious instruction, and free time before bedtime. In what is today the state of New Mexico, Franciscan friars were given control over their Indian converts. In the early seventeenth century, 50 churches were built by 26 friars. Tools and other hardware were paid by the Crown and sent by wagon train from Mexico City. Each mission received ten axes, three

adzes, three spades, ten hoes, one medium-sized saw, one chisel, two augers, one plane, a large latch for the church door, two small locks, a dozen hinges, and 6,000 nails. Appropriating the adobe-style brick, the Native Americans worked together with the friars to build the self-enclosed missions. A chain of Franciscan missions was established further west in what is today the state of California. Spanish penetration further west along the Alta California coast between Los Angeles and the current Mexico border was more difficult in the face of Indian resistance. One mission in the area of San Diego faced resistance to mass baptisms (at least 300 in a period of three months) from the local population and was attacked. Following an initial attack on the mission in 1769, the animosity continued after approximately 500 baptisms and in November 1775 the Diegen˜os (as the local residents were called) mounted a major attack on the mission. The Franciscans were taken by surprise even though there had been

372 |

Mission System

Mission Santa Barbara was founded in 1786, the tenth of 21 Franciscan missions in California. (Salman Arif/Dreamstime)

warning signs. Father Luis Jayme said of the first attack: ‘‘No wonder the Indians here were bad when the mission was first founded. To begin with, they did not know why [the Spaniards] had come unless they intended to take their lands away from them.’’ The Roman Catholic mission system began to decline in Mexico during the war of independence from Spain in 1821, and in what is today the American Southwest after the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the ensuing MexicanAmerican War from 1846 to 1848. The missions remaining in Mexican territory were largely dismantled, and some were sold during Benito Juarez’s rule as a result of the separation of church and state enacted by the 1857 Mexican Constitution. During Roman Catholic control of colonial South America, the modern

Protestant mission movement considered this region ‘‘Christianized,’’ and all Protestant work was aimed at ex-patriots and conducted in English. U.S. citizen James Thompson preached the first Protestant sermon in South America in Buenos Aires in 1920 followed by immigrants from Europe establishing their own national churches. Following the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, Rev. Fountain E. Pitts traveled to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina and established the first Englishspeaking Methodist Society in Rio de Janeiro in 1835. The first known Protestant sermon in Spanish was preached by Methodist John Francis Thomson on May 25, 1867 in Buenos Aires. After the Spanish colonial laws were rescinded in 1872–1873, Protestant missionary work was established in Spanish in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. The Presbyterian Church

Mission System

| 373

COLONIZATION ACT OF 1824 Spain, and later Mexico, had difficulty attracting settlers to their northern frontier, known today as the U.S. Southwest. The Colonization Act of 1824 was an attempt to liberalize land policy to attract settlers. Even Euro-Americans were encouraged to migrate to Texas and establish homesteads. As Mexican families moved to the frontier during the 1820s and 1830s, settling close to the missions, they found themselves in competition with the Franciscan missionaries. The Catholic Church held most of the land and laborers (in the form of Indians). Competition for these resources led to anticlericism (not for religious but economic reasons), resulting in 1833 with the Mexican Congress secularizing the missions, thus breaking the Church’s hold on the area’s resources. Nearly 8 million acres of lands held by the missions were granted or sold to Mexican officials, soldiers, and civilians (including women). These new landholders became a ranchero/a class. The Indians who were working under the ‘‘care’’ of missionaries were also emancipated, with most of those who worked at the missions receiving parcels of the mission’s land. Unfortunately, Indian ownership of land lasted a short time. As they lost their land, they became workers at the estates of the new ranchero/a class. —MAD

established missionary work in Mexico in December 1872. Methodists followed with the purchase of the first Protestant Church located at No. 5, Gante Street in downtown Mexico City, a former Franciscan monastery made available by President Benito Juarez’s Constitutional Reformation. Former Catholic seminarian, Alejo Hernandez, fought for Juarez and later converted to Methodism to become the first ordained Mexican Protestant and pastored this congregation. Throughout Latin America, Protestants were perceived as being allies of liberalism, and liberal politicians welcomed Protestant missionary work. U.S. mainline denominations such as the Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Baptists started schools and hospitals along with church plants. Exiles from the early battles for Cuban independence fled to Key West and Tampa and found an ally in American Protestantism. Some were converted and returned to Cuba to start

the first Protestant services in 1873. After U.S. military incursions into Latin America, for example, Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘‘rough riders’’ 1898 intervention in the Spanish-American War in Cuba, Protestant mission work was often viewed as a ‘‘foreign’’ element. Other immigrants remained in the United States creating Hispanic communities in Florida, the Northeast, and the Southwest. Protestant mission systems began in the United States among Hispanic communities after the establishment of mainline Home Missionary Societies in the 1860s. As the American frontier moved west after the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War, home missionaries ministered to Native American and Hispanic communities in the American Southwest to establish schools and plant churches—often in tension with the Roman Catholic traditions engrained in Mexican-American culture. Philip Wingeier-Rayo

374 |

Mormons/Latter-day Saints

References and Further Reading Barton, Paul. Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). Bastian, Jean-Pierre. La Mutacio´n Religiosa de Ame´rica Latina, Para una Sociologı´a del Cambio Social en la Modernidad Perife´rica (Mexico City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, 1997, 2003). Burns, Kathryn. Colonial Habits: Currents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Lewis, Laura A. Hall of Mirrors (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Martinez, Juan Francisco. Sea La Luz: The Making of Mexican Protestantism in the American Southwest 1829–1900 (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2006). Wingeier-Rayo, Philip. Cuban Methodism: The Untold Story of Survival and Revival (Lawrenceville, GA: Dolphins & Orchids, 2004, 2006). Yohn, Susan Mitchell. A Contest of Faiths: Missionary Women and Pluralism in the American Southwest (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

MORMONS/LATTER-DAY SAINTS Anglo-American visionary Joseph Smith founded Mormonism in the early nineteenth century. By far the religion’s largest denomination—and the subject of this entry—is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter LDS Church), headquartered in Salt Lake City and claiming 12 million members. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, adherents have preferred to be called ‘‘Latter-day Saints,’’ but ‘‘Mormon’’ is still a standard scholarly usage.

By 2005, some 200,000 Latino/a members of the LDS Church lived across the United States. Additionally, Mormonism affects Hispanic Americans by dint of the religion’s political influence in Utah and other western states. Mormonism has unfolded on a transnational stage, with missionaries and immigrants playing important roles in the movement’s history. Consequently, Hispanic American Mormon experience cannot be isolated from Mormonism in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Because of rapid growth in Latin America, Spanish speakers are expected to overtake English speakers as the LDS Church’s largest language group during the early 2010s. Thus Hispanic Americans are both the largest minority within Mormonism in the United States and part of the religion’s rapidly up-and-coming new global majority.

Initial Mormon-Latino Contacts For 15 years after the religion’s founding in 1830, Mormons suffered recurring episodes of state-sanctioned as well as vigilante violence against them due to radical practices such as communitarianism, theocracy, and polygamy. After Joseph Smith was arrested and killed by a mob in 1844, the main body of Mormons fled U.S. borders, resettling in present-day Utah, which was then Mexican territory. As Chicano scholar Armando Solo´ rzano has quipped, the Mormons were, in effect, illegal immigrants. The Mormon community at this time was composed mostly of AngloAmericans and British immigrants, joined later by large numbers of Scandinavian converts. Although Franciscans explored Utah in 1776, neither Spanish nor Mexican

Mormons/Latter-day Saints | 375 administrations established colonies there. The region was home to UtoAztecan speaking peoples; indeed, as early as the sixteenth century, a Utah site was proposed as the location of Aztla´n, the Aztec homeland. Within a year of the Mormons’ arrival, the United States annexed the Utah territory under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mormons were uneasy about returning to life under the American government. They had, however, provided a battalion of 500 to fight in the Mexican-American War. Chicano scholars have interpreted the Mormon Battalion as an alliance with the U.S. policy of Manifest Destiny. That same policy, however, led to persecution of the Mormons as the federal government moved to assert control of the region by abolishing Mormon theocracy and polygamy. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Mormons established colonies in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and what had become the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in Arizona. They also launched their first missions to Latin America. Mormons had a particular interest in preaching to Native Americans and mestizos because of teachings from the Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith claimed was a translation of lost scriptures written on golden plates by Israelites who had colonized the Americas in Old Testament times. The descendants of these people, called Lamanites, lapsed into barbarism, becoming the continent’s indigenous peoples. The Book of Mormon prophesies that the Lamanites will convert and recover their former glory as a precursor to Christ’s second coming. Down to the present, many Native American and mestizo Mormons proudly claim Lamanite identity, deriving from it

a sense of extraordinary heritage and destiny. After an abortive, poorly prepared 1852 mission to Chile, a Mexican mission was launched in the 1870s, attracting a few hundred converts by century’s end. Among the fruits of this mission were the first Spanish translation of the Book of Mormon and the creation of colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora as havens for Anglo Mormon polygamists fleeing prosecution in the United States. The missionaries’ work was interrupted by U.S. government efforts to confiscate church assets; by the Mexican Revolution, which also prompted Mormons to evacuate their Mexican colonies; and by the Mexican government’s deportation of foreign ministers after the Cristero rebellion. Mexican Mormon congregations endured, however—on both sides of the border.

Beginnings of Hispanic American Mormonism Withdrawing temporarily from Mexico during the Revolution, Anglo-American missionaries shifted their attention to Mexican Americans in Colorado and the border states from Texas to California. Around the same time, three sisters who had joined the church in Mexico— Augustina, Dolores, and Domitila Rivera—migrated to Salt Lake. There they launched missionary efforts among Hispanic Americans, who had been coming to Utah since the beginning of the twentieth century to work in industries created by the Mormons, such as sugar beet farming. The Rivera sisters were joined in 1920 by Juan Ramo´n Martı´nez, from New Mexico; Francisco Solano, a Spaniard who encountered Mormonism

376 |

Mormons/Latter-day Saints

in South Africa; and Mexican-born Margarito Bautista. These six became the core of Mormonism’s oldest continuously operating ethnic congregation in the United States, eventually called the Lucero Ward. Outside Utah, proselytizing to Hispanic Americans continued under the Mexican Mission, which straddled the border until a separate Spanish American Mission was created for the United States in 1936. Eduardo Balderas, a Mexican native reared in Texas, was hired in 1939 as the church’s first full-time translator, making many devotional texts available to Spanish-speaking Mormons in and out of the United States. The temple ceremonies, which convey esoteric instruction for the afterlife, were translated into Spanish in 1945, the first time that the century-old rites were administered in any language other than English. Hundreds of Mexican and Hispanic American Mormons gathered annually to perform the ceremonies at the church’s Mesa, Arizona, temple, the only place the ceremonies were available in Spanish until the 1970s. Especially for Hispanic Americans in Utah, membership in the LDS Church offered tangible benefits: spaces in which to socialize and preserve their culture, connections to White Mormon employers, and access to the church’s welfare system. But Anglo Mormons’ sense of racial privilege also bred a paternalistic attitude that kept Latina/o congregations and missions under Anglo leadership into the 1960s. During the 1930s, Margarito Bautista and others petitioned for a Mexican to head the Mexican Mission. When Anglo leaders rejected the petition, a third of the church’s Mexican membership organized a separate denomination called the Third

Convention. Bautista and other Third Conventionists fused teachings about the destiny of the Lamanites with postRevolutionary nationalistic fervor.

Growth and New Challenges Mormon conversions in Latin America rose dramatically during the 1960s and 1970s, making that region the largest source of Mormon growth outside the United States throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Missionizing had begun in Argentina during the 1920s; by the 1960s, missionaries worked throughout Central and South America. In 1961, the first Latin American stake (analogous to a diocese) was created in Mexico City. The stake was initially headed by an Anglo, but within a few years that appointment passed to a Mexican, Agrı´col Lozano. In 1983, Mexico City became the site of the first temple in Latin America; at century’s end, the church had constructed nearly 25 temples and thousands of local meetinghouses to serve its 4.5 million Latin American members. By 2005, nine Spanish-surnamed individuals had served in the First and Second Quorums of Seventy, the lower tiers of the church’s highest-ranking leadership. Also by that year, church membership in Mexico had reached 1 million, the greatest number of Mormons anywhere outside the United States. In the United States, missionizing to Hispanic Americans expanded to the East Coast with the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Immigration of Mormons from Latin America contributed to the continuing growth of the church’s Latino/a membership in the United States. During the 1970s, the church helped Latin American Mormons fleeing

Mormons/Latter-day Saints | 377 political unrest in their countries of origin obtain U.S. visas and refugee status. In 1978, church president Spencer W. Kimball abolished the controversial policy of banning Mormons of Black African descent from holding church office or receiving temple ceremonies. This turning point cleared the way for Mormon growth among Black Spanish speakers, such as Dominicans. Why did Mormonism appeal to Latino/as? Oral histories suggest that the church’s emphasis on strengthening families and traditional gender roles appeals to many, as do prohibitions on alcohol and gambling, opportunities for local leadership in a lay-led church, and a middle-class ethos reflecting American corporate values. Also, Lamanite identity is important for many mestizo Mormons, particularly those who identify, for nationalist reasons, with pre-Columbian civilizations, notably Mexicans and Peruvians. Some Hispanic American Mormons developed a Chicano consciousness during the 1960s. Mormons in El Paso organized an Asociacio´n Cultural Me´xico Americana in 1969 to voice concerns about discrimination and the predominance of Anglo culture in the church. Also in the late 1960s, Orlando Rivera, the Lucero Ward’s first nonAnglo bishop, joined with a Catholic priest to found SOCIO, an organization that promoted Latino/a civil rights in Utah. Rivera was frustrated that Anglo church leaders, politically conservative by temperament, remained detached from the struggle for civil rights. Church leaders showed somewhat greater concern for Hispanic American exploitation during the 2000s. By then, according to newspaper reports, an estimated 30 percent of Utah’s growing Latina/o population was Mormon.

Contemporary Issues Ethnic Congregations. Since the midtwentieth century, concern for organizational efficiency has led to the demise of ethnically or linguistically bounded missions, such as the Spanish American mission, in favor of geographically defined ones. Church policy has vacillated in its support for ethnic congregations in the United States, the greatest number of which are Spanish speaking. While Kimball enthusiastically supported such congregations, other Anglo leaders have favored integrating minorities into English-speaking wards. These leaders believe that cultural diversity must be managed to avoid compromising the unity of the international church or the integrity of its revealed message. Conservative anxieties about multiculturalism in the United States likely play a factor as well. Although church leaders have moved periodically since the 1970s toward disbanding ethnic congregations, in 2006 the number of Spanish-speaking units in the United States was at an alltime high of 600. In Los Angeles, entire Spanish-speaking stakes have been organized. Anglo-Latino/a and Intra-Latina/o Tensions. For a century, Hispanic American Mormons have complained about unequal treatment from Anglo coreligionists—one reason that many Hispanic Americans prefer separate congregations. They have resented, for example, being pigeonholed as providers of ethnic food and dance for church socials. In addition, there are predictable intercultural misunderstandings: Anglos perceive Latino/as as disorganized, Latina/ os perceive Anglos as cold, and so on. The drastically disproportionate number of Latina/os in the highest levels of

378 |

Mormons/Latter-day Saints

San Diego California Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Scott Prokop/Dreamstime)

church leadership is a likely source of future discontent. (All Latino/a leaders at that level have been Latin American natives, not Hispanic American.) Within Hispanic American congregations, some have worried about a tendency for members to form cliques by nationality. Non-Mexicans have complained about Mexican dominance. Since 2002, the church has hosted annual celebrations of Latino/a cultures in its massive Salt Lake conference center. Drawing thousands of Hispanic American Mormons, these events aim to promote a sense of pan-Latina/o unity while showcasing different nationalities. Immigration and Related Issues. The church has not voiced official positions on immigration reform or border security. However, Anglo-American Mormons tend to be politically conservative, and this has led Mormon lawmakers and

voters in Utah, Arizona, and elsewhere to support initiatives such as English Only. Some conservative Mormons have called for church leaders to deny baptism or temple ceremonies to undocumented immigrants. The church has publicly rejected these proposals. In 2002, the church launched a Hispanic Initiative that included creating a clinic and English classes for Salt Lake Latina/os. While the initiative is oriented toward assimilation, it represents an effort by Anglo Mormons to respond to the exploitation of Hispanic Americans. After Mexican president Vicente Fox held a 2006 meeting with LDS Church leaders in Salt Lake to discuss the church’s work in Mexico and the situation of Mexican Mormons in Utah, CNN commentator Lou Dobbs accused the church of encouraging illegal immigration.

Mozarabic Rite Challenges to Lamanite Identity. In the early 2000s, some Mormon intellectuals in the English-speaking world pointed out that DNA studies contradicted the long-standing Mormon belief that Native Americans were of Israelite descent. Other Mormon intellectuals responded to this challenge by proposing that the peoples described in the Book of Mormon occupied a much smaller territory than Mormons had traditionally believed and were eventually absorbed into indigenous populations. At stake in this debate is the plausibility of the Book of Mormon and, by extension, the authenticity of the religion’s claim to revelation. Revising Lamanite identity allows Mormons to preserve faith in the Book of Mormon in the face of scientific counterevidence. However, that revision has been disturbing to some Latina/o Mormons whose own identities are bound up in statements by church leaders affirming that Native Americans and mestizos belong to the chosen Lamanite lineage. It is unclear how this dilemma will be resolved. Probably most Mormons in Latin America are unaware of these debates among English-speaking intellectuals. Hispanic Americans are more likely to encounter the debates.

Timeline 1830 1847 1920

1936 1961

Joseph Smith publishes the Book of Mormon. Mormon pioneers settle in Mexican territory (present-day Utah). The longest operating Hispanic American Mormon congregation, eventually known as the Lucero Ward, is founded. Margarito Bautista and other Mexican Mormons petition unsuccessfully for Mexican leadership. The first Latin American stake is organized in Mexico.

1966 1969

1978 2002 2004

| 379

Orlando Rivera becomes the first Hispanic American bishop of the Lucero Ward. Mormons in Texas found the Asociacio´n Cultural Me´xico Americana to voice concerns about the dominance of Anglo culture in the church. Church president Spencer W. Kimball lifts restrictions on church members with Black African ancestry. Church leaders launch a Hispanic Initiative in Salt Lake City. The number of Mormons in Mexico reaches 1 million; about 200,000 Latino Mormons live in the United States.

John-Charles Duffy

References and Further Reading Embry, Jessie L. In His Own Language’’: Mormon Spanish Speaking Congregations in the United States (Provo, UT: The Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, 1997). Gurnon, Emily. ‘‘Minority Mormon: Latino and Latter-day Saint.’’ Christian Century (February 16, 1994): 157–159. Iber, Jorge. Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912–1999 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000). Rivera, Orlando A. ‘‘Mormonism and the Chicano.’’ Mormonism: A Faith for All Cultures, ed. F. LaMond Tullis (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1978). Solo´rzano, Armando. ‘‘Struggle over Memory: The Roots of the Mexican Americans in Utah, 1776 through the 1850s.’’ Aztla´n 23, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 81–117.

MOZARABIC RITE The official name of this liturgical system centered at Toledo, Spain, is the

380 |

Mozarabic Rite

Hispano-Mozarabic Rite. Variously called the Old Spanish Rite, the Hispanic Rite, and more usually the Mozarabic Rite, the ancient rite of Spain is one of several Latin language liturgical systems that arose in the West in the first four centuries of the Christian era. Only three have survived to this day, the Roman, the Milanese, and the Spanish. Vatican II’s openness to diversity in the liturgy was stated in the Decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches (1964) when it stated that all the rites celebrated by Catholics in East or West enjoy the same dignity and privileges as the Roman rite (OE 3). This led Cardinal Marcelo Gonza´ lez Martı´n (Archbishop of Toledo 1972– 1995) to renew the ancient Spanish rite’s status and life. He formed a commission whose work resulted in updating and designating it as an alternate liturgy for all Catholics in Spain in 1988. Consequently, new liturgical books for the celebration of the Eucharist appeared in 1991. With permission the Eucharist in the Mozarabic Rite may be celebrated elsewhere, and it has been celebrated in the United States on seven occasions since its updating: five at Sacred Heart School of Theology (1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, and 2004); once in Chicago (Quigley Seminary, 1999); and once at Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana (2003). The liturgy is primarily celebrated in Latin, although an unofficial Spanish translation is occasionally used. The importance of this rite for Latino/ as in the United States is that when the Mozarabic rite was replaced as the primary liturgy for Spain by the Roman rite, many of the Mozarabic sacramental celebrations entered into the popular religious practices of peoples evangelized by Spanish missionaries throughout the world. These include such things as the

Adam and Eve, from the Manuscript Beato de Libeana, tenth century. (The Art Archive/ Corbis)

use of the lazo and arras at weddings, the presentation of children in the church, blessings on occasions of rites of passage such as quince an˜os celebrations, and an approach to sacramentality that sees God’s presence and blessing of creation and humankind everywhere. Events are marked by special blessings and celebrations, as well as by the use of padrinos (godparents). In addition, the high Christology of the liturgy is reflected in the popular approach to Jesus Christ as the God-Man who is exalted above all others. This spirituality lends itself to seeing the Virgin Mary and saints as mediators, for instance, and the establishment of shrines and home altars where God can be readily encountered by the faithful. Furthermore, liturgy is not to be confined to the Church building but is to be taken out on the streets to encourage the public manifestation of

Mozarabic Rite faith, a trait seen in the numbers of Latino/as who seek ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday. The rite also has a notable penitential character, which is expressed in Hispanic popular religion through mandas and promesas, votive offerings, and practices such as Via Crucis processions. The Mozarabic Rite is the principal liturgical system celebrated by Mozarabs, an ethnic group centered at Toledo. By the time Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to all residents of the empire (212 CE), the Romanization of the Hispanic peoples, and therefore also the citizens of Toledo, was completed in a legal sense. The adoption of Roman names, customs, and language took longer. Nonetheless, a large number of Iberians considered themselves Roman in many ways by the time of the Visigothic triumph in the fifth century, not least of all in their Christianity. Thus, it is appropriate to refer to them as Hispano-Romans. The growth of the Hispano-Roman church was exemplified in many ways by the renown of the Council of Elvira (c. 314) and the influence of one of its bishops, Hosius of Co´rdoba (d. 357), who as an advisor to the Emperor Constantine (d. 337) presided in the emperor’s name at the Council of Nicaea (325). Certainly, the acta of the Hispano-Roman and Visigothic Councils of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries reveal a church in touch with the wider communion of Catholic Churches while especially adhering to the Apostolic See. Present-day Mozarabs claim to form a community composed of the descendants of those Hispano-Roman and Visigothic Christians who held onto their faith despite the vicissitudes of Islamic invasion and the need to adapt culturally

| 381

to the dominant culture. Through the centuries they intermarried with subsequent conquerors and inhabitants of Toledo including Arabs, Berbers, Syrians, Castilians, Galicians, and French. During the more than 370 years of Islamic domination, they spoke Arabic and acquired the cultural characteristics of the dominant Arabic culture. Since the reconquest of Toledo (1085), Mozarabs have blended in with the general Spanish populace. Over the course of time, many Mozarab families were subsumed into the dominant culture and disappeared as part of a distinct cultural group or forgot their origins. For long periods of time those who despite everything maintained their sense of identity have suffered marginalization and domination as well. Mozarabs today speak modern-day Castilian, although at one time they spoke a particular Romance dialect. Economically they fall within various economic levels and socially rank in the upper-middle to the titled classes. Nonetheless, in language, appearance, dress, lifestyle, occupation, education, and religious practice they appear to differ little from the general population of Toledo. The third and fourth centuries witnessed great development in the celebration of the Eucharist among Christians resulting in the formation of various liturgical families. Thus, the Latin West saw the rise of the Latin-language liturgies between the fifth and seventh centuries, and clearly there are significant affinities between the Mozarabic rite and the other Latin liturgies. This is especially true of the Roman and Gallican rites in terms of common evolution, structure, memorial, and soteriology. The development of the HispanoMozarabic Rite was a slow process that

382 |

Mozarabic Rite

had its greatest unfolding during the Visigothic era in the sixth and seventh centuries. The acta of the III and IV Councils of Toledo, conducted under the auspices of Kings Reccared (586–601) and Sisenand (631–636), give clear evidence of this. Three metropolitan sees had the greatest influence on the rite’s development: Seville, Tarragona, and Toledo. Three bishops, Leander (c. 540–600), Isidore (c. 560–636), and Ildephonse of Toledo (c. 610–667), especially contributed to its formation. Notably, Toledo III (589) was presided over by Leander, whereas Toledo IV (633) was presided over by Isidore. The prenotanda to the Missale Hispano-Mozarabicum (1991) indicate that various sociocultural factors contributed to the evolution of the rite. First of all there was the synthesis of Roman cultural values and organization particularly maintained in the highly Latinized zones of the peninsula. By the time the Visigoths triumphed in Spain, they had already absorbed many of the same Roman cultural values and patterns of organization. This helped form a solid cultural base of language and values that provided the Spanish church with the opportunity to develop its liturgy. Second, a relative religious peace was obtained through the official conversion of the Visigoths from the Arian to the Catholic faith. Third, the Visigothic court generated a Latin humanism that flourished in the work of the Iberian Fathers, such as Braulio of Zaragoza (d. 631). A creative period resulted in terms of arts and letters as well as the composition of music that contributed greatly to the liturgy. Fourth, the acta of several Visigothic councils reveal that great attention was paid to the celebration of

the Eucharist. These councils attempted to provide some semblance of liturgical unity emanating from Toledo, the Visigothic capital. This was accomplished in some measure under Julian of Toledo (d. 690) who compiled the first liturgical texts into what later ages would identify as a sacramentary. A commission established by Cardinal Gonza´lez Martı´n (1982) was charged with identifying and retrieving the structure of the Eucharist and its subsequent reformulation into the Missale HispanoMozarabicum. The commission based its work on what can only be identified as the ideal of a ‘‘classical period’’ in the development of the rite. Unfortunately, there has never been an ideal Roman or Hispano-Mozarabic period, for as is well known, the churches influenced one another on many levels and incorporated practices that suited their worship and held these as part of their treasure. Nonetheless, the classical period is seen as the fifth to seventh centuries when most of the euchological texts and musical compositions were formulated. This was the period just prior to the Islamic invasions of 711. It was also the period in which the Visigothic kingdom reached its apex. The seventh century in particular is seen as the period of highest creativity. Therefore, the updated rite as it appears in the Missale Hispano-Mozarabicum and the Liber Commicus (lectionary) reflects the texts of this period while excluding most of what was introduced between then and the Cisneros reform of the sixteenth century. Once Toledo’s ecclesiastical primacy was lost with the Islamic invasion, a significant group of Christians remaining there maintained their faith and

Mujerista celebrated as well as developed their liturgy. With great difficulty they continued to recopy their texts and add new prayer formulas, which would help them interpret the experience of domination and marginalization. Once Toledo had been retaken and the Roman rite imposed, the Mozarab community there continued to cling to its rite. The parishes of Santa Eulalia and Santas Justa y Rufina had their own schools of scribes that recopied the liturgical texts for their use. Thanks to these two parishes and their efforts to preserve their heritage, canon Alfonso Ortiz was able to compile the necessary manuscripts to form the core of the Missale mixtum (1500) of Cardinal Francisco Xime´nez de Cisneros (1495–1517). Over the centuries numerous factors have kept Toledo at the forefront of efforts to maintain the rite even though other places such as Salamanca and Plasencia have contributed to this effort. Specifically, Toledo regained its position as the primatial see with the reconquest in 1085. Later, Cardinal Cisneros established a Mozarabic chapel in the cathedral of Toledo in 1502, assuring the ancient Spanish liturgy a home where the rite could be conserved for posterity. Most recently, Cardinal Gonza´lez Martı´n’s role as former president of the Spanish Episcopal Liturgical Commission and his interest in the rite have contributed to the latest efforts to conserve it. The efforts of the Mozarab community to preserve and promote the rite since the reconquest have helped maintain Toledo’s leadership. These factors have borne fruit in the updating and reestablishment of the Hispano-Mozarabic Rite in the contemporary era. Rau´l Go´mez-Ruiz

| 383

References and Further Reading Burman, Thomas E. Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050–1200. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 52 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994). Go´mez-Ruiz, Rau´l. Mozarabs, Hispanics, and the Cross (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2007). Isidore of Seville. De ecclesiasticis officiis, trans. Thomas L. Knoebel (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2008). Liber Commicus, 2 vols. (Toledo: Arzobispado de Toledo, 1991). Missale Hispano-Mozarabicum, 2 vols. (Toledo: Arzobispado de Toledo, 1991). Pinell, Jordi. Liturgia hispa´nica, Biblioteca litu´rgica 9 (Barcelona: Centre de Pastoral Litu´rgica, 1998). Vives, Jose´, Toma´s Marı´n Martı´nez, and Gonzalo Martı´nez Dı´ez, eds., Concilios Visigo´ticos e Hispano-Romanos, Espan˜a Cristiana 1 (Barcelona-Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı´ficas Instituto Enrique Flo´rez, 1963).

MUJERISTA Mujerista Theology engages in theological praxis that have as its goal the liberation of U.S. Latinas, hence from the Spanish word mujer, which translates as woman. Its main proponent, Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az, has documented and analyzed the accounts of daily life and faith of U.S. Latinas, principally by means of ethnographic and meta-ethnographic studies, and has coined the name ‘‘Mujerista Theology.’’ Other methods of study, such as sociological and psychological interpretation and analysis, are also employed as methodological resources in Mujerista Theology. Yolanda Tarango has been engaged with

384 |

Mujerista

the tasks of Mujerista Theology since the beginnings of its articulation in the 1990s in the United States. The majority of Latinas in the United States live in poor conditions and are marginalized through political and economic institutions by the dominant social group. Mujerista Theology, as a specific liberation theology contextualized in the life and faith of U.S. Latinas, sees Latinas as moral agents in the communal ‘‘historical project’’ of achieving and maintaining their own liberation from the complex and oppressive forces that surround them. Salvation and human history go hand in hand with Liberation Theology, as well as in the theology of mujeristas. The historical project of liberation of U.S. Latinas, according to Mujerista Theology, is one of securing the fullness of life that God destined for them concretely within the realities and experience of day-to-day living. The fullness of life that is sought by mujerista Latinas starts with survival, the satisfaction of both the basic needs to sustain physical life and the wants that make for a full and pleasant daily existence. Armed with a hermeneutics of liberation, mujerista Latinas in the United States engage themselves in the communal struggle (La Lucha) against the dynamics of oppressive powers and arrive at their self-determination. By analyzing their stories of oppression and their faith stories of empowerment, they can come to denounce, for example, the benefits that the privileged part of the world collects from a global economy that exploits the other part of the world. In most cases, the countries of origin of U.S. Latinas, or that of their parents or grandparents, happen to be precisely in that exploited part of the world. In the praxis of Mujerista Theology, the

conscientization of U.S. Latinas about their oppressive social and even ecclesial locations intermingles with their theological and ethical reflection by actually surviving the oppressive reality and constructing a different one for themselves as individuals and as a community. In this way, the theological praxis of Mujerista Theology can emerge only from the grassroots foundation of both the pain and the hope of the community. Theology and ethics are inseparable, then, in the praxis of liberation of U.S. Latinas. Their new reality is constructed precisely through the combination of both the social analysis and the empowerment that their faith provides them. The Latina voices that are lifted up ask about how God is present in their daily lives, and who is God for them, in the first place. They ask themselves how their own beliefs and popular religiosity interact with their daily lived existences. Even though there are significant differences between the various groups of Latinas, such as generational, socioeconomic, national heritage, degree of adaptation to the cultural environment of the United States and particular mestizaje mix, Latinas find a unity in the forces that oppress them all: sexism, ethnic/ racial prejudice, and socioeconomic discrimination. The forms of discrimination are more subtle after the 1960s in the United States, and so they have become much more insidious and much more difficult to point out to those who do not experience their sting. Latinas know that discrimination is alive and well, and they see it every day in institutions that keep subtly supporting the status quo. In this context, U.S. Latinas point out the social sin that hurts them individually and communally. Through the faithful analysis of their context, Latinas see the social

Mulatez dimension of sin, and confront it. The structures of power that deny Latinas the abundance of life that was meant for them and all by God are thus unmasked and challenged. Latinas claim the justice that they deserve and their right to belong fully to social institutions that organize communal life, be it the economic market or the church. Mujerista Latinas’ theological reflections nourish their firm belief that they belong to God’s family on this earth (the ‘‘kin-dom’’ of God), and in the particular country of which they are now part, the United States of America. Latinas give priority to their own conscience in their social interactions and in their analysis of the reality that surrounds them. The Hispanic culture in general holds the ethical role of conscience highly. Many are the everyday expressions in Spanish that point to that fact, as in the following: ‘‘No tiene conciencia,’’ ‘‘He does not have a conscience,’’ referring to an individual who has broken an ethical rule of the community; or ‘‘No le duele la consciencia,’’ ‘‘His conscience doesn’t hurt,’’ even though the person has done something unacceptable. Essential then to Mujerista Theology is a process of conscientization about the contextual realities that trap the Latinas viz-a` -viz the hope and strength that their faith instills in them. The conscientization method utilizes the action-reflectionaction model with the dual goal of survival and liberation. Latinas become subjects of their own history, and not mere victims of the oppressive forces, by recognizing in community their sociopolitical rights and claiming them in the name of the dignity conferred on them by God. In that way, mujerista Latinas in the United States walk toward their preferred future, steadily surviving and

| 385

enjoying their lives in the fullness that God intended for them. Alicia Vargas

References and Further Reading Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996). ———. En la Lucha in the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a, and Yolanda Tarango. Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). Perez, Arturo, Consuelo Covarrubias, and Edward Foley, eds. Asi Es: Historias de espiritualidad hispana (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1994).

MULATEZ The term ‘‘mulatez’’ refers to people of African and European mix racial heritage. As a racial and cultural symbol, it points to the ways in which mulatto/as act and position themselves in relation to others and how they are seen and positioned in society. These ways of positioning the self in relation to society open and close possibilities of actions for mulatto/as in societies where race plays a central role in determining social, political, religious, and economic arrangements. Under the legacy of Spanish colonialism, and later U.S. imperial interests, social arrangements were developed that placed whiteness at the top of the social hierarchy, Blacks at the bottom, with the middle arranged by various degrees of separation or closeness to whiteness vis-a`-vis blackness. In the resulting racialized social structure,

386 |

Mulatez

mulatto/a bodies lived in the existing tension among whiteness, blackness, and other racial conceptions that developed in the Americas and the Caribbean. Mulatez importance is in its symbolic meanings as a social construct. Competing ideologies, political projects, and science are among the factors that contribute to the conceptualization of mulatez. On a cautionary note, ‘‘mestizaje’’ and ‘‘mulatez’’ are not synonymous. Although some scholars use both terms interchangeably, often in an attempt to gather together experiences thought of as shared by people of mixed descent, for mulattos the mixing of the two terms functions as a way to conceal their blackness. For this reason, in the remainder of this entry, mestizaje will not be part of the discussion. Measuring blackness in the Americas and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean is quite common. The gradation of blackness either grants certain privileges or denies them, depending on closeness to blackness. The closer an individual is to being Black the more parallel the degradation of societal conditions where racism is prevalent. The ways of defining blackness range from characteristics of skin tones, hair textures, facial features, ways of speaking, and/or cultural productions. From its usage as a pejorative term that originally referred to mules, ‘‘mulatez,’’ as some scholars argue, is gaining increasing usage as a selfidentification of marginalized people of mixed African descent within the Latino/a population. These scholars insist that it is possible to speak of a mulatto culture without being racially (as it regards physical appearance) Black. This can occur in places where African ancestry has played an important role in the development of symbolic practices. For

example, some scholars seem to be in agreement that Puerto Rico is ‘‘whitening’’ faster than any other nation in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Whatever truth exists in this claim, the African influence is undeniable. Musical production (particularly bomba, plena, salsa, and Latin Jazz), cuisine, the arts ma´scaras and vegigantes, popular festivities like La Fiesta de Santiago Apo´ stol at Loı´za Aldea, and literature underscore the African influences on the Island. African culture, rhythm, and instrumentation strongly influence music, graphic arts, cuisine, and linguistic patterns of the Caribbean and the Americas. The sociological and anthropological literature is ambiguous on how to theorize ‘‘mulatez.’’ As per literature, what it means to be a mulatto/a is understood in relation and attitudes toward blackness. Any negative attitude that is attached to blackness in a particular society by extension also applies to mulatto/ as as long as they appear to be of African descent; on the other hand, privileges and advances could be possible if the mulatto/a is of light complexion. This explains the historical lack of theorizing about differences between mulattos and African slaves or free Blacks that extended beyond the privileges of social and economic advantages available to light-skinned mulatto/as, often serving in houses of Whites. From Central, South American, and the Caribbean, attitudes toward mulatto/ as are diverse. For example, in Peru´ and Colombia it is common to make a distinction between what the elites consider high culture, referred to as la cultura, and those practices often considered ‘‘popular’’ (of lesser importance) and Black simply as cultura. The article la creates a demarcation between these two

Mulatez cultures, reflecting ingrained social attitudes toward anything African. Also, the word negrear (to ‘‘negroize’’) is used to denote insult or a way to ask for better treatment. ‘‘No me negrees’’ (do not ‘‘negroize’’ me) is a common way to complain against poor treatment, thus underscoring the reality that there exists a way in which negro/as (Blacks) can be treated that is not acceptable to Whites. In countries of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, like Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, mulatez is often considered on a scale of degree to blackness, from the most African looking to those who could almost pass as White— which, not surprising, is considered the best. Dominicans often refer to their racial heritage as indios while labeling their Haitian neighbors as Blacks. In Puerto Rico, the term jabao refers to a light skin mulatto/a attempting to pass as White. In Haiti and Trinidad, negritude is embraced as a source of national identity and resistance. As it can be intuited from this discussion, mulatez is positioned in the intersection of whiteness and blackness, often forcing a choice between the privileges of whiteness or the stigma of blackness. During the late seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, an ideology of racial improvement gained strength among the Creole elite. Because the prevailing view about those from African descent was that they were primitive, White masters justified their use of the female slave body as a sexual object as an attempt to improve and purify the race through the infusion of ‘‘white’’ blood, a process known as la limpieza de sangre (the washing of the blood). This ideology of blanqueamiento (whitening) has survived until this day. It is often said that

| 387

by marrying White, or at least a person of lighter skin, the race is improved. With the growing influence of the United States in the Caribbean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, conceptions of race became more radicalized. The racial project that dominated the United States introduced a different form of racism to Spanishspeaking countries. The ‘‘one drop rule’’ prevalent in the American South was enough to consider most Hispanics Black. When U.S. troops arrived in the Caribbean, they considered the inhabitants of the Great Antilles Blacks. Prior to and after the Spanish-American War period, political cartoons routinely depicted Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos as Blacks using the same images previously used to portray African Americans. The evolutionary uplifting of these ‘‘new peoples’’ was construed as the ‘‘White men’s burden.’’ They were perceived as lacking the ability to selfgovern and needing civilization, with arguments similar to those used in the United States to condone segregation and disenfranchisement of Blacks. Census data show that the racial understanding of the United States had a great impact on the self-conceptions of these countries. The number of those who classified themselves as mulatto/as crossed racial lines over to White, Indian, or other, particularly in the Spanishspeaking Caribbean. Whitening became a better strategy for advancement. Usually, discussions of racism focus on the struggles between peoples in the margin and those sectors in society that subjugate them to subaltern places. Often neglected are analyses of internal racism among marginalized communities. The Latino/a community in the United States

388 |

Mulatez

is no different. Whatever the reasons for this neglect, the experiences of Afro-Latino/as and mulatto/as have been submerged in Pan-Hispanic identities that promote ‘‘brownness’’ as a selfunderstanding of the Latino/a community in the United States. Whether intentional or not, it is hard to deny that mestizaje, as a category of selfunderstanding, privileges indigenous elements of Latino/a culture over African ones, a problematic matter for AfroLatino/as and mulatto/as. How Black must one be to be mulatto? Often heard in the African American communities are discussions surrounding the question of being ‘‘black enough.’’ This will, without a doubt, become an issue when blackness is discussed among mulatto/as. Brownness may signify a strong indigenous descent, but more commonly in the Caribbean it points to greater racial mixing—Spanish, Indian, and African. It could also point to blackness as a ‘‘fair skin African-descent,’’ who may or may not be Latino/a. Such formulations already imply a deprecation of blackness. The cultural question to then ask in the context of U.S. society is why is a ‘‘fair skin’’ African American seen as Black, but a ‘‘fair-skin’’ mulatto of Latino/a descent seen as brown?

Religion and Mulatez Recently, the concept of mulatez has entered the Latino/a religious discourse as a way to reclaim practices, traditions, and cultural artifacts of African descent. In the Latino/a discourse, mulatez functions in three interrelated ways: first, as a marker of racial and cultural identity; second, as an epistemological principle by which to understand the world; and third, as a religious identity.

As the discussion of mulatez in theology, as well as biblical and theological studies, gains force, Ada Marı´a IsasiDı´az, Michelle Gonza´lez, Samuel Cruz, and Miguel De La Torre are at the forefront on the theorizing of mulatez. For these authors, ‘‘mulatez’’ offers a space from which to speak with a particular Black Latino/a voice as an aid to theorize Latino/as’ cultural, religious, and political lives in U.S. society. One of the developments of using ‘‘mulatez’’ in religious discourse is that it provides mutually enriching conversations with the African American theological tradition. This requires extensive engagements with African American religious scholars and revisioning Latino/a history in the United States. For Isasi-Dı´az, the use of ‘‘mulatez’’ becomes an ethical option. ‘‘Mulatez’’ enables Latino/as to engage in ways of coping, struggling, and flourishing as a community against oppressive powers of racism and sexism. As a cultural category, for Isasi-Dı´az, using ‘‘mulatez’’ acknowledges the mingling of elements from diverse cultures, Hispanic as well as those learned from the dominant culture. These elements come together to form how Latina/os see the world and fuel their struggle for a just society. Michelle Gonza´ lez criticizes the Mexican American domination of Latino/a religious discourse and its privileging of a particular kind of popular religiosity, which cannot claim to represent the multiple Latino/a communities. She engages African American religious construction of blackness because of its exclusion of the Afro-Latino experience. Although she claims that Afro-Latino/as do not have the history of racism in the United States like their African American counterpart, they and their ancestors

Mulatez have been victims of the large slave traffic. In addition, the historical contribution of Latino/as to U.S. society, and their growing numbers, a significant portion of whom are of African descent, warrants that they be included in the conversation of race. Gonzalez also addresses the African elements of popular religion, particularly within the Cuban and Cuban American community. Devotions to saints, in particular to La Caridad, are surrounded by racial understanding that needs careful analysis. Samuel Cruz notes that the major efforts outlining popular religiosity have been made by Catholic scholars on Catholic popular devotions. Little attention has been paid to the ‘‘Africanization’’ of Protestantism, the ways in which local traditions of Latino/as communities, migrants, and those rooted in the mainland, are incorporated into the Protestant traditions. In his studies, Cruz connects Pentecostalism and AfroCaribbean religions, particularly Santerı´a. He demonstrates that strong African influences are present in how Caribbean Pentecostalism relates religion to the world. He compares Pentecostal understandings of prayer, blessings, the spiritual world, exorcism, and prophecy to the beliefs and rituals of Santerı´a. He concludes by showing how many elements of the African worldview found their way into Pentecostalism. The use of ‘‘mulatez’’ by White Latina/o scholars within the religious discourse has been criticized by some Hispanics. Miguel De La Torre questions the usefulness of ‘‘mulatez’’ in religious and theological discourse due to its racist connotations. His primary concern is that the term ‘‘mulatez’’ is neither used nor accepted as a form of selfdescription by predominately White

| 389

Latino/a communities (i.e., Miami, Florida) due to inter-Hispanic racism, but, rather, an imposition made mostly by White Latino/as scholars onto the community. Furthermore, some Black and biracial communities find the term ‘‘mulatto’’ racially offensive. De La Torre insists that any White scholar who attempts to use the category ‘‘mulatez’’ is reifying a racist ideology that undermines negritude and silences mulatto/as who are excluded not only from U.S. society, but by the Hispanic community.

Conclusion All who consider themselves mulatto/as do not experience mulatez in the same way. In societies where the racial hierarchy is prevalent, it is possible for light-skinned mulatto/as to experience certain privileges and perhaps be granted certain social standing that will be denied to darker skinned mulatto/as. Skin coloration and perception of race as ‘‘Whites’’ may help many Latino/as on the road to social advancement in the United States. Through personal, social, and cultural preconceptions, the viewer may attribute certain characteristics and abilities to the mulatto/a. However, an individual may self-identity as a person of mulatto descent as an exercise of affirming a particular subjectivity and way of acting in the world. What exactly being a mulatto/a means, then, depends on lived experiences, geographical location, and particular views of race, culture, and ethnicity from which one speaks. Although mulatez initially had a clear racialized understanding, it has been used in other ways to describe general cultural traits not limited to general physiognomy.

390 |

Mysticism

At the same time, in the various engagements with mulatez, it is becoming increasingly difficult to see how these authors deal with the ‘‘hard facts’’ of African elements in the Latino/as communities. On the positive side, interest in the discussion of mulatez opens space to uncover how Africanized worldviews and forms of expressions can be included in U.S. Latino/a religious discourse from which they are often missing. Literary movements that deal with blackness such as Afro Cuban poetry, the Nuyorican Poets, Latino/a music, and graffiti, among other forms of cultural and artistic expression, are increasingly relevant as fountains of inspirations and resistance. On the negative side, including mulatez in the U.S. Latino/a religious discourse presents the problem of deciding what aspects of African culture will be included in theological reflection. What elements of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latino/a religiosity can be included in Christian theological reflection? How are we to analyze elements of ritual practices in Christian churches that reflect African influences or that are derived from them? Pertinent to the Latino/a academy is the question of who speaks in the voice of Afro-Latino/as: are they White Latino/a scholars, or Afro-Latino/ as? The shortage of religious history of slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas from a Latino/a religious perspective in the United States needs to be addressed as well. Elias Ortega-Aponte

References and Further Reading Andrews, G. R. Afro-Latin America 1800– 2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Cruz, Samuel. Masked Africanisms: Puerto Rican Pentecostalism (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 2005). De La Torre, Miguel A. ‘‘Rethinking Mulatez.’’ Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´n Espinosa (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2006). Gonzalez, M. A. Afro-Cuban Theology: Religion, Race, Culture, and Identity (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006). Isasi-Dı´az, A. M. La Lucha Continues: Mujerista Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004). Torres, A., and N. E. Whitten, Jr. Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean Vols. III (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

MYSTICISM Derived from a Greek word meaning ‘‘initiation,’’ mysticism signifies mystery, divine inspiration, esoteric spirituality, or awe stemming from an experience of ultimate reality. From a Christian theological perspective, ‘‘mysticism’’ refers to the experience of direct knowledge of God, or to the religious practices of mystics and saints aimed at attaining communion with God. Among the various Latino/a religious cultures of North America, the general understanding of mysticism is grounded in the story of the famous Roman Catholic male and female mystics of early modern Spain and the Spanish colonies of the Americas. There is a threefold pattern common to almost all mystical states reported among different religious traditions around the world. Broadly speaking, the three stages are the following: Initiation, Purification, and Fulfillment. The

Mysticism

Engraving depicts Saint Teresa of Avila interceding for souls in Purgatory, an engraving by Schelte Adams Bolswert after a painting from the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, circa 1600. Teresa of Avila (1515– 1582) was a Spanish mystic, Carmelite nun, and author during the Counter Reformation. (Getty Images)

initiatory stage usually involves a spontaneous mystical experience, or a calling to know God more intimately, followed by a sense of longing either to understand the initial outpouring of spiritual feelings and phenomena or to duplicate the feelings of the original experience. The mystic, or seeker, often reports an inability to reproduce the experience and its altered state of mind at will. The various mystical writers and contemplative visionaries spanning the history of Christianity have also referred to this purification stage as ‘‘purgation’’ or cleansing, which in traditional Christian mystical theology is reported as lasting from a few months to several decades. During this middle stage of spiritual unfolding, the mystic engages

| 391

in different practices, or exercises, aimed at furthering one’s ability to perceive and discern the nonmaterial realities of the soul and the world of Spirit as well as deepening one’s intimacy with God. Among these practices are various forms of prayer and meditation aimed at stilling the mind and quickening the faculties of the soul, such as reciting verses from the Holy Scriptures, chanting or singing, walking, rhythmic breathing, fasting, even staring at a bowl of water, a mirror, or a lighted candle. There is a connection between certain forms of physical, mental, or emotional exhaustion and the onset of mystical states of consciousness. In the classic Christian understanding of such exercises, however, it is only by the Grace of God through Jesus Christ and the abiding power and gifts of the Holy Spirit that the mystic enters the third stage of mystical knowledge referred to as the ‘‘fulfillment’’ of his or her quest for knowledge of God. This final stage of mystical unfolding and consciousness is signified by terms such as ‘‘union’’ or ‘‘enlightenment.’’ Hispanics, whether self-identifying as Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Pentecostal, are familiar with the famous Spanish mystics Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) and John of the Cross (1542–1591), each of whom was also a leader in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Although in her youth she suffered from both physical and emotional illnesses, and later struggled with acute anxiety over the writing and dissemination of her visionary works, Teresa of Avila eventually took up the pen and became one of most influential and revered mystics of the sixteenth-century Catholic Reformation. After her mother’s death, Teresa’s father took her to an Augustinian convent to be raised and educated by nuns. Saint

392 |

Mysticism

Teresa’s theology was influenced by the Augustinian tradition and accounts for some of the existential dynamics evident in her understanding of human suffering and Grace. Her autobiography, La Vida de la Santa Madre Teresa de Jesus (ca. 1565), along with The Interior Castle (1577) and The Way of Perfection (ca. 1567), provided a metaphorical and pedagogical model of Christian spirituality for the men and women entering the Carmelite Order. Despite the prevailing ascetic stereotype of the Christian mystic, and despite opposition from conservatives in the older Carmelite ranks, Teresa undertook the reform and expansion of Carmelite convents throughout Spain, a task that exemplified the notion of ‘‘faith in action’’ that was so central to the Catholic Reformation. She advocated for ‘‘deep prayer’’ among the laity while believing that it pleased God when both clergy and laity followed this contemplative practice. Teresa’s colleague, John of the Cross, joined her in reforming their beloved Carmelite Order, and he also wrote some of the most dynamic and beloved Christian mystical poetry of all time. His poems, Living Flame of Love, and the Spiritual Canticle, together with his treatise on mystical union with God, the Ascent of Mount Carmel, are today ranked among the spiritual classics of Christianity. John’s Dark Night of the Soul traces the soul’s longing for union with God through a series of sensorial trials and spiritual awakenings spanning the trajectory of the mystical path. His mastery of Castilian prose and verse has drawn comparisons with Miguel de Cervantes as both of these writers made major contributions to the foundations of the Spanish language.

The inspiration for the founding of the Jesuit Order was revealed to the Spanish soldier, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), while recovering from a canon blast that severely wounded his leg during Pentecost week in May 1521. Later that month while convalescing back in Loyola, he began pondering how he might serve God and the Church rather than his former military career. Ignatius’s diaries and personal reflections witness that he was blessed with mystical gifts and visions such as experiencing the love of the Trinity, seeing lights floating through the air, having the gift of tears, being aware of angelic presences, and hearing music emanating from heavenly sources. Ignatius possessed a profound familiarity with the mystical power of the Holy Spirit in transforming persons and communities. His major work, known as the Spiritual Exercises, focused on silent prayer and close scriptural readings that followed the major stages of Christ’s earthly life in relation to the Holy Trinity. The Society of Jesus, or the Jesuit Order, has been promoting contemplative retreats based on Saint Ignatius’s book for nearly 500 years and has been on the vanguard of social justice and liberation movements since its founding. There were many more men and women throughout the Americas over the next several centuries who felt called to a life of deep prayer and mystical piety, perhaps even influenced by the publication of the works of Saint Teresa and Saint John during the early 1600s. The commitment of the Jesuits to justice and education inspired many to take up Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. Even though they are not well known outside of Roman Catholic circles, these men and women were significant contributors

Mysticism to the story of Hispanic mysticism. Among their ranks were notable women mystics such as the Peruvian Creole nun, Rosa de Santa Maria (1586–1617), who following her canonization in 1671 became the Virgin Patroness of the Americas as Saint Rose of Lima. We find also a Mexican nun who became the first female theologian of the Americas, Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz (ca. 1648–1695). The Chilean nun, Ursula Suarez (1666– 1749), critiqued the colonial division of labor and the subservient roles assigned by society to both secular and religious women. Although her story was not published in Chile until 1984, she has emerged in recent years as a Chilean role model of saintly piety and social activism at the intersections of race, class struggle, and gender oppression. These and other women saints and mystics pushed the frontiers of the gender divide in Spanish America while emerging as strong voices for feminist and liberation concerns, long before these issues appeared on the horizons of even the most progressive colonial theologians. Another important mystical figure and writer of the Hispanic religious tradition was the Spanish priest, Miguel de Molinos (1640–1696), who founded Quietism in the seventeenth century, a movement which later influenced the rise of Methodism. Father Molinos and his followers believed that humanity’s most solemn perfection could be attained by denying the egotistical concerns and worldly desires of the self in favor of the soul’s complete fusion with the essence of God. Hence by rendering the mind inactive (or quiet), the faculties of the soul and the divine presence take hold of the individual and will begin leading the believer to spiritual perfection. A few years after publishing The Spiritual

| 393

Guide (1675), Molinos was accused of heresy by Pope Innocent XI, arrested by the Spanish Inquisition, and sentenced to life in prison in 1687. Although the basic ideas of Quietism were present in earlier Christian heresies, Father Molinos’s late seventeenth-century version of this school of mystical thought and practice perhaps resembled Protestant notions of personal piety and justification far too much for the Papacy and the Spanish Inquisition to leave him without censure. Molinos died in a papal prison at Rome, which was then under the control of the Spanish Empire. The lives and works of Spanish and Latin American mystics still inspire Roman Catholic Hispanics across South, Central, and North America to ponder the pathways of mystical piety aligned with ‘‘faith in action’’ while serving the needs of the marginalized and oppressed. On the other hand, the widespread and popular appeal of these exemplary Christian mystics and saints’ lives has also touched the hearts and minds of numerous non-Catholic Latino/as. Hence, although there is not a clearly defined Protestant Hispanic tradition of mysticism, certain forms of Protestant and Pentecostal piety, devotion, pneumatological feeling, and spiritual practices can be described as fostering mystical states of mind or knowledge of God. Albert Herna´ndez

References and Further Reading Teresa of Avila. The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, 3 vols., trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies Publications, 1976–1985).

394 |

Mysticism

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies Publications, 1991). Ellwood, Robert S. Mysticism and Religion, 2nd ed. (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 1998). Gonzalez, Michelle A. Sor Juana: Beauty and Justice in the Americas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003).

McGinn, Bernard. The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, 4 vols. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1991–2005). Myers, Kathleen Ann. Neither Saints, nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Peers, E. Allison. Spanish Mysticism: A Preliminary Survey (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003).

Index

Acosta, Oscar Zeta, 61, 330 Activism. See Political activity Adam (Genesis), 709 Adams, Don, 312 Addison, Joseph, 6 Adelantados, 149–150, 161 Adoptionism, 591–592 Advent celebrations, 456–457 AEMINPU (Asociacio´n Evange´lica de Misio´n Israelita del Nuevo Pacto Universal), 519 Aesthetics, 6–10, 612–613. See also Art AETH (Association for Hispanic Theological Education), 73, 75, 147, 658, 659, 663 Affirmative Action, 141, 321, 362 African Americans: black civil rights movement, 61, 138, 763 black women in ministry, 255 Diaspora theology, 204 on feminist movement, 253–254 racial hierarchy during colonial period, 356, 385 zambo, 352

Abalos, David, 291–292 Abbasid rulers, 483 Abelard, Peter, 591 Abeyta, Bernardo, 437 Abilene School Board, 413 Abortion, 447, 516, 517, 563 Abraham (Old Testament), 644 Abrams, M. H., 7 Abu al-Walid I, 482 Abuelita (little grandmother) theology, 347 Abuelos, 350 Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS), 112, 147, 257, 259, 659, 764 Acatec people, 124 Accommodationists, 136 Accompaniment (acompan˜amiento), 3–5, 119, 142–143, 551, 640–642 Acculturation, 21–22, 53–54, 55, 57, 248, 250, 325–326, 359 ACHTUS (Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States), 112, 147, 257, 259, 659, 764 Acompan˜amiento, 3–6 I-1

I-2

|

Index

Africans/African slave labor, 11–21 Afro Cuban poetry, 390 Afro-Hispanic religiosity, formation of, 16–20 ancestor worship, 223–224 bishops, 8–9 Cuba, 162 culture, 386 emergence of African slavery in the Iberian West, 12–13 Hispanics as descendants of, 355 Las Casas on, 216 limpieza de sangre, 15 the Middle Passage and African existence in the Iberian New World, 13–16 negritude and negrismo, 18 Palo brought to Americas by, 417 Puerto Rico, 263 San Miguel de Guadalupe, 153 statistics, 417 syncretism of Christianity with Yoruba religious beliefs, 263–264 See also Mulatez Afterlife, 196–199 Agnes of the Fields, Saint, 458 Agosı´n, Marjorie, 316–317 AGPIM (Association of Graduate Programs in Ministry), 77 Aguanile (Colo´n), 494 Ahumada, Francisco de, 574 Ajiaco Christianity, 21–23, 242 Alarco´n, Norma, 254, 255–256 Alcance Victoria (Victory Outreach), 23–25, 88, 423, 433 Alexander VI, Pope, xiii, 149, 368, 513, 522 Alfonso VI, King, 484 Alfonso VIII, King, 484 Alianza de Ministerios Evange´licos Nacionales (AMEN), 231 The Alianza Dominicana, 206 (photo) La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (The Federal Land-Grant Alliance), 136, 139–140 Alicea, Benjamin, 764

Alienation, 26–28, 203, 265, 271, 305, 539, 668, 747 Alien Enemy Act, 46 Alien Land Laws, 45, 46 Alinsky, Saul, 131, 138 Allende, Salvador, 232, 520 Alliance for Progress, 519–520 All Saints’ Day, 197, 266 All Souls’ Day, 195, 197, 199 Almagro, Diego de, 152 Almohads, 484–485 Almoravids, 484 Al Qaeda, 192 Altarcitos, 686 Altars and Icons (McMann), 32, 33 Altars and shrines, 28–36 altarcitos, 686 in businesses, 32, 34 construction, 32–33 defined, 28 for Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), 197–199 history of, 28–32 home altar making by mestizos, 29 home altars in Latin America, 31 for Latinas who have left organized religion, 33 Lucumı´, 33 passive vs. active creations, 32 at pilgrimage sites, 30 of Protestants, 33 public, 32, 34–36 retablos, 8 Santerı´a, 33, 506 (photo), 508 shrines, 34–36 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 223, 224 Alumbrados, 711 Alurista, 61, 63, 407 Alvarez, Julia, 334 ´ lvarez De Toledo, Fernando, 79 A Alves, Rubem, 241 Amat, Thaddues, Bishop, 31 AMEN (Alianza de Ministerios Evange´licos Nacionales), 231 American Association of Pastoral Counseling, 704

Index American Baptist Churches (AMS), 121 American Baroque, 401 American Jewish Committee, 317 The Americano Dream (Sosa), 56 American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS), 187 Amor, 665 AMS (American Baptist Churches), 121 Amulets, 751 Anawim (the poor of Yahweh), 70 Anaya, Rudolfo A., 63, 331 Ancestor worship, 223–224, 507, 578 Andalucı´a, 483, 484 Andean Messianism, 519 . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (Rivera), 330–331 Anglo conformity model, 49, 55, 56, 58 ANHS (National Association of Hispanic Priests), 110 Animal sacrifices, 168, 280, 508, 509, 511, 578 Annacondia, Carlos, 433 ‘‘Anonymous Christianity,’’ 36–37 ‘‘Anonymous Santerı´a,’’ 36–38 Anousim, 315 Anthony, Saint, 458, 510, 722 Anthropology, 176–178 Antidicomarianites, 568, 570 The Antilles, 101–102 Anti–Vietnam war movement, 135–136, 140 Anzaldu´a, Gloria, 87–88, 254, 255–256, 259, 331, 404–405, 536 Aparecida, Brazil, 117–118 Apartheid, 441 Apologe´tica (Las Casas), 730 Aponte, Edwin D., 214–215 Apostolic period, 68 Apuntes (journal), 547, 658, 659, 765 Aquino, Marı´a Pilar, 10, 159, 252, 256– 258, 259, 260, 676, 744 Aragon, 484–485, 525, 530. See also Ferdinand II, King of Aragon Arango, Doroteo (Pancho Villa), 80, 81 (photo), 82 Arauca people, 396

|

Arbenz, Jacobo, 120 Archibeque, Don Miguel, 422 Arellano, Elvira, 499 Argentina/Argentineans: Catholic Charismatic movement, 425, 427 education, xviii gaucho, 340 household demographics, xvii immigration, 518, 520 income, xviii melting-pot phenomenon, 480 Nuestra Sen˜ora de Lujan, 571 pastoral care and counseling, 706 Pentecostal movement, 433 Protestants, 372 shrines, 440 Argu¨elles, Jose´, 398, 407 Arguinzoni, Sonny, 23, 24 Arguinzoni, Sonny, Jr., 24, 25 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 579–580 Aristotle, 6–7, 690–692, 696 Arizmendi, Juan Alejo de, 473–474 Arizona, xv Armageddon, 312 Armas, Carlos Castillo, 120 Arroyo Seco, 350 Art, 6–10, 277, 285–286, 757–758. See also Aesthetics Aryan supremacy, 480 Asamblea Aposto´lica de la Fe en Cristo Jesu´s, Inc., 429 Ascent of Mount Carmel (John of the Cross), 392 Asesoramiento pastoral, 699 ASH (Association of Hispanic Priests), 109 Ashe´, 37, 503, 511, 640 Ash Wednesday, 381 Asians, 38–47; Chinese Cubans, 43–44 ‘‘chino macaco,’’ 39 Diaspora theology, 204 Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), 47 Japanese Latin Americans, 38–42

I-3

I-4

|

Index

Mexican Filipinos, 42–43 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 44–46 time line, 46–47 Ası´ Es: Stories of Hispanic Spirituality, 756, 758 Asociacio´n Cultural Me´xico Americana, 377, 379 Asociacio´n Evange´lica de Misio´n Israelita del Nuevo Pacto Universal (AEMINPU), 519 Assemblies of God, 95, 192 Assemblies of God Higher Education Institutions, 72 Assembly of Christian Churches, 192 Assimilation, 47–58; Americanization programs for borderlands regions, 86–87 Anglo Protestant missionary policy, 295 Chicano Theology vs., 134, 135, 136 of children of Pedro Pan, 412 conversion associated with, 157 cultural affirmation of Hispanics vs., 321 cultural assimilation (acculturation), 48–49, 53–54 defined, 47, 57 Diaspora theology vs., 204 double consciousness, 321–22 generational differences in worship as result of, 684–85 goal systems, 49–50, 55, 56, 58 ‘‘hyphenated identities,’’ 296 ‘‘la familia’’ redefined by, 250 melting-pot phenomenon, 49–50, 55, 56, 58, 480 mestizaje as umbrella term, 355 obstacles to, 51 perceived as positive good, 359 polycentric identities, 54–55, 57–58 stages of, 48–49, 53, 55 Who Are We? Challenges to America’s National Identity (Huntington), 55 Assimilation in American Life (Gordon), 48–51, 53, 55–56, 58

Assis, Bishop Raymundo Damasceno, 115 Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH), 73, 75, 147, 658, 659, 663 Association for Theological Schools (ATS), 704 Association of Graduate Programs in Ministry (AGPIM), 77 Association of Hispanic Priests (ASH), 109 Association of Theological Schools (ATS), 545–547, 663 Asturias, Kingdom of, 483 Asylum, 443, 444, 499. See also Sanctuary Movement Atemoztli, 195 Atheists, xvi, 515. See also Unaffiliated populations Atkinson, Marı´a, 279 Atlantis, 481 Atonement, 538–539, 591 At-risk urban youth, 426 ATS (Association of Theological Schools), 545–547, 663 Attitude receptional assimilation, 49 Audiencia, 217 Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, 7, 618, 623, 710, 727 Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (Acosta), 330 Auto-blood sacrifice, 517 ´ vila, Pedrarias de, 157 A Avila, Pedro Menendez de, 370 Aymara Nation, 195, 519 Azabache, 721 Azevedo, Marcello de C., 145, 146 Aztecs: altars and shrines, 28–29 conquest of, 148, 151, 153, 368–369, 482, 527 corn, 400; departure from Aztla´n to Chapultepec, 58–59, 62, 63 Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), 195–197, 199

Index dieties, 63–65 human sacrifice, 732 Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (Little Book of the Medicinal Herbs of the Indians), 180 nagual/nahualli, 537 pyramids, 732 Quetzalcoatl, 368 significance of Virgin Mary to, 534 teo´tl, 400 Utah territory, 374–375, 379 warrior bravado, 340 Aztla´n, 58–65 Congreso de Aztla´n, 62 dieties, 63–65 El Plan Espiritual de Aztla´n, 61–62, 63, 140 La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (The Federal Land-Grant Alliance) on regaining land, 140 location of, 58–59, 62, 63, 375 MECHA (El Movimiento Estudiantil de Atzla´n), 141 psychological, identity, and political impact of, 60–63, 61–63, 134 symbolic meaning, 59 Aztla´n: The History, Resources and Attraction of New Mexico (Ritch), 59–60 Azusa Street Revival, 409, 423, 424, 428, 429, 430 Baba, Saint, 509 Babalawos, 275, 280, 502, 504, 508 Babalu´-Aye´, 280, 509 Babylonian exile, 412, 651–652 Bacon, Sumner, 460 Baile de las ma´scaras, 403 Baker, James, 411–412 Bakongo, 17 Balboa, Vasco Nun˜ez de, 153, 368 Balderas, Eduardo, 376 Ball, Henry C., 72, 428 Baltasar (Three Kings), 265 Baltonado, Sara, 700 ‘‘Banana republics,’’ xix–xx

|

Bantu people, 417 Baptism/bautizo, 31, 37, 682, 729 Baptist Spanish Publishing House, 462 Barbara, Saint, 19, 510, 541 Barca, Caldero´n de la, 718 Barna Research Group, 487, 488 Barnes, Bishop Gerald R., 98, 189–190, 191–192 Baroque period, 10, 401, 730–733 Barr, E. L., 132–133 Barrida (‘‘sweeping’’), 277 Barrie, J. M., 411 Barrios, 140, 209, 214, 297, 493, 623 Barrios, Justo Rufino, 128 Bartolo, 419–420 Barton, Dr. Roy D., 765 Basch, Linda, 554 Baseball, 207 Base Communities (BCs), 67–71, 98, 115, 117, 145–146, 190–192, 285, 523–524 Basil, Saint, 710 Basilicas, 682 Bastoneros, 350 Batista, Fulgencio, 165, 172 Battle of Alcama, 483 Battle of Covadonga, 483 Battle of Dos Rio, 164 Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, 484 Battle of the Guadalete River, 483 Baudrillard, Jean, 450 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 6 Bautista, Margarito, 376, 379 Bay of Pigs invasion, 173 BCs (Base Communities), 67–71, 98, 115, 117, 145–416, 190–192, 285, 523–524 Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (Turner), 32, 33 Beauty. See Aesthetics Bebbington, David, 445 Becoming Mexican American (Sa´nchez), 360–361 Beezley, William H., 31 Behar, Ruth, 316–317

I-5

I-6

|

Index

Behavior receptional assimilation, 49 Bele´n Jesuit, 170, 456 Belize/Belizeans, 120, 122–123, 126– 127, 350 Beltran, Dr. Gil, 170 Bembe´, 507 Benavides, Gustavo, 736 La bendicio´n, 247–248 Benedict XVI, Pope, 114–115, 117 (photo) Benin, 501 Benı´tez, Morales, 401 Benson, Clarence H., 72 Bernalillo, New Mexico, 350 Bewitched victims (enbrujada), 537 Bible. See New Testament (Christian Bible); Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics (Gottwald), 241 Bible conference, 72 Bible institutes, 71–77; cost, 74, 77 curricula, 75, 76–77 development of, 72–73 educational purpose, 73 enrollment, 74 Lay Ministry Formation Programs, 75–77 pedagogy, 75 teachers, 74 types of, 73–74, 76 See also Education/schools Bible study groups, 687 Bifocality, 555 Bilingual Manual Guide (FIP), 76 Bilingual religious services, 54 (photo), 467 Biola University, 73 Black civil rights movement, 61, 138, 763 Black Cubans, 44 Black Legend, 78–80 Blades, Ruben, 494, 495 Blanqueamiento (whitening), 162, 387, 472, 480

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 481 Blessing requests, 247–248 Bless Me Ultima (Anaya), 331 Blood Court, 79 Boff, Clodovis, 695 Boff, Leonardo, 71, 736 Bolı´var, Simo´n, 79–80, 494 Bolivia/Bolivians: colonialism, 177 education, xviii immigration, 518 Inca Empire, 152 income, xviii Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 La Virgen de Copacabana, 571–572 shrines, 440 Bolswert, Schelte Adams, 391 (photo) Bolufer, Bobby, 509 Bonaventure, St., 710, 750 Bonino, Jose´ Miguez, 284, 694 Bonnı´n, Eduardo, 97 Book of Mormon, 375, 378, 407 Border Saints, 80–83 Borderlands, 83–88 alienation as result of artificial borders, 26–28 Americanization programs, 86–87 border as metaphor, 87–88 border saints, 80–82 culture, 296 described, 83 forces of fragmentation, 770–771 frontier myth of terra nullis, 662–663 imbalance of power within, 85 maquiladoras (border factories), xx, 26 (photo) nepantla, 403–407 as result of Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo, 83–84 settlement houses, 86 Teologı´a en conjunto (collaborative theology), 118–119, 661, 676– 678, 761, 761–771 theoretical foundations of borderlands religion, 87–88

Index transnational Southwest border, 553 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Anzaldu´a), 87–88, 331, 404–405 Born-again Christians, 190, 192, 230, 233–234, 235–236 Bota´nica, 179, 180, 280, 506 Boturini, Lorenzo Benaduccie, 58, 59 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10 Bourgeois, Patrick, 426 Bourke, John G., 273–275, 276–277 Bourne, Randolph, 553 Bovedas, 223, 224 Bracero Program, 361, 442 Braulio of Zaragoza, 382 Brazil/Brazilians: Candomble´, 223, 502, 504 Catholic Charismatic movement, 427–428 Catholic-Pentecostal cooperation, 434 colonial history, 518, 732 comunidads de base (CEBs), 145, 146 French Huguenot settlement, 370 immigration, 520 Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 Macumba, 223 Marian Patroness, 572 Pentecostal movement, 431–432, 433 Protestants, 425 self-identification, 518; shrines, 439 slave trade, 12, 13 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 221 Umbanda, 223 University Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), 564, 565 Breaking (bboying, dancing), 285–286 Bregar, 335 A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas), 78–80, 154, 216, 217, 369, 397–398 British Honduras, 122–123 British Virgin Islands, 313

|

Brown, Buffalo Z., 330 Brown, Joseph Epes, 400 Brown, Robert McAfee, 284–285 Brownell, Herbert, 61 Brownsville Revival, 433 Brujerı´a (witchcraft), 193, 274–275, 417–419, 503, 537 Buddhism, xvi, 42, 89–93, 193 Burgess, E., 47 Burns, Jeffrey, 359 Burns, Ruth, 177 Bush, George H. W., 41 Bush, George W., 231, 470 Byrne, Archbishop Edwin Vincent, 422 Caballero, Jose´ de La Luz, 162 Caballero, Martin, 722 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nun˜ez, 153–154 Cabildos (social clubs), 417, 502–503 Cabral, Manuel del, 18 ´ lvares, 732 Cabral, Pedro A Cabrera, Lydia, 275, 418 Cabrera, Omar, 433 Cabrera, Rafael, 128 Cabrillo, Juan Rodriguez, 154 Cacique natives, 575 ‘‘Cada Dia’’ (Cofer), 332–333 Caesar Augustus, Emperor, 457 Caı´da de mollera, 274 California, xiv, xv, xix, 45 California Gold Rush, 89, 518 California Migrant Ministry, 138 Called and Gifted (Catholic Church), 75–76 Calles, Plutarco Elı´as, 82 Calvin, John, 590, 691, 730 Camacho, Olga, 723 Caminemos conservative Jesu´s (Goizueta), 242 Camino Real, 155 Canada, 440 Canales, Emmy, 97 Canary Islands, 162 La cancio´n del final del mundo (Blades), 494 Candomble´, 223, 502, 504

I-7

I-8

|

Index

CANF (Cuban American National Foundation), 170 Cano, Melchior, 159 Cantalamessa, Raniero, 711 Cantı´nflas, 137 Canto a Yemaya (Cruz), 493 Capilla del Santo Nin˜o de Atocha, 437 Capitalism, 176, 177 Caracalla, 381 CARA (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate), 76, 191 Carbia, Ro´mulo, 80 Carcan˜o, Bishop Minerva G., 466 Cardenal, Ernest, 174 Cargo, David, 140 Caribbean/s: African heritage, 16, 355 ‘‘banana republics,’’ xx diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 386–387 early roots of Latina/os, xix gender roles, 247 slave trade, 12, 15–16 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 221–222 Taı´nos people, 396 See also specific nations by name Caridad, 343–344 Carlos I of Spain (Carlos V), 79, 153 Carmelite Order, 391–392, 752 Carpinteria, California, 312 (photo) Carrasco, Davı´d, 9, 29, 405 La Carreta Made a U-Turn (Laviera), 332 Carroll R., M. Daniel, 298 Carta de Jamaica (Bolı´var), 79–80 Casa Bautista de Publicaciones, 462 La Casa del Carpintero Church, 54 (photo) Castaneda, Carlos, 396 Castellani, Alberto, 718 Castellanos, Sergio Ulloa, 702 Caste War of Yucata´n, 123 Castile, 483–485, 525, 530 Castillo, Ana, 254, 255–256, 331 Castro, Fidel: Camp Columbia speech, 172

Communism and alliance with USSR, 165 education, 170, 456 Elia´n Gonzalez as symbol of nationalism, 167 Fidel y la religio´n (Fidel and Religion) (Castro), 175 Marxist-Leninist declaration, 173 motivation for Cuban Revolution, 171–172 relationship between government and the church, 169, 173–174, 523 U.S. relations with Cuba following revolution, 505 See also Cuba Catalonia, 533 Catechumenate, 682 Cathedral of La Habana, 173 Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, 99 (photo), 684 (photo) Catherine of Siena, 523 Catholic Action movement, 97, 535 Catholic Charismatic movement, 95–98, 425–428 Charisma in Missions, 96–97 described, 95 emphasis on spiritual gifts, 96, 97 growth of movement, 433–435, 489, 711–712 healing Masses, 687–688 history of, 425–427 immigration of members, 434 influence on gender roles, 341 origins, 96 Pentecostals vs., 95–96 on prosperity gospel, 211 in Puerto Rico, 431 as reaction to perceived threat of modernity, 110–111 statistics, 98, 424, 425, 427–428 women within, 95–96, 97 Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR), 96–97, 426, 433–434, 711–712 Catholic Church/Catholics: anti–Catholicism of Protestants, 51, 434, 460–463 apparitions, 344–345

Index assimilation of Catholics in U.S., 51–53 attempt to ‘‘Americanize’’ Latino/as, 106 Base Communities (BCs), 67–71, 98, 115, 117, 145–146, 190–192, 285, 523–524 Bible banned in Latin America during Spanish colonial rule, 231 biblical reading, 109–110 Catholic-Pentecostal Cooperation, 434–435 church attendance, 445 colonial heritage, 100–101 commitment to the poor, 67, 70, 452– 453, 591, 616, 638–639, 660, 716 vs. communism, 412 Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM), 112–119 converts from, 110–111, 156–157, 229, 230–233, 307, 363–365, 425, 514 Council of Trent, 100, 103–105, 246, 343, 730–733, 751 Counter-Reformation, 370, 391–392 in Cuba, 17, 172, 173–174, 502–503, 523 Cuban Americans, 167–168 Curanderismo identification, 224–225 current ‘‘multiculturalizing’’ trend within U.S. Church, 106–107 devotion to saints, 19, 534–535, 683 Dominican Republic, 206–207 ecclesiology, biblical-theological framework, 295–298 Encuentros, 108 on exile and exodus, 240 finances, 513, 522 foreign-born priests within U.S. Church, 191 future of, 111–113 Las Hermanas (The Sisters), 107, 213, 363, 413–414, 764 history of Christian Scholastic teaching, 710

|

home altar making by mestizos, 29 on homosexuality, 270–271 Iberian colonizers, 18–20 Irish Catholics vs., 104–105, 332 Japanese Mexican Americans, 42 language of church services, 327, 531–532 Las Pastorelas, 419–420 Latino/a Catholicism, 98–113 Lay Ministry Formation Programs, 75–77 Liberation theology vs., 114–116 marginalization of Hispanics within, 364–365 marginal status of Latino/as, 106–113 mass media’s influence upon, 106 on Mexican Catholicism, 359 Mexicans, xvi missionaries, 29, 29–30, 31–32, 86– 87, 246, 358–359 modern attitude toward indigenous religious traditions, 399 Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 National Catholic Association of Diocesan Directors for Hispanic Ministry (NCADDHM), 52 national parishes, 240 ‘‘New Ecumenism,’’ 215, 101–103 Operation Pedro Pan, 167, 410–412 Padres Asociados Para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales (PADRES), 109, 213, 363, 763– 764 papal bulls of 1493, 368 parallel Latino/a church within broader Catholic Church, 108 parochial schools, 454–456 Penitentes, Los Hermanos, 421–422 Philippine Islands residents, 42 political activity, 445, 446–447, 562– 563 popular Catholicism, 98–100, 101– 102, 366–367 post-Tridentine reformed Catholics, 103

I-9

I-10

|

Index

post-World War II trends, 106 post-1960s: the Impacts of Modernity, Vatican II, and Social Movements, 105–111 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 45 Reformation, 103–105 Renewalist movement, 489–490 Rerum Novarum, 31 right-wing military dictators in South America and, 522–523 Roman Catholic Catechism system, 461 Roman Catholic Cursillo program, 138 scholarship, 112 seminaries, 548 sexism within, 258 of slave masters, 12 on social justice, 317 socioeconomic status of Hispanic Catholics, 209 South Americans, xvi Spanish-speaking priests, 191 statistics, xvi, 98, 156, 191, 233–235, 363, 487, 488 syncretism, 19, 502–503 as transnational religious organization, 555 Treaty of Tordesillas, 513 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), 52 Vodou influenced by, 577 See also Vatican II Catholicism, 98–113 Caudillos (military dictators), 340, 531 CBCs (Christian Base Communities), 67–71, 98, 115, 117, 145–146, 190– 192, 285, 523–524 CCR (Catholic Charismatic Renewal), 96–97, 426, 433–434, 711–712 Cedric, Saint, 457–458 CEFL (Center for Emerging Female Leadership), 255 CEHILA (Comisio´n de Estudios de Historia de la Iglesia en Ame´rica Latina y el Caribe), 677

CELAM. See Conference of Latin American Bishops Cemeteries, 34–36, 752 Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), 76, 191 Center for Emerging Female Leadership (CEFL), 255 Center for Urban Theological Studies (CUTS), 73–74 Central America/Central Americans, 119–130 ‘‘banana republics,’’ xix–xx Catholic-Pentecostal cooperation, 434 celebrations, 126, 129, 197 culture and folklore, 123–126 defined, 119 diversity of, 119–120 early roots of Latina/os, xix Evangelicals, xvi, 129–130 Federal Republic of Central America, 119 gender roles, 247 immigration background, 120–123 literature, 334 on mulatto/as, 386–387 religion, 126–130 slave trade, 12 unaffiliated population, 514 See also specific nations by name Central Japanese Association of Peru (CJAP), 39 Centzon Totochtin (Four Hundred Rabbits) harvest, 65 Cervantez, Yreina, 33 Ce´saire, Aime´, 18 Ce´spedes, Carlos Manuel de, 163 Chabebe, Father, 172 Chalma, Mexico, 30 Chamorro people, 536 Chanes, 717 Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion. See Pew Hispanic Center survey

Index Chango´ (god of lightening and fire), 275, 510, 512, 516, 541 Characteristics of Hispanic religiosity, xx–xxi Charismatics, xxi, 179, 189–190, 210– 211, 427, 490–491. See also Catholic Charismatic movement Charles V, King of Spain, 154, 369 Charro/cowboy, 340 Chavero, Alfredo, 59 Cha´vez, Arturo, 213 Cha´vez, Ce´sar, 130–133 commitment to nonviolence, 63, 131, 138, 219, 442 fasts, 131–132 influenced by Catholic spirituality, 219, 442 lack of identification with Chicano Movement, 137, 138 ‘‘Letter from Delano’’ (Cha´ vez), 132–133 photograph of, 130 (photo) popular religious practice utilized by, 132 religious symbolism employed by, 138 UFW founded by, 219 Cha´vez, Cuco, 495 Cha´vez, Fray Ange´lico, 330, 350 Chavez, Linda, 56 Chesapeake Bay, 153 Chesnut, R. Andrew, 427 Chiapas, Mexico, 401, 424 Chicaflips, 43 Chicago, Illinois: World’s Columbian Exposition, 89, 150 World’s Parliament of Religions, 89–90 Chicano/as, 135–141 aesthetic themes, 9 altars and shrines, 33–34 borderlands theory, 88 Chicana feminist movement, 64, 140, 253–254 Chicano/a Theology, 133–135

|

connection with broader Latino/a perspective, 254 cultural legacy, 141 defined, 135, 141, 290 ethnographic studies of, 177–178 Halloween rejected by, 197 Las Hermanas (The Sisters), 107, 213, 363, 413–414, 764 ‘‘Hispanic’’ and ‘‘Latino/a’’ vs., 135 historical origin of term, 362 history of movement, 362–363 La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), 62–63 Latina feminist theory developed by, 254 leaders of movement, 138–141 literature, 330–331 mainstream American perception of, 362–363 Mexican American campus activists, 135–136 Mexican Filipinos, 43 Mormons, 377 racism and racial self-hate confronted by, 137 raza co´smica, 479–481 self-identification, 254 significance of ‘‘Chicano/a’’ term, 135 sı´ se puede, 335 student movement, 135, 137–138 violent methods, 136 See also Aztla´n; Mexican Americans Chicano Moratorium (1970), 140 Chicano/a Movement, 135–142 Chicano National Liberation Youth Conference, 59, 60, 61, 140 Chicano Theology, 133–135 Chicapinos, 43 Chicomo´ztoc, 59 Chicunauhmictlan, 196 Chihuahua City, Mexico, 26 (photo), 375 Children. See Youth The Children of Sanchez (Lewis), 176 Chile/Chileans: Allende, Salvador, 232, 520

I-11

I-12

|

Index

Arauca people, 396 Catholic Charismatic movement, 425, 427 Catholic-Pentecostal cooperation, 434 education, xviii immigration, 518, 520 Inca Empire, 152 Nuestra Sen˜ora del Carmen (Mount Carmel), 572 pastoral care and counseling, 706 Pinochet, Augusto, 520 Protestants, 425 shrines, 440 Chimayo´, New Mexico, 30, 437, 662 (photo) China/Chinese populations: in Belize, 123 Chinese Cubans, 43–44 Chinese Exclusion Act, 46 ‘‘chino macaco,’’ 39 Coolies, 44 immigration during California Gold Rush, 89 mestizos on the Philippine Islands, 42 number system, 715 Pacific Middle Passage, 43–44 Peruvian Chinese colony, 39 Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), 38 The Chingo´n, 340 La Chinita, 522 Choc, Victor, 350 Chopra, Deepak, 278 Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Schillebeeckx), 733–734 Christenson, Allen J., 398 Christian, William, 534–535 Christian Base Communities (CBCs), 67–71, 98, 115, 117, 145–146, 190– 192, 285, 523–24 Christian Science, 274 Christmas celebrations, 46, 169, 419– 420 Christology, 589–598

Christological heresies and Latino/a Christology, 591–592 key paradigm, 596–598 language, culture, and borderland, 593–596 person, work, and states of Christ, 589–591 Chuj people, 124 Church attendance, 281, 327, 445–446, 535 The Church in Latin America (Dussel), 677 Church Missionary Society, 72 Church of Christ, 487 Church of God, 279 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). See Mormons Church of the Lukumı´ Babalu´ Aye, 508, 509 Cihuacoalt (earth goddess), 402, 407, 517 Cisneros, Cardinal Francisco Xime´nez de, 382, 383 Cisneros, Henry, 441 Cisneros case, 362 Civic assimilation, 49 Civic environmentalism, 219 Civil religion, 240 Civil rights movement: black civil rights movement, 61, 138, 763 Cha´vez, Ce´sar, 130–133 Chicano Movement and, 43, 60, 135–136 Filipino Americans, 43 as liberation theologians, 525 Protestant churches on, 240 CJAP (Central Japanese Association of Peru), 39 Classic Son, 495 Clavijero, Francesco Saverio, 59 Clement X, Pope, 523 Clement XII, Pope, 574 Clinton, Bill, 166–167 Coalition of Hispanic Christian Leadership, 661, 764

Index Coatlaxopeuh, 404, 570, 573 Coatlicue (Snake Skirt), 63–64, 407, 517 Cobre, Cuba, 168 Co´dice Boturini (Boturini), 58, 59 Cofer, Judith Ortiz, 332–333 Coffee, 501 Cold War. See Communism Colegio de Belen (Belen School), 170 Colindres, Alejandro, 124, 573 Collaborative pastoral ministry (pastoral de conjunto), 118–119 Collaborative theology (teologı´a de conjunto), 118–119, 661, 676–678, 761–771 Collins, Wayne M., 40 Collyridians, 568 Colombia/Colombians: African heritage, 355 Catholic Charismatic movement, 425, 427 diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 386–387 immigration, 518, 521 Nuestra Sen˜ora de Chiquinquira, 572 revolution, 174 shrines, 440 Colon, Diego, 152 Colo´n, Jesu´s, 332 Colo´n, Puchi, 495 Colo´n, Willie, 494 Colonial period, overview, xiii–xiv, xviii–xix, 9, 12–13, 18–20, 100–101, 356, 385. See also Spain/Spaniards Colonization Act (1824), 373 Columbus, Christopher: expulsion from Hispaniola, 216 land claimed by Spain as result of voyages, 148, 160–161, 351, 368, 470, 472 Las Casas on second voyage, 216, 369 portrait, 151 (photo) significance of expeditions, 150–151, 485, 525–526

|

slavery following 1492 journey, 13, 15 as suspected convert, 157 systematic invasion, 397 time line of voyages, 152, 153 The Comeback (Vega), 332 Coming-of-age ceremonies: Quincean˜era, 126, 144 (photo), 241, 245, 257, 266, 735 Xilonen, 241 Comisio´n de Estudios de Historia de la Iglesia en Ame´rica Latina y el Caribe (CEHILA), 677 Communism: Catholic Church and Catholics vs., 412 within Cuba, 165, 166–167, 172–174, 444 (photo) refugee status of communist nations, 499 in South America, 519–520 Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), 441 Community Service Organization (CSO), 131, 138 Compadrazgo (godparenthood), 126, 245, 246, 248, 729 Compadre Mon (Cabral), 18 Compostela, Spain, 97 Comunidads de base. See Base Communities (BCs) La Comunidad (The Community), 142– 147, 765 Concepcı´on, 146 Concepts and Practical Instruments for Pastoral Institutes (FIP), 76 Concerning Feuerbach (Marx), 692 Concilium (journal), 659 Conde-Frazier, Elizabeth, 299–300, 329, 687, 750 Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM), 68, 113–119, 145–146 Comisio´n de Estudios de Historia de la Iglesia en Ame´rica Latina y el Caribe (CEHILA), 677 impact on U.S. Hispanics, 118–119

I-13

I-14

|

Index

Medellı´n Conference, 3, 114–117, 145–146, 237, 302–303, 452, 523, 713 ‘‘preferential option for the poor’’ and ‘‘preferential option for the young,’’ 452 Puebla, Mexico, 3, 114, 115–116, 117, 146, 303, 452, 714 Confianza (trust), 248 Congar, Yves, 711 Congreso de Aztla´n, 62 Conner, Randy, 536 Conquistadores, 147–156 Adelantados, 149–150 Christianity spread by, 149, 150, 155, 397 Columbus’s voyages as beginning of the ‘‘Age of the Conquistadors,’’ 151 Cuba explored by, 161–162 described, 527–529 encomienda system, 78, 149, 215– 217, 368, 369 financial support for, 530 goals, 152, 397 indigenous collaboration with, 527–529 machismo, 340 modern views of, 152, 155–156 not exclusively Spanish, 527 origin of term, 147–148 parodies of, 403 requerimiento, 149 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas), 397–398 systematic invasion, 397 time line of major events, 152–155 See also Reconquista; specific individuals by name Consejo pastoral, 699 Constantine, Emperor, 67–68, 381, 436 Constitution Deus scientiarum Dominus (Pope Pius IX), 753 Contraception, 517 Contra War, 121, 122 Converts/conversion, 156–158

anousim, 315 assimilation associated with, 157; from Catholic Church, 110–111, 156–157, 229, 230–233, 307, 363–365, 425, 514 coexistence of old and new traditions, 328 conversion of Jews by, 157, 314–315, 459 described, 156 to Islam, 306, 307 as justification for encomienda system, 216–217 primary language of, 326 reasons, 156–157, 232–233 See also Missionaries Convivencia, 486 Cook, Stephen, 426 Coolies, 44 Copernican revolution, 733 Copil, 64 COPS (Communities Organized for Public Service), 441 Corazo´n (heart), 755–757 Corbett, Jim, 442–443, 499–500 Cordero, Gil, 358, 438, 575 Co´rdoba, Francisco Herna´ndez de, 153 Cordoba (Umayyad Caliphatef), 483–484 Coritos, 685 Corn, 400, 405 Coronado, Francisco Va´squez de, 154, 370 Corte´s, Felipe, 706 Corte´s, Herna´n: ‘‘Age of Conquistadors’’ led by, 84, 151 Aztecs captured by, 368–369, 482, 527 The Dance of Cortez, 350 indigenous collaboration with, 528 La Malinche, 148, 402, 517 La Virgen de Remedios, 65, 152 ships burned by, 482 Corte´s, Rev. Luis, Jr., 232, 234, 562 Cortese, Aimee, 255

Index Corte´z, Ernesto, Jr., 219, 441 The Cosmic Race: The Mission of the Ibero-American Race (Caldero´n), 479–481 Cosmology, 17 Costa Rica/Costa Ricans: Catholic-Pentecostal cooperation, 434 celebrations, 129 culture and folklore, 125 ‘‘machismo’’ usage, 339 migration patterns, 120, 122 pastoral care and counseling, 706 populations in the U.S., 125 religion, 127–128 ´ ngeles, 572 Santa Marı´a de los A shrines, 440 Costas, Orlando Enrique, 660, 678, 739– 741, 764 Costoya, Manuel Mejido, 451 ‘‘Costumbre’’ (Cofer), 333 Cotera, Marta, 137, 140, 254 Lo cotidiano (daily living), 158–160 aesthetics, 10 at the center of Latino/a theological analysis, 611–612, 676 described, 118–119 within feminist theology, 5, 252, 257 God reveals God’s self in, 637 as Latino methodological construct, 551, 660–661 leading scholars on, 158–160, 648– 649, 744–745 the Trinity understood through, 559 Cotton, 45–46 Council of Chalcedon, 589, 592 Council of Elvira, 381 Council of Ephesus, 342, 568–569 Council of Nicaea, 381 Council of Trent, 100, 103–105, 246, 343, 730–733, 751 Councils of Toledo, 382 Counseling. See Pastoral care Counter-Reformation, 370, 391–392 Coutinho, Osvaldo de Azeredo, 222 (photo)

|

Coyolxauhqui, 64 Coyote, New Mexico, 136 Crane, Ricardo, 706 Creation, 682 Cremin, Lawrence A., 71–72 Criollos (Creoles), 30, 78, 101, 123, 162, 356, 530–531 Cristero Wars, 82, 299, 375 Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Kant), 6 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 6 Cro´nica Mexica´yotl (Tezozo´moc), 58 The Cross and the Switchblade (Wilkerson), 426 Las Cruces, 403 Crumrine, N. Ross, 437, 439 Crusade for Justice (Gonzales), 140 Cruz, Bobby, 495 Cruz, Celia, 493, 494–495 Cruz, Juan de la, 749 Cruz, Marcial de la, 429 Cruz, Nicky, 24, 332, 426 Cruz, Nilo, 333 Cruz, Ronaldo, 52 Cruz, Samuel, 388, 389 Cruz, Sor Juana Ine´s de la, 732, 732 (photo) Crystal City, Texas, 141 CSO (Community Service Organization), 131, 138 Cuauhtemoc, 368 Cuautli, Juan Ce, 65, 152 Cuba/Cubans: African heritage, 355 Africanization of marginalized Whites, 504–505 Ajiaco Christianity, 21–23, 242 baseball, 207 Battle of Dos Rio, 164 Bay of Pigs invasion, 173 black, 44 blanqueamiento (whitening) policy, 162 Caridad, 343–344 Catholic clerics, 17, 523 Chinese Cubans, 43–44 church-state relations, 173–175

I-15

I-16

|

Index Colegio de Belen (Belen School), 170 Columbus’s expedition to, 151, 160– 161 Communism within, 166–167, 172– 174, 444 (photo) conditional freedoms, 502 criollos (Creoles), 162 cubanidad, 21–22 Cuban Revolutionary Party, 164 demographics, xvii De Soto, Hernando, 369 education, xviii, 250 Elia´n Gonzalez custody battle, 167, 443, 444 (photo) as English-speakers, xvii first Euro-American Protestant worship service held in, 233 foreign born, xvii as former colonial possession of Spain, xix gamblers, 715 Hatuey’s resistance to Spanish colonizers, 161 immigration and citizenship status, xvii income, xviii indigenous population, 160–161, 162 intellectuals influenced by Jefferson and Lincoln, 163 Jesuit priests expelled by, 456 La Virgen de la caridad del cobre, 402 lo cotidiano (daily life), 10 Martı´, Jose´, 161 (photo), 164 median age, xvii mulattos, 162 natural resources, 161 New Orleans trade, 163 Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Caridad, 572 October Missile Crisis, 411 Peruvian Embassy, 165 Platt Amendment, 164 political affiliation, 562 Protestant population, 234, 463 Republican Period, 504 resolver, 335

returning natives who converted while away, 233 salsa worship, 493–495 Santerı´a, 17 secular, xvi shrines, 440 slavery, 13, 17, 43–44, 162, 216, 417, 501–502 Spanish-American War, 373 Spanish conquest and colonization, 102, 153, 160–162 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 222 spiritual revival, 175 strategic position, 161–162 Ten Years’ War, 163, 528 unaffiliated population, 514 U.S.-relations, xix, 150, 160, 164– 165, 174 See also Cuban Americans; Cuban Revolution Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), 170 Cuban Americans, 160–171; ancestors, 163 Balsero (Cuban Rafters) Crisis of 1994, 165–167, 238 biblical themes of exile and immigration experience, 167, 169, 243, 411, 412, 443 Bota´nica, 506 concentrations in U.S. cities, 160, 165, 170–171, 505 Cuban exile private schools, 170 Elia´n Gonzalez custody battle, 167, 443, 444 (photo) espiritismo (Spiritism), 224 exile community network system (ile system), 505–506 graduation rates, 455 historical background, 160–167, 238 hyphenated identities, 296 immigration following Cuban Revolution, 160, 165–166, 238 Jewbans, 316 key concepts, ritual structures, and institutions, 167–171, 173 literature, 333

Index Mariel Boatlift, 165 Nuestra Sen˜ora de La Caridad de El Cobre (Our Lady of Charity), 168–169 Operation Pedro Pan, 167, 410–412 poverty rate, 209 Protestants, 373 Roman Catholic identification, 167–168 Santerı´a, 168, 505–506 shrines, 412, 439 statistics, 160 la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, 168 waves of immigration, 238 Cuban Children’s Program, 411 Cuban Revolution, xix, 171–175 Camp Columbia speech, 172 Castro’s motivation, 171–172 early martyrs of, 172 Evangelicals’ support for, 232 gradual emergence of, 162–165 Grito de Yara, 163 migration following, 44, 160, 165–166 Military Units for Assistance to Production (UMAP), 174 participation of Catholic leaders within, 172 protests vs., 172–174 as threat to Christianity within Cuba, 172–174 U.S. relations with Cuba following, 505 Cue´llar, Diego Vela´zquez de, 153 Cuetlaxochitl (poinsettias), 64 Culhuacanos, 58 Culto, 681 Cultural Citizen Project, 178 Cultural Memory: Resistance, Faith, Identity (Rodriguez), 259 Culture: aesthetics, 11 American culture affected by Hispanic presence, xiv, 49 cultural affirmation, 321

|

cultural anthropology, 176–178 cultural assimilation (acculturation), 48–49, 53–54 cultural criticism, 650 cultural pluralism, 50, 55, 56, 58 Curanderismo (healings), 179–185, 273–282 art in healing, 277 Catholic Charismatic movement, 687–688 Curandera/os (healers), xvi, 31, 34– 36, 276 (photo), 276–277 Espiritualismo as institutionalized curanderismo, 224–229 for the evil eye, 751 explaining illness, 274–725 healer cults, 278 health of churchgoers, 281 Latino/a population, 193 limpias (spiritual cleansing), 537, 752, 754 major traditions detected in, 273–274 for mal aire, 752 Olaza´bal, Francisco, 409–410 origin of term, 224 Pentecostalism as a health care system, 278–279, 281–282 Santerı´a as a health care system, 279– 280, 509 science and religion, 280–282 sin associated with illness, 275 Spiritism as a health care system, 279 tarot cards, 715 testimonios, 544 therapeutic strategies, 275–278 via pastoral care, 699–707 women as healers, 278 Cursillos de Cristiandad, 97, 98, 190, 490–491 Cuzco, Peru, 177, 369 Cyclical church dramas, 419–420 Daily living experience. See Lo cotidiano (daily life) Dalton, Frederick, 132

I-17

I-18

|

Index

La Dama Duende (Barca), 718 Damas, Le´on-Gontran, 18 Dammen, Rev. Karen, 270 Dance of Los Matachines, 348–351 Dark Ages, 710 Dark Night of the Soul (John of the Cross), 392 Darley, Rev. Alex M., 422 Darwin, Charles, 480, 481 Da´vila, Alvaro, 758–759 Da´vila, Arlene, 292 Davis, J. E., 462 Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos), 9, 33, 195–199, 266, 403 De Alva, Klor, 405 Dealy, Glen, 531 Death rituals: Dı´a de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), 9, 33, 195–199, 266, 403 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 45 Santerı´a, 224 De Avedan˜o, Diego, 731–732 DeBry, Theodorus, 78 Deck, Allan Figueroa, 9, 365 The Decline of the West (Spengler), 480 Decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches, 380 Deculturation, 21–22 Deejaying, 285–286 De la Cruz, Sor Juana Ine´s, 253 De La Torre, Benigno Dominguez, 509 De La Torre, Miguel A.: on aesthetics, 10 ajiaco, 22 ‘‘anonymous Santerı´a’’ coined by, 36 on Chinese Cubans, 43 on Elia´ n Gonzalez custody battle, 443 ‘‘exilio’’ coined by, 242–243 on function of scripture in Latino and other marginalized circles, 648 hermeneutical circle, 285 on ‘‘mulatez,’’ 388, 389 nepantla, 405 on ‘‘New Ecumenism,’’ 214–215

Rethinking Latino Religion and Identity (De La Torre and Espinosa), 194 De La Vega, Gracilaso, 731 De locis theologicis (Cano), 159 ‘‘Democracy Versus the Melting Pot’’ (Kallen), 50 Democratic Party (U.S.), 234, 562–563 Demographics, 187– Denmark, 12 Denver War on Poverty, 140 De Porres, Saint Martin, 520 (photo), 521 Descartes, Rene´, 450 Desegregation, 454 De Soto, Hernando, 154, 369 The Devil, 401 The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Taussig), 176–177 Dharmadhatus (meditation centers), 91 Dı´a de la Raza, 574 Dı´a de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), 9, 33, 195–199, 266, 403 Diakonia, 214 Diaspora theology, 200–204, 295, 315. See also Exile and exodus Dı´az, Miguel, 264, 551–552 Diaz, Noel, 97 Dı´az, Porfirio, 81 Dı´az-Stevens, Ana Marı´a, 724, 736 La dicha mı´a (Cruz), 494–495 Dimensiones en Cuidado Pastoral en Latinoamerica, 707 Diosito, 722 Diphrasism, 404 Disenfranchisement. See Alienation Distributive-reformist approach, 319– 320 Divino Redemptoris, 412 Divorce, 249 Dobbs, Lou, 378 Docetism, 591 Doctrine of the Faith, 453 Doctrinero, 215 Dominga, Madre Marı´a, 474 Dominican Americans, 205–207

Index baseball, 207 bota´nica, 179 Dominican American National Round Table, 206 Dominican Day parade, 206 (photo) Dominican Studies Institute, 206– 207 as economic immigrants, 206 education and occupational status, 250 graduation rates, 455 Mormons, 377 poverty rate, 209 shrines, 440 Tatica from Higuey, 209 U.S. officeholders, 206 Dominican Republic/Dominicans: African heritage, 355 binational status, 206 demographics, xvii diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 387 as English-speakers, xvii foreign born, xvii income, xviii Jehovah’s Witness, 313 literature, 333–334 Our Lady of Altagracia (Highest Grace), 572 Pentecostal movement, 207 Roman Catholicism as official religion, 206–207 Santerı´a, 207 Trujillo assassination, 205 Voodoo, 207 Don˜a Marina, 148 Donjuanismo, 339–340 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 263 Los Dorados organization, 4 (photo), 456 (photo) D’Orbigny, Alcide Dessalines, 395 Double consciousness, 28, 321–322 Double loyalty, 206 Downey, Michael, 755, 757 Down These Mean Streets (Thomas), 332

|

Drama, 419–420, 719 Dreaming in Cuban (Garcia), 333 Drug-rehabilitation programs, 23–25 Duality, 756 Du Bois, W. E. B., 28 Los Duendes, 718 Duns Scotus, John, 569 Duquesne University, 426 Dura´n, Diego, 404 Durkheim, Emile, 176 Dussel, Enrique, 677 Duvalier, Franc¸ois, 579, 580 Easter celebrations, 402, 662 (photo), 750 (photo) East Los Angeles student walkouts, 61 Ecclesial base community model, 118– 119 Ecclesiogenesis, defined, 69 Ecclesiology, 599–668 Echaniz, Sylvia, 226 Echevarrı´a, Jose´ Antonio, 172 Ecology and environmental issues, 118, 218–220 Economics, 209–213 Economic Trinity, 558 Economy, 209–212; accumulated buying power of the Latino/a community, 209 barrios, 140, 209, 214, 297, 493, 623 diversity within communion, 657 economic justice, 319–320 government benefits and services, 209, 211, 446–447, 563 liberationist theology and, 210, 211–212 maquiladoras (border factories), xx, 26 (photo) prosperity gospel, 210–211 role of religion in global economy, 581 See also Poverty/poor communities Ecuador/Ecuadorians: Catholic Charismatic movement, 425 immigration, 518, 521 Inca Empire, 152

I-19

I-20

|

Index

Nuestra Sen˜ora del Quinche, 573 shrines, 440 Ecumenism, 213–215 Edict of Expulsion (1492), 314–315 Edict of Milan, 67–68 Editorial Mundo Hispano, 462 Education/schools: Chicano Studies programs, 140–141 collaborative programs, 765–766 demographics, xviii diversity within communion, 657 education reform, 141 established by Protestant missionaries, 461 graduation rates, 455 increasing levels of, 250 New Testament on, 74 private religious schools, 454–456 public, 454–455 Sunday Schools, 461 theological and religious education, 71–77, 545–550, 704–705 Urban Training Centers (UTC), 24– 25 See also Education/schools Edwards, Jonathan, 415 18th Street Gang, 126 Eirene, 705–706 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 410 Ekklesia, 69, 143–144 El Bronx Remembered (Mohr), 332 El Cid the Champion, 484 El Coloquio de San Jose´ (New Mexico folk play), 420 El Cristo negro de Esquipulas, 401 Elders, respect for, 340 El Dios de nosotros, 639 El Divino Narciso (Cruz), 732 El Dorado, 152 Electronic Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology (journal), 112 Eleggua (Elegbara/Eshu), 510 ‘‘El Grito’’ (Romano), 177–178 El Habanero (newspaper), 163 El hombre americano (D’Orbigny), 395 Elias, Padre (Roque Rojas Esparza), 225, 226–229

Elizondo, Virgilio: aesthetics, 11 biographical information, 623, 659 collaborative theology, 763 criticism of, 624 on eschatologies that jeopardize sociopolitical action undertaken by Latino/as, 620 on fiesta (celebration), 264–265, 669 Galilean Journey, 241–242, 353–354, 741 on Guadalupe, 401, 575–576, 735– 736, 741–742 Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL), 97–98, 187, 767 on Jesus as a Galilean Jew, 241–242, 296, 353–354, 648, 666, 741 mestizaje as a theological category, 551, 662, 674–675 Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC), 213, 659, 764 on soteriology, 741–742 on unity, 214 Elliott, J. H., 529 El movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA), 361–362 El Norte (film), 181 El Padre Antonio y el monaguillo Andre´s (Blades), 494 El Paso, Texas, 209 ‘‘El Plan de Barrio’’ (Gonzales), 140 El Plan Espiritual de Aztla´n, 61–62, 63, 140 El Salvador/Salvadorans, 496–498 barrios, 297 culture and folklore, 124, 334, 497–498 demographics, xvii education, xviii gangs, 126, 497–498 immigration, xx, 120–121, 124, 238, 297, 442–443, 496–497 Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 language, xvii, 124

Index religion, 128, 129, 425, 427, 440, 496–497, 572–573 Salvador del Mundo, El, 497 soccer war, 121 violence and oppressive regime, xx, 120–121, 297, 496, 498, 499–500 Emceeing, 285–286 Empacho, 274 Empowerment, 5 Encomiendas (forced labor), 78, 149, 215–217, 368, 369 Encuentro de Pueblos Indigenas de las Americas (Encounter of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas), 399 Encuentro Latino (Latin Encounter), 96–97 Encuentros, 108 Encyclopedia Britannica, 47 Enduring Flame (Dı´az-Stevens), 548, 736 Engagement (Segovia’s diaspora theology), 203–204 Engels, Friedrich, 618 England: Black Legend used as propaganda vs. Spain, 79 British Honduras, 122–123 cultural values and norms brought to U.S., 49, 55 Enlightenment, 176 Moorish Dancers, 349 slave trade, 12 English (language), xvii, 55, 141, 325, 326, 378, 685 Enigmatic Powers (Benavides and Vidal), 548, 736 The Enlightenment, 176, 450 Enriquez, King Alfonso, 484 Environmentalism, 218–220 Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus, 568 Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA), 373, 487 Epistemology, 611–613 Erasmus, Desiderius, 539

|

Ermita de la Caridad, Miami, Florida, 439 Escando´n, Maria Amparo, 331 Eschatology, 615–624, 668–669 contents of Latino/a eschatology, 620–623 defined, 615 truth as contextually bound, 616–618 truth as realized in history, 618–620 Escobar, Samuel, 488–489 Escuela Dominical, 461 Esparza, Ofelia, 33 Esparza, Roque Rojas, 225, 226–229 Esperanza’s Box of Saints (Escando´n), 331 Esperanza USA, 232, 234, 562 Espı´n, Orlando, 112, 159, 262–264, 297, 551, 663, 720, 758 Espinosa, Gasto´n, 97, 157, 187, 405 Espiritismo, 220–224 See also Spiritism Espiritistas, 221, 225, 226, 269 Espı´ritu, 756 Espiritualidad, 224–229, 749 Espiritualismo, 224–230 Esteve y Toma´s, Bishop Gill, 472 ‘‘Estranged Labor’’ (Marx), 692 ETA (Evangelical Training Association), 75 Ethics, 10, 11, 627–635, 751–752 Etiology, 274 Euangelion, 230 The Eucharistic table, 682 Evangelicals: Bibles sent to Latin America by, 231 Central America, xvi, 129–130 church attendance, 445 ‘‘evangelicos’’ vs., 236, 328, 463 Great Commission (Mark 16:15), 231, 236 Hispanics, xvi political affiliation, 445, 562–563 proselytism, 363 Puerto Rico/ans, xvi on social justice, 317–318 socioeconomic status of, 209 statistics, 487

I-21

I-22

|

Index

testimonios, 544 See also Protestantism/Protestants Evangelical Training Association (ETA), 75 Evange´lica/os, 230–236 as contextual theology, 673 conversion to, 230–233 demographics, 233–234 described, 234, 328 Euro-American evangelicals vs., 236, 328, 463 historical roots, 231–233, 463 within Liberation Theology, 146 National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), 236 political views, 235 religious activities, 234–235 social services provided by, 232–233 Evangelli nuntiandi (Pope Paul VI), 713–714 Evil eye (mal de ojo), 275, 537, 721, 751, 752 Evolution, 480, 481 Exile and exodus, 237–240; Biblical interpretation, 237, 238–240, 295, 296–297, 412 biblical narratives, 237, 412, 644, 651–652 described, 295 God of life-giving migrations, 644–645 Jesus’ prophetic exile from this world, 645 Jewish pilgrim festivals during, 436 key figures, 241–243 major doctrinal points, 238–241 metaphor used to describe plight of the poor, 237–238 origin of term, 242–243 reconciliation between Exilic Cubans and Resident Cubans, 23 ritual structures, 241 See also Diaspora theology; Immigration Exilio, 237–243 Eximiae Devotionis, 368

‘‘The Exodus as Event and Process’’ (Gottwald), 241 Exorcism, 564–565 Fact Book on Theological Education (ATS), 545 Faith expressions. See Popular religion Faith healing. See Curanderismo (healings) ‘‘The Faith of Hispanics Is Shifting’’ (Barna Research Group), 488 Falicov, Celia Jaes, 701–702 Fallen fontanelle, 274 Faltas tu´, faltas tu´, Timoteo faltas tu´ (Cruz), 495 Family, 245–250 Central American values, 126 church as family, 668 compadrazgo (godparenthood), 126, 245, 246, 248, 729 familismo, 340 family ethics, 631–632 sizes, 515, 517 the Trinity, 559 Fania All Stars, 493 Los Fariseos (Cruz), 495 Farmworkers: the Great Grape Strike, 47, 131, 363 migrant workers, 130–133, 212 (photo), 399 United Farm Workers (UFW), 107, 131–133, 137, 138, 219, 363, 442, 514 Fatima, Portugal, 344 Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, 344 Feast of San Isidro, 457–458 Feast of the Assumption of Mary, 342 Feast of the Three Kings, 266 The Federal Land-Grant Alliance (La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes), 136, 139–140 Federal Republic of Central America, 119 Federation of Pastoral Institutes (Federacio´n de Institutos Pastorales, FIP), 76

Index Feminist movement/theory, 251–260 Chicana feminist movement, 64, 137–138, 140, 253–254 contributions to the field of epistemology, 612 empowerment emphasized by, 5 ‘‘feminism,’’ interpretations of, 251, 252 Hermeneutics of Suspicion, 257–259 Latina/Chicana Feminism vs. Euro-American Feminists, 253–254 Latina Feminist epistemology, 254–256 as liberation theology, 673, 676 lo cotidiano (daily life), 10, 252, 257 marianismo challenged by, 348 Mujerista theology, 158–159, 259– 260, 335–337, 383–385, 552, 673, 736 Mujerista theology, Isasi-Dı´az on, 242, 252, 258, 648, 744–745 overview, 251–252 political activity in support of women’s rights, 446–447 praxis methodology and option for the poor, 259–260 rooted in the ordinary, 256–257 suffragists, 253 See also Women Ferdinand II, King of Aragon: Edict of Expulsion (1492), 314 right to fill high ecclesiastical posts within her domain, 513, 522 Spanish Reconquest, xiii, 147–148, 161, 368 Ferguson, Adam, 176 Ferna´ndez, Eduardo C., 758 Fernando II, King of Castile, 485 Fernando III, King of Castile, 484–485 Feudal contracts, 148 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 672 Fiance´e Act (1946), 43, 47 Fichte, Johann G., 480 Fidelity, 517 Fidel y la religio´n (Fidel and Religion) (Castro), 175

|

Fidencio, El Nin˜o, 34–36, 80, 82, 181, 182, 278 La Fiesta de la Santa Cruz, 458 Fiesta of Santiago, 9 Fiestas, 261–267, 402–403, 643, 669 Fife, John, 442–443, 499–500 Filipinos. See Philippines Findlay, Eileen, 469 FIP (Federation of Pastoral Institutes), 76 ‘‘First Communion’’ (Rivera), 332 First Hispanic Baptist church, Santa Barbara, California, 464 (photo) First Holy Communion, 457 First Spanish Methodist Church, 584–585 Flipsicans, 43 Flores, Patricio Fernandez, 105 Florida, xiii, xiv, xv, 102–104, 153–154, 168, 369, 370 Florida water, 224 Flor y canto, 404 Folk saints, 80–82 Fontela, Diego, 509 Foraker Act, 474 ‘‘The Foreign-born Population in the United States’’ (U.S. Census), 488 Fortier, Ted, 259 ‘‘Fountain of Youth,’’ 153 Four Hundred Rabbits (Centzon Totochtin) harvest, 65 Fowler, James, 259 Fox, Geoffrey, 291 Fox, Vicente, 378 France, 12, 163, 176, 292, 370 Franciscan friars, 371–372, 373, 710, 751, 752 Francis of Assisi, St., 512, 572, 686, 722 Franco, Francisco, 490 Frank, Jerome, 259 Frankfurt school of philosophy, 283 Franz, Frederick, 312 La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesu´s Nazareno, 421–422 Fraternidad Teolo´gica Latinoamericana (FTL), 705

I-23

I-24

|

Index

Free speech movement, 132 French Huguenot settlements, 370 Friedzon, Claudio, 433 Frohlich, Mary, 757 From the Heart of the People (Aquino), 258 Fronteras (CEHILA), 677 Frontier myth of terra nullis, 662–663 Frui, 7 FTL (Fraternidad Teolo´gica Latinoamericana), 705 Fuentes, Carlos, 407, 533, 534 Fujimori, Alberto, 519 The Future Is Mestizo (Elizondo), 353–354 Gadsden Purchase, 357 Galilean Journey (Elizondo), 241–242, 353–354, 741 Galilee and Galileans, 241–242, 296, 353–354, 639–640, 648, 666, 741 Gallardo, Sister Gloria, 107, 413 Galvan, Elias Gabriel, 270 Galva´n, Juan, 308 Gamblers, 715 Gamonal, Ezequiel Ataucusi, 519 Gandhi, Mohandas, 131 GANG (God’s Anointed Now Generation), 24–25 Gangs, 23–25, 126, 426, 497–498, 583–585 Garcia, Cristina, 44, 333 Garcı´a, Ismael, 214 Garcı´a, Espı´n and Sixto, 552–553 Garcı´a-Rivera, Alejandro, 9 Garcia-Treto, Francisco, 647–648 Garinagu/Garifuna people, 123, 124, 125, 128 Garza, Reverend Nick, 236 Garzo´n, Esther, 96 Gaspar (Three Kings), 265 Gaucho, 340 Gautama, Siddhartha, 89 Gautier, Mary, 191 Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender

(GLBT) communities, 256, 269–271, 350, 447, 516, 563 Gender roles, 246–247, 249, 250, 255, 270, 339–341, 346–348. See also Women Gentlemen’s Agreement (1907), 46 George, Saint, 19, 533 Getting Home Alive (Morales), 333 G.I. Bill, 135, 361 Gilligan, Carol, 259 GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) communities, 256, 269– 271, 350, 447, 516, 563 Globalization, 57, 297, 556 Glossolalia (speaking in tongues), xx, 95, 189, 423, 489–490 God, 637–645; Hispanic reinterpretation of, 665 methodological presuppositions, 637–639 naming and understanding God from Latina/o perspectives, 639–645 revelation of divine name to Moses, 637 Godparenthood (compadrazgo), 126, 245, 246, 248, 729 God’s Anointed Now Generation (GANG), 24–25 Goizueta, Roberto S.: accompaniment, 142–143, 159, 242, 641, 666 on Fiesta, 265–266 on language and culture, 531, 551 on popular religiosity, 9–10, 663 on praxis, 10, 697 on Puebla Conference, 452 sacramental theology, 736 Gomez, Oba´ Oriate´ Victor Manuel, 509 Go´ngora, Carlos Singu¨enza y, 732 Gonzales, Rodolfo ‘‘Corky,’’ 61, 62, 133, 140–141 Gonzalez, Elia´n, 166–167, 411, 443, 444 (photo) Gonzalez, Elisa, 90–91 Gonza´lez, Juan, 292, 441 Gonza´lez, Justo L.:

Index Apuntes (journal), 547, 658, 659 Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH), 73, 75, 658, 659 biographical information, 202, 658 collaborative theology, 763 on contributions of Hispanics to Trinity thought, 664 criticism of, 624 on eschatologies that jeopardize sociopolitical action undertaken by Latino/as, 591–592, 620, 621–622 Hispanic Summer Program (HSP), 658, 766 Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI), 147, 546, 658, 659 on Hispanic way of being church, 668 on the incarnation, 665 on Latina/o reading of the Bible, 650–653 on man˜ana, 669 on mixture of cultures, 213 paradigms of Hispanic Diaspora theology, 202–203 on soteriology, 742–744 The Story of Christianity (Gonza´lez), 658 on unity, 214 on worship, 684–685 Gonza´lez, Michelle A., 10, 23, 252, 388–389 Gonza´lez, Saint Toribio Romo, 80, 82, 299 Gonza´lez, Sister Marı´a Elena, 213 Gonzalez-Quintana, Juan Miguel, 167 Good Friday, 4 (photo), 5, 456 (photo), 457, 619 (photo), 641 (photo) Good Government Law, 417 Gordon, Milton, 48–51, 53, 55–56, 58 Gordon College, 73 Gottwald, Norman K., 239, 241 Government aid, 209, 211, 446–447, 563 Gracia, Jorge, 292, 526, 530 Grafitti, 285–286, 390

|

Granada, 367–368, 484–485, 525 Grassroots transnationalism, 556 Gravesites, 34–36 Gray, James M., 72 Great Antilles Blacks, 387 Great Commission (Mark 16:15), 231, 236 Great Depression, 240, 360–361 The Great Grape Strike, 47, 131, 363 ‘‘The Great Nation of Futurity’’ (O’Sullivan), 150 Greece (ancient), 7, 12, 689–691 Greeley, Andrew, 187–189, 190 Green phenomenon, 218 Gregory I, Pope, 358 Gregory XIII, Pope, 344 Gregory XVI, Pope, 472 Griffin, Mark, 296 Griffith, James S., 35–36 Grijalva, Juan de, 369–370 Grito de Yara, 163 Gross, Jeffrey, 147 Growth rate of Latino population, xv, xvi Gruzinski, Sergei, 400–401 Guadalajara, Mexico, 556 Guam, xix, 150, 536 Guama´n Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 731 Guanahani, 150–151, 368 Guatemala/Guatemalans: Catholic Charismatic movement, 427 celebrations, 129 civil war, 120 earthquake of 1976, 120, 128 education, xviii El Cristo negro de Esquipulas, 401 as English-speakers, xvii gangs, 126 household demographics, xvii Ladino and Indian populations, 48 migration patterns, 120, 121, 123, 123–124 Pentecostal movement, 433 Protestants, 425 Sanctuary Movement, 442–443 shrines, 440

I-25

I-26

|

Index

violence, 498–500 la Virgen del Rosario, 573 Xinca people, 123 Guerra, Juan Luis, 495 Guest worker program, 442 Guevarra, Rudy, 43 Guillen, Nicolas, 18 ‘‘Gunboat diplomacy,’’ xix–xx Gutie´rrez, Gustavo: on Christian praxis, 3, 695–696 on exodus and exile, 238–239, 241 Liberation Theology introduced by, 114, 237, 523, 524, 693 ‘‘preferential option for the poor,’’ 453 on relationships with the poor, 5 on spirituality, 755, 756 Gutie´rrez, Jose´ Angel, 62, 141 Gutie´rrez, Ramo´n, 32 Guzman, Domingo de, 573 Habsburg Dynasty, 79 Haiti, 387, 502, 577–581 Hall, Linda, 534 Halloween, 197 Handbook of Religion and Health (Oxford Press), 281 Harlem Renaissance, 18 Harvest of Empire a History of Latinos in America (Gonza´lez), 292, 441 Harwood, Thomas and Emily, 86, 460 Hatuey, 161 Hawaii, 43, 528 HCAPL (Hispanic Churches in American Public Life), xvi, 97–98, 187–194, 425, 432, 446, 767 Healings. See Curanderismo Health Care, 273–283 Health insurance, 209 Heart of Aztla´n (Anaya), 63 Hebrew Bible. See Old Testament Heerinckx, Iacobo, 753 Hegel, Georg W. F., 6, 480, 618 Hellenistic Empire, 12 Henschel, Milton, 312

Las Hermanas (The Sisters), 107, 213, 363, 413–414, 764 Los Hermanos Penitentes, 421–422, 457, 462 Hermeneutical Circle, 283–285 Hermeneutics, 203–204, 282–285, 647–656 Biblical hermeneutics by Latino/a theologians, 648–649 Garcia-Treto, Francisco, 647–648 Gonza´lez and ‘‘reading through Hispanic eyes,’’ 650–653 immigration studies, 298–300 intercultural studies, 653–656 Segovia and the critique of the historical–critical methodologies, 649–650, 653–654 Hermitan˜o, 419–420 Hernandez, Alejo, 373 Hernandez, Esteban, 172 Hernandez, Esther, 33 Heschel, Abraham, 415 Heurta, Dolores, 219, 219 (photo) Hidden Stories: Unveiling the History of the Latino Church (McCormick Theological Seminary), 765 Higashide, Seiichi, 40, 41 Hijuelos, Oscar, 333 Hindus and Hinduism, 44, 45, 123, 193 Hinojosa, Gilberto, 358 Hip-hop culture, 285–286 Hippocratic theory, 179 Hispania, 482–483 Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL), xvi, 97–98, 187–194, 425, 432, 446, 767 Hispanic Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity, 232, 234 The Hispanic Condition and Latino USA (Stavans), 292 The Hispanic Databook, xvii, xviii Hispanic/Latino Identity (Gracia), 292 Hispanic Ministry at the Turn of the Millennium (Barnes), 98, 189–190, 191–192 Hispanic Nation Culture, Politics, and

Index the Construction of Identity (Fox), 291 Hispanic Summer Program (HSP), 658, 766 Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI), 147, 546, 658, 659 Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church, 661–662 Hispanic World Publishers, 462 Hispaniola, 149, 151, 216 Hispano-Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 Holiness movements, 225 Holland, 12, 78–79 The Holy Spirit, 666–667, 709–712 Holy Thursday, 457 Holy Week, 266, 640–642 Los hombres de maı´z, 129 Home altars, 31–32 Home chapels, 30 Home Missionary Societies, 373 Homosexuality, 256, 269–271, 350, 447, 516, 563 Honduras/Hondurans: culture and folklore, 124–125 Garinagu/Garifuna people, 128 migration patterns, 120, 122 Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Concepcio´n de Suyapa, 573 patron saint of, 124 populations in the U.S., 124–125 poverty levels, xviii Protestants, 425 religion, 128 shrines, 440 soccer war, 121 street gangs, 126 U.S. military base within, 125 Los Hoodios, 317 Hoodoo, 580 (photo) Hordes, Stanley, 315 Hosius of Co´rdoba, 381 Hospitality, 644 House churches. See Base Communities (BCs) How the Garcı´a Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvaraez), 334

|

Hoyos, Juan and Rodrigo, 168, 168–169 HR 4437, 336 (photo) HTI (Hispanic Theological Initiative), 147, 546, 658, 659 Hudu, 580 (photo) Huerta, Dolores, 138, 442 The Huichols, 9, 396 Huitzilopochtli (God of the Sun and War), 29, 58, 63, 64–65, 407 Human rights, 78–80 Human sacrifice, 578, 732 Humboldt, Alexander von, 59 Hunt, Larry, 446–447 Huntington, Samuel, 55–56, 515 Hurricane Mitch, 122 IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation), 138, 219 The Ibo, 17 Icaza, Rosa Marı´a, 534, 757 Identificational assimilation, 49 Identity: defining blackness, 386 ethics of, 631–632 Latino/a identity, 289–294, 323–324, 325, 327, 344, 362, 472–473 polycentric identities, 54–55, 57–58 Ifa´, 502, 507, 512 La Iglesia de la Gente, 442 Iglesia La Luz del Mundo, 556 Iglesias peregrinas en busca de identidad Cuadros del protestantismo latino en los Estados Unidos (CEHILA), 677 Ignatian Exercises, 751, 752 Ignatius of Loyola, Saint, 392, 533, 711 Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, 555–556 Ildephonse of Toledo, 382 Ile system, 505–506 Illegal immigrants, xv, 361, 362, 378, 397 (photo), 442–444, 446. See also Sanctuary Movement Illness. See Curanderismo (healings) The Illuminative Way, 753 Imago Dei, 666–667, 745

I-27

I-28

|

Index

IMF (International Monetary Fund), 521 Immaculate Conception, 569 Immaculate Heart of Mary Church Sunday, 701 (photo) Immigration, 294–300 Alliance for Progress, 519–520 from ‘‘banana republics,’’ xix–xx during California Gold Rush, 89 calls for reform, 55, 322, 443–444, 561, 619 (photo) Catholic ecclesiology, 297–298 Central Americans, statistics, 120, 122, 123 concentrations in U.S. cities, 160, 165, 170–171, 505, 519 descendants of Hispanics as earliest immigrants, xiv exilio (exile), 237–238 ‘‘The Foreign-born Population in the United States’’ (U.S. Census), 488 generational gaps resulting from acculturation, 248–249, 684 hermeneutics, 298–300 history of U.S. immigration laws, 289, 336 (photo) ‘‘hyphenated identities,’’ 296 Immigrant Responsibility Act (1996), 498 Immigration Act (1917), 44, 46 Immigration and Nationality Act (1952), 47 Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), 43, 46, 47, 553 Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), 121 Luce-Celler Bill, 46 marginality and questions of identity, 295–296 National Origin Act (1924), 46, 61 Operation Pedro Pan, 167, 410–412 pastoral care for immigrants, 467, 699–707 of Pentecostals and Catholic Charismatics, 434 plans to return to homelands, 521

political conflicts between home nations brought to U.S., 521 quotas, 553 remittances, 206, 553, 556 as result of U.S. political interventions in Latin America, 618 Sanctuary Movement, 442–443, 444, 496–497, 498–501 Shrine of Saint Toribio, 299 South Americans, 518, 519, 519–521 Temporary Protected Status (TPS), 121, 122 transnationalism, 553–557 undocumented ‘‘immigrants,’’ xv, 361, 362, 378, 397 (photo), 442– 444, 446 uprooting of meaning systems, 701–702 urbanization and, 106 U.S. history of conquest and annexation, xix voting rights, 253 See also Assimilation; Diaspora theology; Exile and exodus; specific nationalities by name Imperial Valley, California, 45–46 Inca Empire, 151–152, 154, 369, 395– 396, 519, 527 (photo), 731 Income statistics, xviii Inculturation, 686–687 Inda, Jonathan Xavier, 178 Independent/nondenominational Christians, 487 Independent Party (U.S.), 562 India, 44–45 La India, 493–494 Indigenous peoples. See Native peoples Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), 138, 219 Industrial Revolution, 691 Ine´s del Campo, Saint, 458 Infancy Gospel of James, 265 Informes (newsletter), 107 Initial Evidence Theory, 95 Inkarri, 519 Innocent XI, Pope, 393

Index In Search of Bernabe´ (Lı´mon), 334 INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services), 121 Institutionalized violence, 301–306 Instituto de Liturgia Hispana, 112 Instituto Latino de Cuidado Pastoral, 702–703 Inter Caetera I and II, xiii, 368 Interdenominational cooperation, 434– 435 InterGen, 220 The Interior Castle (Teresa of Avila), 392 Intermarriages, 15, 44, 45, 216 Internalizing the Vision (Arguinzoni), 25 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 521 Introductio in Theologiam Spiritualem (Heerinckx), 753 Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel), 6 Irarra´-zabal, Diego, 401, 402 Irenaeus, 643 Irish Catholics, 104–105, 332 Isabel I, Queen of Spain, xiii, 148, 161, 314, 368, 485, 513 Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a: biographical information, 242, 252, 623, 744 criticism of, 624 on eschatologies that jeopardize sociopolitical action undertaken by Latino/as, 620–621 on incarnation, 746 on kin-dom of God, 159, 597, 621, 669, 745 on la lucha, 664 on liberative praxis, 697 on lo cotidiano (daily life), 158–159, 256–257, 383, 648–649, 676 mujerista theology, 242, 252, 258, 259, 260, 383, 552, 648 on soteriology, 744–745 theorizing of mulatez, 388 Iscariot, Judas, 532 Isidore, Bishop, 382

|

Isidore, Saint, 457–458 Islam/Muslims, 306–309 Caliphate of Granada, 147, 152–153 demographics, xvi, 488 expulsion from Spain, 157 history of slavery, 12 Latino/a population, 192–193, 306–307 migration patterns, 123 Moors, 263, 307, 339, 367–368, 482– 483, 526, 532, 534 Puerto Ricans and, 332 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 44 Reconquista, 480, 482–486, 526 Israel (ancient): cities of refuge, 500 conquest of Jericho, 368 exile and exodus, 239–240, 644 Lamanites, 375, 376, 377, 378 pilgrimages, 436 See also Jews and Judaism Israelite Mission, 519 Ita´, 280 Italy, 349 Ixtapalapa, Mexico, 228–229 Jabao, 387 Jacaltec people, 124 Jacaltenango Maya, 399 Jackson, Jesse, 175 Jamaica, 13, 578 James, Saint (Santiago de Compostela), 437–438, 485 James, William, 259 James (apostle), 263, 265, 437–438, 574 Janitors strike, 629 (photo) Janitzio Island, Mexico, 34 (photo) Japan/Japanese: California Gold Rush, 89 Gentlemen’s Agreement (1907), 46 Japanese Latin Americans, 38–42 migration encouraged by government, 38 Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), 38 World War II, 40–41, 46 Jaramillo, Don Pedro (Healer of Los

I-29

I-30

|

Index

Olmos), 34–35, 80, 81, 182, 184 (photo), 278 Jayme, Father Luis, 371, 372 Jehovah’s Witness, xvi, 157, 192, 311– 313, 363, 487 Je´mez, 350 Jeremiah, prophet, 652 Jericho, 368 Jesuit Order, 392, 456, 711 Jesus Christ: adoptionism, 591–592 apostles, 144 baptism, 262 as Christ Moreno, 524 Christology, 589–598 Church as the Body of Christ, 145 Docetism, 591 as Galilean Jew, 241–242, 296, 353– 354, 648, 666, 741 gifts brought by Three Wise Kings, 169 God’s divine name made known by, 637 Hispanic reinterpretation of, 666 on illness, 275 Jewish rituals practiced by, 758 Logos, 694 Lordship of, 230, 235–236 marginal status of, 354 Mary’s and Joseph’s search for an inn, 644 Mayans on, 401 mestizo experience, 666 ministries, 144 as the New Adam, 569 pilgrimage to Jerusalem, 436 prophetic exile from the world, 645 salvific life and message, 337, 538–539 second coming, xxi transfiguration at Mount Tabor, 497 Jet (azabache), 721 Jewish Identity Project, 317 Jews and Judaism, 314–317 anousim, 315 cities of refuge, 500

conquest of Jericho, 368 conversos (marranos), 157, 314–315, 459 exile and exodus, 169, 238–240, 315, 412, 644 expulsion from Spain, 157, 314–315, 367–68, 526 immigration, 314–316 Jewish Cuban Americans, 168, 316 Jewish rituals practiced by Jesus, 758 Ladino, 315 Lamanites, 375, 376, 377, 378 Latino/a population, 192–193, 314, 315–317 Palo Mayombe/Palo Monte as ‘‘Jewish’’ witchcraft, 418–419 pilgrimages, 436 Puerto Ricans, 332, 333 Sephardic Jews, 314–315 within Spanish population in the Southwest, 459 statistics and demographics, xvi, 488 Jime´-nez, Jose ‘‘Cha Cha,’’ 583–584 Joachim of Fiore, 710 Job (Book of the Old Testament), 78, 275 John, of Damascus, Saint, 728 John of the Cross, St., 391, 392, 711 John Paul II, Pope: call for a new evangelization, 116 Cuba visit, 175 (photo) Our Lady of Altagracia (Highest Grace) crowned by, 572 on Pentecostal movement, 434 popular Church condemned by, 114–115 ‘‘preferential option for the poor,’’ 453 Johnson, Lyndon B., 253 John the Apostle, 144–145, 146 John the Baptist, Saint, 262, 511 John XXIII, Pope, 523, 575 Jones-Correa, Michael, 535 Joseph (father of Jesus), 644 Journal of Hispanic/ Latino Theology, 112, 659

Index Juana Ine´s de la Cruz, Sor, 10 Juan Diego, Saint, 84–85, 134, 241, 343, 358, 534, 642–643, 741–742 Juan en la Ciudad (Cruz), 495 Juarez, Benito, 372, 373 Judas Tadeo, San, 532 Juderı´as y Loyot, Julia´n, 78 Julian of Toledo, 382 Justice, 317–324, 612–613 Kallen, Horace, 50 Kamen, Henry, 528, 529, 731, 733 Kanjobal Mayans, 124, 129 Kant, Immanuel, 6 Kaq’chik’el people, 124, 128 Kardec, Allan (Rivail), 220, 223, 225 Kardecism. See Spiritism (Espiritismo) Karuna (compassion), 92 Keifer, Ralph, 426 Kelleher, Margaret Mary, 681 Kelly, Jana Morgan, 445 Kelly, Nathan J., 445 Kerygma (core of the Gospel), 97, 490 Ketchup, xiv Kimball, Spencer W., 377, 379 Kin-dom of God, 159, 337, 385, 597, 621, 669, 745 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 131, 138, 442, 525 Kit Carson National Forest, 136, 139–140 Knorr, Nathan H., 312 Knowing, 612–613 Koenig, Harold, 274, 281 Koinonia ecclesiological model, 69–70, 214 Kole Kole, 516 Kramar, Glenn, 96, 427 Kramar, Marilynn, 96–97, 427 Kumeyaay, 371–372 La Bamba (film), 181 LABI (Latin American Bible Institute), 72, 74 Labor market. See Economy Laboure, Catherine, 569

|

Labyrinth of Solitude (Paz), 340 Ladino, 48, 315 LADO (Latino American Dawah Organization), 308 Laity, 75–77, 95–96, 105, 145, 464, 723–724, 767 La lucha, 257, 335–337, 384, 552, 643– 644, 661, 664 La Lucha Continues: Mujerista Theology (Isasi-Dı´az), 744–745 La Luz School, 170 Lamanites, 375, 376, 377, 378 Lamy, Jean Baptiste, 422 Land rights: Alien Land Act (1913), 46 Chicano activists on, 133, 134, 138– 140 under encomienda system, 216 Gonzales, Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’ on, 140 La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (The Federal Land-Grant Alliance), 136, 139–140 Native Americans, 373 post-Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 84 of Punjabi Mexican Americans, 45 Treaty of Mesilla, 441 Language, 325–327 acculturation and, 325–326 affect on spirituality, 326–327 Arabic influence on Spanish, 532 assumption that all Hispanics speak Spanish, xv of church services, 54 (photo), 327, 381, 467, 531–532, 685 cultural significance of, 325, 531–532 English-Only Movement as, 55, 141, 378 English-speakers, xvii of evange´lica/os, 234 Ladino, 48, 315 Latino identity and, 325 Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 Nahuatl, 403–404 religious affiliation related to spoken languages, 514 in schools, 455

I-31

I-32

|

Index

Spanglish, xv, 53, 326, 473 Spanish-speaking priests, 191 statistics, 325 Tex–Mex, 53 Lara, Jaime, 718 Larson, D. B., 274 La Salette, France, 344 De Las Casas, Bartolome´: African slave trade advocated by, 13 biographical information, 216, 369 as convert, 157 ‘‘Las Casas-Sepu´ lveda Controversy,’’ 369 objection to encomiendas system, 216, 217, 369 portrait, 78 (photo) as ‘‘Protectorate of the Indians,’’ 78– 80, 153, 369, 761–762 renewed attention to, 535 vs. requerimiento, 149 on rituals of native peoples, 729–730 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas), 78–80, 154, 216, 217, 369, 397–398 as source of the Black Legend, 78–80 Las Trampas, New Mexico, 628 (photo) Latina evange´lica theology, 327–329 Latinamente, 612 Latin America: anticlericalism and church-state conflict, 31 ‘‘banana republics,’’ xix–xx caudillos (military dictators), 340, 531 democratization of, 118 ecumenical movement in, 145–147 encomienda system, 215–217 Japanese Latin Americans, 38–42 retablos, 8 secularization of, 31 Latin American Bible Institute (LABI), 72, 74 Latin American Episcopal Conference, 68 Latinas in Ministry (LIM), 255

Latin Encounter (Encuentro Latino), 96–97 Latin-language liturgies, 381 Latino American Dawah Organization (LADO), 308 Latino/a population, overview: average household size, 515, 517 characteristics of Hispanic religiosity, xx–xxi demographics, xiv–xv, xvi, xvii–xviii, 454 diversity within, xv, xvi, 628, 657–658 economic stratum, xvi, xviii education, xviii foreign born, xvii growth rate, xv, xvi home ownership, xviii immigration and citizenship status, xv–xvi Latino/a identity, 289–294, 323–324, 325, 327, 344, 362, 472–473 overview of history, 761–762 poverty levels, xviii terminology to describe, 289–291, 290–294, 627–628 U.S. history of conquest and annexation, xix Latino/a theology, 657–669 contributions to the formulation of Christian doctrines, 664–669 described, 657–658 historical development, 658–660 Latin American liberation theology vs., 251–252 major themes and characteristics, 661–664 methodological foundations, 660–661 Latino Jews (Martini), 317 Latino National Survey (LNS), 187 Latino Pastoral Action Center (LPAC), 255, 446 Latinos Inc. (Da´vila), 292 Latinos in the United States (Abalos), 291–292

Index Latter-Day Saints. See Mormons Laviera, Tato, 332 Lavoe, He´ctor, 494, 495 Lay Ministry Formation Programs, 75–77 Lazarus, Saint, 280, 509, 622 LDS (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). See Mormons Leadership training, 76 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 61 Leal, David, 535 Leander, Bishop, 382 Lebanese people, 123 The Lectionary, 686 Lee, Fr. Bernard J., 71, 143 Leo, Mama, 255 Leo´n, Jorge A., 706 Leo´n, Luis, 88 Leon (medieval kingdom), 483–484 Leon-Portilla, Miguel, 85 Lesbians, 256 ‘‘Letter from Delano’’ (Cha´vez), 132–133 Levitt, Peggy, 555 Lewis, Oscar, 176 Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (Little Book of the Medicinal Herbs of the Indians), 180 Liberation theology/theologians, 671–678 biblical foundation, 671 Catholic Church vs., 114–116 of Christian Base Communities (CBCs), 523–524 Civil Rights movement as, 525 as constructive theologies, 672–673 as contextual theologies, 671–672, 673–674 continuing relevance of, 524 described, 210, 522, 671–673 economics and, 211–212 exilio (exile), 237–240 goals, 524 grounded in friendships with poor persons, 5

|

hermeneutical circle, 283–285 historical background, 237 justification for revolutionary justice, 240 la lucha, 257, 335–337, 384, 552, 643–644, 661, 664, 744–745 as Latino methodological construct, 660–661 lo cotidiano, 676 on mestizaje/mulatez, 674–675 Mujerista Theology, 242, 258, 383–385 on orthopraxis, 693–696 Pentecostal and charismatics movements, 491 popular religiosity, 675–676 postcolonial analysis, 449 postmodern conceptions, 451–452 Preferential Option for the Poor, 67, 70 Puerto Rican theology, 476 Segovia’s Diaspora theology, 204 on social justice, 318–319 teologı´a en conjunto, 676–678 Third World liberation theologies, 762 U.S.-based Latina/o contextual theologies, 673–678 See also Social justice Liber Commicus, 382 Liber Sacerdotalis (Castellani), 718 Lilly Endowment, 546 Lima, Peru, 146, 524 LIM (Latinas in Ministry), 255 Limo´n, Graciela, 334 Limpias (spiritual cleansing), 537, 752, 754. See also Curanderismo (healings) La limpieza de sangre (the washing of the blood), 15, 387 Linares, Guillermo, 206 Lincoln-Marti Schools, 170 Literature, 330–335, 390 The little black man Jose, 224 Liturgy, 681–688

I-33

I-34

|

Index

historical developments and major doctrinal points, 681–683 language of church services, 54 (photo), 327, 381, 467, 531–532, 685 Latino manifestations, 683–688 Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 Living Flame of Love (John of the Cross), 392 Living in Spanglish (Morales), 292 Llorente, Francisco, 429 La Llorona (Weeping Woman), 402, 570–571 Locus theologicus, 159 Logos, 694 Lola, Mama, 580–581 Lo´pez, Luı´s, 429 Lo´pez, Narciso, 162, 163 Lo´pez, Abundio L. and Rosa, 424, 429 Lo´pez de Legazpi, Miguel, 154 Lo´pez de Palacios Rubios, Juan, 149 Lord’s Prayer, 669 Lorenzo, San, 350 Los Angeles, California, xiv, 361 Louisiana Purchase, 373 Lourdes, France, 344, 345 Love, 665 Lozano, Agrı´col, 376 Lozano-Dı´az, Nora, 329 LPAC (Latino Pastoral Action Center), 255, 446 LRUP (La Raza Unida Party), 60, 62, 140, 141, 362 Luce, Alice E., 72 Luce-Celler Bill, 42–43, 46, 47 Lucey, Archbishop Robert E., 111 Lugo, Father Ismael de, 173 Lugo, Juan Leo´n, 430–431 Lukumı´: ancestor worship, 507 animal sacrifices, 508, 509 Bembe´, 507 cabildos, 417 Church of the Lukumı´ Babalu´ Aye, 508 described, 17

dieties, 509–513 doctrinal points, 506–508 healings, 509 key figures, 509 reincarnation, 507 ritual structures, 33, 508–509 See also Santerı´a LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), 61 Luther, Martin, 370, 691, 730 Lutherans, 487 Lveda, Juan Gine´s de Sepu´, 369 Lynchings, 84 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 450 MACC (Mexican American Cultural Center), 76, 105, 107, 213, 659, 764 Macedo, Bishop Edir, 432, 564, 565 Machado, Daisy L., 295, 329 Machismo, 339–341, 346–348, 517 Machista attitudes, 247 MacKay, Angus, 534 Macumba, 223 Madero, Francisco I., 226 Madres y huachos (Montecino), 570 Madrigal, Father, 172 Maduro, Otto, 736 Maelo, 495 Magellan, Ferdinand, 153, 154 Magic, 274–275 Mahayana Buddhism, 92 Mahony, Cardinal Roger, 629 (photo) Maize culture, 213 Mal aire, 752 Malcom X (autobiography), 583 Mal de ojo (evil eye), 275, 537, 721, 751, 752 Maldonado, Luis, 716 Maldonado, Rigo, 33 La Malinche, 148, 350, 402, 516–517 Malverde, Jesu´s, 80, 81, 719 (photo), 720 Mammon, 134 Mam people, 124 Man˜ana, 622, 669, 744 Man˜ana (Gonza´lez), 591–592

Index Mandas (to send), 714 The Mandike, 17 Mandilo´n, 340–341 Manifest Destiny, 86, 103, 150, 204, 233, 375, 460, 768 Manning, Cardinal Timothy, 96–97, 427 Manual de Adultos, 718 Manuale Sacramentorum, 718 Manuscript Beato de Libeana, 380 (photo) Maoism, 583–584 MAPA (Mexican American Political Organization), 361 Maquiladoras (border factories), xx, 26 (photo) ´ scar Andre´s Maradiaga, Cardinal O ´ Rodrıguez, 115 Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), 126 MARCHA (Metodistas Asociados Representando la Causa de los Hispano Americanos), 465 Marginality. See Alienation Marı´a de la Cabeza, Santa, 458 Maria Lionza (Blades), 494 Marian devotions, 341–346567–576 Antidicomarianites, 568, 570 dark-skinned Madonnas, 533 doctrines and dogmas, 568–570 Elizondo on devotion to, 735–736, 741–742 four mothers of Latin America, 570–571 of indigenous people, 401–402 Marian patronesses of Latin America, 571–575 popular religion, 722 Protestants on, 570 short history of Marian devotion, 567–568 Spanish tradition of veneration, 533–535 U.S. Hispanic Marianism, 575–576 See also Virgin Mary Marianismo, 341, 346–348 Marico´n, 341 ‘‘Mariel Boatlift,’’ 165

|

Marimacha, 339 Marins, Jose, 71 Marital assimilation, 49 Marranos (converses), 157, 314–15, 459 Marriage, 15, 44, 45, 49, 216 Martell-Otero, Loida I., 329 Martı´, Jose´, 161, 163, 164, 166 Martı´n, Cardinal Marcelo Gonza´lez, 380, 382, 383 Martin, Ralph, 426 Martin de Porres, Saint, 510, 722 Martı´nez, Antonio Jose´, 421–422 Martinez, Demetria, 334 Martinez, Felipe, 397 (photo) Martı´nez, Jorge, 573 Martı´nez, Juan Navarro, 429 Martı´nez, Juan Ramo´n, 375–376 Martı´nez, Luis Aponte, 115 Martini, Carlos, 317 Marto, Jacinta and Francisco, 569 Martyrs, 437–438 Marx and Marxism: biblica criticism, 650 contemplation model, 7 Cuba, 173 described, 176 ethnographic studies of the poor, 176–177 on growing role of economic relations and financial institutions, 481 within Latina/o eschatology, 623 on philosophy, 672, 692 reading of history, 618 on reason, 450 socioeconomic and political analysis informed by, 305 understanding of praxis, 691–693, 696 Vatican on, 70, 114–116 Young Lords Organization (YLO), 583–584 Mary, mother of Jesus. See Virgin Mary Masvida, Eduardo Boza, 173 The Matachines, 348–351 Matador (bullfighter), 340 Matos, Luis Pale´s, 18

I-35

I-36

|

Index

Matovina, Timothy, 534 Matthew, 265 Mayahuel (diety), 65, 152 Mayans: corn, 400 indigenous languages, 124 on Jesus, 401 migration patterns, 123–124 Popol Vuh, 129, 398, 768 religion, 29, 128, 129 Spanish conquest, 153, 528 Maynard-Reid, Pedrito, 261–263 Mayombe, 223, 417–419 MAYO (Mexican American Youth Organization), 141, 361–362 Mayo people, 183 McCormick Theological Seminary, 584–585, 765 McDonnell, Father Kilian, 427 McKinley, William, 42, 474, 528 McMann, Jean, 32, 33 MECHA (El Movimiento Estudiantil de Atzla´n), 63, 141 Medellı´n Conference, 3, 114–117, 145– 146, 237, 302–303, 452, 523, 713 Median age of Hispanics, xvii Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity (Morales), 333 Medina, Lara, 85, 536 Mediodia, 226–228 Mediums. See Spiritism (Espiritismo) Medjugorje, Croatia, 344 Megachurches, 565 Melchor (Three Kings), 265 Mello, Bishop Manoel de, 434 Melting-pot phenomenon, 49–50, 55, 56, 58, 480 See also Assimilation The Melting Pot (Zangwill), 50 Memorias de Bernardo Vega (Vega), 331–332 Men: legal system of Roman law, 339; machismo, 339–341, 346–348, 517 sexual behavior of, 348 Mendozo, Antonio de, 154

Mene´ndez de Avile´s, Pedro, xiii, 154, 410 Merced, Jose, 506 (photo) Mercedarian Friars, 574 Mercy, 642 Merton, Thomas, 583 Mesa-Baines, Amalia, 33 Mesa blanca, 224 Mesoamerican religion, 9, 30 Messianic movements, 564–565 Mestizaje, 351–356 Christological image within Hispanic theology, 666 contemporary meaning of, 352–356 described, 20, 22, 327–328, 351, 354–355 early history of, 351–352 within Latino methodological construct, 662 mulatez vs., 386 Reconquista roots, 486 resistive and liberatory possibilities, 354 self-understanding of, 387–388 as umbrella term, 355, 551 Mestizos: altars and shrines, 29–31 described, 213–214, 327, 352 history of, 148, 214, 217, 369, 398 indigenous women as victims of Spanish invasion, 398, 529, 570–571 Jesus Christ’s experience as, 666 nepantla, 29 pigmentocracies, 398–399 popular Catholicism of, 100–101 raza co´smica, 479–481 tejano/as, 291 Methodist Church/Methodists, 372–373, 393, 464–465, 466, 467, 487, 489, 548 Metodistas Asociados Representando la Causa de los Hispano Americanos (MARCHA), 465 Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC), 76, 105, 107, 213, 659, 764

Index Mexican American Political Organization (MAPA), 361 Mexican American Program at Perkins School of Theology, 765 Mexican Americans, 357–367 assimilation, 295 barrioization, 358 Bracero Program, 361 Chicano and new immigrant generation (1965–1985), 361–363 Cisneros case, 362 civil rights movement, 60 dispossession and occupational dislocation of (1848–1900), 357–359 espiritualismo, 226 as first major influx of Hispanics to the U.S., xix graduation rates, 455 The Great Grape Strike, 47 legacy of the immigrant generation (1900–1940), 359–360 legacy of the Mexican American generation (1940–1965), 360–361 literature, 330–331 Mexican American religious experience (1980–), 363–367 migration patterns, 360 pachucos, 61 poverty rate, 209 Repatriation Program, 360–361 Roman Catholic Church on, 359 shrines, 439 statistics, 360, 425 United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 131 within U.S. armed forces, 361 See also Chicano/as Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900–1965 (Hinojosa), 358 Mexican-American War: barrios formed after, 209 border created by, xix, 26 compensation paid by U.S. to Mexico for war damages, 84 Manifest Destiny following, 86

|

missionaries to border region following, 51, 86–87, 358–359, 372, 373 Mormon Battalion, 375 new Mexican American dioceses created following, 31–32 post-treaty violence, 84 start of, 150 tejano/as, 291 U.S. territory increased following, 59–60, 357 See also Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), 141, 361–362 ‘‘The Mexican Catholic Community in California’’ (Burns), 359 Mexicanensis, 718 Mexico/Mexicans: Advent tradition, 266 Caste War of Yucata´n, 123 Catholic, xvi, 31–32 Catholic Charismatic movement, 425, 427 as center of Spanish colonial rule in the Western Hemisphere, 154 charros/cowboys, 340 Colonization Act (1824), 373 Constitutional Reformation, 372, 373 Cristero War, 82, 375 demographics, xvii early roots of Latina/os, xix education, xviii, 250 encomienda system, 215–217; as English speakers, xvii; espiritualismo, 221, 224–229; exilio (exile), 237–238 flag, 64 foreign born, xvii Gadsden Purchase, 357 gender roles, 247 Halloween, 197 immigration and citizenship status, xvii income, xviii Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 Japanese Mexican Americans, 41–42

I-37

I-38

|

Index

Jewish population, 316 Ladino and Indian populations, 48 median age, xvii Mexican Filipinos, 42–43, 47 Mexican Independence, 228 Mexican Revolution, 80, 81 (photo), 82, 430 Mexipino, 43 Mormons, 375 Operation Wetback, 61 Pentecostal movement, 424–425, 429–430 popular Catholicism within, 101, 103 poverty levels, xviii Protestants, 234, 373, 425, 460–463 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 44–46 rationalist mentality, 101–102 shrines, 31, 299, 439 Toltecs, 28, 29, 407 U.S.-Mexico border, 80–82, 220 See also Mexican Americans; Mexican-American War Mexiflips, 43 Mezcla, 551 Mezcolanza, 298 Miami, Florida, xiv. See also Cuban Americans Michael, St., 19 Michael the Archangel, 419–420 Mictlan, 196–197, 199 Middle Ages, 68 Midwives (parteras), 31 Mi Familia (film), 181 Migrant workers, 130–133, 212 (photo), 399. See also Farmworkers Migration. See Diaspora theology; Immigration Mining, 352 Ministry training programs. See Education/schools Mint (yerba buena), 275–276 Miracles, xxi, 342–343, 345, 543–545. See also Curanderismo (healings) The Miraculous Day of Ama´lia Gome´z (Rechy), 331 Miranda, Ismael, 495

Miranda, Jesse, 97, 187, 231, 767 Miron, Louis, 178 Misas de Aguinaldo (Masses of the Gift), 457 Missale Hispano-Mozarabicum, 382 Missionaries, 367–373 to border region following MexicanAmerican War, 51, 86–87, 358– 359, 372, 373 Charisma in Missions, 96–97 Christian Spirituality via, 754 churches built by, 29–30 Colonization Act (1824), 373 Conquistadores and, 149, 150, 155, 367–370, 397 destruction of public temples by, 29; financial support for, 370, 371 following Spanish-American War, 528 Great Commission (Mark 16:15), 231, 236 Home Missionary Societies, 373 in Latin America, 231–232 the Matachines brought by, 349–350 mission system, described, 370–371 Mormons, 375 Protestants, 460–463 in Puerto Rico, 473–475 returning natives who converted while away, 233 San Diego Revolt, 371–372 schools established by, 461 as spiritual dimension to Manifest Destiny, 233 Student Volunteer Movement, 72 Swedish Pentecostal missionaries, 429 Western civilization introduced by, 370 See also Converts/conversion Mission Santa Barbara, 372, 372 (photo) Mission System, 367–374 Mi Tierra restaurant, 34 Mixe-Poluca people, 401 Moctezuma, 59, 368 Modernism theory, 450 Mogrovejo, Bishop Toribio de, 521, 523

Index Mohr, Nicholasa, 332 Mojados (wetbacks), 361, 362 Molinos, Miguel de, 393 Monanca, 350 Monastic textual preservation, 710 Monkey Hunting (Garcia), 44 Monroe Doctrine, 372 Montecino, Sonia, 570 Montesinos, Fray Antonio de, 78, 217, 761–762 Montesquieu, Charles, 176 Montgomery, George and Carrie Judd, 409 Moody, Dwight L., 72 Moody Institute model, 75 Moors, 263, 307, 339, 367–368, 482– 483, 526, 532, 534 See also Islam/Muslims Mopan Mayans, 123 Moraga, Cherrı´e, 254, 255–256 Morales, Alejandro, 331 Morales, Aurora Levins, 316–317, 333 Morales, Ed, 292 Morales, Juan Castillo (Juan Soldado), 80, 82, 723 Moral theology, 176, 751–752 Moreno, Juan, 168, 168–169 Morinis, E. Alan, 437, 439 Mormons/Latter-day Saints, 374–379 beginnings of Hispanic American Mormonism, 375–376 Black Spanish speakers, 377, 379 Book of Mormon, 375, 378, 407 contemporary issues, 376–379 conversion to, 157 founding, 374 industries created by, 375 initial Mormon-Latino contacts, 374–375 Lucero Ward, 375–376, 377, 379 polygamy, 375 Popol Vuh, 398 statistics, xvi, 192, 363, 374, 376, 377, 379, 487–488 Third Conventionists, 376 timeline, 379

|

Morocco, 482–483, 486 Moses (Prophet), 637, 644 Mother Tongue (Martinez), 334 Mottessi, Alberto, 433 Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztla´n (M.E.Ch.A.), 63, 141 Moya, Francisco Sanchez de, 169 Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 Mpungus, 418 Mr. Ives’ Christmas (Hijuelos), 333 Mujerista theology, 158–159, 259–260, 335–337, 383–385, 552, 673, 736 Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a, 242, 252, 258, 648, 744–745 Mulatez, 20–21, 385–390 within Cuba, 162 defined, 22, 352, 385, 386 diverse attitudes toward, 20–21, 386–387 within Latino methodological construct, 662 mestizaje vs., 386 popular Catholicism of, 100–101 racial hierarchy during colonial period, 385–386 racist connotation, 20–21, 22, 355 as religious identity, 388–389 self-understanding of, 387–388 Multiculturalism, perceived threat of, 56 Mun˜oz, Carlos, 138 Music, 125, 285–286, 386, 390, 493– 495, 685 Muslims. See Islam/Muslims Muxerista Pedagogy (Revilla), 256 Mysticism, 390–393, 751, 754, 756 Nagual/nahualli (male witch), 537 Nahua people: Dı´a de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), 195–199 duality, 756 on God and the Devil, 401 mythology, 30–31, 241, 406–407 Nahuatl language, 403–404 nepantlah, 297, 403–407 origins, 124

I-39

I-40

|

Index

philosophical conceptions of the Trinity, 558 Nanko-Ferna´ndez, Carmen, 299 Naomi (Book of Ruth), 652 Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, 292 Nardal sisters, 18 Narvaez, Alonso de, 522, 572 Narvaez, Panfilo de, 153–154 Nasrid Caliphate of Granada, 482 National Association for Lay Ministry, 77 National Association of Hispanic Priests (ANHS), 110 National Catholic Association of Diocesan Directors for Hispanic Ministry (NCADDHM), 52 National Catholic Council on Hispanic Ministry, 112 National Catholic War Council, 111 National Catholic Welfare Council, 111 National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, 59, 60, 61, 140 National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), 131 National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), 236 National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and Conference, 232, 562 National Hispanic Scholarship fund, 105 National Origin Act (1924), 61 ‘‘National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic Ministry,’’ 108 National Plan for Hispanic Ministry (1988), 453 National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, 571 Nation of Islam, 306 Native peoples, 395–400 of Belize, 123 cathedrals built by, 400–401 continuous struggle, 399 corn as lifeblood of, 400 diversity of indigenous communities, 395 early roots of Latina/os, xviii–xix

encomiendas (forced labor), 78, 149, 215–217, 368, 369 the encounter, 397–399 fiesta, 262–263 The Great Mysterious, 396–397 indigenous women as victims of Spanish invasion, 398, 529, 570–571 Ladination, 48 Lamanites, 375, 376, 377, 378 land rights, 373 Latino/a religiosity influenced by, 399–403 Manifest Destiny vs., 150 Marian devotions, 401–402, 534 military alliances with Spanish Conquistadors, 527–529 modern attitude of Catholic Church toward indigenous religious traditions, 399 peyote, 9, 396 premodern aesthetic sensibilities, 8–9 prior to the encounter, 395–397 as source for curanderismo, 179; spiritual traditions, 193 syncretism, 399–401 treaties violated by U.S., 133 zambo, 352 See also specific ethnicities by name Nativity Posadas, 65 Nattier, Jan, 89 Natural resources, xix Nava, Antonio Castan˜eda, 429 Navarre, 484 Navarro, Juan Martı´nez, 429 Nazareth, 639–640 Nazis, 480 NCADDHM (National Catholic Association of Diocesan Directors for Hispanic Ministry), 52 Negrear, 387 El negrito Jose (the little Black man Jose), 224 Negritude and negrismo, 18 Neoculturation, 21–22

Index Nepantlah, 29, 85, 88, 297, 327, 403– 407, 675 NEP (New Ecological Paradigm), 218–219 Nevada, xix New Age Movement, 479 New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), 218–219 New Laws of the Indies, 216 New Mexico, xv, 59–60, 86 New Orleans, Louisiana, 163 New Sanctuary Movement, 444, 496– 497, 499 New Testament (Christian Bible): banned in Latin America during Spanish colonial rule, 231 on community, 143–145 early Christian communities, 69 foundation of liberation theology, 671 Gonza´lez on Latina/o reading of the Bible, 650–653 on illness, 275 on immigrants and neighbors, 297, 298 magical phrases, 564 on Mary, 567–568 Pauline churches, 618 post-Vatican II biblical reading, 109–110 presented graphically through art, autos sacramentales, storytelling, and preaching, 109 of Protestant missionaries, 461–462 on relationships with others, 694 as source for curanderismo, 179 Spanish Bible, 460, 461–462 New York City, xv, 206–207 New York World’s Fair (1964), 376 NFWA (National Farm Workers Association), 131 Nganga christiana, 418–419 Nganga judı´a, 418–419 NHCLC (National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference), 236 Nican Mopohua, 642

|

Nicaragua/Nicaraguans: Contra War, xx, 115, 121, 122, 174 exilio (exile), 237–238 Hurricane Mitch, 122 immigration, xx, 120, 121–122 Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 ‘‘machismo’’ usage, 339 religion, 128, 129, 425, 440, 573–574 Somoza regime, 238 Nichiren Buddhism, 90, 92–93 Nicholson, E. F. G., 460 Nicky Cruz Outreach, 426 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 690–691 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 480, 623 Nigeria, 501 9/11 Terror attacks, 306, 307 Nin˜os de Marı´a, 457 Noah’s flood, 495 Noble, Mercedes, 509 Noche Buena (The Good Night), 169 Noche de griterı´a, 129 Noe´ (Blades), 495 North America, described, 617–618 Nosotros, 637 Novenas to patron saints, 257 Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Altagracia, 207 Nuestra Sen˜ora de La Caridad de El Cobre (Our Lady of Charity), 30, 168–169, 412 Nuestra Sen˜ora de Suyapa, 124 Nueva Esperanza, 232, 234, 562 Nuevas Leyes de Espan˜a (New Laws of Spain), 78 Numerology, 715 Nun˜ez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar, 370 Nuyoricans, 390, 473, 493–495 Obatala´ (Oddua/Orisha-nla), 37, 510–511 Obea, 126 Obejas, Achy, 333 Occupational fatalities, 220 Ochu´n, 411, 513, 516 October Missile Crisis, 411

I-41

I-42

|

Index

Octogesima Adveniens (Pope Paul VI), 115 Oddua, 37, 510–511 Ofrendas, 33, 198 Oggu´n, 263, 511, 512 Ojeda, Carlos, 509 Olaza´bal, Francisco, 409–410, 430, 431 Old Masks, New Faces (PARAL), 548 Old Spanish Rite, 379–383 Old Testament (Hebrew Bible): Absolute Beauty, 7 animal sacrifices, 280 on community, 143 depiction of God, 275, 642 exodus and exile, 237, 238–240, 243, 644 focus on obeying God’s commandments, 694 foundation of liberation theology, 671 on goodness of creation, 682 Hebrew enslavement in the book of Exodus, 146 imago Dei, 243 Jesus as the New Adam, 569 Mary as the New Eve, 568, 569 pilgrim festivals, 436 ‘‘shepherding’’ concept, 703 sin associated with illness, 275 as source for curanderismo, 179 on welcoming the stranger, 297, 298 Olodumare (‘‘the Lord of all destinies’’), 37, 280, 505, 506, 507, 510, 511 Olofi, 510 Olorisha priesthood, 508 Ometeotl, 406–407 On˜ate, Don Juan de, 154–155, 421 Onderdonk, Frank, 460 Oneness Pentecostal movement, 192, 429 On the Holy Spirit (St. Basil), 710 Operation Pedro Pan, 167, 410–412 Operation Wetback, 61 Ore´, Jero´nimo, 731 Oregon Territory, 150

Oregon v. Smith, 396 Orellana, Francisco de, 150, 152 Organization of Peruvian Catholic Brotherhoods, 524 Orisha-nla, 37, 510–511 Orishas, xvi, 37, 168, 275, 280, 502, 504–507, 508 Orozco, Jose´ Clemente, 407 Ortega, Gregoria, 107, 413–414 Ortega, Juvenal, 509 Orte´ga, Ruben, 429 Orthopathos (right suffering), 300, 414–416 Orthopraxis, 689–698 Ortiz, Alfonso, 383 Ortiz, Fernando, 21–22 Ortiz, Rev. Frank, 430 Oru´nla, 512 Orunmila, 508, 512 Oshossi (god of hunting), 19 Oshun, 275 O’Sullivan, John L., 150 Other Sheep Multicultural Ministries, 269 Our Islands and Their People, 474 Our Lady of Candlemas, 512 Our Lady of Charity Shrine (Nuestra Sen˜ora de La Caridad de El Cobre), 30, 168–169, 412 Our Lady of Copacabana, 733 Our Lady of Guadalupe: annual pilgrimage in honor of, 342 (photo), 438 (photo), 438–439 Catholic Charismatic movement on, 97 Catholic Church claim of ownership, 228 celebrated in Espiritualista temples, 225 as Chicana/o symbol of identity, 134 as dark-skinned Madonna, 358, 533 Elizondo on devotion to, 401, 735– 736, 741–742 feast day, 225, 344 Guadalupanas, 344, 573 installation, 719

Index Juan Diego, 84–85, 134, 241, 343, 358, 534, 642–643, 741–742 pregnant with life appearance, 642–643 Santa Fe mural, 200 (photo) significance of daily devotion to, 85 ‘‘Statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe appearing to Juan Diego, Indians, and Bishop,’’742 (photo) syncretistic symbolism, 30–31, 64, 732 as Tonantzin (revered mother), 30– 31, 64, 85, 196, 241, 407 on UFW banners, 132, 138 See also Marian devotions Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, San Diego, 641 (photo) Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women (Rodriguez), 259 Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, Salt Lake City, Utah, 296 (photo) Our Lady of Regla, 513, 516 Our Lady Queen of Angels Church, 629 (photo) Our Lord of Chalma, 30 Out of the Barrio (Chavez), 56 Ovando, Friar Nicola´s de, 216, 572 Oviedo, Damiana, 225 Oya´, 512 Ozteotl (deity), 30 Pachamama, 401 Pacheco, Johnny, 493, 494 Pachon, Harry, 97 Pachucos, 61 Pacific Islands, 536 Pacific Middle Passage, 43–44 Padilla, Gil, 138 Padilla, Jose´, 192 Padres Asociados Para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales (PADRES), 109, 213, 363, 763–764 Padrinazgo, 246

Padrinos. See Compadrazgo (godparenthood) Paganism, 193 Pais, Frank and Josue´, 172 Palestine, 436 Palma, Toma´s Estrada, 164 Palm Sunday, 436, 457 Palo, 223, 417–419 Panama/Panamanians: African heritage, 355 culture and folklore, 125 education, xviii as English-speakers, xvii migration patterns, 120, 122 populations in the U.S., 125 religion, 127, 425, 440, 574 Spanish conquest, 153 U.S. presence, 127 World War II internment camps, 40 Panchimalco, 124 Pan de muertos, 198 Parada y Festival de Los Reyes Magos (Three Kings Day Parade and Festival), 127 (photo), 169–170 Paraguay/Paraguayans: as English-speakers, xvii immigration, 518, 520 Nuestra Sen˜ora de Caacupe, 574 poverty levels, xviii shrines, 440 La Virgen de los Milagros, 574 Para Ochun (Lavoe), 494 Paredes, A., 178 Parentesco, 245 Parham, Charles, 423 Park, R. E., 47 Parochial schools, 454–456 Parteras (midwives), 31 Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), 471 Partido Popular Democra´tico (PPD), 471 Pastoral care and counseling, 699–707 Pastoral de conjunto (collaborative pastoral ministry), 118–119 Las Pastorelas, 266, 419–420 Paterfamilias, 339

|

I-43

I-44

|

Index

La Patria Libre (The Free Nation) (newspaper), 164 Patriarchy, 10 Patrick, Saint, 349 Patristic era, 68 Patron saints, overview, 402–403, 683. See also specific saints by name Paul (apostle), 69, 145, 652–653 Paul VI, Pope, 114–115, 472, 574, 713–714 Paz, Octavio, 340 Pearl Harbor, attack on, 40 PECAF (Programa de Entrenamiento y Certificacion de Asesores Familiares), 706 Pedraja, Luis G., 214, 526, 559, 664– 665, 666 Pelagio, 438 Pelayo, Don, 483 PEM (Programa de Enriquecimiento Matrimonial), 706 Penitentes, Los Hermanos, 421–422, 457, 462 Pentecostalism, 423–435 apocalyptic nature of, 278–279 Azusa Street Revival, 409, 423, 424, 428, 429, 430 beliefs and teachings, 110, 189, 423 Catholic Charismatic movement vs., 95–96, 434 Catholic-Pentecostal Cooperation, 434–435 contextual pneumatologies, 711–712 Dominican Republic, 207 Evange´lica/os as, 230 fragmentation of movement in Latin America, 428–429 as growing trend, 110–111, 365, 423– 425, 687 health care, 179, 275, 278–279, 281–282 history of movement, 278, 423, 428–432 immigration of members, 434 leading figures, 409–410, 428 major denominations, 423

proselytism, 363, 429 on prosperity gospel, 210–211 as response to social and economic repression, 491 Santerı´a, 389 speaking in tongues, 95, 189, 423 statistics, 189–190, 192, 423–424, 427, 430, 431–432 theological education for ministers, 548 University Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) as alternative to, 564 women, 429, 433 worship, 687 Peralta, Pedro de, 155 Pereira, Juana, 572 Pe´rez, Brı´gido, 429 Perez, Demetrio, Jr., 170 Perez, Emma, 88 Pe´rez, Laura E., 536 Pe´rez, Zaida Maldonado, 329, 559, 664, 665 Perez y Gonzalez, Maria, 255 Perkins School of Theology, 547, 765 Permı´tanme hablar, 257 Personalismo, 177, 340 Peru/Peruvians: Andean Messianism, 519 China immigrants, 39 colonialism, 177 conquistadores, 369, 527 (photo), 527–528 diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 386–387 education, xviii immigration, 518, 521, 524 Inca Empire, 151–152 Japanese Peruvians, 38–41 Organization of Peruvian Catholic Brotherhoods, 524 Peruvian Embassy in Havana, 165 poverty levels, xviii race riots (1940), 39–40 El Sen˜or de los Milagros, 524 El Sen˜or de Quyllur Rit’i (Quispicanchi), 401

Index shrines, 439–40 the Virgen de la Merced (Mercy), 574 Peter, St., 511 Peter Pan (Barrie), 411 Petro´polis, Brazil, 237 Pew Charitable Trusts: Alianza de Ministerios Evange´licos Nacionales (AMEN), 231 Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL), xvi, 97–98, 187–194, 425, 432, 446, 767 Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI) founded by, 546 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey (2008), 444–445, 446, 487–488 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) breakdown in faith affiliation, xvi, 487–488 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) emphasis on ethnic-oriented worship, xx Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) household incomes, 209 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on abortion, 516, 563 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on changes in faith affiliation, xx, 53, 156, 157–158, 233–235 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on gay marriage, 516, 563 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on language and spirituality, 326–327 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on political affiliation, 561–563 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on prosperity gospel, 210–211 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on religious identification, 363–364 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) ‘‘spirit-filled’’ religious experiences, xx–xxi Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) unaffiliated population, 514–515

Peyote, 9, 396 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 232, 234 Philip II, King of Spain, 79, 154 Philip III, King of Spain, 154–155 Philippines/Filipinos: Catholic missionaries, 246 children born in U.S. to Filipino immigrants, 42 conversion to Catholicism, 43 de facto segregation in the U.S., 42 Fiance´e Act (1946), 43, 47 independence, 42–43, 46 Luce-Celler Bill, 42–43, 47 Mexican Filipinos, 42–43, 47 pensionado program, 42 Philippine-American War, xix The Repatriation Act, 46 Spanish conquest, 153, 154 spiritual hybridity, 536 Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934), 42–43, 46 United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 131 U.S. control of, 46, 150 War Brides Act (1945), 43, 46 Phoenix, Arizona, 46 Phronesis, 690 Piarro, Francisco, 154 Pichardo, Ernesto, 508, 509 Pidgin English, 125 Pigmentocracies, 398–399 Pilgrimage, 30, 35–36, 436–440 La Pin˜ata, 403 Pinchbeck, Daniel, 398 Pineda-Madrid, Nancy, 254, 256, 259 Pinochet, Augusto, 520 Pinoys, 43 Pious exercises. See Popular religion La Pirojundia, 350 Pitts, Rev. Fountain E., 372 Pius IX, Pope, 102, 104, 422, 753 Pius V, Pope, 573 Pius VII, Pope, 522 Pius XI, Pope, 102 Pius XII, Pope, 124, 573, 575

|

I-45

I-46

|

Index

Pizarro, Francisco, 150, 151–152, 369, 527–528 Plasencia, 383 Pla´stico (Blades), 494 Plato, 7, 690 Platt Amendment, 164 Plaza of Three Cultures, 369 Plotinus, 7 Plutarch, 539 Pneumatology, 709–712 PNP (Partido Nuevo Progresista), 471 Pocho (Villarreal), 330 Poetics (Aristotle), 6–7 Poiesis, 690–691 Political activity, 440–447 brief historical development, 441–444 church attendance linked to, 445– 446, 535 ethics of the common, 634–635 growing political strength of Latinos, 561 immigration policies, 322, 443–444, 446, 619 (photo) not practiced by Central American Evangelicals in the U.S., 129 political affiliation, 562–563 religious conviction and, xxi, 444–447 by religious organizations, 514 social capital, 444 U.S. political parties, 561–563 voter registration drives, 361, 561 Political asylum, 443, 444, 499. See also Sanctuary Movement Political justice, 322–323 Poluca people, 401 Polycentric identities, 54–55, 57–58 Polygamy, 375 Polysynthesis, 400 Ponce de Leon, Juan, 152–153, 368, 470–471 Poor. See Poverty/poor communities Poor People’s March, 140 Popol Vuh, 129, 398, 768 Popular religion, 257, 264, 366–367,

545, 675–676, 687, 713–725, 758–759 The Porciuncula, 96–97 Portes, Alejandro, 556 Portola´, Gaspar de, 155 Portugal: Brazil colonized by, 518 indigenous peoples of Americas decimated by, 13 Reconquista, 482–483, 484–485 slave trade, 12–13, 15, 577–578 Treaty of Tordesillas, 513 La Posadas, 266, 457, 644, 687 Postcolonial theories, 447–449 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard), 450 Postmodernism, 449–452 Poststructuralist philosophers, 283 Pourrat, Pierre, 753 Poverty/poor communities: acompan˜amiento, 3–5 Aparecida on, 117–118 Catholic commitment to, 3, 114, 115 consequences of, 27–28, 212 empowerment of, 146 ethnographic studies of, 176–177 exile metaphor, 237–238 government benefits and services, 209, 211, 446–447, 563 liberationist theology and, 210, 211–212 Marian devotions as symbol of, 344, 345, 346 Preferential Option for the Poor, 67, 70, 452–453, 591, 616, 638–639, 660, 716 prosperity gospel, xxi, 210–211, 564–565 Santo Domingo document on, 116–117 statistics, xviii, 209–210 struggles during the 1970s and 1980s, 4–5 See also Economy PPD (Partido Popular Democra´tico), 471

Index Praxis theology, 10, 259–260, 284, 689– 698, 762 Preferential Option for the Poor, 67, 70, 452–453, 591, 616, 638–639, 660, 716 Preferential Option for the Young, 452, 453 Pregnancy, 249 Prendas, 418 Presbyterian Church, 174–175, 372, 465, 487, 489 Presbyterian Menaul School, 86 Presentation of Children, 734 Priestless parishes, 69 Priests Associated for Education, Social, and Religious Rights (PADRES), 109, 213, 363, 763–764 Primitive Christian Church, New York City, 750 (photo) Princeton Seminary, 765–766 Private religious schools, 454–456 Las Procesiones de Corpus Christi, 458 Procesiones del Domingo de Ramos, 457 Processions, 456–458, 719 Programa de Enriquecimiento Matrimonial (PEM), 706 Programa de Entrenamiento en Psicologı´a (P.E.P.P.), 706 Programa de Entrenamiento y Certificacion de Asesores Familiares (PECAF), 706 Program for the Analysis of Religion Among Latinas/os (PARAL), 548, 659 Promesas (promises), 714 Property rights. See Land rights Prophesying, xx Prosperity gospel, xxi, 210–211, 564–565 Prostitution, 23 Protestant assemblies of CLAI (Latin American Council of Churches), 146 Protestantism/Protestants, 458–469 Africanization of, 389 as alternative to Spanish rule, 232

|

anti-Catholicism, 51 assimilation of Protestant Latina/os, 48–49, 52–53, 55 Black Legend used as propaganda vs. Spain by, 79 Central Americans, 129–130 conversion rates from, 156 converts to, 192, 363–365 on Cuba, 174–175 Cuban Americans, 373 Cursillos de Cristiandad, 490–491 denominations, list of, 463 on exile and exodus, 240 family altars, 33 fundamentalism, 72 Hispanic clergy, 464, 467–468 historical context and origins, 459 on homosexuality, 270 house churches, 68 issues and challenges, 466–469 laity, 464 language of church services, 327, 467 language of Hispanic Protestants, 326–327 Latina evange´lica theology, 327–329 Latino/a identity as, 328 Manifest Destiny, 460 on Marian devotion, 570 missionary work, 86–87, 230–232, 460–463, 528 modernism and industrialism addressed by, 72 ‘‘New Ecumenism,’’ 215 political activity, 446–447 Reformation, 370, 682–683, 728– 729, 730 religious iconography at home of Hispanic Protestants, 247 settlement houses, 461 significance of Latino/as within mainline Protestant denominations, 463–466 social Christianity, 72 socioeconomic status, 209, 467–468 during Spanish Inquisition, 459–460 statistics, 233–234, 363, 425, 487

I-47

I-48

|

Index

superimposition on Latina/o Church history, 763 See also Evangelicals Proyecto histo´rico, 744–745 Psicologı´a pastoral, 704 Psicopastoral-Programa Permanente de Psicologı´a Pastoral, 706 Public schools, 454–455 Puebla Conference, 3, 114, 115–116, 117, 146, 303, 452, 714 Pueblo Nation, 195, 437 Pueblo Rebellion, 155, 350, 486 A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (Colo´n), 332 Puerto Rico/Puerto Ricans, 469–476 African heritage, 355 alienation as result of artificial borders, 26 baseball, 207 bregar, 335 carnivals, 263 Catholic Charismatic movement, 427 Columbus’s arrival, 470, 472 converts, 157 demographics, xvii diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 387 education and occupational status, xviii, 250 as English-speakers, xvii espiritismo (Spiritism), 222, 224 Evangelicals, xvi, 234 Foraker Act, 474 foreign born, xvii graduation rates, 455 historical background, xix, 470–471, 471–476 immigration and citizenship status, xvii, 471 income, xviii Irish Catholics vs., 332 jabao, 387 Jehovah’s Witness, 313 Jews and Judaism, 332, 333 literature, 331–333 median age, xvii

Methodist Church, 465 Muslims and, 332 Nuestra Sen˜ora Madre de la Divina Providencia, 574 Nuyoricans, 390, 473, 493–495 patron saints, 262, 472 Pentecostal movement, 430–431 political activity, 442, 471, 563 Ponce de Leon, Juan, 153, 470–471 popular Catholicism of, 101 poverty levels, xviii, 209 Protestant population, 425, 463 remittances from, 206 San Juan Fiesta, 262 second major influx of Hispanics to the U.S. from, xix shrines, 440 size, 469 slavery, 13, 263 Spanish-American War, 474 Taı´nos, 470, 472, 475–476 teologı´a puertorriquen˜a vs. teologı´a puertorriquen˜ista, 476 as U.S. colony, xix, 150 Vieques, 470, 471 Virgen del Pozo, 345 whitening of, 386, 472 World War I, 471 Young Lords Organization (YLO), 583–585 Pulido, Alberto Lo´pez, 422 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 44–46 Punto Guanacastero, 125 Pupil (nomadic tribe), 124 The Purgative Way, 753 Purgatory, 628 (photo) La purı´sima, 129 Pyramids, 29 Al Qaeda, 192 Q’eqchi’ Mayans, 123, 128 Quecholli (festival), 64 Queen of May, 457 Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent God), 63, 65, 196–197, 349, 368, 404, 407, 570

Index Quiche communities, 124, 399 Quichua, 519 Quietism, 393 Quincean˜era, 126, 144 (photo), 241, 245, 257, 266, 735 Quintero, Carmen, 750 (photo) Quinto Sol (press), 330 Quito conference, 705 Quivira, 154 Race: blanqueamiento (whitening), 162, 387, 472, 480 la raza co´ smica (the cosmic race), 479–481, 674 La limpieza de sangre (the washing of the blood), 15, 387 sangre azul (blue-blood), 526, 529 See also specific races by name Rachamim, 642 Racism: ‘‘chino macaco,’’ 39 confronted by Chicano/as, 137 environmental, 220 historical reality of, 355–356 internal racism among marginalized communities, 387–388 racial hierarchy during colonial period, 356, 385 racialization as legacy of Spanish Reconquest, 486 White supremacy, 16–17, 20 RAE (Real Academia Espan˜ola), 755–756 Rag Doll Plagues (Morales), 331 Al-Rahman I, Abd, 483 Rahner, Karl, 36–37, 733 Rain of Gold (Villasen˜or), 331 Ramı´rez, Jose´ Fernando, 59 Ramı´rez, Ricardo, 264, 757 Ramos, Maria, 522 Rancheras (Mexican polkas), 340 Ranchero/a class, 373 Rankin, Melinda, 460 Rapping, 286 Rastafarianism, 578

|

Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph, 114–115, 117 (photo) Ray, Ricardo ‘‘Richie,’’ 495 La Raza Cosmica/The Cosmic Race (Vasconcelos), 353, 479–481, 674 La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), 60, 62, 140, 141, 362 Raza Womyn, 256 Reagan, Ronald, 121, 317, 499 Real Academia Espan˜ola (RAE), 755–756 Recarred, King, 532 Rechy, John, 331 Recinos, Harold, 9, 297, 648 Recognizing the Latino Resurgence (PARAL), 548 Reconquista, 480, 482–486, 526. See also Conquistadores Regla de Ocha-Ifa. See Santerı´a Reglas de Congo (Rule of the Congo), 223, 417–419 Regular Clerks of the Congregation of Saint Paul, Barnabites, 472 Reina, Casiodoro de, 460 Reincarnation, 221, 225, 507 Reissig, Jose´ Luis, 92 ‘‘Religion and Latino Partisanship in the United States’’ (Kelly and Kelly), 445 Religious affiliation, 487–489 Religious drama, 348–351, 419–420, 719 Religious freedom, 508, 509 Religious iconography. See Altars and shrines Remittances, 206, 553, 556 Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 484 RENEW programs, 71 Renewalist movement, 489–491 Reno, Janet, 167 Repatriation Program, 360–361 Repentance, 538–539 Reposition of the Blessed Sacrament, 457 Republican Party (U.S.), 234, 562–563 Republic of San Joaquin del Rio Chama —Echo Amphitheater, 136

I-49

I-50

|

Index

Requerimiento, 149 In re Ricardo Rodriguez, 60–61 Rerum Novarum, 31 Resolver, 335 Respect for elders, 340 Retablos, 8, 277 Rethinking Latino Religion and Identity (De La Torre and Espinosa), 194 Return to my Native Land (Ce´saire), 18 The Revolt of the Cockroach People (Acosta), 330 Revolutionary violence, 240 Rezadora (female prayer leaders), 31 Richard of St. Victor, 731 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 372, 555–556 Rio Grande Valley, 273–275, 276–277 Rios, Father Ruben, 701 (photo) Rios, Rev. Dr. Elizabeth D., 255 Ritch, William G., 59–60 Rivail, Hippolyte Le´on Denizard (Allan Kardec), 220, 223, 225 Rivera, Charlie, 236 Rivera, Diego, 407 Rivera, Edward, 332 Rivera, Ismael, 495 Rivera, Jose´ ‘‘Papo,’’ 495 Rivera, Orlando, 377, 379 Rivera, Pedro de, 155 Rivera, Raymond, 446 Rivera, Toma´s, 330–331 Rivera-Paga´n, Luis, 476 Rivera sisters, 375 Riverside Manifesto, 661, 764 Robles, Diego de, 573 Rock of Gibraltar, 482–483 Rodrigo, King, 483 Rodriguez, Carmen Pla´, 508, 509 Rodriguez, Daniel R., 765 Rodrı´guez, Edmundo, 413 Rodrı´guez, Jeanette, 256–257, 258–259, 552 Rodrı´guez, Luis Rivera, 298, 476 Rodrı´guez, Richard, 296 Rodriguez, Samuel, 236 Rodrı´guez, Vladimir, 706 Rodrı´quez, Carlos Manuel, 475

Rojas’s Final Testament (Esparza), 226–229 Roma´n, Bishop Agustı´n, 412 Romanists, 86 Roman Missal, 718 Romano, Octavio, 177–178 The Romantics, 6 Rome (ancient), 68, 339, 381, 482 Romero, Archbishop Oscar, 297, 334, 453, 494, 496, 497, 500 Roosevelt, Theodore, 46, 50, 373 Rosa, Ambrosio, 313 Rosa de Lima, Santa, 523, 722 La Rosa de los Vientos (Blades), 494 Rosaldo, Renato, 178 Rose of Lima, Saint, 393 Roshi, Ejo Takata, 92 Ross, Fred, 130–131 Rouse, Roger, 555 Royal College and Seminary of San Carlos, Havana, 162 Rubens, Peter Paul, 391 (photo) Ruiz, Jean-Pierre, 112, 758 Run, Baby, Run (Cruz), 332, 426 Russell, Charles Taze, 312 Ruth and Naomi, 652 Rutherford, Judge, 312 Rzano, Armando Solo´, 374 Saco, Jose´ Antonio, 162 Sacraments and sacramentals, 727–736 in Baroque America, 730–733 current directions, 735–736 derived from Jewish practices, 727 historical development, 727–728, 727–730 post-Vatican II trends, 733–735 Sacrifices: ancient temple platforms for, 29 animal, 168, 280, 508, 509, 511, 578 ashe´, 503 auto-blood sacrifices, 517 human, 578, 732 La Sagrada Familia, 247 Saint Augustine, Florida, 154

Index Saints, 19–20, 80–82. See also specific saints by name Saint Vincent (island), 123 Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, 91 Salamanca, 383 Salazar, Ruben, 136 Saldivar, Jose´ David, 178 Salpointe, Archbishop Jean Baptiste, 422 Salsa (food), xiv Salsa worship, 493–495 Salvadorans, 496–498See also El Salvador/Salvadorans Salvation, 673 ‘‘anonymous Christianity,’’ 36–37 Catholic faith on, 19 as individual act, 538–539 Protestants on, 19 soteriology, 673, 739–747 Salvatrucha, Mara, 497–498 Samoe´, Cardinal Antonio, 114 San Antonio, Texas, xiv, 34, 102, 107, 209 San Antonio Meditation Center, 91 San Augustine, Florida, xiii, xiv Sa´nchez, George, 360–361 Sa´nchez, Miguel, 732 Sa´nchez, Samantha, 308 Sa´nchez-Walsh, Arlene, 687 San Cristobal, 129 Sanctuary Movement, 442–443, 444, 496–497, 498–501 San Diego, California: Mexican Filipinos, 43 Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, San Diego, 641 (photo) San Diego California Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, 378 (photo) San Diego Revolt, 371–372 Sandinistas, 115, 121, 122, 174 Sandoval, Chela, 88 Sandoval, Moises, 531–532 San Fernando Cathedral, 102 San Francisco, California, 342 (photo) Sangre azul (blue-blood), 526, 529

|

San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, 349 (photo) San Juan Basilica in McAllen, Texas, 364 (photo) San Juan Fiesta, 262 San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico, 350 San Miguel Acata´n, 129 San Miguel de Guadalupe, xiii, 153 San Salvador, 150, 368 Santa Anna, Antonio Lo´pez, 84 La Santa de Cabora (Urrea, Teresa de), 34–35, 80, 81–82, 183, 278 Santa Eulalia (parish), 383 Santa Fe, New Mexico, xiv, 60, 155, 200 (photo) Santa Marı´a de Guadalupe in Extremadura, 438 ‘‘Santa Marı´a del Camino’’ (hymn), 576 Santas Justa y Rufina (parish), 383 Santerı´a, 501–513 altars and shrines, 33, 506 (photo), 508 in America, 505–506 ancestor worship, 507 animal sacrifices, 168, 280, 511 ‘‘anonymous Santerı´a,’’ 36–38; ashe´, 37, 503, 511, 640 babalawos, 275, 502, 504 baptism, 37 bota´nica, 280 Chango´ (god of lightening and fire), 275 Cuban Americans, 168 death rituals, 224 described, 168 desyncretized in America, 280 dieties, 505, 509–513 divination systems, 508–509 doctrinal points, 506–508 Dominican Republic, 207 healers and healing, 179, 277, 279– 280, 509 historical background, 168, 279–280, 501–505 on homosexuality, 269 Ifa´, 502, 507, 512

I-51

I-52

|

Index

key figures, 509 Lucumı´, 17 olorisha priesthood, 508 origin of term, 17 Pentecostal movement, 389 ritual structures, 508–509 salsa worship influenced by, 493–495 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 223–224 symbolic religious value of Elia´ n Gonza´lez, 411 syncretism, 264, 540–541 on truth, 37 Santiago de Cuba, 161–162 Santiago de Tlatelolco Catholic Church, 369 Santiago (Saint James) de Campostela, 437–438, 485 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 116–117, 153, 303 Santos, Lucia, 569 The Santuario, 437 Santuario de Chimayo, 457 Santuario del Sen˜or de Esquipulas, 662 (photo) Sao Paulo, Brazil, 146 Saracen Moors, 339 Sarah (Old Testament), 644 Sardn˜as, Father, 172 Satanism, 193 Sata/o, 327, 329, 675 Sauhmador, 198 Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (Thomas), 332 Schillebeeckx, Edward, 733–734 Schiller, Nina Glick, 554, 556 Scholastic theologians, 710 Schoolmen theology, 733–734 Schools. See Education/schools Schopenhauer, Arthur, 480 Schulenburg, William, 343 Seabrook Farms, 40 Seattle, Washington, 281 Second Vatican Council. See Vatican II Secularism, xvi, 158, 327, 363, 513–515 Sedillo, Pablo, 52

‘‘See–judge–act,’’ 114 Segovia, Fernando F., 202, 203–204, 242, 295, 298, 649–650, 653–654 Segregation, 454 Segundo, Juan Luis, 284, 733 Selena (‘‘Queen of Tejano music’’), 34 Self-appropriation, 203–204 Self-definition, 204, 518 Self-direction, 204 Sembrador, El, 97 Senghor, Leopoldo Se´dar, 18 Sen˜or de Esquı´pulas, 437 Sen˜or del Gran Poder, 721 El Sen˜or de los Milagros, 439, 524 El Sen˜or de Quyllur Rit’i (Quispicanchi), 401 Sensus fidelium. See Popular religion Sensus fidelium, 643, 663 Separation of church and state, 17, 513–514 Sephardic Jews, 314–315 September 11, 2001, terror attacks, 306, 307 Sepu´lveda, Plinio, 706 Serantes, Archbishop Pe´rez, 172 Serra, Father Junı´pero, 155, 371 Settlement houses, 86 ‘‘Seven Cities of Gold’’ (Cibola), 154 Seven Story Mountain (Merton), 583 Seventh-day Adventists, 192, 274, 312 Sevilla, Don˜a Marı´a de, 572 Seville, 483, 485 Sexuality, 515–518 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Anzaldu´a), 87–88 ethical connections of sexuality and race, 612 female slaves as sexual objects, 387 homosexuality, 256, 269–271, 350, 447, 516, 563 machismo and sexual practices, 348 religious teachings, 515–516 sexual identity, 256, 269–271 stereotypes about Latina/os, 515–517 Tlazolteotl, 517 Seymour, William J., 410, 423, 424

Index Shambhala Meditation Center, 90–91 Shango (god of thunder and lightning), 19 Shell Oil, 220 Sherrill, John, 426 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas), 78–80, 154, 216, 217, 369, 397–398 Shrine of Our Lady of Charity, 169 Shrine of Saint Toribio, 299 Shrine of Santiago, 97 Shrines, 30, 34–36, 81–82, 437, 439. See also Altars and shrines Sikh, 44, 45, 46 Silva, Jose Inacio da, 565 Simpatia, 340 Sin, 275, 538–539 Sinaloa, Mexico, 183 The sinner’s prayer, 230 Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), 38 Sı´ntora, Jose´ Fidencio Constantino (‘‘El Nin˜o’’), 34–36, 80, 82, 181, 182, 278 Siqueyras, Don˜a Ana Mattos de, 571 Sı´ se puede, 335 Slaves/slavery, 11–21 Black Legend, 78 cabildos (social clubs), 417 Catholicism of masters, 12 Chinese laborers as alternative to African slaves, 43–44 Cuba, 501–502 domestically bred slaves in U.S., 16 emancipation of, 418 Europe’s imperial status reinforced by, 15 female slaves as sexual objects, 387 Hellenistic Empire, 12 justification for, 368 mining labor, 352 Mulatez controversy, 20–21 persistence of African religiosity in the face of Iberian colonization, 16–20, 18–20, 577–579 Portugal, 577–578 slave trade, history of, 12–16, 43–44 Tippu Tip, 14 (photo)

|

treatment of, 14–16 underground railroad, 500 Sleepy Lagoon Case, 361 Smith, Adam, 176 Smith, Brian H., 191, 434, 435 Smith, Joseph, 374, 375, 378 Smith, Oregon v., 396 Snake Skirt (Coatlicue), 63–64 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 138 Sobrino, Jon, 297, 453 Soccer war, 121 Social capital, 444 Social Christianity, 72 Social justice, 70, 109, 129, 317–324, 687. See also Liberation theology/theologians Social theory, 176 Social transformation (orthopraxis), 300 Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, 315 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 548 So Far From God (Castillo), 331 Solano, Francisco, 375–376 La Soldadera (soldier woman), 570–571 Soldado, Juan, 80, 82, 723 Solivan, Samuel, 300, 415–416, 623 Somosa, Anastasio, 121 Songoro Cosongo (Guillen), 18 Sonny (Arguinzoni), 24 Sonora, Mexico, 183, 375 Sorbazo, Jorge, 706 Sorcery. See Witchcraft (brujerı´a) Sosa, Juan, 760 Sosa, Lionel, 56 Soteriology, 673, 739–747 South America/ns, 518–525 Catholic, xvi diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 386–387 diversity of, 519 geographic groupings, 518 immigration, 518, 518–519, 519–521 Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 liberation theologians, 522

I-53

I-54

|

Index

literature, 334 religious contributions, 522–525 slave trade, 12 statistics, 518–519 See also specific nations by name Southern Baptist Convention, 373, 465, 487, 489 Southwest Pastoral Institute, 76 Soviet Union, 165. See also Communism Spain/Spaniards, 525–536 altars and shrines, 29–30 Audiencia, 217 Bible banned in Latin America by, 231 Black Legend, 78–80 blanqueamiento (whitening), 480 cathedrals, 400–401 Catholicism during colonial period, 100–101, 532–533 celebrations of independence from, 126 chivalry and male honor, 339–340 colonies, overview, xiii–xiv, xviii, xix Colonization Act (1824), 373 conversion of Jews by, 157, 314–315, 459 Cuba colonized by, 161–162 Cursillos de Cristiandad, 490 devotion to saints, 534–535 discovery of new medicines, 273 encomienda system, 149, 215–217 encouraged by the Crown to marry Amerindians, 217, 398 expulsion of Jews from, 157, 314– 315, 367–368, 526 Fiesta, 262 Hispanic pneumatological heritage, 710–711 home chapels, 30 household demographics, xvii income, xviii indigenous collaboration with, 527–529 indigenous peoples of Americas decimated by, 13

indigenous women as victims of conquest, 398, 529, 570–571 institutional contributions, 530–531 Islamic invasion of, 381, 382–383 Kingdom as amalgamation of kingdoms and regions, 530 language, xvii, 531–532 legacy for Hispanic American religious culture, 525–535 median age, xvii mining, 352 as mixture of people and cultures, 526 Moors, 263, 307 Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 national messianism as result of Columbus’s discoveries, 485 Philippine Islands ruled by, 42, 43 Popol Vuh, 398 popular Catholicism vs. rule of, 100–101 prelude to Spanish Conquest, 525–527 Puerto Rico, 263, 470–471, 473–474 racial hierarchy in America, 356, 385 Reconquista, 147–149, 367–370, 480, 482–486, 526 retablos, 8 Romanization of, 381 sangre azul (blue-blood), 526 Santa Marı´a del Pilar, 574 slave trade, 12–13 Spanish Bible, 460, 461–462 Spiritism’s appeal to freedom fighters, 222 Treaty of Tordesillas, 513 Tridentine Catholicism, 103–104 union of church and state, 513, 522 Virgin Mary, 533–535 warring tribes of Native Americans, 396 White Legend, 80 See also Conquistadores Spanglish, xv, 53, 326, 473 Spanish-American War, xix, 26, 46, 150, 154, 164, 474, 528

Index Spanish Inquisition: vs. Alumbrados, 711 Black Legend, 79 brujeria, 503 conversos (marranos), 157, 314–315, 459 loyalty and faithfulness to the Catholic Church during, 459–460 Quietism censored by, 393 Santerı´a, 503 violent measures of, 79 Spanish (language): Arabic influence, 532 assumption that all Hispanics speak Spanish, xv Latino identity and, 325 Spanglish, xv, 53, 326, 473 Spanish-speaking priests, 191 statistics, 325 Tex–Mex, 53 See also Language Sparks, David, 536 Speaking in tongues (glossolalia), xx, 95, 189, 423, 489–490 Spellman, Cardinal Francis, 473 Spencer, Herbert, 480 Spengler, Oswald, 480 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 220–229 African-based religions influenced by, 223 beliefs and teachings, 221 demographics, 190 described, xx–xxi healers and healing, 179, 279 Latino/a population, 193 for marginalized communities, 223 origins, 220–221, 225, 749 progressive and individualist underpinnings, 221 See also Spirituality Spiritist Codification (Kardec), 220, 223 Spiritual Canticle (John of the Cross), 392 Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius of Loyola), 392 The Spiritual Guide (Molinos), 393 Spiritual hybridity, 536–537. See also Syncretism

|

La spiritualite´ Chre´tienne (Pourrat), 753 Spirituality, 749–760 arte (art), 757–758 Christocentrism, 759 corazo´n (heart), 755–757 historical development, 749–755 latina/o spiritualities, 758–760 origin of term, 750, 754, 756 Spiritualogians, defined, 754 stages of, 754–755 Stanley, Henry Morton, 14 (photo) Stations of the Cross, 686 Stavans, Ilan, 292, 316–317, 356 Stereotypes of Hispanics, 27, 515–517 Stevens, Evelyn, 348 Stock, Simon, 572 The Story of Christianity (Gonza´lez), 658 Street knowledge, street fashion, and street entrepreneurialism, 285–286 Structural assimilation, 49, 58 Structural sin, 538–539 Student Association, 138 Student movement, 135, 137–138 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 138 Student Volunteer Movement, 72 Suarez, Ursula, 393 Suenens, Cardinal Leon Joseph, 427 Suffragists, 253 Sugar plantations, 12, 13, 501, 577–578 Sugar rituals, 198 Suicide, 281 Summa Theologica (Thomas Aquinas), 691 Sunday Schools, 461 Supernatural phenomenon. See also Spiritism (Espiritismo) Sur 13, 498 Susto, 274, 755 Sutherland, Alexander, 460 Swedish missionaries, 429 Symbolo catholico indiano (Ore´), 731 Syncretism, 539–541 described, 85, 399–401, 417, 536– 537, 540

I-55

I-56

|

Index

Enigmatic Powers (PARAL), 548 imbalance of power, 85 limitations of term, 19, 405 origin of term, 539–540 slaves, 417, 540–541 Syrians, 123 Szanton Blanc, Christina, 554 Tabasco, Mexico, 424 Taifa Kingdoms, 483 Taı´nos, 396, 470, 472, 475–476, 558 Tamborito, 125 Ta´mez, Elsa, 407, 453 Tanquerey, Adolphe, 753 Taoism, 193, 715 Tarango, Yolanda, 383–384 Tariq Ibn-Ziyad, 482–483 Tarot cards, 715 Tatica from Higuey, 207 Taussig, Michael, 176–177 Taxes, 211, 446–447 Teachers. See Education/schools El Teatro Campesino, 132, 137 Techne, 691 Teen Challenge, 24, 426 Tehueco people, 183 Tejano/as, 291 Temple platforms, 29 Temple Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, 65 Temporary Protected Status (TPS), 121, 122 Tenochitlan, 29 ‘‘Ten Years’ War,’’ 163, 528 Teologı´a de conjunto (collaborative theology), 118–119, 661, 676–678, 761–771 Teologı´a de la liberacio´n (Gutie´rrez). See A Theology of Liberation (Gutie´rrez) Teotl-Dios, 640 Tepeyac Association, 619 (photo) Teresa de Jesus, Santa, 512 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 391–392, 574, 711, 749 Terms of Survival (Cofer), 333 Testimonios, 543–545, 687

Tewa people, 30 Texas: annexation, 150 Colonization Act (1824), 373 independence, 357 Latino/as population, xiv, xv natural resources, xix tejano/as, 291 Tex–Mex (language), 53 Tezcatlipoca, 537 Tezozo´moc, Alvarado, 58 Theological and Religious Education, 545–550 Theological anthropology, 551–553, 639, 667–668 A Theology of Human Hope (Alves), 241 A Theology of Liberation (Gutie´rrez), 3, 5, 114, 241, 523, 693 Theoria, 690, 692 Theosophy, 479, 481 Theravada Buddhism, 89–90, 91 They Speak with Other Tongues (Sherrill), 426 Third World liberation theologies, 762 Third World products, 115 Thomas, Piri, 332, 473 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 246, 691, 710, 728–729 Thomas the Apostle, Saint, 407, 732 Thompson, James, 372 Thomson, John Francis, 372 Three Kings, 265 Three Kings Day Parade and Festival (Parada y Festival de Los Reyes Magos), 127 (photo), 169–170 Tibetan Buddhism, 91 Tijerina, Reies Lo´pez, 63, 133, 136, 138–140, 139 (photo) Tillich, Paul, 7, 618 Timoteo (Cruz), 495 Tippu Tip, 14 (photo) Tirres, Chris, 9 Tlaloc (rain god), 29, 195 Tlazolteotl, 517 Tobacco plantations, 13, 501

Index El Todopoderoso (Lavoe), 495 Toledo, Spain, 379–380, 381, 483, 484, 711 Toltecs, 28, 29, 407 Toma´s Rivera Policy Institute, 97 Tomorrow’s Child (Alves), 241 Tonantzin/Coatlicue, 30–31, 64, 85, 196, 241, 407 Topiltzin Quetzalco´atl, 407 Toribia, Marı´a, 458 Toribio, San, 299 Toronto Blessing Revival, 433 Torres, Camilio, 174 Torres, Nestor, 93 Torres, Rodolfo, 178 Torrey, Reuben A., 72, 409 Tortillas Again (film), 181 Tortugas, 351 Totonicapa´n, Guatemala, 129 ‘‘Toward a Hermeneutics of the Diaspora’’ (Segovia), 242 ‘‘Toward a Theology of Ecclesial Lay Ministry’’ (University of Dayton), 76 Toxcatl Panquetzaliztli ceremony, 64–65 Tozozontli (festival), 63–64 TPS (Temporary Protected Status), 121, 122 Tracy, David, 616 Trade. See Economy Traditioning, 612 Transculturacio´n, 21–22 ‘‘Transnational America’’ (Bourne), 553 Transnationalism, 553–557 Treasures Out of Darkness (Arguinzoni), 25 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: citizenship granted to Mexicans by, 59, 60–61 formative years following, 59, 357 La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (The Federal Land-Grant Alliance) on regaining land, 136, 139–40 land ceded by, xix, 59–61, 83–84, 375, 379, 553

|

post-treaty violence, 84 terms, 84 Treaty of Mesilla, 441 violated by U.S., 133, 138–139 Treaty of Mesilla, 441 Treaty of Paris, 46, 474 Treaty of Tordesillas, 513 Trejo, Alonso y Antonio, 207 Los Tres Juanes (the Three Johns), 572 Tres Reyes Magos, 265 Trinidad, 387 The Trinity, 558–560 diversity as quality of, 559–560 familia, 559 Hispanic reinterpretation of, 559, 664–665 oppressive societal structures as dysfunctional Trinitarian systems, 559 rejected by Oneness Pentecostals, 192 retablos, 8 through the experience of community, 145, 558–559 Trinitarian controversy, 589 Triplex munis (triple offices), 590 Triumph of the Holy Cross, 458 Tropico Negro (Cabral), 18 Trujillo, Bishop Alfonso Lo´pez, 114 Trujillo, Horacio, 97 Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas, 205 Trungpa Rinpoche, Cho¨gyam, 91 Tucson, Arizona, 4 (photo) Tuncap, Michael, 536 Tun tun de pasa y griferia (Matos), 18 Turks, 123 Turner, Kay, 32, 33 ‘‘Two Places and No Place on Which to Stand’’ (Segovia), 242 Txotxile people, 401 Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934), 42–43, 46 Tzeltal communities, 92 Tzoalli, 195 Tzotzopaztli, 195 Tzutujil Maya, 9

I-57

I-58

|

Index

UCKG (University Church of the Kingdom of God), 564–565 UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara), 63, 140–141 Umayyad Caliphs, 482–484 Umbanda, 223 Unaffiliated populations, xvi, 514. See also Atheists Unamuno, Miguel de, 532 Un bembe pa’ Yemaya´ (Colo´n), 494 Undocumented ‘‘immigrants,’’ xv, 361, 362, 378, 397 (photo), 442–444, 446. See also Sanctuary Movement Unio´n de Cubanos en el Exilio, 173 United Farm Workers (UFW), 107, 131– 133, 137, 138, 219, 363, 442, 514 United Methodist Church, 466, 467, 489, 548 United States: armed forces, 361 Catholic Charismatic movement, 425 expansion of Christianity within, xiii–xiv history of conquest and annexation, xix home ownership, xviii Japanese immigrants, 38–39 natural resources, xix Philippines claimed by, 42 political interventions in Latin America, 443, 496–497, 618 political parties, 561–563 tax code, 211 World War II, internment of Japanese people, 40–41 World War II, war with Japan, 40–41 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), 52, 111 Unitive Way, 753 Unity, 215, 266, 323–324 University Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), 564–565 University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), 63, 140–141 University of Dayton, 76 University of Notre Dame, 426

University of Paris, 710 Urbanization, 106, 229 Urban pastoral, 117–118 Urban Training Centers (UTC), 24–25 Urrabazo, Father Rosendo, 213 Urrea, Teresa de (La Santa de Cabora), 34–35, 80, 81–82, 183, 278 Uruguay/Uruguayans: immigration, 518, 520 income, xviii La Virgen de los Treinta y Tres, 575 median age, xvii poverty levels, xviii shrines, 440 war of independence, 575 USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops), 52, 111 U.S. Census, 38, 487, 487–489, 518 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 219 USS Maine, 528 U.S. political parties, 561–563 U.S. Virgin Islands, 313 Utah, 374–379 UTC (Urban Training Centers), 24–25 Vajradhatus (meditation centers), 90–91 Vajrayana Buddhism, 90, 91 Valdez, A. C., 429 Valdez, Juan de, 460 Valdez, Luis, 137 Valdez, Susie, 424 Valencia, 484 Valenzuela, Romanita Carbajal de, 429 Vallejo, Linda, 33 Vann, Diana Siegel, 317 Van Praagh, James, 278 Varela, Maria, 138 Varela y Morales, Fe´lix, 162–163, 166 Vargas, Don Diego de, 155, 486 Vasconcelos, Jose´, 9–10, 353, 479–481, 674, 735 ´ Vasquez, Fray Francisco, 497 Va´squez, Manuel, 300 Va´squez de Ayllo´n, Lucas, xiii, 153 Vatican I, 455

Index Vatican II: ‘‘anonymous Christianity,’’ 37 basic theological principles affirmed by, 763–764 on biblical reading, 109–110 on Christian unity, 146–147 Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) to promote, 112–114 on diversity in the liturgy, 380 ecclesial life and doctrinal formulations updated by, 68, 69 ecumenicalism brought about by, 455 on lay participation and leadership, 105, 145 on popular religion, 713–714 purpose of, 523 reaction of church leaders to, 763–764 on social justice, 129 on worship and sacraments, 682–683 Vazquez, Cristina, 144 (photo) Vega, Bernardo, 331–332 Vega, Ed, 332 Vega, Inca Garcilaso de la, 395–396 Vega, Toni, 495 Vejigantes, 263 Velazquez, Refugio, 409 Vela´zquez de Cue´llar, Diego, 161, 216 Venezuela/Venezuelans: African heritage, 355 baseball, 207 Cacique natives, 575 Catholic Charismatic movement, 425, 427 education, xviii foreign born, xvii German Lutheran settlement, 370 immigration, 518 Nuestra Sen˜ora de Coromoto, 575 shrines, 440 Verbo, 667 El Vez, 88 Via Crucis, 4 (photo), 5, 686, 687 Via dolorosa (sorrowful way), 415

|

Victory Outreach (Alcance Victoria), 23–25, 88, 423, 433 Vida cotidiana. See Lo cotidiano (daily life) La Vida de la Santa Madre Teresa de Jesus (Teresa of Avila), 392 Vidal, Jaime, 716, 736 Vieques, 470, 471 El Viernes Santo (Good Friday), 4 (photo), 5, 456 (photo), 457, 619 (photo), 641 (photo) La Vie Spirituelle (Tanquerey), 753 Vietnam Era, 135 Villa, Pancho, 80, 81 (photo), 82 Villafan˜e, Eldin, 491, 623, 667 Villarreal, Jose Antonio, 330 Villasen˜or, Victor, 331 La Violada (raped woman), 570–571 Violence: gangs, 23–25, 126, 426, 497–498, 583–585 institutionalized, 300–306 oppressive regimes, xx, 120–121, 297, 496, 498, 499–500 permitted by hermeneutical circle, 284 revolutionary violence, 240 Virgen de Chiquinquira, 522 La Virgen de Guadalupe. See Our Lady of Guadalupe La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, 168, 402, 439 Virgen del Pozo, 345 La Virgen de Remedios, 65, 152 La Virgen de San Juan de los lagos del Valle de Texas, 439 Virgen de Suyapa, 124 Virgin de San Juan de Los Lagos in Mexico, 439 Virgin Mary, 567–577 Assumption, 569 Catholic Charismatic movement on, 97 Christocentric dimension, 568 as Coatlalopeuh, 358 doctrines regarding Mary, 341

I-59

I-60

|

Index

Ecclesiotypical dimensions, 568 as ideal symbol of virgin and mother, 247, 341, 347–348 Immaculate Conception of, 569 incorporated within Santerı´a, 37 Native Americans on, 534 as the New Eve, 568, 569 as Our Lady of Providence, 472 Perpetual Virginity, 569 as Queen of May, 457 respect for feminine deities symbolized by, 87 search for inn, 644 song of the anawim, 642–643 Virgin-Whore dichotomy, 516–517 as warrior figure for the Spanish, 534 See also Marian devotions Virgin of Guadalupe. See Our Lady of Guadalupe Virgin of Montserrat, 533 Virgin of the Rosary, 522 Visigothic era, 381, 382, 482–483, 532 Vivar, Rodrigo Dı´az de, 484 Voodoo, 207, 577–582, 580 (photo) Voter registration drives, 361, 561 Voting Rights Act (1965), 253 Voudoun, 502 Wahlberg, John, 313 Walker, Theron, 296 Walkout (film), 442 Walsh, Monsignor Bryan O., 410–412 The War Brides Act, 43, 46 War on Poverty, 135 Watchtower (Russell), 312 Water spirits, 717 The Way of Perfection (Teresa of Avila), 392 Way of the Cross, 686 Weber, Max, 176, 450 Wesley, John, 415, 618 West, Cornel, 16 Whipple, Bishop Benjamin, 233 White Legend, 80 White supremacy, 16–17, 20 Whitson, R. E., 145

Who Are We? Challenges to America’s National Identity (Huntington), 55– 56, 515 Wilkerson, David, 24, 426 Wilson, Woodrow, 50 Witchcraft (brujerı´a), 179, 193, 274– 275, 417–419, 503, 537 Women: Abuelita (little grandmother) theology, 347 abuse vs., 125, 398, 529, 570–571 altars, 33 within Catholic Charismatic movement, 95–96, 97 Chicano Movement, 137–138 education and occupational status, 125, 250, 257–258, 321 Espiritualistas, 224, 226 extended families, 126 female slaves as sexual objects, 387 gender roles, 246–247, 249, 250 grassroots Christianity usually led by, 716, 724 as healers, 278 Las Hermanas (The Sisters), 107, 213, 363, 413–414, 764 Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church, 661–662 Latina evange´lica theology, 327–329 Latino/a literature, 331 legal system of Roman law, 339 machista attitudes, 247 Marianismo, 341, 346–348 marimacha, 339 Mujerista theology, 158–159, 259– 260, 335–337, 383–385, 552, 673, 736 Mujerista theology, Isasi-Dı´az on, 242, 252, 258, 648, 744–745 Muslims, 307–308 parteras (midwives), 31 Pentecostal movement, 429, 433 rezadora (female prayer leaders), 31 sexual behavior of, 348 as single parents, 249, 250 El Teatro Campesino, 137

Index Virgin Mary mystique as ideal, 347– 348 See also Feminist movement/ theory Wood, Leonard, 164 Workers’ rights campaigns. See United Farm Workers (UFW) World’s Columbian Exposition, 89, 150 World’s Fair (New York, 1964), 376 World’s Parliament of Religions, 89–90 World War I: National Catholic War Council, 111 Puerto Rico, 471 U.S. demand for labor during, 121 World War II: Bracero Program, 361 Fiance´e Act (1946), 43 Filipinos in U.S. military, 42 internment camps, 40, 46 Pearl Harbor attack, 40 Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals, 40 War Brides Act (1945), 43, 46 X, Malcolm, 525, 583 Xilonen, 241 Xinca people, 123 Xiuhcoatl (serpent), 64 Xochiquetzal, 517 Xolotl (Lord of the Underworld and the God of Lightning), 63, 407 Yaqui people, 183 Ybor, Vicente Martinez, 163 Ybor City, Florida, 163 Yemaya´, 512–513 Yemaya y Ochun (La India), 493–494 Yerba buena (mint), 275–276 Yerberos/yerbateros, 180, 277 Yip, Mike, 44 Yoruba people, 17, 263–264, 279–280, 417, 501–505, 507, 512, 540–541. See also Santerı´a Young Lords Organization (YLO), 442, 583–585

|

Young Lords Party (YLP), 583–585 Youth: acculturation of, 248 baptism, 729 at Bible institutes, 74 family structure, 249–250 gangs and violence, 497–498, 583–585 hip-hop culture, 285–286 Hispanic school-age children statistics, 454 immigration, 518 la bendicio´n sought from older relatives, 247–248 Operation Pedro Pan, 167, 410–412 preferential option for the young, 452, 453 Presentation of Children, 734 Quincean˜era, 126, 144 (photo), 241, 245, 257, 266, 735 susceptible to the evil eye and mal aire, 751, 752 youth movement, 72, 135, 137–138, 140, 141, 361–362 youth organizations, 361–362, 426, 442 See also Education/schools Yuba Sikh Parade, 46 Yucatan Peninsula, 153 Yupanqui, Francisco Tito, 571–572 Zaccaria, Saint Anthony Mary, 472 Zacchi, Cesare, 174 Zambo, 352 Zangwill, Israel, 50 Zapata, Dominga, 757 Zavala, Bishop Gabino, 684 (photo) Zempoalxochitl, 198 Zen Buddhism, 91, 92 Zion’s Watchtower and Herald of Christ’s Presence (Russell), 312 Zoot-suit riots, 361 Zubirı´a, Bishop, 421–422 Zumarraga, Bishop, 570, 573 Zuni Nation, 195

I-61

Hispanic American Religious Cultures

Selected titles in ABC-CLIO’s American Religious Cultures series African American Religious Cultures Anthony B. Pinn, Editor Asian American Religious Cultures Fumitaka Matsuoka and Jane Naomi Iwamura, Editors Hispanic American Religious Cultures Miguel A. De La Torre, Editor

Hispanic American Religious Cultures

VOLUME 2: N–Y, ESSAYS

Miguel A. De La Torre, Editor

Copyright © 2009 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hispanic American religious cultures / Miguel A. De La Torre, editor. p. cm. – (American religious cultures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–59884–139–8 (hardcopy : alk. paper) – ISBN 978–1–59884–140–4 (ebook) 1. Hispanic Americans–Religion–Encyclopedias. I. De La Torre, Miguel A. BL2525.H57 2009 200.89’68073—dc22 2009012661

13 12 11 10 9

1 2 3 4 5

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

To the millions of Hispanic congregations throughout the United States, accept this encyclopedia as our way of worshipping the Creator with all of our minds.

Contents

Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii

VOLUME 1 PART 1 ENTRIES Acompan˜amiento 3 Aesthetics 6 Africans 11 Ajiaco Christianity 21 Alcance Victoria 23 Alienation 26 Altars and Shrines 28 Anonymous Santerı´a 36 Asians 38 Assimilation 47 Aztla´n 58 Base Communities 67 Bible Institutes 71 Black Legend 78 Border Saints 80 Borderlands 83 Buddhism 89 Catholic Charismatic Movement 95 Catholicism 98 CELAM 113

Central Americans 119 Cha´vez, Ce´sar 130 Chicano Theology 133 Chicano/a Movement 135 Comunidad 142 Conquistadores 147 Conversion 156 Lo Cotidiano 158 Cuban Revolution 160 Cuban Americans 171 Cultural Anthropology 176 Curanderismo 179 Demographics 187 Dı´a de los Muertos 195 Diaspora Theology 200 Dominican Americans 205 Economics 209 Ecumenism 213 Encomienda 215 Environmentalism 218 vii

viii

|

Contents Espiritismo 220 Espiritualismo 224 Evange´lico/a 230 Exilio 237 Familia 245 Feminism 251 Fiesta 261 GLBT 269 Health Care 273 Hermeneutical Circle 283 Hip-Hop and Graffiti 285 Identity (Latino/a vs. Hispanic) 289 Immigration 294 Institutionalized Violence 301 Islam 306 Jehovah’s Witnesses 311 Jews 314

Justice 317 Language 325 Latina Evange´lica Theology 327 Literature 330 La Lucha 335 Machismo 339 Marian Devotions 341 Marianismo 346 Matachines 348 Mestizaje 351 Mexican Americans 357 Mission System 367 Mormons/Latter-day Saints 374 Mozarabic Rite 379 Mujerista 383 Mulatez 385 Mysticism 390

Index I-1

VOLUME 2 Native Americans 395 Nepantla 403 Olaza´bal, Francisco 409 Operation Pedro Pan 410 Ortega, Gregoria 413 Orthopathos 414 Palo 417 La Pastorela 419 Penitentes, Los Hermanos 421 Pentecostalism 423 Pilgrimage 436 Political Involvement 440 Postcolonialism 447 Postmodernism 449 Preferential Options 452 Private Religious Schools 454 Processions 456 Protestantism 458 Puerto Ricans 469 Raza Co´smica 479 Reconquista 482 Religious Affiliation 487

Renewalist Movement 489 Salsa Worship 493 Salvadorans 496 Sanctuary Movement 498 Santerı´a 501 Secularism 513 Sexuality 515 South Americans 518 Spaniards 525 Spiritual Hybridity 536 Structural Sin 538 Syncretism 539 Testimonios 543 Theological and Religious Education 545 Theological Anthropology 551 Transnationalism 553 Trinity 558 U.S. Political Parties 561 Universal Church of the Kingdom of God 564 Virgin Mary 567

Contents Voodoo 577 Young Lords Party 583

PART 2 ESSAYS Christology 589 Ecclesiology 599 Epistemology 611 Eschatology 615 Ethics 627 God 637 Hermeneutics 647 Latino/a Theology 657 Liberation Theology 671 Liturgy and Worship 681 Orthopraxis 689 About the Editor 773 List of Contributors 775 Index I-1

Pastoral Care and Counseling 699 Pneumatology 709 Popular Religion 713 Sacraments and Sacramentals 727 Soteriology 739 Spirituality 749 Teologia en Conjunto 761

|

ix

N Dessalines D’Orbigny, in his El hombre americano: Atlas e ´ı ndice alfabe´ tico listed over 250 different ethnocultural and religious groups. While Aztecs, Maya, and Inca, along with their descendants, have dominated the landscape, a greater diversity of indigenous communities exists, which cannot be reduced to just these three ancient civilizations. Native American nations are identified by their ethnocultural and religious composition, as well as by the regions they inhabit. When these indigenous nations encountered Europeans, they influenced, impacted, and contributed to the transformation of European versions of Christianity. These influences can be found throughout Latin America and among U.S. Latina/os.

NATIVE AMERICANS While the term ‘‘Native Americans’’ commonly refers to the numerous indigenous communities located in the United States, here it also refers to the various indigenous peoples in Central and South America. Many of these groups display a diverse array of cultural and religious practices that preserve direct continuity with the primal religions and cultures of their ancestors. For five centuries, these groups have been in direct contact, clash, and interaction with the dominant mestizo culture and local versions of Christianity. These are not dead religious traditions, but in many places represent dynamic thriving communities in which their religious activities, customs, rituals, and traditions are part of the very life of their communities. The nations of Native Americans are not one homogeneous large group dispersed throughout the continent. Although no consensus exists as to how many ethnic and cultural groups presently populate the Americas, Alcide

Prior to the Encounter Marked ethnic, cultural, territorial, and religious differences among some of the indigenous nations have historically led to violent encounters. For example, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega writes that the 395

396 |

Native Americans

PEYOTE Peyote (from Nahuatl peyotl) is a cactus native to southern Texas and northern Mexico, which many U.S. and Mexican Indians ritually consume as sacred medicine. Peyote contains mescaline, a chemical producing altered states of consciousness that can include visions. Although peyote is a controlled substance under U.S. and Mexican law, the state of Texas allows it to be harvested and sold to American Indians, a carefully regulated business historically led by Spanish-surnamed families. Mexican Indians have used peyote for thousands of years; the Huichols still make an annual 300-mile pilgrimage to peyote grounds near San Luis Potosı´. Ritual peyote use, sometimes syncretized with Christian symbols, became established on U.S. Indian reservations beginning in the 1880s and was incorporated in 1918 as the Native American Church. Peruvian American Carlos Castaneda helped popularize peyote among the spiritual counterculture of the 1960s–1970s. In a widely criticized 1990 ruling, Oregon v. Smith, the U.S. Supreme Court denied First Amendment protection to peyotists, but subsequent legislation and court rulings in both the United States and Mexico have expanded protection for religious peyote use. While the Mexican government safeguards Huichol peyote grounds, peyote supplies in Texas are threatened by overharvesting and expanded ranching and mining. —JCD

Inca people tended to function like an empire, invading the neighboring tribes, and assimilating them under the assumption that they were improving their existence. For different reasons, the Mexica people of the plains of central Mexico were also characterized as a military people, warring with neighboring tribes. Eventually, these tribes helped the Spaniards defeat the Mexica. While war was a part of some of these indigenous communities, it was considered a way for tribe members to demonstrate their bravery. In some cases, like the Arauca people of Chile, the purpose was not to destroy the opponent’s warriors or village but to improve one’s military skills. In the same way, there were other tribes, like the Taı´nos of the Caribbean, who promoted peace. For indigenous peoples, religion is considered integral to their lives and

cultures. Discussions of religious practices, customs, or beliefs are interconnected with all other aspects of life. According to their worldview (cosmovision), the entire universe originated from and is permeated by sacred energies that appear in many forms, as diverse natural beings, and through determining events. They conceive life holistically rather than the Western European individualistic worldview. One commonality among indigenous peoples is their understanding of a unique powerful force that sustains all of life. This is identified by various names by different groups: Kukulkan (Quiche), Pachacamac and Quollana Amo (Quechua, Aymara), and more generally The Great Mysterious. These names are not equivalent to the Christian notion of God. The use of the contemporary The Great Spirit already displays a

Native Americans

| 397

Felipe Martinez uses an eagle feather to fan copal smoke at a banner with an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, during a Native American cleansing ceremony on March 6, 2006. Martinez is one of twelve day laborers on a 3,000-mile, twomonth run from Santa Monica, California, to New York City to raise awareness of discrimination faced by undocumented immigrants. (Getty Images)

Christian influence attempting to reduce the reality of the sacred force into a being. For indigenous communities there is no radical dichotomy between the spiritual and material worlds. The Great Mysterious is not understood as an entity separate from the rest of creation, but as one with the totality of all that is, permeating all of life and reality. Indeed, for the indigenous communities the spiritual world and the material world are so interconnected that one’s lifestyle and experiences reach out to both dimensions.

The Encounter In 1492 the Spanish (and Portuguese) arrived at what today we call the

Americas. According to Columbus’s diary they first landed in the islands of the Caribbean (Cuba and Santo Domingo). On the continent, their invasion was systematic. They targeted the places with the largest concentration of natives: Herna´ n Corte´ z in Me´ xico, Francisco Pizarro in Peru´ , Diego de Alvarado among the Mayas of Guatemala, and ´ vila in Nicaragua. Their Pedro Arias de A goals were to ensure the submission of the indigenous peoples to the Spanish crown, the collection of gold and riches, and the Christianization of the inhabitants. Clashes between the Spanish and the Natives ensued. In his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies Bartolome´

398 |

Native Americans

POPOL VUH The Popol Vuh (or Popol Wuj, ‘‘Council Book’’) is a collection of Maya myths, one of the few indigenous religious texts not destroyed during the Spanish Conquest. The surviving text was composed in Guatemala in the K’iche’ language, written in Roman script during the 1550s, based on a hieroglyphic version that has not survived. The book recounts the creation of the world and of human beings, the exploits of the twin gods Hunahpu and Xbalanque, and the early migrations and wars of the K’iche’. Genealogies of their rulers down to the Spanish Conquest are also recorded. Since the 1990s, Maya Christians influenced by inculturation theology have reclaimed the Popol Vuh as scripture, reading it alongside the Bible in settings such as the Mass. Theosophists have claimed that the Popol Vuh contains parallels to their own doctrines; Mormons have made analogous claims (among them Allen J. Christenson, who has published academic translations of the Popol Vuh). More loosely, Maya cosmology has inspired New Age authors Daniel Pinchbeck and Mexican American Jose´ Argu¨elles. —JCD

de Las Casas records how the Caribbean natives were decimated. With the superior weaponry and horses of the Spanish the various indigenous tribes of the continent did not fair better. Millions of indigenous peoples died in battle, thousands of others were tortured and forced to accept Christianity, and countless others died because of diseases brought by the Europeans for which the natives did not have the immunity. As the clashes intensified, the worst victims of the Spanish invasion became the indigenous women. Thousands were violently abused and raped, and thousands of others, as spoils of war, were taken as concubines by the Spanish. As a result many mixed children were born. Labeled mestizo/as, these children were rejected by the Spanish people, the Catholic Church, and the indigenous. Spanish colonial society rejected them because of their mixed background. They were considered contaminated because of their indigenous blood. Among the Christian missionaries, many abhorred their presence because they thought that

mestizos embodied the libertine ways of the Spanish males and the sexual insatiability of indigenous women. Originally the Spanish crown encouraged marriages between noble Spanish and indigenous royal families, but most mestizo/as carried the stigma of illegitimacy because they were born out of wedlock. The indigenous peoples saw the mestizo/as as a reminder of their experience of rape and despoliation. This was exacerbated as many mestizos adopted their Spanish fathers’ behavior by raping indigenous women, as narrated by Guama´n Poma de Ayala. Over time, the mestizo/as grew in number, and those who were children of noble Spaniards integrated Spanish colonial societies. Most mestizo/as, however, remained in an ambiguous existence from which they carved their own social space and identity as mixed people. The colonial caste societies started to crumble and turned into pigmentocracies, so many light skin mestizo/as claimed to be Spanish and denied their indigenous ancestry. By the time of the

Native Americans wars of independence, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, mestizo/as had become the dominant ethnocultural group. They, along with the few criollos remaining, were the protagonist in constructing the postindependence societies and nations imitating the EuropeanSpanish cultural and religious world. In these new societies, indigenous and African peoples were sentenced to the margins. Through policies of Spanish literacy programs, systematic military invasions, and dispossession of lands, as well as economic pressures, the indigenous peoples were persecuted and condemned to assimilate the mestizo cultures and to remain on the fringes of the mestizo social fabric.

A Continuous Struggle For five centuries the indigenous peoples of the Americas have struggled to survive and preserve their cultural and religious heritage. Their efforts received a new impetus as new movements emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. Also, with the birth of liberation theologies and the impact of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the attitude of the Catholic Church has changed toward indigenous religious traditions and practices. They were once considered an expression of devil worship, but now there are movements attempting to reclaim indigenous traditions as legitimate expressions of faith. This is also the case among some mainline denominations, i.e., the Anglicans and Presbyterians. Reclaiming their cultures and religious practices are complemented with civil activism by which the indigenous peoples struggle for their rights as citizens, for the preservation of their lands

| 399

and territories, and for their place within the social fabric of the Americas. The mobilization and creation of numerous indigenous movements, alliances, and coalitions resist the forces of global capitalism while proposing alternative ways to construct a better world. One example of the collective effort of these communities is the recent Encuentro de Pueblos Indigenas de las Americas (Encounter of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas), which took place in Sonora, Mexico, October 11–14, 2007. Many indigenous communities continue their struggle to preserve their cultures and religions after migrating. They reconstruct their communities in new geographical regions. This is exemplified by the Quiche communities in Los Angeles, the Jacaltenango Maya in Jupiter, Florida, or the various indigenous seasonal workers that migrate into the United States to work the fields.

Influencing Latino/a Religiosity The clash between indigenous peoples and the European conquistadors changed both the indigenous religions and European version of Christianity in fundamental ways. The result of these changes is seen today in various ways among Hispanics. The imposition of Christianity upon indigenous peoples gave birth to extraordinarily creative new religious expressions and symbols that incorporated both indigenous and Christian elements. European versions of Christianity and its cultures were transformed in profound and irreversible ways as demonstrated in the religious symbols and practices of Latina/os. Negatively understood as syncretistic, these new expressions are specific ways in which the indigenous peoples adopted,

400 |

Native Americans

CORN Corn has historically been the lifeblood of all the Americas. Almost every country in Latin America has its own unique national dish based on corn. Even in the United States, tortillas are the second highest selling packaged bread product—selling at a rate of one tortilla a day for every American. It is estimated that 98 percent of Hispanics eat either corn tamales or corn tortillas every day. The indigenous people who first grew corn regarded it as a sacred crop, as illustrated by ancient rock paintings. It was believed by the Mayan that the deities created humanity out of corn; hence, they came to be known as the ‘‘people of corn.’’ They honored corn in its various forms of maturation— as a seed, as a sprouting plant, and as a full-grown plant. Corn served as an appropriate sacrifice to several of the Aztecs’ agricultural deities. To this day, Hispanic farmers throughout the Americas sprinkle cornmeal on their fields during the planting season while chanting and praying for a successful crop so that it can provide health to the family and unity for the community. —MAD

adapted, and reinterpreted Christian elements without fully abandoning their primal inherited religions and practices. The claims that many indigenous peoples have ‘‘converted’’ to Christianity should not be understood as a rejection of their primal religious worldview. The interweaving of indigenous religious and Christian elements and Christian ones relates very closely to the nonexclusive cumulative quality of indigenous religions. This is what Joseph Epes Brown has termed ‘‘Polysynthesis,’’ by which he identifies the ways in which more deities can be added to the indigenous pantheon without disturbing their religious world. This religious openness and the complementary dualistic character of the indigenous religions proves a fertile ground for new religious expression in which Christian symbols are reinterpreted in terms of the indigenous religious world. For example, in Mexico the interconnection between indigenous religious and Christian results partly from the Spanish missionaries’ mistranslation of the Nahuatl word

teo´tl as ‘‘god,’’ ‘‘saint,’’ or ‘‘demon.’’ But the Aztec teo´tl signified a sacred power manifested in natural forms—a rainstorm, a tree, a mountain, or persons of high distinction such as a king, an ancestor, a warrior—or in mysterious or chaotic places. What the Spaniards translated as ‘‘god’’ really referred to a spectrum of hierophanies, which animated their world. Many of these symbols found their way into the cultural and religious context of Hispanics, pointing to the profound impact of indigenous religious and cultural traditions. What is defined as Hispanic cultural / religious ethos cannot be fully understood apart from the tapestry of indigenous and Spanish (European) religious and cultural elements. This is particularly true of architecture. The legacy of indigenous religions is found in the many basilicas that were built beginning in the sixteenth century in the various regions of the Americas. According to Sergei Gruzinski, as the Spaniards promoted the building of great cathedrals their intention was

Native Americans to build them in the Baroque style. Since they used the labor of the indigenous peoples as the builders, craftsmen, artists, and painters, the style was changed, displaying indigenous religious images and motifs. All of these, he argues, gave birth to what is commonly labeled the ‘‘American Baroque’’ architectural style. Indeed, Otto Morales Benı´tez, among others, insists that the American Baroque represents a unique way the indigenous and Spanish cultural and religious influences coalesce. The best interpretation of the Baroque is a unique expression of indigenous artistic creativity combined with resistance; refusing to be erased from history, the indigenous peoples left a rich religious and cultural legacy in the creation of sacred spaces. Because the indigenous religions displayed an operative dualism, it is not surprising to find religious groups applying such dualism to Christianity. For example, for the Poluca and Nahua people of Veracruz, Mexico, God and the Devil are not enemies but brothers. In the lowlands of Chiapas, people have saints aligned with God and with the Devil. Among other groups, the solar god has been replaced by Jesus and the Devil for the master of the animals and of the subterranean world. Among the Mayans, Jesus is frequently depicted as crosseyed. And by the Txotxile and MixePoluca Jesus is described as cross-eyed, with acne, bad body odor, pustules, and covered with flies, which is how the sun god is usually described. More specifically, sites that were traditionally part of the indigenous pantheon have now been reinterpreted as Christian shrines and popular expressions of the Christian faith. We can see this in El Sen˜ or de Quyllur Rit’i (Quispicanchi) located in

| 401

Peru, or El Cristo negro de Esquipulas, in Guatemala, which continue to attract large numbers of pilgrims throughout Latin America and Latina/os in the United States. Another aspect of the indigenous religious legacy upon Hispanic religion and culture is the cult to Mary. The strong feminine spirituality in most of the indigenous religious traditions helps explain and understand this rich and complex aspect of Latina/o religious faith expression. In many places, the Earth Mother or the Pachamama has been replaced with devotion to Mary. In other places the Pachamama is portrayed with Marian overtones. As Diego Irarra´zabal states, ‘‘Mary has been Pachamamaized and the Pachamama and its communities have been Marianized.’’ It would be a mistake to conclude that these are simply contextual expression and appropriations of devotion to Mary the mother of Jesus. Although there are Christian elements in each of the various Marys venerated by the people, a careful analysis of their origins and development reveals that these are the amalgam of indigenous and European religious elements. The various versions of Mary among Latina/o peoples are something entirely new and unique. This helps explain why Virgilio Elizondo refers to Guadalupe as a truly American expression of Mary. To him, the site of her apparition, the mention of flowers and songs, the printed image of Guadalupe on Juan Diego’s tilma, and the various indigenous religious elements incorporated in her image demonstrate that she is not a mere contextual adaptation of European Marian devotion. Guadalupe is not the only unique expression of Mary that has emerged from among the indigenous communities

402 |

Native Americans

LA LLORONA La Llorona, Weeping Woman, is an ancient tale from the indigenous religions of ancient Mexico. Cihuacoalt, the earth goddess, wept and cried in the night, while haunting the countryside. A later Mexican oral tradition tells of an indigenous woman, La Llorona, who was courted and seduced by a rich Spanish hidalgo, nobleman. Together they had two sons, but after several years together he decided to return to Spain and planned to take his sons, while leaving her behind. She became mad with grief, shrieking and wailing and attacking her lover over her loss. In her mania, she took her two sons to the river and drowned them. She then died of grief at the side of the river. When she went to the gates of heaven, she was told she could enter if she brought the souls of her two lost sons. Unable to enter heaven, La Llorona continues to roam the countryside weeping and wailing as she frantically looks for her lost children. This tragic legend is sometimes tied with the story of La Malinche, the mistress of Cortez, who is considered a traitor to her people since she translated for him aiding his conquest of the Mexican people. —TLT

and that today pervades the Hispanic religious world. Because of migration to the United States, many of these interpretations of Mary have become central to Latina/o religiosity. For example, among Cubans in the United States, La Virgen de la caridad del cobre remains a central part of people’s devotion to Mary. Other Marian expressions are Marı´a Candelaria, Marı´a de la concepcio´n, La Virgen de Cancuc, La Virgen del Carmen, and La Virgen del Rosario. According to Irarra´ zabal, these and many other Marian expressions exemplify some of the ways in which the Virgin of the Conquest was transformed into an autochthonous symbol as a result of the clash between the Spanish and the indigenous. Many of these various Marian expressions are displayed over the celebration of Easter, as people participate in the religious processions in their local communities. This is another clear example of the ways in which ‘‘indigenous Marianism’’ contributes to Hispanic manifestations of Mary.

Similar to these indigenous Marian expressions, there are also manifestations of Mary containing African religious overtones. Many of these Marian expressions are found in various ways among the Latino/as. One final element of the indigenous religious impact on Hispanic culture is in the form of festivals or fiestas. Aside from their intrinsic cultural value and their tremendous community building power, festivals among Latina/os have deep religious roots, many of which can be connected to indigenous religions and traditions that have now become part of the Hispanic cultural-religious fabric. Festivals are often intrinsically related to the celebration of Patron Saints, many of which originated with the earlier indigenous practices of revering regional deities. These Patron Saint feasts (Fiestas patronales) play a central role in entire communities among Hispanics. Although still containing religious overtones, numerous other festivals

Nepantla

| 403

reveal the pervasive indigenous influence among Hispanics. The Baile (dance) of the Toro-Venado among Nicaragu¨ ans, and the Baile de las ma´ scaras among Guatemalans represent a parody of the Spanish conquistadors. Similarly the festival of Las Cruces in New Mexico chronicles the struggles of the indigenous peoples as they confronted the Catholic Spanish conquistadors. The celebration of la Pin˜ata, reminds us of the object lessons by which Spanish missionaries instructed the indigenous peoples on how to deal with the Devil. All of these festivals and Patron Saint’s Day are colored by autochthonous dances, dishes, customs, and religious practices, many of which are characteristically indigenous in origin. There are many other popular customs and traditions that Latina/os celebrate, which help them understand the indigenous impact. One of the most popular of these is the Dı´a de los muertos (the Day of the Dead), which has intimate connections with indigenous beliefs concerning the afterlife. Other myths worth mentioning are the story of La Llorona, El Cadejo, and La Sihuamonta. It is in these and many other ways that indigenous religious traditions remain present in Hispanic cultural practices and customs. They continue to shape Hispanic religious experiences with and notions of the divine, their identity as people, and their particular understanding of Land and Church. Ne´stor Medina

de la Torre Lo´pez, Arturo E. ‘‘ ‘La ma´s rigurosa secta de nuestra religio´n’: La asociacio´n evange´lica de la misio´n israelita del nuevo pacto universal.’’ Religiones Andinas, ed. Manuel M. Marzal (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2005). Espı´n, Orlando O., and Miguel H. Dı´az, eds. From the Heart of Our People: Latino/a Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999). Irarra´zaval, Diego. Cultura y fe latinoamericanas (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Rehue Ltda.; Instituto de Estudios Aymaras, 1994). Lo´pez Austin, Alfredo. ‘‘Indigenous Mythology from Present-Day Mexico.’’ Native Religions and Cultures of Central and South America: Anthropology of the Sacred, ed. Lawrence Eugene Sullivan (New York: Continuum, 2002). Marzal, Manuel M., ed. ‘‘La Religio´n Quechua actual.’’ Religiones Andinas, vol. 4, Enciclopedia Iberoamericana de Religiones (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2005). Sullivan, Lawrence Eugene, ed. Native Religions and Cultures of Central and South America: Anthropology of the Sacred (New York: Continuum, 2002). Vecsey, Christopher, ed. Religion in North America (Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press, 1990). Yujra Mamani, Carlos. Nuestra cultura nativa es impresionante = Jiwasanakana nayra jakawinakasaxa sarnaqawinakasaxa uraqisanxa musparkan˜awa (La Paz, Bolivia: Ediciones Gra´ficas E.G., 1996).

References and Further Reading

‘‘Nepantla’’ is a Nahuatl term meaning in the middle, or the middle place. Nahuatl is the language of the Nahuas, the largest indigenous ethnic/cultural group in the central valley of Mexico during the 1500s. It is a living language and is

Brown, Joseph Epes. The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian (New York: Crossroads, 1982).

NEPANTLA

404 |

Nepantla

FLOR Y CANTO The Spanish phrase ‘‘flor y canto’’ is literally ‘‘flower and song,’’ a common Nahuatl diphrasism. A diphrasism is a compound expression like ‘‘bread and butter.’’ It is a metaphor expressing an idea or concept by using two words that are adjacent to or complement each other. This diphrasism (in xo´ chitl in cuı´catl) was used by Nahuatl philosophers (Tlamatinime) to refer to poetry, art, and symbolism as getting at the truth of human existence or as speaking truth. It is through flor y canto that humans can encounter the Giver of Life, and at the same time it is the fruit of this encounter. For this reason, the artist is the true theologian. Flor y canto may have been another way of speaking of Quetzalcoatl (feathered serpent). Flor being symbolic of the snake that crawls on the earth from which flowers come and feathers coming from the birds in heaven whose songs we hear. Flowers take the energy of the earth and transform it into beauty; songs lift the listener into heaven. Flor y canto are symbolic of the union of earth and heaven. Flor y canto were also the awaited signs of Quetzalcoatl’s return, signs that accompanied the appearances of Coatlaxopeuh (Guadalupe). —GCG

presently spoken in this region of Mexico. The word ‘‘nepantla’’ is usually attached to nouns in the Nahuatl language. For example, ‘‘tlalli’’ means land, so tlalnepantla means middle of the earth. Translated into the English language, to be ‘‘in nepantla’’ implies to be at the center. The Dominican missionary, Diego Dura´n, recorded the use of the term in a sixteenth-century conversation between himself and an Aztec elder. The elder used the term to explain the psychological space that he and his people occupied as a result of the violent imposition of Christianity upon the native peoples of ‘‘New Spain.’’ Upon further questioning about his use of the term, the elder explained, ‘‘Do not be frightened . . . they believed in God and at the same time keep their ancient customs.’’ In essence, the elder attempted to explain the native’s unwillingness to take sides in the religious conquest and their epistemological ability to provide space for

both religions to coexist in harmony, in a middle space, in nepantla, in a neutral space where one does not have power over the other. The elder’s worldview was large enough to encompass multiple manifestations of the divine and reveals the tremendous agency at work when one occupies the middle space, nepantla. Contemporary usage of the term by Latina/o writers, artists, and theologians is often employed to describe the middle space that non-White and mixed-raced persons inhabit on a daily basis. The writings of Chicana cultural theorist, Gloria Anzaldu´ a, initiated a reexamination of the term in her groundbreaking publication Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). For Anzaldu´a, straddling borders or spaces occurs ‘‘wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the pace between two individuals shrink with intimacy’’

Nepantla (1987, vii). Through her examination of the great tensions confronted by border inhabitants (mestizas and mestizos) who do not meet the standards of White America, Anzaldu´a exposed the tensions and confusion of nepantla, but also the great creativity and joy experienced by ‘‘neplanteras’’ who are participating in ‘‘the further evolution of humankind’’ (1987). For Anzaldu´ a and those she inspired, nepantla is the middle space that, if not understood from a historical, cultural, psychological, physical, and spiritual perspective, can be confusing. But once the forces of colonization and domination are understood, and one’s own integrity as a ‘‘person of color’’ is constantly nurtured, then nepantla becomes a site of meaning making and transformation. To be in the middle moves us toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. As Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´ n Espinosa write, ‘‘Being in the middle does not imply a running away —from or to another place—but rather it describes an attitude, an outlook, a worldview, a state of being in its own right’’ (2006, 1). Nepantla differs from the concept of syncretism that refers to the blending of diverse beliefs and practices into new and distinct forms. The term ‘‘syncretism’’ is often used to describe Latin American religions resulting from the European imposition of Christianity upon native religions. Scholars are realizing the limitations of this term as it can easily silence complex historical contexts, power relations, and the ‘‘phenomenological distress’’ (Carrasco 1995, 69) in which syncretic traditions evolved. According to Davı´d Carrasco, syncretism ‘‘can be useful when viewed as a ‘tool for interpretation’ rather than

| 405

a description of social patterns’’ (1995, 71). As such, he suggests the redesigning of the tool to better understand the dynamics of Latino/a cultures and religions. Redefining syncretism as shared culture, Carrasco illuminates what took place throughout colonial Latin America, in the ‘‘contact zone of incomplete and developing forms where the social and symbolic relations were permeated by conflict and loss, coercion and indigenous urging more than adherence’’ (1995, 78). Syncretism, when understood as shared culture, reveals the agency and ingenuity of the indigenous to transform Christianity for their benefit. For example, a crucifix made of corn husks conjoins the sacrifice of Christ with the sacredness of maize and ‘‘the cosmomagical powers stemming from the earth’’ (1995, 76). Syncretism as shared culture also exemplifies a middle space, and as such holds a place within nepantla, but as Klor de Alva points out, ‘‘Nepantlaism should never be confused with syncretism, which is, in both a historical and a psychological sense, the consequence of nepantalism’’ (cited in Leo´n 2004, 27). Nepantla, as a multifaceted psychological and spiritual space, provides for pre-Christian indigenous traditions and syncretic Christianity to coexist, side by side, in mutual harmony and respect. In nepantla, there is room for all. Nepantla provides a place where the indigenous elders and their descendants can survive, rest, and prosper. In the transparency of nepantla, there are no power struggles regarding who holds ‘‘the truth.’’ ‘‘Nepantla spirituality’’ attempts to bridge Christian and ‘‘pagan’’ worldviews for persons seeking to maintain ties to both. For practitioners of Nepantla spirituality, rather then being limited by

406 |

Nepantla

confusion or ambiguity, they act as subjects in deciding how diverse religious and cultural forces can or cannot work together. Like the native elder of the sixteenth century, they creatively maneuver the boundaries and borders and consciously make choices about what aspects of diverse worldviews nurture the complexity of their spiritual and biological mestizaje, and what for them enables communication with spiritual forces. Within nepantla, Chicana/os and other Latina/os can have the wisdom of both the indigenous and the Christian. For ‘‘persons of color’’ who are products of cultural and biological mestizaje within a legacy of colonization, reconciling the differences and discovering the similarities between Christian and indigenous traditions offers healing. Healing in this context is about bringing forth self-knowledge and historical consciousness so that one may claim religious agency, or the ability to determine for oneself what is morally and ethically just, and what enables communication with the divine. As one practitioner of nepantla spirituality writes, ‘‘Nepantla spirituality is a useful concept because many people feel that the Catholicism alone will not satisfy their spiritual needs. Nepantla is the common ground, where both Indigenous and Christian religions can meet’’ (Medina 2006, 265). To exist in nepantla is to live on the border, on the boundaries of cultures and social structures, where life is in constant motion, in constant fluidity. To be in nepantla also means to be in the center of things, to exist in the middle places where all things come together. Nepantla, the center place, is a place of balance, a place of equilibrium, or as discussed earlier a place of chaos and confusion.

Border people, las mestizas y los mestizos, constantly live in nepantla. We can never leave the middle space as that is where we were created, in ‘‘the contact zone.’’ As Anzaldu´ a stated, ‘‘As you make your way through life, nepantla itself becomes the place you live in most of the time—home.’’ How we choose to occupy our home is crucial. Nepantla offers a choice, a choice to exclude or to include.

Dieties Ometeotl Ometeotl is a composite of ome (two) and teotl (god/lord/divine energy). The oldest of the old gods, s/he is the one benevolent dual god/dess also known as Ometecutli (dual lord) and Omecihuatl (dual lady). S/he is the father/mother of the gods in Nahuatl mythology. S/he is also Totahtzin/Tonantzin our father/ mother even though humanity was actually created by Ometeotl’s children the four Tezcatlipoca (god of smoking mirrors) and not Ometeotl her/himself. The Tezcatlipoca are four manifestations of the one god. Ometeotl seems to have been a relatively unknown god/dess to the majority of the Nahuatl peoples. There were no images or temples erected to him/her. S/he was primarily referred to only in the poetry of the Tlamatinime (philosophers/knowers). From this poetry we find that Ometeotl is a god/dess of duality. Duality is not the same as dualism. Rather than being at odds with each other, in duality things like male and female, life and death, spirit and matter, stillness and movement are in harmony with each other. What seem to be opposites come together in Ometeotl to form

Nepantla one harmonic whole. Ometeotl can be found in all things and reveals his/her presence through flor y canto, the inspiration of art and poetry. –GCG

Quetzalcóatl Quetzalco´atl is a Toltec and Nahua deity with equivalents among other Mesoamerican peoples. Often depicted as a feathered serpent, Quetzalco´ atl is a creator god associated with rain, wind, fertility, and the morning star. As Topiltzin Quetzalco´atl, he is a Toltec culture hero, possibly an actual tenth-century ruler, credited with abolishing human sacrifice and disappearing with a promise to return. Post-Conquest sources described Quetzalco´ atl as a bearded White man, whom Spanish writers equated with Saint Thomas the Apostle. As a symbol, Quetzalco´atl has attracted twentieth-century Mexican or Mexican American artists and writers, among them Diego Rivera, Jose´ Clemente Orozco, Carlos Fuentes, and Alurista. Protestant liberation theologian Elsa Tamez reads stories about Quetzalco´atl alongside the Christian scriptures, seeing Quetzalco´atl as a revelation of God who, with Jesus, stands against war and injustice. Mormons have equated the bearded White god with an ancient American visitation by Jesus, as recounted in the Book of Mormon, while Mexican American Jose´ Argu¨ elles and other New Age authors anticipate Quetzalco´atl’s return in the form of a global spiritual transformation. A sculpture of Quetzalco´ atl erected in San Jose, California, in 1994 led to an unsuccessful lawsuit alleging violation of church-state separation. —JCD

| 407

Tonantzin The Shrine to our Lady of Guadalupe is built on Tepeyac, which was considered the holy ground of the Nahuatl mother goddess Tonantzin. Tonantzin is known as Cihuacoatl (snake woman) and Coatlicue (she with a snake skirt). She is referred to as the ‘‘goddess of sustenance’’ and ‘‘honored grandmother.’’ She is the Aztec goddess of the earth and the mother of the corn and flowers. She is usually depicted as a deadly goddess wearing a skirt made of snakes and a necklace of human body parts. According to ancient mythology, this devouring mother was impregnated by a Quetzal feather and so she became the virgin mother of Quetzalco´atl and Xolotl, the god of death. Outraged at their mother’s suspicious pregnancy, Coyolxauhqui and her 400 brothers and sisters decided to kill Coatlicue. At that moment she gave birth to Huitzilopochtli, the sun who destroyed his mother’s enemies and set them in the sky as the moon and the stars. In some Chicano/a thought, Guadalupe is often referred to as the inculturation or syncretistic manifestation of Tonantzin. The story of Guadalupe never mentions Tonantzin directly even though the Virgin Mary does appear on Tonantzin’s holy ground. Guadalupe also does not manifest Tonantzin’s deadly side. —GCG Lara Medina

References and Further Reading Anzaldu´a, Gloria. Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987). Carrasco, David. ‘‘Jaguar Christians in the Contact Zone.’’ Enigmatic Powers:

408 |

Nepantla

Syncretism with African and Indigenous Peoples’ Religions Among Latinos, ed. Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo and Andres I. Pe´rez y Mena (New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, 1995). De La Torre, Miguel A., and Gasto´n Espinosa. ‘‘Introduction.’’ Rethinking Latino (a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´n Espinosa (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2006). Leo´n, Luis D. La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexicans

Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California, 2004). Leo´n-Portilla, Miguel. Endangered Cultures (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990). Medina, Lara. ‘‘Nepantla Spirituality: Negotiating Multiple Religious Identities Among U.S. Latinas.’’ Rethinking Latino (a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´n Espinosa (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2006).

O El Paso, Texas. Olaza´bal then traveled to Moody Bible Institute where he studied for one semester before following American evangelist Reuben A. Torrey to Los Angeles, where he was hired to evangelize the Spanish speaking on behalf of the Church of the Open Door. After he left, Olaza´ bal pastored Spanish-speaking Northern Methodist Episcopal churches in Pasadena and later the San Francisco Bay area. In 1916, he was persuaded by the Montgomerys (who had since converted to Pentecostalism after attending the Azusa Street Revival) to convert to Pentecostalism. He was ordained on September 24, 1916, by the General Council of the Assemblies of God and went on to pioneer the work in Los Angeles, El Paso, and throughout Texas. He eventually left the Assemblies of God because (he said) the ‘‘gringos have control.’’ As a result, he created the first completely independent and indigenous Latino/a Pentecostal denomination in the United States in 1923 called the Latin American Council of Christian Churches. Olaza´ bal’s

OLAZÁBAL, FRANCISCO (1886–1937) Francisco Olaza´bal pioneered the Latino/ a Pentecostal movement in the United States, Mexico, and Puerto Rico from 1916 to 1937. He was raised a pious Catholic until the age of 12, at which time he and his mother (Refugio Velazquez) were converted to Protestantism through the work of itinerant Methodist preachers in Mazatla´ n, Mexico. They served lay traveling Methodist evangelists in the Sierra Madre Mountains. After visiting family in San Francisco and considering sailing the world as a merchant marine, Olaza´bal rededicated his life to the Christian ministry through the preaching of George and Carrie Judd Montgomery around 1902–1903. He later attended the Wesleyan School of Theology in San Luı´s Potosı´, Mexico, for three years (1908–1010). He immigrated to the United States in 1911, where he assumed the pastorate of a Spanish-language Methodist Church in 409

410 |

Operation Pedro Pan

evangelistic-healing campaigns attracted 250,000 people throughout the United States, Mexico, and Puerto Rico during his 30-year (1907–1937) ministry. He held major evangelistic-healing campaigns in East Los Angeles, San Fernando, Watts, Modesto (California), Nogales (Arizona), Chicago, El Paso, San Antonio, Brownsville, Houston, Laredo, Mexico City, Cleveland, Tennessee, New York City, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. He organized an evangelistichealing campaign in Spanish Harlem in 1931 that attracted over 100,000 people and another in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1934 that attracted thousands of people to the Pentecostal faith. He founded a Bible college in El Paso in 1922, first published the magazine El Mensajero Cristiano in 1923, and contributed to the origins of at least 14 denominations. At its height, his council claimed 150 churches and 50,000 followers, with missionaries in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central America, Columbia, Chile, and Spain. After his death in 1937 at the age of 51, due to an auto accident, Olaza´bal’s body was displayed in a gas-vapor-filled casket for viewing by tens of thousands of people in Houston, Spanish Harlem, Chicago, El Paso, and East Los Angeles, where he is buried in Evergreen Cemetery not far from William J. Seymour, the African American founder of the global Pentecostal movement. Gasto´n Espinosa

References and Further Reading Espinosa, Gasto´n. ‘‘El Azteca: Francisco Olazabal and Latino Pentecostal Charisma, Power, and Faith Healing in the Borderlands.’’ Journal of the American

Academy of Religion 67, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 597–616.

OPERATION PEDRO PAN Operation Pedro Pan was a joint relief effort from December 1960 to October 1962 on the part of the Catholic Church, the U.S. government, and concerned Cubans that led to the unprecedented exodus of 14,131 children (mostly between the ages of 10 and 16) from Cuba to the United States. In December 1960 the Eisenhower administration noticed that an increasing number of unaccompanied minors were being sent to the United States, typically to Miami, from Cuba by desperate parents in fear of Castro’s revolutionary regime and the monopolization of education and businesses by the communist government. This situation was beginning to pose a real humanitarian crisis for the immigrants, especially refugee children who were arriving to the United States alone and in need of basic goods such as food, shelter, and education. As a result, over $1 million was apportioned by the U.S. government in the early 1960s to aid in the relief effort. The agency chosen to allocate this funding was the Catholic Welfare Bureau of the Archdiocese of Miami. Lead responsibility fell into the hands of its director, Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh. The Reverend Walsh had firsthand experience of this crisis in Miami among the growing number of young Cuban exiles particularly through his encounter with a hungry and homeless 15-year-old named Pedro Mene´ ndez. Working out of the Centro Hispano Cato´ lico (Hispanic Catholic Center) housed at a Miami parish school, Walsh enlisted nearly 100 Catholic Charities agencies around

Operation Pedro Pan

| 411

´ N GONZA ´ LEZ ELIA On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old Cuban boy named Elia´n Gonza´lez was found off the U.S. coast. Within days, he became internationally known as the child caught in the midst of a custody battle between Cuban Americans and Cubans from the homeland. As the world focused on the political saga, a religious subtext developed. Surrounding Elia´n’s Miami home, Catholics and Protestants gathered to pray. These worshipers claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary hovering over the house and on a bank glass door. Others referred to Elia´n as the miracle child or Miami’s Jesus. The Miami community pointed out that like Jesus, Elia´n arrived weeks before Christmas, at the end of the millennium. Even the year 2000, the sixth millennium since the supposed creation of the earth, conferred upon Elia´n, like Jesus, the symbol of hope. For followers of Santerı´a, Elia´n was a child of Ochu´n, the quasi-deity of the sea. In spite of Elia´n’s symbolic religious value to Miami Cubans, a predawn raid by U.S. Federal Marshals on his house on April 22, 2000, ended the standoff. Catholic and Protestant ministers denounced the government’s sacrilege of violating Holy Week, and called the community to prayer and peaceful demonstration. —MAD

the United States to meet this humanitarian need. The concerted effort, known as the Cuban Children’s Program, served as the domestic counterpart to Operation Pedro Pan. The goal of the domestic program was to care for the exiled children by finding foster homes for them and providing them with financial assistance. Temporary shelters situated in the Miami-Dade area were established at Florida City, Saint Raphael Hall, Kendall Children’s Home, Camp Matecumbe, and Opalocka. These sites provided immediate housing for the young exiles, along with food, education, and recreation until they were assigned to permanent residences either with family or in foster homes. The relief effort also evolved into an ecumenical and interreligious endeavor that included the Service Bureau for Protestant Children and the Jewish Family and Children Service. While the Cuban Children’s Program addressed the domestic concerns of the

exiles, Operation Pedro Pan dealt specifically with the logistical and practical aim of evacuating children from Cuba. The island operation was organized primarily by Monsignor Walsh and James Baker, a U.S. citizen and headmaster of the Ruston Academy in Havana, Cuba. Baker and Walsh shared a mutual concern for the fate of Cuban children under the prospects of communist indoctrination since parochial schools were being closed and parental authority was being threatened under the revolutionary government. They envisioned an evacuation operation whose nomenclature was inspired by J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, a story of children embarking on a flight to a new land of fantastic possibilities unaccompanied by their parents. Baker, along with the assistance of local churches in Cuba, provided a direct line of communication from the United States to an underground network of politically disenchanted Cuban parents on the island, predominantly of middle-class

412 |

Operation Pedro Pan

standing. His academy had the responsibility of issuing student visas to children that granted them legal passage to the United States. The collaboration between Walsh and Baker provided the crucial nexus for carrying out Operation Pedro Pan while the financial and political support of the U.S. government and the sponsorship of religious organizations made the dream of this flight possible. The ideological background of Operation Pedro Pan was shaped by a complex array of religious and political factors, both ancient and modern, revolving around the dramatic narratives of freedom and exile. The political tension underlying the conflicted Cold War period of Pedro Pan was framed by two competing and antagonistic modern social economic orders: the democratic market-driven freedom of the United States and revolutionary Cuba’s communist struggle for liberation from class oppression. The alternative visions of history and freedom between these two geographically close countries created a disparate rift issuing in mutual fear that reached its apex during the two-year span of Pedro Pan in such events as the trade embargo, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the October Missile Crisis. The nuclear threat of the October crisis in 1962, in fact, terminated flights between the United States and Cuba and concluded the evacuation of children under Operation Pedro Pan. The U.S. government with its strict aversion to communism already had a religious ally in the social teaching of the Catholic Church. In 1937 the papal encyclical Divino Redemptoris rebuked communism for stripping humanity of its spiritual dimension and attacking its most original sacred institution, the

family. With clergy becoming increasingly marginalized and deported from revolutionary Cuba because of their political opposition, the biblical story of exile became the key religious hermeneutic for understanding the Cuban refugee experience. In December 1961 a replica of the statue of Our Lady of Charity (the Virgin of El Cobre), a prominent religious symbol of Cuban national identity, was transplanted from Havana to Miami. For many, this event marked the origin of the Cuban diaspora. Religious voices addressing the popular piety of Cubans in the United States, such as Bishop Agustı´n Roma´n of Miami, have referred to the Jewish Babylonian exile (sixth century BCE) as the model for interpreting the Cuban diaspora. The opportunity for catharsis, rejection of idolatry, social justice, hope of return, and restoration have served as guiding principles of self-reflection for the exilic Cuban imagination informed by the Babylonian narrative. The intent of all parties collaborating in Operation Pedro Pan was to eventually reunite the children with their parents. Although this reality came to pass for many, it did not for every Pedro Pan exile. Yet, on the whole, the children of Pedro Pan have assimilated strikingly well into the professional sector of American society as engineers, business owners, social workers, writers, attorneys, and physicians. David Manuel Lantigua

References and Further Reading Conde, Yvonne M. Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Ortega, Gregoria CRECED: Final Document (Hato Rey, Puerto Rico: Ramallo Bros. Printing, 1996). De La Torre, Miguel. La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). de los Angeles Torres, Marı´a. The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan on the Streets of Miami (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003). Triay, Victor Andres. Fleeing Castro: Operation Pedro Pan and the Cuban Children’s Program (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998).

ORTEGA, GREGORIA Gregoria Ortega is co-founder of Las Hermanas, a national organization of Latina Catholics. Raised as a devout Catholic in El Paso, Texas, Gregoria joined religious life at the age of 18 as a member of the Victory Missionary Sisters, commonly known as Victoryknoll. At the age of 39, Ortega accepted a teaching assignment among Chicano youth in Abilene, West Texas. Sister Ortega understood the legacy of racial discrimination toward Mexican Americans in Texas where lynching remained a method of social control into the early twentieth century. In the early 1970s, when Ortega arrived in Abilene, segregation was commonly practiced in barber shops, beauty salons, cemeteries, bowling alleys, and swimming pools. Even the battle over segregation in public schools continued into the 1970s as some administrators refused to integrate according to federal law. Ortega found herself in the middle of a battle for civil rights as she ministered in the diocese of San Angelo, an area ranking fifth in the nation in terms

| 413

of where Chicanos were most rigidly segregated. Teaching religious education to high school Chicano youth, Ortega discussed Martin Luther King Jr. and Ce´sar Cha´vez with an emphasis on their commitment to nonviolence. When the students could no longer tolerate overt discrimination in their school, they organized a walkout lasting nine days. Ortega supported them wholeheartedly as long as they remained nonviolent. Her support lasted through the legal case filed by the students and their parents against the Abilene School Board. Sister Ortega’s public presence as a religious activist provoked the anger of school board officials and her religious superiors. A newly appointed bishop and local priests decided she should be expelled from the diocese without even having a conversation with her. Ortega’s dedication to the Chicano people and the Church did not stop with her expulsion. After a few months of rest, she returned to San Antonio, Texas, where she received support from a close friend, Father Edmundo Rodrı´guez, to start an organization of Mexican American religious sisters concerned about the plight of their people. Through Rodrı´guez, Ortega met Sister Gloria Gallardo of the Holy Ghost Sisters and together they sent out a national invitation to as many Chicana sisters as they could identify. With Gallardo sharing her salary from her work as a community organizer in the Galveston-Houston diocese, the two women struggled to create their vision of a church in support of Chicanos. Finally in April 1971, 50 primarily Mexican American sisters met in Houston to discuss and pray about the implications of the Chicano movement for the

414 |

Orthopathos

Catholic Church. After three days of meetings, those present voted to start a national organization under the name of Las Hermanas with the motto ‘‘United in Action and Prayer.’’ Within six months, membership grew to 900 and over the next few years Las Hermanas directly challenged the Church to support the efforts of the Chicano movement for civil rights and to improve its own treatment of Spanish-speaking Catholics. Over the following decade, Las Hermanas members involved themselves in the United Farm Worker Movement, helped to establish the first Mexican American Cultural Center in San Antonio, and collaborated with PADRES, an organization of Chicano priests, to push for the appointment of Chicano bishops. Las Hermanas uncovered the exploitation of immigrant Mexican sisters by the Catholic Church, conducted a national survey with findings that exposed the absence of ministry programs for Latinos, and collaborated on the First and Second National Encuentros in 1972 and 1977 organized by Latino/a laity and clergy. Although Gregoria Ortega is no longer a member, Las Hermanas continues to exist with a primarily lay membership focusing on the empowerment of grassroots Latina Catholics. Lara Medina

References and Further Reading Martinez, Richard. PADRES: The National Chicano Priest Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). Medina, Lara. Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Religious-Political Activism in the U.S. Catholic Church (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).

ORTHOPATHOS Etymologically suggesting ‘‘right affections’’ or ‘‘right emotions,’’ the term orthopathos (or ‘‘orthopathy’’) is usually considered alongside ‘‘orthodoxy’’ (right beliefs/praise/glory) and ‘‘orthopraxy’’/ ‘‘orthopraxis’’ (right practice) as elements constituting a model for Christian discipleship and spirituality. Deriving their roots largely from Pietistic and Wesleyan paradigms, these three ‘‘orthos’’ are considered to be a holistic approach to Christian discipleship, suggesting the integration of ‘‘head,’’ ‘‘heart,’’ and ‘‘hand’’ or ‘‘knowing,’’ ‘‘being,’’ and ‘‘doing.’’ This schema attempts to overcome the way that Christianity is often depicted as a disengaged and disembodied faith by placing right belief (which often maintains a place of privilege) on par with elements of an affective and active nature. Such a strategy creates a burden for proponents of this model to give a robust account of the latter two ‘‘orthos,’’ as these are more challenging to substantiate than the more familiar and historically prominent notion of orthodoxy. Whereas liberationist theologians have contributed within the past few decades to the development of orthopraxis, perhaps the most difficult of the three to clarify is orthopathos. Several factors contribute to this challenge. Undoubtedly, a rampant suspicion regarding affectional language exists among those cultures indebted to the Hellenistic mind-set so that words such as ‘‘emotions,’’ ‘‘passions,’’ and ‘‘affections’’ tend to suggest elements that are of a fleeting, irrational, and unmanageable/involuntary nature. Studying beliefs or practices appears to be a much more

Orthopathos objectively based endeavor as opposed to the deeply subjective and psychologically complex process of analyzing the affective life. Finally, particularly within the realm of Christian studies, affectional language is usually associated with revivalist settings, those that tend to be avoided or relegated to the periphery by those espousing a more formal and ‘‘respectable’’ understanding of Christianity. When one thinks about the affections and the Christian life, revivalists such as John Wesley (who advocated both a ‘‘heart religion’’ and the pursuit of ‘‘perfect love’’) and Jonathan Edwards (who wrote a famous work entitled A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections) come to mind, and yet for many years, such figures were considered first and foremost revivalist preachers and only secondarily theologians. Several developments within Christianity and Western culture at large have made a term such as orthopathos more viable within the academy. The theological disciplines have become more accommodating to a ‘‘practical divinity’’ so that practical theology has come into its own as a specialized field. Also, the heirs of the Wesleyan and Holiness revivals, namely the Pentecostal and charismatic movements, have emerged as viable theological subtraditions within Christianity, especially because of their vast and growing numbers in the TwoThirds World. Gradually, theologians and others have begun to investigate these global movements with a level of theological sophistication and seriousness that has merited significant attention. Such trends and a general interest within the Zeitgeist (spirit of the age) of all things spiritual have helped make spirituality an area of scholarly pursuit, a development leading to new conceptual

| 415

paradigms that take into account the embodied piety of everyday Christians. Within this context the Latino voice of Samuel Solivan has emerged. A Pentecostal ‘‘New Yorican,’’ Solivan speaks from and to the North American context when he suggests that orthodoxy and orthopraxis are no longer useful in their current usage within the theological guild. For Solivan, orthodoxy has become little more than reified theological statements that help promote the status quo rather than contribute to the humanization of the dehumanized ‘‘others’’ on the margins of society. Additionally, according to Solivan’s narration, orthopraxis or praxis more generally has evolved as another intellectual language within academe so that those who talk about liberation and praxis-oriented themes rarely are those who actually engage in the concrete, hands-on work of promoting greater justice and peace in the world. Within this frame of reference, Solivan suggests that orthopathos can invigorate the other two ‘‘orthos’’ so that they are not excessively disengaged from the reality of the suffering poor. What distinguishes Solivan’s use of the term orthopathos from others is that he is advocating pathos, or suffering/ pain, as a key epistemological entryway for theological discourse, especially the kind that attempts to take seriously marginalization, oppression, and injustice. He roots such a notion in God’s own pathos (here drawing from the work of the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel) and the via dolorosa (sorrowful way) of the incarnate Son in order to show that God’s work makes it possible for the poor and dehumanized to lead lives of fullness and liberation. Solivan believes that the pathos of the suffering poor can become orthopathos when the

416 |

Orthopathos

transformative work of the Holy Spirit is active among those who identify and locate themselves in solidarity with the pathos-ridden condition of the marginalized. Such endeavors mirror God’s own active and ever-present work among the poor and disenfranchised. Several reservations could be made regarding Solivan’s account. The way he narrates orthodoxy and orthopraxis appears to be excessively sweeping, especially given the complex range of meanings and uses for such broad terms. Solivan also fails to offer a robust historical account for his program, one that could have served in nuancing and substantiating his claims about divine impassibility and the very nature of orthopathic speech. Finally, despite his best intentions, Solivan leaves much to be desired in the way he narrates theologically the logic of moving from pathos to orthopathos. Nevertheless, despite these shortcomings, Solivan’s argument still stands. He points to the perpetual difficulty that those who would espouse an account of discipleship based on the three orthos face, namely the challenge of rendering

a viable notion of orthopathos/orthopathy. From Solivan’s vantage point, any account of this oft-neglected element ought to include mechanisms for bringing to consciousness the pain and suffering of those who are on the margins. A theological claim of this kind is rightfully made by a Latino who has been engaged in ministry within such contexts and a Pentecostal who recognizes the work of the Spirit today as transforming the suffering of the poor and oppressed so that they can be freed to lead dignified and hopeful lives. Daniel Castelo

References and Further Reading Land, Steven J. Pentecostal Spirituality (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994). Solivan, Samuel. The Spirit, Pathos and Liberation (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998). Steele, Richard B., ed. ‘‘Heart Religion’’ in the Methodist Tradition and Related Movements (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001).

P transform and assimilate elements from different cultures); specifically, slaves were forced to emphasize Catholicism. Slaves disguised African gods or spiritual entities in the clothes of Catholic saints and transferred all the power, characteristics, fetishes, and due devotion that belonged to a specific god or spiritual entity. Racism has also influenced the process of syncretism through religious persecution of various religions in Cuba. Slaves were encouraged to form cabildos (social clubs) created along ethnic and linguistic lines by the Whites based on the divide-and-rule strategy to avoid a rebellion. The cabildo served as a religious function and house temples for the emerging Lucumi religion. From the end of the nineteenth century, the houses of Lucumi and Palo Monte priests (los negros brujos) were special targets of police raids intended to do away with brujeria (witchcraft). In 1884, the Good Government Law was passed, forbidding all cabildos from meeting or organizing festivals. Negros brujos and ordinary

PALO Reglas de Congo (Rule of the Congo), Regla Conga, Regla de Palo, or Palo Monte, Mayombe are all variations of the spiritual faith developed mostly in the Congo culture of central Africa of Bantu origin. Palo was brought to Cuba, the Americas, and Hispan˜ ola Island (present day Haiti and Dominican Republic) by African Blacks who were forced into the slave trade. From the 1530s until the abolition of the slave trade in the 1880s, at least 10 million Africans were transported to the Americas of which 4.7 million Africans were transported to the Caribbean (Klein 1986). Between 1810 and 1870, the Spanish colony of Cuba acquired about 600,000 slaves; however, in 1880 Cuba had 200,000 slaves and an entire AfroCuban population of 450,000 (Klein 1986). Slaves were ripped from their culture and religious traditions and forced to de-emphasize their faith in Bantu and Yoruban roots. As a result, the process of syncretism occurred (all religions 417

418 |

Palo

Afro-Cubans became ‘‘icons of fear’’ between the emancipation of slaves in 1886 and the first years of the new Republic. At that time, brujeria was considered as the cause of social delinquency and the ritual murder of White children for their blood. By 1910, all Black organizations were outlawed for fear of a race war. However, intensive reinvestigation of the states’ witch-hunt cases against brujos found that hysteria, masquerading as evidence, and racism contributed to brutal executions of innocent elderly African men by garrote. Therefore, all variations of Palo keep secret societies that do not seek to convert new members or interact religiously with other groups. The secrecy is rooted in the oppression endured previously, which continues to exist in Cuba. Palo lacks a highly decentralized governing religious body without a formal central instructional structure. Practitioners and believers of Palo residing in Cuba, Dominican Republic, and AfroLatin communities in the United States, Venezuela, Colombia, and Puerto Rico are unknown. It is unknown how many followers practice Catholicism or another religion in addition to Palo. Palo’s central belief system is human association with certain spirits of the dead. In Palo, Nsambi is the Supreme Creator and Regla de Palo is initiated by worship of the spirits of ancestors—the dead, and the nature spirits or supernatural beings, mpungus, that dwell in natural forces, such as trees, rivers, and the sea. The word ‘‘Palo’’ refers to ‘‘stick’’ in Spanish and the sticks or branches from the forest are used by paleros (practitioners) as a magical element in spells. Some scholars consider Palo as the ‘‘dark side of Santeria.’’ Palo has been associated with brujeria or bilongo, the Spanish

words for witchcraft, and its practitioners insist that Palo can be used for both good and evil. Alcohol, tobacco, and gunpowder are used in divination rituals, which are supremely important elements of Palo. Specifically, to divine, to see the future, to organize life in a rapid and effective manner, is a priority in the cults of Bantu origin. Quick and reliable divination and the palero’s efficacy in this profession guarantee his prestige in the Congo religion. The Congo liturgy’s core is in the nganga in which all animistic powers are concentrated and have various levels of energy depending on the amount of time that it has resided in it as part of its message. Anthropologist Lydia Cabrera explains that nganga is a spirit, a supernatural force as well as a receptacle itself (a three-legged iron cauldron) that contains various objects placed in the now distant past (i.e., earth from the cemetery and crossroads, sticks, insects, animal bones), which provide the material foundation for the Father or Mother (palero) of the nganga to carry out his/her orders. All of the mpungus, saints or supernatural beings, are condensed within the nganga like a microcosm. Prendas are forces secondary to the nganga and may be talismans or amulets, which can be found in any object or thing (i.e., trees, stones, shells, gourds, horns). The ngangas contain good and bad spirits similar to the sacred stones of the Lucumi. Palo Mayombe or Palo Monte are the most widely known and popular rites, and some consider these to be used for evil or are referred to as ‘‘Jewish’’ (nganga judı´a) rather than ‘‘Christian’’ (nganga christiana) witchcraft. The nganga judı´a is primarily about power and uses a symbol of a railroad spike. The attempt is to work with spirits of

La Pastorela | 419 criminals and the insane and attempt to extract vengeance, humble, or domesticate one’s enemies. Such practices can cause illness, break up marriages, create financial difficulties, or even death to one’s enemy. The nganga christiana operates with spirits of good people and uses the symbol of a crucifix to cure the sick, bring peace and harmony, and help those who are distressed. Sarah J. Rangel-Sanchez

References and Further Reading Barnet, Miguel. Afro-Cuban Religions (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001). Brown, David H. Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). Cabrera, Lydia. Reglas del Congo, Palo Monte, Mayombe (Miami: Peninsular Printing, 1979). De La Torre, Miguel A. Santeria: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004). Klein, Herbert S. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

LA PASTORELA The Catholic Church has historically introduced medieval cyclical dramas known as mystery, miracle, and morality plays into its seasonal liturgies. Mystery plays deal with the life of Jesus, miracle plays recount the lives of the saints, and morality plays depict the ongoing battle between good and evil. Las Pastorelas fall into all three of these categories.

Across the centuries, Las Pastorelas provided the faithful of the Catholic Church with visual imagery of the articles of the faith in a jargon that they could understand. It was not until the cyclical church dramas began to be presented that ordinary lay people slowly began to recognize holy writ. By carefully listening to the dialogues of the characters of these folk dramas, they slowly began to understand how their faith was manifested in their daily lives. As the faithful began to experience ‘‘the Word made flesh,’’ they began to take on a more active role in the presentation of Las Pastorelas. The actors in these folk plays were not seasoned performers. They were ordinary day laborers who would memorize volumes of dialogue and concoct their own costumes from readily available materials. Just before Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve the village would gather quietly as they listened to voices singing from outside the church door. The door would be flung open and in would come the figure of Saint Michael the Archangel leading the shepherds. All would process in double file, with the most important shepherds walking closest to Saint Michael. The first following Saint Michael would be the chief shepherds Bato and Tubal; Gil and Lipio were next, followed by Bacirio and Cojo. All bore shepherds’ crooks decorated with flowers, ribbons, and tinfoil. Next to process would be the figure of Gila. She was the shepherdess who, in the spirit of purity, would be clad all in white. The last two figures, farthest from Saint Michael, were Hermitan˜o and Bartolo. Hermitan˜o represents the universal man who seeks sanctity but who is led astray by the riches that the world offers. Bartolo

420 |

La Pastorela

represents all lazy men who do not want to make a solitary effort at work, but who expect payment, albeit undeserved. At the start of the folk play, all the shepherds enter singing and thus reveal their identities in poetic verse. They gather to sup and sleep. They sing about the cold weather while Gila prepares the evening meal. Thus, it seems that all is well and they lie down for the night. Only Lipio and Tubal keep watch over the flocks by night. Suddenly, the Evil One, Luzbel, appears among them. In an eloquent speech he states that he is going to try to confound them so that they will not know of the birth of the Baby Jesus. Luzbel tries to trick both the shepherds and the audience throughout the play. Luzbel has incredibly long lines. His words are laced with mythological and biblical allusions as well as poetic lines lifted straight from the work of poet Luis de Go´ngora. Luzbel is the Gongoresque Devil that must be subdued and vanquished by his opponent Michael the Archangel. Both spirits must do battle throughout the drama for the souls of the shepherds. They must also contend with the corruption or redemption of the shepherdess Gila and the holy man Hermitan˜o. Luzbel tempts Hermitan˜o, seducing him with his smooth logic so that he will steal away Gila: ‘‘What need have you of that cross and that rosary . . . ?’’ he asks. The obvious question that springs forth is this: How can the hermit have a cross since Jesus has not even been born, let alone died on it? Saint Dominic has yet to be born and so the rosary has not been invented yet. Neither has become a salvific symbol yet. The answer to these paradoxes is that both of these objects are anachronistic, existing out of ordinary time. Since the play is a

metaphorical one based on the struggle between Good and Evil, it makes perfect sense to the Christians watching it. Hermitan˜ o, trying to atone for his shortcomings, keeps watch by night. Suddenly, he hears an exquisite song of joy. He believes that brother Tubal is singing in the fields. Just then Lipio and Tubal rush in, proclaiming the good tidings told to them by the angels. Alas, Luzbel too has heard the glad tidings. Finally, after a brief struggle, Saint Michael vanquishes Luzbel and binds him for a thousand years. He comforts the shepherds with smooth words, and they begin to prepare rustic gifts to take to the Infant God. They are all eager to go to Bethlehem save for Bartolo, who prefers to stay in bed. By use of hilarious parody, they finally convince him to go worship the Infant God. Saint Michael ties up Luzbel and all ends well. There are many manuscripts of the Las Pastorelas in various collections in the American Southwest. If we compare these manuscripts with the peninsular manuscripts from Spain, we will note some prominent differences. Luzbel, for example, has Satan as his helper as well as a whole host of devils. He declares war on the Virgin Mary. This is a scene transferred to another New Mexico folk play called El Coloquio de San Jose´ . The cry of ‘‘Alarm!’’ pronounced by Luzbel finds its echo in another drama here titled Los Moros y los Cristianos. The role of Bartolo is relegated in the peninsular script to Borrego and that of Gila, to Eliseta. The role of Hermitan˜o is relegated to a character named Laureano. Only the character of Bato remains constant in both the peninsular and New Mexico manuscripts. Larry Torres

Penitentes, Los Hermanos

References and Further Reading Cole, M. R., ed. Los Pastores: A Mexican Play of the Nativity. Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, Vol. IX. (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company/ American Folklore Society, 1907). Ravicz, Marilyn Ekdahl. Early Colonial Religious Drama in Mexico: From Tzompantli to Golgotha (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, Inc., 1970). Torres, Larry. Six New Mexico Folkplays for the Advent Season (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).

PENITENTES, LOS HERMANOS La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesu´s Nazareno (pious fraternity of our father Jesus the Nazarene), more commonly known as the Penitentes (penitent ones), Los Hermanos (brothers), or Los Hermanos Penitentes (penitent brothers), is an organization of Roman Catholic laity that emerged in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Members of the La Hermandad (brotherhood) commit themselves to performing acts of corporal and spiritual penance and to providing aid to members and others. In some villages, the Penitentes built the churches and provided religious education. Although the organization has been predominantly composed of men, a few women have become members. La Hermandad established a number of Moradas (chapters). Each Morada elects its own Hermano Mayor (head penitent), who presides over the chapter. Since 1947, the administrative center of La Hermandad has been La Mesa Directiva

| 421

(governing board), which is presided over by the Archbishop of Santa Fe. Nineteenth-century reports estimated that 85 to 95 percent of the Roman Catholic male population of this area belonged to the Brotherhood (Weigle 1976, 98) Scholars have sought to establish the origins of the Penitente Brotherhood, only to admit that they do not know— and are not likely to ever know—the precise origins of the Hermandad. Historical records, however, indicate that European settlers accompanying Spanish explorer Don Juan de On˜ate were performing acts of self-flagellation in northern New Mexico in 1598. In 1826, Padre (Father) Antonio Jose´ Martı´nez became the pastor of the Taos area, which actually included much of northern New Mexico from Ranchos de Taos into present-day southern Colorado. In 1833, Martı´nez suspended their public activity and wrote to Bishop Zubirı´a of the Archdiocese of Durango about the presence of La Hermandad de la Sangre de Cristo (brotherhood of the blood of Christ) who make exercises of penance during the Lenten seasons principally on Fridays, all of Holy Week, Fridays from this time until Pentecost, and other days of such significance in the year. These exercises consist of dragging wooden crosses, whipping themselves with scourges that they have for the purpose, piercing their backs with sharp stones or flints until the blood flows; and other rigorous means. . . . (T)hey do this everywhere by day, but in the processions of Holy Week, they have the custom of marching in front of the images in the manner described, so that they cause a great spectacle to the bystanders. They say that thus it has been granted to them from time immemorial. (Wroth 1991, 172–173)

422 |

Penitentes, Los Hermanos

Zubirı´a responded quickly in support of Martinez’s position, stating that although performing private acts of penance in moderation could be spiritually beneficial, he prohibited all organized, public, and penitential activities of the Brotherhood. The Hermanos were instructed to do all of their acts of penance in the privacy of the church or their homes. Despite Zubirı´a’s directive, the Hermandad did not disband. Archival evidence suggests that Jean Baptiste Lamy, who eventually became the first Bishop of Santa Fe, visited Pope Pius IX in Rome in 1854, and received a directive to disband the Hermandad. The papal directive, however, did not suppress the actions of the Penitentes. Consequently, Lamy expanded the rules governing the Penitentes, demanding that the Hermanos subject themselves to the authority of the bishop and that all of the proceedings, meetings, and acts of penance be done in secrecy. In 1885, Archbishop Jean Baptiste Salpointe, successor of Lamy, attempted to revive the Third Order of Saint Francis, originally called the Order of Penance, and declared that the practices of the Hermandad had their origins in the Third Order. He demanded that the Hermanos return to their Franciscan roots. Alberto Lo´ pez Pulido argues that Salpointe constructed this link as a way to gain control over the Brotherhood. According to Pulido, pastors were told to refrain from celebrating Mass in the Morada and to withhold the sacraments from Penitentes if they refused to submit to the rules. The Brothers resisted Salpointe’s attempt to subsume the Hermandad into the Third Order. Salpointe’s successors in the last part of the nineteenth century

and early years of the twentieth century continued to denounce public acts of penance and to threaten offenders with denial of the sacraments and the impossibility of becoming God-parents. These same years were also characterized by an increase in attention from Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist, and Baptist ministers and their communities who were moving into the territory. Perhaps the most well known among them was Rev. Alex M. Darley, who titled himself the ‘‘apostle of the Colorado Mexicans.’’ Thanks to the ongoing pressure by the archbishops of Santa Fe to keep Penitente activities private or secret and to the increased negative publicity of Protestant commentators such as Darley, the Penitentes increased the level of secrecy surrounding their membership and their activities. In 1946, Don Miguel Archibeque organized the Moradas into one association and effected a ‘‘reconciliation’’ with the Roman Catholic Church. Archbishop Edwin Vincent Byrne approved a new set of rules for the Hermandad. Although Archibeque was not able to obtain unanimous approval, Byrne announced the creation of the Archbishop’s Mesa Directiva in 1947. Byrne declared that the Brotherhood was not a ‘‘fanatical sect apart from the church.’’ He also affirmed the Brothers’ practice of ‘‘corporal and spiritual penance,’’ maintaining that it was mandated by Jesus himself as a ‘‘necessity’’ for salvation. . . .’’ Nonetheless, the archbishop reaffirmed the position of previous archbishops that their penitential practices must be done in moderation and in private, so as to avoid scandal and pride. David M. Mellott

Pentecostalism

References and Further Reading Darley, Alex M. The Passionists of the Southwest or the Holy Brotherhood: A Revelation of the ‘‘Penitentes’’ (Glorieta, NM: Rio Grande Press, 1893, 1968). Lo´pez Pulido, Alberto. The Sacred World of the Penitentes (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). Steele, Thomas J., ed. and trans. Archbishop Lamy: In His Own Words (Albuquerque: LPD Press, 2000). Weigle, Marta. Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the Southwest (Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City Press, 1976). Wroth, William. Images of Penance, Images of Mercy: Southwestern Santos in the Late Nineteenth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

PENTECOSTALISM Pentecostalism, now a worldwide movement numbering over 600 million people on six continents, began in the United States in the early twentieth century. It was founded by Charles F. Parham (1873–1929) and the Black Holiness minister William J. Seymour (1870– 1922) in the early twentieth century. The first Latino/as converted to the movement were at the Azusa Street Revival in 1906. Pentecostalism represents the coming together of four major theological streams in late nineteenth-century U.S. Christianity: (1) the Holiness and Wesleyan idea of entire sanctification, (2) the Reformed idea of power for Christian service, (3) dispensational premillennialism, and (4) a robust belief in faith healing. Pentecostals emphasize the spiritual gifts (charismata) listed in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14: wisdom,

| 423

knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous powers, discernment of spirits, tongues, interpretation of tongues, and prophecy. The belief in tongues as the physical evidence of Holy Spirit baptism is the teaching that separates Pentecostalism from other branches of Christianity. The largest Pentecostal denominations in the United States include the General Council of the Assemblies of God (AG —1914), the United Pentecostal Church (UPC—1917), the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (4Square—1927), the African American Church of God in Christ (COGIC— 1897, 1907), the Church of God, Cleveland, TN (1886, 1907), and the Church of God of Prophecy (1923). The largest Latino-serving Pentecostal bodies in the United States are the Hispanic Districts of the Assemblies of God, the Pentecostal Church of God, the Assembly of Christian Churches, the Apostolic Assembly of the Faith in Christ Jesus, the Church of God, Cleveland, TN, the Church of God of Prophecy, the Foursquare Church, the Latin American Council of Christian Churches, the Damascus Christian Church, Victory Outreach, and Calvary Chapel.

Growth of the Latino Protestant Pentecostal Movement The Hispanic Pentecostal/Charismatic movement has grown from a handful of Mexicans at the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles (1906–1909) to more than 164 million men, women, and children throughout Latin America and the United States in 2007. About 27 percent (151 million) of all Latin Americans and 28 percent (9.2 million in 2004;

424 |

Pentecostalism

AZUSA STREET REVIVAL Located at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles at a leased African Methodist Episcopal building, the Azusa Street Revival (1906–1909) marks the iconic event that helped make the Pentecostal-charismatic movement a global phenomenon. Led by the African American pastor William J. Seymour, the revival proved to be a racially and ethnically diverse worship setting as well as a center for missional activity. Whereas usually the events at the Apostolic Faith Mission are thought of in terms of Black and White attendees, other groups were present, including Hispanics. Prominent examples include Susie Valdez (mother of the evangelist A. C. Valdez), who after testifying of her healing in the revival went on to lead her family in evangelistic and social outreach efforts, and Abundio and Rosa de Lo´pez, who became important figures both within the life of the mission (Abundio was ordained by Seymour) and through open-air, evangelistic services in the Mexican Plaza District of Los Angeles. Apparently, a falling out occurred between the leadership and the Mexican constituency of the mission so that the latter left around 1909. Nevertheless, the Pentecostal message was preached by and among Latino/as throughout the borderlands and beyond by many who were linked in one way or another with Azusa. —DC

12.88 million in 2008) of all U.S. Hispanics are either Protestant Pentecostal or Catholic Charismatic (Espinosa 2004, 266). Despite varying levels of apostasy, fragmentation, and competition, the Latina/o Protestant Pentecostal/Charismatic movement is still growing rapidly in a number of countries. There are 72 million Protestant Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians in Latin America, which make up the majority of Latin America’s 100 million Protestants. Nearly 35 percent of all Pentecostals around the world live in Latin America. Today, 17 percent of all Latin Americans are Protestant, largely Pentecostal. The Catholic Church estimates that 8,000–10,000 Catholics convert to Protestantism every day throughout Latin America. On any given Sunday in Latin America, scholars now report that there may be more Protestants than Catholics attending church

(Espinosa 2004, 267). Furthermore, scholars predict that as early as 2010 one in three Latin Americans may be Protestant or non-Catholic, largely Pentecostal or Evangelical. Pentecostal growth in Latin America has been uneven. Mexico, for example, has one of the lowest percentages of Pentecostal Protestantism per national population in all of Latin America. Despite this fact, there are 7 million Protestants (out of a national population of 99 million) in Mexico, the second largest number in Latin America after Brazil. The 1990 Mexican Census found that 76 percent of all non-Catholics were Evangelical (largely Pentecostal) and that they have experienced the largest growth in regions like Tabasco and Chiapas, where they make up 17 and 15 percent of the population, respectively. Mexican Pentecostals are served by more than 166 Pentecostal denominations of

Pentecostalism which approximately 159 are completely independent and indigenous (Espinosa 2004, 267). Mexican Pentecostals and Protestants are contributing to the growth of Latino/ a Protestantism in the United States. Scholars found that 15 percent of all Mexican immigrants arriving in the United States are Protestant or other Christian. They are contributing to the growth of the more than 9.2 million Latina/o Protestants in the United States in 2008. The Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL) survey also found that although nearly 800,000 U.S. Hispanics indicated they ‘‘recently converted’’ or returned back to Catholicism from another non-Catholic denomination or no religious tradition, it also found that over 3.9 million Latino/as recently converted from Catholicism. Thus, for every one Hispanic that has returned to Catholic Church, four have left it. Furthermore, a clear majority of Latino/as (57 percent) that ‘‘recently converted’’ from Catholicism to Protestantism were second- or third-generation U.S. citizens (Espinosa 2004, 266–268). Not all countries in Latin America have experienced Mexico’s low Protestant growth rate. Drawing on figures from the year 2000, Protestants make up 29 percent (50 million) of all Brazilians, 27 percent (4 million) of all Chileans, 25 percent (2.8 million) of all Guatemalans, 22 percent (1.4 million) of all El Salvadorians, 22 percent of all Puerto Ricans (867,000), 20 percent (7 million) of all U.S. Latinos, 19 percent (950,000) of all Nicaraguans, and 18 percent of all Hondurans (1.1 million) and all Panamanians (520,000). Brazil has witnessed the most dramatic numerical growth, going from 12.8 percent (12.3 million) of the national population in 1970 to 50 million

| 425

in 2000. The largest Protestant denomination in Brazil (and Latin America) is the Assemblies of God, which reportedly has over 20 million affiliates. Scholars in Brazil now claim that there are twice as many Assemblies of God congregations (85,000) as Catholic congregations (35,598) (Espinosa 2004, 268–269). The numerically largest Latino/a Protestant denomination in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and the Dominican Republic is Pentecostal, often the Assemblies of God or an independent indigenous Pentecostal tradition.

Pentecostalization of U.S. Latino and Latin American Catholicism By 2007 there were 78 million Catholic Charismatics in Latin America and 6.8 million Latina/o Catholic Charismatics in the United States. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s 119 million Catholic Charismatics are located in Latin America south of the U.S. border, where they participate in an estimated 102,873 weekly prayer groups and are supported (although not necessarily directed) by more than 2,000 priests, 100 bishops, and tens of thousands of lay leaders. The movement has witnessed uneven growth throughout Latin America and the United States over the past four decades. It has experienced the largest numerical growth in Brazil (35 million), Colombia (11 million), Mexico (9 million), the United States (6.8 million), Argentina (5 million), Venezuela (3 million), Chile (1.6 million), and Ecuador (1.2 million) (Espinosa 2004, 271–275). The Latin American Catholic Charismatic movement traces its roots back to

426 |

Pentecostalism

NICKY CRUZ (1938–) Ex-gang leader turned evangelist, Nicky Cruz (b. December 6, 1938, in San Juan, Puerto Rico) has spent nearly 50 years ministering to troubled teens engaged in gang life, drugs, and alcohol. An ordained Assembly of God minister and much sought-after speaker, Nicky Cruz is founder of ‘‘Nicky Cruz Outreach’’ (www.nickycruz.org), a ministry that targets at-risk urban youth with a message of hope found in Jesus Christ. The author of more than a dozen books, Nicky Cruz is best known for his autobiography, Run Baby Run (originally published in 1968), which has sold over 14 million copies worldwide and chronicles Cruz’s troubled life from Puerto Rico, where he was raised by abusive parents, to the gang-ridden streets of New York City. In the mid-1950s Cruz became leader of a notorious inner-city gang. Then at the age of 19 his life was transformed through the ministry of evangelist David Wilkerson, founder of ‘‘Teen Challenge.’’ Wilkerson’s account of the conversion of Nicky Cruz is the subject of the bestselling book, The Cross and the Switchblade (1963), which was later adapted into a movie by the same title in 1970. —DAR

the United States and to Bogota´, Colombia. The movement’s four primary origins are the following: (1) the U.S. -based Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) in 1967, (2) a Bogota´, Colombia, based Catholic Charismatic prayer group in 1967, (3) the U.S.-based Charisma in Missions Catholic Evangelization and Renewal Society in 1972, and (4) Latin American Catholics who defected to Pentecostalism and then later returned to Catholicism over the past century. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal began at Duquesne University, United States, in 1967 after two lay instructors in the department of theology named Ralph Keifer and Patrick Bourgeois became interested in the Pentecostal movement after reading John Sherrill’s They Speak with Other Tongues (1964) and Assemblies of God evangelist David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade (1963), which presciently depicted the conversion of an im-

poverished Latino named Nicky Cruz to Pentecostalism. Keifer became so curious about the Pentecostal movement that he began attending a Charismatic prayer group held in the home of a Presbyterian laywoman. He soon received the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Shortly thereafter, Keifer, Bourgeois, and their students organized the first Catholic Charismatic prayer group at Duquesne University. This series of events helped birth the Catholic Charismatic renewal movement in the United States. The renewal spread to other Catholic universities such as the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, where Ralph Martin and Stephen Cook, two recent graduates of Notre Dame, quickly became leaders of the fledgling movement. The first nationwide Catholic Charismatic convention took place at the University of Notre Dame on April 7–9, 1967. By the early 1970s, the Catholic Charismatic movement attracted the support of national and international Catholic leaders like

Pentecostalism Father Kilian McDonnell and Belgian Cardinal Leon Joseph Suenens. Little is known about the Catholic Charismatic prayer group that began in Colombia. However, we do know that the Charisma in Missions renewal and evangelization society was organized by two former Assemblies of God missionaries to Colombia named Glenn and Marilynn Kramar in the Los Angeles area in 1972. They first began evangelizing and spreading the Pentecostal message in Colombia in 1967 before they returned to the United States. After receiving a pastoral blessing from Cardinal Timothy Manning in 1982, they opened the Charisma in Missions headquarters in the Los Angeles area. They brought some of the evangelistic strategies and spirituality they practiced in the Assemblies of God into the Catholic Charismatic movement. They also spread their version of the Catholic Charismatic movement throughout the United States, Mexico, Colombia, and Central and South America by organizing prayer groups, conferences, and selling workbooks and an estimated 2 million cassette tapes in Spanish. From these two origins and others, the Catholic Charismatic movement quickly spread to Puerto Rico (1969), Venezuela (1969), Mexico (1971), Brazil (1971), Argentina (1972), Chile (1972), Guatemala (1972), El Salvador (1977), and throughout the rest of Spanish-speaking Latin America by 1977. Vatican II, the Cursillo movement, and the theology of liberation movements all helped pave the way for the Catholic Charismatic movement because of their emphases on spiritual renewal, lay leadership, and faith-based empowerment. Many scholars are surprised to hear that there are more Catholic

| 427

Charismatics than Protestant Pentecostals in Mexico. In fact, 9.2 million of Mexico’s 13.5 million Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians are Roman Catholic. The movement has grown very rapidly since it began in Mexico City in June 1971. Although, as Chesnut points out, some clerics are critical or ambivalent about the movement, it has garnered strong support from more than 700 priests and 53 bishops. It is largely the small but growing institutional support that has enabled it to hold national services like the one conducted at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City that attracted 71,000 participants. The movement has also witnessed notable growth on the island of Puerto Rico, where it has also grown from a handful of people in 1969 to over 215,000 people (one-third of which were under the age of 25) attending 850 weekly prayer meetings by 1997. There is little reason to doubt that the immigration of Catholic Charismatics from Mexico and Puerto Rico has not contributed to the growth of the movement among U.S. Latina/os. By 2008, there were 6.8 million U.S. Latino/a Catholic Charismatics, making it one of the largest overlooked popular grassroots religious movements in the United States (Espinosa 2004, 274). In South America, Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina have witnessed significant Catholic Charismatic growth over the past four decades. The country that has witnessed the most notable numerical growth is Brazil. The movement has grown from a small prayer group in 1971 to more than 35 million affiliates in 2000. Together with Pentecostal and Charismatic Protestants, there are 76 million Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians in Brazil. In fact, 15 percent of all

428 |

Pentecostalism

Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians in the world today are located in Brazil. The Brazilian Catholic Charismatic movement sponsors 60,000 weekly prayer groups and is supported by over 500 priests, five bishops, and thousands of lay leaders. In Sa˜ o Paulo, annual renewal events have attracted 120,000 participants (Espinosa 2004, 279–280). Regardless of its staying power, it would be inaccurate to conclude that the Catholic Charismatic Movement has simply brought Protestant Pentecostalism wholesale into Latin American Catholicism. They have reinvented and rearticulated their Charismatic beliefs in light of traditional Catholic teachings and encyclicals on spiritual renewal. Precisely because they have been accused of being too lay driven and of serving as a Trojan horse for Protestantism, Catholic Charismatics have been very careful to emphasize that they are faithful Catholics who wholly support the doctrines, discipline, and hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, many see themselves as the new vanguard for Catholic evangelization and renewal. Despite this fact, the hierarchy has stressed that the Charismatic renewal (which is often led by women) must remain under clerical control and should avoid interacting with Pentecostal and Charismatic Protestants.

Indigenization of U.S. Latino/a and Latin American Pentecostalism The growth of the largely overlooked independent and indigenous Hispanic Pentecostal movement helps explain the rapid growth of Pentecostalism throughout Latin America and the United States. There are three major reasons why this

process took place so early in Latin American Pentecostalism. First, many early Pentecostal missionaries like Henry C. Ball (1896–1989), who was the Superintendent of the Assemblies of God work in Latin America in the 1940s, pushed for self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-governing indigenous churches. Second, indigenous ‘‘independent’’ U.S. Latino/a Pentecostal preachers from the Azusa Street Revival like Abundio L. Lo´pez, A. C. Valdez, Susie Villa Valdez, Brı´gido Pe´ rez, Luı´s Lo´ pez, and Juan Martı´nez Navarro, along with other later evangelists like Juan Lugo, Francisco Llorente, Antonio Castan˜ eda Nava, Francisco Olaza´bal, Carlos Sepu´lveda, Matilde Vargas, and Leoncia Rosado Rosseau began conducting evangelistic work in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Latin America in the early twentieth century. Third, Pentecostal churches and districts went through a number of schisms and fragmented or developed into new independent and indigenous denominations (or concilios—councils), which in turn did the same. It is precisely the indigenization, fragmentation, and localized rearticulation of Pentecostalism in the regional vernacular language, culture, and customs of the people that help explain its phenomenal growth. The chronic fragmentation and indigenization of the Pentecostal movement in Latin America is one of the primary reasons why the movement has been able to adapt and spread throughout Latin America over the past 100 years. In fact, the majority of Latin American Pentecostals are now part of independent (38 million) rather than classical (34 million) Pentecostal denominations. Most scholars have overlooked the rapid growth of independent Pentecostalism. The vast majority of Latin America’s

Pentecostalism

| 429

FRANCISCO LLORENTE (1890–1928) Francisco Llorente founded the Oneness Pentecostal movement among Latina/os in the United States and began the Asamblea Aposto´lica de la Fe en Cristo Jesu´s, Inc. (Apostolic Assembly of the Faith in Christ Jesus, Inc.). Born in Acapulco, Mexico, he traveled to San Diego, California, in 1912, where he was converted to Pentecostalism through the preaching of Azusa Street Revival evangelist Juan Navarro Martı´nez. Shortly thereafter he was ordained an evangelist and began preaching in migrant farm labor camps throughout southern California. He and other converts like Marcial de la Cruz and Antonio Castan ˜eda Nava converted many Mexicans to the Pentecostal movement and set up congregations and missions in Colton, San Bernardino, Riverside, Los Angeles, and Watts. Although most African American and Anglo-American Oneness bodies ordain women, the Apostolic Assembly prohibits the ordination of women, requires women to wear a head covering when in prayer, and requests that they not wear pants, cosmetics, or cut their hair short. In 1925, Llorente was named the first president of the Apostolic Assembly. He served in this capacity until 1928, by which time the Assembly counted 15 congregations. —GE

1,991 Pentecostal denominations and councils are independent (1,767) rather than tied to classical (224) Pentecostal bodies with historic ties to the United States. This fragmentation thesis hypothesizes that Pentecostal leaders invoke direct unmediated experiences with God as a pretext and basis for splitting off from an existing denomination to form another in an effort to restore Christianity back to its Apostolic roots described in the book of Acts (Espinosa 2004, 266, 276). Contrary to popular perception, one of the first Latin American countries to indigenize the Pentecostal message was Mexico. Although the Pentecostal movement in Mexico was shaped by AngloAmerican and Swedish Pentecostal missionaries like Clarissa Nuzum, George and Carrie Judd Montgomery, H. C. and Sunshine Ball, Alice E. Luce, and Axel and Ester Andersson, as eluded earlier, the first Pentecostal evangelists to

spread the movement to Mexico and organize a church were independent Latino/a Pentecostals from the United States. After attending the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in 1906, Mexicans like Abundio L. and Rosa Lo´pez, A. C. Valdez, Brı´gido Pe´rez, Luı´s Lo´pez, and Juan Martı´nez Navarro spread Pentecostalism to Mexicans living along the U.S.-Mexico border between 1906 and 1909, some of which no doubt returned to Mexico with their newfound faith. Furthermore, Romanita Carbajal de Valenzuela left the Spanish Apostolic Faith Mission in 1914 (and possibly earlier) in Los Angeles to spread the Pentecostal message in her hometown of Villa Aldama, Chihuahua, Mexico, where she converted a Methodist pastor named Ruben Orte´ga to Pentecostalism and helped plant the first permanent Pentecostal church in Mexico. The independent and indigenous Mexican work received a shot in the arm when

430 |

Pentecostalism

´ N LUGO (1890–1984) JUAN LEO Juan Leo´n Lugo pioneered the Pentecostal movement in Puerto Rico and New York City. He converted to Pentecostalism through the work of his mother, Juana, and by Rev. Frank Ortiz on Oahu, Hawaii, in 1913. Ortiz was converted through the preaching of Azusa Street Revival missionaries en route to China and Japan around 1912. Lugo spread the Pentecostal message to immigrants in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles from 1913 to 1916. He was ordained on January 16, 1916, by the Assemblies of God in San Jose, California. He was commissioned by Bethel Temple in Los Angeles to serve as a missionary to Puerto Rico. He arrived on the island on August 30, 1916 and began evangelistic work in Santurce and Ponce. Frank Ortiz Jr., Solomon and Dionisia Feliciano, Frank and Aura Finkenbinder, and Isabel, his future wife, soon joined his evangelistic work. He planted a number of churches on the island before pioneering the work in New York City in 1931. He founded Mizpa Bible Institute on the island in 1937. In 1940, he left the Assemblies of God to work with the Assemblies of Christian Churches and thereafter other Pentecostal bodies. —GE

Francisco Olaza´bal returned to his homeland in the 1920s and 1930s to hold large evangelistic campaigns in Mexico City, Ciudad Jua´ rez, Nogales, Mazatla´ n, and other parts of Mexico. Not long after the Mexican Revolution simmered down, after 1930 the Mexican government required that all foreign denominations hand over the leadership of their movements to Mexican nationals. This led to the nationalization and indigenization of almost all Anglo-American and Swedishcontrolled Pentecostal and Protestant denominations in Mexico. Subsequently, it led to a number of internal struggles for control of the new denominations and to denominational fragmentation that birthed a number of new independent and indigenous denominations. Today there are more than 159 independent and completely indigenous Pentecostal denominations in Mexico that have no administrative, financial, or emotional ties to the United States. They serve more than 4.3 million Protestant

Pentecostals in Mexico (Espinosa 2004, 274, 278, 281). However, a growing number of indigenous Mexican denominations like the Apostolic Church of the Faith in Jesus Christ have set up churches and missions among the Mexican diaspora living in the United States. A similar indigenization process took place in Puerto Rico. Although an Anglo-American woman was probably the first person to preach the Pentecostal message in Puerto Rico in 1909, the first person to plant lasting Pentecostal work on the island was Juan Leo´ n Lugo (1890–1984). After being converted to the Pentecostal movement by some Puerto Ricans, who were themselves converted by Azusa Street Revival (1906–1909) participants who stopped off in the Hawaiian Islands, he took the Pentecostal message to California (1913) and New York City (1916) before taking it to his native Puerto Rico in August 1916. He spread the Pentecostal message throughout the island and

Pentecostalism

| 431

MAMA LEO (1912–2006) Born as Leoncia Rosado Rousseau in Puerto Rico on April 11, 1912, Mama Leo received the ‘‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’’ during the revival of the 1930s among the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in her homeland. On September 22, 1935, she moved to New York with her husband, Rev. Francisco Rosado. After serving as Evangelists, the couple started the Iglesia Cristiana Damascus (Damascus Christian Church) in the Bronx. During these years, they were in contact and associated with Latino Pentecostal key figure Francisco Olaza´bal. When her husband was drafted by the military, Mama Leo became the pastor of the church and probably was the first Latina Pentecostal pastor in New York. Working among gang members and drug addicts, especially within the Puerto Rican neighborhoods, became the core of her ministry, not only through preaching in the street but with the establishment of rehabilitation programs. Out of this concern, Mama Leo, with her husband, founded the ‘‘Damascus Youth Crusade’’ in 1975. This drug and outreach program benefited many in the inner city who were considered outcast and marginalized, and it proved to be a model for other Christian drug programs across the Americas. Mama Leo passed away on October 5, 2006. —HMV

incorporated his work in 1922 as the Pentecostal Church of God in cooperation with the Assemblies of God. In 1931, he helped pioneer the Pentecostal work among the Puerto Rican diaspora living in New York City. That same year Francisco Olaza´ bal arrived in Spanish Harlem. At the invitation of some of his converts in New York City, in 1934 and in 1936 he conducted two large-scale evangelistic healing campaigns in Puerto Rico. Thousands were converted. His campaign broke the monopoly that Juan Lugo and the Assemblies of God enjoyed over the Pentecostal work on the island. His campaign also led to the creation of a number of indigenous Pentecostal bodies. Twenty years later in 1957, the Pentecostal Church of God based in Puerto Rico split off from the Assemblies of God in the United States because their leaders believed they were being discriminated against. The Pentecostal

Church of God is now the largest Protestant denomination on the island, followed by the Seventh-day Adventists, the Assemblies of God, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Today there are 63 Pentecostal denominations in Puerto Rico, 57 of which are independent bodies. In 2000, more than 1.1 million Puerto Ricans (28 percent of the population) on the island were part of the Protestant and Catholic Pentecostal/Charismatic movement, 867,000 of which were Protestant (Espinosa 2004, 275–279). Despite the growth of independent Pentecostal denominations in Mexico and Puerto Rico, the country that has experienced the most rapid independent Pentecostal growth is Brazil. Today there are 50 million Protestants in Brazil, the vast majority (41 million) of which are Pentecostal or Charismatic. They make up almost one-third (29 percent) of all Brazilians today. Although the Assemblies of God is the largest Protestant

432 |

Pentecostalism

body with approximately 20 million affiliates, the next five largest Protestant denominations (with 1.8 million adherents or more) in Brazil are independent and indigenous Pentecostal denominations like the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, the God Is Love Pentecostal Church, the Cornerstone Gospel Church, Brazil for Christ, and the Christian Congregation of Brazil (Espinosa 2004, 277–280). Furthermore, there are another 400 independent and indigenous Pentecostal denominations operating in Brazil. The HCAPL national survey found that the top three largest Latino/a Protestant traditions in the United States are all Pentecostal and two of these are independent.

Latin American Evangelization of U.S. Latina/os One of the most important results of the rapid growth of the Pentecostal movement in Latin America is the decision of a growing number of independent and indigenous Pentecostal bodies to send missionaries to evangelize Hispanic citizens and immigrants in the United States. Although there is no official count of how many independent and indigenous denominations in Latin America have sent missionaries to the U.S. mainland, I would estimate this number to be well over 150. Among independent Latin American Pentecostals, it is a status symbol to say that you have missionaries and churches in the largest and most powerful country on earth. Perhaps the best example of the ‘‘back to the future’’ phenomena of Latin American Pentecostals returning to the United States to spread Pentecostalism is the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. The second largest Protestant

body in Brazil after the Assemblies of God, the Universal Church has grown from the preaching of Edir Macedo (1944–) in a largely empty funeral parlor in 1977 to more than 4 million people in 2000. He came to the United States in 1986 to personally initiate the work. Since then, the Church has planted at least 25 mother churches and a number of preaching points in most of the major Spanish-speaking barrios in the United States. Most of these churches serve as the basis for planting new churches throughout a given metropolitan area. There are at least two Universal Church bishops residing in the United States that oversee the work. The Universal Church is also targeting English-speaking Anglo-Americans and African Americans. In addition, they publish ¡PARE de Sufrir! (Stop Suffering!), which has a U.S. circulation of 50,000. The Universal Church is exporting its ‘‘high octane’’ version of Pentecostalism to the United States, with evangelistic crusades, divine healing services, and public exorcisms. They also use the latest technology, radio, and television to spread their message (Espinosa 2004, 280–281). Not nearly as media driven, yet no less determined, are the hundreds of missionaries from Mexico’s Apostolic Church of the Faith in Jesus Christ, the Light of the World Church, Puerto Rico’s Pentecostal Church of God, MI (Movimiento Internacional), Guatemala’s Church of Christ, Final Call, and other Latin American Pentecostal denominations that are setting up missions and churches among the Latin American diaspora in the United States. They and other independent Pentecostal denominations are aggressively competing for the heart and soul of the Latino/a community along with Anglo-American and native U.S.

Pentecostalism Hispanic Pentecostal denominations like the Hispanic Districts of the Assemblies of God, the Assembly of Christian Churches, the Apostolic Assembly of the Faith in Christ Jesus, Victory Outreach International, and other Pentecostal/Charismatic traditions. These new Latin American imports are theologically and socially diverse. For although the Light of the World Church requires men and women to sit on different sides of the aisles and requires women to wear a veil, refrain from cutting their hair, and avoid wearing cosmetics, jewelry, or pants, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God uses drama, skits, Christian pop music, radio, and television to reach young and old alike. Comportment does not seem to be a major issue for them. Furthermore, although some foreign imports like Apostolic Church of the Faith in Jesus Christ are non-Trinitarian and Oneness in theology, others like the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God are Trinitarian. Another important development is the influence that Latin American Pentecostalism is having on Anglo-American Pentecostalism. Perhaps the best example of this is the fact that the founders of the Toronto Blessing Revival in Canada trace their spiritual genealogy back to the Pentecostal revival in Argentina. The Toronto Blessing, the longest such revival in North American history, has in turn helped inspire and influence the Brownsville Revival in Florida. This revival had a direct impact on American and Canadian Pentecostal subcultures. In many respects, we are witnessing a back-to-the-future phenomenon with Latin American Pentecostal evangelists taking their Azusa Street–like message of salvation and divine healing on

| 433

speaking tours in Anglo-American Pentecostal churches across the United States and Canada. The four most famous Argentine evangelists that minister in the United States are Carlos Annacondia, Claudio Friedzon, Alberto Mottessi, and Omar Cabrera. Their enormous churches and revival services, which have drawn up to 60,000 people in Argentina, have been closely followed in American Pentecostal circles and have received major multipage coverage in the most important interdenominational Pentecostal magazine in the United States, Charisma. The attention that Annacondia, Friedzon, Mottessi, and Cabrera have received through their speaking tours, books, videos, and revivals in Latin America and in the United States has prompted a growing number of American Pentecostal leaders to adopt their strategies and even to travel to Latin America to visit their churches in order to bring back to the United States new methods and strategies for their own ministries. American and Canadian Pentecostal leaders are also following similar revival movements in Brazil and Guatemala. Finally, although we lack time to fully explore here, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Latin American Catholic Charismatics are contributing to the spread of the Catholic Charismatic movement among U.S. Latinos (Espinosa 2004, 282). The result of Latin American Pentecostal missionary work in the United States, along with high levels of immigration from countries with large Pentecostal/Charismatic populations, is that a very high percentage of U.S. Latina/os are Pentecostal/Charismatic. The HCAPL national survey found that Latino/as of Mexican, El Salvadorian,

434 |

Pentecostalism

Guatemalan, Colombian, and Cuban descent are Pentecostal/Charismatic at a higher rate than found in their country of origin. This may be due to Protestant Pentecostals and Catholic Charismatics immigrating to the United States at a higher rate than non-Pentecostal/Charismatics. Although evidence is lacking for all of Latin America, scholars have recently found that Mexican Protestants immigrate to the United States at more than twice (15 percent) the percentage of the national Mexican population (7.2 percent). This may also be true for Latin Americans that come from countries with large Protestant populations (e.g., Guatemala, El Salvador) and/or from countries where there is acute discrimination, persecution, and other forms of historic social disenfranchisement (e.g., Cuba, Mexico, Colombia). In total, there are 20 million Pentecostal/Charismatic Protestants and Catholics in the six largest Latin American countries sending Latin Americans to the United States (Espinosa 2004, 283–284).

Catholic-Pentecostal Cooperation The growth of Protestant Pentecostalism has prompted some Catholic leaders to seek out creative ways to work together on common causes. This is an incredibly difficult task because of the deep animosity that exists between Pentecostal Protestants and Catholics in Latin America. This animosity is hard to overcome when, as religion scholar Brian H. Smith notes, Pentecostals accuse the pope of being the ‘‘Antichrist’’ and Catholics of practicing ‘‘idolatry’’ because they ‘‘worship’’ the Virgin Mary and the saints. Still others insult Catholic leaders

by claiming that the devil runs ‘‘rampant’’ in Catholic convents and monasteries, where ‘‘nuns have abortions’’ and ‘‘priests spread homosexuality.’’ In similarly sharp rhetoric, in 1992 at the Latin American Conference of Catholic Bishops, Pope John Paul II accused Pentecostals and other ‘‘sects’’ of being ‘‘rapacious wolves’’ and ‘‘pseudospiritual movements’’ that were devouring Latin American Catholics and causing ‘‘division and discord in our communities’’ (1998, 4, 60–64, 92–95). Despite the real hostility that exists between Hispanic Protestants and Catholics in the Americas, there is a small but growing trend toward ecumenical/interdenominational cooperation. Smith notes that Pentecostals and Catholics have joined forces on moral issues in a number of Latin American countries to promote family values, oppose any measures to legalize abortion or homosexual marriage, fight corruption and military dictatorships, and champion human rights and social justice. In Costa Rica, for example, a number of Catholic and Pentecostal ministers joined forces in 1993 to oppose a legislative proposal that would instruct high school students on how to have safe sex outside of marriage. Similarly in Chile in 1995, some Catholics and Pentecostals worked together to oppose a new law that would grant equal rights to gays and lesbians. In Central America, some Pentecostals collaborated with Catholic Christian Base communities to aid those attacked by Right Wing militias. In Brazil, Bishop Manoel de Mello of the Brazil for Christ denomination praised Catholic bishops for speaking out against human rights violations and sharply criticized Evangelicals for remaining silent. There are also other examples of Catholic and Protestant

Pentecostalism scholars working together in seminary education and in writing church histories (Smith 1998, 95–97). Smith argues that there are three possible future scenarios for CatholicPentecostal interaction: (1) mutually reinforcing flight from the world whereby they focus on inward spirituality and neglect social responsibilities; (2) conflicting religiopolitical agendas whereby Catholics would support existing government structures while Pentecostals would defend free-market capitalism and political democracy; and (3) prophetic social catalyst moving in tandem for moral reform and social and political change. The transdenominational and transnational Pentecostal/ Charismatic movement may be one of the most important ecumenical bridges available today. However, anti-Catholic bigotry and mandates from the Catholic hierarchy that Catholic Charismatics should not invite Protestant Pentecostals to speak at Catholic Charismatic Church–sponsored events undermine this potentially important ecumenical/ interdenominational bridge in CatholicPentecostal relations (Smith 1998, 15–19, 85–99). This movement toward ecumenical/ interdenominational cooperation between Latino/a Pentecostals and Catholics is moving ahead at a much faster pace in the United States. A number of seminary programs, institutes, and conferences like the former Hispanic branch of the Fund for Theological Education (FTE), Hispanic Summer Program, AETH, the Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI), and the HCAPL study have brought Latina/o Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals students and/or faculty together for funding, seminary training, ministry

| 435

workshops and seminars, and networking opportunities (Espinosa 2004, 285–286). Gasto´n Espinosa

References and Further Reading Camp, Roderic Ai. Crossing Swords: Politics and Religion in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Chesnut, R. Andrew. Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). De Leon, Victor. The Silent Pentecostals: A Biographical History of the Pentecostal Movement among Hispanics in the Twentieth-Century (Taylors, SC: Faith Printing Company, 1979). Espinosa, Gasto´n. ‘‘El Azteca: Francisco Olazabal and Latino Pentecostal Charisma, Power, and Faith Healing in the Borderlands.’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 597–616. Espinosa, Gasto´n. ‘‘‘Your Daughters Shall Prophesy’: A History of Women in Ministry in the Latino Pentecostal Movement in the United States.’’ Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism, ed. Margaret Lamberts Bendroth and Virginia Lieson Brereton (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Espinosa, Gasto´n. ‘‘The Pentecostalization of Latin American and U.S. Latino Christianity.’’ Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 26, no. 2 (2004): 262–292. Espinosa, Gasto´n. ‘‘Ordinary Prophet: William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival.’’ The Azusa Street Revival and Its Legacy, ed. Harold D. Hunter and Cecil M. Robeck Jr. (Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 2006), 29–60. Sa´nchez-Walsh, Arlene. Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and

436 |

Pilgrimage

Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Smith, Brian H. Religious Politics in Latin America: Pentecostal vs. Catholic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998). Villafane, Eldin. The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1992).

PILGRIMAGE ‘‘Pilgrimage,’’ or in Spanish ‘‘peregrinacio´ n,’’ comes from the Latin words ‘‘per’’ and ‘‘ager’’ (to wander about). The religious concept of pilgrimage, however, is not to wander about aimlessly, but to go a great distance for the purpose of worshipping in a specific place, usually a shrine or tomb where some type of theophany (divine revelation or manifestation) has occurred. Pilgrimage seems to be a part of every major religion and is an important tradition in the three religions that come from Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Pilgrimage in JudeoChristian Tradition From ancient times, pilgrimage has been tied to cultic centers or shrines and to offering or sacrifice. Pilgrims would travel to a shrine to celebrate a specific holiday (holy day) in honor of a certain god or sacred being. While there, the pilgrim would offer part of her/his produce (fruit, vegetable, or animal) in supplication or thanksgiving. In the Hebrew Scriptures, we find the Israelites being called to come before God in three pilgrim festivals (solemn and joyful

occasions). These are Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Booths. The Jewish practice of going on pilgrimage to these holy places was so strong that even during the exile, pilgrimage to Jerusalem continued. Despite the fact that the Ark of the Covenant had been lost, faithful Jews continued to ‘‘go up to’’ Jerusalem to offer prayers of supplication and thanksgiving to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. In the Christian Scriptures, Jesus and the Holy Family, being faithful Jews, also went up to Jerusalem in pilgrimage to offer sacrifice (Luke 2:22, 41). As an adult, Jesus continued the practice of going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem with his disciples (John 2:13). His triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday can be seen as part of the pilgrim ritual of his disciples. As Jews, early Christians seem to continue the practice of going on pilgrimage to Jewish Shrines in Palestine; however, with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (70 CE) Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land took on less of a religious tone in favor of a more historical interest in the places where Jesus had lived. Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land also seem to have been occasions to visit and aid the impoverished Christian communities still living in Palestine. The conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century gave freedom of worship to all Christians. With the end of persecution, the places of Christian martyrdom as well as the tombs of famous Christian martyrs became places of pilgrimage for those who could not travel to the Holy Land. The places of Christian pilgrimage slowly became organized around types of locations: shrines to Jesus’ life, Christian martyrdom, and radical monastic life. As time

Pilgrimage

| 437

´ CHIMAYO A town and valley 28 miles northeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Chimayo´ and its famous chapel, the Santuario, are destination sites for yearly pilgrimages, especially during Holy Week. Steeped in folklore, Chimayo´ has been associated with several major legends relating to the supernatural and miraculous. One such legend involves a pit in the ground of which the dirt (called tierra bendita, ‘‘blessed earth’’) is said to have healing power. The tradition stems back to precolonial days when the Pueblo Indians found the fertile land to be sacred, and later this myth came to be fused with a legend of Guatemalan descent surrounding a crucifix known as the Sen˜or de Esquı´pulas. Both the pit, El Posito, and the crucifix were centralized when Bernardo Abeyta, a member of the Penitentes brotherhood, received permission to build a private chapel in 1814; the present structure was built by 1816. Over 300,000 people visit Chimayo´ each year to partake of its chiles and fruits, support its famous weaving industry, and visit the Santuario, as well as the Capilla del Santo Nin˜o de Atocha, to search for a miracle and to draw closer to God. Because of its folkloric heritage, the Chimayo´ valley is one of the most important religious sites in the American Southwest. —DC

passed, a fourth type of pilgrimage site became important: shrines to apparitions of Jesus, Mary, or a Saint. Most of today’s Christian shrines belong to this fourth category.

Shrines and Other Holy Places Shrines are places tied to the holy or the sacred. According to Crumrine and Morinis, they are ‘‘revered places which cultures have often erected in the most awe-inspiring locations, honored with the highest manifestations of their arts and crafts, revered as the earthly seat of God, and given much blood, sweat, tears, and money to visit’’ (1991, 2). Above all, they are sites that have witnessed the action of God in a particularly powerful way through either miracles or martyrdom. Besides the places of Jesus’ life, the Christian community in the fourth century began to distinguish certain catacombs around the Roman Empire as

shrines because of the martyrs buried there. As knowledge of them grew, these shrines became important centers of international travel. As the centuries passed, every important region of Christendom desired to have its place of pilgrimage. Legend, miracles, and ancient documentation led to the discovery of various martyrs in Europe and the Middle East. The most famous of these was the discovery of the body of the Apostle James, the son of Zebedee and ‘‘brother’’ (cousin) of Jesus. His tomb was discovered in the year 830 in Galicia (Spain) at Campus Stellae. The Shrine came to be called Santiago (Saint James) de Campostela, and it the most famous of Spain’s 1,014 shrines. According to Christian legend, the body of Santiago was buried because, in his efforts to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth, he had journeyed to Hispaniola. When he had founded the Church in Spain, the Virgin Mary appeared to him

438 |

Pilgrimage

on a Pillar in Zaragosa. She told him Jesus wanted him to return to Jerusalem to be martyred in witness to the faith. Before leaving for Jerusalem, he established a Shrine to Santa Marı´a del Pilar as a place of pilgrimage for Spanish Christians. He left for Jerusalem, and after his martyrdom in 44 CE his body was taken back to Spain and buried. Eventually the location of his tomb was forgotten until the hermit Pelagio discovered it in a miraculous manner. Almost immediately it became a place of pilgrimage. Since then, Christians have been making their way to Santiago de Compostela in the far northwestern corner of Spain in an area that used to be known as finis mundi (the ends of the earth). Before the socalled ‘‘discovery’’ of the Western Hemisphere, it was thought that this was the

place Jesus referred to in Acts 1:8 when he sent his disciples to preach the Gospel to the ‘‘ends of the earth.’’ Another famous pilgrimage location in Spain is that of Santa Marı´a de Guadalupe in Extremadura. In the midthirteenth century, the shepherd Gil Cordero miraculously discovered a Lucan statue of Mary hidden during the Moorish invasion of Spain. A shrine was built for it and pilgrims soon began to come to venerate the holy image. It was from this location that the Christian concept of shrines and pilgrimage moved to America. Probably the most famous Christian American shrine is that of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyac (Mexico City). This shrine dates back to 1531 and is erroneously named after the shrine to Guadalupe in Spain. Still, this happy

Large crowd outside the Old Basilica of Guadaloupe during the annual pilgrimage to the shrine of Mexico’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe. (Danny Lehman/Corbis)

Pilgrimage accident demonstrates how in America the European, African, and Indigenous ideas of pilgrimage and shrines would come to influence how Americans, especially Latino/as, understand these two concepts. Pilgrimage in Europe was a penitential act. In Latin America it is often with a vow (promesa/manda) in mind. Pilgrimage in the Latina/o mind-set is a mixture of devotion, belief, bartering, gratitude, ritual, and travel. Iconography and myth are essential to pilgrimage. Normally, Hispanic pilgrims will travel short or great distances to see for themselves the location of a mythic event like the apparition of Marı´a to Juan Diego at Tepeyac or the survival of the image of Christ (Sen˜ or de los Milagros) on the only wall of a chapel that remained standing after a great earthquake in Lima, Peru. According to Crumrine and Morinis, Mayan and other Indigenous religious and cultural pilgrimages in Latin America ‘‘take on cosmological significance, as journeys to shrines are identified with macrocosmic cycles of movement among astral bodies.’’ The Christian influence on pilgrimage is one of conversion. The visit to a shrine moves one from the familiar world of home to the unfamiliar world of the holy place and back again, hopefully as a new person. Pilgrimage is meant to be done with an open heart and ‘‘is an exercise in humble supplication, surrender, and prayer in which the qualities of the Christian heart are cultivated’’ (1991, 5, 14). Besides connection to the mythic and cosmological, pilgrimage brings the pilgrim into contact with a spiritual and often cultural icon. The pilgrimage shrine and its image of Christ, Mary, or one of the Saints often belongs to a

| 439

particular culture and needs to be familiar to that culture. But, because it is transcendental in nature, it needs to differentiate itself enough from the cultural norm that it becomes special, aweinspiring, and transforming. Anthropological and social studies have shown that ‘‘pilgrimage can work to reinforce the social image and identity of a group within a diversified ethnic population’’ (Crumrine and Morinis 1991, 7). When Latina/os are unable to go back to their homeland, the venerated image of the shrine becomes a pilgrim and travels to a local parish in the United States, where the Hispanics of the area can come and visit. At times these pilgrimage images stay in a local area and become miraculous in and of themselves, thus beginning a new Latin American shrine in the United States. For example, the shrine of the Virgin de San Juan de Los Lagos in Mexico became La Virgen de San Juan de los lagos del Valle de Texas and the shrine to the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre in Cuba became the Ermita de la Caridad in Miami, Florida.

Conclusion The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, hold pilgrimage as an important and hopefully lifechanging event. It should not be undertaken as a tourist or as simple travel, rather a pilgrim needs to undertake his/ her pilgrimage as an act of faith and a connection to the mythic events and peoples of faith. Christian Latino/as seeking pilgrimage do not have to travel to the Holy Land or Europe as shrines and places of pilgrimage abound in the Americas. There are between 57 and 111 shrines in the United States; Mexico has 223 shrines; Brazil has 121; Peru has

440 |

Political Involvement

106; Argentina has 93; Ecuador has 91; Chile has 74; Colombia has 68; Canada has 52 shrines, including 1 to Our Lady of Guadalupe; Bolivia and Venezuela have 41 holy places each; Uruguay has 16; El Salvador has 14; Guatemala has 12; Honduras has 9; Puerto Rico has 7; the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Panama have 5 shrines each; and finally, Cuba has 3, Paraguay has 2, and Costa Rica has 1 place of pilgrimage (Crumrine and Morinis 1991, 22). Gilberto Cavazos-Gonza´lez

References and Further Reading Crumrine, N. Ross, and E. Alan Morinis, eds. Pilgrimage in Latin America: Contributions to the Study of Anthropology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991). LaBande, Edmund Rene´. ‘‘Pilgrimages: Medieval and Modern.’’ New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Gale Cengage, 2003). McCarthy, Maria Caritas. ‘‘Pilgrimage: Early Christian.’’ New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Gale Cengage, 2003). Polan, Stanley Morris. ‘‘Pilgrimage.’’ New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Gale Cengage, 2003).

POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT Political participation on behalf of groups and individuals is an integral function of democratic societies, both sustaining and challenging the decisions and powers of governmental bodies. Historically, scholars have differentiated between conventional means of political engagement such as voting, lobbying, campaigning, or running for office, or

more direct means via protests, demonstrations, and forms of civil disobedience as methods to ensure an equitable and efficient distribution of scarce resources. From a Latino/a perspective, a lack of scholarly focus has led to erroneous assumptions about the nonexistent influence of religion on civic participation amongst the community. This stands in stark contrast to the gamut of existing information on the role of the churches and religious organizations on African American political involvement during slavery, Jim Crow, and the post–civil rights era. Gaps in scholarly literature (as well as depictions and reports by mainstream media sources), have aided long-held perceptions that Latina/os are politically passive, with most historically affiliated to a Catholic church that perpetuated the status quo and refrained from assisting the community amidst structures of oppression (Espinosa, Elizondo, and Miranda 2005, 4). However, while recent scholarly observations acknowledge the truths to past accounts, they also reveal untold stories of religious organizations and spiritual leaders actively engaging in social and economic justice issues, likewise using faith as vehicles for political activism. At the same time, the ‘‘modes’’ of political participation in which Hispanics engage, from less controversial methods like voting and discussion forums to more direct action initiatives like rallies, protests, and walkouts, often vary by religious affiliation. Overall, studies show most Latino/as wish their churches were more politically active from the local to state and national levels. In addition, Hispanics express interest in seeing their religious leaders talk more about politics, especially Evangelicals in comparison to Catholics and other religious affiliations.

Political Involvement

| 441

COMMUNITIES ORGANIZED FOR PUBLIC SERVICE Founded in 1974 by Ernesto Corte´z Jr. and other San Antonio, Texas, activists, Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), as its name indicates, is concerned with the everyday issues facing the Latino/a community. COPS was organized as an association of 26 Catholic parishes located in the predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods of San Antonio. Each parish became an important building block whose leaders also became the leaders of COPS. Avoiding divisive social issues, COPS concentrated on the basic needs of the community, i.e., proper drainage, traffic problems, good relationships with the police, or clearing dumping grounds within Hispanic neighborhoods. Their efforts also helped block the construction of a Bandera freeway that would have negatively affected the Latina/o community. While remaining nonpartisan, COPS participated in voter registration drives of Latina/os that eventually translated into electing Hispanics to public office. Through their efforts, they were able to participate in the election of San Antonio’s first Latino mayor, Henry Cisneros, who was also the first Latino mayor of a major U.S. city. —MAD

However, the extent and mode of political participation largely depends on the policy issues that most impact the community, with immigration largely at the center of past and contemporary debate.

Brief Historical Development The historical intersection between Latino/a religion and political involvement can be traced back to the initial U.S. invasion of Mexican territory (1846– 1848). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended a bloody war and drew borders between the two nations, set the legal framework for the United States to occupy over 50 percent of Mexican land. Followed by the Treaty of Mesilla (1854), which settled disputes over remaining sections of the Southwest, areas representing present-day states such as Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming were all brought under the auspices of the U.S. government.

Initially, the 1848 treaty was supposed to guarantee citizenship and property rights to Mexicans who chose to stay in occupied Mexico, but racially motivated violence spread against them and attempts of integration into U.S. institutions was met with resistance. Outright exclusion of property ownership and political disenfranchisement created the foundations for what Juan Gonzalez (2001) likened to a system of apartheid in his book Harvest of Empire, given that Mexicans and other minority groups outnumbered the colonizing EuroAmericans but had little or no access to resources and power structures. During the initial era of Southwest colonization, historical accounts show that the Catholic Church at times remained silent, concentrating more on spreading Christianity than challenging the oppressive social conditions their predominantly Mexican congregants faced. Meanwhile, Protestants were likewise disinterested, focusing instead on

442 |

Political Involvement

converting Euro-Americans who followed the country’s path of westward expansionism. However, there is evidence that some Hispanic clergy resisted the discriminatory attitudes and actions of occupying European religious officials, subsequently inspiring congregants to do the same. Public ethnoreligious celebrations were also products of this resistance, proudly organized to honor the Catholic traditions of their ancestors prior to colonization. In addition, by the late nineteenth century, Latino clergy experienced displacement by European clergy purposely recruited to meet the spiritual needs of growing EuroAmerican populations in the Southwest. This diluted any progress by church leaders in organizing against worsening economic conditions for Latina/o populations. During the 1900s, Latino/a workers’ rights campaigns, with well-known leaders like Dolores Huerta and Ce´sar Cha´vez, are thought to have been largely ‘‘secular’’ movements. However, while most scholars have compared Cha´vez to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for their shared belief in advocating nonviolent action, they largely ignore that the Catholic Church and faith were instrumental in Cha´vez’s struggle for social justice. Likewise, during the latter part of the Bracero Program, a governmentsponsored guest worker program that recruited nearly 5 million Mexicans from 1942 to 1964, a broad coalition of unions, churches, and research centers put pressure on the U.S. government to improve the housing and labor conditions workers faced. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other Hispanics formed advocacy groups utilizing the concept of identity politics, a powerful

organizing tool to build group solidarity in order to address historical and present-day experiences of racism, prejudice, and discrimination. In some localities, churches opened their doors as safe houses for Latino/a students and community groups, while others turned their backs to them. Recently depicted in the film Walkout and based on actual accounts, thousands of East Los Angeles High School students organized and mobilized in the spring of 1968 to protest unequal treatment, with local churches often serving as meeting grounds for organizers. As a result, the walkout movement spread across the country, influencing the need for educational reform. Nevertheless, as in the case of the Puerto Rican youth movement and organization the Young Lords, a local East Harlem church (the First Spanish Methodist Church) was seized by the group because it was empty six days a week, turning it into La Iglesia de la Gente. For 11 days the church became a makeshift community center, where primarily local people of color came to engage in testimonials, poetry, music, song, and other activities in protest of economic conditions and institutionalized oppression. After a surge in undocumented immigration due to political unrest in Latin America during the 1980s, the Sanctuary Movement emerged across the United States. Over 500 congregations, including those of both the Catholic and Protestant denominations, joined forces to aid and shelter Central American immigrants from the Immigration and Naturalization Service authorities. The Reverends John Fife and Jim Corbett, aware of the devastating effects of civil unrest in Guatemala and El Salvador, began opening up churches in South Texas under the

Political Involvement

| 443

´ LICOS POR LA RAZA CATO Started in 1969 by a Loyola Marymount University law student, Ricardo Cruz, Cato´licos por la Raza (CPLR) was a political organization that protested how the Catholic dioceses, specifically the Los Angeles diocese, spent church funds in wealthier and whiter neighborhoods while ignoring poorer Hispanic neighborhoods. CPLR was also concerned that the Catholic Church was neither appointing Hispanic clergy in leadership positions nor paying attention to other concerns raised within Latina/o parishes. Although originally established as a response to the closing of a predominant Mexican girl’s school, Our Lady Queen of Girl’s High School, its first public protest occurred during the 1969 Christmas Eve Mass at Saint Basil located in Wilshire. Then Cardinal James McIntyre spent close to $4 million for the event. Hundreds protested by leading a march to the Mass—picketing outside while service continued inside. Eventually, several entered the church, leading to 21 of the protestors being arrested, including Ricardo Cruz. Citing ‘‘moral corruption’’ for his activities in leading the march, Cruz’s admission to the California State Bar was postponed. Although the Catholic Church criticized the Christmas Eve actions of CPLR, they did respond by appointing several Latinos as cardinals throughout the southwestern United States. Additionally, the use of Spanish and Hispanic culture (specifically Mexican) was incorporated into the church, along with official support to organizations like the United Farm Workers. —MAD

medieval law of ‘‘right to sanctuary.’’ During the fourth to seventeenth century, law officials did not have the legal right to arrest criminals in a place of religious worship. Church leaders used this argument to help protect those who needed asylum from bloodshed in their native countries. The Sanctuary Movement soon gained momentum and became popular in Arizona, Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, and California. In protest against mid-1980s American interventionist policies in Latin America and other Third World regions, many university campuses also adapted the manifesto of ‘‘right to sanctuary.’’ By 1987, 440 locations across the United States were declared as refuges for Central American immigrants. At the end of the millennium, religion and politics also played an integral role during the Elia´n Gonza´lez custody battle,

one that reached worldwide media attention. As Miguel De La Torre (2003) pointed out, not only had the Cuban exilic community used religion to justify their overall political and economic power over time, but religious symbols and biblical comparisons of the coming of a Christ child, as well as support from influential local Catholic clergy, were largely instrumental in prolonging the international custody battle. More recently, a resurgence of nativism and xenophobia has largely been fueled over the growing presence of undocumented immigrants from Latin America. As Congress debated immigration reform in May 2006 and 2007, immigrant rights marches involving thousands from Los Angeles to New York were largely organized or sponsored by local and national faith-based groups and advocacy organizations. A

444 |

Political Involvement

Hundreds of protesters wave flags at the ‘‘Americans for Elian’s Freedom’’ rally at the Miami courthouse on May 11, 2000. The demonstrators demanded that Elian Gonzalez be allowed to stay in the United States. (Getty Images)

similar organization inspired by faithbased initiatives in the 1980s named ‘‘The New Sanctuary Movement’’ was created to offer support to undocumented immigrants. However, their aims have shifted from offering asylum to undocumented immigrants to providing low cost and free legal aid.

The Impact of Religion on Latina/o Political Participation —Results from Studies Over the past decade political scientists have begun to pay more attention to the growing Latino/a community’s role and impact on the U.S. political process. Studies that examine group political participation largely rely on testing the theoretical premises of ‘‘social capital,’’

loosely known as the organizational networks in which groups engage in order to sustain the structures of modern pluralistic democracies. According to a 2008 study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, most Latino/as see religion as a moral compass to guide their own political thinking, expressing their concern about the need for political participation both inside the confines of the church and in everyday life. Additionally, a vast majority of those surveyed saw the pulpit as an appropriate place for the expression of political views. Not only did an overwhelming two-thirds of Hispanics of differing nationalities and denominations opine that religious beliefs should be raised in church, they also commented that political leaders, both at the local and national levels, do not express their

Political Involvement own religious views frequently enough. This backed an earlier 2002 survey of 260 church leaders and members in six major cities in the United States and Puerto Rico (Marquez and Wainer 2002). The study found that church members do not necessarily participate in politics other than voting and that church leaders largely condemn direct action such as rallies, protests, and demonstration, instead encouraging nonpolitical social and community involvement. The authors suggested their findings are largely explained by their churches’ avoidance of partisan politics. However, Hispanic churches’ commitment to community and social engagement increases different forms of political activism on behalf of their members, thus creating the foundations for future political participation at state, national, and international levels. When assessing political participation by religious affiliation, studies reveal divergent results. Evangelicals were most likely to apply personal religious beliefs to their political thinking. According to the Pew study, 66 percent of evangelicals reported religion as the most important factor in political decisions as compared to 44 percent of Catholics. Whereas only 10 percent of evangelicals reported that religion and politics should remain disparate, over 30 percent of Catholics reported that religion had no influence in their political lives. A possible reason for this difference is that Evangelicals tend to place higher value on spirituality in all aspects of life. As historian David Bebbington posits, one hallmark of evangelicalism includes conversionism, or the belief that lives need to be changed. Through the mouthpiece of evangelicalism, believers may use politics as a

| 445

means to better their own personal situations, whether locally or globally (Espinosa et al. 2005, 15). In their article, ‘‘Religion and Latino Partisanship in the United States,’’ Nathan J. Kelly and Jana Morgan Kelly discovered that the number of hours spent in church had a direct influence on the religious influence upon politics. They suggest a reason for this is that churches provide an important social context in which political information is exchanged. Therefore, Latina/os affiliated with a specific congregation within their religious community are likely to adopt partisan attachments that are consistent with the messages received (88). The Pew study backs this finding. Over 40 percent of Evangelicals attend church services at least three times a week and over 60 percent frequent services at least one time per week. Fifty-one percent of Catholics reported that they attend church on a sporadic basis, and 30 percent reported that participation was limited to a particular religious event, such as a baptism or a wedding. Because frequent, even daily, church attendance (as in the case of Evangelicals like Pentecostals) is encouraged, religion and politics seem to remain inseparable in the Evangelical church as compared to their Catholic counterparts. Religion may continue to have a substantial effect upon political thinking due to a sharp decline in Catholicism and exponential increase in Evangelicalism and Protestant affiliation since the 1980s. The authors postulated that many Christians were finding Protestantism more attractive due to a closer-knit church community, more egalitarian gender roles in the church, social gatherings outside the church, and a more relaxed church atmosphere. If this

446 |

Political Involvement

LATINO PASTORAL ACTION CENTER Founded in 1992 by the Reverend Dr. Raymond Rivera, the New York City–based Latino Pastoral Action Center (LPAC) is a national Christ-centered faith-based organization that aims to educate, equip, and empower Latino and other urban churches to develop holistic ministries. The vision of LPAC is to energize civil society and rebuild social capital. They seek to strengthen the Four Pillars of Community Life™: Families, Schools, Community-based Organizations (CBOs), and Churches, which they insist collectively make up the foundation of a healthy community. In addition, they apply a model developed by Rev. Dr. Rivera called the Four Principles of Holistic Ministry™: Liberation, Healing, Community, and Transformation to develop cadres of strong, independent, articulate leaders who legitimately represent and are accountable to their communities. These individuals gain a greater sense of self, and serve as resources to their peers and communities. In turn, they work with others to strengthen the Four Pillars of Community Life. To rebuild social capital, LPAC operates community-based, citywide, national, and international ministries, while serving as a model of holistic ministry for urban leaders in the United States and around the world. Through these ministries, LPAC aims to revitalize the community by guiding children, youth, and adults to a lifelong calling of personal and community growth. —EDR

trend continues, one may predict a trend toward the coalescence of politics and religion. The breadth and extent of political topics discussed in church settings has also received examination. According to the Hispanic Churches in American Public Life Survey (2008), 54 percent of Latino/as believed that they have a say in government decisions. So strong is the connection between religion and politics in the Hispanic community that when compared to Euro-American (White) Christians, Latino/as who consider themselves as ‘‘spiritual but not religious,’’ still perceive a stronger connection between these two factors. According to the Pew study, over 50 percent of secular Hispanic Catholics felt that American politics were lacking spirituality, whereas only 30 percent of White Catholics reported the same.

When asked specifically what issues were most personally relevant, 80 percent reported concerns with U.S. immigration policy. Immigration is a particularly fervid political topic among Latino/as in America who have not yet attained legal status. According to the Hispanic Churches in American Public Life Survey, 74 percent of Latina/os want their churches to support undocumented immigrants, even at the risk of breaking the law. Subsequently, 80 percent of undocumented Hispanics reported that their churches should become more involved with immigration law, at both the grassroots and the national levels. Issues such as gender equality, taxation, and government aid are more readily discussed in the Protestant denomination. As Larry Hunt states, ‘‘Protestantism may offer more opportunity for access to leadership roles and stimulate more

Postcolonialism religious and social participation among Hispanics by offering a smaller and more intimate sense of community’’ (2001, 142). Protestant churches tend to be smaller, more participation-oriented, and congregational (as opposed to the noncommunity-based organization, i.e., Episcopalian). Thus, under the protection of the close-knit church communities, spiritual leaders and churchgoers feel more open to probity, especially regarding political issues. In the Catholic Church, only 20 percent reported that women’s rights were discussed, and in the Protestant church that number was nearly tripled. Although topics such as abortion and homosexuality remain controversial among Latino/as, 58 percent of Protestants, including Evangelicals, reported they were discussed openly in church, whereas 45 percent of Catholics reported that both were discussed in a more evasive manner. Alan Aja and Anne Hoffman

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel. La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Espinosa, Gaston, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda. ‘‘Hispanic Churches in American Public Life: Summary of Findings.’’ Center for the Study of Latino Religion, Interim Reports, Vol. 2003, no. 2 (March 2003): 1–29. Espinosa, Gaston, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda. Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Fraga, Luis R., John A. Garcia, Rodney E. Hero, Michael Jones-Correa, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, and Gary M. Segura. ‘‘Su

| 447

Casa Es Nuestra Casa: Latino Politics Research and the Development of American Political Science.’’ American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (November 2006): 515–522. Hunt, Larry R. ‘‘Religion, Gender, and the Hispanic Experience in the United States: Catholic/Protestant Differences in Religious Involvement, Social Status, and Gender-Role Attitudes.’’ Review of Religious Research 43, no. 2 (December 2001): 139–160. Jones-Correa, Michael, and David Leal. ‘‘Political Participation: Does Religion Matter?’’ Political Research Quarterly 54 (December 2001): 751–770. Kelly, Nathan J., and Jana Morgan Kelly. ‘‘Religion and Latino Partisanship in the United States.’’ Political Research Quarterly 58, no. 1 (March 2005): 87–95. Marquez, Frances, and Andrew Wainer. ‘‘Latino Religion and Civic Engagement: How and Where do Congregations Encourage Participation.’’ Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, August 28, 2002. Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007).

POSTCOLONIALISM Even though the definition of the term ‘‘postcolonialism’’ is debatable, we can at least say that postcolonialism, as a tool of critical analysis, seriously considers the historical implications of centuries of imperialism and colonialism. Postcolonialism recognizes that liberation did not come with the end of the wars of independence fought throughout the Two-Thirds World, which fell victim to the colonial process. Rather, imperial structures of oppression continue to this

448 |

Postcolonialism

day manifested as militarism, economic globalization (neoliberalism), and the normalization and legitimization of the cultural Eurocentric norms. The social, economic, political, and religious narratives produced at the center of Eurocentric thought maintain oppressive global structures that define a reality that continues to benefit the former colonizers. Part of this constructed reality defines the identities of the colonized in relation to the colonizer. By defining and classifying the existence of the colonized, it makes their subordination to the selfdefined ‘‘superiority’’ of White Christian European existence and thought possible. Therefore, part of the liberationist project is to define one’s group identity, as a people, apart from the definitions created by the colonizers of yesteryear and of today. Postcolonialism becomes a methodology by which the colonized speaks back to Eurocentric colonizers about how they have defined the identities, cultures, and customs of the colonized. Although a multitude of systems and structures exists to colonize the minds of the oppressed, for purposes of this entry, the cultural text that concerns us revolves around the religious narrative, specifically a Christianity practiced by Latina/os that can subconsciously reinforce their own subjugation. Inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere who first experienced the Spanish conquest, then the colonization by various European powers, and the hegemony of the United States must ask how theological thought and the biblical text were used and misused to produce a religious ideology that not only justified but encouraged the subjugation of one people by another, usually along race and ethnic lines. Likewise, postcolonialism examines the types of theological and biblical interpretations

that can foster anti-imperialist resistance to the colonial narrative. It would seem that Latino/a theologies of liberation would be open to postcolonial critical analysis. After all, the term ‘‘liberation’’ as used within religious circles came into vogue during the late 1960s when many colonized groups throughout the world begin to construct a theological response to the exploitation of Two-Thirds World people (including those within the United States), an oppression manifested as racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism. As such, postcolonial theories arose from anticolonial struggles for liberation from injustices and the suffering caused by empires. Nevertheless, many of the early Hispanic religious scholars were suspicious of postcolonial theories, disregarding them as another Eurocentric intellectual venture. This perception may be because many, who were among the first generation of Latino/a scholars, focused almost exclusively on Catholic thought and, to a lesser extent, on Protestantism. This was expected, for after all, the vast majority (over 90 percent) of the Hispanic community identified with Christianity. Many of these early Latina/o scholars were trained at Christian seminaries and/or divinity schools and served or continue to serve in ministry. The worldview they developed was formed by both modernity and church teachings. Hence, hesitancy exists in addressing the connection between the colonialization project, along with its religious dimension, and their Christian faith and field of study. By contrast, the more recent Latina/o religious scholars entering the academic guild come from a very different social location. Since the 1990s, these scholars began to recognize the complexities that

Postmodernism any discourse on differences concerning sexual identity, ethnic and racial groups, and cultural and national origins have upon any conversation concerning Liberationist thought. Recognizing that Hispanics were not a monolithic group was not enough. The ambiguities of differences complicated oppression as overlapping levels of subjugation began to be considered. Most of these newer Latina/ o scholars, who were university trained, who probably never served as a minister or a priest, and who may have claimed no faith allegiance, began to explore these differences in earnest. In exploring these differences, they were more receptive to employing critical theories like postmodernity and postcolonialism. Hispanics who use a postcolonial methodology are keenly aware that the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is not a simple dichotomy. No neat division exists between the boundary that separates the colonizer from the colonized. What exists is a space of exchange producing multiple conflicting identities, histories, and cultures. The postcolonialist looks toward what is hidden between these binary poles. Hence, much attention is given to the concept of hybridity. We are not simply Hispanic or Anglo, White or Black, male or female; rather we exist where these binary poles connect, merge, conflict, and create. This space becomes the product of rape, violation, massacres, invasion, and conquest, in short, a colonized space. Postcolonialism attempts to move beyond that space, hence the ‘‘post’’ in postcolonialism. Hybridity forces the Latino/a religious scholar to be conscious of how her/his own construction of liberative discourses might at times participate in its own oppressive ideologies. Through such self-critique of

| 449

complicity with oppressive structures, postcolonial thoughts achieve its most critical contribution to the liberative discourse. The use of postcolonial critical theory by Latina/os also forces the Eurocentric academy to seriously consider their own complicity with theological presuppositions informed by subjective colonized assumptions that are accepted as objective. Those Hispanic scholars who employ postcolonial analysis in their work do so with an understanding that it provides a way of understanding why and how oppressive global structures operate. This knowledge is helpful in the very struggle for justice. Thus, Latino/a based liberation theologies and postcolonial theories are not at odds with each other. Instead, the latter can help bring in the implementation of the former. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading Dube, Musa W. ‘‘Postcolonialism & Liberation,’’ Handbook of U.S. Theologies of Liberation, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004). Keller, Catherine, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera, eds. Postcolonial Theories: Divinity and Empire (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004). Segovia, Fernando F. Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000).

POSTMODERNISM Postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define. It is sometimes used to describe the period since the late 1960s, an epoch that—allegedly—follows and is distinct from modernism. The term entered the

450 |

Postmodernism

lexicon with Jean-Franc¸ ois Lyotard’s publication of The Postmodern Condition (1979). Theoretical discourses of modernism, from Rene´ Descartes through the Enlightenment to the social theories of Karl Marx and Max Weber, championed reason as an adequate source for discovering and systematizing all knowledge and for building a progressive, free, and egalitarian society. Yet for all its ‘‘accomplishments,’’ modernism also produced immense suffering for its victims, ranging from colonial genocide to oppression of the workers by capitalist industrialization, exploitation of women, and marginalization and exclusion of entire peoples, including U.S. Latino/as. Modernism produced disciplines, institutions, and modes of discourse, which legitimate various forms of domination and control. Postmodern thinkers such as Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard claim that the historically unprecedented social developments in technology, media, and socioeconomic configurations require new theories and concepts. Postmodernism refers not only to a historical period but to a diffuse set of discursive challenges, critical approaches, and rhetorical practices that aggressively attack traditional society, theory, and culture. Not social theory per se, it combines fragmentary insights and methodologies from literary studies, historical theory, and philosophy in its attempts to challenge established paradigms. While postmodern discourses address a diverse and baffling array of topics, they share a critique of modernism. Modernism is criticized for making totalizing and universalizing claims, assuming the existence of a foundation for all knowledge, and presenting its findings as absolute truth. More specifically, postmodern theory challenges the modern notion that

theory reflects reality, emphasizing the perspectival, contingent, and relative nature of knowledge. Moreover, it examines the interplay of knowledge and power and the role of power in the production and authorization of knowledge.

U.S. Latino/a Critiques of Postmodernism U.S. Latino/a religious scholars mostly reject the postmodern project and have been hesitant to seriously engage the movement. This rejection stems from a suspicion that postmodernism, as the outworking of modernism, serves the same agenda of modernism—to justify the systematic exclusion and exploitation of U.S. Latino/a people. More particularly, these scholars critique postmodernism’s radical relativism, internal inconsistency, and parochial character. First, they commonly claim that postmodernism’s relativism leaves no foundation from which to critique power structures. If every perspective constitutes a viable truth claim, then no means exist for criticizing any one perspective, even if one position directly leads to oppression. Thus, the postmodern position eliminates any basis for challenging the oppressive status quo, trivializing the suffering of U.S. Latino/as and other marginalized people. Second, though postmodern theory challenges universalizing and totalizing claims, ideologies, and unchanging truths, and denies the veracity of any grand explanatory narrative, it dogmatically holds relativism as universally valid. For postmodernism, the only universal truth is that there is no truth. Finally, postmodernism is found primarily in metropolitan centers of the modern world, former seats of colonial power. Though postmodernism recognizes the parochial character of

Postmodernism all knowledge and human enterprise and challenges modern myths used to justify the oppression of others, it ironically remains narrowly concerned with European interests. U.S. Latino/as scholars’ rejection of postmodern theory should not be interpreted as romantic nostalgia for modernism. Like others who suffered under the aegis of modernism, they have much to celebrate in its demise. They have little reason to hope that postmodernism will turn out differently. Yet, they also recognize the ambiguity of modernism: though it provided ideologies of oppression, it also contained the impulse toward emancipation from oppression. Many ‘‘discoveries’’ of postmodern theory, such as the uncovering of epistemological limits of modernism, have long been visible to those on the underside of modernism. U.S. Latino/a religious scholars have anticipated many of the elements that form part of current postmodern theory.

U.S. Latino/a use of Postmodern Theory Although many U.S. Latino/a religious scholars dismiss postmodernism on the whole, some recognize the need to engage in these currents, given the pervasiveness of postmodernism in the theoretical currents of the North American Academy. They read postmodern texts carefully, wrestle with the postmodern turn in critical theory, and face the challenges to totalizing gestures of theological texts and religious systems. They combine and connect the Iberian, indigenous, and African thought forms of their U.S. Latino/a heritage to the traits of postmodernism. They link the symboliccultural concept of mestizaje to hybridity,

| 451

the diasporic, alien, and exile categories of identity to alterity, and the interpretation of meaning through communal praxis to intersubjectivity. They take seriously, for example, the postmodern theorists’ insight into the reduction of spatial distances through advances in travel and communication and perceive its effects in the transnational, fluid movements of religious practices, rituals, and icons on the borderlands. However, they do not indiscriminately adopt the entirety of postmodernism; rather they cautiously and critically appropriate elements of postmodernism’s critique of modernism that resonates with their work. The significance of postmodernism rests on its deployment and reformulation with the concrete postcolonial contexts of U.S. Latino/a faith communities. Against those who argue that postmodernism truncates the possibility of liberation, Manuel Mejido Costoya counters that unless U.S. Latino/a religious thought critically engages postmodern conceptions, the liberationist impulse to transform society will be reduced to the level of hermeneutics, merely conversation about liberation (2006, 277).

Concluding Assessment Even as U.S. Latino/a religious thought has anticipated many of postmodernism’s critiques of modernity, many of its assumptions and themes remain in need of postmodern scrutiny. For example, the concept of liberation, as a central aspect of Hispanic religious thought, to the extent that it envisions a wide-scale social emancipation, rests on modernist progressivism and hermeneutic reduction. Despite all vociferous attacks against postmodernism’s radical relativism, internal inconsistency, and parochial

452 |

Preferential Options

elements, U.S. Latino/a religions bear a surprising affinity with postmodernism. For example, postmodernism’s eschewing of essentialism and the reification of an unequivocal self in favor of the experience of hybridity, fluidity, and intersubjectivity of identities deeply resonates with the forefront of contemporary U.S. Latino/a religious projects. Increasingly they are acknowledging these connections and reformulating religious thought to contend with postmodern challenges. Rodolfo J. Herna´ndez-Dı´az

References and Further Reading Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford Press, 1991). Goizueta, Roberto S. ‘‘Rationality or Irrationality? Modernity, Postmodernity, and the U.S. Hispanic Theologian.’’ Caminemos con Jesu´s: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Gonza´lez, Justo L. ‘‘Metamodern Aliens in Postmodern Jerusalem.’’ Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise, ed. A. M. Isasi-Dı´az and F. F. Segovia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). Mejido Costoya, Manuel J. ‘‘The Postmodern: Liberation or Language?’’ Handbook of Latina/o Theologies, ed. E. D. Aponte and M. A. De La Torre (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006). Rivera, Mayra. The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).

PREFERENTIAL OPTIONS In 1979, at the Third General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate

(CELAM) meeting at Puebla de Los Angeles, Mexico, the expressions ‘‘preferential option for the poor’’ and ‘‘preferential option for the young’’ entered the ecclesial vocabulary of the Roman Catholic Church. The option for the poor becomes a staple of Catholic Social Teaching and a defining principle for Latin American and U.S. Hispanic theologies. The option for the young receives significantly less attention. The preferential option for the poor is born out of the experience of the Latin American church. The concept is reflected in the final documents of the CELAM meeting at Medellı´n, Colombia, in 1968. There the bishops affirm that they have heard the cries arising from the suffering poor and commit to a solidarity that ‘‘ought to bring us to a distribution of resources and apostolic personnel that effectively gives preference to the poorest and most needy sectors’’ (1970, no. 9). This commitment to being a ‘‘Church of the poor’’ is articulated explicitly at Puebla and, as Roberto Goizueta observes, marks a ‘‘transposition of social justice from the realm of ethics to the realm of epistemology and theological method.’’ To make a preference for the poor is to respond to the multiple oppressions inflicted on people because of material poverty. It is not an optional commitment but finds grounding in biblical imperatives to align with those who are marginalized. The option for the poor calls for evaluation of economic, social, and political systems, structures, policies, and life-styles from the perspective of those most devastatingly impacted by their outcomes. This preference does not imply the exclusivity of divine love or attention. Yet it situates the church with

Preferential Options the poor, who are agents of their own history as well as evangelization, challenging the church to conversion, action, and solidarity. The phrase entered the papal lexicon in 1980 in John Paul II’s address to the Brazilian bishops. From this point forward it began to appear with increasing frequency in papal, regional, and national episcopal articulations of social teaching across the globe. In Latin American liberation theologies the option for the poor is central to the thought of Gustavo Gutie´rrez and others such as Elsa Ta´mez and Jon Sobrino who influenced Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop from El Salvador. In the United States, the option for the poor is among the hermeneutic stances employed by Catholic and some Protestant Latino/a theologians. In some of these theologies, the option expands beyond socioeconomic factors to include the oppression experienced by Hispanics because of the denigration of Latino/a cultures and popular religious expressions within the U.S. context. The final document from Puebla explicitly discusses a preferential option for young people in the section that follows an explication of the option for the poor. As with the poor, the young emerge as those who are both evangelized and evangelizers. The absence of the option for the young in theological reflections after Puebla draws the attention of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which notes the significance of the silence. The option for the young finds limited expression in U.S. documents related to the third Encuentro and in the 1988 National Plan for Hispanic Ministry. This commitment for Hispanic youth in particular is fueled by a concern

| 453

for experiences of marginalization that are intensified by poverty and issues of cultural identity. Like those of the bishops at Puebla, these references regard youth as treasure and prophetic voice. Carmen M. Nanko-Ferna´ndez

References and Further Reading Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. ‘‘Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation.’’ August 6, 1984. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/ congregations/cfaith/documents/ rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theologyliberation_en.html. Goizueta, Roberto S. ‘‘The Preferential Option for the Poor: The CELAM Documents and the NCCB Pastoral Letter on U.S. Hispanics as Sources for U.S. Hispanic Theology.’’ Journal of Hispanic/ Latino Theology 3, no. 2 (1995): 65–77. Nanko, Carmen Marie. ‘‘Justice Crosses the Border: The Preferential Option for the Poor in the United States.’’ A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice, ed. Marı´a Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodrı´guez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM). The Church in the Present Day Transformation of Latin America in Light of the Council: II Conclusions, ed. Louis Michael Colonnese (Bogota´, D.E.-Colombia: General Secretariat of CELAM, 1970). Third General Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM). ‘‘Evangelization in Latin America’s Present and Future: Final Document.’’ Puebla and Beyond: Documentation and Commentary, ed. John Eagleson and Philip Scharper; trans. John Drury (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979).

454 |

Private Religious Schools

PRIVATE RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS According to the 2000 Census, Hispanics are the largest minority group under the age of 18, representing 16 percent of U.S. school-age children or one-third of the Hispanic population. This schoolage population is growing faster than any other racial or ethnic group, probably due to two factors. First, the median age of Latina/os is 26.6 years younger than any other U.S. group. And second, 20 percent of all newborn Americans are Hispanic. It is not surprising that the public education system has become an important concern to the Latino/a population. Unfortunately, the public schools where Latina/os are usually enrolled continue to be mostly segregated, overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded. Private religious schools can serve as an alternative to public education. These private religious schools provide students with religious instruction throughout the curricula. Many faith traditions (i.e., Protestants, Jewish, Muslim, Evangelicals, Catholics, etc.) provide elementary and middle-school education to children whose parents are looking for an alternative to the public school system and can afford it. In addition, some private schools offer a high school education. The reasons for placing a child in a private religious school vary. For some, these private schools ensure that more financial resources will be used in the classroom, thus supporting the claim that private schools provide a superior education. Attending private school is seen by some as an advantage when competing for acceptance into prestigious colleges. Others choose religious schools as an alternative to what is

perceived to be the threat of teaching secular humanism in the public school system. Parents who believe that public schools are tolerant, if not advocates, of homosexuality and/or abortion, while being hostile to religious instruction (i.e., banning prayer in school in 1963), may wish to shield their children from such influences. Private religious schools that reflect their own personal beliefs become in their minds the means of transmitting their values to their children. Yet for others, due to the cost of a private education, they believe that private schools are a safeguard to racial exclusivity. Many Christian schools established during the Civil Rights era were founded for the sole purpose of providing a loophole to the Supreme Court’s mandate of desegregation. And finally, some parents are attracted to the discipline provided in private religious schools. In areas with high rates of crime and drug use, where public schools might be plagued with violence, the discipline of religious schools can provide a sense of security and safety for parents worried about the safety of their children. This is not to say that all private religious schools agree that their existence is based on such reasons; nevertheless, among the many reasons why parents choose a private religious education over a public school, these are among the prominent motivations. One of the consequences of the expense to attend private schools is that mainly parents with economic privileges are able to send their children to these institutions. Because Latina/os are predominantly located at the lower economic stratums, few have the financial means to afford private education for their children. Relegating poor Hispanics in economically deprived neighborhoods to public schools may prove

Private Religious Schools disadvantageous to Latina/o youth. For those attending the public school system, the prospects of graduating high school remain dismal. In 2003, Euro-American high school completion rate stood at 84 percent. Compare this with Mexican Americans at 48.7 percent, Dominican Americans at 51.7 percent, Puerto Ricans at 63.3 percent, or Cuban Americans at 68.7 percent. Of those who do graduate from high school, only 36.5 percent pursue a college education. Hispanics attending public education face a history where the educational system was designed to ‘‘Americanize’’ Latina/os by attempting to erase the Hispanic cultural heritage, along with the Spanish language. Additionally, these schools (specifically in the Southwestern United States) mainly offered agricultural classes, industrial training, and home economics. In other words, they were designed to train Latina/o children to be farmhands and domestic help. For most Latino/as who attended public schools prior to the 1980s, memories of corporal punishment for speaking Spanish or of being counseled to attend vocational schools to learn how to perform menial jobs remain vivid. Furthermore, there is a lack of proper role models among public school teachers where only 4 percent of them are Hispanic. For these reasons, private religious school seems to provide an alternative for those who can afford it. Among private religious schools, the faith tradition with the most numerous institutions is the parochial schools attached to Roman Catholic parishes. Parochial schools have existed within the Americas since the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. They were originally established with the goal of converting the indigenous people to

| 455

Christianity. With time, because of the lack of education for the children of the early settlers, religious orders started to provide educational instruction to nonIndians. The Catholic exclusive hold on education in the Americas began to loosen during the early nineteenth century with the rise of secularization movements. Nevertheless, the importance of parochial schools was reaffirmed by Vatican I (1869–1870), which viewed public education under state supervision with suspicion. Meanwhile in the United States, EuroAmerican parochial schools flourished during the 19th century, mainly as a response to the dominance of Protestantism within the public school system. These schools basically provided a twelfth grade education to Catholics that was divided into two parts: kindergarten through eighth grade, followed by a ninth through twelfth grade secondary education. Classes were usually taught by nuns, students wore uniforms, and Mass attendance was mandatory. With the ecumenicalism brought about by Vatican II (1962–1965), parochial schools ceased being exclusively for Catholic students. In addition, responding to concerns over academic rigor, lay teachers began to be hired to teach major portions of the curriculum. Even though the vast majority of Hispanics are Roman Catholics (70 percent according to the Hispanic Churches in American Public Life), only 20 percent attend Catholic schools. Still, for the few who do attend, their schooling can provide opportunities that are more difficult to attain by those receiving a public education. Private religious schools in Hispanic enclaves seem to thrive in nurturing and sustaining the Latino/a culture and training the next generation of

456 |

Processions

leaders. For example, with the expulsion from Communist Cuba of the Jesuit priests who ran Havana’s top private schools during the 1960s, many reestablished those same schools in Miami, Florida. The renowned Havana school Bele´ n Jesuit, which was founded in 1854 (the school from which Fidel Castro graduated), was reestablished in Miami in 1961. With a strong emphasis on bilingual education, private schools like Bele´n Jesuit, LaSalle, and Loyola have helped form the next generation of Latino/a religious and community leaders. One of the critiques leveled against these types of schools is they reinforce elitism because they cater mainly to boys from families with economic means. Miguel A. De La Torre

Nuestra Sen˜ora de Guadalupe are wont to take place amid bonfires called luminarias in Spanish and Native villages. Her feast day always falls on December 12. This procesio´ n recalls and honors the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe to the Indian Juan Diego on Tepeyac hill near Mexico City in 1531. The procession is unique in that amid the pageantry and choral singing of village voices, rifles are fired off to mark each of Guadalupe’s four apparitions. In recent years, gunshots have been replaced by firework displays. The start of Lent varies from year to year, depending on lunar cycles. What never changes, though, is the fact that it is the time of year held to be most sacred

References and Further Reading Milia´n, Alberto. ‘‘Parochial Schools.’’ Encyclopedia Latina: History, Culture, and Society in the United States, ed. Ilan Stavans (Danbury, CT: Scholastic Library Publishing, 2005). Ve´lez, William. ‘‘The Educational Experiences of Latinos in the United States.’’ Latinas/os in the United States: Changing the Face of Ame´rica, ed. Rodrı´guez, Havida´n, Rogelio Sa´enz, and Cecilia Menjı´var (New York: Springer, 2008).

PROCESSIONS ‘‘Processions,’’ the English word for ‘‘procesiones,’’ are religious displays of veneration and adoration that have traditionally been done by Catholics for centuries. In the Great American Southwest these processions tend to follow the liturgical calendar year. Beginning with the time of Advent, procesiones in honor of

At sunrise on Good Friday, members of Tucson’s Los Dorados organization raise a white cross on a mountain peak near the city. (Stephanie Maze/Corbis)

Processions

| 457

POSADAS La Posadas is one of the best known Latino/a Advent celebrations. ‘‘Posada,’’ which means ‘‘resting place,’’ is the name for ‘‘inn.’’ In the Advent celebration it is meant to recall the inns that rejected Jose´ and Marı´a as they traveled to Bethlehem to be counted in the census declared by the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus (cf. Luke 2:12–5). Las Posadas originated in Mexico during the second half of the eighteenth century. At that time the Church hierarchy decided to do away with the boisterous masses called Misas de Aguinaldo (Masses of the Gift). These masses were held during the nine days of the Magnificat’s ‘‘O antiphons’’ and acted out the nativity story recalling God’s gift in Jesus. The bishops, however, became concerned that the festive flair of these masses had gotten out of hand. The laity then took the reenactments they had seen in church to their houses. Approximately 200 years later las Posadas are still being celebrated. Traditionally pilgrims carrying images of Joseph, Mary, the angel, and the donkey go to three or four different homes asking for room in the inn (Posada). Only the last house gives it to them, and a celebration of food and song ensues. —GCG

by Catholics in villages of the Southwest. The first day of Holy Week is called Palm Sunday. Procesiones del Domingo de Ramos held on this day commemorate Jesus’ triumphant entrance into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey while people waved palm branches and yelled ‘‘hosanna in the highest.’’ These types of procesiones are usually led by a holy confraternity of men collectively known as ‘‘Los Hermanos Penitentes de Nuestro Padre Jesu´s Nazareno.’’ They gather to explain Lenten ritual symbolism to the faithful and to unravel the upcoming mysteries of Holy Week. Toward the end of Holy Week, on Holy Thursday, the village priest leads a church procesio´n for the Reposition of the Blessed Sacrament immediately following Mass and in preparation for services to be held on Good Friday. El Viernes Santo, as Good Friday is known, is marked by ritual procesiones to sacred sites. Such sites often include a devotional visit to the Santuario de Chimayo´,

which is held to be the most sacred spot in the American Southwest. It houses the miraculous image of the healing Lord of Esquipulas. Processions to Chimayo´ on this day focus on the miraculous dirt on the chapel, which is believed to contain healing powers. The beginning of May marks procesiones led by children who are going to receive their First Holy Communion. They strew flower petals along the processional way around the church, singing songs of the season. They are sometimes helped along by older confirmandi, that is, children who will be confirmed later that season. Procesiones in May are always held in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The procesiones culminate with the coronation of the Virgin Mary as Queen of May. The children who participate in them are called Nin˜ os de Marı´a. May is also the time of year during which the Feast of San Isidro falls. Saint Isidore or Saint Cedric, as he is also recognized in English, is the patron saint

458 |

Protestantism

of agriculture. Procesiones held in honor of San Isidro will often carry small statues of the saint praying while angels plow his fields for him with a pair of oxen. Sometimes another statuette is also carried next to San Isidro. It is the image of Santa Ine´s del Campo or Saint Agnes of the Fields. In certain villages she is honored as mistress of growing plants. In Spain, an even more interesting object is carried in such processions. It is the disembodied head of Marı´a Toribia or Santa Marı´a de la Cabeza, as she is known. Pious legend holds that she was the wife of San Isidro himself. Procesiones of this type tend to meld Catholic tradition with ancient fertility rites. Las procesiones de Corpus Christi take place in late May or in early June. They honor the humanity of Jesus with processions that visit several outdoor pavilions or folk altars set up by various leagues and confraternities in the village. They are held with much pomp and they are always visited by the priest carrying the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance underneath a canopy. May processions used to include la Fiesta de la Santa Cruz. The Feast celebrating the Triumph of the Holy Cross has been transferred to September now in the liturgical calendar of events. Mid-June is the time traditionally dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua. San Antonio is almost universally recognized as the saint who is invoked whenever something is lost and must be found. In certain places he is also invoked by girls who hope to find suitable husbands. His feast day on June 16 is marked with choral processions that laud his miracles and wonders. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia entry titled ‘‘St. Anthony of Padua,’’ when

these procesiones come to a shady spot, all listen as his story is told: Saint Anthony of Padua, in Padua you were born [Anthony was actually born in Lisbon, Portugal]. You donned the habit, girded loin and studied night and morn. When first you gave a sermon, revealed was this to you: Your father would be hanged that day, by witnesses untrue. As you went to defend him your prayer book lost became. The Most High found and wrote within a promise in your name. ‘‘I speak to you, dear Anthony,’’ a voice three times exclaimed. ‘‘Within your book a promise penned for all who call your name: Whatever’s lost; soon found shall be, forgotten; recalled verily, and what is far, brought close to thee if in thy name, be made the plea.’’

Larry Torres

References and Further Reading Dal-Gal, N. ‘‘St. Anthony of Padua.’’ The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907). Montan˜o, Mary. Tradiciones Nuevo Mexicanas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001). Weigle, Marta, and Peter White. The Lore of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

PROTESTANTISM The religious landscape of the Hispanic population in the United States has become as complex and diverse as it is among the general population. The denominational and religious expansion among the broader population is also reflected within the Latino/a population.

Protestantism No longer simply Catholic or Protestant, Hispanic religious identities and traditions reflect a strong presence of ‘‘evangelical,’’ Pentecostal, and other historic religious groups, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, as well as religious identities beyond Christian denominations, such as Jewish, Muslims, and Buddhists. Thus, to understand Latina/o Protestantism it is important to recognize the religious environment in which it lives and the historical context from which it has emerged.

Historical Context and Origins Hispanic Protestants are among the oldest religious groups beyond the Catholic within the Latino/a population. Although there were Spanish Jews among the settling Spanish population in the Southwest, their presence tended to be more secretive and even underground. It is common knowledge that the early settling Spanish population was Catholic, migrating from their native Spain at the time when the Spanish Inquisition was at its peak. At the core of the Spanish inquisition was a Catholicism that did not tolerate religious differences among the population. Loyalty and faithfulness to the Catholic Church had to be publicly proclaimed and practiced. Any religious belief or practices other than Catholicism were not tolerated and subject to persecution. Thus, to be Spanish was to be Catholic. Such an environment of religious intolerance shaped the early beginnings and much of the experience and formation of Latina/o Protestantism in the United States. Spanish Catholicism during the settlement of the Americas shaped the religious and social environment of the Spanish settlers and communities. The

| 459

assumption was that all Spanish settlers and their descendants were Catholic. The colonial Catholic Church was physically at the center of Spanish settlement. It was also at the center of social and cultural life, including the economic and political dynamics of the Spanish communities. It shaped personal and community identities. The Church shaped community life and dictated its communal and ritual life. Spanish communities took on Catholic religious symbols, names, and festivals. In the Mexican territories that are now part of the United States, Catholicism was the official religion. To believe and practice any other type of religious life was prohibited and extremely difficult. Jews had to go underground in order to practice their religious traditions while publicly practicing Catholicism. In that religious climate, Protestantism was not allowed, as well. It was in such a religious climate that Hispanic Protestantism was born and it was such a climate that shaped how Latino/a Protestantism was to be perceived and lived.

Connection to Spain A direct historical connection of Hispanic Protestantism to Spain or the Spanish Reformation has not been documented. While Latino/a Catholicism’s connection to Spanish Catholicism is clear and well documented in history, as well as the presence of Spanish Jews who brought their religious faith and practices to the new world, no direct connection has been documented for Hispanic Protestantism to Spanish sources or roots. No documented case has been discovered that suggests some form of Spanish Protestantism being brought to the Spanish territories from Spain. At

460 |

Protestantism

this point, there is no institutional or continuation of any Spanish Protestant religious activity connecting the Americas and Spain. The one connection to religious events in Spain was the Spanish Bible. The work of Juan de Valdez and Casiodoro de Reina led to the Spanish translation of the Bible, and this was a crucial contribution to Protestant missionary work in the Americas. The distribution of the Bible in Spanish was a key factor in the conversion of many Hispanics to Protestantism. However, neither Spanish translator is known to have migrated in exile to the Americas. Instead, they exiled to Portugal and Italy. Nor do we have historical evidence of any person or group coming to the Americas engaged in missionary or religious work based on the work of the Spanish translators. However, without the Spanish Bible, Latino/ a Protestantism would have had to wait.

Anglo Protestant Missionary Work This suggests that Hispanic Protestantism is a product of the sociohistorical realities of the new world. The historical scene was the western expansion of the American population who brought their Protestantism with them. Protestantism was introduced to the Spanish and Latino/a mestizo population by Anglo Protestants moving westward in the middle to late nineteenth century. As this population pushed the western frontier, it did so under the influence of Manifest Destiny, the notion that the Anglo Protestant peoples, cultures, and their Protestant religious faith were superior to the Native American peoples, but also to the early Spanish settlers and their culture and religious Catholic faith tradition.

From the very beginning, American Protestantism held a sense of superiority over Spanish Catholicism and later, Hispanic Catholicism. Catholicism was viewed as an inferior and defective religious system. Although the expanding Anglo population did not initially intend to minister unto the Spanish population, social contact was almost unavoidable and exposure to the Protestant faith occurred. In addition, isolated cases of religious outreach did occur, especially in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and California. Anglo Protestant missionaries became active with major support from national Protestant denominations such as the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists. Among these missionaries were Sumner Bacon, Melinda Rankin, Alexander Sutherland, Frank Onderdonk, Thomas Harwood, and E. F. G. Nicholson. It is interesting to note that the American missionary zeal had two core motivations. One was religious conversion grounded in the belief that the Protestant faith was clearly superior to Catholicism and was more enlightened. Catholicism was defined as deficient and responsible for the poor spiritual and social condition of Latina/os. The preaching of the gospel was intended to free these people from the ‘‘yoke’’ and tyranny of Catholicism. The Anglo believed that the Protestant faith was the one true gospel. The second motivation was the acculturation and Americanization of the Mexican population. There was a strong interest in making Hispanics not only good Christians but also good Americans. A close connection was made between Catholicism and inferior life conditions and unacceptable behavior among the Hispanic population. Protestantism was viewed as a means of

Protestantism

| 461

ESCUELA DOMINICAL While the modern Sunday School had its beginnings in 1781 in England, its incorporation into Hispanic Protestantism would not follow for well over a century. Prior to the 1880s, most Anglo Protestants considered Hispanics to be effectively ‘‘Christianized’’ due to Roman Catholic ecclesiological hegemony over Mexico and Central and South America. It was not until the 1860s and afterward that Bible societies and Colporteur agencies made serious efforts to introduce Hispanics to Protestantism. With the beginning of the first Hispanic Protestant churches on U.S. soil in the 1880s, Sunday Schools soon followed. From their beginning Escuela Dominical, or Sunday Schools, have been indispensible to Latino/a Protestant congregations. Perhaps as an alternative to the Roman Catholic Catechism system, they have been used to inculcate Christian doctrine to children and adults alike, to train and equip future lay leaders, and to fulfill their sense of the Great Commission by evangelizing newcomers into the faith. It is estimated that 75 percent of Hispanics who join the Protestant church do so because of the influence of the Escuela Dominical. While some churches have abandoned the traditional Sunday School, most mainline Hispanic churches in the United States continue to see it as upholding the Judeo-Christian tradition of family instruction. —RDG

improving life conditions and leading to better behavior and acceptable citizenship. Hispanics needed social uplifting through education and acculturation, in addition to religious conversion. Thus, American Protestant denominations invested in the conversion, education, and socialization of the Latina/o population. In addition to churches, Protestant missionaries established schools, educational institutions, and settlement houses throughout the Southwest to serve the Hispanic population. Some of these educational institutions include Lydia Patterson Institute in El Paso, Texas; Holding Institute in Laredo, Texas; McCurdy School in Espanola, New Mexico; Presbyterian Pan American School in south Texas; and Harwood School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Settlement houses include the Wesley community centers throughout the Southwest. The primary mission of Protestant settlement houses and later community centers was the

social betterment of the Latino/a community through social work and social activities that led to a responsible and acceptable social behavior. In other words, missionary work included the acculturation of the Hispanic population. The most effective missionary strategy in reaching the Hispanic population was the introduction and exposure to the Bible in Spanish and Spanish religious tracts. Apparently, Spanish Catholics had no personal or direct knowledge of the Bible. Catholic priests were the only persons in the settlements who owned and had access to the Bible. The distribution of Spanish Bibles became a major Protestant activity. When the Protestant Bible became available to the Latina/o community, religious conversion soon followed. The Bible became a highly prized possession, the center of family life, and discussion focus of small circles of interested persons. In many cases, the Protestant Bible had to be hidden so as

462 |

Protestantism

BAPTIST SPANISH PUBLISHING HOUSE Since its founding by missionary J. E. Davis, in Toluca, Mexico, in 1905, the Baptist Spanish Publishing House (aka Casa Bautista de Publicaciones, Editorial Mundo Hispano, Hispanic World Publishers) has been making its contributions to both reflect and produce cultural changes. Moved to the border city of El Paso, Texas, in late 1916 because of unsettled times in Revolutionary Mexico, it has become an international institution, governed by an International Board of Trustees and led by an international staff of editors and administrators. Its offices and plant have been located at 7000 Alabama Street (in El Paso) since 1938. From its inception, materials for Bible study in Hispanic evangelical churches (in Me´xico, the United States, and as many as 40 other countries) have occupied a major place in its publication program. But it also offers a wide range of books—both originals in Spanish and translations from English and other languages. —JTP

not to cause problems with the local priests. The Spanish Bible became the major tool of introducing religious intrigue and initiating a search for more religious and biblical knowledge. Bible study was central in the birth of Hispanic Protestantism and became an important part of its heritage and culture. The Bible was central to the life of the Protestants and became the symbol of early Latino/a Protestantism. The first missionaries among the Hispanic population were Anglos. However, the most effective missionaries were newly converted Latina/os. These newly converted Hispanics knew the people, the territory, the culture, and had a personal history with the Catholic experience. Protestant denominations were quick to provide education and support for these new indigenous religious leaders. Many young Hispanic ministers were mentored by Anglo missionaries. Latino/a converts became Hispanic missionaries. They became missionaries to their own communities. Although they used terms like evangelists and ministers, they were known as ‘‘hermanos’’ within

the Hispanic Protestant communities and were successful in establishing many Protestant congregations both in urban areas and in villages across the Southwest and West Coast. Some of these hermanos were pioneers such as Alejo Herna´ndez and Jose´ Policarpo Rodrı´guez in Texas, as well as Gabino Rendon and Benigno Cardenas in New Mexico. The response of the Catholic Church to the conversion of Latina/os was not well received. The Catholic Spanish population was living at the northern edges of the Spanish and Mexican territories and was underserved by the Catholic Church due to the scarcity of priests. The lack of priests suggests that the population was not adequately trained in their religious faith nor properly ministered to in their religious tradition. In many cases, lay Catholics would serve congregations, and isolated priests acted with little or no supervision from Catholic authorities. When religious conversions began to occur, the Catholic Church reacted in protest and an equally negative promotion of Protestantism. Catholic priests prohibited laity from

Protestantism reading the Bible or attending Protestant Church worship or activities. Catholics were not allowed to enroll in Protestant schools. This was a particular issue in northern New Mexico where Presbyterian schools attracted many local Latina/os and became a means for religious conversation. In many cases, Catholics were excommunicated for sending their children to Protestant schools. As a result of the mutually negative propaganda, a strong anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant climate quickly emerged not only between the religious bodies but also within the Hispanic population. Latino/a Catholics and Hispanic Protestants took on the attitudes taught by their respective religious traditions. Latina/o Protestants viewed Hispanic Catholics with the same negative attitudes as the Anglo Protestants held. Latino/a Catholics viewed Hispanic Protestants through the same lenses as the Catholic Church taught. Latina/o families were divided and friendships broken because of the Catholic-Protestant rift. Mutual distrust and mutual demonization was commonplace. Religious intolerance was a powerful reality at the birth of Hispanic Protestantism. Yet, Protestantism took root within the Latina/o population. Early missionary efforts resulted in conversions and eventually in the establishment of Latino/a Protestant congregations among Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist Churches, especially in New Mexico and Texas. Similar efforts developed in Puerto Rico and Cuba, which produced a significant Latino/a Protestant population that became part of this country through immigration and influenced the North, East, and Florida regions. Today, Hispanic Protestants are found in every Protestant denomination and Protestant

| 463

religious movement in the United States. These include Baptist denominations, Methodists, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, Lutherans, Reformed, and others. Likewise, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses have been quite successful with Latina/os.

Protestant Significance For generations, the common term for all non-Catholic Hispanics was ‘‘protestantes.’’ This was especially true among Catholics, who also referred to Protestantes as ‘‘sectas.’’ Within the Latino/a Protestant communities the more common term for self-definition is ‘‘evangelicos.’’ The historic use of the term ‘‘evangelicos’’ has a different meaning from today’s usage of ‘‘evangelical’’ in English. Today, ‘‘Evangelical’’ in English refers to a particular theological and ecclesiastical tradition more associated with Pentecostal, charismatic, and ‘‘nondenominational’’ traditions. NonCatholic Hispanic religious traditions have diversified into three major clusters: Evangelical/Pentecostals, Mainline Protestants, and others, especially Mormons. The Jehovah’s Witness movement has also attracted a number of Latino/as. Mainline Protestant traditions include the more historic Protestant denominations such as the United Methodist Church, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, Reformed, and United Church of Christ. With regard to presence in the Hispanic population, 15 percent identify as Evangelical and approximately 10 percent as mainline Protestant. The significance of the presence of Latino/as within mainline Protestant denominations is historical, sociological, and even theological. The brief historical summary in the previous section points

464 |

Protestantism

First Hispanic Baptist church in Santa Barbara, California. (Cynthia Odell)

to the significant contributions that mainline churches have made through their early efforts in reaching out to Hispanics and to the establishment of Latina/o congregations. The establishment of Hispanic congregations is highly significant. Latino/a Protestant congregations had their own Hispanic clergy and lay leadership. Congregational structures and their administration resulted in the emergence of Latino/a leadership. The demand for Hispanic clergy led to the education of scores of Hispanic persons with liberal arts education and theological training. Many of the first Hispanics to attend colleges and universities were preparing for ministry in Protestant denominations. Lay leaders also developed with organizational skills. They learned how to run

meetings and make reports. Laity became Sunday school teachers and local church officials. All of this led to leadership development, as well as a strong dosage of self-respect and dignity. In addition to the establishment of local Latino/a congregations, denominational judicatories were developed to coordinate Hispanic ministries and congregations. These are geographic structures established for the purpose of supervising and coordinating the religious work of the denomination, and they required top-level administrators and supervisors, most of whom were Hispanic. For example, the Methodist Church created annual conferences and one, the Rio Grande Annual Conference, still exists, covering Texas and New

Protestantism

| 465

MARCHA Metodistas Asociados Representando la Causa de los Hispano Americanos (MARCHA) is Spanish for the organization Methodists Associated to Represent the Cause of Hispanic Americans. Established in the early 1970s, MARCHA serves as the officially recognized caucus of Latino/as within the United Methodist Church (USA) and the Methodist Church of Puerto Rico. It also maintains relations with Methodist churches in Latin America. The primary purpose of MARCHA is to address and advocate for issues and programs of importance to Latino/as within the denomination, as well as beyond. Its membership is composed of Hispanic individual laypersons and clergy of the United Methodist Church and the Methodist Church of Puerto Rico, as well as representatives of various church bodies and regional caucuses. MARCHA holds annual national meetings to conduct its business, provide training and continuing education, and facilitate networking and action related to denominational and social issues of significance to Latinas/os. In partnership with other ethnic caucuses, MARCHA plays a major role in the life of the denomination advocating for church legislation and addressing issues of discrimination, injustice, and ministry within the church and society. —DMJ

Mexico. In Texas, Baptists created the Mexican Baptist Conventions of Texas, and the Presbyterians had the TexasMexican Presbytery for administering the Hispanic work; these existed until recent times. The creation of Latino/a congregations and judicatories is also significant in that it generated Hispanic organizational leadership and facilitated structures of self-determination. After the Anglo-American conquest, it was the Protestant denominations that facilitated and supported the creations of Latina/o structures that were owned and operated by Hispanics. Protestant churches were some of the few community structures and organizations that were thoroughly Latino/a owned and operated. Hispanics owned and managed their church buildings and facilities. These were early models of self-help community organizations. Mainline Protestantism also brought a new religious reality and new religious

options for Latina/os. The establishment of Protestant congregations meant that Hispanics had a religious choice. The Latino/a population was no longer a homogeneous religious community. In addition, there was not just one Protestant denomination. Hispanics could choose from several Protestant churches. Protestantism brought religious diversity to the Latino/a population. In fact, many Latina/o Protestants took on strong denominational identity, pride, and loyalty. Religious diversity and choice brought religious and theological themes into family and community conversations and debate. Religious diversity suggested that there was more than one way to understand God, the church, and religious life. Religious understanding was no longer a monopoly taught by one church and one set of clergy. The Christian faith was now open for discussion and was even open to differences of opinion. The Protestant-Catholic divide and

466 |

Protestantism

˜ O (1954–) BISHOP MINERVA G. CARCAN Minerva G. Carcan ˜o, a native of Edinburg, Texas, is the first Latina to be elected to the episcopacy of the United Methodist Church, serving as Bishop of the Phoenix Episcopal Area, Desert Southwest Annual Conference. Additionally she is the official spokesperson for the Council of Bishops on immigration. Bishop Carcan ˜o is a 1975 graduate of the University of Texas Pan American with a BA in Social Work. She received a Master of Theology degree from Perkins School of Theology of Southern Methodist University in 1979. Carcan ˜ o had several pastoral appointments in Texas and California. In 1986 she became the first Hispanic woman to be appointed a district superintendent in the United Methodist Church, serving the Western District of the Rio Grande Conference in west Texas and New Mexico. Carcan ˜o spent four years (1992– 1996) as the organizing pastor of the South Albuquerque Cooperative Ministry. She then served as director of both the Mexican American Program and the Hispanic Ministries Program at Perkins School of Theology. Subsequently, Carcan ˜o became superintendent of the Metropolitan District of the Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference of the UMC. Carcan ˜o also was the chair of worship resources on the committee that prepared Mil Voces, the United Methodist Spanish-language hymnal. —EDA

the new multiplicity of Protestant denominations generated much religious debate and conversation.

Issues and Challenges Although mainline Protestant denominations initiated religious work among the Hispanic population and had early successes, many challenges remain or have emerged for the mainline Protestant denominations, as well as for the Latino/a mainline Protestant congregations. History has not resolved all of the issues, and the current social/religious realities present new challenges for Hispanic Protestantism. Stagnant Membership. As with the general churches from mainline Protestant traditions, the Latino/a mainline churches have experienced recent stagnant membership. In many cases, especially in small towns and rural areas,

Latina/o Protestant churches have been closed. For decades small membership congregations were supported by the denominations as mission churches. However, as the denominations also faced stagnant or dropping memberships, financial strains have led to the reduction of mission support for Hispanic congregations. Given the historic small membership of many Latino/a congregations, a drop in mission support made it difficult for many Latina/o churches to financially support themselves. As a result, the most current strategy has been to focus on major cities or metropolitan areas for religious work. Among some major mainline Protestant denominations, support for Hispanic ministries has become a difficult debate. Cultural Realities. An important characteristic of many mainline Latino/a congregations is the level of acculturation among its membership, especially among

Protestantism the younger generations. Many secondand third-generation mainline Protestant Latino/as do not speak Spanish or have difficulty with it. As a result many of these congregations have bilingual worship services or programs that are totally in English. It is not uncommon for acculturated mainline Hispanic Protestants to join Anglo congregations. This results in a membership, leadership, and financial drain for Latina/o Protestant congregations. It also presents stressful issues of language and culture that affect older generations. Many Hispanic Protestant congregations struggle with the issue of cultural identity and cultural competence. Initially established to serve the Spanish-speaking population, they now serve English-speaking Latino/as and struggle with the issue of mission and purpose. To what extent is Spanish central to being a Hispanic congregation? Immigrant Outreach. A current challenge facing many Latino/a mainline Protestant churches is reaching out to the Latina/o immigrant population. It has been extremely difficult for established Hispanic Protestant congregations to successfully attract immigrants. The acculturation of mainline Latino/a congregations and the extensive use of English may explain part of the challenge for attracting immigrants who need a Spanish language program. Cultural and identity issues may also go beyond language. It is a common perception that many mainline Protestant Latina/o congregations have developed a middleclass mentality and culture. Such a congregational cultural climate may present a challenge to immigrants who may be poor. Racial-Ethnic Realities. In spite of acculturation, Hispanic Protestants still

| 467

retain their ethnic identity. Latino/a Protestant congregations are essentially ethnic congregations. Even when the congregation has become essentially English speaking, the membership will be Hispanic. Within the denominational structures, networks, and membership, Latina/o Protestants are still defined as an ethnic minority population and thus are different from the dominant Anglo Protestant membership. Racial and ethnic attitudes and relations in the broader social environment tend to be reflected within the denominational life. Some mainline denominations have special structures and offices to deal with ethnic ministries and issues. For example, the United Methodist Church has the Commission on Religion and Race with one of its tasks being to monitor racism within the denomination. Many mainline denominations will have ethnic caucuses, including Latino/a caucuses. Socioeconomic Realities and Hispanic Clergy. Although many Latina/o mainline congregations may have a middle-class mentality and culture, economically the membership comes from a history of poverty and financial marginalization. Financial pockets are not deep and many are first-generation middleclass and high school or college graduates. With such poverty background and small memberships, Latino/a congregations struggle to meet denominational expectations and become self-supporting. Limited funds are left for meaningful ministry beyond paying utilities and paying the pastor’s salary. Pastors of Latino/a congregations receive among the lowest salaries in the denomination. Many congregations cannot support a full-time pastor. Many seminary-trained Hispanic clergy seek higher-paying congregations; some serve

468 |

Protestantism

Anglo congregations. As a result, mainline Protestant Latino/a congregations struggle to fill their pulpits with seminary-trained Hispanic pastors. As a result, many churches will employ pastors from non-mainline traditions and struggle with theological fit. Thus, Latina/o Protestant congregations struggle with issues that are essentially financial and struggle to keep their educated clergy. Not surprisingly, Hispanic congregations and ministries tend to play marginal roles in mainline Protestant denominational life. Theological Orientation and Attitudes. Hispanic mainline Protestant theological perspectives tend to be shaped by the blending of the denominational theology and doctrines, sociopolitical ethnic realities, and the broader Latino/a religious culture. As part of broader mainline denominations, Latina/o Protestants tend to reflect some of the liberal and ecumenical orientation of Protestant denominations, especially seminarytrained Hispanic clergy. However, most Latino/a Protestant laity would probably reflect a leaning toward the more moderate to conservative end of the theological continuum. With regard to social attitudes, Latina/o Protestants would also tend toward the moderate, with the exception of issues related to civil rights and racism. In such areas, they would be liberal and supportive of social justice. Although many of the larger and historic Hispanic congregations tend to reflect the historic traditions of their mainline denominations especially with regard to worship and music, which tend to be grounded in their European roots, Latino/a congregations nonetheless are part of the larger Hispanic religious reality. Latina/o Protestants have maintained their Hispanic ethnic identity. Latino/a

Protestant congregations are increasingly influenced by the more culturally grounded Latino/a music and worship. ‘‘Coritos’’ and more informal worship have become more common. This is especially true among smaller congregations and those served by immigrant clergy or clergy not trained in a denominational seminary in the United States. Pentecostal Success. The growth of Latino/a Pentecostal and nondenominational Evangelical congregations has impacted Hispanic mainline Protestantism. They are no longer the only option to Catholicism. Latina/os can choose from a wide variety of theologies, worship, music, and congregational cultures. Pentecostal and Evangelical churches offer enthusiastic worship and attractive theologies that address the daily lives of Hispanics. Such churches are finding success in reaching out to Latino/as, while mainline Protestant churches struggle to do so. The Pentecostal influence upon Mainline Protestants is real. The growth of Pentecostalism within the Latino/a population has gotten the attention of mainline Latina/o Protestants. However, the Hispanic Protestant response has been diverse. Although Protestant clergy leadership and laity are forced to ask the question of why Pentecostalism is apparently attracting so many Latino/as while they struggle to stay open, not all agree on what the lessons are. Protestants have significant theological, liturgical, and structural issues with Pentecostalism and do not seek to duplicate them. Protestant liturgical traditions and theological roots are strong. Yet, Protestant worship has incorporated some of the enthusiastic nature of Pentecostal worship, but usually within a traditional Protestant worship service.

Puerto Ricans | 469 As this entry suggests, Hispanic mainline Protestantism has an important history of contributions to Latino/a religious life. Latina/o mainline Protestants were the first converts to Protestantism within the United States, and they paid a painful price within their families and communities. Hispanic Protestants established congregations and produced generations of Latino/a religious and lay leadership. These leaders led their congregations in self-determination and paved the way in defining what Latina/o Protestantism was to become. Today, it faces many new challenges. The challenges have to do with cultural and linguistic identity, mission, and purpose, as well as congregational culture and worship. However, the hope for Latino/a Protestantism is that its future is in the hands of Hispanic leadership. David Maldonado Jr.

References and Further Reading Banker, Mark T. Presbyterian Missions and Cultural Interaction in the Far Southwest 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1993). Barton, Paul. Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). Barton, Paul, and David Maldonado Jr. Hispanic Christianity within Mainline Protestant Traditions: A Bibliography (Decatur, GA: Asociacion para la Educacion Teologica Hispana, 1998). Brackenridge, R. Douglas, and Francisco O. Treto-Garcia. Iglesia Presbiteriana: A History of Presbyterians and Mexican Americans in the Southwest (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1974). Hernandez, Alberto. ‘‘Historic Mainline Protestants.’’ Handbook of Latina/o Theologies, ed. Edwin David Aponte and

Miguel A. De La Torre (St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2006). Maldonado, David, Jr. Protestantes/Protestants: Hispanic Christianity within Mainline Traditions (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999). Maldonado, David, Jr. Crossing Guadalupe Street: Growing Up Hispanic and Protestant (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001). Maldonado, David, Jr. ‘‘The Changing Religious Practice of Hispanics.’’ Hispanics in the United States, ed. Pastora San Juan Cafferty and David W. Engstrom (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000). Maldonado, David, Jr. ‘‘Hispanic Protestantism: Historical Reflections.’’ Apuntes 11, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 3–16. Martinez, Juan Francisco. Sea La Luz: The Making of Mexican Protestantism in the American Southwest, 1829–1900. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2006. Sylvest, Edwin, Jr. ‘‘Hispanic American Protestantism in the United States.’’ Frontera: A History of the Latin American Church in the USA Since 1513, ed. Moises Sandoval (San Antonio: The Mexican American Cultural Center, 1983). Walker, Randi Jones. Protestantism in the Sangre de Cristos 1850–1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991).

PUERTO RICANS According to Eileen Findlay, ‘‘The mottled past still haunts Puerto Rico’’ (1999, 1). Though a small island, Puerto Rico has been the center of historical and cultural struggles far exceeding its geographically narrow shores. Spanning just 100 miles by 35 miles in the Caribbean Sea, the island’s landscape is as diverse as its people. Under the shadow of Spanish and then American political

470 |

Puerto Ricans

VIEQUES Vieques is a small island municipality of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, an unincorporated and nonsovereign territory of the United States in the Caribbean. During World War II, the U.S. government expropriated most of the Vieques territory for military purposes. Vieques became an important sight for naval exercises and military operations of the U.S. Navy Atlantic Fleet, NATO, and South American and Caribbean allied forces. U.S. military interventions were rehearsed in Vieques: Dominican Republic, Panama, Granada, Haiti, Balkans, Iraq, and Somalia. Vieques is a 51 square mile island where the navy was in control of two-thirds of its land and civilian residents used to live squeezed between an ammunition depot and a maneuver area. In April 1999 a navy jet mistakenly dropped bombs on the wrong target, killing one guard and a civilian employee of the base. This accident generated a massive protest that developed during the next years into a broad-base nonviolent civil disobedience movement with local, continental, and international support. Many Latino/a religious leaders helped organize and participated in these protests. On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the navy to cease operations in Vieques. The people of Vieques are still struggling with the challenges of land sovereignty, economic development, health issues, and a major environmental cleanup. —LRR

control, Puerto Ricans have long struggled to craft a sense of national, cultural, and religious identity in the wake of Spanish colonialism and American neocolonialism. Heirs of the often violent encounters of indigenous, African, and Spanish cultural forces, Puerto Ricans are colonial subjects in a postcolonial world, citizens in a foreign nation, a nation within a nation.

Historical Background Long before Columbus’s consequential ‘‘discovery’’ of the island he christened ‘‘San Juan Batista,’’ Puerto Rico’s native inhabitants crafted societies of great cultural depth. Unfortunately, the island’s first inhabitants, the Taı´nos, are now lost to us except for a few archeological remnants and national monuments erected in their memory. Though their naming of

the island as Borinquen remains as Puerto Ricans regularly call one another ‘‘boricuas,’’ cultural influence between Taı´nos and modern Puerto Ricans is indirect at best. Disease, conquest, and enslavement ensured that links between Taı´nos and Puerto Ricans were severed early. The historical reconstruction of these peoples is difficult and tinged by ideological aims. In other words, the influence of Taı´no culture upon Puerto Ricans emerged much later in the island’s history as these Puerto Rican ancestors were rediscovered in the island’s cultural narrative. Columbus’s arrival on November 19, 1493, marked the eventual end of the Taı´no, as well as the advent of longstanding Spanish rule. The first governor of the island, Juan Ponce de Leo´ n, arrived in 1508 and soon the island’s shores were fortified, providing safe

Puerto Ricans | 471 harbors and trading hubs in the ‘‘rich ports’’ of Puerto Rico. Spanish domination remained unabated throughout the nineteenth century but lifted slightly just a year before the critical political shifts of 1898 as partial autonomy was granted to the island and its inhabitants. Autonomy, limited as it was, proved fleeting. Puerto Rico’s colonial masters changed as a result of the U.S.’s victory in the Spanish-American War. In 1898, political ownership of Puerto Rico shifted as the looming hegemony of the U.S. grew in the Western Hemisphere. The political situation of Puerto Rico changed radically. The integration of this Caribbean island within the fabric of American power was tenuous, consistently prioritizing American sensibilities. For example, the 1901 Supreme Court assessment of Puerto Rico’s place within the American nation proved paradoxical and U.S.-centered, describing the island as ‘‘foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.’’ The shape of politics in Puerto Rico shifted radically in 1917 when the U.S. government extended citizenship to Puerto Ricans, a move precipitated at least partly by World War I and the country’s need for soldiers. In the coming decades, the privileges of American citizenship would inaugurate a significant migration. Reaching a peak in 1953, many Puerto Ricans left the island for the promises of life in the United States, especially in New York City. The 2003 census found more Puerto Ricans living on the U.S. mainland than in Puerto Rico. The question of the island’s political status in relation to the United States remains the primary barometer of Puerto Rican politics. The Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) advocates statehood,

while the Partido Popular Democra´tico (PPD) rallies behind the continuation of the political status quo. In addition, the Partido Independentista Puertorriquen˜o (PIP) represents an important minority voice in public discourse, calling for Puerto Rico’s complete independence. In 1998, a nonbinding plebiscite revealed a highly divided populace, nearly evenly split between statehood and the continuation of the status quo. The recent debate over the presence of the U.S. Navy on the island of Vieques has only exacerbated these political divisions. Ambivalence over the island’s political status also defines the life of Puerto Ricans living in the United States today. Statistically among the poorest and least-educated ethnic groups, many Puerto Ricans have found it difficult to tap into the American Dream that has drawn so many to ‘‘jump the puddle’’ (brincar el charco). Though able to evade to a large degree the contentious issue of immigration, Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. find themselves on the margins of American culture.

Puerto Rico’s Mottled Past, Present, and Future Perhaps no other factor is as complex, yet definitive, in the analysis of Puerto Rican culture than the elusive notions of race and ethnicity. The negotiations of race and ethnicity were a critical component in the encounter of Europeans, indigenous populations, and Africans in Latin America. Puerto Rico has acquired a paradoxical reputation as a racial paradise. Along with Brazil, Puerto Rico has long been lauded as a jewel of ethnic integration, a paradise in which racial dissension is absent. In the past, the myth of ‘‘racial democracy’’ was the natural

472 |

Puerto Ricans

OUR LADY OF PROVIDENCE ‘‘Our Lady of Providence’’ is a title for the Virgin Mary that originated in Italy during the thirteenth century. In Roman Catholicism, Mary is the helper and protector of Jesus and of all creatures in need. The word ‘‘providence’’ represents divine care and guidance. The term also conveys God’s sovereignty, agency, and superintendence over human life. The Regular Clerks of the Congregation of Saint Paul, Barnabites, were founded in Italy, in 1530, by Saint Anthony Mary Zaccaria, and adopted the devotion of the Virgin of Providence. Soon this cult disseminated throughout Italy, France, and Spain, where devotees built a shrine in Tarragona, Catalonia. Popes, Gregory XVI in particular, made frequent visits. An Italian depiction of Mary leaning over the Child, who peacefully sleeps on her lap while she holds his left hand between her own hands folded in prayer, is now the classic image of this Virgin. In 1854, the Bishop Gill Esteve y Toma´s introduced the devotion to the Providence in the Cathedral of San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 1969, Paul VI declared her the Patroness of Puerto Rico and by papal decree unified the celebration of the arrival of the image, on November 2, with the ‘‘discovery’’ of Puerto Rico, which occurred on November 19, 1493. —VLC

explanation for Puerto Rico’s seeming racial harmony. Instead of rigid boundaries, racial divisions have appeared to both outsiders and internal ideologies as porous, permitting the so-called ‘‘mulatto escape hatch’’; ‘‘whitening’’ thus became a mode of social ascendancy. That is, an improvement in social class via marriage, higher education, and/or social advancement had a ‘‘lightening’’ effect upon the individual’s perceived race. Thus, for some cultural critics, Puerto Rico has come to represent an ethnic utopia worthy of emulation. While such an assignment seems to celebrate the island’s cultural diversity, it disguises the racial strife that defines the frequently bitter negotiations of Puerto Rican identity. More than providing an insight into Puerto Rico, such assessments often emerge from the inability to think beyond the racial dyad of Black and White so prevalent in the United States.

The reclamation of indigenous identity also provides a fascinating insight into Puerto Rico’s cultural negotiations. In particular, Puerto Rico’s construction of national identity reveals the central function of race and ethnicity in the definition of its cultures. Though Puerto Rico’s native population was eradicated by war and disease, the reclamation of Taı´nos as the pre-Colombian ancestors of modern Puerto Ricans occurred in the twentieth century at the intersection of ideology and archeology. Evidence of their history, culture, and rituals being sparse, archaeological reconstruction of Taı´nos is largely an ideological project hoping to define the Puerto Rican people. Ultimately, the Taı´no is not a physical presence on the island today, but an ideological notion constructed at the end of an archaeologist’s spade. As critical as race and ethnicity are to the construction of Puerto Rican identity, one ought to remember that they are not

Puerto Ricans | 473

NUYORICAN The approximately 500,000 Puerto Ricans or people of Puerto Rican descent who live in the New York metropolitan area are referred to as Nuyoricans. The word ‘‘Nuyorican’’ demonstrates this hybrid identity, combining the English word ‘‘New’’ from New York with ‘‘Rican’’ from Puerto Rican. Their various religious practices (Catholic, Pentecostal, Seventh-day Adventist, Jehovah’s Witness, often combined with aspects of Santerı´a) are a product of the island’s history. In 1899 after Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory, missionaries from U.S. Protestant churches divided the island into nine fields. Today less than 50 percent of Puerto Ricans on the island and in U.S. urban centers is Catholic and the majority of Protestants is Pentecostal. In 1951, a report to New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman stated that while 800 Puerto Rican Protestant ministers served in New York, there were no Puerto Rican Catholic priests. Puerto Ricans, who did not feel welcomed in the English-speaking Catholic Masses, turned to smaller Spanish-speaking Protestant churches. Prominent Nuyorican Piri Thomas’s family included a Pentecostal mother, espiritista stepmother, and ‘‘deathbed’’ Catholic father. Nuyorican also refers to the ‘‘Spanglish’’ spoken by Puerto Ricans in New York and to the intellectual movement of poets, musicians, and artists such as Tito Puente, Jesu´s Colo´n, and Esmeralda Santiago, whose work deals with their dual culture often including a hybrid religious culture. —AA

isolated phenomena. It is quite difficult, if not impossible, to analyze these critical categories without also recalling how gender, social status, religion, and class are inextricably tied together. The power of the confluence of sexuality and race are most potent in that they together shaped everyday power relations and became explicitly politicized in the construction of Puerto Rican identity. Ultimately, one cannot comprehend the cultures of Puerto Rico without grappling with these difficult yet essential cultural facets. The very definition of ‘‘Puerto Ricanness’’ is inseparable from the complex ethnic negotiations that have punctuated the island’s history.

Important Moments in Puerto Rican Religion Until 1898, the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Puerto Rico was

virtually unchallenged. Within a decade of Columbus’s arrival, the first ecclesiastical province in these newly ‘‘discovered’’ lands was established in the neighboring island of Hispaniola. By 1511, San Juan hosted one of the first three dioceses in the ‘‘New World’’ and was the first with a local prelate. The following year Puerto Rico became host to the earliest and one of the most substantial library collections of Western learning. Ultimately, the colonizing of Puerto Rico was not only a political activity spearheaded by the Spanish crown but also a religious mission sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church. Fortified by political support, the church and the Spanish state were inseparable foundations of the Puerto Rican colony. Among the many ecclesial leaders who helped shape Puerto Rico in the years of Spanish rule, the ascension of Juan Alejo de Arizmendi as the first Puerto Rican born

474 |

Puerto Ricans

MADRE MARI´A DOMINGA (1897–1991) Marı´a Dominga was born in Puerto Rico. In 1913, she entered the congregation of the Dominican Sisters of the Holy Cross, in Brooklyn, New York. She performed her ministry first as a parish school teacher and later as a foundress and first Mother General of Las Hermanas Dominicas de Nuestra Sen ˜ora del Rosario de Fatima on November 3, 1949, the second native congregation of religious women to be founded on the island of Puerto Rico. From the beginning Madre Dominga insisted that in order to serve the poor, one must give concrete witness to a life of poverty and a deep spiritual life. The sisters opened and maintained missionary houses throughout the Caribbean, Central America and the United States. They opted to work in the community to strengthen the values of the Puerto Rican family, and thus, their motto: Llevar a Cristo a la familia y la familia a Cristo (To bring Christ to the family and bring the family to Christ). Madre Marı´a Dominga died at the age of 96 in 1991. Soon after her death, her case for canonization was formally introduced and is being studied by church officials. —ADS

bishop in 1804 was a particularly historical and symbolic moment for the development of Puerto Rican national identity. The massive political shifts that followed upon the U.S.’s possession of Puerto Rico were accompanied by concomitant changes in the geography of Christianity on the island. Just two years after the 1898 Treaty of Paris ended the Spanish-American War and granted the United States possession of Puerto Rico and Cuba, the Foraker Act became law and established a civilian government. Simultaneously, President William McKinley enacted a legal proposition already augured by the arrival of American troops on Puerto Rican soil. McKinley expressly ordered the separation of church and state, effectively breaking the unequivocal legal buttresses of the Roman Catholic Church on the island. No longer a de facto partner in the political machinery of Puerto Rico, the Catholic Church could not receive financial and juridical support from the new civilian government.

At the turn of the century, American influence was growing around the world, perhaps best exemplified by the possession of islands around the world, which projected this burgeoning power. To familiarize Americans with these various possessions, a pictorial description of Our Islands and Their People was published in 1899. Puerto Rico, as one of the featured islands, and its economic struggles entered the American psyche thanks to the recent refinements of photography. Other media reports reinforced these characterizations and helped shape American perceptions of Puerto Rico, its people, and its history. From the perspective of American missionaries and politicians, Roman Catholicism and Spanish monarchical rule functioned in a fateful symbiosis, an arrangement now deemed catastrophic for the Puerto Rican people and arcane thanks to the advent of American democracy. Protestant denominations from the United States were primed to introduce ‘‘pure’’ religion in Puerto Rico

Puerto Ricans | 475

CARLOS MANUEL RODRI´QUEZ (1918–1963) Carlos Manuel Rodrı´quez, or Charlie, as he was best known to his friends and colleagues, was born in Caguas, Puerto Rico, on November 22, 1918. He was badly wounded when he tried to rescue his one-year-old cousin from the attack of a rabid dog. The severe bites led to serious intestinal problems during his entire life and most likely his untimely death of intestinal cancer on July 13, 1963. Charlie attempted a baccalaureate degree, which he was forced to abandon because of bad health. He ultimately dedicated all of his time to the Catholic University Center, becoming a Catholic lay minister. He organized the Cı´rculo de Cultura Cristiana and published Christian Life Days as a tool for university students to enjoy the liturgical seasons. He belonged to the Holy Name Society and the Knights of Columbus, and as a member of the Brotherhood of Christian Doctrine, he taught catechism to high school students. Anticipating the liturgical changes brought about by Vatican II, Charlie encouraged liturgical renewal among the clergy and the laity, working for active participation of the laity and the use of the vernacular language. On April 29, 2001, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II. —ASD

in a new, implicit symbiosis between Protestantism and American democracy. Nevertheless, these same denominations were uninterested in a competitive struggle for the souls of Puerto Ricans. After all, the wider aim of bringing ‘‘true’’ Christianity to the island’s people abated grand denominational designs. In addition, American Protestants hoped to engender the ecumenical spirit of the time upon the people of Puerto Rico. These various trajectories prompted a pivotal ‘‘comity’’ agreement. While the large cities of San Juan and Ponce were denominational neutral grounds, the rest of the island was cleaved into four exclusive sections for the missionary activities of Presbyterians, American Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodist Episcopalians. Eventually, the Christian Church (Disciples), the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the United Brethren in Christ, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church also gained a part in the comity compact. Many of these denominations

partnered to found the Seminario Evange´lico de Puerto Rico (Evangelical Seminary of Puerto Rico) in 1919. Despite these denominational machinations, Roman Catholicism remained a crucial religious touchstone in Puerto Rico. Magnificent Catholic churches still dominate the town centers of Puerto Rico. In addition, Pentecostal Christian faiths have thrived, adding yet another dimension to the history of Puerto Rican religion. In recent years, the dual dominance of mainline Protestant churches and Catholicism has given way to a far more fractured situation in which independent churches and faiths have complicated an already tangled web of religious belief. In a certain sense, however, this diverse religious landscape is not new. Popular Puerto Rican religion has often combined elements of ecclesiastically approved Christian dogma with elements of Taı´no and African religions. This syncretistic blend of traditional dogma and elements of the occult is known as

476 |

Puerto Ricans

espiritismo (spiritism). Although not recognized by official church institutions, spiritists beliefs such as Santerı´a influence the daily religious practices of Puerto Ricans. Recent years have seen the burgeoning of Puerto Rican scholarship on religion and theology. In a recent essay, Luis Rivera-Paga´n outlines some of the most important contributions to and studies of Puerto Rican theology. RiveraPaga´ n provides ‘‘four hermeneutical paths’’ that succinctly summarize and assess the various trajectories of Puerto Rican theology. First, reflecting the diversity of Puerto Ricans themselves, a single, monolithic Puerto Rican theology proves elusive; in fact, one of the defining marks of Puerto Rican theology is its diversity. Second, he affirms Luis Rivera Rodrı´guez’s distinction between teologı´a puertorriquen˜ a and teologı´a puertorriquen˜ista. The former is a primarily historical effort that considers how Puerto Ricans have experienced God and self within their historical particularity. The latter ‘‘is that reflection from Christian faith and praxis about God and the human condition and destiny in the Puerto Rican experience and context made . . . with an option for puertorriquen˜ idad.’’ The first is more of a descriptive effort while the second is more prescriptive, asking how the Puerto Rican experience can reassess theology. Third, we must recognize that male theologians have dominated the enterprise of Puerto Rican theology and that its continued vitality requires the cultivation of feminist interpretations of puertorriquen˜ idad. Finally, Puerto Rican theology reflects the continuing influence of liberation theology as well as the shifting definitions and criteria of a liberationist perspective. Though many have too

quickly pointed to the demise of liberation theology, Puerto Rican theology suggests that liberation theology is instead experiencing a great deal of transformation and diversification (2006, 144–151). Despite these four defining points, Puerto Rican theology remains difficult to pinpoint, especially because Puerto Ricans living on the island and those living in the mainland of the United States bring differing, though often complementary, perspectives. In conclusion, Puerto Rican religious cultures are shaped at the critical intersection of history, ethnic identity, and religion proper. As a profound expression of a people’s hopes and fears, religion reaches to the very core of cultural identity in a cultural discourse inextricable from a people’s sense of history and self. This is particularly true in Puerto Rico where politics, culture, identity, and the nation are tenuous and disputed notions. Eric Daniel Barreto

References and Further Reading Duany, Jorge. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Findlay, Eileen. Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Gotay, Samuel Silva. Protestantismo y polı´tica en Puerto Rico, 1898–1930: Hacia una historia del protestantismo evange´lico en Puerto Rico (San Juan, PR: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1997). Haslip-Viera, Gabriel, ed. Taı´no Revival: Critical Perspectives on Puerto Rican Identity and Cultural Politics (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001).

Puerto Ricans | 477 Pico´, Fernando. History of Puerto Rico: A Panorama of Its People (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006). Rivera-Paga´n, Luis N. ‘‘Puertorriquen˜os/as.’’ Handbook of Latina/o Theologies, ed. Edwin David Aponte and Miguel A. De La Torre (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006). Rodrı´guez Leo´n, Mario A. El Obispo Juan Alejo de Arizmendi: Ante el proceso

revolucionario y el inicio de la emancipacio´n de Ame´rica Latina y el Caribe (Bayamo´n, PR: Centro de Estudios de los Dominicos del Caribe, 2003). Stevens-Arroyo, Antonio M. Cave of the Jagua: The Mythological World of the Taı´nos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988).

R impurity or postcolonial shame, as stereotyped by all Euro-Western racial ideologies. Instead their racial features and Latino identity were to be interpreted, and celebrated, as a sign of the growing Ibero-American mestizo and Hispanic peoples’ important roles in the future of the human race. Vasconcelos’s conceptualization of the Cosmic Race was influenced by many of the major intellectual currents of the times, and by lesser ones, like Theosophy, which today is associated with the New Age Movement. When he was appointed Rector of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in 1920, Vasconcelos petitioned the governing board and received permission for a new university motto: Por mi Raza hablara´ el Espiritu´, which translates as ‘‘The Spirit shall speak through my People.’’ Given his strong Roman Catholic background, Vasconcelos most likely was alluding to the Holy Spirit’s empowering role in the history of Salvation. However, his universalism was influenced also by nineteenth-century

RAZA CÓSMICA The phrase raza co´smica first entered the public consciousness of Mexicans and Chicano/as as an expression of cultural and religious identity deriving from the 1925 publication of The Cosmic Race: The Mission of the Ibero-American Race by Mexican politician and Minister of Education Jose´ Vasconcelos Caldero´ n (1882–1959). Although criticized for its connections with the racial ideologies of the late 1800s and early 1900s, Vasconcelos’s racial project in La Raza Co´smica affirmed the cultural uniqueness and humanitarian potential of the racial mixing (mestizaje) that occurred, following the Spanish and Portuguese conquests, between European colonists and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. While the literal English meaning of the Spanish term raza is ‘‘race,’’ in the Mexican sociopolitical context of the 1920s the term signified more precisely the idea of a ‘‘people’’ or a ‘‘civilization’’ whose mestizo origins were not to be interpreted as a mark of racial 479

480 |

Raza Cósmica

BLANQUEAMIENTO The concept of blanqueamiento, ‘‘whitening’’ or ‘‘becoming white,’’ was a Spanish colonial administration policy from the 1500s to the 1800s. Given its historic conflict with dark-complexioned North African Berbers, Moroccans, and Arabs during the Reconquista (ca. 711–1492), Spain developed racialized class structures and social prejudices whereby ‘‘whiteness’’ signified a person’s Spanish or Christian ‘‘purity of blood’’ (pureza de sangre), while ‘‘blackness’’ signified a person’s Moorish ‘‘impurity’’ or Muslim heritage. The lack of Caucasian women throughout the colonies motivated many Spanish soldiers and settlers to take wives or concubines from among the indigenous population. Offspring from these unions encountered upper-class prejudices favoring lighter complexions against the diverse shades of skin color resulting from racial mixing. African slaves were at the bottom of this matrix. Concerned about racial imbalances and class struggles, Spain offered land grants to poor White settlers and their families whose presence then ensured more ‘‘whitening’’ opportunities among the colonial population. Dark-complexioned colonial subjects motivated by internalized oppression often sought lighter-skinned marriage partners for ‘‘whitening’’ the family’s racial and social status (mejorar la raza). Local manifestations of this colonial legacy linger across contemporary Central and South America, which immigrants from Latin America often bring with them to the United States. —AH

German Idealism, particularly Georg W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of history and Johann G. Fichte’s notions of selfconsciousness. He was quite fond of reading Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. In addition, he was familiar with Oswald Spengler’s two-volume history of modern Europe, The Decline of the West (1917), which used biological categories to ponder the rise, growth, and decay of Western civilization. Vasconcelos believed the application of Charles Darwin’s doctrine of natural selection to the social and political arenas was highly problematic because these zoologicalracial ideologies, first developed in England by Herbert Spencer and later expanded by German scientists and nationalists, despised the interracial sexual unions that had populated and enriched vast regions of the world where ancient civilizations once flourished

outside the immediate reach of Caucasian Europe—areas like Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Vasconcelos, and other Latin American intellectuals and religious leaders, critiqued these racialized worldviews as divisive and dehumanizing theories, which culminated in the myth of Aryan supremacy and the threat of Nazi expansionism. In contrast, Vasconcelos believed, with deep conviction, that he had detected a divinely ordained trajectory in the history of the past five centuries whereby the various races of the human family were intermixing at a gradually increasing pace that would result in the appearance of a ‘‘new human type,’’ which he called ‘‘the Cosmic Race.’’ He believed the ‘‘melting-pot’’ phenomenon in the United States, and similar trends in Argentina, were evidence of humanity’s emerging multiracial future. His

Raza Cósmica evolutionary views of human history were also influenced by his understanding of Darwinism and by his personal interest in the esoteric ideas of the Russian Theosophist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Vasconcelos borrowed Madame Blavatsky’s notions about a great migration of people all over the earth after the fall of Atlantis from which sprang the great civilizations of the ancient world like Egypt and Greece, as well as the indigenous civilizations of the Americas like the Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs. Against the prevailing four major racial categories of his day based on skin color —White, Black, Red, and Yellow—he posited the emergence of a fifth race, ‘‘the Cosmic Race,’’ from the interracial mixing common in Mexico and Latin America as mestizaje. Vasconcelos’s predictions, while uplifting Hispanics, Spaniards, and Latin Americans of mixed racial ancestry, also pitted this ‘‘Ibero-American race’’ against AngloSaxon and Germanic Caucasians, and his attitude toward the role of ‘‘Blacks’’ in this scheme was ambivalent and outdated. All contemporary criticisms of Vasconcelos’s racial project aside, it is extremely important to note that at a time when not only Germany and Japan but much of the world seemed intoxicated by ideologies of race and nationalistic exclusivity, he criticized the myth of racial purity by emphatically maintaining that racial mixing and the development of syncretistic cultures had been part of human history since the very beginnings of civilization during the latter stages of the Neolithic Era. During the first half of the twentieth century, his theory of La Raza Co´smica inspired intellectuals and activists from a wide spectrum of

| 481

cultures yearning for social justice and liberation from Eurocentric racism: first in Mexico, then throughout Latin America, and eventually across the Hispanic communities of the southwestern United States. Despite his tendency to romanticize the Spanish and Roman Catholic heritage, Vasconcelos was acutely aware of the lingering negative effects of the Iberian colonial legacy among the peoples and nations of the Americas. His use of the term ‘‘raza’’ and affirmation of mestizaje influenced social justice efforts in Mexico and among Chicano/as in the United States. Finally, just as Karl Marx’s emphasis in the mid-1800s on the growing role of economic relations and financial institutions in world history is today seen as a prophetic understanding of future trends, Vasconcelos’s vision in the 1920s of an increasingly multicultural and interdependent planet was prophetic of contemporary trends in Latin America and the global community. Albert Herna´ndez

References and Further Reading Graham, Richard, ed. The Idea of Race in Latin America: 1870–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Miller, Marilyn Grace. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). Vasconcelos, Jose´. La Raza Co´smica: Misio´n de la Raza Iberoamericana (Barcelona, Spain: Agencia Mundial de Librerı´a, 1926). Vasconcelos, Jose´. The Cosmic Race/La Raza Co´smica, bilingual ed., trans. Didier T. Jaen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press Paperbacks, 1997).

482 |

Reconquista

RECONQUISTA Reconquista is the Spanish term for the epic struggle fought on the Iberian Peninsula by Spain and Portugal from the Moorish invasion of Gibraltar on July 19, 711, to the fall of the Nasrid Caliphate of Granada on January 2, 1492. Although modern Spanish nationalism often misrepresented the conflict as a continuous religious war against a unified foreign conqueror, the Spanish Reconquest was actually a series of intermittent military campaigns against widely divergent Arab, Berber, and Muslim factions from North Africa spanning nearly eight centuries. Although numbering very few actual Arabs or Muslims among their ranks, the indigenous North African, dark-skinned Berber warriors who accompanied General Tariq ibn-Ziyad’s invasion forces in 711 would forever be known in Spanish history as los Moros (the Moors). Their arrival was immortalized in the master narrative of Spanish history as ‘‘The Moorish Conquest,’’ hence, the mythic counterattack known as the Spanish Reconquest, and the term for the romantic heroism of medieval Spanish knights and mercenaries known as Conquistadores. Since the Spanish Reconquest began nearly four centuries before the more familiar Crusades to the Holy Land (1095–1291), some historians interpret these Iberian wars as an earlier phase of the medieval Western European phenomenon of Christian ‘‘crusading’’ against Islam, while others have interpreted the Reconquista as a series of conflicts unique to Spanish feudalism and the multicultural situation in medieval Iberia. Whatever interpretive framework we apply to understanding this struggle, its effect on the formation of medieval

and early modern Spanish national consciousness, and its subsequent impact on Spain’s imperial objectives and colonization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas after 1492, had a lasting influence in Spain, as well as in Latin America and the Hispanic American religious cultures of what was once known as Spanish North America, and these trajectories still influence a number of contemporary cultural and political issues around the world.

Historical Development The Romans called the Iberian Peninsula Hispania and in early medieval times its inhabitants were still called Hispani, hence the term ‘‘Hispanic,’’ from which the English term ‘‘Spaniard’’ is also derived. After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE, the Visigoths controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula until an Arab-Berber alliance with military and political ties reaching all the way back to Damascus’s Umayyad Caliph, Abu al-Walid I (ca. 668–715), crossed over from North Africa. Commanding an army of 7,000 Berber and Arab soldiers from Morocco, the young Berber general Tariq ibn-Ziyad burned all of his ships so that the troops would accept nothing short of total victory in the conquest of Hispania, a dramatic historical act repeated in 1519 by Herna´n Corte´ s (1485–1547) as he landed in Mexico and burned his ships before conquering the Aztec Empire. The famous geographic feature on the tip of the Iberian Peninsula facing the North African coast of Morocco, the Rock of Gibraltar (Jebel al-Tariq), which in Arabic means ‘‘Tariq’s Rock,’’ was named after this cunning young general. Superbly organized with light cavalry and strong

Reconquista infantry, the invaders overthrew the Visigoths throughout most of present-day southern Spain and Portugal. The final blow for the Visigoths came in July 711 when Tariq’s forces defeated the army of Spain’s last Visigothic ruler, King Rodrigo, at the Battle of the Guadalete River. A few months later Toledo, the Visigoth capital, fell and almost the entire peninsula soon came under Moorish rule. As the Moors consolidated their victories, the southern and western portions of Iberia were divided into a series of small kingdoms governed by various Berber or Arab emirs. The newcomers renamed the area ‘‘al-Andalus,’’ meaning the ‘‘land of the Vandals,’’ after another Germanic tribe they confused with the Visigoths. Later known to Spaniards as ‘‘Andalucı´a,’’ the region’s romantic charm and rich cultural legacies have endured into the present. The surviving Spanish-Visigoth feudal nobility, along with their subjects, retreated to Iberia’s northwestern regions in Asturias and Galicia, while others sought safety from the advancing Moorish forces in towns and villages located high in the Pyrenees Mountains. Spain’s patriotic counterattack was first launched from the Kingdom of Asturias when the region’s founder and hero, Don Pelayo, defeated the Moors at the Battles of Alcama and Covadonga sometime between 718 and 725. While much of Pelayo’s story seems legendary, his kingship and military victories mark the traditional and historic starting point of the Spanish Reconquest. These legends seem largely a creation of later Spanish generations whose nationalistic concerns regarded King Pelayo as the royal patriarch of Leon and Castile, powerful medieval kingdoms that developed later

| 483

from the Kingdom of Asturias. The stark political reality for both Spanish and Moorish leadership is that neither side fared very well in Iberia from 718 until about 756. The Umayyad Caliphs of Damascus (modern Syria) showed little interest in Andalucı´a after 720, and the Abbasid rulers of Baghdad (modern Iraq) were even more distant from Iberia than their Umayyad predecessors. Factional rivalries, civil war, and territorial disputes produced a highly unstable political situation across Andalucı´a and North Africa for 40 years following Tariq’s victories. The decisive turning point in the history of Hispano-Arabic Andalucı´a, however, occurred on Friday, May 14, 756, when a surviving Arab prince from Damascus’s recently massacred Umayyad Dynasty, Abd al-Rahman I, declared himself leader of the people and heir to his family’s dynastic claims by establishing the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba. His support grew when local leaders realized his mother was also a North African Berber princess. Regarded as the ‘‘Golden Age’’ of Islamic civilization on European soil, economic prosperity, scientific knowledge, and education thrived in Cordoba for the next two centuries. Under the successful and creative leadership of Abd al-Rahman and his strong successors, the Cordovan State flourished until about 1031 when internal corruption, factional dissent, and the growing power of several independent warring states, known as the Taifa Kingdoms, destabilized political and economic conditions across Andalucı´a. By 1083 Seville had replaced Cordoba as Iberia’s major city and center of Islamic culture. The demise of Cordoba’s Umayyad Caliphs presented a unique military and

484 |

Reconquista

territorial opportunity for the Christian kingdoms situated across the northern half of the Iberian Peninsula. Leading the Spanish forces under the banner of a united Leon and Castile, King Alfonso VI (1079–1109) conquered Toledo in 1085, a military victory that alarmed Islamic rulers across the Mediterranean region. While dealing a serious setback to Hispano-Arabic political and military objectives, this event’s cultural impact on Western European civilization helped spark the so-called ‘‘Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’’ as many ancient Greek and Roman classics and scientific works believed lost after the fall of the Roman Empire were translated from Arabic into Latin during the 1100s and brought to the attention of scholars in Europe’s rapidly growing cathedral schools and universities. King Alfonso VI also employed Spain’s most famous warrior of the Reconquest, Rodrigo Dı´az de Vivar (ca. 1044–1099), whose legendary military skills earned him the honorary title, ‘‘El Cid the Champion’’ among Muslim and Christian knights. According to several accounts, El Cid and King Alfonso both admired the Greek and Roman classics and recognized the contributions of Arab scholars to the preservation of knowledge. In 1086, however, a rival faction of Islamic fundamentalists crossed over from North Africa conquering Seville and Cordoba, and most of Andalusia. They called themselves the Almoravids, from the Arabic phrase al-Murabitum, literally meaning ‘‘people of the ribat,’’ Arabic for a religious community analogous to a ‘‘monastery.’’ Believing the Cordovan Empire’s collapse was the result of excessive worldliness and lack of piety, the Almoravids refused lofty titles like ‘‘caliph’’ or ‘‘emir’’ and

followed an austere way of life. The Spanish kingdoms retained control of Toledo while continuing the Reconquest against this latest North African opponent whose primary weaknesses stemmed from their poorly organized central government back in Seville. Besieged from the outside by the growing power and military successes of the Spanish Reconquest and from the inside by factionalism and dissent, the Almoravids were overthrown in 1148 at Seville by local Hispano-Arabic leaders who appealed for assistance to the rising Almohad faction from North Africa. By 1155 the Almohads ousted the Almoravids from both Cordoba and Granada and became the dominant Islamic power in Iberia for a century. Meanwhile, Christian Spain and Portugal had been gradually consolidating their power base among their own factions and feudal kingdoms. In 1147 King Alfonso Enriquez of Portugal, known as El Conquistador, captured Lisbon from the Moors with the help of crusader knights from Leon and Castile, Cologne, Flanders, and England. By 1149 Catalonia’s last Muslim outposts fell to Spanish forces led by the Counts of Barcelona. The most decisive victory of the Reconquest was fought on July 16, 1212, at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa as King Alfonso VIII of Castile united the kingdoms of Leon, Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal against the Almohad Empire. Alfonso’s successor, King Fernando III of Castile, led a series of campaigns against the major urban centers of Almohad power in Iberia. He succeeded by first taking Cordoba (1236) and Valencia (1238), and then paving the way for the siege of the Almohad capital at Seville, which surrendered on November 23, 1248. A key Spanish-

Reconquista Christian strategy in this phase of the Reconquest was their use of ‘‘divideand-conquer’’ tactics, which pitted rival Arab and Muslim factions against each other and further weakened the overall political and military effectiveness of the Almohads. On December 22, 1248, King Fernando III and his allies entered Seville as conquerors of the most religiously and culturally diverse kingdom on European soil. The Reconquista had achieved most of its goals in a little over 500 years and was regarded by many of the figures of that era as a mission accomplished and closed. However, during the decisive Mediterranean conflicts of the thirteenth century, the Christian kingdoms and feudal factions of the Iberian Peninsula witnessed the rise of the violently expansionist and highly skilled seafaring House of Aragon, which began its own program of conquest first by attacking the Balearic Islands in 1229 and then seeking control of Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily with the broader aim of eventually taking Naples and Rome. In the 1300s the Aragonese forged an alliance with Castile and Portugal aimed at controlling the Iberian Peninsula once and for all by conquering Granada and toppling the Nasrids. The project had two major objectives: the final expulsion of Muslim rule from Christian Europe, and the emergence of the royal House of Aragon as a major power among the Christian nations of Europe. These actions on the part of Aragon revived the Spanish Reconquest and culminated in the surrender of the Caliphate of Granada to Spain as Europe’s first, modern nation-state under the unified rule of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabel I of Castile on January 2, 1492.

| 485

Major Doctrinal Points Although the Spanish Reconquest was a military and political process spanning centuries, its cultural and religious effects took on the nature and fervor of nationalistic doctrine as its objectives became inextricably tied to the formation of Spanish national identity and Spanish Catholicism. Under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel’s powerful joint rulership the Reconquest took on the nationalistic symbolism and intolerant proportions for which it became infamous in the colonization of the Americas and in the varied histories of Hispanic American religious cultures. For example, Spain’s famous patron saint, Santiago de Compostela (St. James), whose traditional pilgrimage route was one of the most famous practices in medieval Christendom, was also known throughout the Reconquest as St. Santiago Mata Moros, literally ‘‘St. James, the Killer of Moors.’’ The epithet made this beloved, pious saint a favorite figure among the Conquistadors who came to the Americas searching for gold and enslaved the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, by defeating the Muslims in 1492 after so many centuries of war in what appeared to most other European nations and the papacy as an apocalyptic struggle, and which coincided with news of Christopher Columbus’s epic discoveries in an unknown land, Spain developed a distinct sense of ‘‘National Messianism,’’ which propelled it to the pinnacle of European political and colonial power over the next two centuries. Indeed, whenever and wherever Spanish colonial power was threatened, the image and memory of the Reconquest was called

486 |

Reconquista

upon to inspire the troops and rally the people into defeating the opposition, such as in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when a statue of the Virgin Mary rescued from a burning church during the 1680 Pueblo Indian Revolt returned in 1692 as La Conquistadora (Our Lady of Conquering Love) at the head of an army led by Don Diego de Vargas who resettled the region for the Spanish Crown. Racialization is another legacy of the Spanish Reconquest that had a lasting impact on the modern world. Spain’s racialized prejudices about the superiority of white skin tones versus dark skin tones developed from the fear and violence spawned by its early encounters between North Africans and Europeans, and eventually included taboos against interracial marriages, which were signified first by the religious identities of light-skinned Christians versus darkcomplexioned Moors, Muslims, or Arabs. Later in the 1300s and 1400s, these prejudices were signified by more intentionally racialized and legal categories for Spanish national identity. Race and religion became objectified categories of exclusion and oppression that were used with legal force to keep Christian Spaniards from intermingling with Jews and Muslims, categories later deployed with lethal force in all Spanish colonies that contributed much to the racism and classism that permeated Latin America and Hispanic American culture. Not all aspects of the Spanish Reconquest produced negative results or dealt with warfare. Arab and Moroccan influences filtered in from North Africa and from as far away as Damascus and Baghdad. A rich blending of Islamic, Christian, and Jewish cultural influences known as convivencia (living together)

occurred in the art and architecture, poetry and literature, and music of Medieval Spain, which can still be seen and heard everywhere in the country today. The long struggle against the North African factions caused the premature end of feudalism in Iberia and led Spain to become Western Europe’s first modern nation-state. Finally despite the Spanish Empire’s social taboos and legal sanctions against interracial mixing, the Latin American and Hispanic American racial mixing known as mestizaje,has much older, deeper historical roots during the Golden Age of Hispano-Arabic Andalusian civilization and the Spanish Reconquest than its alleged first appearance in sixteenth-century colonial Mexico and Peru has led the general public to believe. Albert Herna´ndez

References and Further Reading Fletcher, Richard. Moorish Spain, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Glick, Thomas F. Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages, 2nd rev. ed. (Boston: Brill, 2005). Lowney, Chris. A Vanished World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Mann, Vivian B., Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds. Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain (New York: George Braziller, Reissue Edition 2007). Menocal, Marı´a Rosa. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 2002). O’Callaghan, Joseph F. Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

Religious Affiliation

RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION The Hispanic population represents a major component of the American life and culture. The U.S. Census Report of 2000 stated a total population of 281.4 million residents (excluding Puerto Rico and the U.S. islands). Hispanics comprised 35.3 million (12.5 percent); 27.1 million (76.8 percent) of Hispanics live in seven states (California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, and New Jersey), with California (11 million) and Texas (6.7 million) being the states with the strongest Hispanic presence. This growth and rapid expansion of the Hispanic population is shaping the religious panorama of the United States. Although the U.S. Census Bureau remains the main source of information and statistics regarding the American population, the Census Bureau fails to provide data about the religious affiliation of the people living in the United States. The Census is prohibited by Public Law 94-521 to ask questions on religious preferences. Consequently, although religion plays a vital role in the American life, especially among Latino/ as, it is impossible to determine the religious affiliation of people in the United Sates in general and of Hispanics in particular. Nevertheless, research studies conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Barna Group, along with the ongoing work of the Hartford Institute and the Church Council of Churches, provide a general description of Latina/ os and their religious inclinations. The Pew Research Center published one of the most comprehensive studies about Hispanic religion in the United States in 2007. The report Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation

| 487

of American Religion was produced with the collaboration of the Pew Hispanic Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. This report states that Latino/as are transforming the nation’s religious landscape because of their growing numbers and strong religious practices, which differ from nonHispanics who are more widely distributed among various religions and Christian denominations. The Pew report describes six major religious traditions among Hispanics: Roman Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, Mainline Protestants, other Christians (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, or Orthodox), other Faiths (Muslims and other non-Christian faiths), and Seculars. Approximately one in ten Hispanics do not claim any religion affiliation (8 percent). Therefore, it can be argued that a religious inclination represents an important ethos for Hispanics. More than twothirds (68 percent) of Hispanics identify themselves as Roman Catholics. The next largest category is made up of evangelical Protestants with 15 percent. No one denomination comprises more than 7 percent of the total. The denominational distribution of Latino/a Protestants is as follows: Pentecostal (6.9 percent), Baptist (3.1 percent), Independent or nondenominational (3.1 percent), Congregational or Church of Christ (0.7 percent), Presbyterian (0.3 percent), Methodist (0.3 percent), Lutheran (0.2 percent), Episcopalian (0.2 percent), Denomination not specified (3.8 percent). According to the Pew report, Jehovah’s Witnesses are the largest religious group related to Christianity with 1.9 percent of the Hispanic population in the United States. Hispanic Mormons represent 0.7 percent, and only 0.1 percent

488 |

Religious Affiliation

claims a religious affiliation with the Orthodox Church. Less than 1 percent (0.9) of Hispanics identify themselves as members of Jewish, Muslim, or other non-Christian religions, while 1.1 percent of Hispanics refused to disclose their religious affiliation to the Pew Research Center. Catholicism in the United States is stronger among Hispanics than among other racial groups (either Whites or Blacks). First-generation Hispanics tend to be affiliated with Roman Catholicism more than with other religions or Christian denominations. Among foreignborn Hispanics, 74 percent of adults are Roman Catholics compared with 58 percent of native-born Hispanics. Since immigration has increased significantly in the past few years, the Pew Report projects that Hispanics will become an ever-increasing segment of the Catholic Church in the United States. In 2001, the Barna Research Group conducted a study about Hispanic religious affiliation. They published the report ‘‘The Faith of Hispanics Is Shifting’’ based on surveys among more than 4,000 adults in the United States. Of those adults, 468 identified themselves as Latina/os. This study argues that the religious affiliation of Hispanics is gradually shifting from its traditionally Roman Catholic affiliation to a more diverse ‘‘spiritual hybrid.’’ Although Roman Catholicism continues to be the major religion preference among Latino/ as, other Christian groups are attracting large numbers of Hispanics. According to this research, Hispanics have a higher tendency than non-Hispanics to attend Charismatic and Pentecostal churches. In order to completely comprehend the Hispanic religious affiliation in the United States, it becomes imperative to

comprehend the religious dynamics of Latin America. According to the U.S. Census in its publication ‘‘The Foreignborn Population in the United States,’’ in 2002, 35.2 million foreign-born people reside in the United States (11.5 percent of the total American population). Of the American foreign-born population, 52.2 percent comes from Latin America, with 36.4 percent from Central America (including Mexico), 6.2 percent from South America, and 9.6 percent from the Caribbean (Puerto Ricans are considered American by birth). Samuel Escobar, a well-known Peruvian theologian, discusses key characteristics of Christians in Latin America. The term ‘‘evangelical’’ describes the majority of Protestants such as those who belong to what is considered ‘‘historical’’ churches that came from Europe and North America, independent churches established from independent missionaries, and classic Pentecostal churches. The Roman Catholic Church continues to be the dominant religious organization in Latin America, although it has been declining both numerically and influentially in society. Meanwhile, Evangelical numbers are growing. For example, in 1968 only 85,000 Evangelicals lived in Colombia (0.43 percent of the population), but in 2000 this number grew to 2 million (5 percent of the population). According to a study from the Catholic University in Chile, 13.9 percent of the population in that country identify themselves with evangelicals. Escobar argues that since the America’s Synod that met in Rome in 1997 with the presence of 300 Catholic Cardinals and Bishops from Latin America, the United States, and Canada, the Roman Catholic Church has emphasized the ‘‘new

Renewalist Movement evangelization.’’ The Catholic Church is now emphasizing conversation and more collaboration between North and South America. A religious movement that Escobar calls ‘‘almost-evangelical’’ (paraevange´lico) is becoming a preponderant religious force in Latin America. This movement comes from charismatic Roman Catholics, charismatic megachurches in the United States, and groups from traditional Protestant churches. According to Escobar, these groups are becoming a religious force different from Catholics and Evangelicals.

Conclusion Religion is a central element in the Latina/o culture. The main religious affiliation for Hispanics is the Roman Catholic Church. In 2002, the Official Catholic Directory states that there are 65,270,444 Catholics in the United States, to which 72.6 percent (almost 26 million) of Hispanics belong. Yet, only 64 percent of Hispanic Catholics attend services regularly. Even though the majority of Latino/as identify themselves with Christianity, Hispanics are not well represented among Christian denominations in the United States. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.) has 330 Hispanic congregations with a total membership of over 40,000 people. Hispanics represent a small number compared with the 2.3 million members and more than 10,000 congregations. In 2002, the United Methodist Church had 600 communities of faith in 52 conferences and started 75 new Hispanic congregations in 35 conferences. The total Latino/a membership in the United Methodist Church in 2002 was 45,417, a small number compared with a total

| 489

membership of almost 8 million. The Southern Baptist Convention in 2005 had 48,884 churches and church-type missions and a total membership of 15,065,076, of which 2,827 churches are Hispanic with a membership of 175,752 people. Octavio Javier Esqueda

References and Further Reading Barna, George. ‘‘The Faith of Hispanics is Shifting.’’ The Barna Update (January 3, 2001). Available at www.barna.org. Escobar, Samuel. ‘‘Los Evange´licos en Ame´rica Latina Hoy.’’ Apuntes Pastorales XXII-1 (October–December 2004): 10–14. Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: La tinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2007). Sa´nchez, Daniel. Hispanic Realities Impacting America (Fort Worth: Church Starting Network, 2006). U.S. Census. ‘‘The Hispanic Population 2000.’’ Available at www.census.gov.

RENEWALIST MOVEMENT Renewalist Christianity is one of the largest and fastest growing movements within Christianity worldwide. In general, renewalist Christianity emphasizes the intervention of the Holy Spirit in the daily lives of Christian believers. ‘‘Renewalist’’ becomes a term that encompasses Pentecostals and charismatic Protestants and Catholics. These groups believe that the movement of God’s Spirit becomes manifested through metaphysical phenomena that includes, but is not limited to the following: (1) glossolalia the act of speaking in

490 |

Renewalist Movement

tongues, specifically a human language the speaker does not know or a heavenly language that is only understood by God and God’s angels; (2) the performance of miracles, specifically the healing of the sick and, in some cases, the raising of the dead; (3) the act of prophesying, specifically the utterance of a word from God that may or may not contain an element of foretelling; and (4) the participation of exuberant worship services, complete with spontaneous displays of emotional enthusiasm, such as shouting, dancing, clamping of hands, raising of hands, jumping, uncontrollable laughter, uncontrollable shaking, and speaking in tongues. Central to the renewalist movement is the concept of ‘‘baptism of the Holy Spirit,’’ also known as the ‘‘second baptism’’ or the ‘‘second blessing.’’ This event signals the first moment that the Spirit indwells a believer. It is usually accompanied with some supernatural manifestation of the Spirit, as in the case of glossolalia. Within the United States, Latino/as identify with renewalism at higher rates than non-Hispanics. Those Hispanics who prescribe to renewalist thought are more likely than their non-Hispanic counterparts to: (1) regularly read the Bible; (2) take a literal view of the biblical text; (3) share their faith for the purpose of evangelizing; (4) adhere to the teachings of the ‘‘prosperity gospel,’’ specifically that God blesses believers with financial success and good health; and (5) believe that Jesus’ second coming will occur within their lifetime. Hispanics with lower levels of education are more likely to be renewalists, as are those who are foreign born. Among Hispanic Catholics, a majority (54 percent) describe themselves as being either charismatic or Pentecostal,

compared to the rest of the nonHispanic Catholic population where only about one in ten uses these labels for selfidentification. These Hispanic Catholics are more likely than non-Hispanic Catholics to: (1) speak in tongues or prophesy, and (2) to witness or participate in an exorcism, that is, the casting out of demons from those possessed. Even Latina/o Catholics who do not self-identify as charismatic or Pentecostal still report experiencing or participating in Spiritled metaphysical experiences. It appears that this renewalist movement has not displaced Catholic identity, but rather, has been incorporated by Hispanic Catholicism. Not surprisingly, Latino/a Catholics practice a different type of Catholicism than non-Hispanics, a Catholicism that incorporates many charismatic or Pentecostal behaviors. An example of the incorporation of charismatic elements within Catholicism while maintaining a Catholic identity can be found in the influential movements among Hispanics known as Cursillos de Cristiandad. Originating in Franco’s Spain in 1944, cursillos began as a conservative and hierarchical movement that focused on the sacraments. By the mid-1960s, the movement spread to every part of the United States where Hispanic Catholics resided. Cursillos are retreat-type events where participants renew their commitment to the faith through an ‘‘encounter’’ with the mysteries of the kerygma (core of the Gospel). Participants are encouraged to emotionally experience the mystery of the Divine through an experience akin to being ‘‘born-again’’ for Catholics. A majority of Latina/o Protestants (57 percent) can be classified as belonging to this movement, compared to the non-Hispanic Protestant population

Renewalist Movement where one in five uses the labels ‘‘charismatic’’ or ‘‘Pentecostal.’’ Among nonCatholic Latino/a faith traditions, the three traditions with the highest concentration of Latino/as are Pentecostals. They are the Assembly of Christian Churches, the Pentecostal Church of God, and the Apostolic Assembly of Faith in Christ Jesus, which, respectively, ranked third, fourth, and tenth. Ethicist Eldin Villafan˜ e attempted to explain how Latina/os within the renewalist movement understand the working of the Spirit. The charismatic and Pentecostal revival experience among Latina/os can be seen as a liberative theological response to the social and economic repression they suffer. By interpreting Galatians 5:25, Villafan˜ e believes that to live in the Spirit (a theological self-understanding) is to also walk in the Spirit (an ethical selfunderstanding). Through the power and manifestation of the Spirit, the Latino/a disenfranchised can challenge the structures of sin and evil as the whole congregation receives charismatic empowerment and the spiritual resources to encounter the social and discriminative struggles they face daily. For after all, this is the historical project in which

| 491

the Spirit is engaged, to facilitate believers’ participation in the reign of God—a reign that is concerned with establishing justice, restraining evil, and fostering conditions for an ethical moral order. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. Religion and Religiosity, ed. Havida´n Rodrı´guez, Rogelio Sa´enz, and Cecilia Menjı´var, eds. Latinas/ os in the United States: Changing the Face of Ame´rica (New York: Springer, 2008). Espinosa, Gasto´n. ‘‘Methodological Reflections on Latino Social Science Research.’’ Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Gasto´n Espinosa (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2006). Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007). Villafan˜e, Eldin. The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993).

S guaracha, or son montuno, but also the rich influence of musicians of ‘‘different nationalities’’ upon the emergent sounds. Given the strong presence of artists of Puerto Rican origin in New York and among the ranks of the Fania All Stars, salsa as a classic genre also became inclusive of traditional bomba and plena forms from the island. The influence of various jazz forms in arrangements and improvisations can add yet another layer of complexity to salsa. As a means of popular religious expression, salsa music explores a variety of experiences and themes. Cuban and Nuyorican singers Celia Cruz and La India—known, respectively, as the queen and princess of salsa—delve into Yoruba-based African-Caribbean religious roots. In Celia’s Canto a Yemaya (Afro-Cubana, 1998), the singer presents a syncretism of African and Roman Catholic themes by addressing Yemaya as the spiritual guide and Virgin to whom the poor pray for peace. Inspired in the religion of Santerı´a, La India pays homage to the sister spirits Yemaya y Ochun

SALSA WORSHIP The origins of the term ‘‘salsa’’ as an umbrella concept to refer to distinctive or combined musical expressions, styles, and sounds—primarily but not exclusively from Cuba—are debatable. Arguably the contemporary popular use, inclusive nature, and homogeneity of the term and its various musical forms in significant sectors of the Hispanic world can be traced back to the richly diverse Latin music scene in New York City during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Besides its contribution to the marketing of salsa as a genre and its internationalization, the creation of the Fania All Stars in 1968 became especially influential in the formation of a popular salsa consciousness primarily grounded in the urban experience of the barrio. Johnny Pacheco, a Dominican and a founding member of the Fania All Stars, once defined salsa as Cuban music with a New York influence. This meant, in part, there were ‘‘more aggressive arrangements’’ than the traditional Cuban guaguanco´ , 493

494 |

Salsa Worship

Ruben Blades in concert. (Neal Preston/ Corbis)

(Llego´ La India via Eddie Palmieri, 1992), referring to them as mother and saint. In Para Ochun (El Sabio, 1980), Puerto Rican salsa star He´ ctor Lavoe, whose drug addiction and depression once led him to seek the aid of a santero, sings of bringing flowers to the Queen’s altar to seek her protection. Nuyorican trombonist and bandleader Willie Colo´n’s Aguanile (El Juicio, 1972, sung by He´ctor Lavoe) and his Un bembe pa’ Yemaya´ (The Winners, 1987 sung by Celia Cruz) are Santerı´a-influenced chants. Aguanile in particular mixes Santerı´a chanting with the Christian Greek liturgical rubric ‘‘Lord, have mercy . . . Christ, have mercy’’ (Kyrie eleison . . . Christe eleison), prayers to the Holy and Immortal God, and references to Christ’s crucifixion. In collaboration with Colo´n, Panamanian singer Rube´ n Blades’s

Maria Lionza (Siembra, 1978) offers a tribute to the people of Venezuela through a description of the myth and popular cult of the goddess from Sorte Mountain in Yaracuy. The subversive political use of religious themes is commonplace in salsa. Rube´ n Blades’s composition about an outspoken pacifist priest, El Padre Antonio y el monaguillo Andre´ s (Buscando Ame´rica, 1984)—a classic tribute to El Salvador’s assassinated Archbishop ´ scar Arnulfo Romero—stood as a defiO ant affirmation of the church’s solidarity with the oppressed at a time in history when dictatorial and totalitarian regimes ruled in many Latin American countries. His musical adaptation of a partly Christianized Chilam Balam Mayan prophetic text (La Rosa de los Vientos, 1996) speaks of the final judgment but also points to the utopian hope for a new Ame´ rica—like the one Simo´ n Bolivar dreamed of as Blades points out in other songs (e.g., Pla´stico, in the album Siembra, 1978). Drawing on another apocalyptic theme, Blades’s La cancio´ n del final del mundo (Escenas, 1985) is a deceptively joyous criticism of nuclear proliferation with an accompanying urgent call to save the earth from destruction. Blades’s Maria Lionza is hailed as a Queen—a Virgin Mary–like figure—who watches over the destiny of all Latina/os and looks after their unity and liberty. Salsa serves as a powerful vehicle for expressing more traditional Christian themes, for example, conversion, in the context of popular religiosity or through adaptations of biblical stories. In the account of her musical career La dicha mı´a, a Johnny Pacheco composition (Celia Cruz & Friends: A Night of Salsa, 1999), Cruz thanks blessed Santa Ba´ rbara and prays to all the saints for her

Salsa Worship good fortune as a singer. Cruz’s improvisations are interspersed with a recurrent chorus of thanksgiving to the Lord: Esa dicha me la dio el Sen˜or. In El Nazareno (Traigo de todo, 1974), the sonero mayor (premiere improviser) of Puerto Rico, Ismael Rivera, affectionately Maelo, offers a tribute to the Black Christ of Portobelo, Panama´, who gives good advice and protection and to whom he attributes a conversion experience that turned him from a life of drugs, partying, and hypocrisy to a life of happiness, good fortune, and service to the downtrodden and enemies. He´ctor Lavoe’s classic El Todopoderoso (La voz, 1975) uses the Lenten motif of Christ’s passion (used previously in the song Aguanile) as a call for solidarity in a selfish world. Rube´n Blades’s Noe´ (Mucho mejor, 1984) tells the story of Noah and God’s judgment through the flood to an unbelieving people with a humorous comment here and there about urban life, e.g., after the flood, the ark ends up in New York’s 110th Street! Of central significance in the conception and popularity of ‘‘Christian salsa,’’ not only for Christians but also for the general Latino/a public, is the long-term collaboration of Nuyorican pianist Ricardo ‘‘Richie’’ Ray and vocalist Bobby Cruz. Already popular musicians in the New York music scene of the 1960s, Ray’s announcement of his becoming a born-again evangelical Christian in the mid-1970s, with his friend Cruz’s conversion following soon afterwards, led to the creation of many salsa hits. Juan en la Ciudad (Reconstruccio´n, 1976) tells the biblical story of the prodigal son who squanders his inheritance on worldly pleasures but is accepted into the loving arms of a

| 495

forgiving father. Timoteo (El bestial sonido, 1999) is a call to people who are self-secure in their works to seek the Lord’s forgiveness before it is too late. Although the chorus, Faltas tu´, faltas tu´, Timoteo faltas tu´, reminds the irreligious man that he is the only one left in the family without the Lord, the song does not end with a happy conversion but with the sad and sudden death of Timoteo without the benefit of salvation. Los Fariseos (El bestial sonido, 1999) gives an account of Christ’s last moments before his death with a dramatic chorus of the Pharisees asking for the release of Barabbas. Some mainstream salsa artists such as Fania star Ismael Miranda (Buscando el camino, 2008), Toni Vega (Cuestio´n de fe, 2004), and Dominican Juan Luis Guerra (Para Ti, 2004)—a merengue singer who occasionally sings salsa— have released songs related more closely to faith in Christ. There are now artists who focus exclusively on Christian salsa such as Jose´ ‘‘Papo’’ Rivera (Salsa cristiana, in the album Unplugged—Evento histo´rico, 2005) and Puchi Colo´n (Salsa Praise, 2002; Lo mejor de mi para E´ l, 2004; Salsa Praise 2, 2008). Others such as Roman Catholic singer and composer Cuco Cha´vez (La nueva misa cariben˜a, in his album Caribe, 1993) or the Lutheran group Classic Son (Misa cubana 2, 2002) from Cuba have set traditional liturgical orders of worship to a variety of Caribbean rhythms. Leopoldo A. Sa´nchez M.

References and Further Reading Orovio, Helio. Cuban Music from A to Z (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

496 |

Salvadorans

SALVADORANS El Salvador, the smallest of the five Central American nations, is one of the most densely populated countries with more than 5 million people in an area of roughly 8,000 square miles. Democracy has been absent for most of the country’s history, and this has led to civil unrest and extensive periods of political and social violence. In 1992, the country reached a period of political peace and stability through a United Nations Peace Accord between leftist guerillas and the Salvadoran army. The country continues, however, to struggle with high levels of postwar violence. Salvadorans in the United States reflect the country’s sociopolitical instability as well as the connection between U.S. policies in the region.

Political Connections Salvadoran immigration to the United States is a fairly recent phenomenon. In contrast with other immigrant groups that have a long history of immigration to the United States, the first wave of Salvadoran immigration began in the 1980s propelled by the civil war, which devastated the country for 12 years. Since 1980, thousands of Salvadorans have immigrated, escaping political persecution, massacres, death squads, human rights violations, poverty, and postwar violence. In many ways, their immigration reflects the intertwined sociopolitical connection between the two countries. During the 1980s, the United States financed the Salvadoran government and trained military personnel to defeat the perceived threat from communism. At its peak, U.S. support included a military package of more than $1 million per day

in counterinsurgency aid. U.S. military aid proved ineffective and spawned tragic consequences. Many ex-graduates of American military schools perpetrated gross violations of human rights, including the assassination of the Archbishop ´ scar Arnulfo Romero of San Salvador, O in 1980; the massacre of more than 500 civilians in El Mozote in 1981; and the execution of six Jesuits, including the president of the Catholic University and two workers in 1989. These violations perpetrated by American-trained personnel ultimately contributed to the immigration of thousands of civilians to the United States.

Religious Connections The influx of Salvadoran immigrants has transformed the religious landscape of U.S. Latino/a communities in two ways. First, the repression that forced refugees to flee and the federal immigration policy that would have denied them political asylum ignited the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s. Many congregations across the United States responded to immigrants’ pleas for humane assistance by offering social and political support in the form of social services, advocacy support and legal challenges to federal immigration policies. By sheltering or hiding families inside congregations, offering food services to those in need, and providing legal counsel to families, these congregations resisted U.S. policies. The Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s has inspired many groups working with immigrants in the United States today. Groups such as the New Sanctuary Movement continue working with immigrants by accompanying and protecting them from violations of their human

Salvadorans

| 497

EL SALVADOR DEL MUNDO Salvadorans take part in a nationwide week-long celebration to honor their patron, El Salvador del Mundo, Jesus Christ the ‘‘Divine Savior of the World,’’ after whom they named their country. This celebration was instituted in the official Catholic calendar in 1457, and celebrates Jesus’ transfiguration at Mount Tabor, as described in the Christian gospels. In the colonial times, the newly funded city of San Salvador adopted this celebration as its own. According to the chronicler Fray Francisco Va´squez, San Salvador honored its patron with great solemnity and arcs made of flowers, altars, sermons, street parades, and other cultural expressions. The main festivities to honor El Divino Salvador del Mundo take place on August 5 and 6 every year. For a week, Salvadoran Catholics celebrate their patron with parades, dances, cultural events, and religious ceremonies both inside and outside the country. During the main religious celebration on August 6, thousands in San Salvador, Los Angeles, Washington, San Francisco, and other cities with significant Salvadoran presence, celebrate their religious and cultural heritage. This patron saint reflects the changing reality of border and cultural crossing among Salvadorans in the twenty-first century. —SLA

rights such as hatred, workplace discrimination, and unjust deportation. Borrowing from the tradition of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, these movements attempt to respond to the new realities of immigration. Second, Salvadoran immigration to the United States transformed the religious landscape of the Latino/a community by providing new elements of popular religiosity. Every year on March 24, millions of Americans, Salvadorans and non-Salvadorans, commemorate the life and martyrdom of ´ scar Romero of El SalvaArchbishop O dor. On this day, congregations, students, unions, and other nonreligious groups honor Romero’s commitment to peace and justice through marches, service learning projects, vigils, prayers for peace, and protests. In the second week of November, religious communities across the nation meet at Fort Benning, Georgia, to perform acts of civil

disobedience and peaceful demonstrations at the School of the Americas, now Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, in commemoration of the killing of six Salvadoran Jesuits and two workers by U.S. trained military personnel. In August, many Catholic denominations in the United States celebrate El Divino Salvador del Mundo, patron of San Salvador and one of the main religious figures for Salvadorans. In all, these celebrations reveal the connection between religion and sociocultural realities in the United States and in El Salvador.

Cultural Connections Culturally, Salvadoran immigration underlines the connection between cultural transmigration through the phenomenon of youth gangs. Youth gangs initiated in the United States by Latino/a youth such as Mara Salvatrucha and

498 |

Sanctuary Movement

Sur 13 have crossed the border again, but this time in reverse, from the United States to El Salvador. Many Salvadoran youths who found refuge in the United States during the 1980s were later deported back to their country of origin under the Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which allowed for the deportation of any legal resident convicted of a felony that carried a punishment of at least one year in jail. Salvatrucha and Sur 13 traveled with many of the deported youth, giving them a sense of identity and belonging through violent initiation rites, symbolic representation outside of society, a spoken dress code, and their own unique language, in many cases a mix of Spanish with English words. In addition, they organized the youth in clicas, or cells, with clear roles and responsibilities for each member. In a country with a long history of war and postwar violence and low investments in its youth, these underground groups spread rapidly throughout El Salvador, and they now control entire communities through the exercise of vigilante justice, taxation, drug trafficking, and other illegal activities. With more than 20,000 members, these gangs are the de facto power in many communities and cities across the country as they provide security, organize revenge killings for victims of crime, and empower their members through violence and a sense of belonging. In many ways, gangs are the other face of the intercultural and political relations between the United States and El Salvador. Many of these youths grew up in poor communities within the United States and are now living in poor communities in El Salvador. They had escaped cycles of violence from their

countries, and are now back into a new cycle of postwar violence. They use globalization to spread their message, but maintain a local presence across El Salvador and the United States. Salvador Leavitt-Alca´ntara

References and Further Reading Alvarenga Venutolo, Patricia. Cultura Y E´tica De La Violencia: El Salvador 1880–1932 (San Jose´: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana- EDUCA, 1996). Anderson, Thomas R. Matanza: The 1932 ‘‘Slaughter’’ That Traumatized a Nation, Shaping U.S.-Salvadoran Policy to This Day, 2nd ed. (Willimantic, CT: Burbstone Press, 1992). Gill, Lesley. The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

SANCTUARY MOVEMENT During the 1980s, U.S. policies in Central America created military conflicts in places like El Salvador and Guatemala. For some, staying in their native land meant death, usually at the hands of the government. Many sought a safe haven in the United States as refugees. Refugees, by legal definition, are those who fear persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, political views, and/or their association with political or social organizations. By 1980, the Salvadoran military killed over 10,000 people, ´ scar Romero including Archbishop O and four churchwomen from the United States. Church leaders and workers were usually targeted for arrest, rape, torture, and disappearance (a euphemism for killing). Guatemala, on the other hand,

Sanctuary Movement

| 499

NEW SANCTUARY MOVEMENT In September 2006, Elvira Arellano, a 32-year-old undocumented cleaning woman, walked into Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago and requested the right of sanctuary, an ancient practice of seeking refuge in a sacred place. Her actions were a desperate attempt to avoid separation from her seven-year-old son, Saul, who is a U.S. citizen. She was eventually deported on August 19, 2007. Her act of disobedience sparked the New Sanctuary Movement, a coalition of congregations responding to the perceived injustices faced by the undocumented. The movement is reminiscent of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, which occurred during the height of Central American Civil Wars. The New Sanctuary Movement consists of interfaith religious leaders and participating congregations who open their church doors to undocumented immigrants residing in the United States. Those associated with the movement attest that all people share basic common rights to a livelihood, to maintaining family unity, and to physical and emotional safety. Yet they believe that the immigration policy of the United States violates these rights through its policy of separating children from their parents demonstrated in unjust deportations and in the exploitation of immigrant workers. —MAD

witnessed over 50,000 deaths, over 100,000 disappeared, and 626 village massacres. Nevertheless, the Reagan administration refused to grant refugee status to those attempting to escape persecution, taking the stance that these migrants were simply coming to the United States seeking economic opportunities. For the Reagan administration, refugee status was determined by whether the government from where the asylum seekers originated was on good or bad terms with the U.S. administration. Because Cuba and Sandinista-led Nicaragua had hostile relationships with the U.S. government, those leaving these communist/socialist nations were routinely granted refugee status. But because El Salvador and Guatemala were receiving military aid from the Reagan administration, and saw these armed conflicts as the front of the Cold War, applicants for political asylum from those nations were routinely denied refugee status. Less than 4 percent of all

applicants would be approved. Unable to meet U.S. legal requirements for migration as refugees, these applicants, who were usually poor peasants, were denied legal entry, leaving them with the alternative of facing persecution or death. In response, Jim Corbett (a Quaker) and John Fife (a Presbyterian) cofounded the Sanctuary Movement. The Sanctuary Movement lacked a central command or hierarchical structure. It consisted of loose connections among faith-based communities, human rights groups, and secular organizations. Shortly, the movement was represented by various denominations and traditions, including Baptists, Jews, Mennonites, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Roman Catholics, and Unitarian Universalists. On March 24, 1982, Reverend Fife, pastor of Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, along with five churches in San Francisco, declared their worship space a sanctuary for those

500 |

Sanctuary Movement

A family of undocumented immigrants from Guatemala facing deportation answer questions from the media after the public launch of the New Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles. Calling for a moratorium on immigration raids and deportations that have separated hundreds of illegal immigrants from their U.S.-born children, the New Sanctuary Movement is opening churches and places of worship to harbor families who risk being torn apart. (Danny Moloshok/Reuters/Corbis)

fleeing the violence in El Salvador and Guatemala. It was no coincidence that they chose the second anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Romero to mark the start of the Sanctuary Movement. Soon afterward, Corbett asked the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America to set up an ‘‘underground railroad’’ that moved refugees seeking sanctuary away from the heavily patrolled border area of the southwestern United States to the less patrolled North. The practice of setting aside a space of refuge has it roots in the biblical text. When the Jews entered the Promised Land, six levitical cities were designated as cities of refuge, places that provided absolute security to fugitives (Joshua 20:7-9). In the event of accidental homicide, the person charged could seek

asylum from avengers. This tradition of setting aside a site of refuge became part of American tradition during slavery. An underground railroad was established composed of safe houses, which served as havens for runaway slaves journeying north toward freedom. Eventually, some 400 religious congregations and 12 universities joined the Sanctuary Movement, establishing safe havens where over 70,000 refugees could find refuge. Local municipalities were encouraged to adopt ordinances that expressed solidarities with those refugees seeking asylum, even if it meant a refusal to cooperate with the federal government’s efforts to enforce immigration laws. Twenty-two cities and one state (New Mexico) joined the movement’s call to set up sanctuary spaces. Church

Santería leaders and laity faced arrest (up to five years in prison) and fines ($2,000 for each refugee harbored) for declaring their worship space a true sanctuary. In 1985, 11 sanctuary movement activists were indicted on alien-smuggling charges. After a six-month trial in Tucson where they were not permitted to reference El Salvador or Guatemala, eight were convicted of various felonies and three were acquitted. All eight convicted received probation. Their ‘‘crime’’ was providing refugees with emergency housing, legal and social services, job training, and English classes. The Sanctuary Movement insisted that they were not engaged in ‘‘civil disobedience,’’ but rather ‘‘civil initiative,’’ that they were upholding the laws on how to treat war refugees—laws that the U.S. government was refusing to uphold. Their ‘‘civil initiative’’ raised consciousness concerning the plight of these migrants and how the United States contributed to their conditions, inspiring similar actions to be taken in other countries. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading Bau, Ignatius. This Ground is Holy: Church Sanctuary and Central American Refugees (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985). De La Torre, Miguel. ‘‘For Immigrants.’’ To Do Justice: A Guide for Progressive Christians (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008). De La Torre, Miguel. Trails of Hope and Terror: Testimonies on Immigration (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009). Golden, Renny, and Michael J. McConnell. Sanctuary: The New Underground Railroad (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986).

| 501

SANTERÍA The religion known as Santerı´a has its origins in the West African religious traditions that were introduced to the New World through the Atlantic slave trade. Large concentrations of ethnic Yoruba peoples largely from the geographic area that today incorporates the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the Republic of Benin arrived in Cuba between 1830 and 1886. The last official documented accounts of slavery date to 1886. Yoruba populations were also exported to Virginia, United States. Between 1517 and 1880 Cuba had imported more than 1 million slaves from 80 different African cultures. The Spanish colonial island economy relied on the cultivation of coffee, tobacco, and labor-intensive sugar plantations. Most of the slave populations were located in rural plantations, while others supplied growing demands for domestic labor. Yoruba peoples were preferred for domestic labor. Slaves, considered a human commodity, were imported upon approval of the Roman Catholic Church of Spain, hereinafter referred to as the Church, and processed by the government. Roman Catholic baptism of all slaves constituted legal entry into the island colony. A shortage of Roman Catholic clergy and churches disadvantaged broad efforts to evangelize slaves throughout the country, particularly in rural areas. White plantation owners and populations living in rural areas were mostly located in significantly remote places away from nearby urban parishes. Studies of geography and commodity trade routes strongly suggest that most rural slaves were never exposed to churches or clergy. The domestic slave and free labor force living

502 |

Santería

´ IFA Ifa´ is the oracle religion of the Yoruba people. It originated from Orunmila in Ile-Ife, the second of the three Yoruba Supreme Beings. It is a system of divination based on the 16 basic and 256 derivative figures obtained either by the manipulation of 16 palm nuts or by the toss of a chain of eight half seed shells. Origins of Ifa´ come from West African regions, but can be seen practiced in Latin America. In Cuba, it is seen through the practice of Santerı´a, while it is seen through Candomble´ in Brazil and Voudoun in Haiti. The divination act is performed by a Babalawo, and the purpose of it is to obtain divination through the spirits. The Yoruba believe that through the teachings of Ifa´, fate can also be controlled to a large extent. It is through the performance of certain propitiatory sacrifices and magic prescribed by the Babalawo that this can be achieved by grouping palm nuts in one hand and shifting them to the other. As this goes on, the Babalawo makes single or double marks in wood powder (saw dust) of seeds that fall out during hand transfers and spreads powder on the divination tray until one of the 256 odus is created to explain the future. —SJR & RHR

in, or near, developing townships like the port of Regla, Cuba, were influenced and monitored for evangelization purposes. African indigenous religions were outlawed, though strategic toleration was practiced. Clergy had the statesponsored authority and mission to evangelize, teach the Spanish language, reeducate, indoctrinate all people of color, investigate, and ensure that slave protection laws were observed. The long-term paternalistic power of the Church gained an unknown number of converts mainly in urban centers. The colonial system provided weekend leisure time on the plantations. Slave privileges served as a mechanism for evangelization, at times permitting limited African religious expressions. Periodic leisure time was afforded and justified under a psychological scapegoat criterion. To avoid communication between slaves in neighboring plantations during religious leisure time, they used an alternating system between the

plantations. An important advantage was that slaves could purchase their freedom; however, it depended on clergy approval. In some cases a conditional prefreedom credit system took place. The slave owner at times provided a conditional freedom that allowed the slave to seek employment and pay for his/her freedom by committing to an installment plan. The free slaves also had the right to purchase slaves. Many free slaves in rural areas relocated to urban centers seeking port, manufacturing, and domestic jobs. The urban population came closest to Roman Catholic acculturation. The Church’s records strongly suggest that the sponsoring of religious syncretism by the Cuban church would be a viable means to advance religious conversion over time. Cultural and religious syncretic expressions contributed to the legal establishment of urban AfroCuban social organizations called Cabildos. This was a colonial strategic policy suitable for containment of free slave

Santería

| 503

ASHE´ ‘‘Ashe´’’ is a Yoruba word introduced to the Americas via African slavery in the Caribbean. It can best be understood as a sacred energy that becomes the power, grace, blood, and life force of all reality, embracing mystery, secret power, and divinity. As a transcendent world force, it is absolute, illimitable, pure power, nondefinite, and nondefinable. This energy current is amoral, neither good nor bad. It is unable to be seen or personified, a neutral cosmic energy undergirding every aspect of existence. All that has life or exhibits power has ashe´. The movement of the wind, the elements of plants, fire, and moving water expends ashe´. When a candle is lit to an orisha, a quasi-deity within Santerı´a, the act releases power—the power of fire, smoke, and burning wax. This ashe´ is able to feed and empowers the orisha. The most potent ashe´ can be found in the spilling of sacrificial blood. Within some Hispanic communities, the term ‘‘ashe´’’ has become a form of greeting or a term equivalent to ‘‘amen.’’ —MAD

populations that were permitted to operate under a secure affiliation and monitoring system by urban parishes. Members of these organizations frequently participated in Church events, religious services, and sacraments and maintained an interfaith relationship with their local Catholic priest. The relationship was reciprocal. It was customary for Cabildos to support Catholic feast days and religious events. They also encouraged participation in Catholic sacraments, holy masses, and the superficial association of saints with Yoruba deities. Catholic priests were known to participate in Cabildosponsored socioreligious events and preserved a trusting relationship. The Catholic attempt to stamp out African retentions through religious assimilation and conversion over time failed. Moreover, many overlapping ethical and moral code values and religious similarities were identified and preserved. Other features that were radically dissimilar to core African beliefs were dismissed. The integration of Whites

into African religions by way of popular piety made a considerable contribution to the survival of Yoruba indigenous religion. The academic operational term Afro-Cuban Santerı´a, known variously as Saint Worship, Regla de Ocha-Ifa´ , and/or Lukumı´, referred to the popular expressions accommodated by early Yoruba people and first-generation descendants. During the Spanish Inquisition the word ‘‘Santerı´a’’ was used to denote a deviated Catholic worshipper, which excluded African traditions by definition. Any person worshipping a Catholic saint outside the narrow institutional orthodoxy of the times was labeled a santero, therefore, addressing the rising concerns about Spanish Santerı´a or Folk Catholicism. If expressions of popular piety incorporated beliefs and practices beyond institutional acceptance, the characterization of brujo (witch) or brujerı´a (witchcraft) was used to denote a person practicing witchcraft. In Cuba, the words Santerı´a or Santero/a became a popular New World operational label

504 |

Santería

BABALAWO Babalawos are the Ifa´ (system of divination) priests that are seen more commonly in the Yoruba cultures that are native to the West African countries (such as Nigeria, Togo, Benin—formally known as Dahomey, and Cote d’Ivoire). Babalawos refer to Ifa´ for purposes of divination by use of palm nuts. The Babalawos are seen as the embodiment and soul of the Yoruba Nation. They serve as a link from past generations to present ones. Often, Babalawos are held in high esteem, especially in king and tribal councils. Babalawos usually have the last words in decisions that will affect the tribe as a whole. Ifa´ is consulted at almost every juncture and important occasion. Although Babalawos originate from West Africa, they are also found in countries such as Cuba, Brazil, and Panama, as a result of the slave trade. In Cuba these Babalawos are apparent through the practices of Santerı´a, while in Brazil they are seen through the practices of Candomble´. Although traditions vary from country to country, they all share the same origins and fundamentals that relate them to one another. The basic use of pine nuts, divination chains, and trays remains vital to the practice of Babalawos. —SJR & RHR

extending the definition to any person who fused Catholicism with African religions and various forms of European Spiritism. Over time, fostering a whitening process of an undetermined number of Afro-Cubans, primarily in urban settings, into the new social order, customs, education, and language somewhat succeeded in social terms. However, a religious juxtaposition diagramming operational Catholic equivalences with cultural fusion began to form. Reciprocity in gender relations, biracial marriages, common-law unions, adultery, prostitution, domestic labor influences, and White immigration were some of the many undercurrents that account for cultural fusion in Cuban colonial and republican lower-income groups. The Republican Period from 1902 to 1959 accounts for important social and religious changes. National labor movements founded in 1925, and legalized in 1938, recruited many Afro-Cuban members who held leadership positions.

Central to their platforms was a schism between Blacks as nationals challenging the traditional racial minority classification. The new constitution of 1940 included clauses prohibiting racial discrimination. Economic and social upward mobility among Afro-Cubans permeates a religious revitalization and preservation consciousness movement. Popular piety among the marginalized Whites becomes a joining empowerment force where reverse religious conversion of Whites takes root. As the marginalized population moves up the social strata, it begins to gain and expand White sympathy, adherents, and converts reaching all levels of society. Therefore, the africanization of marginalized Whites proliferated. The evolving trend led to an internal religious process of converting Yoruba oral traditions into a unifying Spanish language production of monographs, books, and academic discourse. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, the first two Spanish language versions

Santería

| 505

ORISHAS Followers of the Afro-Cuban religion known as Santerı´a believe that the supreme God Olodumare created quasi-deities called orishas to serve as protectors and guides for every human being. Their roots can be traced to Africa, brought to the Caribbean by those destined to be slaves. In order to continue worshiping their African gods under the constraints of slavery, slaves hid their deities behind the masks of Catholic saints, identifying specific orishas as specific saints. These orishas provide guidance and security to humans, whom they adopt as their children. Today, each santero/a is consecrated to a specific orisha. Because Santerı´a is shaped and formed by earth-centered forces of nature, these forces are personified as orishas. Besides being understood as quasideities and forces of nature, these orishas also represent archetypes, personalities, energies, and elements. Since physical elements of existence reflect spiritual principles, the believer is assured that they do not exist in a universe that lacks reason or direction. All that is, whether seen or unseen, exists in totality where orishas protect all of creation. They provide structure to reality, and without them, human existence cannot develop. Orishas were the first to walk the earth, and from them all humans are descended. —MAD

of Ifa´ Odu (Lukumı´-Yoruba canon/ scripture) by Ogu´n priest Pedro Arango were internally circulated in Havana. Other books that focused on philosophy, Yoruba-Spanish vocabulary, and divination systems became readily available in the marketplace.

Santería in America Fidel Castro’s revolutionary triumph in 1959 initiated economic tension between Cuba and the United States. By 1961 the United States imposed an economic trade embargo and the revolution was declared socialist. Castro’s declaration caused an abrupt exodus of Cubans to the United States. Most exiles were of the White middle and upper social class. They settled in large numbers in New Jersey, New York, and Miami, with an overflow settling in Puerto Rico. Priesthood ordinations in New York and Puerto Rico began in 1961–1963 followed by Miami in the late 1960s. With

the growing influx of exiles during this period came an increasing number of priests and priestesses who began reconnecting through small groups at each location. Home worship was transformed into centers that operated as an extended family. The constant stream of new arrivals, displaced from their homeland, generally did not know the language, laws, and the American way of life. Their private dwellings and rental apartments called ile soon developed into an exile community network system. The networks as support centers ministered on religious matters, maintained contact with Cuba, facilitated links and strengthened relations with groups in other cities, and provided a significant social services role. Economic development took shape from the onset of ile networks. The rapid necessity to meet expanding ritual and ceremonial demands amalgamated a complex industry of readily available market products and the manufacturing

506 |

Santería

A Santerı´a altar and religious objects belonging to Santerı´a priest Jose Merced in Euless, Texas. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

of religious items that depended on priestly craft. Localized products and natural resources had varied limitations based on geographical location. Travel between cities and postal services facilitated the acquisition of raw materials. The free-market principle of supply and demand created new specialized jobs, increased consumption of a wide range of products in local markets, and increased imports and exports. By the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, the informal economic subsystem developed into a structured American business phenomenon known as the Bota´ nica that did not exist in Cuba. These are specialized retail religious supply stores. The stores’ client base was connected to local religious leaders. A rapid commodity consolidation process began to unfold in the various communities. The exile Lukumı´ religion and

marginalized Latino/a community started to merge. As the merging of communities took place, the Bota´nicas absorbed the product needs of popular piety found in predominantly Catholic Spanishspeaking communities. The Bota´ nica product line surpassed Lukumı´ and embraced the needs of popular Catholic and Espiritismo traditions. Out of the expansive nature of the business grew the practicality of the wholesalers that consolidate manufactured goods throughout the diaspora and supply Bota´nica’s nationally. Stores are generally located in moderate to high concentrations of Latino-Hispanic communities. The infusion of Cuban Santerı´a into the overwhelmingly Christian American culture transgresses Cuba’s paradigm. The religion has become multicultural, multiethnic, and globalized. Most members are self-denominated White representing all socioeconomic levels. Superficial ties are maintained with Cuba, but the religion as professed in the United States is self-dependent. There is a generational gap where many reject the colonial classification of the term ‘‘Santerı´a’’ and its association with Roman Catholicism; thus, ‘‘Lukumı´’’ is the preferred name for the religion.

Doctrinal Points Lukumı´-Yoruba is a pre-Christian faith that does not rely on Christianity or the Bible. It believes in one almighty creator known as ‘‘Olodumare’’ and a hereditary core of deified emissaries named orishas that have delegated or borrowed power. The orishas are worshipped as sacred dimensions each with a representing archetype and group types containing anthropomorphic characteristics that govern a complex structure of natural life

Santería

| 507

BEMBE´ ‘‘Bembe´’’ is a loosely used term that means live musical fiesta, or drum dancing. ‘‘Bembe´’’ signifies ‘‘to be’’ or ‘‘to live.’’ In the context of Lukumı´ religious events bembe´ can be any festive drums that have not been consecrated, therefore, drums used for informal socioreligious musical events associated with thanksgiving celebration. The festive events include drum percussion called Lu´lu and Yonko´ri, which are rhythmic songs honoring Lukumı´-Yoruba deities called orisha. The Akpo´n is a soloist singer that initiates sets of songs and stimulates audience participation. A chorus known as Ankorı´ is randomly formed and leads dances among congregants. Bembe´ in the form of celebration are generally one day events lasting less than seven hours. Altars consisting of food offerings to the deities and ancestors are constructed. Minor rituals are done to spiritually purify sacred spaces. Bembe´ celebrations in excess of one day are called batamu´n, lasting several days, and bata´ drums are employed. The bata´ are three sand-clock shaped log drums of different sizes. Each wood log is perforated, cut to specific external and internal measurements. Each drum contains two open mouths covered by leather. Other instruments like the maraca, called Achere´, are generally used by the Akpo´n. —EP

domains. There are deified culture heroes and martyrs. Ancestor worship is recognized and practiced. The religious canon or sacred text is called ‘‘Ifa´ ’’ consisting of odu, which are 16 primal chapters and 240 subchapters. It is an extensive corpus of history, myths, legends, folktales, verses, and proverbs. Ifa´ is used as a complex divination system for individual, community, and religious guidance. Ifa´-odu governs the ethics, morals, and theological principles by which priests and adherents live and worship. Core beliefs include a concept of reincarnation and the fulfillment of destiny assigned by Olodumare. Human reason and purpose is conceptualized within a framework connected to nature worship, sacredness of Olodumare’s planetary creation, free will and fate, universal laws, and the recognition of binary principles of constructive and destructive forces that may be natural and supernatural. The beliefs include the sacredness of

a small group of sacrificial farm animals that form an integral part of Olodumare’s mandates. The religion has no concept of the Christian Satan or Devil power authority, or concept of hell. The philosophy centers on the here and now—balance and resolution of life trials and tribulations. It is not based on the idea of miracle or life after death paradise. Central to the core beliefs is that Olodumare distributed knowledge; therefore, all religions have truth but none hold a monopoly on truth. The distribution of knowledge includes human science and technology. A concept of religious diplomatic relations is believed and practiced. Superficial contact with the religion does not require a person to assimilate and internalize Lukumı´ or instantaneously dismiss themselves from their ongoing religious tradition in order to benefit or receive guidance. In this regard, the lack of a rigid evangelization model has been perceived as syncretism. However, if the

508 |

Santería

´ AYE´ CHURCH OF THE LUKUMI´ BABALU Church of the Lukumı´ Babalu´ Aye´ was incorporated in the state of Florida in 1974. It is the first known Lukumı´-Yoruba church within the United States. The founders were Carmen Pla´ Rodriguez and Ernesto Pichardo. Both were born in Cuba and migrated to the United States in 1961, shortly after Castro’s revolution. They settled in Miami, Florida. During the first decade of the church’s incorporation, its founders formed a small ad hoc group for the primary purpose of research and structural studies. An official membership drive began in 1984. The first organizational group was established in 1986, charged with the goal of opening its first house of worship in the City of Hialeah, Florida. The church leased a commercial property with the option to buy in mid-1987. Upon public announcement of intent to establish the nation’s first Lukumı´-Yoruba church, it encountered intense political and religious opposition. The initial obstacle was the acquisition of a certificate of occupancy from the city. Additionally, elected officials passed resolutions and three ordinances prohibiting religious animal sacrifice. On June 11, 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned lower court decisions in favor of the church. This landmark decision is considered an important religious freedom case of American history. —EP

person is destined by Olodumare to become an adherent or priest/ess, he/she is expected over time to acculturate, assimilate, and internalize the Lukumı´ way of life by adhering to the spiritual principles and mandates of Olodumare.

Ritual Structures Priests and priestesses are called olorisha or olosha as subsequent ordained extensions of their individual tutelary orisha. The general olorisha priesthood hierarchy is based on ordination seniority and specialization through long-term traditional oral apprenticeship and experience. There is one separate henotheistic priesthood order, known variously as babalawo, oluwo´, omo´ -odu, Ifa priest, or priest of the deity Orunmila, that claims hierarchal religious seniority and canon authority. Ordination into the priesthood is a complex process that requires preordination rituals, ordination

ceremonies, and postordination completion rituals over a period of one year. The religion has its holy and celebrative days associated with each African orisha archetype. Priests and priestesses also celebrate their respective ordination day annually. These are elaborate socioreligious events that generally take place in homes. Altars are constructed corresponding to the priest’s tutelary orisha, food offerings are placed at altars, food is consumed by the congregants, and at times live religious musical presentations are included honoring the orishas. Major community events are called ‘‘drumming’’ and are officiated by specialized religious musicians. Orisha possession is frequently experienced by ordained members, whereby the orishas randomly advise congregants. Natural communication and guidance relies on two complex divination systems known as dilogu´n, in which 16 cowry shells are employed and, the ikı´n 16 kola nuts or

Santería opele divining chain. Both systems are used to interpret canons for individuals and community. Herbal medicine, prayer, invocation, protective charms, hymns, praise songs, baptism, marriage, birth and death rites, as well as food and selective sacred animal offerings are all part of this religion. Religious canon regulates all rituals and ceremonies, dietary laws, and taboos. There is an elaborate construct of rituals and ceremonies utilized for faith healing, and as means of alternative therapy or crisis intervention, the exorcism of spiritual malady, thanksgiving, petitioning, and for general health, safety, and prosperity of all humankind.

Key Figures There are many notable Cuban Lukumı´ priests that made instrumental contributions during the 1960s. In 1961, New York records the first olorisha priesthood ordination in America by Mercedes Noble. The officiating priest of the deity Obatala´ was Oba´ Oriate´ Victor Manuel Gomez. He also became Miami’s first officiating Oba´ Oriate´ in the late 1960s. Arriving in New York from Cuba in 1962, Obatala´ priest Benigno Dominguez De La Torre ordained four people by 1964. He moved to Puerto Rico and became Puerto Rico’s top olorisha progenitor between 1965 and 1970. In the month of November 1963, Shango priest Juvenal Ortega ordained the first olorisha in Puerto Rico. The progenitor in the United States of the first two babalawo ordinations was Carlos Ojeda. Bobby Bolufer was one of the first two ordained in 1969 and became Puerto Rico’s first officiating babalawo. The organization of babalawos led by Carlos Ojeda and Diego

| 509

Fontela became official in 1974. In January 1974, olorisha Carmen Pla´ Rodriguez and Oba´ Oriate´ Ernesto Pichardo founded the Church of the Lukumı´ Babalu´ Aye´ in Hialeah, Florida. The church won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court First Amendment case in 1993, recognizing constitutional protection for religious animal sacrifice.

Dieties Babalú-Ayé Babalu´-Aye´, Cuba’s version of the African Ewe-Fon-Dahomey deity, is Nigeria’s Obaluaye (king of the earth), Omolu (the Lord’s son), and Chankpana, god of contagious disease who punishes or afflicts with severity. Since he descended to earth from the supreme Olofi, he requires submission to his authority. Babalu´-Aye´’s devotee dresses in jute and sackcloth in replication of an ancient symbol of distress and sickness. He has a bag strung across his chest in which he carries his favorite foods and is accompanied by a dog that licks the wounds of the sick. This unkempt-looking creature is dreaded for his association with a variety of sicknesses and their agents, but he is also respected for what he can do to anyone who antagonizes his devotees. Myth has it that Babalu´-Aye´ works miracles and is strict and unforgiving to devotees who break their pledges. He symbolizes Saint Lazarus or Saint Baba, and his cult followers in Cuba perform his flagellation sacrifice with frequency. On the 17th of each month, his devotees dress in sackcloth and fulfill a pledge in his honor (on December 17 his feast day) that is now traditional in Havana. —NSM

510 |

Santería

Changó Chango´ is one of the main orishas, or quasi-deities, of the Yoruba pantheon (Africa) and the religion Santerı´a. This orisha is very popular among Cubans and Cuban Americans. He is the god that rules over thunder and lightning, fire, electricity, and semen. Being one of the patrons of warriors, he simultaneously represents many human virtues and vices. Chango´ is known for being in constant battle with his nemesis and brother Oggu´n, the god of war. Although he is admired by friends for being virile, brave, loyal, hardworking, as well as a skilled dancer, he is also known for having a terrible temper and is prone to womanizing, bragging, gambling, and lying. He is credited with having 44 wives: his main wife being Obba and his main mistresses being Ochu´ n, the love goddess, and Oya´, the ruler of the cemetery. Oya´, previously Oggu´n’s wife, is his favorite lover. In present-day Nigeria, the former Yoruba territory, it is believed that the king of Oyo´ committed suicide and now rules as Chango´ . According to many ancient legends, he is the son of Aggayu´, ruler of volcanoes and their rivers of molten lava. Within Santerı´a, Chango´ has several manifestations, the most common being Santa Ba´rbara, a martyred teenage girl of the third century. —VLC

Eleggua Eleggua (Elegbara/Eshu) is the trickster orisha who victorious Cuban revolutionaries celebrated in 1959 as they marched from Oriente into Havana, wearing his necklaces and waving his red and black flags. This triumphant mythological

warrior orisha holds a prominent place in Santerı´a culture. As the most influential santo in Cuba, the fearless deity ruler of roads opens and closes paths. He is present at the opening of all ceremonies and is given incantations at the end, in request for permission to perform initiations. Santero/as seek his blessings before executing magic spells and give him first place in ritual sacrifices. Eleggua represents Saint Martin and Saint Anthony and is naturally fond of children. Not surprisingly, a headpiece carved of cowrie shells with boyish bulging eyes and ears is his lead representation. In Cuba, Eleggua is a magician whose spells are not easily broken, and he can divine the future even without sacred tools. He personifies destiny, good luck, human desire, as well as tragedy. His medium tells jokes, often curt ones, engages in mischievous activities, smokes a large cigar, loves alcohol, and eats his gourmet foods (which includes smoked fish, roasted possum, and male chickens). —NSM

Obatalá Called Oddua and Orisha-nla, Obatala´ is the chief of the orishas and one who shares the character of the supreme deity, Olodumare. Obatala´ walks many paths: the creator of humankind and the world, source of all beginnings, supreme judge, principal messenger, husband, and wife. As creator, he is responsible for all human deformation and peculiarities. The West African deity is androgynous, he is Olofi’s son and Olodumare’s wife, and thus has multiple personalities; he appears in as many as 16 female and male characters. In spite of Obatala´ ’s varied names and shifting gender personae, her feminine

Santería personality called Oddua is dominant. In Santerı´a she is associated with the Our Holy Lady of Mercy and regarded as the goddess of purity, truth, justice, mercy, wisdom, and peace; she is represented by a white dove. Obatala´’s special feast day is September 24, the birthday of Our Lady of Mercy. Her devotees carry her lucky number, 8, and dress in her color, white. The hills and mountains of Cuba are hers because they produce her special herbs. In Santerı´a worship, the masculine Obatala´ is number one. He is the ritual head, and the color white symbolizes his majesty and purity; his iyawo, or initiate, must spend an entire year wearing white as a sign of his rebirth within the Santeria faith. —NSM

Oggún Oggu´n is the python deity representing earth-based technologies (blacksmith, steel, mining, smelting, and minerals) and war in West Africa, and is one of the oldest spirits in the orisha pantheon. The mythological power originated in Ogun-Oyo, Nigeria, and adapted to New World slave religion. This shrewd but mischievous deity is the brother of Eleggua, Ochosi, and Chango´—orishas with whom he competes for the goddess Ochun. In Santerı´a and Vodou religions, Oggu´n represents Saint John the Baptist and Saint Peter who holds the symbolic keys to the kingdom of heaven. Oggu´n’s avatars wear sacred beads with his favorite colors; they have an appetite for his gourmet dishes, smoke big cigars, showcase his cultural symbols of automobiles, tanks, railways, and metal tools; and they wield a machete for clearing underbrush and symbolically engaging battle. He has many sacred herbs and is the first orisha to dine at the Bembe´ feast when there

| 511

is an animal sacrifice. Oggu´n carries an air in Afro-Hispanic culture because he is loved by farmers, taxi drivers, police officers, and other professionals. He became an interracial cultural icon and a system of spirituality with a strong cultic following throughout the Americas. —NSM

Olodumare As the Great One and God of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, Olodumare is known by many other names throughout Africa. He is the supreme deity and mighty creator of the world. Also, he is the source and originator of all things, sovereign ruler, and repository of the destinies of all creatures, divine and natural. Olodumare made a pantheon of intermediate beings (named vodu and orisa) to work on his behalf in the natural and spiritual worlds. He gave the divinities specific tasks for governing the world and holds them responsible for its order and chaos. Issuing from Olodumare through the divinities and ancestors is a cosmic energy of ashe that links and animates everything with the spiritual force. Although God is the central character in myths recalling the creation of the world, he is a hidden or distant controller of the universe. In Afro-Caribbean religions, Olodumare is honored as God mainly during initiation rites or other special occasions. Cuban and Puerto Rican devotees do not make him the center of their worship. Their objects of ritual actions are orishas who, in return for devotion, mediate powerful ashe to their human devotees. Practitioners believe Olodumare gives everyone a destiny or road map in life. —NSM

512 |

Santería

Orúnla A creole version of the African divinity Orunmila of Ife, Oru´nla is regarded as the master of all secrets, knowledge, and concentrated magical science. This mythological ruler of divine realms is the ancestral father of all spiritual mysteries and patron of babalawo priests endowed with his gift of knowledge of the cowry shells. Oru´nla, the only orisha to witness the creation of the universe and the setting of human destinies, is the source of ifa divination, entrusted to him by the creator Olodumare. As custodian of human knowledge, he owns the table of Ifa´, the chief instrument used in divining the future. Followers of Santerı´a religion revere Oru´ nla for his spiritual powers; though he resides in heaven as each initiate chooses his or her destiny, he comes to earth and incarnates in his human mediums. Oru´nla is also the double of Saint Francis of Assisi, whose special day is October 4 and who is known for his piety. Sometimes this wise and intuitive deity gets cantankerous and, with an iron will, makes rash decisions. However, he is a greatly loved orisha whose avatars wear his number 16 on yellow and green, eat his special food, and use his many sacred herbs to communicate with other orishas. —NSM

Oyá Oya´ is one of the quasi-deities of the Yoruba pantheon (Africa) and the religion Santerı´a. She is patroness of the cemetery, queen of the realm of death, and mistress of the flame. As guardian of the underworld, she is one of the most fearsome orishas. Originally her domain was the sea, but she was tricked by

Yemaya´ into making a trade. In Africa, Oya´ is the goddess of the Niger River, but her power over natural phenomena, such as tornadoes, is what provokes fear all over the Yoruba territory. In Cuba, Oya´ is known as the goddess of the winds of change and storms. According to the ancient legends, Oya´ was married to Oggu´n, god of war, brother and also rival of Chango´ , god of thunder. One day, while riding a magnificent horse near Oggu´ n’s house, Chango´ seduced and abducted Oya´ . She became his lover, who as a female warrior often goes into battle as his companion. Together with Chango´, they make fierce love and war. Beautiful and prone to violence, she is represented as a warrior-goddess, carrying a ‘‘machete’’ or sword. She is best known as the manifestation of Santa Teresa de Jesu´s and Our Lady of Candlemas. —VLC

Yemayá Called mother of all that exists, Yemaya´ is a sister of the deity Ochun and a favorite orisha in Afro-Caribbean religions. The model mother and giver of life, protector of maternity, goddess of oceans, and patron of mariners, she is symbolized by the Atlantic ocean. As if to debunk American stereotypes of Black inferiority, ignorance, and low IQ, Cubans see the Black Yemaya´ as the goddess of rational thinking, good judgment, and intellect. Her temperament is as complex as her wisdom: She wears seven alternate blue and red beads; she dances as vigorously as angry waves and is like a wild tempest, but can be calm and peaceful. She is majestic, haughty, and salacious but protects her children with motherly grace. Since her

Secularism face is always masked, Yemaya´ is only revealed in dreams; the anchor, half moon, and silver sun announce her presence. Like Ochun, Yemaya´ is one of Chango´’s wives and is associated with Christian saint Our Lady of Regla. Devotees wear her blue and white colors and are fond of her special foods (fruits, bananas, male goats, poultry, and fish). Her statue is a beautiful matron with a prominent voluptuous breast that bespeaks a dream of fertility for Cuba’s land of want and hardship. —NSM Ernesto Pichardo

References and Further Reading Ayorinde, Christine. Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2004). Brown, David H. Santerı´a Enthroned Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). De La Torre, Miguel A. Santerı´a the Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004). Mason, Michael Atwood. Living Santerı´a Rituals and Experiences in an Afro-Cuban Religion (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). Murphy, Joseph. Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora (Boston: Boston Beacon Press, 1994).

SECULARISM Hispanics who trace their roots to Spain or Latin America are influenced by a history that has normatively blurred the lines between political and religious institutions. Catholicism’s dominance

| 513

within society created a union of church and state. As early as 1474, Isabella, queen of Castile, secured the right to fill high ecclesiastical posts within her domain from the papacy, a right her husband, Ferdinand, would eventually use during the conquest of the Americas. By 1494, a mere two years after the ‘‘discovery’’ of the so-called New World, Pope Alexander VI (of Spanish origin) negotiated the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the lands to be conquered in the Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal. All ecclesiastic powers operating in what was called New Spain became subservient to the crown. For example, through patronato real, the king was given the right to appoint the high ecclesiastical offices (including bishops) of the churches in the Americas. Also, the king took the responsibility of administering the diezmo (tithes) and church expenses. In effect, the king of Spain became a vice-pope. This created difficulties in Latin America during the independent movements of the nineteenth century when the struggle against the state also meant a struggle against the church. Although some of the independent movements adopted anticlerical dimensions, most revolutions displayed indigenized Eurocentric icons (i.e., la Virgen de Guadalupe in Mexico or la Virgen del Cobre in Cuba) to rally the masses. The secularization process did not begin with the U.S. conquest of lands held by Spanish-speaking people. Catholic missions throughout what would become the southwestern United States were initially secularized by the Mexican Congress in 1833 to meet the economic demands of Mexican citizens living close to the mission. The purpose of secularizing these missions was to break the Church’s economic prominence in what

514 |

Secularism

was then the frontier. These missions quickly fell into neglect and disrepair. A century would pass before restoration projects would be undertaken, mainly by Euro-Americans, for the sake of tourism. As the United States conquered lands held by Spanish speakers (i.e., Florida and Puerto Rico from Spain and the southwest from Mexico), the new rulers imposed the U.S. concept of ‘‘separation of church and state.’’ Although religious biases toward the predominantly Catholic inhabitants of the land were manifested in a multiple of cultural, political, and social ways, the ideology created a new way of being, or not being, religious within a Eurocentric political system. While Hispanics have a historical tradition that merges politics and religion, these traditions are manifested and dealt with differently within the United States from the Euro-Americans. For some, political structures become a way to bring relief and liberation to Hispanics who live in poverty and oppression. It was common for political movements, like the United Farm Workers Union, to use banners adorned with Hispanic religious symbols. Not surprisingly, a 2007 poll conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center found that most Latino/ as (66 percent) see religion as a moral compass that guides their political thinking. Similarly, most Hispanics (65 percent) believe it is appropriate to address political and social issues from the pulpit. Those who refer to themselves as secular say that they have no specific religious affiliation or consider themselves as agnostic or atheist. While a large number of Latino/as who call themselves secular (44 percent) and say that religious beliefs are not important in influencing their political thinking, a substantial

minority (37 percent) say that religious beliefs play an important or somewhat important role in influencing their political thinking. Similarly, half (50 percent) of those who call themselves secular say that churches should stay out of political matters, while 43 percent believe that political views should be expressed from the pulpit. The same poll found that 7.8 percent of those questioned about their faith labeled themselves as secular—a figure that is less than non-Hispanic Whites (11.4 percent) and slightly higher than non-Hispanic Blacks (7.7 percent). Of the Latina/os who convert to a new faith, 28 percent reported moving away from all forms of religious expression. Almost two-thirds (65 percent) of those who identify as Latino/a secular claimed to have practiced a religious faith at some earlier point in their lives, with 39 percent saying that the faith tradition they practiced was Catholicism. Latina/os who call themselves secular are predominantly male (66 percent) and younger than those who identify with a faith tradition. These converts to secularism are relatively wealthy, with about a third of them earning over $50,000 a year (compared to just 17 percent of all Latina/ os). More than half (54 percent) were born in the United States; a majority (68 percent) speaks English or are bilingual; and 20 percent have a college diploma (compared to 10 percent of all Hispanics). Those claiming to be secular are disproportionately Cuban (8 percent claim to be secular but Cubans represent 4 percent of Hispanics) and Central American (14 percent claim to be secular but Central Americans represent 9 percent of Latina/os). These Latina/o seculars are evenly split among political ideologies with

Sexuality 28 percent identifying themselves as conservatives (compare to 9 percent of nonHispanics), 29 percent self-identifying as moderates (compared to 43 percent of non-Hispanics), and 33 percent calling themselves liberals (compare to 42 percent of non-Hispanics). It is interesting to note that 29 percent of those who claim to be secular say that religion is still very important to them, with 8 percent of them attending weekly church services. Nevertheless, those who specifically claim to be atheists are viewed more negatively by Hispanics than the general public. Only 19 percent of Latino/as view atheists favorably compared to 35 percent of the favorable view of atheists by the general public. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading Rodrı´guez, Havida´n, Rogelio Sa´enz, and Cecilia Menjı´var, eds. Latinas/os in the United States: Changing the Face of Ame´rica (New York: Springer, 2008). Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007).

SEXUALITY One of the stereotypes by which Latina/ os are described concerns their so-called sexual fecundity. Although it is true that Hispanics have larger families than Euro-Americans (3.59 average household size compared to 2.59), how that data have historically been interpreted has contributed to oppressive structures. To represent Hispanics as having high fertility rates is to depict them as overly sexually active. Images of hot-blooded

| 515

Latin lovers and hip-swinging spicy sen˜oritas have dominated popular imagination, a possible attempt to project Euro-American self-denying fantasies upon a Hispanic other. These stereotypes are not limited to popular culture. For example, the eminent Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, in his book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), claims that Latino/as pose a threat to the United States on many fronts, including being overly fertile (224), in other words, oversexed. When this image exists in a Euro-American culture that has historically maintained a philosophical dualism between the purity of the mind that must transcend the carnal pleasures of the body, then Hispanics, by definition, are seen by the dominant culture as being more physical and less intellectual. Add to this the sexual dualism developed early within Christianity between spirit and flesh, where the spirit is incorruptible and the flesh is associated with sin. After all, lust does become one of the seven deadly sins. The result is a Latina/o body that is relegated to being instinctively ‘‘passionate,’’ if not sinful. Hispanic bodies can therefore be offered up as pleasurable objects or, worse, as deserving the imposition of strong techniques in sexual seduction (if not abuse). Ironically, rather than fitting the licentious stereotypes imposed upon Hispanics by the dominant Euro-American culture when it comes to issues related to sexuality, Latina/os appear to be more conservative than their Euro-American counterparts. Ignored are the roles that honor/shame play within the Hispanic culture and their impact on suppressing sexual desire. The same philosophical and religious influences that have shaped the Euro-American construction of

516 |

Sexuality

´N OCHU Ochu´n is the African patron goddess of love and sexual pleasure, luxury, and beauty. Also, she is ruler of oceans and fresh waters. As one of the most popular and venerated deities, she is called the giver of life, mother of the orishas, and possessor of feminine virtues that guard women’s pregnancy. The accomplished dancer Ochu´n typifies the ‘‘sensuous saint’’ and controls the knowledge and art of lovemaking. She loves everything yellow and her ornaments and necklaces reveal an expensive taste for fine clothes, jewelry, and an assortment of exotic foods. Legend has it that Ochu´n seduces other male orisha lovers, although her main consort is Chango´. She is known widely as Cuba’s patron saint and mother, la Virgin (Our Lady of Regla) de la Caridad del Cobre, whose feast day the church celebrates on September 7. The public statue of this goddess of the erogenous and wealth symbolizes the graces of Cuban women and, as Kole Kole, represents children and the poor and needy and shows great patience and kindness. Ochu´n has become a national identity symbol of hope in a distressed Cuba and, since 1960, a metaphor for peace and reconciliation among ethnic Cubans in the American diaspora. —NSM

sexuality have been dominant within the Hispanic community and their nations of origin. The dominant Catholic and evangelical influences upon the Latino/a community have also associated any form of sex outside of heterosexual marriages as sinful and depicted sexual excess as contrary to Christian teachings. For example, according to a 2007 poll conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, more Latino/as oppose gay marriage (56 percent) than non-Hispanics (42 percent). The vast majority of Latina/o evangelicals oppose gay marriage (86 percent), while Hispanic Catholics are more divided with 52 percent opposing gay marriage and a significant minority (32 percent) in favor of it. On another issue related to sexuality, abortion, 57 percent of all Latino/as state that it should be illegal to have an abortion, significantly higher than non-Hispanics at 40 percent. Again, Latino/a evangelicals appear to be more conservative with 77 percent opposing abortion compared to 54 percent of Hispanic Catholics. Of

course, understanding these attitudes about homosexuality and abortion cannot be limited to membership in a religious faith tradition. Studies have shown that recently arrived immigrants and those for whom Spanish is the dominant language tend to be more conservative on social issues. It appears that as English proficiency is acquired, a more liberal shift occurs. A self-imposed stereotype that has also negatively impacted Latino/a understanding of sexuality is the Virgin-Whore dichotomy that has been imposed upon Latina bodies. Influenced by dualistic thinking, Latinas are provided with two models. The first is the Virgin Mary, or La Virgen de Guadalupe. The Virgin functions as the ideal model of Latina femininity that emphasizes the so-called female virtues of motherhood, nurturer, and caregiver. Because this model is a Virgin, purity and a lack of sexuality is added to the qualities of the ideal Latina. The other choice offered is the Whore, usually in the symbol of la Malinche,

Sexuality

| 517

TLAZOLTEOTL Tlazolteotl is the deity of sexuality in the sense of both procreation and eroticism. Originally a Mayan Huastec deity from people along the Gulf of Mexico, who came under Aztec rule about 1450, Tlazolteotl is the patroness associated with both fertility and sexual pleasure. She is most often depicted giving birth and protecting both pregnant women and midwives, as well as the herbs they need, including those herbs used for abortion. Together with Xochiquetzal, ‘‘beautiful like a flower,’’ who was the patroness of ritual and illicit sexual relations, Tlazolteotl, ‘‘eater of dirt,’’ was one of the deities who cleansed the people of the sins they confessed through ritual, including auto-blood sacrifice. Feminine deities who protected abortion and sex for purposes other than procreation, as well as to whom the people confessed, presented a challenge to Christian sensibilities at the time of European contact. Like many male Aztec deities, Tlazolteotl can take the form necessary for her cosmological task: Coatlicue, the Serpent who gives birth to the deities and welcomes the dead into her jaws so they become one with the cosmos, or Tonantzin, the Mother Earth who gives life, or Cihuacoatl, the patroness of women who die in childbirth. —MVS

the indigenous woman who has played the role in Latino/a imagination of being Herna´n Corte´s (the conquistador) lover, translator, and betrayer of her own people. La Malinche functions as a warning against the dangers of unchecked femininity, specifically a sensual, subversive, and treacherous femininity. A dichotomy developed within Latino/a culture between the ‘‘good’’ girl and the ‘‘bad’’ girl, between the sacred and the sensual, between la Virgen and la Malinche, between the Virgin and the Whore. A larger Hispanic family is not the consequence of hypersexuality. Views on abortion, along with Catholic teachings on contraception, may partially explain the higher fidelity rates among Hispanics. Additionally, the emphasis and importance that familia (family) plays within the Hispanic culture can account for larger families. This concept of familia has led to customs among Hispanics, which has contributed to the Euro-American stereotypes concerning

the Latina/o sensuality. For example, it is customary for Hispanics to hug and kiss (on the cheek) when greeting each other—even men embrace each other as a common form of salutation. Such abrazos (hugs) among Latino men, while disconcerting to Euro-American men’s homophobia, do not cast any doubt upon the Latino man’s machismo. Sex among Hispanics is no more excessive than the sexual habits of EuroAmericans—or any other group for that matter—yet stereotypes of overactive libidos, within popular culture and the academy, have contributed to biases that have proven detrimental to Latino/as. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. A Lily Among the Thorns: Imagining a New Christian Sexuality (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007).

518 |

South Americans

De La Torre, Miguel A. ‘‘Beyond Machismo: A Cuban Case Study.’’ The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 19 (1999): 213–233. De La Torre, Miguel A. Out of the Shadows into the Light: Christianity and Homosexuality (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2009). Lo´pez, Robert Oscar. ‘‘Sexuality.’’ Encyclopedia Latina, ed. Ilan Stavans (Danbury, CT: Scholastic Library Publishing, 2005). Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007).

SOUTH AMERICANS South Americans, along with Central Americans, have historically been labeled as the ‘‘Other Hispanics’’ by the U.S. Census Bureau. Unfortunately, because they have been treated as a monolithic group, they represent the least documented U.S. Hispanic group. Even though South Americans have been migrating to the United States since the late 1700s, it is difficult to find statistical information about them. Throughout the 1800s, many came to the United States fleeing the violence of South America’s wars for independence (1810–1824). Others, specifically Chileans and Peruvians, came in search of riches during the 1849 California gold rush. According to the 2000 Census, South Americans as a group representing nine Latin American countries, comprise 4 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population and 0.5 percent of the overall U.S. population. They are mostly immigrants, with 76.58 percent being foreign born, of which 28.13 percent are U.S. naturalized citizens. The majority of South Americans from predominant Spanishspeaking nations come from Argentina,

Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. These nine countries can be grouped geographically. Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay comprise the Southern Cone; Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru represent the central mountain region; and Columbia and Venezuela are located on the Caribbean Sea. Brazil is not included among South Americans because of the difficulty of labeling them as Hispanics, even though many Euro-Americans do. Brazilians are ambivalent about self-identifying as Hispanic or Latino/as. They were colonized by the Portuguese rather than the Spaniards and, as such, do not share the language or the colonial history of the rest of South America. And while Brazil is one of the major South American countries that influences the continent’s politics and economy, and it is recognized that Brazilian culture has also had an impact upon the United States, we do the Brazilians a disservice if we simply lump them together with all South Americans. South Americans living in the United States have a median age of 33, older than the Hispanic overall median age of 26 but still younger than the overall U.S. median of 35.4. Compared to the rest of the Latino/a population (with the exception of Spaniards), South Americans have attained higher levels of education with 76.11 percent graduating from high school (compared to 52.42 percent of all Hispanics), and 25.18 percent graduating from college (compared to 10.44 percent). South Americans are also economically more stable than Hispanics. The median household income of South Americans is $41,132 per year, significantly higher than the overall Latino/a median income of $33,676, but still

South Americans

| 519

AEMINPU The Asociacio´n Evange´lica de Misio´n Israelita del Nuevo Pacto Universal (AEMINPU; Evangelical Association of the Israelite Mission of the New Universal Covenant) is led by Ezequiel Ataucusi Gamonal, who is considered to be the incarnation of the Holy Ghost, the New Christ, the Son of Man, Father Israel, and even a New Inca. AEMINPU is based on an Andean Messianism. This Peru-based church wishes to return to the roots of Christianity, a time before the Romanization of Christianity by Emperor Constantine. Members call themselves Israelite because they identify with God’s chosen people and with the ‘‘authentic’’ ritual practices prior to Constantine’s reforms. A mixture of Andean Messianism and biblical reinterpretation, the movement is based on what members consider to have been the organization of the Inca Empire. In this way, the movement matches the ‘‘old messianic return to the time of the Incas,’’ motivated by the myth of the Inkarri (Atahualpa, the Inca king’s promise of returning and reestablishing the Inca Empire just before he was beheaded by the Spaniards). The Israelite Mission has grown to become the largest creed in Peru, second only to Catholicism. Outside of Peru it has spread to Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and among Latinas/os in the United States. —NM

slightly lower than the overall U.S. median household income of $41,994. Yet surprisingly, the percentage of South Americans living in poverty, 15.05 percent, while lower than the overall Hispanic population at 22.63 percent is still disproportionately higher than the total U.S. rate of 12.38 percent. The largest concentrations of South Americans live in New Jersey (2.18 percent), Florida (1.98 percent), and New York (1.75 percent) with Miami-Dade, FL (7.2 percent), Queens County, NY (7.20 percent), and Hudson County, NJ (7.19 percent) topping the list. Because of the lack of documentation concerning South Americans, it is easy to stereotype them as being mainly White, Roman Catholic, and Spanish speaking. In reality, South Americans represent a very diverse group of people. It is not uncommon to find U.S. Hispanics with South American roots whose primary language is indigenous. Rather than Spanish, they speak Quichua or Aymara. Besides these

indigenous roots, there is a strong African presence due to the slavery that was once practiced, especially in northern Columbia and Venezuela. Many South Americans have an Asian background; for example, the former president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000), is from Japanese descent. South America is as diverse as the United States, and as such, there is no typical South American.

South American Migration Many who migrated to the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s included political refugees fleeing U.S.backed (and at times installed) rightwing military regimes. Fearing ‘‘another Cuba’’ in the hemisphere, in the early 1960s the United States launched the Alliance for Progress, hoping it would create a middle class. Unfortunately, the emerging middle class that benefited from these earlier attempts of the Alliance for Progress in social and economic

520 |

South Americans

Peruvian Catholics march in a procession honoring Saint Martin de Porres in the East Village, New York City, on May 6, 2007. Saint Martin de Porres, the first black saint of the Americas, was born in sixteenth-century Peru to a Spanish nobleman and a young freed black slave and was canonized May 6, 1962. (Getty Images)

development found themselves in countries unable to absorb their new skills and talents. Frustrated by the inability to advance economically, many migrated to the United States. This exodus of trained professionals caused a brain drain in the countries they left. The Alliance for Progress was originally designed to modernize and enhance social services (i.e., literacy programs, hospitals, and road construction) but soon morphed into a National Security doctrine. As the Cold War battles moved to the South American continent, preventing ‘‘another Cuba’’ was achieved not through economic development but by supporting dictatorial regimes. A poignant example of this can be found in President Salvador Allende’s government in Chile. Elected to one of the

oldest democracies in the hemisphere, Allende began to construct a socialist alternative to the Alliance for Progress. With the open support of the United States, specifically the CIA, his government was overthrown and replaced with the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The cry to ‘‘fight communists’’ provided political and economic support from the United States throughout Latin America in spite of the atrocities being experienced by the general public. In South America, the life-threatening state terror in Argentina (1976–1983), Chile (1973–1990), Paraguay (1954–1989), and Uruguay (1973–1984) [as well as Brazil (1964–19850)] caused many citizens to find refuge in Europe. Because of the U.S. government’s support of these

South Americans

| 521

MARTIN DE PORRES (1579–1639) Martin de Porres was the illegitimate son of a Spaniard and an Afro-Latina, who was born at Lima, Peru, in 1579. His father eventually recognized him as his son, but when returning to Spain left him in his mother’s care. De Porres was baptized by the future saint Toribio de Mogrovejo. At age 12, he became a barber and a medic. At 15 he joined the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) as a ‘‘donato.’’ Being illegitimate and mulato hindered him from full incorporation into the Dominicans. He turned the friary into a hospital by taking in the sick off the streets. When the brothers complained that he was breaking cloister, de Porres responded, ‘‘It is better to break cloister than to break charity.’’ His reputation as a doctor grew, and he treated rich and poor, people and animals alike. He would say, ‘‘I cure you but it is God that heals you.’’ He desired to be a missionary but was not allowed to do so. Missionaries in China and Japan declared that he would appear and encourage them when they felt like giving up. He died in 1639 and was canonized in 1962. He is often depicted with a broom and small animals. —GCG

military juntas, the United States was not able to publicly recognize the migrants of these South American nations as refugees fleeing persecution. Nevertheless, a few did find a safe haven in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay area. During the mid to late 1980s, the cause for immigration shifted as South Americans migrated to the United States due to economic reasons. As many of these regimes transition to democracies, economic crises developed due mainly to the neoliberal policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Spiraling inflation, widespread unemployment, and the dismantling of the welfare state led many from the urban middle class to either drop below the poverty line or leave for the United States. This migration, specifically from Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru, consisted of many urban professionals. In addition to the challenges of settling in a new land, they live as neighbors who at times find themselves engaged in the

political quarrels rooted in their nations of origins. For example, continued tensions exist among Columbians, Ecuadorians, and Venezuelans over border disputes or between Chileans and Argentineans over long-standing political conflicts between their home nations. While many came to make a new life in the United States, others came with the full expectation of eventually returning to their homeland. For example, Columbians escaping the violence of their civil war created an ethnic enclave in Jackson Heights, New York. Disinterested in U.S. social issues, they recreated their homelands on a new land, complete with restaurants and shops. They were more concerned with their children remaining Columbians than with their assimilation to U.S. culture. Aliens by choice, they remained active in the life of their homelands, even voting in their nation’s elections, always waiting for the day they could return. For many, that day never came.

522 |

South Americans

´ VIRGEN DE CHIQUINQUIRA Alonso de Narvaez, the Spanish painter, is credited with painting the sixteenthcentury portrait of the Virgin of the Rosary. The portrait was placed in a Columbian chapel where it was exposed to a leaky roof. By 1577 the damaged painting with obscured images was moved to Chiquinquira´, Columbia. According to the story, a pious woman from Seville, Maria Ramos, hung the faded painting in the chapel in 1586 and prayed. On December 26, 1586, the damaged painting completely restored itself. By 1829, Pope Pius VII declared Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquira´ patroness of Columbia. The Virgin is also venerated in Venezuela and among Venezuelans in the United States. According to the story, a washwoman during her chores noticed a small slab of wood floating on Lake Maracaibo in the early eighteenth century. Retrieving the wood, she discerned an undistinguishable image. She took the wood home. While working around the house, she heard knocks coming from the slab. Upon investigating she discovered a glowing light that produced the image of Columbia’s Virgin de Chiquinquira´. The wood with image is at the Basilica at Maracaibo. Among Venezuelans, la Virgin de Chiquinquira´ is affectionately called La Chinita. —MAD

Religious Contributions The political conditions of South America gave rise to a religious movement that has greatly influenced U.S. Latino/a theologies, along with other non-Hispanic theologies. Known as Liberation Theology, this movement became a religious response to the political and economic sufferings of South Americans. The roots of this South American religious movement can be found during the Spanish colonialization of the continent. Early in the conquest of the hemisphere, the Spanish Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503) granted the king of Spain the right to administer all of the ecclesiastical duties of the Church located in what was then called New Spain. Patronato real (the king’s patronage) gave the king the right to administer the tithes and appoint high ecclesiastical offices, making Spain’s king a vice-pope. Early on, two church structures developed in

South America. One was complicit with the colonial political structures and another was composed of individual priests of various religious orders who chose to be in solidarity with the victims of colonialism—the dispossessed Indians. Thus a two-tiered, informal ecclesiastical structure evolved. Many liberation theologians view these early protestors of colonialism as forerunners for what would develop into the South American liberation theology movement. The emerging nations that arose as a result of the wars for independence throughout South America during the early 1800s attempted to maintain the same control over the church that Spain previously enjoyed. As a result, Christendom carved out a space for itself from which to operate—a space it could maintain by providing religious legitimacy to the existing political structures. For the most part, the Church found an ally in the right-wing military dictators of the

South Americans

| 523

ROSA DE LIMA (1586–1617) Isabel Flores de Oliva was canonized by Clement X in 1671 as the first saint from the Americas. She is commonly called Santa Rosa de Lima because as an infant her nanny dreamt that her face had become a rose. When she was confirmed at age 11 in 1597, Bishop Toribio de Mogrovejo called her Rosa without any knowledge of the nanny’s dream. He would eventually be canonized after her. As a teenager, she disliked being called Rosa and only accepted the name when at 25 she was consecrated as a Dominican. She lived in Lima most of her life, except for a brief period when as a child her parents moved to Quives. It was in Quives that she began her battle with rheumathroid arthritis. Upon her return to Lima, her parents encouraged her to marry, but she refused. She cut her hair and disfigured her face and eventually became a recluse in her own home like Catherine of Siena. She would leave her hermitage only in service of the poor and to go to Mass. At the age of 20 she began her formation as a Dominican sister. She died in 1617 at the age of 31. —GCG

1970s in their fight against Godless communism. The Castro revolution in Cuba, followed by the expulsion of most of the Catholic clergy from the island, left many within the Church concerned that another Cuba might occur in their homeland. But while much of Christendom found the military juntas as allies, from the underside of Christendom was the church of those being tortured and disappeared, composed mainly of the poor, the peasants, and the marginalized. The religious response to the suffering of South Americans evolved into a theology. Crucial to the development of this theology was Pope John XXIII’s (1958– 1963) call for a Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). One of the reasons why the Pope called for this Council was so the Church could come to terms with modernity. To that end it produced a pastoral encyclical called Gaudium et spes (1965). The encyclical emphasized the church’s responsibility for ‘‘those who are poor or afflicted in any way.’’ When the South Americans attending the

Council returned to their homelands, they had difficulty applying the teachings that came from the Council to the South American experience. How does one do Christianity within the context of U.S. -backed brutal dictatorships? How does the Church respond to the suffering of the people? What does it mean to take responsibility for ‘‘those who are poor or afflicted’’ within South America. In 1968 a conference was held in Medellı´n, Columbia, to discuss how to implement Vatican II within the South American context. The document that arose from this conference became a blueprint for Liberation Theology. Shortly afterwards, Gustavo Gutie´rrez, a Peruvian priest, published Teologı´a de la liberacio´n (1971), a reflection on how theology can be formed by learning from the daily struggle of the poor. The book was translated into English in 1973 under the title A Theology of Liberation. One of the developments in the implementation of Liberation Theology was the creation of Christian Base Communities (CBCs).

524 |

South Americans

˜ OR DE LOS MILAGROS SEN El Sen ˜or de los Milagros, the Lord of the Miracles, is a religious mural from Lima, Peru, housed in the Shrine of the Nazarenas. Believed to be painted by a seventeenth-century African slave, the mural portrays Jesus Christ as Christ Moreno—a Peruvian of African descent. Rather than a White Jesus who shares the race of the colonizers, the Jesus in the mural finds solidarity with Peru’s disenfranchised. When the 1665 earthquake struck Lima, it destroyed all of the walls in the church where the icon was located, except the wall containing the mural. Images of the icon have become a unifying symbol among Peruvians living outside their homeland. During the early 1970s, Peruvians in the northeastern United States started religious brotherhoods to honor el Sen ˜or de los Milagros. An image of the icon was housed in the Sacred Heart Church in Manhattan. As the U.S. Peruvian population grew, so did the number of brotherhoods. By 1977, the Organization of Peruvian Catholic Brotherhoods in the USA was established to coordinate the activities of the different brotherhoods throughout the United States, specifically the October 18 annual procession. —MAD

These base communities were composed mainly of poor people. They were provided with opportunities to appropriate and practice their Christian faith in a new way. These base communities directly reflected on the social, ecclesiastical, and economic marginalization they were facing. The theology that developed in South America was tied to the social and political needs of the people. For this reason, among the salient goals of Liberation Theology were the following: (1) the goal of achieving liberation from all forms of social, political, economic, and institutional exploitation; (2) the goal of creating a more dignified life by providing human control over determining each person’s own destiny; (3) the goal of creating a new person in Christ that is delivered from the consequences of the sin of oppression; (4) the goal of establishing justice; and (5) the goal of forming a new social order based on sociopolitical freedom and redistribution of economic resources.

With the replacement of military dictatorships by civilian governments during the 1980s, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and its hope in leftist utopias, and with the election of leftist, some of whom were persecuted during the 1970s by the military juntas, questions have begun to arise about the relevance of Liberation Theology in South America. This led Gustavo Gutie´rrez to comment during the 1996 conference of the American Academy of Religion that he does not believe in Liberation Theology, rather, he believes in Jesus Christ. Because all theologies are contextual to a certain place and time, they must be abandoned when the theology can no longer address the needs of the people. But because the poor and oppressed will continue to exist, whatever theology arises that addresses their needs and introduces the divine into their struggle, that theological perspective will be liberative. Although it can be argued that this liberationist perspective already existed

Spaniards within the United States, specifically during the Civil Rights Movement and the contributions made by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the South American version of Liberation Theology impacted and influenced many different U.S. religious movements, including those of Latina/os. What today are known as Hispanic theologies find that many of their tenets are either a result of or have been highly influenced by the many theological perspectives that arose from South America’s religious response to political oppression. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading Berryman, Phillip. Liberation Theology: Essential Facts About the Revolutionary Religious Movement in Latin America and Beyond (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). Berryman, Phillip. Religion in the Megacity: Catholic and Protestant Portraits from Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996). Ellacurı´a, Ignacio, and Jon Sobrino. Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). Gutie´rrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, rev. ed., trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). The Hispanic Databook (Millerton, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2004). Peterson, Anna, Manuel A. Va´squez, and Philip Williams, eds. Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). Richard, Pablo. Death of Christendoms, Birth of the Church, trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987).

| 525

Vasquez, Manuel A. ‘‘Central and South Americans, and ‘Other Latinos/as.’ ’’ Handbook of Latina/o Theologies, ed. Edwin David Aponte and Miguel A. De La Torre (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006).

SPANIARDS Spaniards have had a formative influence on the religious culture of Hispanic Americans. Spain has left a rich legacy that is clouded, too, with moral ambiguity and controversy. An examination of the Spanish influences on the formation of Hispanic American religious cultures shows that it is an influence mediated through Latin America, a region, people, and culture formed by the encounter between Spain, the indigenous civilizations of the Americas, and African slaves brought over by the Spanish and the Portuguese. This encounter was marked by conquest, enslavement, and degradation, as well as a powerful encounter among developed and accomplished cultures. Consequently, to assess the Spanish contribution to Hispanic American religious cultures requires an assessment of the many negative legacies of the Conquest, while at the same time acknowledging and celebrating the rich Spanish dimension that remains integral to Hispanic American identity.

Prelude to Conquest A handful of factors that helped make the Spanish Conquest possible have left lasting consequences. First, the fall of the Kingdom of Granada to Castile and Aragon and the success of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas both occurred in 1492. Columbus’s discoveries could not have been timelier for Spain. The completion of the Spanish

526 |

Spaniards

reconquest (Reconquista) of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors left Spain possessing a large group of fighting men seeking the next adventure, men who for various reasons lacked any hope for social advancement in the new kingdom, and a zealous Catholic faith borne out of centuries of driving the Muslim out of what was viewed as Christian territory. America would provide a new frontier whereby this pent-up energy could find a new outlet. The crusading spirit of the reconquest was transformed into a new crusading spirit of conquest. Instead of recapturing a known country for glory, honor, and Christianity, the new cause was the exploration and conquest of an unknown land, securing any wealth found there as a reward for daring the unknown, ensuring social advancement denied at home, and converting the indigenous peoples of America to Christianity. Second, the Spanish brought with them an ambiguous view of race that theologian Luis Pedraja describes as a curious mixture of tolerance and condescending racism. An understanding of the contradictory views the Spanish held of the people they encountered in the Americas can be seen through the lens of their own history. Spaniards share a quality with the Latin and Hispanic American people and cultures they helped give birth to; they too are a mix of the people and cultures that migrated, conquered, and settled in Spain. Besides the first-known residents of the Iberian Peninsula, the Celts, Iberians, Basques, and later arrivals, namely the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Berbers, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Moors, and Jews, all contributed to Spanish identity and culture. Many of these later arrivals had evolved from a plurality of

backgrounds. For example, Carthage began as a Phoenician outpost, and the Phoenicians, in turn, evolved from the Canaanite civilization in Palestine. Hispania, as Spain was known under Roman rule, was opened to nearly every civilization Rome conquered and incorporated into its Empire. Jorge Gracia adds that the Moors brought to Spain their Arab, Syrian, Egyptian, Nubian, and Berber roots, all united under Islam. Unfortunately, this history did not open the Spanish to consistently seek constructive relationships to the indigenous peoples of America. Sangre azul, literally ‘‘blue-blood,’’ was a racial (and racist) category coined by the Spanish during the reconquest (Reconquista) of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors, employed for political ends to distinguish ‘‘real’’ Spaniards from persons with family bloodlines ‘‘contaminated’’ with Moorish or Jewish elements. According Gracia, the Christian kingdoms of reconquest-era Spain, countries in a continual state of war against the Moors, had to remain on guard against treason and betrayal. The best security against that were family bloodlines, which served as the basis for every loyalty and political alliance forged during that epoch. Ironically, sangre azul developed precisely because everyone knew that Spanish bloodlines inextricably were a mixture of all the peoples who made Spain, including the Moors and the Jews. Tragically, this legal fiction led to the expulsion of the Jews and all remaining Moors for the sake of building up political stability and the religious orthodoxy of a newly united, officially Catholic kingdom. In the Americas, despite the intermarriage of the first waves of Spanish arrivals (overwhelmingly male) with Indian women,

Spaniards

| 527

and despite the plural roots of Spanish identity, neither could stop the racism that grew out of the fiction of the ‘‘pureblooded’’ Spaniard. Racism, an abiding concern of Latin and Hispanic Americans, finds its ultimate origin here. The question of race relations among the Spanish, Africans, and Indians during the Conquest is a history of a missed opportunity to create a truly mixed society and the tragedy of the racism that eventually triumphed. It reveals, too, an important issue that both Latin and Hispanic Americans need to grapple with: the term ‘‘Spanish Conquest’’ is not entirely accurate because the Conquistadors were never exclusively Spanish.

The Conquest It is commonplace to describe the Spanish Conquest as a catastrophe executed by all-powerful Spanish Conquistadors inexorably overrunning indigenous civilizations, and then introducing African slaves who replaced the decimated Indian populations in the work force. There is much truth to this statement; one dare not underplay nor dismiss the destruction of the Indians, but it glosses over a far more complicated history. That Francisco Pizarro could capture Peru with an army of 200 Spaniards, and Herna´n Corte´z could capture the Aztec Empire with fewer than 600 men, points to a historical fact beyond Spanish courage in the face of the unknown and skill in battle. Scholars of the Spanish Empire have recovered an almost-forgotten legacy of the Conquest, where its success depended on extensive, active aid and military alliances between the Spanish Conquistadors and local Indian tribes. And, these collaborators sometimes included freed Africans. In other words,

Engraving from about 1600 depicts Spanish invaders battling the Incas in Peru. Francisco Pizarro conquered the empire of the Incas in 1533, claiming their lands for the king of Spain. (Library of Congress)

to argue that the Conquest was a cataclysm that destroyed the existing order, turned the world of the Indian upside down, and precipitated their systematic impoverishment and oppression is a problematic generalization because it would not have been universally held by the Indians themselves. For example, Pizarro’s conquest of Peru´ is the example of Indian collaboration par excellence. When Pizarro’s expeditionary force landed in Peru´, they and the Inca factions who fought with them both took advantage of the fact that the Inca Empire had just come out of a period of civil war. Far from the Conquest being a cataclysm, for many Inca factions the arrival of the Spanish was an opportunity for political and military gain. The great irony here was how many

528 |

Spaniards

SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR The Spanish-American War was fought between Spain and the United States from April to August 1898. American politicians, mindful of the Monroe Doctrine yet inspired by notions of Manifest Destiny, had been watching Spain’s Caribbean military activities since Cuba’s Ten Years’ War (1868–1878). When a new phase of the Cuban Revolution broke out in 1895, American politicians declared support for the Cuban patriots amidst a rising tide of anti-Spanish propaganda in U.S. newspapers. Spain’s alleged intentional sinking of battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, triggered the outbreak of war. Most of the fighting occurred on the islands of Cuba and the Philippines, while President William McKinley asked for and received Congressional approval for annexing Hawaii. Although in decline for over a century, the war marked the end of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and the end of Spain’s naval presence in the Pacific. By gaining Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from its victory over Spain, the United States emerged as an international power. During the U.S. occupation, Roman Catholic Hispanics in these islands were introduced to Protestantism by American missionaries, marking an important moment in the religious history of these islands and their people. —AH

of the Inca allied themselves with Spanish in the conquest of their own empire. Pizarro’s conquest was an opportunity for Peru´ ’s tribes to overthrow the hegemonic rule of the Inca and replace it with a complicated and uneasy relationship with the newly arrived Spanish power. Indian-Spanish relationships took a variety of forms ranging from military alliances to a mutual understanding where the territory conquered by the Spanish was viewed by neighboring tribes as legitimate conquests by a powerful new arrival. The first Indian revolts that happened in the decades immediately following the Spanish Conquest were not revolts against an oppressor, but wars amongst tribes and the Spanish against each other’s territorial incursions. With the loss of the Inca hegemony, the Conquest evolved into a situation resembling a civil war, with tribes warring with each other and with

or against the Spaniards, under an emerging but incomplete Spanish hegemony. Indigenous collaboration with the Spanish was the norm throughout the Conquest. In Mexico, many Indian chiefs took for themselves the title of ‘‘conquistador’’ and individual cities would write memorials to Philip II on how they assisted the Spanish in the Conquest. Cortez’s conquest of Mexico resembled Pizarro’s in that his Indian allies consistently tipped the balance of power in his favor. In the Yucatan, Mayan clans took pride in their alliance with the Spanish against rival Mayan clans and their role in creating the new Spanish Empire in America. Henry Kamen argues that the Conquest did not initially bring about Indian desolation, but something more complicated. The indigenous response to the Spanish invasion was based on political calculus of self-interest similar to Spanish decisions, and their responses

Spaniards varied between collaboration and resistance. Indigenous cultures showed great resilience and adaptation, treating the Conquest as an opportunity to create a new world. The catastrophic destruction and dispossession of the Indians by the Conquest developed in the two centuries following the arrival of the Spanish. What began as a mutual acceptance and melding of the Spanish and Indian cultures broke down and hardened into a racially stratified society. The openness the Spanish first displayed to the Indians can be seen in the spectrum of relationships between the new arrivals, who were entirely male, and Indian women. Many historians fall into the trap of caricaturing all relationships between Spanish men and Indian women as exploitative. But Kamen cautions that the status of indigenous women must not be reduced to the generalized status of ‘‘kept women’’ for the conquerors. Upon arrival, the Spanish did not display much prejudice, immediately accepting the need to take indigenous women as companions, and were delighted to meet women, who impressed the Spanish by their ability to defend themselves. J. H. Elliott suggests that consensual unions were as prevalent as forced ones. Intermarriage between Spanish Christian men and Indian women (and later Spanish Christian women to marry Indian men) was officially encouraged by the Spanish crown to facilitate communicating, teaching, and learning between the two peoples, to learn how to work their lands and manage their property, and to convert the Indians to the Catholic faith and Spanish ways of living. Therefore, it can be reasonably concluded that although exploitation certainly was a factor in many

| 529

Spanish/Indian relationships, sincere and loving marriages must have been just as prevalent for the Spanish conquest to have succeeded. Without the active support and collaboration of the Indian women with their Spanish husbands, life for the invaders would have been impossible. Unfortunately, this intermarriage of Spanish and Indians, instead of creating a cultura mezclada, an authentic melding of Spanish and Indians races and cultures, broke down into a stratified society based on race and class. Intermarriage between the Spanish and Indians gave rise to children of mixed race and, as with the Indian women, Spanish men had a range of responses to their mixedrace children. Elliott points out that Spanish fathers often tended to raise such children as their own, especially if they were sons, to the point that they were culturally absorbed into the new elites of Latin America. However, the fact that many mestizos were born illegitimately, coupled with the inability to classify mestizos in a hierarchical society shot through with the idea of sangre azul, contributed to an increasing exclusion of mixed-race people. What developed was a system of social stratification based on ethnicity and class, whereby skin color becomes lighter as one goes up the class ladder. Individual exceptions proved this general rule. This racial and class stratification was solidified further by the Spanish response to indigenous rebellions during the eighteenth century. The catastrophe suffered by the Indian population as a whole did not occur with the Conquest itself, but when the Spanish and mestizo elites stopped the melding of cultures in an effort to consolidate their position of power.

530 |

Spaniards

Institutional Contributions The conquest was sponsored by the united thrones of Castile and Aragon, which formed the nucleus of a united monarchy for a united Spain. However, despite the fact that the expeditionary forces that conquered the Americas carried the legal sanction of the Crown, it was left to the Conquistadors themselves to finance and make provision for their respective enterprises. Much of the origin of another problem faced by Latin and Hispanic Americans, the relationship between the political power at the center and those who live disenfranchised on the periphery of power, can be found here. Historically, the Spanish political reality is nearly as complex as their ancestry. Gracia points out that the unified Kingdom of Spain is an amalgamation of kingdoms and regions, many of which possessed unique cultures and dialects. Centered on the united thrones of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, Spain would eventually incorporate, besides the Moorish Kingdom of Granada, the kingdoms of Majorca, Navarre, and Valencia, the Principality of Barcelona, the Basque Provinces, Galicia, and the Canary Islands. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Spanish monarchy sought to amass greater power onto itself at the expense of a nascent parliamentary system that had existed since 1188, and the traditional medieval rights held by individual towns and regions (e.g., the fueros, or rights held by the Basques). Subsequent history would prove that this effort was never entirely successful. Spanish history would be marked by a constant tension, which often boiled over into conflict and sometimes war, between the Crown at the center and the

constituent regions of Spain over how the country ought to be governed, that exists to the present day. The unresolved issue of the political balance of power between the Spanish Crown and authorities subordinate to that power extended to their American empire. Over the three centuries between Columbus and the Wars of Liberation, the Spanish Crown and its American governors could never adequately control the Creoles (Spanish subjects born in Latin America) who ran colonial economic and political affairs on the ground. Essentially, the cause of the Crown’s difficulties with the Creoles lay with the latter’s belief that the conquest and settlement of the continent was gained through their own sweat and blood. Kamen argues that the Creole position was entirely correct. Although the Spanish expeditionary forces that conquered the Americas had the legal endorsement of the Crown, the financing, provisioning, and execution of these expeditions was underwritten as a private enterprise. Conquistadors carefully planned their expeditions with detailed strategies and goals, adequately provisioned their army, and manned it with trusted personnel consisting of men who could trust each other, and who often came from the same family, town, or province. In lieu of financial support, the Crown gave these expeditions of conquest legal sanction by granting its leaders military commands and the authority to receive and distribute the majority of the spoils of conquest to defray costs and profit from their efforts. The Creole descendants of these Conquerors saw themselves as heirs to this achievement, and this attitude was reinforced by their development of the political and economic structures on the continent. They thought both of

Spaniards these things won them the right to govern their lands as they saw fit even as they pledged their allegiance to the king. This attitude was one reason why attempts by the Crown to reform and improve the condition of the Indians failed. The other reason was distance between Spain and her American empire made the enforcement of any laws difficult without Creole cooperation. Therefore, in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, the Crown sought to establish more direct control over the empire, which would serve as a major contributing factor for the Creoles to fight to liberate and rule their respective territories for themselves. Ironically, Latin American independence did not bring democratic, liberal forms of government to the people. Instead, what developed was a government more centralized and authoritarian than their former Spanish masters. Caudillismo is a term coined by Glen Dealy to describe the core idea behind how much of Latin America was governed since independence. The caudillo is ‘‘the surrounded man’’ who rules through interpersonal relationships, specifically by the granting of favors in exchange for continued loyalty. Born out of the Creole’s self-proclaimed right to rule, Caudillismo led to the creation of a system where the government and the economy were controlled by a small elite consisting of a large handful of families. This disenfranchised the majority of Latin Americans from the political and economic life of their nation. Oligarchic governments, stunted economic growth, restrictions on economic opportunity, the political upheaval caused by the internecine conflicts among the elites, and attempts to overthrow the oligarchy through revolutionary means, all

| 531

contributed to the forced exiling of Latin Americans to the United States to find economic opportunity, justice, and freedom. The Hispanic American tradition of grassroots political organization and activism against social, political, and economic injustice of every stripe finds part of its inspiration in this memory of suffering socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement in the hands of Latin American oligarchies, which held to the habit of maintaining centralized, authoritarian power inherited from Spanish rule. Besides this memory of marginalization and oppression under the tyranny of oligarchy, Hispanic Americans have received resources to assert their identity as a people from the Spanish. Though introduced into America as part of the Spanish Conquest, these resources possess an integrity of their own, which can transcend that historical baggage.

The Contribution of Language The Spanish language, which arrived in America as a the language of conquest, has been appropriated by Hispanic Americans as a means to maintain their community identity. Theologian Roberto Goizueta argues that of all the qualities any culture possesses, including the Hispanic American culture, the language symbolizes communal identity. Its power lies in the ability of language to shape culture and one’s reality as a member of a community. Moises Sandoval offers an example that confirms Goizueta’s argument. One of the earliest campaigns Hispanic Americans fought to gain a place within the Catholic Church in the United States dealt with the issue of allowing the people to worship in Spanish—the Mass, sacraments, and other pastoral ministries to be given by priests in

532 |

Spaniards

SAN JUDAS TADEO The patron saint of hopeless causes, for Latino/as, is San Judas Tadeo, Apo´stol. Judas had the bad fortune of sharing his name with Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus, and this is why in English he is known as Jude. In the New Testament he is referred to as an Apostle and is called Judas of James. This relationship to James may indicate that he was a member of Jesus’ family and has linked him with the letter of Jude. According to Esusebius’s History of the Church, Judas Thaddeus is intimately tied to the first icon of Christ, the Edessa Image. The ailing king of Edessa is reported to have sent Jesus an invitation to visit him. He hoped the Lord would heal him of a chronic illness. Instead, Jesus sent a cloth with his face miraculously etched on it. Jude is said to have taken the image to the king and cured him. Because of his namesake Judas Iscariot, Judas Thaddeus soon became the forgotten saint. Veneration of him began in nineteenth-century Spain and Italy and spread to the Americas at a time to help people deal with the turmoil of revolutions and the effects of the great depression. —GCG

Spanish. Additional evidence for appropriation is found within the language as spoken by Hispanic Americans themselves. Spanish, like any living language, incorporated features of other languages it encountered. (The 700 years of Moorish rule gave Spanish a significant Arabic influence, which contributed approximately one-quarter of the former language’s vocabulary.) The Conquest opened Spanish to receive influences from all the indigenous languages it encountered, to the point that Hispanic Americans can trace their Latin American ancestry by means of linguistic archaeology. Differences in vocabulary among the regional varieties of Spanish that grew out of Latin America usually came from the incorporation of indigenous words and phrases, be it the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs or the Guarani of Paraguay. When Hispanic Americans speak Spanish, they both consciously and unconsciously identify with their Spanish and indigenous roots. The free use of Spanish alongside English is a

symbol asserting their freedom to be both completely Hispanic and completely American by their command of the two majority languages of both American continents.

The Contribution of Catholicism Miguel de Unamuno’s quip that ‘‘Here in Spain, we are all Catholics, even the atheists’’ is notable for its lack of hyperbole. Beginning in 589, when the Visigoth King Recarred declared Spain to be Catholic instead of Arian, the Catholic faith integrated itself completely into the fabric of Spanish culture. The reconquest sealed Catholic Christianity’s status as both an official and popular religion because it consistently served as the primary unifying principle the Spanish rallied around in their campaigns against the Moors. Ironically, the best evidence for the durability of Catholic Christianity in both Spanish and Latin American culture can be found during the periodic episodes of anticlerical

Spaniards

| 533

VIRGIN OF MONTSERRAT Co-patroness of Catalonia, along with Saint George, the Virgin of Montserrat is venerated inside the monastery of Santa Marı´a del Montserrat a few miles north of Barcelona, Spain. Montserrat in Catalonian means ‘‘tight or closed-in valley.’’ In the painting, this Dark Madonna is shown against a backdrop of sharp, rocky crags being entertained by altar boys. She is one of many dark-skinned Madonnas venerated throughout Europe, and especially throughout Spain, where Moorish history left its indelible mark. In Catalonia she is known as ‘‘Moreneta’’ meaning ‘‘she of Moorish color.’’ This Madonna balances the equally dark-skinned Christ Child upon her lap. Some scholars have suggested that this Madonna (as well as scores of others) was not deliberately dark at the beginning. They suggest that perhaps centuries of veneration among the candles of the faithful have rendered this and many other such Madonnas dark from the soot. Legend holds that Saint Ignatius of Loyola himself prayed before this image and laid down his armaments there before he founded the Jesuit Order. The best-known reflection of dark-skinned counterpart Madonnas in the Americas is Our Lady of Guadalupe whose image from 1531 is about 300 years younger that the twelfth-century image in Montserrat. —LT

activity against the Church. Despite the fact that the clergy and institutions of the Church can be criticized and attacked to the point of destruction, an elemental sense of the sacred, coupled with a continued respect and appreciation for popular Catholic devotional practices, continues to survive and thrive. Of course, the Catholic faith offered a major motive and served as the primary catalyst for the Spanish efforts to conquer America. The question that must be asked is, how and why did Catholic Christianity become so successfully integrated into Latin America, and among Hispanic Americans, who are heirs to the Conquest? In another irony, the Indians and their mestizo descendants appropriated the faith, but on their own terms. Carlos Fuentes identifies the cause behind this appropriation. The introduction of the Christian idea of a God-man who sacrifices himself for his people even to the point of death won over the

Indians of America. Unwittingly, Christianity had reached beyond the native religious demands of sacrifice to the gods to recover the memory that, in the beginning, it was the gods themselves who sacrificed for their sake. The Hispanic American practice of Catholic Christianity is a blending of Spanish and indigenous traditions so pervasive that it affects Protestant Hispanics who take cues from Catholic devotional life.

The Contribution of the Virgin Mary Mary’s central role in Hispanic American religious culture finds its origin in the Spanish tradition of venerating her. Marian devotion, like the Catholic faith that promoted it, was integrated into Spanish culture through the reconquest. She was viewed as the devoted and helping mother as well as a powerful intercessor between humanity and a God

534 |

Spaniards

who, according to theologian Timothy Matovina, Spanish Catholics feared as a stern and distant being. Her intercession was called upon repeatedly in the war against the Moors to the point that Angus MacKay described the frontier between the Spanish Catholic and the Moorish Moslem a Mariological one. Mary became a warrior figure for the Spanish, symbolizing their triumph over the whole of the Iberian Peninsula. With the Conquest came Mary, whose intercession was called upon by explorer and conquistador alike to ensure a successful expedition and military victory. In the Americas as in Spain, Mary came as a warrior figure symbolizing the conquering power of the Spanish, and with the subsequent colonization she was called upon for everything from the conversion of the Indians to the protection of crop harvests. Ironically, the Indians, as Linda Hall argues, appropriated Mary on their own terms, despite her original status as an instrument of Spanish conquest. Among the Aztecs, Mary could be appropriated beyond her being the Mother of God and intercessor with God because to invoke her help appealed to their worldview shot through with miraculous, even magical, qualities. Aztec religion contained a strongly held and deeply rooted tradition of the sacred feminine. Janus-faced goddesses, both nurturing and dangerous at the same time, populated the Aztec pantheon. Among the Inca, strong traditions of goddess worship, coupled with the existence of ‘‘Chosen Women,’’ beautiful virgins selected to serve the Inca king, existed. These features of Aztec and Inca religion made the Catholic idea of a benevolent, powerful female intercessor with the Divine most compatible.

Fuentes argues that the Indians found in Mary a mother figure that transformed them from the despoiled victims of conquest to the pure children of the Blessed Mother. The Indians appropriated the Spanish idea of Mary as a symbol of God allied and fighting with them, endorsing their belief that despite the Conquest, they remained in God’s favor. Latin and Hispanic Americans interpret the 1531 apparition of Mary to Juan Diego as a sign that God’s favor is not limited to the conquering Spaniards. Rosa Marı´a Icaza points out the way Mary treated Juan Diego showed that God would not treat the Indian as an inferior underclass. Mary called Juan Diego by name, a sign of respect and recognition of him as a person, she entrusted him with a mission and showed patience when he encountered difficulties in fulfilling that mission, and she challenged him to grow as a complete human being to live out his divine call. How God treats those who society labels as least demonstrates a rejection of such marginalization and oppression, and the converse assertion that all human beings are God’s people. Hispanic Americans look upon the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a sign that those who boast Spanish, Indian, and African ancestry are God’s people too, and that their mestizo identity is a gift from God. Marian devotions are part of a larger tradition inherited from the Spanish. According to William Christian, the devotion to the saints is another important tradition. Commonplace upon Hispanic Americans is the practice of seeking out the personal patronage of a saint to call upon for protection or help. This patronage extends to everything from commercial enterprises to entire

Spaniards neighborhoods. Of the many features found in the various fiestas, which are a part of Hispanic American religious life, at least part of their origins can be traced to Spain, too.

Conclusion Hispanic Americans have inherited from the Spanish a tradition of the Church as a political force. For example, while the Conquest was fully progressing, Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome´ de Las Casas developed a body of natural rights theory in defense of the Indians. Arguing how the Indians demonstrated the human qualities of rationality, demonstrated by their ability to create families, build communities, possess property, and have an economic and political structure, these men helped create modern human rights theory. The work of both men, especially Las Casas, is enjoying renewed attention as a philosophical and theological resource against marginalization and oppression. The Church has remained, despite episodes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of sustaining anticlericalism and suffering persecution, a political force in Spain. Beginning with the Catholic Action movement in the late 1950s, which contributed to the Liberation Theology movement in the late 1960s, the Church in Latin America moved beyond being a traditional support of the social and political status quo to become a political force advocating for the disenfranchised poor majority. Among Hispanic American Catholics, the Church has assumed a central role in their political activity too. Michael Jones-Correa and David Leal found that active Hispanic and non-Hispanic Catholic churchgoers generally participated more in politics. The reason lies

| 535

with the simple fact that the Church serves as the primary center from which Catholics become politically mobilized and civically involved. The Spanish legacy for Hispanic American religious culture is one that contributed beyond a religious heritage, replete with important social, economic, and political influences. This legacy helps vivify and bind together Hispanic Americans as a community, and link them with a powerful Spanish and Latin American lineage marked by equal parts tragedy and triumph. Ramo´n Luza´rraga

References and Further Reading Dealy, Glen Caudill. The Latin Americans: Spirit and Ethos (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). Elizondo, Virgilio, Allan Figueroa Deck, S.J., and Timothy Matovina. The Treasure of Guadalupe (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006). Elliott, J. H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). Fuentes, Carlos. The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). Goizueta, Roberto S. Caminemos con Jesu´s: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). Gracia, Jorge J. E. Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Hall, Linda B. Mary, Mother and Warrior: The Virgin in Spain and the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). Jones-Correa, Michael A., and David L. Leal. ‘‘Political Participation: Does Religion

536 |

Spiritual Hybridity

Matter?’’ Political Research Quarterly 54, no. 4 (December 2001): 751–770. Kamen, Henry. Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003).

SPIRITUAL HYBRIDITY Spiritual hybridity began in the late fifteenth century as a cultural mixture of spiritual and/or religious belief systems and practices, in Spanish-speaking Latin America and among Latina/os of the United States as a result of the European invasions and colonization of the American continent and the Caribbean. The use of ‘‘spiritual hybridity,’’ rather than ‘‘religious syncretism,’’ follows the more recent attempts by culturally mixed and queer peoples to discuss the ambiguous, continual, and multidirectional flow of cultural influences across power differentials. For example, Gloria Anzaldu´a and Laura E. Pe´rez write on spiritual hybridity, Lara Medina on ‘‘nepantla spirituality,’’ and Randy Conner and David Sparks on ‘‘queering creole spiritual traditions.’’ Other parts of the world, such as the Philippines and some of the Pacific Islands, have also experienced cultural hybridity as a result of Spanish and other European imperialisms that are relevant to a broader understanding of Latina/o spiritual hybridity or religious ‘‘syncretism.’’ With respect to the influence of the Spanish on the Chamorro people of Guam, Michael Tuncap, during the Ethnic Studies California Graduate Student Conference held in the Spring of 2007, called for an interrogation of what is meant by the term ‘‘Latina/o.’’ Such hybridizations in spiritual beliefs and practices continued throughout the centuries by means of both the

imposition and appropriation of Christianity where native populations are concerned; as a result of mixture with traditions brought to the Americas by enslaved peoples from various parts of Africa; by native peoples transported from one part of the Caribbean and/ or the Americas to another as labor; and by subsequent immigrations from Europe and various other parts of the world, including China, India, and the Middle East. In more recent times, as a result of the youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s, Latina/os also began to explore Buddhism, Hinduism, and nonhereditary Native American beliefs and practices like their generational peers. Finally, these past four decades have also witnessed spiritual hybridity as Latina/os pick and choose between various Latina/o traditions, such that we see Central Americans or Chicanas now initiated into santerı´a, as it disseminates from Afro-Cuban culture, and Caribbean-origined Latina/os practicing Mexica (‘‘Aztec’’) sweat lodge or other indigenous ceremonies from the American continent. Further, the nature of colonial-era Spanish religious beliefs and practices must be understood in some cases as already being potentially culturally hybrid. This is particularly evident with respect to the religious cultures of conversos, Jews who converted to Christianity during the Inquisition; of hidden Jewish Spanish colonizers (who account for some of the culturally hybrid practices of populations like those of New Mexican Hispanos); and of Muslims of Moorish Spain. Among Latina/os of the United States, incorporated originally through the imperialist wars of expansion of the United States against Mexico (1846–

Spiritual Hybridity

| 537

BRUJERI´A Brujerı´a (from Bruja, witch) is the belief and practice of witchcraft. In the Latino/a worldview, witches are considered as either malevolent sorcerers or benevolent curers. Some are believed to have the assistance of the devil and spirits and extraordinary evil powers (maleficia) to change into animal form, and to inflict enemies with suffering, death, financial failure, and sickness through the evil eye (mal de ojo), resulting in bewitched victims (enbrujada). Curers (curanderos), on the other hand, usually have the power to remove the bewitchment through limpias (spiritual cleansing). Curers use natural remedies to remove the malevolent influence of bewitchment. Brujeria in Latina/o culture is a blend of Spanish witchcraft and Mesoamerican traditions. Spanish witchcraft was based on four basic beliefs about witches, usually female: their pact with the devil, the aquelarre, or their mysterious gathering place, flights, and metamorphosis. Most indigenous groups in the Americas believe in some form of sorcery or witchcraft. The Aztecs believed in the nagual or nahualli, a male witch with magical powers to change into animal form, and Tezcatlipoca was the god of night and their patron. —FAO & KGD

1848) and Spain for possession of its former colonies in 1898 (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines), complex religious hybridities in belief and practice that arise out of centuries of intense renewed and new cultural contacts are further complicated. Latin American–origin peoples of the United States have been placed in contact with Anglo-Protestant dominant cultures (not the least of which through the public educational system) and with European immigrant Protestants, but also with culturally different forms of Roman Catholic practice than that of dominant culture that have been described as Eurocentric and antiHispanic. Thus, we might also speak of new kinds of spiritual hybridities as Roman Catholics convert in record numbers to various forms of Protestantism. The complex historically continuous layering throughout the past 500 years of different religious worldviews among Latina/os, both in Latin America and in the United States, is an area of present

active interest in a variety of disciplines that promises to enrich our understanding of the various forms of spiritual hybridity that characterize different Latina/o populations in unique ways. Laura E. Pe´rez

References and Further Reading Arrizo´n, Alicia. Queering Mestizaje. Transculturation and Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006). Conner, Randy, with David Sparks. Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Participation in African-Inspired Traditions in the Americas (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2004). Medina, Lara. ‘‘Nepantla Spirituality: Negotiating Multiple Identities and Faiths Among U.S. Latinas.’’ Rethinking Latino (a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel De La Torre and Gaston Espinoza (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2007).

538 |

Structural Sin

Pe´rez, Laura E. ‘‘Spirit Glyphs: Reimagining Art and Artist in the Work of Chicana Tlamatinime.’’ Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. I (April 1998). ———. Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

STRUCTURAL SIN It is not surprising that a hyperindividualistic culture would reduce sin and salvation to the personal. For many Euro-American Christians, sin is an action, or omission, committed by an individual who now stands guilty before God. This individual action (or lack thereof) creates alienation between the individual and God. Sin becomes universal with ‘‘sin’’ being defined by those in power. The sin of those privileged by the prevailing social structures becomes normative for all humans, ignoring that power relationships mean different groups are tempted in different ways. For example, what is considered a sin for a White male with economic class (i.e., pride) may be a needed virtue for a poor Black Latina woman who is constantly told to be humble. Salvation is also reduced to an individual act. The act needing remedy is the sin committed by the individual, and the act providing the remedy is Jesus Christ’s death on the cross. It is therefore common to hear sermons and religious admonitions within Euro-American churches that focus on and encourage personal piety. Yet sin always manifests itself socially, through laws and regulations that permit the few to live in privilege and the many to live in want. Laws, customs, traditions, moral regulations, and so-called common sense are constructed

by society to normalize and legitimize the prevailing power structures. By making sin a private matter, little is done to challenge or change structural sin. Those benefiting from how society is structured may recognize that sin may have been individually committed, but ignore that because we are communal creatures, it affects other humans. Individual biases against those of a different gender, economic class, or race and ethnicity become the collective biases of the society. These biases are codified, institutionalized, and legitimized by the government, marketplace and church. In this way, the social structures are designed to be oppressive toward marginalized communities, which include Latina/os, so that the dominant culture can exist within its privileged space. For many within the dominant culture, a failure to recognize their complicity with structural sin exists. Sympathy with the plight of oppressed Hispanics is meaningless if those who society benefits remain ignorant of how structural sin maintains and sustains poverty, violence, and oppression within the nation’s barrios. Even if individuals repent their biases, society will continue implementing oppression in their stead. Complicity to structural sins, regardless of the beliefs and practices of the individual, makes everyone a sinner who benefits by how society is structured, for all sins have individual and communal dimensions. Hispanics’ understanding of sin and salvation is more communal, recognizing that all sins have a social context. While not minimizing the importance of living a moral life as an individual, Latino/as also recognize that sin is not limited to the personal. Sin also exists within the social structures of society. The

Syncretism consequences of oppression and violence can be caused by the acts of an individual, as well as by the normal and legitimate policies, laws, and moral regulations of the social order. These structural sins exist in the economic policies, the cultural traditions, and the legal codes of the society. To simply concentrate on personal piety ignores how sin, in the form of social structures, is designed to privilege a minority group at the expense of those disenfranchised by the social order. Hence all sins, as relational, not only create alienation between the individual and God, but also between the individual and his/her neighbor, the individual and her/his community, and the individual and God’s creation. Recognizing the social dimension of sin leads to an understanding of sin not from the perspective of the sinner, but from the perspective of the one sinned against. Structural sin cannot be redeemed by individual atonement. Atonement ceases to be limited to Jesus Christ’s death on the cross. His life and resurrection are just as salvific. For Christ, salvation from sin is not limited to the individual, but also to the community. Individual repentance of sin may be welcomed, but remains insufficient as long as structural sins remain. Individual repentance is insufficient because it fails to change or challenge the status quo. The society as a whole requires redemption, a moving away from structural sins toward a more just society. Hispanics are not the only ones negatively affected by structural sins. Those who benefit from the status quo are also negatively impacted, and thus in need of salvation. Members of the dominant culture must live up to a false construction

| 539

of superiority that justifies why they are privileged by the social structures. This false construction requires a complicity with structural sins which usually results in a loss of one’s humanity. Not only are those oppressed by structural sin in need of salvation from oppression, those benefiting from structural sins are also in need of salvation—of regaining their humanity. The danger of reducing sin simply to the personal masks the causes and consequences of structural sin and the need of both the privileged and the disenfranchised for salvation. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading Corte´s-Fuentes, David. ‘‘Sin.’’ Handbook of Latina/o Theologies (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006). De La Torre, Miguel, and Edwin David Aponte. Introducing Latino/a Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). Gonza´lez, Justo. ‘‘The Alienation of Alienation.’’ The Other Side of Sin: Woundedness from the Perspective of the Sinnedagainst, ed. Andrew Sung Park and Susan L. Nelson (New York: SUNY Press, 2001).

SYNCRETISM The earliest use of the term ‘‘syncretism’’ occurred when Plutarch chose it to describe how the Cretans would quarrel among themselves but quickly reconcile with foreign enemies. By the sixteenth century, Erasmus used the term to describe the reconciliation achieved among those who theologically disagreed. The term came to imply the mixture of ideas or concepts—specifically

540 |

Syncretism

religious ideas and concepts—that were incompatible. Today, the term is mainly used among religious thinkers to describe the mixture or fusion of a ‘‘pure’’ religious faith with a ‘‘pagan’’ religion. Usually when a faith tradition is described as syncretistic, the term connotes a certain derogatory quality. Among Latino/as, the term syncretism is mainly used to describe non-Christian faith traditions that use Christian symbols, concepts, and ideas, specifically Santerı´a, but also other traditions with indigenous roots like curanderismo or espiritualismo. In reality, all religions are syncretistic. When faith traditions like Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism are introduced to a culture, both the culture and the way that religion is understood and practiced are transformed. For a new faith to exist within a new cultural setting, a certain degree of syncretism occurs to reconcile areas of incongruency between the everyday life as experienced by people rooted in social structures that predates them and the new faith that usually asks to live and think in new ways. Sometimes the changes to both the culture and religion are minor, almost unnoticeable. At other times the changes are profound. Among religious thinkers, the term ‘‘syncretism’’ has historically been used to describe a religion like Santerı´a, but seldom used to describe a religion like Christianity. Part of the reason is that the major religious tradition that has been legitimized and normalized by the culture is seen as ‘‘pure’’ regardless of how much it has borrowed from the multiple cultures it has passed through. Labeling the faith tradition that is not legitimized or normalized by the culture as syncretistic defines it as an impure mixture and subordinates it to the purity

of the dominant faith tradition of the culture. Hence a value system is established where the syncretism of the dominant faith is masked while the exposed syncretism of the marginalized faith is labeled as an abomination of the true faith. Within the Latina/o religious milieu, religions like Santerı´a have historically been seen by Christian churches as the merging of Catholic and African beliefs by the so-called confused, primitive mind of child-like Black slaves. Today, there are Hispanics who worship at a Christian church, more than likely a Catholic Church, who also participate in more indigenous religious rituals like Santerı´a. For some, it is acceptable to offer a sacrifice to one of the orishas (quasi-deities) of Santerı´a on Saturday night and still attend Sunday morning Mass. The Catholic Church has historically seen its role as correcting the confusion of those engaged in Santerı´a’s rituals. Other Christian faiths voice a harsher criticism. For example, many Evangelicals—especially Pentecostals— believe that Santerı´a is a Satanic faith that perverts Christian symbols. While some degree of syncretism occurs within all faith traditions, it would be naı¨ve to simply describe religious expressions like Santerı´a as syncretistic. In a Caribbean culture that has historically oppressed those from African descent, especially through slavery, Africans were forced to find creative ways of keeping their traditions alive. In a predominantly Christian culture that forced slaves to be baptized to accept the religion of the slave masters and prohibited Africans from participating in the religious expressions of their homeland, Africans were forced to keep their true belief systems masked and secret. So,

Syncretism when a slave bowed her or his knees before the statue of a Catholic saint, the slave knew that she/he was really worshipping the orisha whom that statue represented. This merging was not the product of a confused or primitive mind, but rather a shrewd maneuver on the part of the slaves. All the devotion that was due to a particular orisha was projected upon a Catholic saint who signified a particular orisha. In a way, they dressed their African Gods in the clothes of medieval Catholic saints. The Christian overlords were happy because they saw their slaves outwardly worshipping a Catholic saint, for example Saint Barbara, but in reality, all the worship directed by the slave to Saint Barbara was actually for the orisha Chango´. It was the Christian overlords, in the minds of the Africans, who were primitive and confused because they lacked the knowledge about the true power that lay behind the statues of Catholic saints. This type of masking continues today. When a Christian comes to a santero/a for a consultation, the Christian would seldom be told to offer some sacrifice to the orisha Chango´. Because the primary duty of the santera/o is to restore harmony in the life of the seeker, regardless of their faith tradition, the santero/a does not enter into a discussion about Yoruba pantheon. Instead, the santera/o might simply explain that Saint Barbara was originally known in Africa as Chango´, and what is required now is to offer a sacrifice to Saint Barbara/Chango´ . With time, after harmony is restored to the life of the seeker, the santera/o can begin to teach the seeker about the cosmic powers behind symbols of Catholic saints. Saint Barbara recedes as Chango´ becomes more prominent in the seeker’s

| 541

consciousness. The statue of Saint Barbara, which is unimportant to Santerı´a, still serves an important function for the seeker by providing a familiar religious environment where the seeker can find important points of reference. In this way the seeker is transitioned into a new faith. For some, the transition, which can take years, is complete; while for others, a full transition from Catholicism to Santerı´a may never take place, with the believer participating in the rituals of the two different faith traditions. The term ‘‘syncretism’’ becomes a poor term by which to describe nonChristian, more indigenous faiths of Hispanics. Such religions, like Santerı´a, can best be understood as a faith reality that is different from Christianity and from its original indigenous religion. Rather than using the derogatory term ‘‘syncretism,’’ these newer Latina/o religious faiths should be understood as new cultural realities. These so-called syncretistic religions have matured to the point that syncretistic labels can be discarded. Although originally a syncretistic label might have proven helpful in understanding how the religion developed, it hinders the ability to fully grasp the importance of what can be understood to be a present-day transcultural phenomenon. To continue to insist that religions like Santerı´a are some dialectical product of the Yoruba’s belief system and Iberian Roman Catholicism, where a ‘‘confused’’ merging of the saints and orishas took place, fails to properly understand that Hispanics are not confused about their beliefs. Distinctions in faith traditions and practices have always been recognized. Miguel A. De La Torre

542 |

Syncretism

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. Santerı´a the Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in

America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004). Schreiter, Robert J. Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996).

T the practice of testimonios in Latino/a churches, where the practice is more prevalent than in Anglo counterparts. Within church services, the practice of giving testimonies can vary in form and content. While testimonies are more common in prayer services and worship gatherings at homes, in many instances, a place is provided within more traditional services. In those instances, either the order of service allows an opening for people who would like to share their testimony or the pastor invites them to do so. At the given moment, those who desire to share the testimonies stand and tell their stories, which can vary in length from a brief praise for an answered prayer to a lengthier account of an event or experience. Some testimonies are recurring accounts shared regularly by individuals in the congregation, while others are new accounts of recent events. In most cases, only a few stories are shared before the service continues after an appropriate response by the congregants. While the content of the testimonies varies, there are several recurring themes

TESTIMONIOS In Latino/a churches the practice of giving testimonios, public testimonies of God’s work in one’s life, is common in many of the evangelical and charismatic Protestant worship services. While difficult to trace the origins, there is ample evidence of similar practices in Spanish and Latino/a Catholic traditions. The retablas provide visual evidence in the churches of miracles and answered prayers depicted in colorful plaques on the walls. The practice of providing public expressions of gratitude for answered prayers can also be found in many cultures within the Catholic Church. Another possible origin for these practices comes from the evangelical traditions of revivals and Pentecostal Churches, where participants were often given opportunities to give ‘‘witness’’ or ‘‘testimony’’ of God’s miracles or salvation. It is probable that the evangelical practices resonated with the Catholic traditions of public acknowledgments of miracles and eventually evolved into 543

544 |

Testimonios

that tend to be overarching. One of the most common themes is an account of the congregant’s conversion experience. While this is common within evangelical revivals, and may well find its roots in the revivalist tradition where testimonies were common, accounts of conversion experiences enter other forms of worship. Typically, these accounts provide a contrast between one’s life before and after the conversion experience, which typically has transformed the life of the individual. Generally, the purpose of these accounts is to encourage others to convert and to highlight the virtues of the new life experienced in Christ. While in most instances these accounts are firstperson narratives, on some occasions members share the stories of a close relative or friend who may not be present or able to share. A second common theme is answered prayers. These accounts tell the story of a particular need or situation for which the person had been praying and how the prayer was answered. While typically the answered prayer presents itself as a resolution to the problem, it is not always answered as expected. In some instances, people share how a prayer was answered in an unexpected manner, which the congregant nevertheless interprets as God’s answer to their request. Within Latino/a congregations, the prayer requests and answers at times are for finding employment, for the immigration status of friends and relatives, or for protection from harmful circumstances. Within this genre, one can also find testimonies of healings, which are significant for a community that often has little access to and resources for health care. Testimonies of healing do not necessarily involve a full and miraculous restoration of health, but can also involve temporary or partial

relief. Even in instances where medical intervention occurs, the actual healing is still attributed to God, who is seen as guiding or providing the medical assistance. These testimonies perceive God’s action in and through the events that bring either temporary comfort or healing to the individuals involved. A third form of testimony involves divine intervention of some form. In these instances, divine intervention might have occurred without a prayer being offered or without the person being aware of the circumstances until after the event. These forms of testimonies may involve deliverance from a tragedy or loss, the intervention of someone that brought a perceived blessing, or a timely word of comfort. These testimonies might range from simple happenstance to dramatic events. Within this genre one might also include direct divine intervention in a person’s life, such as visions or special awareness that is often shared with the congregation as a message. Although testimonies vary in nature and this brief typology simply covers some of the more common themes, the practice of giving testimonies serves several clear functions within Latino/a churches. First, testimonies are a didactic tool that instructs congregants on the nature of the faith and in the manner through which God works. Testimonies assist new converts in understanding how God might be at work in their lives and how to interpret events through the lenses of their faith. For instance, members of the church are instructed on how God might answer prayers in a manner that is different from that which they might expect or how a miraculous event can occur under ordinary circumstances. Second, testimonies offer empowerment to disenfranchised communities.

Theological and Religious Education The stories attest to God’s power and work in their midst. While individuals in these congregations might feel marginalized and powerless within the economic and political structure, the testimonies of God’s work in their lives provide them with a sense of value and importance. They might be of little consequence to the power brokers and historical forces of the world, but they matter to God and find a source of greater power that sustains them and helps them to transcend the difficulties and struggles of life. It also empowers them to take part in the church, by allowing them to tell their story and to participate in the teaching and life of the congregation in an active manner. Finally, one can argue that testimonies are a manifestation of popular religion within the Protestant church, since they allow for unstructured and unsanctioned expressions of faith from the people, which allow them to express their understanding of the faith outside of the organized tradition. At times, the extemporaneous nature of the testimonies can take over a service or alter its course as the message resonates with the congregation, forcing the pastor to focus on the testimony itself. Ultimately, they provide a venue for personal expression of individual understandings of the nature of one’s faith and God’s ongoing work in the life of the congregation. Luis G. Pedraja

References and Further Reading Aponte, Edwin David, and Miguel A. De La Torre. Handbook of Latina/o Theologies (St. Louis: Charlice Press, 2006).

| 545

De La Torre, Miguel A., and Edwin David Aponte. Introducing Latino/a Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). Pedraja, Luis G. Teologı´a: An Introduction to Hispanic Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003).

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION In 2008, the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), the accrediting agency for theological education in the United States and Canada, distributed the Fact Book on Theological Education for the academic year 2006–2007. This fact book is designed to provide a concise overview of the current enterprise of graduate theological education in the United States and Canada, and it states the following: As of fall 2006 there are 253 member schools. Of these only forty-two member schools offer a Doctorate of Philosophy and/or Doctorate of Theology. The religious affiliation of these PhD granting institutions consists of: 60% Protestant Denominational Schools, 27% Inter/Nondenominational Schools, 10% Roman Catholic Schools, and 5% Orthodox Schools. Out of the forty-two schools, thirty-nine are in the United States and two are in Canada.

The Hispanic population ATS statistics indicate that Latina/os constitute more than 20 percent of the U.S. population, but only 4 percent of the faculty and students at ATS schools are Hispanic. Additionally, about two-thirds of these member schools do not have any Latina/ o faculty members. Furthermore, most are not trained in issues that affect this

546 |

Theological and Religious Education

HISPANIC THEOLOGICAL INITIATIVE Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI) was founded in 1996 under the leadership of Justo Gonza´lez. HTI was sparked by demographic inconsistencies between the shifting ethnic composition of the United States and the unchanging makeup of religion faculties. As the number of Latinas/os grew, corresponding growth in theological education was lacking. Prior to the program’s inception, there were a mere ‘‘69 Latina/o scholars of religion teaching in theological schools, seminaries, and colleges’’ according to the Association of Theological Schools. Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lilly Endowment, HTI has sought to support Latina/o students in theological education, to shape a vibrant community of Hispanic scholars, and finally to have a significant impact upon Latino/a churches. In other words, the aims of HTI have centered around three foci: graduate students, the academy, and the church. Though the shape of the program has changed over time, HTI has primarily provided financial, mentoring, and networking support to doctoral students in religion. In these specific ways, HTI has worked toward alleviating those pitfalls that most commonly obstructed qualified doctoral candidates from completing their education. After a decade’s effort, the number of Latina/o faculty has expanded to over 127, at least 58 of which received an HTI fellowship. —EDB

ever-growing and acutely religious minority group in the United States. Of the 3,622 full-time faculty in ATS schools in the 2007–2008 academic year, only 124 or 3 percent are Hispanic. Although the percentage is small, the distribution of Hispanic faculty in teaching fields is relatively good: 22 percent are in Biblical Studies, 24 percent in theological/historical studies/ethics, 24 percent in pastoral/practical theology areas. The others are spread across a variety of teaching fields. The ATS database only keeps track of faculty and students at its 253 schools. However, in the Hispanic Theological Initiative database, a scholarship, mentoring, and networking program with the primary mission to increase the presence of Latino faculty —especially tenured faculty—in seminaries, schools of theology, and universities, 162 Hispanic faculty are recorded in the United States.

For 12 years, HTI has worked collaboratively to help students overcome the many challenges Latina/os encounter while pursuing doctoral studies in religious and theological education. Since its inception in 1996, HTI has, as follows: (1) awarded 105 doctoral fellowships; (2) engaged 38 tenured or tenured-equivalent professors as mentors of HTI fellows; (3) supported 55 HTI fellows to the completion of their doctorates; (4) currently provided support to 39 HTI fellows in the pipeline; and (5) maintained an average time-todegree for HTI doctoral fellows of 4.85 years. Additionally, among the students who have received HTI fellowships: (1) 13 denominations are represented; (2) 40 percent are Roman Catholic scholars; (3) 60 percent are Protestant scholars; (4) 33 percent are women; and (5) 67 percent are men.

Theological and Religious Education

| 547

APUNTES Apuntes, first published in February 1981, is the oldest journal on Latino/a theology. The journal began as a collaborative venture between the Mexican American Program of Perkins School of Theology and Dr. Justo L. Gonzalez, who served as its editor for 20 years. The publication of Apuntes almost coincides with the beginning of Latino/a theology in the early 1980s. Within its pages one finds essays, written by prominent figures in Latino/a theology, exploring some of the early formative concepts in what was then called Hispanic theology. The name, Apuntes, intentionally alludes to the double meaning of the word in Spanish. First, it can mean the notes or apuntes scribbled on the margins of books and Bibles. Hence, the original subtitle of the journal: Theological reflections from the Hispanic margin. It was intended to give voice to those at the margins of theology, particularly Latino/as. Publishing not only academic essays, but also essays from pastors, the journal fosters dialogue between the church and the academy. Second, apuntes means ‘‘to take aim.’’ Thus, the journal has a double aim: to make the voices of the Latino/a church heard and to critique both the theological and the ecclesiastical establishment. —LGP

Among the 55 HTI fellows who now have doctorates: (1) 53 are working and teaching in the academy; (2) 75 percent are in full-time teaching positions; (3) 25 percent are adjunct faculty members or work in administration, research, and the nonprofit sector including ministry; (4) 27 percent have published books; (5) 22 percent are tenured; (6) 25 percent are in tenure-track teaching positions; and (7) five have been appointed as deans. These results bear witness to the fact that HTI’s synergetic and holistic approach (one that provides funding, mentoring, and networking opportunities) has provided an excellence model for academia that continues to serve the Latina/o student community by helping students achieve both a doctoral degree and continued long-term career success. However, while great strides have been made in the past 12 years, there is still much work to be done. The census

demonstrates that Latina/os are the least well represented of all ethnic groups among faculty in the United States, in spite of the fact that they are the largest minority in the country. Hispanics are still the least represented group in the faculty and student bodies of ATS schools, and as the Latino/a population continues to grow, the future of these schools increasingly rests with their ability to effectively educate racial and ethnic religious leaders. Indeed, before mid-century, the Hispanic community will be the largest minority group in the United States. Moreover, the majority of Latina/o faculty falls within the lower levels of academic rank; they are disproportionately represented among the ‘‘instructor’’ and ‘‘lecturer’’ categories. This level of academic rank gives them little voice in university policies and practices, makes it difficult for them to mentor doctoral students (because of tenure pressures and lack of status), and

548 |

Theological and Religious Education

PARAL The Program for the Analysis of Religion Among Latinas/os (PARAL) was launched in 1988 by various Latina/o scholars within the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Countering the absence of Hispanic religion from much of social science study, PARAL developed an agenda for interdisciplinary study of Latina/o religion in the United States, resulting in funding from major foundations beginning in 1989. The systematic exploration of Latino religious experience produced PARAL’s first conference in April 1993 at Princeton University. Three themes were explored, resulting in three volumes of the PARAL Series: An Enduring Flame (1994) examined popular religiosity; Old Masks, New Faces (1995) tackled the linkages between religion and cultural identity; Enigmatic Powers (1995) reviewed syncretism with indigenous and African religions. A fourth volume with bibliography of pre-1995 works followed. Over the next decade PARAL sponsored conferences, panels, and sessions at scholarly gatherings. The 1996 meeting at the University of California, Santa Barbara examined the impact of popular religious expression in liturgical music and pastoral practice with oral history from Latino/a leaders, producing the award-winning Recognizing the Latino Resurgence (1998). In the new millennium, PARAL began collaborating with a documentary series on Latino/a religion. —ASA

places them in a vulnerable status. As only 2 percent of all full professors in the academy, they are a scarce resource for Latina/o graduate students. Thus, the underrepresentation of Latinas/os at ATS schools and in religion departments of universities becomes particularly more worrisome, given the high degree of religious participation in the Hispanic community. Theological schools have their roots in predominantly White denominations and social structures. As the total racial/ethnic population surpasses the total White population in the United States before mid-century, the future of these schools increasingly rests with their ability to effectively educate racial/ethnic religious leaders, and the future of American Christianity is tied to its capacity to serve racial/ethnic populations. Similar trends exist for Latina/o administrators. The dearth of Latina/os

in key administrative roles, such as college presidents, provosts, deans, and department chairs, may be considered a ripple effect from the very small number of Latina/o academics, because Latina/o administrators in executive positions are primarily selected from the faculty ranks. University administrators are also key in that they often have more decisionmaking power than do faculty and greater access to budgets, which enables them to have a direct impact on minority student recruitment, retention, and wellbeing. Hence, the hiring of Latina/o administrators must be viewed as an important priority in raising the profile of Latina/o issues within academe. The reason most often given by hiring committees for not making offers to highly qualified Latina/o applicants was a difference in ‘‘style’’ that did not ‘‘fit’’ with the expectations of the committee. Among the specific style issues were

Theological and Religious Education appearance and access to important networks, two attributes that almost certainly were affected by the candidate’s ethnicity, not their ability or qualifications for the job. The lack of Latina/os in the PhD pipeline is a serious concern for the Latina/o community as academicians play an important role within higher education and the community as mentors, scholars, and leading researchers on issues pertinent to the Hispanic community as well as the society as a whole. Because Latina/os are the nation’s largest minority group, unless they are able to achieve at the same levels as other groups, not only they, but the society as a whole, will suffer. There are some reasons for Hispanic underrepresentation. A smaller percentage of the Hispanic community holds baccalaureate degrees and so a smaller pool is available for postbaccalaureate degree programs. The dominant religious expression in the Hispanic community is Roman Catholic, which has a much larger ratio of church members to seminary students than most Protestants. For example, there is one United Methodist in seminary for every 1,500 UMC members but one Roman Catholic in seminary for every 10,000 Roman Catholics. The other dominant religious expression in the Hispanic community—Pentecostal— does not require theological education for ministers. While these reasons contribute to the underrepresentation, the need for more students and more meaningful theological education for Hispanic students is crucial. What is going on and why are these numbers so low? The myriad reasons for the early and chronic underachievement of Latina/o students have been well documented in many books and articles.

| 549

The most notable characteristic of these data is the relatively flat rate of growth in BA and other degrees over the past two decades for Latina/os. With such a small pool of students eligible for doctoral study, it is not surprising that the pipeline slows to a trickle at the level of the PhD. The majority of Latina/o college students are enrolled in two-year colleges. And transfer rates, especially for minority students, are notoriously low. Only about 3 percent of students enrolled in community colleges actually transfer to four-year colleges annually, in spite of the fact that approximately one-third report intending to transfer when they enroll. If a student decides to go to a fouryear college, the first barrier is getting accepted; after acceptance, the next barrier is that the higher costs cannot be financially met. This makes these institutions much less accessible, and because there are so few Latina/os enrolled, such students often feel marginalized and alone. Also, an institution with limited representation of Latina/o faculty leaves Latina/o students who aspire to these positions with very few role models within postsecondary institutions. Latina/o faculty members provide mentorship to students. When a Latina/o college student is at a four-year college, he/she learns that these institutions do not promote a positive cultural climate for Latina/o students. The student is always struggling with issues of social self-confidence and academic self-concept, which hinders and always attacks their cognitive, intellectual, and critical thinking skills. Moreover, institutions who remain static with their teaching methods and composition of faculty will not help the student

550 |

Theological and Religious Education

become more comfortable at the institution so he/she can flourish. Nonetheless, the few Latina/o students who eventually do attend selective colleges tend to have higher graduation rates and continue with their education. What can be done to increase the pipeline? A study performed by Chang showed students who attended racially diverse institutions feel more selfconfident, establish an academic selfconcept, persist, and are generally satisfied with college. It is critically important for an institution to will and promote diversity throughout the academic structures of the institution to create a positive cultural climate for Latina/o students, which will then produce better cognitive outcomes for students with respect to academic, intellectual, and critical thinking skills. It is also important for an institution to respond and adapt to the pedagogical needs of its students. Another important and significant contribution that faculty members may provide Latina/o students is an environment that supports their research efforts. A big hurdle for Latina/o students was not an academic one but, rather, the problem of being taken seriously as a scholar by faculty who had rather narrow views of what a future academic should look like. For this reason institutions need diverse faculty. There is an assertion that faculty of color are more inclined to mentor and support diverse students because their comfort level with issues of diversity and their own value for diversity translate into pedagogical practices that validate the presence of students of color. Here are more ways that academic institutions can increase the pool of PhD candidates: (1) increase the number of Latina/o faculty; (2) increase the

proportion of grant money; (3) find ways to ensure that students can successfully transfer to four-year colleges and universities to earn their degrees; (4) make the campus more diverse by diversifying not only the student body but also the faculty and the curriculum; and (5) hire more administrators of color in the higher ranks. By beginning to implement a plan of action to increase the Latina/o pool of PhD candidates and faculty, institutions will have the ability to create a more seamless continuum for Latina/os as they navigate through postsecondary and postgraduate education, and the continued charge of redefining the academy for future generations of Latina/o students. Joanne Rodrı´guez-Olmedo

References and Further Reading Castellanos, Jeanett, Alberta M. Gloria, and Mark Kamimura, eds. The Latina/o Pathway to the Ph.D.: Abriendo Caminos (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2006). Chang, Mitchell J. ‘‘The Positive Education Effects of Racial Diversity on Campus.’’ Diversity Challenged, ed. G. Orfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing Group, 2001). Fact Book on Theological Education 2006– 2007 (Pittsburgh: The Association of Theological Schools, 2007). Hurtado, S. ‘‘The Institutional Climate for Talented Latino Students.’’ Research in Higher Education 35, no. I (1994): 21–41. Gandara, P., and L. Chavez. ‘‘Putting the Cart before the Horse: Latinos in Higher Education.’’ Latinos and Public Policy in California: An Agenda for Opportunity, ed. D. Lo´pez and A. Jime´nez (Berkeley, CA: Institute of Governmental Studies, Regents of the University of California, 2003).

Theological Anthropology

THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY From a Latino/a perspective, theological anthropology will privilege what Orlando Espı´n identifies as lo cotidano: the common experiences and struggles of daily life where God is encountered. These experiences, struggles, and encounters with God all occur within the context of a life lived within a community. The Hispanic understanding of community is not to be understood as individuals contractually united as a free, voluntary association. Roberto Goizueta argues that one is involuntarily born into the community, which is marked by distinctive qualities (e.g., the Spanish language and cultural traits from Spain and Latin America). Anchored by the dense network of immediate and extended family ties and strengthened by interpersonal relationships that link families to the larger community, the Latina/o community is one where individuals gain identity as a Hispanic and a Christian. Individual identity is not intrinsically in conflict with the community, but can only be had by being an integral part of the community one is born into or, as Goizueta argues, accompanied (acompan˜ado) by the community and God. Latino/as are born into a community that is a bridge between the cultures of the United States and Latin America. God is encountered as a powerful incarnate presence among Hispanics by virtue of the community’s culture and religious traditions that center on the Church. Consequently, God calls on this community to bridge all forms of division and alienation that divide God’s people, especially

| 551

those who are socially and economically disenfranchised. Constructing a Latina/o theological anthropology presents great challenges due to the pluralism inherent in Hispanic identity and life experiences. For example, there exists a debate among Latina/ os whether the term ‘‘Hispanic’’ best represents the identity of the people or if the term ‘‘Latino’’ is the better alternative. Debates aside, a credible theological anthropology must encompass a plurality of economic, national, religious, political, and social experiences, including those of women and social minorities within the Hispanic population. It must deal with issues that reveal a creative tension between the unity and diversity inherent in Latina/o identity and life, and show how each reinforces the other. Priest and scholar Virgilio Elizondo correctly identifies all Hispanics as mestizaje. The Spanish cultural root all Latino/as share originates from a mix (mezcla) of the peoples and their cultures that migrated and settled in Spain. The Spanish conquest of Latin America, and the centuries following that event, incorporated indigenous American civilizations, Africans, and other European migrants into the mix. Consequently, as Miguel Dı´az argues, Hispanics, by virtue of their broad ancestral background, can be as White as any European Caucasian and as Black as any West African, and every shade in between. This is theologically significant because God calls Latina/os to combat barriers of human division and alienation, and they can do so because cultures are bridged in their very being as a people. Hispanics are in a unique position to bridge many parent cultures, without denying the

552 |

Theological Anthropology

contributions of each, and thus herald the advent of a new humanity. Popular religious practices are decisively important for understanding Latino/a theological anthropology because they serve as perhaps the most obvious and powerful demonstration of identity. Catholic or Protestant, such practices have the common denominator of coming up from the community, centered in the church. Theologian Jeanette Rodrı´guez argues that the church is central for Hispanics because that institution forms and maintains communal bonds centered on understanding God’s saving and integrating presence among the people in daily life. That is manifested through the rich Catholic sacramental and devotional life (especially Marian devotions), and the coritos (simple hymns with refrains), praise and worship styles, and testimonials of faith practiced amongst Protestant congregations. Catholic and Hispanic Protestants mutually influence each other’s religious practices. Indigenous religious practices, done under the guise of Catholic saints and symbols, often exercise an important role in Latina/o religious practices, too. Hispanics share the social trait of the struggle (la lucha) for liberation, which manifests itself in many forms. Primary is the struggle against marginalization and oppression in both society and the church. This situation was born out of the fact that nearly all Latino/as are exiles or the descendants of exiles to the United States from the chronic political and economic problems of Latin America. For Mexican Americans, the struggle occurs in their ancestral homeland, the Mexican territory annexed by the United States following the Mexican-American War. Hispanics have found their religious traditions frowned

upon by the American Christian mainstream, and have also suffered exclusion from participating in the official ministries of the church. Struggle takes on a different form with the commonplace occurrence of Latina/os who have attained full sociopolitical enfranchisement, economic security, and acceptance in the church. There, the question of how to maintain one’s identity as a Hispanic while integrating oneself into the church and American society comes to the fore. Latino/a theological anthropology argues that God sides with the marginalized, calls on the people to resist their marginalization and oppression, and calls, too, on Hispanics who have already overcome both to work with those who continue to suffer under marginalization and oppression and remove its causes. Women are an anchor of Hispanic American identity. Mujerista theology, pioneered by Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az, adds to Hispanic American theological anthropology by calling for a realization of this fact through the inclusion of women who struggle to gain their rightful place as subjects and participate to the full in their families and the community. The objectification of women through overwork, machismo, and other abuses that degrade women as persons is resisted. Theologians Espı´n and Sixto Garcı´a both see Hispanic theological anthropology as an imitation of the Triune God. Following how the plurality of the persons of the Trinity sustains the unity of God without becoming a monolith, a Hispanic American theological anthropology can demonstrate how diverse Hispanic identities and experiences become a dynamic unity, without collapsing a people into a monolithic unity. This can serve as a sign of how Latino/as can be

Transnationalism true to God when they are true to their identity. Ramo´n Luza´rraga

References and Further Reading Aponte, Edwin David, and Miguel A. De La Torre, eds. Handbook of Latina/o Theologies (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006). Diaz, Miguel H. On Being Human: U.S. Hispanic and Rahnerian Perspectives (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). Garcia, Jorge J. E. Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Goizueta, Roberto S. Caminemos con Jesu´s: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996).

TRANSNATIONALISM Transnationalism refers to modes of being and belonging—worldviews, practices, social relations, and institutions— which span two or more nation-states, making it possible for individuals to be multiply embedded, often developing alternative and/or hybrid identities. Applied to Latino/as, the term describes the need and ability of immigrants to be integrated into the social and cultural structures of the society of settlement (often the United States), while maintaining close ties with the countries of origin in Latin America. The concept of transnationalism is not new. Randolph Bourne used it in his 1916 article ‘‘Transnational America,’’ which appeared in Atlantic Monthly, to describe the changing ethnoracial

| 553

landscape in the United States as a result of the massive immigrant waves in the late 1800s and early 1900s and to characterize the young nation’s place in the emerging architecture of interstate relations in the wake of World War I. Moreover, because the United States and Mexico have been closely intertwined since at least the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which left some 80,000 Mexicans in newly acquired U.S. lands, we can say that both Mexican immigration and, particularly, the Southwest border region have always been strongly transnational, long before the term became popular in academic circles. Nevertheless, the concept became significantly rearticulated in the 1990s in response to the successive waves of Latin Americans (as well as Africans and Asians) who came to the United States following the Immigration and Reform Act of 1965, which eliminated a quota system favoring immigration from Central and Northern Europe. Dislocated by the sociopolitical turmoil and the rapid and unequal economic development that have dominated the region from the late 1960s forward, many of these immigrants have settled in the United States, not only securing jobs, but eventually forming families, purchasing houses, sending their American-born children to school, and paying taxes, all activities that weave them into the fabric of everyday life in the United States. Simultaneously, these immigrants make use of new advances in the fields of transportation and communications, such as inexpensive air travel, the Internet, discounted phone cards, and an increasingly globalized mass media. These advances allow them not only to send remittances to and travel with relative frequency to Latin America but to keep abreast of

554 |

Transnationalism

daily events in their communities of origin. To characterize this simultaneous embeddedness, anthropologists Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Christina Szanton Blanc offer the now classic definition of transnationalism: ‘‘the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders’’ (1993, 7). Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc call those immigrants engaged in multiple social relations spanning national borders ‘‘transmigrants.’’ They argue that ‘‘transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more nation-states’’ (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1993, 7) So, a Salvadoran mother who has immigrated to the United States to work as a maid or a nanny in Los Angeles, Houston, or the Washington, DC area, leaving behind her young children under the care of her mother, is engaged in a transnational social field. In addition to sending monthly remittances to ensure her children are well-fed and go to school, she very likely places daily calls to her hometown of Intipuca´ or Chirilagua in Eastern El Salvador to discipline them and to make sure that they do not become members of transnational gangs (maras), which are now present among immigrant and nonimmigrant young people throughout Central and North America (Va´squez and Marquardt 2003, 119-144). If she feels her children are in danger of engaging in destructive

behavior, she may work two or three jobs to send them to private school or she might decide to bring them to the United States, although this move might give the children increased freedom and further challenge her authority. In other words, this Salvadoran mother is parenting transnationally, making crucial decisions about the future of her family that have an impact on the societies of both origin and settlement (Hondageneu-Sotelo and Avila 2003). Another example of transnational livelihoods might be a Brazilian Pentecostal pastor who collects the tithes in his thriving church in Somerville or Framingham, Massachusetts, to support missionary activities in Governador Valadares, his community of origin in the state of Minas Gerais (Levitt 2001). His congregation’s missionary work might involve seeding sister churches in Brazil or among Brazilian immigrants in other countries like Spain, Portugal, or the United Kingdom, creating a polycentric transnational religious network through which videotaped sermons, itinerant preachers, self-help books, and gospel music groups circulate. This transnational exchange of ideas, personnel, resources, and material culture, in turn, transforms the religious landscapes in both the United States and Brazil contributing to their vibrancy and pluralism. The same applies for a Mexican town association in Silicon Valley or in New York City, whose members contribute to the annual feast of their village’s patron saint in Oaxaca or Puebla, or to the upkeep of the local chapel and cemetery, where they hope they will be buried when they die. In fact, one of the most important functions of these transnational home associations is the repatriation and proper burial of the bodies of their deceased members.

Transnationalism These examples show that transnationalism is about what anthropologist Roger Rouse (1991) calls ‘‘bifocality,’’ the ability of Latin American immigrants to zoom in and out of different spaces and times according to the demands of the transnational social field in which they are involved. Bifocality may lead to the juxtaposition of identities and practices or to hybridity, the creation of new cultural and religious expressions blending different aspects across the transnational network. For example, rural Dominican Catholicism in the neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, Boston, may tend toward a Pan-Latinismo, when Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Altagracia, the patroness of the Dominican Republic, comes to be venerated alongside other national saints, such as Saint John the Baptist (Puerto Rico), the Lord of the Miracles (Peru), or el Divino Nin˜o (Colombia). Simultaneously, Dominican immigrants may take back to their villages of origin a more formalized Catholicism learned from the Irish American or Italian American priests ministering to them in Boston. So, their relatives and friends in the Dominican Republic might now demand that mass be said on time, lasting exactly one hour, and that confession take place at the appointed regular times, as it is done in the United States (Levitt 2001). These examples of transnationalism also demonstrate that religion is often central in the creation of transnational social fields. This is not surprising given that most religious traditions, by virtue of their goal of bridging personal conversion and renewal with universal salvation, have historically operated at multiple scales from the local to the global. Sociologist Peggy Levitt argues that religious organizations enter

| 555

transnational processes according to at least three configurations. First, ‘‘extended transnational religious organizations’’ basically ‘‘broaden and deepen a global religious system that is already powerful and legitimate’’ (Levitt 2004, 6). The prime example here is the Catholic Church, with its centralized and hierarchical yet tentacular structure linking the Vatican, global religious orders, regional and national episcopal bodies, and the parish, all buttressed by a universalizing doctrine. The second type is ‘‘negotiated transnational religious organizations’’ that present a more flexible and decentralized form of organization. In these organizations, ‘‘relations between sending and receiving country churches evolve without a strong federated institutional structure or rules. Instead, individuals and organizations enter into informal agreements with one another that have weaker connections to political circles but are more flexible constituted’’ (Levitt 2004, 8). The example here would be many small transnational Pentecostal churches but also African-based religions, such as Santerı´a and Candomble´, which rely on loosely connected houses led by charismatic padrinos/madrinas or pais/ma˜es de santo. Finally, there are ‘‘recreated transnational religious organizations,’’ formed by ‘‘groups with guidance from home-country leaders,’’ which seek to replicate local practices, beliefs, and modes of organization abroad. ‘‘[T]hese are franchise-like groups [that] are run by migrants who receive periodic resources, financing, and guidance from sending-country leadership while chapters are supported and supervised regularly by those who remain behind’’ (Levitt 2004, 11–12). Examples of this last category would be the Igreja

556 |

Transnationalism

Universal do Reino de Deus, which emerged in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the Iglesia La Luz del Mundo, established in Guadalajara, Mexico, both of which have temples throughout Latin America and in the major cities in the United States. The various morphologies of transnational religious organizations point to another dimension of transnationalism. Thus far, the literature has tended to emphasize ‘‘transnationalism from below’’ or ‘‘grassroots transnationalism,’’ that is, the activities carried out by individuals as they negotiate daily life. Such an emphasis has generated the impression that transnationalism is automatically emancipatory, that it necessarily entails resistance to the normalizing power of the nation-state (Smith and Guarnizo 1998). While the transnationalism has an undeniable transgressive and creative thrust, it is important to keep in mind that institutions, too, can engage in ‘‘transnational from above.’’ In particular, the state, although challenged by globalization, has also benefited from transnationalism. Throughout Latin America, states have, for example, tried to harness the remittances that immigrants send in order to subsidize economic restructuring projects that are often against the interests of the poor and working classes, from which many of the immigrants come. To facilitate this process, the state may recognize dual citizenship or allow immigrants abroad to vote. Haitian or Dominican politicians may be actively campaigning in the United States, leading to what Nina Glick Schiller (2005) calls ‘‘long-distance nationalism.’’ In a transnational setting, long-distant nationalism is ‘‘a set of ideas about belonging that link together people living in various

geographic locations and motivate or justify their taking action in relation to an ancestral territory and its government’’ (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004, 1020). Further, and arguably more dramatic, is evidence of the power the state is provided by the current divisive debates over undocumented immigration. Both the United States and Latin American countries have actively tried to regulate transnational immigration as a part of a new regime of closure and mobility connected with neoliberal capitalism. In that sense, the term ‘‘transnationalism,’’ as opposed to ‘‘globalization’’ with which it is often wrongly conflated, does not connote that the nation and the state have disappeared or are irrelevant in the emerging social and geopolitical cartographies. Instead, transnationalism points to the need to go beyond ‘‘methodological nationalism,’’ the dominant notion in the social sciences, which posits that the natural unit of analysis is the nationstate, that all the important action takes place within the fixed container of the nation-state (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003). What transnationalism does is to historicize and contextualize the nationstate, to show that its borders are porous and contested yet binding. Transnationalism embeds the nation-state in ongoing social, political, economic, cultural, and religious dynamics that crisscross it as well as enable and constrain it. The enduring power of the state to control the borders of the nation and to manage populations means that, as sociologist Alejandro Portes writes, ‘‘not all immigrants are ‘transmigrants’ and claims to the contrary needlessly weaken the validity of empirical findings on the topic. It is more useful to conceptualize transnationalism as one form of economic, political, and cultural adaptation

Transnationalism that co-exists with other, more traditional forms’’ (2001, 182–183). Instead, in a more likely scenario, immigrants might be able to engage in transnational activities of different intensity, extensity, and durability, depending on the specific needs of the life cycle and the structural constraints they face. Thus, some scholars distinguish among ‘‘core transnationalism’’: those activities that ‘‘(a) form an integral part of the individual’s habitual life; (b) are undertaken on a regular basis; and (c) are patterned and therefore somewhat predictable [and] ‘Expanded’ [or ‘broad’] transnationalism which, in contrast, includes migrants who engage in occasional transnational practices, such as responses to political crises and natural disasters’’ (Levitt 2001, 198). According to this classification, transnational motherhood will very likely involve core transnationalism, while voting in a presidential election in the country of origin might be part of an expanded transnationalism. Overall, transnational frameworks are very valuable in challenging the received idea of American exceptionalism, which views the United States as a radically different society and culture, unaffected by regional and global processes such as colonialism, imperialism, the slave trade, and immigration. The notion of American exceptionalism is built on a denial of coevalness that views Latin American societies as inherently static, corporatist, patriarchal, and authoritarian by virtue of their Catholic background, while the United States is construed as a progressive and democratic society informed by an Anglo-Protestant stress on freedom of conscience and voluntary congregationalism (Va´squez 2005). By highlighting spatiotemporal simultaneity, transnationalism relativizes the hard,

| 557

ahistorical dichotomies set up by the thesis of American exceptionalism. In turn, challenging this thesis is crucial to a fuller understanding of the history, religion, and contemporary life of Latino/as in the United States. It allows us to see Latina/os and Latin Americans as existing in a common space and time, as sustaining rich historical and ongoing connections, with powerful transformative effects throughout the hemisphere. Transnationalism makes possible a hemispheric vision that does not gloss over the continued importance and specificity of the nation-state and the creativity and diversity of local life in Hispanic communities throughout the United States. Manuel A. Va´squez

References and Further Reading Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Christina Szanton Blanc. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1993). Glick Schiller, Nina. ‘‘Long Distance Nationalism.’’ Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, ed. Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember, and Ian Skoggard (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2005). Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, and Ernestine Avila. ‘‘‘I’m Here, But I’m There’: The Meaning of Latina Transnational Motherhood.’’ Gender and U.S. Migration: Contemporary Trends, ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Levitt, Peggy. Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

558 |

Trinity

Levitt, Peggy. ‘‘Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging: The Institutional Character of Transnational Religious Life.’’ Sociology of Religion 65, no. 6 (2004): 174–196. Portes, Alejandro. ‘‘Introduction: The Debates and Significance of Immigrant Transnationalism.’’ Global Networks 1, no. 3 (2001): 181–194. Rouse, Roger. ‘‘Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism.’’ Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991): 8–23. Smith, Michael Peter, and Luis Guarnizo, eds. Transnationalism from Below (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998). Va´squez, Manuel A. ‘‘Historicizing and Materializing the Study of Religion: The Contributions of Migration Studies.’’ Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005). Va´squez, Manuel A., and Marie F. Marquardt. Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. ‘‘Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology.’’ International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 576–610.

TRINITY Contemporary Latino/as understand and celebrate the Trinity through the experience of community. This Latino/a concept of the Trinity—in development over 500 years—may be at odds with traditional considerations. Traditional Trinitarian notions are rooted in philosophical categories and systems that primarily consider the nature of God within God’s self, unrelated to history and human experience. Contemporary Hispanic communities develop some of

these classic Trinitarian concepts, such as divine immanence and economic Trinity, as well as introduce new categories that understand the presence of God within history and culture, and the relationship between this presence and the structure of Latina/o communities. Philosophical conceptions of the Trinity, based on Greco-Roman systems and categories, came into contact with Taı´no and Nahua peoples throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through Spanish explorers and missionaries. Spanish military technology enabled these explorers and missionaries to subjugate the Taı´no/Nahua peoples and colonize them, and catechetical techniques used to form the newly conquered peoples had varied results. Nonetheless, creative constructions of God developed, as Taı´no/Nahua experiences based on their own religious sensibilities, such as ancestral lineage and cyclic stories of death/ rebirth, found their way into trinitarian concepts. These cultural experiences eventually developed into religious formulations on God, incarnation, revelation, salvation, etc. Contemporary Hispanic communities developed conceptions of God by stressing the communitarian qualities of the divine and the means through which these qualities break through history and make possible liberation. It is through the movement of God in history as love shared and concretized through vital families, communities, and institutions that the Trinity is present in the world, ever enveloping these communities in love, in turn serving as continued witness to God’s presence in the world. This character of the Trinity is found in the reality of all people, as well as all human institutions and communities, as they participate in developing structures of

Trinity life and justice. Latina/o communities consider oppressive societal structures, whether these be families, communities, or institutions, to be dysfunctional Trinitarian systems, as these frustrate or oppress the essential quality of the Trinity, an enveloping experience of love and justice given and received. Examples of dysfunctional Trinitarian systems are communities and institutions that engender any type of discrimination, whether religious, ethnic, cultural, economic, racial, or sexual. A number of Hispanic theologians have developed the notion of familia to understand the Trinity. Based on both Roman and Popular Catholic conceptions, the experience of familia integrates what Zaida Maldonado Pe´rez refers to as the ‘‘sociocentric organic,’’ wherein individuals develop meaning within a network of relationships. In turn, life is encountered via relationships, rendering this life unique and set apart—holy—in the sense of the Hebrew Scriptures. This experience of familia extends not only to those individuals of a particular culture or ethnicity, but to all who have experienced and rejected egocentric contractual societies, systems that promote an individual’s development through means of competition and transitory, mutually beneficial liaisons, and endeavor toward strengthening communal bonds and understanding themselves within communal relationships. This concept of familia is comprehensive, not only pertaining to nuclear family systems, but including the mundane, what Pe´rez refers to as lo cotidiano, la lucha, el meollo. These Spanish and Portuguese expressions encapsulate the understanding that purpose and meaning reside within the daily experience of living in

| 559

relationship with others, all of whom are committed to the continued development and growth of la familia, particularly those who live in the midst of systemic injustice and marginalization. In addition to those aspects heretofore mentioned, Luis Pedraja develops the conception of the Trinity from the consideration of the relationship between those with and without power, particularly political and societal power. Drawing upon Cappadocian theological reflection, Pedraja develops the iconoclastic dimension of the Trinity, stressing that the Trinity cannot be conceived of simply as the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit, but instead includes all of these and more, not residing in a model that can be manipulated for the gain of a particular political or societal entity. Throughout Christian history, particular aspects of God have been promulgated and embraced as normative, such as overly spiritualized or rationalized conceptions of God, outside the experience of those without spiritual sensibilities, or the uneducated, to the oppression of particular peoples and the detriment of the entire community of faith. From the perspective of the marginalized, such conceptions of God ought to be rendered as they are—particular and incomplete conceptions that demand interaction and engagement with other conceptions. In addition, a constitutive quality of the Trinity is diversity. Uniform and monolithic structures that compel conformity are radically challenged. Particular mores and values are typically derided and dismissed by dominant cultures, belying the dominant society’s predisposition for their own conceptions of God —stolid, stagnate, and uncommunicative. The Trinity communicates that

560 |

Trinity

diversity reveals the divine, not chaos or confusion, stressing the necessity for sharing and communication. Oswald John Nira

References and Further Reading Diaz, Miguel H. On Being Human: U.S. Hispanic and Rahnerian Perspectives (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). Espı´n, Orlando O. The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on PopuCatholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997).

Gonza´lez, Justo L. Man˜ana: Christian Theology from a Historical Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990). Pedraja, Luis G. ‘‘Trinity.’’ Handbook of U.S. Theologies of Liberation, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004). Pe´rez, Zaida Maldonado. ‘‘The Trinity.’’ Handbook of Latino/a Theologies, ed. Edwin David Aponte and Miguel A. De La Torre (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006).

U Americans and African Americans, the 2008 presidential election demonstrated a new Latina/o voting force that impacted results in states like Nevada, Virginia, and Florida. As more Latina/os enter the political process, they are becoming a crucial swing voting bloc that can affect the final outcome of elections. Politicians are recognizing this potential. Consequently, most presidential contenders are repeatedly making campaign stops in California, Texas, and Florida (states with large Hispanic populations), greeting their audiences in Spanish. This growing political strength helps explain why in 2007, for the first time in U.S. history, both the Democratic and Republican parties held presidential primary debates in Spanish prior to the casting of the first vote in the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire Primary. According to the research conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, Hispanics, with the notable exception of Cubans (24 percent), tend to prefer the

U.S. POLITICAL PARTIES As the Hispanic population increases, sheer numbers will create political power that can potentially influence both the U.S. political process and the two major political parties—Republican and Democrat. Of particular interest is how the religiosity of Latina/os affects political decisions, which in turn can impact the two major parties. For years, Hispanics have faced xenophobic laws and regulations. Many are discovering that an effective response to structural discrimination is obtaining U.S. citizenship and the right to vote. During the 2006 mass Hispanic demonstrations throughout the country to pass comprehensive immigration reform, many chanted, ‘‘Today we march, tomorrow we vote.’’ To make this a reality, many Latina/o leaders have attempted to conduct voter registration drives to place as many Hispanics as possible on the voting rolls. Although Hispanic political participation had historically lagged behind Euro-

561

562 |

U.S. Political Parties

NATIONAL HISPANIC PRAYER BREAKFAST In 2002 Nueva Esperanza led by the Reverend Luis Corte´s Jr. hosted the first National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast, which has become an annual event in Washington, D.C. The first gathering had been scheduled for the fall of 2001, but was moved in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11. Now hosted by Esperanza USA, of which Corte´s is president, the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast brings together Hispanic clergy to pray for the nation and for the Latina/o community. The organization also seeks to gather Latino/a faith leaders and elected officials to discuss and advocate issues that are important to the Hispanic community. The National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and Conference has expanded from a single event to include three days of activities. Typically, during the breakfast program, Hispanic clergy and community members hear from a variety of national political leaders and international speakers highlighting the Hispanic faith community’s presence and contributions to the United States. Speakers over the years have included President George W. Bush, Governor Howard Dean, chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Senator Mel Martinez. Four special awards are given at the breakfast to noted public advocates for the Latino/a community: the Esperanza Leadership Award; the Esperanza Partner; the Esperanza Spirit Award; and the Esperanza Advocate Award. —EDA

Democratic Party. In 2007, 43 percent of Latino/as considered themselves to be Democrats, 20 percent claimed to be Republican, and 20 percent said they were Independent (7 percent listed some other political affiliation). A gender gap seems to exist where Latinas tend to be more liberal and Democratic than their Latino counterparts. Overall, it appears that the Republican Party is making little inroad into the nonCuban Hispanic population. Still, it is important to note that while Democrats have maintained a two-to-one advantage since 1996, Republicans have been able to narrow that gap during the 2000 and 2004 presidential races and the 2006 midterm elections when Hispanics voting for Republicans ranged from 30 to 40 percent. Nevertheless, these inroads seem to have been dwarfed during the 2008 presidential election where

CNN exit polls showed 67 percent of Latino/as going for the Democratic candidate. When party affiliation was examined based on religious affiliation, the 2007 Pew study showed that Hispanic evangelicals are twice as likely to consider themselves Republican as Latina/o Catholics. Yet, when focus solely on the Hispanic Evangelical voter registration, Republicans hold no advantage when compared to non-Hispanic Evangelicals. Among Latina/o Evangelicals, 36 percent are registered with the Republican Party, the same number that is registered with the Democratic Party (19 percent are registered as Independent and 3 percent as other). Compare these figures with nonHispanic Evangelicals where 50 percent are registered as Republicans as opposed to 25 percent who are registered as Democrats (23 percent are registered as

U.S. Political Parties Independents). Puerto Rican Evangelicals run counter to this trend by favoring Democrats (52 percent) over Republicans (18 percent). Among Hispanic Catholic eligible voters, those who claim to be Democrats are three times greater than those who claim to be Republicans (48 percent to 17 percent). This holds true when we take into account ideology. While most Euro-American conservatives consider themselves Republican, Latino/a Catholic conservatives still prefer the Democratic Party (40 percent as opposed to 30 percent conservatives who prefer the Republicans). This is significant when we consider that the majority of the Hispanic electorate is Catholic (63 percent). In fact, 70 percent of all Latina/os who claim to be Democrats are Catholics. When eligible voters were asked during the Pew study as to which party could do a better job on a number of issues, the Democratic Party was overwhelmingly chosen over and against the Republicans with wide margins. These issues included: (1) dealing with the economy (49 percent to 29 percent); (2) improving the educational system (50 percent to 25 percent); (3) dealing with Iraq (48 percent to 26 percent); (4) immigration (49 percent to 22 percent); (5) improving the nation’s morality (46 percent to 28 percent); (6) protecting the environment (51 percent to 22 percent); and (7) protecting civil rights (55 percent to 21 percent). It is interesting to note that depending on the issue, 14 to 18 percent thought neither party would do a good job while 3 to 7 percent said either party could do a good job. The only exceptions where the Republican Party was deemed to do a better job than the Democrats by a slight majority was among Evangelical

| 563

when it came to improving the education system (40 percent to 38 percent), dealing with Iraq (40 percent to 36 percent), and improving the nation’s morality (42 percent to 36 percent). On protecting civil rights, the parties were tied with 39 percent each. One reason why the Democratic Party might have a stronger appeal among Hispanics could be the liberal economic issues with which Latina/os hold strong feelings. Although the religious beliefs of most Hispanics contribute toward a more conservative view on social issues, i.e., abortion (57 percent opposed) and gay marriage (56 percent opposed), they usually take a more liberal stance on economic issues. For example, 69 percent favor government-guaranteed health insurance, while 64 percent believe the poor live difficult lives because of a lack of governmental services. No doubt, the major political parties have taken great strides to reach out to the Latina/o voter. As more of the Latina/o population obtain citizenship, get older, and register to vote, their impact on who gets elected and who does not can become profound. Miguel A. De La Torre

References and Further Reading Geron, Kim, and Melissa R. Michelson. ‘‘Latino Partisanship, Political Activity and Vote Choice.’’ Latinas/os in the United States: Changing the Face of Ame´rica, ed. Havida´n Rodrı´guez, Rogelio Sa´enz, and Cecilia Menjı´var (New York: Springer, 2008). Pew Hispanic Center. Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007).

564 |

Universal Church of the Kingdom of God

UNIVERSAL CHURCH OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD Originally from Brazil, the University Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) is a neo-Pentecostal church emphasizing exorcism and prosperity theology and is the offspring of dissident movements within Pentecostal churches. Modeled on Messianic patterns, it has an entrepreneurial structure with a strong charismatic hero-impresario leader. A new offshoot of Pentecostalism concerned with divine healing has more recently emerged in the ‘‘religious supermarket’’ as an alternative to IndigenousCreole Pentecostalism. Exorcism and prosperity are its central elements. Energetic, charismatic leaders exhort huge gatherings and provide continuous worship services in old cinemas and auditoriums, open buildings in which the public meetings are conceived more as public spectacles than as community life and worship. The hymns, sermons, and exhortations are a kind of therapy for the suffering masses. When the leader comes on stage, enough enthusiasm has already been created to generate an almost hysterical explosion of emotion in the congregation. The pastor becomes a moral agent who brings a message of hope and stability. They enjoy messianic authority that extends to areas of life from the economic to the spiritual. Observers have noted that the flexible bond that results from these shared emotions demands little personal commitment and is a welcome alternative to the pain, needs, and conflicts that participants must confront daily. Faced with daily crises, people prefer a moment of ecstasy with this vibrant and untamed Jesus to the silence and existential vacuum of daily life.

From a doctrinal point of view, many prosperity neo-Pentecostals use the Bible as a fetish and a source of magical phrases as they perform exorcisms and divine healings. Rarely is the Bible actually studied, since the central acts of faith are healing and liberation, as well as thematic reflections with moralistic emphasis, more than biblical teaching. The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil is organized as a religious transnational enterprise and is by far the most successful divine healing prosperity movement coming from Latin America. The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, founded by Bishop Edir Macedo in 1979, developed its model of mission from different ecclesiological presuppositions, assuming some traditional Pentecostal doctrines and adding his own theological and doctrinal tenets, but rooted in divine healing and prosperity theology. Bishop Macedo started this movement with a small group of followers that every Saturday joined him in praising, Bible study, and prayers of intercession, particularly exorcisms to heal people possessed by evil spirits and negative forces. Soon the movement became an established congregation in Rio de Janeiro, planting new congregations in Sao Paulo and other states of Brazil. In the United States, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God has organized congregations in all major cities. In Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Orlando, they offer a multifaceted ministry with counseling (in some cities it is a 24-hour counseling service), healing (primarily exorcism sessions), education, and support to Latin American and Caribbean immigrants. The Hispanic population is the number one target in proselytism, offering recreational

Universal Church of the Kingdom of God activities for the youth and children. One area that is of primary importance is communication through newspapers, bulletins, Internet, radio, and television stations in Portuguese and Spanish. Two predominant themes are displayed in their temples: ‘‘Jesucristo es el Senor’’ (Jesus Christ is Lord) and ‘‘Pare de Sufrir’’ (Stop from Suffering). The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God reported that in 8 years 195 temples were built in 14 states of Brazil. By the end of 2006 they reported that the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God is established in more than 115 countries (Freston 2001, 198–203). Some of the doctrines preached and taught by the Universal Church of God are classical Pentecostal principles based on the foursquare gospel formula: Jesus saves, heals, baptizes, and will return. The distinctive emphases of the Universal Church are expressed in symbols and rituals, which include a black heart with a white hallow in the center, flowers, a glass of water (half empty to illustrate the need for Jesus’ healing touch toward completion), a Jewish menorah, and a cross. They emphasize that Holy Communion is a feast to celebrate a resurrected life in Christ, and they gather twice a month around the communion table, more frequently than classical Pentecostal churches. The teachings and exhortations stress that trusting in God requires a positive attitude, invoking that Jesus is Lord and the believer should accept the challenge to stop any suffering in daily life. Jesus Christ has come to offer abundant life and freedom from any bondage and promises to restore the life of the believer like it was in Paradise. The main emphasis of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God is on

| 565

building megachurches in urban areas, with an aggressive anti-Roman Catholic stance. Bishop Macedo is a hero-impresario figure more than an evangelist. His clientele is very diverse, including poor, middle, and uppermiddle classes. They run several social ministries, including crisis counseling and prayer 24 hours a day for persons in desperate need in many locations. The identity and mission of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God are conceived as a transnational religious enterprise with economic power, which includes the role of mass media in evangelism. As a result, they own radio and television networks, publish a national newspaper in Brazil, and encourage active political participation, including having their own political parties, developing their own political affiliations and coalitions, and electing representatives to Congress and other local and national positions. It is known that Bishop Edir Macedo is a personal friend of the president of Brazil, Jose Inacio Da Silva. Mission and unity in this church model are defined by a global expansive dimension in planting megachurches throughout the world. Carmelo E. A´lvarez

References and Further Reading Corten, Andre´, and Ruth Marshall-Fratani, eds. Between Babel and Pentecost: Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Freston, Paul. ‘‘The Transnationalisation of Brazilian Pentecostalism: The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.’’ Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America,

566 |

Universal Church of the Kingdom of God

ed. Andre´ Corten and Ruth MarshallFratani (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001). Mattos, Paulo Ayres. ‘‘An Introduction to the Theology of Bishop Edir Macedo

(Universal Church of the Kingdom of God): A Case Study of a New Brazilian Pentecostal Church’’ (MST thesis, Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, 2002).

V and Latin America, and in conclusion, we will consider Latino/a Marianism in the United States.

VIRGIN MARY Mary enters into the faith of the Church through the act of giving birth to Jesus of Nazareth. This single event has given rise to countless studies of Mariology and innumerous Marian devotional practices, shrines, titles, and images. Mary or Marı´a, as most Latino/as call her, is many things to many Christians: she is Jesus’ mother, Theotokos, mother of the Church, spouse of the Holy Spirit, daughter of the Father, God’s handmaiden, the new Eve, our sister in faith, and the first disciple, to name a few. Veneration or respect for the Blessed Virgin Mary goes back to the early Christian community and can be found in different Christian churches around the world today. For this reason, before focusing on Marı´a among Latino/as, we will take a brief look at the history of Marian devotion in Christianity, the official doctrines about Mary promulgated by Roman Catholicism. Then we will consider Marı´a in the context of Latino/a matriarchy, the Marian patronesses of Spain

Short History of Marian Devotion Mary is only directly mentioned 12 times in the New Testament (Galatians 4:4–5; Mark 3:31–35; 6:2–3; Matthew 1:16– 25; 12:46–50; Luke 1:26–56; 2:4–33, 41–52; 8:19–21; Acts 1:14; John 2:1– 12; 19:26–27) and is alluded to, according to some scholars, once (Revelation 12:1–6). Paul mentions her once as the nameless woman who birthed Jesus, the Synoptic writers give us her name, and Luke raises her to the status of one of the valiant women of the Old Testament. John refers to her as the nameless mother of the Lord, who has some influence on her son and seemingly symbolizes the Church. The New Testament teaches that Mary is Jesus’ mother. When paired with the Old Testament, Patristic writers found several themes that are part and parcel 567

568 |

Virgin Mary

of Christian Marian titles, roles, and doctrines that still influence how Latino/as relate to Mary in the United States. These are focused on Mary’s unique relationship to Christ (Christocentric) and on Mary as the best example of what the Church should be (Ecclesiotypical). In her Christocentric dimension, Mary is seen as the daughter of David from whose lineage Jesus comes, bride, sister, and mother of Christ in faith, and Christ’s queen mother. Ecclesiotypically, Mary is seen as God’s handmaiden, the perfect disciple, the new Eve in relationship to the new Adam, the daughter of the Father, the mother of the Son, and the spouse of the Holy Spirit. New Testament Mariology fed the early Christian consideration of Mary as the type of the Church. The ChurchMary parallel developed out of the concept of Christ, Jesus as the new Adam; the Church-Mary is the new Eve. The Patristic writers’ main interest in Mary seems to have been concerned with her role in salvation history, a role that is extended to the Church. Considerations of her individualized and singular role are few in the Patristic period. Problems arise when Mary is separated from the Church-Mary parallel. These are centered on maximalist (high) and minimalist (low) Mariologies. In the fourth century, for example, Epiphanius (315–403), Bishop of Cyprus, had to condemn the Collyridians who worshipped her as a goddess. In some extreme cases the maximalist Collyridianism even portrayed Mary as part of the Godhead. Epiphanius also denounced the minimalist Antidicomarianites (opponents of Mary) who saw her as no more than a woman, a vessel from which Jesus came. The leaders of these Christian groups held that Jesus was the son

of Joseph and Mary and not the product of a virgin birth. They eventually modified this position to belief in the virgin birth of Jesus, but not Mary’s perpetual virginity. When we look at the relationship that U.S. Hispanic and Latin American Christians have with Marı´a, we can see two extremes are still present in the Church. Some Christians exaggerate her importance, coming dangerously close to the point of worship, while other Christians seem to almost despise her. We need to remember that Bishop Epiphanius censured both the Antidicomarianites who refused to honor Mary and the Collyridians who idolatrized her. His orthodox position was that Mary should be held in honor, but only the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit should be worshiped and adored. This is still the position expressed in Roman Catholic and Orthodox teachings about Mary today.

Marian Doctrines and Dogmas Good Mariology follows good Christology, and anything we say about Mary is ultimately Christocentric and Ecclesiotypical. Over the centuries four principal beliefs have developed regarding Mary: her Divine Maternity, Perpetual Virginity, Immaculate Conception, and Assumption. These are especially important for the Latino/a and Latin American understanding of Marı´a. The dogma of Mary’s Divine Maternity emphasizes that she is the Mother of the Second Person of the Trinity. However, rather than focus on her virginity, this doctrine is meant to highlight the divine nature of Jesus. The Council of Ephesus (431) while discussing the undivided humanity and divinity of Jesus declared that Mary is more than just

Virgin Mary Christokos (Christ-bearer), she is Theotokos (God-bearer). The title ‘‘Theotokos’’ or ‘‘Mother of God’’ affirms that just as all human mothers give birth not only to the body of their child but to the whole person, so too Mary gave birth to the person, Jesus Christ, who is both human and divine. Mary’s Perpetual Virginity has never officially been proclaimed a dogma. Rather, it seems to be a product of the sensus fidelium (consensus of the faithful) by which popular religiosity affirms a general Christian belief. In the case of Mary’s Perpetual Virginity, Christians affirmed belief in Mary’s virginal birth of Jesus, which slowly turned into belief in her having kept her virginity throughout her life. By the fourth century this popular notion had become so widespread that it made its way into official Church documents as a given. Comparing her to the Ark of the Covenant, Mary is seen as the Ark of the new Covenant in Christ. It is not fitting that her womb would have carried anyone but God. The doctrine of Mary’s Perpetual Virginity is also tied to the devotion that sees her as the New Eve, reflecting on Paul’s image of Jesus as the New Adam. Patristic writers recalled that Adam did not bring sin into the world by himself. The virgin Eve also had a definite role in original sin and the fall. Just as the virgin Eve’s disobedience paved the way for Adam to sin, the Virgin Mary’s obedience made it possible for the Incarnation of the New Adam. The first Eve brought the stain of original sin unto the human soul and the New Eve was made immaculate so that the New Adam could render the faithful immaculate once again. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary is probably the most

| 569

misunderstood dogma about Mary. People often believe that the dogma is meant to proclaim that Mary did not have sexual intercourse to conceive Jesus. And, although the dogma is ultimately about Jesus, it is not about his virgin birth. It is about the strength of his saving grace. The dogma as explained by the Franciscan John Duns Scotus proclaims that in view of the merits of Christ’s salvific action, God kept Mary free of the stain of original sin in order that he be born of her. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is closely tied to the devotion of Mary’s Immaculate Heart, a devotion that can be traced back to the Cistercians of the twelfth century. Scripturally based on Mary’s pondering the events of her Son’s life in her heart (Luke 2:19, 51), this devotion received greater attention only after Mary’s apparition to Catherine Laboure of France in 1830 and three Portuguese children, Jacinta, Francisco, and Lucia in Fatima (1917). It is not unusual in Latino/a homes to find this image of Mary’s burning heart pierced by a sword hanging alongside an image of Jesus’ Sacred Heart. The image is meant to promote love of purity, fervor in living the Gospel, and greater apostolic zeal. While the dogma of Mary’s Assumption into heaven was promulgated in the middle of the twentieth century, secondcentury Christians already held that her beloved Son took Mary, body, soul, and spirit into heaven. This doctrine plays on the love a child has for his mother and the divine power of the Son of God. Mary is given a foretaste of the resurrection and glorification in which all the faithful are meant to share. The Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century held Mary’s perpetual virginity, immaculate nature, and the

570 |

Virgin Mary

COATLAXOPEUH Coatlaxopeuh, pronounced quatlashupe, is a composite of coatl (serpent), tla (the), and xopeuh (to crush, step on, stamp out). It is the title by which the Virgin Mary referred to herself on the hill of Tepeyac outside Mexico City in December 1531. By it she proclaims herself as ‘‘she who crushes or dominates the serpent.’’ To the Spanish Christian mind of the late Middle Ages, this seems to be a reference to Genesis 3:15, which in the Vulgate had been mistranslated as ‘‘she (ipsa) shall crush your (snake) head,’’ rather than he (ipsum) referring to the woman’s offspring. To the Nahuatl mind it seems to be a reference to the goddess Coatlicue (skirt of serpents) who as Tonantzin (our mother) used to appear on Tepeyac and who is the virgin mother of the god Quetzalcoatl (feathered serpent) whose return they awaited. Bishop Zumarraga believed that Coatlaxopeuh was a mispronunciation of Guadalupe, a title by which Mary was revered in Extremadura, Spain. As a result, Our Lady of Tepeyac is universally recognized as Guadalupe. It is only recently that many are reclaiming her original title ‘‘Coatlaxopueh’’ as a means of promoting Latina/o identity and as a symbol for Latina feminism. —GCG

virginal conception of Jesus as being among the great deeds God has done for her (Luke 1:49). Yet, a seemingly antiMarian position grew in Protestantism in the post-Reformation period as Marian devotion became a sign of Catholic Orthodoxy in the face of Protestant polemics. Protestant insistence on Scripture alone slowly relegated Mary to the remembrance of Christ’s nativity. In the centuries that followed while the Catholics encouraged the development of Marian devotion, Protestants all but ignored her. The last quarter of the twentieth century marked an increase of Protestant interest in Mary. Catholic Marian congresses and conferences chose to invite the participation of Orthodox and Protestant theologians in the hope of finding a common ground for healthy Marianism. All Christians are again looking at the Marian doctrines and dogmas developed during the first 1,500 years of Christian history. For the Latin American Church,

this is important because they give U.S. Latino/as many of the Marian images of the past 500 years. These images are of a mother who is seen as providing help in defining the identity of mainly Catholic Christians, and through her Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) move the Hispanic community toward liberation.

Four Mothers of Latin America It has been said that Latino/as are the children of four mothers: la Violada (raped woman), la Llorona, (weeping woman), la Guadalupana (Marı´a), and la Soldadera (soldier woman). In her book Madres y huachos, Sonia Montecino talks about Latin Americans as the mestizo children of a Spanish father and an indigenous mother. This hybrid identity born of the clash of two civilizations was not readily accepted by either culture. When the Europeans conquered America, they often raped the native

Virgin Mary women, leaving them pregnant with unwanted mestizo (mixed blood) children. Often times, they tricked native women into becoming their concubines, by promising a better life in Europe. Often they abandoned these women, and many of them in desperation and grief tried to kill their mestizo children, giving rise to the legend of la Llorona. Many Latino/as believe that it was into a panorama of violence and despair that the Virgin Mother of God came in 1531 on the hill of Tepeyac. Many of the Spanish wanted to go home. The native people wanted to die. The new mestizo race was unwanted. In this context Marı´a appeared to the native Juan Diego as a mestizo woman who sent him to the Spanish bishop. The Guadalupe event gave all three people, the native, the mestizo, and even the Spaniard a chance at rebirth in Christ. Marı´a, Nuestra Sen˜ora (Our Lady), is the third mother who, according to Montecino, becomes the great icon and myth of Latin Ame´ rica. It is she who gave meaning to mestizo reality, taking the bastard and vanquished children of the Spanish invasion and making them children of God. In this way Marı´a, who is both Virgin and Mother, becomes the primary feminine figure of Latin Ame´rica. The fourth mother is la Soldadera who cries out for justice in lands where the children of God are being oppressed. She is the mother who inspires her children in the search for liberation. Even here Marı´a can be found as patroness of many Latin American independence movements and liberation spiritualities from the Mexican revolution to Ce´ sar Cha´vez’s farmworker’s movement, from the Madre de los Desaparecidos (Mother of the Disappeared) to the contemporary call for immigration reform.

| 571

Marian Patronesses of Latin America In 1847, the Roman Curia officially consecrated the United States to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. U.S. Hispanics, however, continue their Marian devotion to the patronesses of their countries of origin. This is especially true of Cubans and Mexicans who have had their patronesses enshrined in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. Before considering Latina/o Marianism, it is important to become familiar with the various titles of Mary in Latin America and Spain. The various titles and invocations of Mary revered by different nations have a common heritage and theology. Argentina: May 8 Nuestra Sen˜ ora de Lujan originally belonged to an Argentinean matron, Don˜a Ana Mattos de Siqueyras. In 1674, she had a chapel built for the reportedly miraculous statue of Marı´a. However, the following day the image had made its way back to the hermitage of an African slave named Manuel, preferring to be with the humble. This happened several times before Don˜ a Ana opened the chapel to the public and invited Manuel to be its caretaker. Bolivia: August 5 La Virgen de Copacabana is the patroness of Bolivia. Her image was sculpted by Francisco Tito Yupanqui, a descendant of Inca royalty. Francisco learned how to sculpt in Mexico and practiced his art for many years before he attempted to sculpt an image of Marı´a for his town of Copacabana. He did so in 1583 only after praying to the Most Holy Trinity in order that God might guide

572 |

Virgin Mary

him in his efforts to honor Jesus’ mother. Quechua and Ahimara natives call her La Coyeta. Her shrine is one of the oldest in Ame´rica. Brazil: May 11 The patroness of Brazil was discovered in 1716 by three fishermen who caught her image in their nets in the Paraiba River. The 36 centimeter image had been in the water for a long time and had attained the dark color of many Latin Americans. For this reason the Brazilians have taken her as their patroness, giving her the name of Aparecida, which can mean ‘‘she who appears’’ or ‘‘she who looks like us.’’ Chile: July 16 The Chilean people honor the patroness of the Carmelite Friars, Nuestra Sen˜ora del Carmen (Mount Carmel) as Maipu´. According to tradition, she gave the Carmelite General Simon Stock a scapular with the promise that whoever dies wearing the scapular will go directly to heaven. As a result, the Virgen del Carmen is the patroness of all those who have dangerous jobs, like soldiers, sailors, firefighters, and the police. Colombia: July 9 Nuestra Sen˜ ora de Chiquinquira´ , patroness of Colombia is called la Chinita by her devotees. Painted by Alonso de Narvaez, it is an image of Our Lady of the Rosary holding the child Jesus and standing between Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Mark the Apostle. Don˜a Marı´a de Sevilla inherited it from her brother Antonio and, although dark and ruined, she placed it in her private chapel in Chiquinquira´. In 1586, a native woman and her son saw a glow coming from the faces of Jesus and Marı´a. They called Don˜a Marı´a, who came to the chapel in

time to see the image restore itself with vivid color and brilliancy. Costa Rica: August 2 ´ ngeles (Saint Santa Marı´a de los A Mary of the Angels), patroness of Costa Rica, is said to have been found on August 2 by the mestiza Juana Pereira. The 7.5 centimeter image called ‘‘la Negrita’’ (dear Black woman) kept returning to the place where it was found, so her Church was built there. She is officially named after the patroness of the Franciscans. Francis of Assisi had given birth to his family at the chapel of the Portiuncula dedicated to Mary of the Angels just outside of Assisi. Cuba: September 8 Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Caridad (Charity) was discovered floating at sea by two indigenous youth and an African child in 1600. They are known as los tres Juanes (the three Johns). The image of Marı´a and her child was miraculously dry. She is dressed in a triangular shaped cape that is common to many Marian images in Latin America. Also known as la Virgen del Cobre and Chachita, she has been Cuba’s patroness for almost a century. Dominican Republic: January 21 In 1502, Friar Nicola´s de Ovando and 11 other friars were sent by the Spanish king to the Dominican Republic to convert the natives ‘‘without doing them harm.’’ The missionaries brought with them a painting of Marı´a looking at her child in the hay entitled Our Lady of Altagracia (Highest Grace). John Paul II crowned her as the first Evangelizer of America in 1979. El Salvador: November 21 In 1682, some businessmen found an abandoned box on the beach in El

Virgin Mary Salvador. Unable to open it, they put in on their mule’s back and took it to town. As it passed the Church, the mule stopped and the box opened revealing a statue of Marı´a. She came to be known as the Virgen de la Paz (Virgin of Peace) because her first miracle was to reconcile warring factions in El Salvador. For this reason, she holds a palm frond in her hand. Ecuador: November 21 Nuestra Sen˜ora del Quinche was originally painted in 1589 for those colonizing Ecuador. However, when they could not pay for it, the artist Diego de Robles sold it to the Oyacachis. These natives recognized it as a painting of a woman who had rescued some of their children from ferocious bears. By 1604, the Oyacachis had been Christianized, and they gave the image to the bishop of Quinche. She is called ‘‘la pequen˜ita’’ (the little one) by her devotees. Guatemala: October 7 In 1592, a Dominican friar had an image of la Virgen del Rosario made. With the growing interest in the Rosary, this image became an important one in the region. In 1821, the Guatemalan independence movement took her as their protectress. Catholic devotion to Marı´a is often tied to the Rosary. Popular legend attributes it to the thirteenthcentury Spaniard Domingo de Guzman. He and other mendicant friars seem to have had some input in the development of the use of prayer beads by lay people to pray 150 Our Fathers in place of the 150 psalms. However, the Rosary in its present form can only be traced back to 1569 when it was promoted by Pope Pius V as a useful instrument for all Christians to meditate on the mysteries of Christ’s joyful incarnation, sorrowful

| 573

passion, and glorious resurrection. It was then that the Hail Mary also took its present form. Honduras: February 3 Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Concepcio´n de Suyapa (Our Lady of the Conception of Suyapa) commemorates a small wooden image found by a young worker, Alejandro Colindres, and the child Jorge Martı´nez when they stopped to rest for the night. The 6.5 centimeter image portrays Marı´a with the face of a native woman. Her temple was built in 1780, and she was declared patroness of Honduras by Pius XII in 1925. Mexico: December 12 In 1531, Mary appeared as a mestizo woman to the native convert Juan Diego at Tepeyac. In response to Bishop Zumarraga’s request for a sign, she left behind a miraculous image filled with Nahuatl and European symbolism. The Story of Guadalupe is that of flor y canto (flower and song), which the Nahuatl tribes prized as beauty and truth. She referred to herself as Coatlalopeuh (she who crushes serpents), which sounded like ‘‘Guadalupe’’ to the Spanish Franciscans. The original Guadalupe is named after a dark statue of the Madonna and Child carved by Saint Luke and found by the Guadalupe River in Extremadura, Spain. The first Franciscan missionaries that came to America were from that region. A shrine was built on Tepeyac for the new Guadalupe and, in 1945, Pius XII declared her the ‘‘Empress of America.’’ Nicaragua: December 8 The Virgen del Viejo (Virgin of the Old Man) honors an image that once belonged to an old hermit who was traveling with a group of sailors, when their boat refused to go any further. The sailors

574 |

Virgin Mary

made him get off the boat and take his image with him. Only then could they continue their journey and la Virgen del Viejo arrived in Nicaragua. The Viejo in question was probably Francisco de Ahu´ vila, who mada, brother to Teresa de A brought three images of Marı´a to the missionaries in Guatemala, Peru´ , and Nicaragua in 1562 as a means of encouraging the evangelization of Ame´rica. Panama: December 8 Panama does not have a national patroness, but it does celebrate the Solemnity of her Immaculate Conception as a national holiday. The lack of a national patroness has led to holding various images of Marı´a in high esteem. The more popular of these is Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Antigua. This painting of the Madonna and Child is in the Church of Chirivi, Tunja, and has had a large following since 1691. Paraguay: December 8 Nuestra Sen˜ ora de Caacupe, also known as La Virgen de los Milagros (Miracles) was carved by a Guarani Christian who implored Maria’s intercession for protection from nonconverted natives who were chasing him. In gratitude for his safety, he carved two images of Marı´a from the tree trunk that had hidden him. The larger one (50 centimeters) was donated to the church of Tobati. She is also known as La Virgen Azul (Blue Virgin) de Paraguay because she wears a blue cloak over a white tunic. Peru: September 24 The Mercedarian Friars built the first Christian church in Lima, Peru. They dedicated it to their patroness, the Virgen de la Merced (Mercy). The Mercedarians were founded in the thirteenth century to buy freedom for slaves or offer to take their place. For this reason the Virgen de

la Merced is often depicted with bags of money. She is also depicted with broken chains, indicating the desire for liberation that is part and parcel of oppressed and marginalized peoples. In 1730, the Peruvians took her as their patroness. Puerto Rico: November 19 In 1969, on the anniversary of Puerto Rico’s discovery by Europeans, Paul VI declared Nuestra Sen˜ ora Madre de la Divina Providencia (Mother of Divine Providence) as patroness of the Island. La Providencia is an image of Marı´a sitting down with the child Jesus asleep on her lap and was first brought to the Island by Bishop Gil Esteve y Toma´s in 1851. Spain: October 12 On October 12, when Latino/as commemorate el Dı´a de la Raza (Day of the People), Spaniards are celebrating Santa Marı´a del Pilar, Marı´a’s oldest known apparition. It is believed that before her assumption, she made an appearance to the Apostle James (Santiago) in Zaragosa, Spain. She wanted to encourage him not to give up on the people living on the Iberian peninsular. She gave him a small image of herself with the child Jesus standing atop a pillar. Pope Clement XII declared October 12 her feast day in remembrance of the Christianized Hispanic arrival in America. Spain (Extremadura): September 8 Although this image is not a national patroness, she is of special importance to Latino/a Marianism. She gave her name to Marı´a de Tepeyac and her dark skin paves the way for the dark and mestizo images of Marı´a venerated by many Latino/as. Her shrine is in the town of Ca´ceres by the Guadalupe River where the image was found in 1326. Documentation found with this dark image of Mary and the child Jesus states that Saint

Virgin Mary Luke carved the evangelist. Through a series of events, the image ended up in Sevilla, Spain, in the latter half of the sixth century. In 711, Christians buried Luke’s image of the Madonna and Child near the Guadalupe River to protect it from the Moors. It lay hidden for over 600 years until the Virgin Mary revealed its location to Gil Cordero. Uruguay: November 4 La Virgen de los Treinta y Tres (of the 33) is a 36-centimeter wood carving of Marı´a. This originally Jesuit image wears a rather large crown, which was given to the statue by a military general in honor of Uruguay’s independence. She is named after the 33 people who took charge of the war of independence in the early 1800s. In 1962, John XXIII named her patroness of Uruguay. Venezuela: September 8 Nuestra Sen˜ ora de Coromoto represents an apparition of Mary to the Cacique natives. The Caciques resisted the evangelization efforts of the missionaries, until Mary appeared to them on the water and invited them to receive baptism. When the Cacique chief continued to resist conversion, she appeared to him in his hut. It is said that he went after her, and when he grabbed her, she disappeared and he found a holy card of her holding Jesus on her lap in his hand. Pius XII named her patroness of Venezuela in 1944.

U.S. Hispanic Marianism After the crucified Christ, the image of Marı´a is the single most important religious symbol among U.S. Hispanics. Among Latino/as, however, Marı´a is never just Mary, she is la madre (the

| 575

mother), madre of Jesus, and madre of Hispanics. This is especially important to people who have had to leave their mothers behind in countries south of the border. For many, la madre is Guadalupe. In the United States, Guadalupe is such a strong cultural symbol among Mexican Americans and other Latino/as that many wanting to reach out to Latino/as are learning to appreciate her importance. Guadalupe/Mary is being considered as helpful to Protestant pastoral ministry and to Hispanic women’s liberation. These new considerations are built upon and different from Roman Catholic considerations of Guadalupe/ Mary. Marian devotion is common among most Roman Catholic cultural groups, but in Latino/as, this devotion is closely tied to cultural self-identity. This is especially true of Guadalupe and Mexican identity on both sides of the Rio Grande. In the United States, roughly three out of every five Latina/os are of Mexican origin. This fact, plus the Catholic Church’s making Guadalupe the Empress of America has its ramifications on overall Latina/o Marian devotions. The story of the Guadalupan event at Tepeyac seems to be the glue that holds Latino/as of various countries of origin together. In the Mexican mind-set, she came to a land of desolation where death seemed to reign supreme and brought new life. Mexican American devotion to Guadalupe does not look any different than Mexican devotion does. What is different is Mexican American theological reflection on Guadalupe. Thanks to the work of Virgilio Elizondo, Latino/a theologians begin their considerations of Marı´a, especially Guadalupe with

576 |

Virgin Mary

contextualization. The image of Guadalupe that reigns supreme in the popular heart is being considered in its historical and mariological contexts. U.S. Hispanic contribution to Mariology is Mary’s option for the poor, and her assistance in the work of evangelization. In Guadalupe of Tepeyac, these two things translate as the dignity of the mestizo and the importance of inculturation to the spread of the Gospel. In Guadalupe, Hispanic theologians find a locus for theological reflection on the new mestizaje continuing among the various generations of Latina/os in the United States. Contextualized studies of the Guadalupan event reveal inculturation as an essential means of evangelization. The contextualized study of the Marı´a at Tepeyac has also led theologians to consider Guadalupe a theophany, which is to say a manifestation of God. In Guadalupe, God has revealed God’s self as one who loves the marginalized and oppressed and gives them the dignity of the children of God. Both Latin American and U.S. Hispanic theologians are reconsidering the importance of Mary to our understanding of God and especially of the Holy Spirit. Once again Mary’s role as model of the Church is being underscored. She is the model of what it means to be a disciple: children of the Father, mothers, brothers, and sisters of the Son, and spouses of the Holy Spirit. A revisiting of the Lucan Mary reveals a woman in whom the Spirit is at work, a woman who prays and takes action. In both Guadalupe and Luke’s Mary, Marianism can be purged of the use of humility and docility to keep women ‘‘in their place.’’ Latino/a theologians are discovering that Marianism can and must be liberating if it is to be Spirit filled.

Conclusion A popular Spanish hymn, ‘‘Santa Marı´a del Camino’’ (Saint Mary of the Journey) written in the latter half of the twentieth century puts it very well when it requests ‘‘Ven con nosotros al caminar; Santa Marı´a ven’’ (Come and walk with us; Saint Mary come). The song virtually removes Mary from an altar requesting her presence in the lucha cotidiana (everyday struggle) for a better world. U.S. Hispanic Marian devotion continues to have the trappings of traditional Marianism: the Rosary, interest in Marian apparitions, and turning to Mary as mother. At the same time, advances in a more liberating understanding of Mary/Guadalupe are beginning to show themselves in popular religiosity as U.S. Hispanic theology reflects on Marı´a’s importance to mestizaje, inculturation, our understanding of the Holy Spirit, Christian discipleship, and the work of liberation. Gilberto Cavazos-Gonza´lez

References and Further Reading Alvarez del Real, Marı´a Eloı´sa. Santuarios de la Virgen Marı´a, Apariciones y Advocaciones (Panama´: Editorial Ame´rica, S.A., 1990). Elizondo, Virgilio. Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). Gasventa, Beverly Roberts, and Cynthia L. Rigby. Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002). Lozano-Dı´az, Nora. ‘‘Ignored Virgen or Unaware Women: A Mexican-American Protestant Reflection on the Virgen of Guadalupe.’’ A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religio´n and Justice, ed. Marı´a

Voodoo Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodriguez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). Montecino, Sonia. Madres y huachos. Alegorı´as del mestizaje Chileno [4ed.] (Santiago: Catalonia Editorial, 2007). Pelikan, Jaroslav. Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

VOODOO The belief known as Vodou in Haiti is called Voodoo in Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Originally it was a religion that slaves brought from West Africa. In Haiti, Vodou encountered the Roman Catholic Church, which was part of the colonial structure. In the southeastern United States it was Christian mysticism and folk religion combined with religious practices and beliefs from West Africa that created Hudu or Hoodoo. Hoodoo evolved into a system of magic, herbalism, divination and sorcery, to become more than just an organized religious ritual. Vodou in Haiti, as well as Santerı´a in Cuba, were influenced by the Roman Catholicism brought by the conquistadores to the Caribbean. The Spanish Reconquista of the fifteenth century was strongly shaped by a crusading spirit in European Catholicism. A dominant factor in Spain was a folk Catholicism influenced by local religious beliefs. Vodou in Haiti encountered a French Catholicism that was also an integral part of the colonial system. Through interaction and transformation, Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santerı´a became hybrid religious systems with their own unique rituals, dynamics, and energies, while preserving some of the sacramental and ritualistic

| 577

dimensions of European Catholicism. The core of their African religious heritage, common to both, was the Yoruba religion. At the heart of their sacrificial, cosmological, spiritual, and ethical principles, they experience a deep sense of the divine in daily life. With these principles, Cubans and Haitians in exile maintain a religious and cultural identity that survives in the challenging realities of people in diaspora, particularly in the United States. Haitian Vodou developed into a dynamic belief system incorporating and integrating new elements, forming a new synthesis with its own emphasis and rituals. It maintained the core of African beliefs, which consisted of spiritual forces in the universe and how these forces are present both in creation and in human life. God as creator is at the center of the cosmos (Le Bon Die) and the voduns (spirits) are manifestations of the divine in earthly situations. There is a strong oral tradition based in faith stories and myths shared from generation to generation intended to honor deities and venerate the ancestors. What is considered today as the Caribbean is the by-product of a colonial enterprise in which slavery and plantation economy (primarily cane sugar), as well as race and class within Creole culture and institutions, forged a Caribbean identity. A major component of that identity is African, introduced to the Caribbean in the seventeenth century via the slave system. An African labor force was created to work the new sugar plantations. The Portuguese established a slave-trading system with Spain and England to bring slaves from Guinea to islands throughout the Caribbean, including Hispaniola. The colonizers and the soon-to-be colonized started a complex

578 |

Voodoo

process in the formation (mestizaje) of new racial, social, ethnic, religious, and cultural entities. The slave trade and the slave-trade system lasted two centuries, deepening both the political and the economic domination in a colonial society. One of the most important aspects of Afro-Caribbean religions is the faith of a people expressed in popular religiosity that is as complex and diverse as colonial domination itself. On each Caribbean island, religion plays a dominant role. The most dominant Afro-Caribbean religious movements were Santerı´a in Cuba and Vodou in Haiti, the latter being influenced by Rastafarianism, a twentiethcentury religious movement founded in Jamaica. These religious movements show a strong element of religious, cultural, and anthropological integration, a distinctive worldview from African religion, and a resistance to colonial domination. Vodou developed and adapted as part of the liberating process toward independence in Haiti, becoming the religion of former slaves. One key element is that the followers of Vodou were open to innovation and adaptation in an increasing process of synthesis more than syncretism. The interaction between Dahomean spirits and Roman Catholic saints developed new rituals where people’s daily experience of the divine was accomplished through dance, symbols, herbs, sacrifices, and customs. These new rituals and ceremonies were highly influenced by components from the Igbo and Yoruba of Nigeria, and the Bakongo of Central Africa. Even Islamic elements influenced the development of these new expressions of worship. Also, the original occupants of the Caribbean—the Taı´no and Arawak Indians—who venerated their own deities were influential in

the formation of Haitian Vodou. The Kongo component or Kongo rite or Lemba was influential in the northern part of Haiti, while in the southern Haiti the Kongo influence called Petro was more influential. Vodou is a cultural event as much as it is a religious ceremony. It integrates ethical values and a deep reverence for life, emphasizing honor and respect for God, the spirits, family, society, and one’s self. The metaphor of the extended family can be applied to a Vodou house or society that is organized as an independent unit, but many times interacts with other societies. The basic beliefs of Vodou include the centrality of the houmfort (temple) and the key role played by religious leaders, specifically the houngan (man) and the mambo (woman) who are invested with authority and divine knowledge. The houngan and the mambo are healers with knowledge of herbs and are able to identify diseases and natural medicines that might be applied to specific illnesses. It includes some basic knowledge of human behavior and the role of the community in the healing process. The lay people bring offerings from nature, including the sacrifice of chickens, goats, or bullocks. Human sacrifice was never part of these ceremonies. As papa (houngan) and mama (mambo), they mediate with the loas or spirits, the gods, and the departed ancestors. These loas are protectors of the communities, receiving the devotion and veneration of believers. The zaka and the guede (divinities) are invoked in the rada ceremony, inducing the possession of spirits, thus revealing the spiritual energy of the loas. The spirits are divided into two categories, hot and cool. The cool spirits are under the Rada category and are congenial and benevolent, while the

Voodoo hot Petro spirits are restless and more aggressive. Their character and behavior is not determined to be good or evil. Every believer has an asiento or ‘‘owner of their head’’ who can possess the devotee. The believer can experience these possessions by dancing, wheeling, or leaping. The hope of the possessed is receiving a blessing. The songs and prayers are important elements in the liturgy, complemented with offerings to the loas, praising and honoring them and invoking their manifestation. As the songs continue, the spirits manifest themselves in the dancing individuals who are expecting divine visitation. These spirits act and speak through the one possessed. The ultimate goal of the Vodouisant (believer) is to seek harmony with nature, family life, personal relationships, and the community. Haitian Vodou provided the roots of resistance to former slaves, the hope for a better future to the Haitian people in building the first African republic in the world (1804), the capacity to dream and struggle for justice to African American ex-slaves in southeastern United States, and spiritual energy and inspiration to the Haitian Diaspora in many parts of the United States. As a religion and cultural expression, Vodou was an integral part of the Haitian population and its colonial heritage. For centuries it operated as a quasi-clandestine practice of the slaves, a faith to resist the oppression and economic exploitation of a brutal slave system. When the independence movement succeeded in establishing a new republic, Vodou continued to be a major force in the spiritual experience of Haitians and a cultural component in the configuration of a new nationality. Franc¸ ois Duvalier (1957–1971), a strong man who knew very well the

| 579

history of oppression and successive dictatorships in the country, was able to establish a regime in which Vodou played a central role. Duvalier, an astute medical doctor who developed a close relationship with the peasants and studied closely their daily experiences, was able to discern that voodoo was a predominant force both culturally and religiously. He manipulated this experience and combined it with a paternalistic authority expressed in a dictatorial and brutal regime. He became an open believer of Vodou and related to Vodou practices and houngans. He created an intelligence network in which many of these houngans became torturers and informants in what was known as the tonton makouts. Many stories were told about his private practice of magic and sorcery. Duvalier was the president that really put together recognition of Vodou as the dominant religion and a religious experience manipulated for political purposes. He also confronted the Catholic Church, and he humiliated the French clergy by deportation or repression and silence. For centuries the Catholic Church in Haiti assumed an ambiguous position with regard to voodoo. Many bishops considered Vodou a religion of obscurantism and barbarism, plagued with superstitions and demonic spirits. Very few priests make a serious attempt to discern the meaning and place of voodoo in Haitian history, culture, and society. More recently, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest elected president of the country, tried to reverse the traditional attitude of the Catholic Church by promising to officially recognize Vodou as a national religious movement, donating land to build temples, and asking Vodou leaders to help in national reconciliation

580 |

Voodoo

Preparation for a voodoo ceremony in Brooklyn, New York. (Marc Asnin/Corbis Saba)

toward the much needed end to violence in Haitian society. Aristide was also reversing the paternalistic attitude and manipulation observed by Franc¸ ois Duvalier in the late 1950s. The Protestant movements in the Caribbean played an ambiguous role with regard to the religious experiences of the slaves, and particularly that of Vodou. Vodou was often viewed with suspicion as an expression of heathen and infidel people in need of the enlightened and civilizing values of the Protestant faith. In recent decades, neo-Pentecostal and charismatic groups from the United States and Europe have insisted on a prosperity theology and a gospel of success that see Vodou religion as alienating and retrograde. An aggressive evangelistic effort by conservative evangelicals, aiming at converting vodouisants to their brand of Christianity, is extending its influence both in Haiti and among Haitians

in the Diaspora. Haitian Vodou continues to play a central role in that society. It continues to be a source of hope and resistance in the midst of instability and uncertainty. Haitian Vodou was officially recognized in 2003. It has shown a capacity to survive in a continuous process of adaptation to the political, cultural, social, and spiritual challenges in a country torn apart by violence, political turmoil, and extreme poverty. Nonetheless, many Haitians migrated to other parts of the Caribbean, and particularly to the United States. They risk their lives in search of better living conditions and a better future for their families. And they bring their Vodou faith with them. The faith was established in Chicago, Miami, New York, and other major cities in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of the waves of Haitian immigrants coming to the United States. The story of Mama Lola, a

Voodoo Haitian Vodou priestess in Brooklyn, New York, and her family as immigrants in the United States, their struggles and sufferings, is a good example of Haitian Diaspora and the role of Vodou in their lives. A strong presence at the beginning of the twentieth century of Haitian Vodou in Cuba interacted with Santerı´a and its Yoruba heritage, allowing for the adoption of new loas to their system, including the formation of ogunismo, a variant of Haitian Vodou in Cuba. One important dimension of Haitian Vodou and its influence needs to be assessed with regard to the religious culture of the Haitian people. Many autochthonous religious groups, including those Evangelical and Protestant churches planted initially by missionaries from the United States, Canada, and Europe, received the impact and incorporated in their worship dances, symbols, and selective practices inherited from Vodou. Today, Haitian Vodou, and vodouisants in the Diaspora in other countries, is challenged by the changing face of the Caribbean, and particularly in Haiti, in the context of a globalized world in which religious experience is affected by an expansive religious market competing for the lives and loyalty of traditional religious believers. All religious movements are influenced by this global economy. All religious experiences are pressed to respond to the challenges of new technologies, new information and discoveries, new dimensions of social relationships, and new spiritual dimensions, in which ethical and moral values become crucial in the global era. The teleinformational and technological revolutions have expanded traditional views about religion, providing for international interconnections and interdependence. World economies are more

| 581

interdependent in this global market, which expands its trading capacity, opens new markets, deregulates prices, promotes competitiveness, and offers the possibility of a free market. Religion plays a crucial role in the market economy. Vodou is one of those religious systems challenged by this global context. The first challenge has to do with the cultural resistance and faith of the people. How people interact and make transactions with new religious systems and spiritualities is crucial. Second, how to promote peace and reconciliation in societies plagued with sociopolitical conflict and a spiral of violence becomes a priority. Third, extreme poverty is increasingly moving toward levels of misery and exclusion for the majority of the population and creates frustration and desperation. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world by any standards. Fourth, the role of religion has the potential of becoming a transforming element, but it can also be used to promote resignation and hopelessness. All religious symbols carry either a liberating power or an alienating inertia. Some important lessons can be learned by institutional churches about an Afro-Caribbean religious experience like Vodou. Going beyond the prejudices of the past 500 years, acknowledging the African worldview as a valid way of understanding and experiencing the divine is a good place to start. Accepting that there is a spiritual realm not always discernible intellectually and logically in this kind of religious experience is another helpful approach. The interaction between dances, movement, rhythm, and the expressions of the body in worship could be another important dimension, neglected many times in

582 |

Voodoo

westernized liturgical experiences. Caring for the sick and their daily needs, both material and spiritual, are two dimensions present in the priestly roles of religious leaders in Vodou. For these reasons, a need exists for the Catholic Church and mainline Protestant denominations to rediscover and engage Vodou. Carmelo E. A´lvarez

References and Further Reading Desmangles, Leslie G. The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in

Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). Dixie, Quinton, and Juan Williams. This Far by Faith (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003). Hurbon, Laennec. Voodoo: Search for the Spirit, trans. Lory Frankel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995). Metraux, Alfred. Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). Pinn, Anthony B. Varieties of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998).

Y for scarce resources with other ethnic minorities, gang membership became a way to seek success, a sense of security, and accomplishments for many youth as they took to the streets. The chairman of the Young Lords, Jose ‘‘Cha Cha’’ Jime´nez, was eventually imprisoned for his gang-related activities. It was during his imprisonment that he became radicalized and motivated to engage in political action on behalf of the Hispanic community. His reading of Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain and Malcom X’s autobiography served as a catalyst to ignite political action. After his release from jail, Jime´nez redirected the gang’s energy into a social movement with a Maoist-Marxist orientation. The gang transformed into a social movement that took on the fight against gentrification of the Lincoln Park neighborhood, poor social services, and a lack of political power to effectuate change. From the organization’s beginning in Chicago, chapters were organized in other major cities in the United States such as New York (later the Young Lords Party

YOUNG LORDS PARTY The Young Lords Organization (YLO) originated in the streets of Chicago as a turf gang to provide protection from other ethnic gangs in the neighborhood. In the beginning, the Young Lords were composed mainly of first- and secondgeneration working-class Puerto Rican youth that arrived in Chicago during the migration of the 1950s. Although the Young Lords were mostly composed of Puerto Ricans, the membership of the organization boasted multiethnicity, including Latino/as from diverse national origins and African Americans. The hope of securing better living conditions in the postwar economy led many Puerto Rican families to relocate to Midwestern cities such as Chicago and Detroit. Yet, these dreams rarely turned into reality as their experience was marked by denigration, discrimination, lack of opportunities, urban poverty, and lack of political clout. In the midst of the acerbic environment, with little or no opportunity for success, and engulfed in the competition 583

584 |

Young Lords Party

Members of the Puerto Rican activist group the Young Lords gather in East Harlem, New York City, in June 1970. (Meyer Liebowitz/New York Times Co./Getty Images)

[YLP]), Philadelphia, and Hartford. It should be noted that these various chapters existed with a large degree of independence from the originating body, but they kept the organization’s political outlook alive, wore uniforms, and imitated some of its strategies. The Maoist-Marxist political orientation did not prevent the Young Lords from making alliances with religious communities, but they were difficult and often sparse. Like many other Marxists throughout Latin America, this group found a way to tap into the religious community of the urban setting they inhabited and to seek a common ground of cooperation with religious bodies for improving the living conditions of Latino/as. The ability to tap into the resources of the Latina/o religious community did not necessarily include an

embrace of a Christian worldview. Instead, the engagement was marked by a willingness to recognize the liberatory potential of the faith of the people and the need to find creative ways to join efforts with them. Furthermore, the Young Lords goaded religious communities to live to their full Christian potential. Of the many Young Lords’ activities (both the YLO and the YLP) two should be highlighted as sites where their importance for the study of Hispanic religion lies. Those two moments are the takeover of McCormick Seminary in Chicago in May 1969 and the takeover of the First Spanish Methodist Church in December 1969 (La Primera Iglesia Metodista Hispana) in New York City. These two events make clear the Young Lords’ critique of the church as an institution as well as their awareness that the church

Young Lords Party plays a vital role in the lives of Latino/as that should not be ignored. Both events trace their root causes to the same reasons: the institutional church as represented by McCormick Seminary and La Primera Iglesia Metodista Hispana fell short of living the Christian mission they professed. They posed similar demands in both cases. They called for the development of child-care facilities for working parents, the development of a breakfast program for children, the opportunity to develop a space for political education, and more concerted investment in social services for the community. These actions, as understood by the Young Lords represented a truer interpretation of the Gospels’ meaning and Jesus’ mission. After all, if during Jesus’ earthly ministry he walked among the poor of the earth, so should the church. In both of these cases, McCormick Seminary and the First Spanish Methodist Church had retreated into a comfortable space where the people’s spiritual needs were attended to but not their physical or material ones. Furthermore, they provided services only to their members and not to the immediate community. In their estimation, spiritual needs could not be addressed in isolation from physical or material needs. Through the running of breakfast programs, clothing drives, legal defense, political education, and health clinics from the space of a church or churchaffiliated institution, the Young Lords sought to radicalize the extent of the care

| 585

the church could provide. The care of the people moves beyond their spiritual needs, instead, they seek to move toward a holistic care of the person. The pressing needs of Latino/a communities—subpar education, social services, and political disenfranchisement—moved the Young Lords to carry out a fight for their rights. Urgency for liberation drove the political agenda that motivated the Young Lords’ actions. For the Latina/o religious ethicist, the history of the Young Lords provides material for reflection of an early expression of liberationist thought by Latino/as in the United States. They stand as an example of radical engagement against the social forces oppressing communities of color in the United States and a call for religious institutions to meaningful Gospel practices in their surrounding community. Elias Ortega-Aponte

References and Further Reading Browning, Frank. From Rumble to Revolution: The Young Lords (Ithaca, NY: Glad Day Press, 1970). Melendez, Miguel. We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003). Torres, Andre´s, and Jose´ E. Velazquez. The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

Part 2

ESSAYS

CHRISTOLOGY

Luis G. Pedraja Through almost two millennia, theologians have struggled with the questions raised in our attempts to understand who Jesus of Nazareth was. The questions arise from our attempts to understand not only the significance of his life, ministry, and death but also his relationship to both God and humanity. In essence, both the Trinitarian and Christological controversies that beleaguered the church for centuries stem from our attempts to understand relationships. While the Trinitarian controversy sought to understand the relationship among our different experiences of God—creator, incarnate, and spirit—the Christological controversy hinges our attempts to understand the relationship between divinity and humanity as experienced in the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth. For over four centuries, the church debated the issue, which culminated in the Council of Chalcedon and its dictum that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. However, this edict did not fully stem the controversies and our continued attempts at understanding who Jesus is and the significance of his life and ministry.

The Person, Work, and States of Christ Traditionally, Christology, as a theological enterprise, is divided into three themes. The first theme revolves around the person of Christ and traces our attempts to understand who Jesus is—questions that focus on the relationship between Jesus’ humanity and divinity. The second, the work of Christ, explores what Jesus does, that is, the significance of his life, ministry, death, and resurrection—in relation to their significance to humanity and to our understanding of Jesus as both human and divine. The third, an ancient and little known approach called the ‘‘states of Christ,’’ follows the kenotic passages of Philippians 2:5–11, where Jesus divests himself of divinity, becomes a humble human being, and is then exalted once again. These three approaches are not separate, but overlap and connect with each other. To understand Christology as framed within the Latino/a context, we must first explore and contextualize these themes further.

589

590 |

Christology

Jesus’ contemporaries did not have the perspective of history and centuries of theological interpretations upon which to draw. They encountered and interacted with someone they knew as Jesus of Nazareth, a human being. While they might have thought of him as an extraordinary human being, a prophet, or a miracle worker, it is doubtful that he had a halo or glowed in the dark. If his divine nature had been evident and undisputable, it is doubtful that he would have met the fate he did or that his nature would have been the subject of centuries of debate. In Jesus, his followers found a unique insight into God and God’s work, but whether they fully understood from the beginning that Jesus was divine is still subject to debate. It is only in retrospect that people made a connection between Jesus of Nazareth and God—and even then, the nature of that connection is still unclear. As the decades and centuries passed, Jesus’ followers sought to understand the nature of Jesus’ relationship to God. Most of our attempts at understanding Jesus were influenced by our philosophical assumptions of both God and humanity, as well as the use of static philosophical categories such as substance and nature. Being was defined primarily in terms of static and fixed categories influenced by human assumptions of perfection, ideals, and deity. Christologies that emphasized Jesus’ divinity over his humanity were called ‘‘high Christologies,’’ while those that emphasized his humanity over his divinity came to be termed ‘‘low Christologies.’’ In a sense, we can imagine a vertical line with divinity at the top and humanity at the bottom of the line. The work of Christ is also influenced and connected with our understanding of who Jesus is. Thus, the nature and significance of Jesus’ work on earth can also be located within this high Christology–low Christology continuum. Traditionally, the work of Christ has been defined in terms of three roles, what John Calvin calls the triplex munis (triple offices). These are Christ as king, priest, and prophet. Naturally, these roles with which theologians identify Christ are artificial and problematic theological constructs. While theologians might identify primarily with one of these roles, most would probably include aspects of the others in their understanding of Christ. Most high Christologies tend to identify with Christ’s divinity, authority, and power as king. While some Latino/a theologians might shy away from this particular understanding and its emphasis on power, along with the risks of the identification of Christ as king with oppressive power structures, there is a strong sense among Latina/os that Christ has authority and power. Without power, Jesus’ ability to overcome the power structures of sin, to change the status quo, or to liberate humanity become moot. The average Hispanic at least hopes that Jesus is able to overcome evil, transform lives, and act on his or her behalf. Latino/a theologians might vary on their understanding of the nature of this power, and most understand it in terms of empowerment instead of an identification with oppressive power structures. Others emphasize Jesus’ priestly role as an intermediary or intercessor on our behalf. Again, this understanding of the work of Christ is important to Latino/as. It is important in that as a ‘‘priest’’ Jesus not only intercedes and advocates on our behalf but also identifies with us. Our notions of the atonement and salvation tend to be ones not of Jesus paying a price to a vengeful God who has been offended, as in Anselm’s understanding of the atonement, but on Jesus’ vicarious suffering, not just for us, but as one of us. This does not mean that some Hispanics do not understand Jesus’ role

Christology

| 591

as priest as bearing our sin, ransoming us from the power of evil, paying our debt, or even vanquishing the powers of death and sin—many Latina/os understand Christ’s work in this way. What it means is that the emphasis tends to be more on Christ’s example and identification with our sin, as well as Jesus’ love for humanity, all of which resonate more with Peter Abelard’s theory of the atonement. Most Latino/a theologians tend to emphasize Jesus’ role as prophet due to the significant influence of Latin American liberation theologies and their shared interest in socioeconomic justice. The understanding of sin in terms of oppression in these theologies, concerns for socioeconomic justice, and emphasis on God’s preferential option for the poor tended to place greater emphasis on Jesus’ work, particularly in terms of Jesus’ preaching and prophetic role. As a result, most Latino/a theologies tend to have ‘‘lower Christologies,’’ emphasizing Jesus’ humanity, prophetic message, and work. This does not negate or diminish their understanding of Jesus’ divinity, but rather, it reveals a radical difference between traditional understandings of divinity and Latino/a theological understanding of divinity. Christologies tend to fall somewhere along the continuum between high Christologies and low Christologies, depending on how much emphasis is given to Jesus’ divinity as opposed to his humanity. If we were to look at this continuum, at the top, we find Docetism, as well as some forms of Gnosticism, that emphasized Jesus’ divinity to such an extent that they obscured or denied his humanity. On the other end of the spectrum were theologies such as Adoptionism, the belief that Jesus was merely a good man adopted by God and filled with the Spirit, or theologies that thought Jesus was a prophet. However, regardless of where on the continuum these theologies were, they had a common trait. They contrasted humanity and divinity. Jesus had to be one or the other. The more he was of one, the less he was of the other. The juxtaposition of humanity and divinity is problematic not only in the philosophical and theological sense, where the two might be understood as different essences, natures, or beings, but it is also problematic in the socioeconomic sense of what is implied in the manner we understand each.

Christological Heresies and Latino/a Christology Latino/a theologians offer unique insights on the polarization of the person of Christ on this continuum of high and low Christologies, including the extreme positions of Docetism and Adoptionism. While both Docetism and Adoptionism would eventually be rejected as heretical, both extremes still persist in the ways that we try to understand the relationship between Jesus’ humanity and divinity. To say that Hispanics subscribe to either, both, or neither would be wrong. The ways in which most Latino/as understand who Jesus is and what Jesus did are as diverse as our communities. But for Latina/o theologians, these extremes hold dangers to our community and to our faith, not simply because they go against the orthodoxy of the church, but because they each have cultural, economic, social, and political implications for us all. In his book, Man˜ana, Justo Gonza´lez argues that each extreme poses a danger to the development of Latino/a Christologies. Christologies that emphasize Jesus’ divinity over his humanity tend to view the material world as base and inferior. In these

592 |

Christology

Christologies, the spiritual overshadows the physical, causing us to trivialize or ignore physical circumstances and needs. The focus of these theologies is otherworldly. According to Gonza´lez, this is problematic for communities that suffer under economic and social oppression. The suffering of this world becomes inconsequential and expected. Rather than seeking social justice and attempting to change oppressive socioeconomic structures, emphasis is given to spiritual conversion. Sin is solely a spiritual problem and our bodily existence is minimized. Our goal is to escape the material world and seek the higher spiritual realities. By spiritualizing Jesus, it is easier to allow the status quo to go unchecked, making it easier to ignore the physical needs of individuals and less likely that we would strive to transform society. Ultimately, this extreme separates the spiritual from the material, increasing the distance between God and humanity. Humanity and divinity are so radically different that it rejects the incarnation, removes Jesus from the messy realities of the world, and makes it impossible for him to identify with human suffering and death. Adoptionism, on the other hand, emphasizes Jesus’ humanity. He is one of us, chosen by God and filled with the Holy Spirit. This makes it possible for Jesus to identify with our humanity, frailty, suffering, and death. However, although God can adopt a human being and coexist with humanity through the Holy Spirit, humanity and divinity are still considered radically different. In addition, adherence to this extreme, according to Gonza´lez, can give credence to the ‘‘local boy does good’’ or ‘‘anyone can make it’’ myths. As a result, it can further oppressive myths that one can succeed simply through hard work, that people of means earned their position in life, and that the poor are lazy. Both of these extremes share common preconceptions about humanity and divinity, assuming that the two are radically different. Even later attempts at understanding Christology, such as the Antiochene and Alexandrine schools, which allowed for both Jesus’ divinity and his humanity, still operated under the assumption that both divinity and humanity were radically different. Chalcedon, by decreeing that Jesus was both, fully human and fully divine, appeared to settle the matter. Jesus was fully both. Yet, while Chalcedon provided a rule or guide by which our language about Jesus was defined, it did not really clarify the relationship. Chalcedon simply created a paradigm that framed the question as a paradox. In addition, it still retained an essentialist perspective that understood both divinity and humanity as radically different. While the two could fully coexist in the person of Christ, the way they coexisted was not clearly defined, relegating the relationship between divinity and humanity as encountered in Jesus of Nazareth to the realm of mystery. Chalcedon’s resolution, that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, does not completely resolve the paradox. If one considers that humanity is created in the image of God, it may be better to seek the similarities than to emphasize the differences—to understand how humans bear the image of God. For Gonza´lez, the answer lies not in the contrast between the human and divine, but in the common traits we share, especially love.

Christology

| 593

Language, Culture, and Borderland Christology Latino/a Christology, like Latina/os, exists at the borders—not only as defined by the boundary between nations, but also in cultural, bodily, economic, and sociopolitical realities. In the Spanish language we speak of Jesucristo, Jesus and Christ are not separate words that speak to a dual reality. The human person, Jesus, and his role as the Christ are inescapably interconnected in the language and minds of the people. In addition, unlike English, where the casual use of the name of Jesus is considered sacrilegious, in Spanish it is invoked in our ordinary existence almost as a prayer, as well as used to name our children. Naming children Jesus and invoking Jesus’ name is in part a product of the culture. Spain, for centuries before the conquest of the Americas, was a country where Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexisted with each other—sometimes in a spirit of tolerance, other times at war with one another. During this time, Christians, who lived with people named Mohammad and Moses, would honor their identity by naming children Jesus. While naming children Jesus might have been a product of history and culture, there is still a certain cultural implication to the way we talk about Jesus. In Jesus Is my Uncle: Christology from a Hispanic Perspective, I argue that the language both reflects and affects a more immanent understanding of God. In Hispanic culture, God is more closely identified with humanity and inhabits our world both spiritually and incarnationally. In contrast, the English language tends to evoke a more transcendent understanding of God. In order to respect God’s holiness, there is a tendency to invest things associated with the divine with a greater degree of otherness that proscribes the use of certain terms in ordinary language and creates a more effective distance between God and the ordinary language of human existence. In a sense, both linguistically and culturally, Latinos/as reflect a lower or at least more immanent Christology than is expressed in English. Orlando Costas, for instance, speaks of the incarnation as the ultimate validation of cultural contextualization. Jesus, becoming human, enters into a particular human culture at a unique point in history. This act invests humanity with a sacramental presence and demonstrates that God is revealed not in the abstract as removed and separated from culture and history, but rather God is revealed through culture and history. In contrast to Neibuhr’s dichotomies of Christ and culture, for Latino/a theologians, Christ is manifest through culture. If Jesus was indeed a historical figure born into a particular time and place, as well as a culture, then we cannot separate who Jesus is from a cultural interpretation. On the contrary, the incarnation, Latino/a theologians would argue, demonstrates that God is revealed through culture. Albert Schweitzer, in his classic book The Quest of the Historical Jesus, makes the argument that our attempts to understand who Jesus was as a historical personage, divested from all the accruements of faith and theological interpretations, still tends to look like the person undertaking the task. In other words, we tend to make Jesus into our image. Most Latino/as tend to identify with Jesus. Like Latina/os, Jesus was born into an occupied country with political unrest. He lived in a country at the margins, being neither Roman nor Greek. In addition, he identified not with the rich and powerful of his time, but with the poor and the outcast. He was not even part of the religious

594 |

Christology

establishment. As many Hispanics, Jesus was persecuted by the political and religious powers of his time, unjustly imprisoned for his views and actions, tortured, and executed. Jesus suffered and died. Latino/as, like many others who often exist at the margins of culture and society, identify with Jesus because Jesus is one of them. In Jesus, we find someone who understands and who can identify with our plight. Such a God—who experiences human suffering and death—can understand, sanctify, and vindicate our own suffering and pain. The incarnational, immanent, nature of Latino/a spirituality allows for a stronger identification with Jesus, without necessarily diminishing the understanding of Jesus as divine. While some Latina/os do tend to emphasize Jesus’ humanity over his divinity, the contrast between Jesus’ humanity and divinity is not as pronounced or dichotomous. In a sense, we can say that God is accessible through Jesus’ humanity. Latino/a Christologies for the most part shy away from the more radical polarities drawn between God and humanity. For example, Orlando Espı´n’s Christology focuses on the human Jesus, exploring what we know about Jesus both through the lenses of the historical context and the faith of the church. We understand who Jesus is through his human experiences and understanding of God. Jesus’ actions and message reveal an understanding of God as caring, involved with human affairs, and committed to a transformed social order manifest in his message about the kingdom of God. For Espı´n, we know the divine through Jesus. Jesus’ death, vanquishment, and apparent failure provide an alternate view of who God is—located not in the throne of power, but in the midst of suffering, humiliation, and death. Oppressed communities can identify with such a God, who in turn also identifies with them. Thus, there is antologia entis that provides us a glimpse into the divine that is different from our own philosophical constructions of perfection, detachment, and absolute power. In turn, it vindicates our suffering and provides for the possibility that God can be found in the suffering of the cross. To use Martin Luther’s phrase, Latino/a Christology is a theology of the cross. Another area that the identification between the Latino/a culture and Christology occurs is through cultural parallels. It is common for theologies that acknowledge their cultural context to draw parallels between their own culture and biblical events. In Galilean Journey, one of the seminal books of Latino/a theology, Virgilio Elizondo makes a connection between Jesus’ Galilean roots and Hispanic identity. Galilee’s geographic location as a remote border province allows Elizondo to draw a comparison between the experience of Latina/os at the borders of the United States and Jesus. Existing at geographic and cultural crossroads, both Jesus and Latino/as are caught between cultures. Whether it is that of a Jewish boy growing up in a Romanoccupied country at a border town or a Mexican American growing up in San Antonio, both live at cultural crossroads. While Chalcedon was not able to resolve how both divinity and humanity could exist in the person of Jesus, the cultural identity of Hispanics allows us to understand how one person can embody two realities. Thus, the Galilean identity of Jesus parallels our own borderland experience, both affirming our own experience and giving us insights into the hypostatic union, how Jesus could be both human and divine.

Christology

| 595

Beyond our identification with Jesus’ Galilean experience in the borderlands of culture, the mestizo and mulato identity of many Latino/as provides us with additional paradigms for understanding the hypostatic union. First, Hispanics not only exist at the cultural borderlands, able to function to some extent in two or more cultures, they also embody various cultures, races, and languages. Thus, Latino/as know viscerally what it is like to embody the tension of disparate realities that may seem incongruous with one another. Some might fear that speaking of the hypostatic union in terms of mestizaje/mulatez is reminiscent of heresies, such as Eutyches, who claimed that divinity and humanity mixed in Jesus to create a new reality. However, Chalcedon’s rejection of Eutyches was due to the fear that such a mixture would lead to Jesus’ divinity overshadowing his humanity or diluting both. Underlying Chalcedon’s rejection are various assumptions that might not be as relevant today. First, it assumes that there are two static substances or essences, unique to themselves—one human and the other divine. Second, it assumes that these essences are incompatible with each other and that one could overtake the other. These were valid concerns given the philosophical categories available at the time. Today, there are other options for understanding identity and being that use dynamic rather than static understandings of identity, personality, and continuity. Thus, the dangers of different substances dominating or intermingling are no longer rigidly determined. In addition, our understanding of God and humanity do not necessarily lead to radical differentiations that would cause one to negate the other and make their coexistence untenable. Understanding the hypostatic union in terms of mestizaje/mulatez need not lead to a mixture that diminishes the reality of both or that causes one to overshadow the other. Those of us who embody two or more cultures know that the two do not blend into a melting pot that eradicates the differences and tensions that exist between them. Genetically, our different races can be identified as much as the traits from each race are evident in our futures, skin, and bodies. Latino/as may speak English and Spanish, aware of the differences between the languages even when speaking a mix of the two. We are painfully aware of the tensions between the cultures we inhabit and embody, knowing what aspect of our experience comes from each. We are not an undifferentiated amalgam of cultures and races that melt into each other. Rather, we are both and in a sense more than both by being cognizant of each in ways that others may not be. The embodiment of these cultures not only provides us with a paradigm for understanding the hypostatic union—how divinity and humanity can exist in one person— but also enable us to draw an analogy between our experience and the incarnation. An added advantage to using the cultural and racial borderland experience to understand Christology comes from the pejorative treatment of those who exist at these crossroads. Being mestizo (a mix of European and indigenous) or mulato (a mix of European and African) also meant embodying a history of domination, subjugation, and rape, as well as not being accepted by either culture or race. It meant being viewed as inferior and treated with disdain. To identify Jesus with those relegated to the margins of society, whether it be through socioeconomic reasons or through racial and cultural discrimination, meant imbuing with value that which was rejected. Jesus identifies with the lowly of society not only through his ministry but through his

596 |

Christology

borderland existence. Like Latino/as who are often viewed with disdain or suffer from various forms of discrimination—economic, cultural, racial, and gender among many —Jesus, too, is marginalized by the elite of his time. Jesus is not only a Jew, a marginal country and sociocultural group in a time dominated by the Greco-Roman ethos, but as a Galilean, Jesus is also marginalized by the centers of Jewish power in Jerusalem. The identification of God’s presence on earth with a marginalized person of humble origins speaks volumes about the contrast between our understanding of God and God’s reality, as well as the things we value in society. Thus, while the parallels between the Latino/a identity can provide us with a paradigm for understanding Christ, the incarnation also provides Hispanics with empowerment and value. The crucified man from the margins of society as the locus of God’s presence on earth certainly captivates our imagination and provides us with a far richer understanding of God than the philosophical categories. As Orlando Espı´n notes, Jesus’ death, vanquishment, and apparent failure at the cross helps us understand and rethink how we imagine God. Jesus’ human experiences, his way of relating to and understanding God, as well as his actions and preaching, provide us with a unique insight into who and how God is. Regardless of how we might understand Jesus’ divinity or humanity, he provides us with a unique view into God. No longer is God the detached, immutable, impassible, remote perfection of the philosophical ideal. God, as experienced through Jesus, reveals a God who is caring, who meddles in human affairs, and who identifies with those who suffer more than with those in power. In Jesus, the possibility of human experience revealing God becomes real. Thus, the possibility that the Latino/a experience can also reveal God not only by identification, but as a locus dei—a place where God can be found actively present—also becomes real.

Key Paradigm for Latino/a Christology While Latino/a Christologies provide us with unique insights into Christology as a whole, helping us to better understand the person and the work of Christ, they also gravitate to certain key paradigms and understandings. First, as noted above, Latino/a Christologies draw parallels between the Hispanic experience and Jesus, making it possible to identify with Jesus as one who understands and, to some extent, validates the Latina/o borderland experience and marginalization. Thus, Latino/a theologians tend to identify with Jesus as a mestizo, a mulato, or even as a sato (mutt), as Loida Martell-Otero does. This helps locate God’s activity in our midst, just as the incarnation places God within human history, God can also be found in the struggle and suffering of humanity at the borderlands, at the margins, at the places where we seldom seek God. In the same manner that Liberation theologians draw an identification between God and the poor, Latino/a theologians extend this identification to cultural and racial dimensions of marginalization. Jesus allows us to see God as present in the barrio, in the junkie dying alone on a rooftop—where Recinos sees Jesus. God is relocated from the luxury and power of palace halls to the grungy dimly lit back alleys of life. As for Martin Luther, Latino/as reject the theology of power in favor

Christology

| 597

of a theology of the cross—and not only extends to but is made possible by our Christology. Hispanic Christology not only identifies with Jesus’ borderland experience, it also identifies with his message. Jesus’ prophetic role and message are significant to Latino/as. Inherent in Jesus’ preaching is a message of love for everyone, forgiveness, justice for those who suffer at the margins, and the advocacy for a unique understanding of God’s reign on earth—the Kingdom of God or, as Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az argues, the kin-dom—for it is a reign distinguished not by power, but by the equity of love and the valuation of all human life. It is God’s family, where we all are God’s children. Jesus’ message and action not only manifest God’s love, but call humanity to act out of love. Justo Gonza´lez, advocates the power of man˜ana in Jesus’ message as the vision of God’s vision of the future, of what could be, as a judgment on what is and should be changed. In Elizondo, while the Galilean Principle speaks to Jesus’ identity as a mestizo, the Jerusalem Principle addresses Jesus’ work in confronting the powers of society, and in doing so risking death. In Jerusalem, Jesus exemplifies God’s call to confront injustice and oppression at the risk of one’s life. This is a key core of Jesus’ message. Love forgives, but love cannot tolerate injustice and oppression either. Love must confront the power of hatred. Finally, it is the Resurrection Principle that empowers Jesus, as well as all of us, to confront the powers of hatred by promising that God will ultimately vindicate and validate our struggle. Latino/a Christologies place greater emphasis on the work of Christ. We know who Jesus is by what he does. Thus, ultimately the person and work of Christ are collapsed. It is not being divine that allows Jesus to act, but his actions that reveal his humanity. When Latina/os read John 1:1, they do not read ‘‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’’ In the Spanish Bible, the Greek word logos is translated as ‘‘verb.’’ Thus, rather than in the beginning was the ‘‘word,’’ we read, in the beginning was the ‘‘verb.’’ In Jesus, God is not merely present as a cognitive content or word. God is present in an active sense. It is God’s creative word— God’s definitive act and activity that we encounter in Jesus. Ultimately, Latino/a Christologies reject the harsh dichotomies drawn between humanity and divinity. Rather than arguing that the more divine the less human, there is a drive to identify the parallels between the two. Human beings were created in God’s image. While many theologies believe that this image was eradicated by sin, there is nothing in the biblical account that would indicate this is the case. Thus, it is possible for those created in the image of God to bear the image of God. The incarnation is not an anomaly. It is a restoration of what humanity was meant to be. Hispanic theologians directly and indirectly recognize the possibility for God’s presence to be found in the midst of humanity. The incarnation attests to this possibility and to its reality. Rather than understanding the person of Christ in a dichotomous sense, Latina/o theology understands it in an active sense. Gonzalez, for instance, argues that virtues such as love, which are shared by both God and humanity, are the key for understanding the juncture between the human and divine. The more we act out of love, the more divinity is revealed through our actions. But the key is ultimately

598 |

Christology

in the actions. The person and the work of Christ are not two separate categories. Jesus is divine by virtue of what he does.

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel A. The Quest for the Cuban Christ: A Historical Search (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). Elizondo, Virgilio. Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996). Espı´n, Orlando O. The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. En la Lucha: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). Gonza´lez, Justo. Man˜ana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990). Pedraja, Luis G. Jesus Is My Uncle: Christology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999). Recinos, Harold J. Who Comes in the Name of the Lord?: Jesus at the Margins (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997).

ECCLESIOLOGY

Nora O. Lozano Ecclesiology is the study of the church and how the individual Christian lives out his/ her life and expresses his/her beliefs within a community of faith. As such, ecclesiology is a rich, challenging, complex, and diverse doctrine that deals with fundamental elements in the life of the Christian churches, as well as with the particular expressions of these elements in different Christian denominations. It is rich because it describes the nature, attributes, mission, government, and sacraments/ordinances of the church, as well as its final hope of an eternal, abundant life with Christ. It is challenging because it reminds Christians daily to live as the body of Christ where each member cares for the other—both spiritually and materially. It is complex because as a concrete, present, corporate expression of the body of believers, it is inextricably tied to issues of culture, identity, power, and control. It is diverse because it embraces a variety of understandings and practices of what church should be—derived from various biblical and denominational perspectives. In their ecclesiological articulations, Latino/a theologians have embraced the traditional Christian categories or approaches of the study of the church as a way of dealing with this doctrine from their own perspective. They have reflected on the Latina/o church using categories such as the visible and invisible church, or as being one holy, catholic, and apostolic church. Other times, Latino/a theologians ground their reflections in images of the church as the body of Christ, the people of God, or the temple of the Holy Spirit. Still others foreground the mission of the church and consider how that priority shapes or should shape the community of believers. Finally, others reflect on how and why power and control in church governance marginalizes Latinos/as in general from the power structures of their denominations and women in particular from achieving positions of leadership and power. Given this diversity of approaches, issues, and content, this entry can only introduce some of the major trends in Latina/o ecclesiology. To place these trends in their right context, I will first explore the history of the Latino/a Roman Catholic Church and the major trends and theologians in this type of ecclesiology, and then do the same from a Latina/o Protestant perspective.

599

600 |

Ecclesiology

Roman Catholic Ecclesiology The general context of this study of the church is the traditional categories of ecclesiology that have been developed throughout Christian history. The particular context for our purposes is the era of the Latin American conquest during the sixteenth century when the Catholic missionaries and priests came from Spain or Portugal to establish the foundations of the Catholic Church in the Hispanic Americas. Justo Gonza´lez (1990), along with others, affirms that since its beginning the church in Latin America has been divided into two churches: the church of the hierarchy and the popular church or church of the poor. The first one is typically identified with the powers of conquest, colonization, and oppression, and the second with the oppressed and those who opposed such inhumanity. Gonza´lez (1990) suggests that this tension of commitments and values within the Catholic Church continues to the present in Latin America as well as in the Latino/a church in the United States. In Latin America, this struggle was particularly evident when the underside church raised its voice in favor of the poor and oppressed at the Latin American bishops’ assemblies in Medellı´n (1968) and Puebla (1979). Within the Latina/o experience, this duality in the Catholic Church is particularly visible in the national hierarchy of the church mainly made up of non-Hispanics, while the popular church is predominantly led by Hispanic priests who better understand the struggles and sufferings of the Hispanic people. The task of the popular church and its leaders has been to respond to the spiritual, material, and justice needs of its parishioners. As a result, this popular church has become a voice for the voiceless, and as its leaders start to penetrate the hierarchical structures of the church, they are offering a new way of doing church that is more consistent with the concerns and perspectives of Latino/a Catholics. An example of this new trend is the three Encuentros Nacionales Hispanos de Pastoral (1972, 1977, 1985) in which grassroots Hispanics articulated the mission of the church and participated in planning its ministry. Gonza´lez (1990) describes this development as the dawning of a new and hopeful day for the Roman Catholic Hispanic church. These Encuentros and the documents that came from them have become foundational in the articulation of a Latina/o Catholic ecclesiology. So as Latino/a Roman Catholic theologians articulated different elements of the doctrine of the church, they have increasingly sided with the popular church in order to nurture, strengthen, and empower it. In light of this shift, Jeanette Rodrı´guez (2006) has reflected on the composition of the church by asking: Who is the Catholic Church? Whereas in the past many Catholics would have responded by saying the Catholic Church is the hierarchy and the priests, Rodrı´guez (2006), with the ‘‘Encuentros Nacionales Hispanos’’ in mind, suggests instead that the church is present wherever there is a faith community, no matter how small. These faith communities attempt to live according to the model of church in Acts, and in order to do that they follow the pattern of the small Latin American Base Christian Communities in which church members are encouraged to reflect on people’s lives in light of their faith. This reflection involves to see reality, to think about it in a critical way, to act or commit to do something about it, to evaluate the meetings, and to celebrate or share with each

Ecclesiology

| 601

other. Rodrı´guez (2006) reminds us that this model of church is rooted in the particular context of the oppressed and suffering Latino community, which is now called and empowered to follow Jesus’ example in being a voice for the voiceless, in seeking out social justice, in struggling to bring liberation to all areas of people’s lives, and in worshiping and celebrating the Reign of God in their lives. Ana Marı´a Pineda (1995) has analyzed the ministry of the Latino/a Catholic church by reflecting on the term pastoral de conjunto (organized pastoral effort). She reminds us that although this term was present in the deliberations of the Second Vatican Council and in the documents of Medellı´n and Puebla, it took on a special significance during the three Encuentros Nacionales Hispanos de Pastoral when U.S. Hispanics contextualized it to fit the U.S. Latino reality. Pastoral de conjunto is a harmonious coordination of all the aspects of pastoral ministry in the particular social, cultural, and religious context of the people with the goal of continuing the work of Jesus and making more present the Kingdom of God among them. As a concept rooted in the Gospel values and in the best cultural values of the people, pastoral de conjunto has fostered a particular model of church as a family where fraternal love and community are the norm, and where injustice is challenged. These understandings, which are based on the interdependence of the faithful and genuine respect and regard for all, Pineda (1995) suggests are a significant Hispanic contribution to the church and society at large. Gary Riebe-Estrella (1999) has looked at Latino/a Catholic ecclesiology through the traditional lens of the church as the people of God. He considers this image to be central because of its constant presence in the documents of the three Encuentros Nacionales Hispanos de Pastoral. He argues that even though this biblical image has been used in many different ecclesiological articulations, each of these articulations takes on a particular meaning depending on the context and experiences of the group that is defined as ‘‘the people of God.’’ Thus, he suggests that for a Latina/o Catholic ecclesiology it is important to define Latino/as as a group that struggles not only with poverty but also with cultural oppression and marginalization that restricts their achievements in educational, employment, and economic areas. Such experiences inevitably shape their understanding of the church as the people of God. Language is another key factor in understanding this image of the church as the people of God. Latino/as will typically think about it in Spanish as el pueblo de Dios, and this notion has particular connotations in the Latina/o mind. The configuration of a pueblo is delineated by Latino/as’ understanding of who its members are. Furthermore, ‘‘pueblo’’ may denote a geographical town or the people who live in this town. Thus, the pueblo is formed by groups of individual familias (families) that through different relationships in the community form the pueblo (the community of a particular town). Of course, these families include not only the nuclear family but the extended family (cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents), as well as those added to the family due to significant relationships such as the compadres (co-parents) who enter the family when they become a child’s padrino/madrina (godparent). This sociocentric organic culture, Riebe-Estrella (1999) affirms, is still very predominant among Latino/as and it defines how they understand themselves as el pueblo de Dios.

602 |

Ecclesiology

Good Friday passion reenactment in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. The reenactment has been a Good Friday fixture in the predominately Mexican community for 31 years. (Getty Images)

Having defined the particular cultural context and web of relationships of Latino/as, Riebe-Estrella (1999) analyzes this image of the people of God and its implications for the Latina/o Catholic Church. He argues that in the Old Testament, Israel was called to be the people of God in order to become a blessing to the nations. In this sense, the Latino/a Catholic Church also has been called to be a blessing to others. Yet the Latina/o Catholic Church also resembles the people of Israel in less desirable characteristics, such as an egocentrism that does not allow them to stop thinking about themselves as the needy ones who are on the receiving end. Riebe-Estrella suggests instead that the Latino/a Catholic Church has much to give to the dominant Anglo culture by living a model of church that moves away from an individualistic life-style to a more social, collective one that lives for the common good. And this is a challenge, for oftentimes in the U.S. Latina/o Catholic landscape this sense of el pueblo de Dios is understood narrowly as being restricted to ‘‘my local parish’’ where ‘‘my family’’ worships and serves. This narrow understanding has brought divisions within the parishes of individual cities and has prevented them from working together for the common good. Riebe-Estrella (1999) concludes by inviting Latinos/as to consider that in the New Testament Jesus expanded the notion of el pueblo de Dios to include all of the people who responded positively to his calling, all who were willing to live now in his love, by forming a true sisterhood and brotherhood. This new understanding of el pueblo de

Ecclesiology

| 603

ANTONIO JOSE´ MARTI´NEZ (1793–1867) Antonio Jose´ Martı´nez was the leading figure among nineteenth-century New Mexican Catholic priests. His numerous accomplishments include a distinguished academic career as a seminarian in Durango, the establishment of a primary school and seminary preparatory school in his hometown of Taos (from which some 30 students went on to be ordained for the priesthood), the operation of the first printing press in what is now the western United States, authorship of numerous books and pamphlets, formal certification as an attorney, and extensive service as an elected New Mexican representative in legislative bodies under the Mexican and later the U.S. governments. In 1854, Frenchman Jean Baptiste Lamy, the newly arrived first bishop of Santa Fe, instituted mandatory tithing and decreed that heads of families who failed to comply be denied the sacraments. Martı´nez’s public contestation of this action eventually led Lamy to excommunicate him from the Catholic Church, which in turn caused a schism between Martı´nez’s supporters and the leaders of the Santa Fe diocese. A controversial figure whom Willa Cather presented in a highly negative light in her infamous novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, Martı´nez and his legacy were defended by contemporary Latino/a writers like Juan Romero who documented his numerous accomplishments. —TM

Dios calls Latino/a Catholics to live out their Christianity beyond their families and local parishes, embracing the people outside their primary circle of relationships. Orlando Espı´n (1995) offers a different and provocative perspective on this doctrine. By dealing with issues of revelation and theological authority within the Catholic Church, he empowers the Latino Catholic Church by affirming the importance of its popular religious expressions as valid and appropriate ways to witness to the revelation of Christian tradition. He thus provides a theological voice to a sector of the church that has often been voiceless. He argues that by the sense of the faithful (Sensus Fidelium) is meant the faithful intuitions of the Christian people as they are moved by the Spirit through their interpretation and experience of the Word of God. In order to protect the validity and authenticity of these popular intuitions as an appropriate witness of the revelation, Espı´n (1995) argues that these expressions need to be confronted with the Bible, the written texts of tradition, and the particular lenses that the theologian may be using as he/she studies them. One of these Latina/o Catholic popular religious expressions is the celebration of Good Friday. This is the day that Latino/as get together to relive and meditate on the passion of Jesus. This celebration has a special meaning to Latino/as because often they can relate to Jesus’ suffering through their own experiences of racism, discrimination, and marginalization. Another popular devotion among Catholic Latino/as is the veneration of the Virgin Mary as the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin del Cobre, or the Virgin of La Caridad. Catholic Latina/os, especially in the Southwest, observe Las Posadas, a Christmas celebration that reenacts Joseph’s and Mary’s search for shelter, as well as quincean˜eras, a rite of passage that celebrates girls moving from childhood to adulthood.

604 |

Ecclesiology

Protestant Latino/a Ecclesiology Protestant Latina/o ecclesiology generally includes the traditional categories of ecclesiology that have been developed worldwide in the course of Christian history. Yet the particular context of this Latina/o ecclesiology is that it developed within a Catholic environment and culture that became well established in the Americas after the Conquest, surrounding Latino/a Protestants with Catholic symbols and understandings that inevitably affected their lives. As a way of differentiating themselves from this pervasive Catholicism, Hispanic Protestants have long harbored a radical anti-Catholic feeling that led them to disassociate themselves from the existent culture. Justo Gonza´lez (1990) describes his experience with these dynamics. He grew up in Cuba as a religious minority questioning the values of his own culture. However, when he moved to the United States he experienced what many Protestant Latino/as have also experienced: even though he no longer belonged to a religious minority, he continued to be a minority—though now in the cultural sense. Many of these Protestant Hispanics learned to criticize their original cultures in their countries, and continue this dynamic by questioning and criticizing the dominant Anglo culture that marginalizes them. Justo Gonza´lez (1990) continues by describing the roots of Hispanic Protestantism in both Latin America and the United States. In Latin America, Protestantism was the result of the missionary work of the nineteenth century as well as of the faith that Protestant immigrants brought with them. Some of these migrants came from northern Europe with their Protestant beliefs and established churches in South America. Others were Latin American migrants who for diverse reasons had been in the United States. They came back to their original lands and brought Protestantism with them. Finally, some churches were formed due to schisms within the Roman Catholic Church. In the case of the United States, many churches there have been formed by Protestant immigrants from Latin America, and many others by new converts who are looking for an alternative to Catholicism. In general, these Protestant churches are churches of the poor in the sense that they are formed by poor people and are committed to help the poor ones in their communities. Protestant theologians agree that the articulation of a Protestant Latina/o ecclesiology is a challenge. Juan Francisco Martı´nez (2006) argues that its difficulty is due to the diversity of views of the church within Protestantism. Justo Gonza´lez (1997) suggests that traditionally this doctrine has played a secondary position in relation to other doctrines due to the following factors: First, the Protestantism that was introduced in Latin America as well as in much of the United States was one centered in the faith of the individual believer, and not in the faith of the community. Consequently, the church was perceived primarily as a vehicle to preach salvation and to nurture those who were saved. A second factor was that this Protestant preaching was done in a predominantly Catholic environment; preachers would often point out the contradictions that they perceived in the Catholic Church, thus provoking an antichurch feeling. Third, as a further challenge to this Catholic environment, the preachers affirmed the authority of the individual in matters of biblical interpretation and questioned the Catholic view of the authority of the community of faith on matters of faith and doctrine. Fourth, during those days of the pre-Vatican II era, the church was understood

Ecclesiology

| 605

to be composed of the members of the hierarchy and priests, and not of the common people. People did not see themselves as the church. Fifth, after the Vatican II days, the rise of Pentecostalism among Latino/as in both Latin America and the United States brought a similar challenge to the church, but from a different perspective: the Pentecostals challenged the structure, traditions, and expectations of the churches by emphasizing the freedom of the Spirit. Gonza´lez (1997) suggests that a final challenging factor is that in the United States many Hispanic churches belong to larger White denominations that have marginalized them. Since the Hispanic pastors of these churches tend to have less theological education than their White counterparts, and the lay members tend to be poor and uneducated, they are deprived of positions of leadership within the larger body of the denomination, and in consequence they developed a functioning congregational ecclesiology. All of these factors have hindered the development of a Latino/a Protestant ecclesiology. In his Latina/o Protestant ecclesiological articulations, Justo Gonza´lez (1997) decided to use biblical metaphors to reinterpret the four traditional and foundational marks of the church: that the church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Gonza´lez (1997) stresses that since the current Latina/o perspective of the church is more missional (what is the church for?), than definitional (what is the church? or who is the church?), in his study he inverts the order of these distinguishing marks. Thus, he begins by defining the apostolic mark of the Latino/a Protestant church. The traditional interpretation of this mark in Protestant circles is conformity to the doctrines and practices of apostolic time. However, Gonza´lez (1997) decides to approach this apostolic mark by analyzing its etymology; ‘‘apostle’’ means to be sent, to have a sense of mission. Considered from this perspective, the Latina/o Protestant church is highly apostolic. In this community the Gospel or the people’s need of salvation is presented with a sense of urgency. To be sent to share this salvation is the mission of the church. But this mission is lived from the perspective of a pilgrim people who have not experienced a sense of belonging in the United States, even though some of these people have been here for centuries. Thus, the Latina/o Protestant church is formed by people who are sent, on the march, on a pilgrimage full of joy as well as pain. This pilgrimage is done as a group, and it welcomes whoever wants to join in the marching toward a promised future, to a great fiesta. In much the same way, Gonza´lez (1997) then proceeds to analyze the catholic mark of the Latino/a Protestant church. Traditionally, the term ‘‘catholic’’ has been understood to mean universal, and this meaning has been difficult for the Latina/o churches to embrace. It implies that there is a universal, valid way to be a Christian that excludes the contributions of those who are on the margins, such as Latino/as. Gonza´lez (1997) argues that the true meaning of the word is ‘‘according to the whole,’’ which implies a unity where variety is necessary for the group and thus welcome. The best image to convey this idea is the body of Christ where there is room for every person regardless of his/her color, language, or social status. This body is completely interdependent, so if one member suffers, all suffer, and if one member rejoices, all rejoice. Furthermore, this image stresses that in order to have a whole, healthy body, the presence of all of its different members and their contributions are necessary and valuable.

606 |

Ecclesiology

But Gonza´lez (1997) is not quite done. He insists that the notion of the holiness of the church be reinterpreted too. The traditional understanding of this term is derived from the missionaries who evangelized the Hispanic Americas, and who had the tendency to associate holiness with the worthiness or unworthiness of particular persons. This understanding led the Latino/a Protestants to perceive the church as the guardian of morality, and to be extremely judgmental of each other. These dynamics, Gonza´lez affirms (1997), have been very damaging and tragic for the Latino/a church. In his reinterpretation of this mark of the church, he therefore stresses that the church is holy because of its connection to God and Christ, not because of its members’ worthiness. Accordingly, its members are able to experience the holiness of the church when they, as children of the Holy, encounter and worship this Holy God. Finally, regarding the church as being one, Gonza´lez (1997) explains that this mark has been expressed through the word ‘‘unity.’’ Unfortunately, Latino/a Protestants perceive this unity as something undesirable because it reminds them of the traditional Roman Catholic understanding that to be ‘‘one’’ all Christians need to be subject to a particular authority—leaving no room for Protestants. Also, the word ‘‘unity’’ makes Latino/a Protestants feel uncomfortable because often the Anglo White denominations speak of a unity that seems to imply uniformity in which Latino/as’ perspectives and values are not appreciated or accepted. Gonza´lez affirms that in spite of their uneasiness with this concept, Latino/a Protestants experience it in a particular way as they live as the family of God. Here Gonza´lez (1997), in agreement with other Hispanic theologians such as Riebe-Estrella (1990), explains that the family, in the Latina/o context, is not only the nuclear family but the extended family that includes all sorts of blood relatives as well as relatives by marriage and by baptism (compadres/comadres). In the U.S. context where many immigrants have had to leave their families behind, this extended family of God, the church, becomes an opportunity to enjoy again the warmth of a true family. Through this extended family of faith, Latino/a Protestants are able to experience the unity of the church as they live like a blood family that, though it experiences tensions and conflicts from within, knows that its members cannot just break away from it. Another expression of this unity is the sharing involved in the Latino/a Protestant church. This solidarity is such that members in very intimate ways share their problems—and the resources to solve these problems. Finally, seen as an extended family, the boundaries of the Latina/o church are not totally defined, meaning that there is always room for more relatives/members who may be different, but who still belong in the unity of the family. Other Protestant theologians have decided to study the church by analyzing particular bodies within the Protestant traditions. In his articulations about a Latina/o Protestant ecclesiology, Juan Francisco Martı´nez (2006) reflects on the believer’s church perspective as represented mainly by Pentecostals, Baptists, Mennonites, and Disciples of Christ. From this perspective, the church is a community of people who have made a voluntary commitment of faith and have been baptized by immersion as a public expression of this commitment. He affirms that for these Protestant Latino/as, the local church occupies a central place in their lives because this is where they experience God in worship, as well as the support and affirmation of the community that functions as an extended family. These churches tend to give much importance to the

Ecclesiology

| 607

HERMANO/A While commonly used as a term of endearment among Latino/as, the concept of hermano/a preponderates the language of faith in Spanish-speaking communities. Members of religious orders within the Roman Catholic tradition are referred to as ‘‘hermano’’ or ‘‘hermana’’ in some generic way in lieu of a vocational title. Within the Hispanic Protestant tradition it is the common greeting used by members of the faith community. The term is utilized both in the context of worship as well as in the daily interactions of Protestant Christians as a form of public identification. To be called ‘‘hermana/ o’’ implies a level of intimacy among people who share a common perspective on life and faith and carries with it an inherent responsibility for ethical behavior, interpersonal commitments, and reciprocity. In religious practices like Santerı´a the term is also used by participants in the context of rituals. In the religious practice of Espiritismo, the term is frequently used in reference to the person who officiates the rituals and serves as the medium for channeling the manifestations of the spiritual world. In all of these uses, however, the term implies a symmetrical relation among religious practitioners and their leaders rather than a hierarchical understanding defined by relational authority and detachment. —JI

Bible and to the life of prayer. In terms of the governance of the church, they affirm a congregational government with autonomy to deal with its own affairs. A key principle in this government and in the life of the church in general is the ‘‘priesthood of all believers.’’ This notion is empowering because it allows all of the members of the church, regardless of their education, occupation, or legal status, to have a role and a responsibility in the church. As they experience increased responsibilities, these lay leaders may move to key leadership positions in the church, perhaps including the pastorate. This kind of organization allows for Latino/as who are marginalized in the White denominations and in society at large the rare opportunity to be leaders and owners of their own local organizations. Martı´nez (2006) suggests that in terms of Latino/a identity, these churches have been a vehicle to transmit and maintain values of the Latina/o community, such as the Spanish language and diverse cultural traditions. This maintenance of Latina/o values has been difficult on two fronts. On the one hand, the White denominations put pressure on these churches to acculturate. On the other hand, these Protestant Latino/ as continue to live in a culture impregnated with Catholic beliefs and traditions, and as they leave Catholicism, they are no longer regarded as being fully Latino/a. Martı´nez (2006) concludes that these churches will continue to attract Latino/as in the future because of the particularly familiar model of church that they offer to the Latino/a community. Ruben P. Armenda´riz (1999) presents a different perspective as he analyzes the characteristics of some Hispanic congregations within the mainline traditions, such as Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and United Church of Christ. In agreement with other Hispanic theologians, he affirms that in these Latina/o churches

608 |

Ecclesiology

CULTO The liturgical experience within the Latino/a Protestant community is referred to as el culto. ‘‘El culto’’ is both the way of practicing or rendering worship to God (rendir culto) and the place separated for those practices where people go for spiritual (cult)ivation (ir al culto). The substitution of the most traditional term for referring to Protestant worship (Servicio de Adoracio´n) for culto lacks a consistent history. It is possible that the term was claimed by Evange´lica/os after the Roman Catholic Church began to refer to the emerging Protestant houses of worship as cultos, or cults in the most pejorative sense, in order to detract the Catholic faithful from visiting these communities. Another possibility is that Protestant missionaries used the term culto as a linguistic equivalent for ‘‘worship,’’ since the appropriate word in Spanish, adoracio´n, was reminiscent of the Catholic veneration of saints, a practice that Protestant missionaries discouraged. Some common features of ‘‘el culto’’ across the diverse theological traditions is the frequent use of single stanza canticles for praising named coritos, the incorporation of musical styles and instruments that are common in the popular culture, unrehearsed public prayer, the sharing of ‘‘testimonios’’ or verbal witnessing to God’s work in people’s lives, and extended sermons and liturgies. —JI

the people clearly relate to one another as members of an extended family, calling each other hermano and hermana (brother and sister). Although there is the assumption that in most of these churches Spanish is the predominant language, Armenda´riz (1999) discovered in his study that the current trend is bilingualism (Spanish and English). The reason for this is that as an intergenerational group, the older members of these Latina/o churches prefer Spanish, while the younger generations prefer English. Another characteristic of these churches is that their members prefer to be called evange´licos/as instead of Protestantes. As evange´licos/as, they affirm the centrality of the Bible as normative in their faith and practice, and self-disciplined behavior as a testimonio (witness) to how they have been transformed by the Gospel. The members of these churches recognize that they are a minority (Protestant) within a minority (Latina/o), and that is how they account for the small size of their churches. However, they see this characteristic as something positive that allows them to experience closeness and familiarity within the congregation. Finally, in terms of the worship experience, Armenda´riz (1999) argues that even though these congregations have for the most part copied the worship services of their Anglo Protestant counterparts, they also have their own cultural expressions within the service, such as the decorations, and some traditional celebrations such as quincean˜eras and las posadas. In terms of popular religiosity, the Latina/o Protestant churches also have their own particular expressions such as los coritos, which are informal songs often written by ordinary people in the churches. They are used in casual gatherings such as youth meetings or less conventional services where the whole church participates. Another

Ecclesiology

| 609

expression of popular religiosity is testimonios, which according to Juan Francisco Martı´nez (2006) are spiritual narratives told by a particular member of the church, narratives of how God blessed or helped him/her in a particular problem or struggle. In many Latina/o Protestant churches, these testimonios are a major part of the service and function as a way of nurturing the spiritual life of the congregation as well as being an opportunity to evangelize the visitors by sharing God’s power with them.

Final Remarks To conclude this survey of ecclesiological articulations from the Latino/a perspective, it is important to present some observations related to both traditions: Catholic and Protestant. First, regarding the popular expressions of these traditions, they seem to be very fluid, as they move from one group to the other. For instance, los coritos are very popular in Latina/o Protestant circles, but every day they become more common and present also in Catholic worship experiences. Las Posadas are a Catholic tradition, but they have made their way into the Latina/o Protestant churches. The same can be said about the celebration of la quincean˜era. In terms of challenges, both of these traditions will continue to experience challenges by their own women (and some supportive men), as they recognize more and more that women are also called to ordained ministries. A second challenge for both traditions will be the issue of ecumenical relationships as both groups attempt to work on issues of social justice. Since both Latino/a Catholic and Protestant people have been oppressed by issues of racism and discrimination, it would make sense for both parties to join together to confront these evils. The theologians of both sides have experienced the issue of being Latino/a as a uniting force, and thus they have set apart their theological differences in order to work together for the common good of the Latina/o community. Hopefully the example of these theologians will move the local churches of both traditions to start working together, without compromising their theological beliefs, to bring God’s justice and peace to the Latino/a community. Furthermore, as Latino/a theologians explore this doctrine of the church from their own perspectives, their articulations will continue to enrich the lives of their respective churches, as well as the life of the Christian church as a whole.

References and Further Reading Armenda´riz, Ruben P. ‘‘The Protestant Hispanic Congregation: Identity.’’ Protestantes/Protestants: Hispanic Christianity within Mainline Traditions, ed. David Maldonado Jr. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999). Espı´n, Orlando. ‘‘Tradition and Popular Religion: An Understanding of the Sensus Fidelium.’’ Mestizo Christianity: Theology from the Latino Perspective, ed. Arturo J. Ban˜uelas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Gonza´lez, Justo. ‘‘In Quest of a Protestant Hispanic Ecclesiology.’’ Teologı´a en Conjunto: A Collaborative Hispanic Protestant Theology, ed. Jose David Rodrı´guez and Loida I. MartellOtero (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997). ———. Man˜ana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990).

610 |

Ecclesiology

Martı´nez, Juan Francisco. ‘‘Church: A Latino/a Protestant Perspective.’’ Handbook of Latina/o Theologies, ed. Edwin David Aponte and Miguel A. De La Torre (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006). Pineda, Ana Marı´a. ‘‘Pastoral de Conjunto.’’ Mestizo Christianity: Theology from the Latino Perspective, ed Arturo J. Ban˜uelas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Riebe-Estrella, Gary. ‘‘Pueblo and Church.’’ From the Heart of Our People: Latino/a Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology, ed. Orlando E. Espı´n and Miguel H. Dı´az (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999). Rodrı´guez, Jeanette. ‘‘Church: A Roman Catholic Perspective.’’ Handbook of Latina/o Theologies, ed. Edwin David Aponte and Miguel A. De La Torre (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006).

EPISTEMOLOGY

Elias Ortega-Aponte How do we come to know the world? Can the world be known? What is the nature of knowledge? What role do our senses play in obtaining knowledge? Is the world out there to be known; is it internal to the subject; what are the relationships between the two? Answering these and related questions constitute the goal of Epistemology. In its most simple formulation, epistemology is the study of knowledge. It attempts to clarify the basis upon which we can claim to know the world and gain true beliefs. As a philosophical discipline, epistemology searches to account for how beliefs may be true and for justification in relation to knowledge of the objects in the natural world and/or in the world of the knowing subject. Traditionally, philosophical epistemology privilege knowledge of propositions (that a subject possesses knowledge of P as a proposition) over other kinds of knowledge, like the knowledge of how to do X. As a theological approach, epistemology seeks to answer the question of the possibility of gaining knowledge of God. It attempts to give an account of the nature of knowledge of the divine. Is knowledge of God true in the same way that mathematical knowledge is considered truth? How about proofs for the existence of God; do they share the same warrant of scientific proofs? A clear view of what knowledge might be bears significant impact in disciplines other than philosophy and theology. A solid theory of knowledge will weigh ethics, politics, sociology, the natural sciences, and other areas of inquiry, making the discipline of epistemology a prime candidate for interdisciplinary endeavors. An understanding of knowledge gathering and transmission is basic to any human anthropology; human societies are organized around vast reservoirs of knowledge (to which new materials are always added) that enable social, political, economic, cultural, and religious activities. Latino/a theology and religious thought emphasize experience, but experience with a particular focus, that of lo cotidiano. Lo cotidiano, that which happens in everyday life, is at the center of Latino/a theological analysis. The substance of epistemological reflection within the Latino/a scholar, rather than an abstract, denatured experience akin to Cartesian reflections, is embodied in the lives of the people. Everyday

611

612 |

Epistemology

experience provides the material of thinking about faith and life. Everyday practices, rituals, devotions, artistic expression, culinary creations, remedios, and popular wisdom are knowledge incarnate. A careful and methodological analysis of these activities reveals important lessons of how God’s revelations are interpreted and subsequently practiced in our communities. This is the first contribution that U.S. Latino/a religious thought makes to the study of epistemology. A second contribution to the field of epistemology from Latino/a theology takes the form of reading the Christian tradition latinamente. This latinidad scrutinizing unmasks racism and prejudice of views seeking dominance of the ways to interpret Christian tradition; it also moves beyond this necessary critical moment to separate the wheat from the chaff, searching for how the truth of the gospel and God’s revelation speak to the Latino/a communities. By gathering the wheat, Latino/a scholars have availed themselves of the grain of tradition, grinding the grain and leavening the flour to make bread to nourish our peoples; at the end, burning the chaff or letting the wind blow it away, we open ways for our communities to heal. Thus, reading tradition latinamente enables new and creative ways of traditioning. Traditioning is the activity of passing down a tradition. This activity should be understood as a knowledge-disseminating practice. Traditioning as a way of gathering knowledge understands that divine revelation takes place in the midst of our daily lives, in struggles, victories, survival strategies, and sinfulness. It is here that divine reality is most present, not in abstract formulation of armchair theologians. The act of handing down a tradition passes on the kernel of it, but also adds to it from the experiences of those who hand down the tradition. U.S. Latina theological feminist contributions to the field of epistemology are numerous. Among them, they have the centrality of the experiences of women of color as a starting point of theoretical and methodological reflection. The starting point of Latina theological feminism in the experience of Latina women has enabled a reconceptualization of divine reality in which aspects of Latinas culture and histories have enriched and challenged traditional conceptions of the divine. It has also taken recourse in extensive literary and artistic productions of Latinas seeking new sites of divine revelatory activity; this has become particularly useful in challenging the patriarchal nature of Hispanic culture and set sexual politics. A third contribution of Latinas to epistemology has been in the field of ethics. Although common among the scholarly work of Latino/as as a whole, Latina theologians have led the way in exploring the ethical connections of sexuality and race through the development of concepts like mulataz, mujerismo, and lo cotidiano. Their work has opened new ways of thinking about appropriate ethical behavior, the relation between religious practices and ethics, and more importantly, the role of the theologian for the Latino/a community. Another significant contribution of U.S. Latino/as to epistemology has been the expansion of the field to incorporate issues of aesthetics and justice into ways of knowing. Knowing is gaining knowledge of what is beautiful and shedding a different light on traditional ways of justifying knowledge. The demand is not placed to give appropriate and sufficient evidence in favor of a belief. Instead, the emphasis lies in the beauty and intent of the world. What the bases are for beauty in creation in connection

Epistemology

| 613

with the divine plan takes the shape of humanizing activity. Justice is primary in securing and preserving human dignity and the flourishing of human beings. Finally, U.S. Latino/a religious epistemology takes the standpoint of the poor, oppressed, and downtrodden. By giving epistemic privilege to the experience of the poor, the end goal of a Latino/a religious is one of liberatory knowledge, knowledge of the divine that informs and calls for a practical expression in liberation. Liberatory knowledge for the Latino/a theologian leads to liberating praxis. This emphasis reveals an often ignored form of knowledge, the knowing how to do an activity. For the Latino/ a theologian, knowing the divine occurs in the midst of daily life, during the search for humanizing and liberatory practices.

References and Further Reading Aquino, Marı´a Pilar, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodrı´guez. A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). Espı´n, Orlando, and Gary Macy. Futuring Our Past: Explorations in the Theology of Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006). Maduro, Otto. Mapas Para La Fiesta: Reflexiones Sobre la Crisis y el Conocimiento (Atlanta: AETH, 1998).

ESCHATOLOGY

Luis E. Benavides The Greek word ‘‘eschatology’’ means ‘‘last things.’’ The fields of philosophy, theology, religion, and psychology appropriated this meaning to explain: (1) how humankind and the universe will end, and (2) the hope for a radical transformation of both of them in the future. In this sense, eschatology became known as both the doctrine of the last things and the doctrine of the beginning of eternity. Eschatology chronicles the end of the beginning and the eternal beginning of the endless end; as such, we can conceive of eschatology as the creation’s journeying back into its Creator. In Christianity, history has a linear movement toward a destiny: God (eternity)creation and fall-redemption-transformation-God (eternity). Because God’s destiny is God-self, the destiny of God’s creation is also God-self. Eschatology cares for providing the truth claims necessary for understanding the destiny of the individual (death, judgment, heaven, and hell) and the final stages of the physical universe. However, as the history of the church and theology advance, Latino/a theologies have enlarged the meaning of eschatology held for many years by Western theology in contemporary theological discourse. The question of eschatology, its meaning and content, has been handled in Latina/o scholarship by reviewing the vicissitudes of history faced by the Latino/a community in the United States. Latino/a eschatology emphatically has the status of a verifiable objective for social justice today, in which hope for the future becomes, retrospectively, hope for the present. Since the driving religious element in eschatology is essentially the expectation of a new state of things, Latina/o eschatology stands for liberation from a particular social, economic, and political situation toward a more just situation in the society of the United States. Such betterment is inextricably bound up with the understanding of the Kingdom of God, in which traditional eschatology is transformed into sociopolitical action, theology into sociology, and idealism into materialism. Western theology’s eschatology, understood as proclaiming a ‘‘pie in the sky when you die,’’ is seen as suspicious by Latino/a eschatology, which is striving for recognition, acceptance, and participation of the Latina/o community in the U.S. society. If there is a ‘‘pie,’’ then let us share it here and now on earth. 615

616 |

Eschatology

Latino/a eschatology’s truth claims hold that hope for the future must not distract but, instead, foster the Church’s responsibility for preaching a gospel of social justice, economic equality, and political change. With these three elements, Latina/o eschatology aims to substantiate the rest of Latino/a statements of faith about God and God’s relationship with God’s creation. Latina/o eschatology is not a chapter at the end of a theological system, as happens in traditional Western theology, but an omnipresent theme. This is why eschatology pervasively penetrates the truth claims of Latina/o theologies in every theme. In Latino/a eschatology the truth is both contextually bound and realized in history.

Truth as Contextually Bound In Latino/a eschatology, the claim that truth is contextually bound conveys a preferential option for a culture, implying that a minority culture lives within a dominant culture. In Latin America, the focus is economic, but in the United States, the focus is cultural pluralism, which is totally antithetical to the well-known melting pot. Latina/o eschatology does not advocate for assimilation that produces Americanization nor for rejecting assimilation that produces tolerance, but for cultural pluralism that produces differentiation. This differentiation suggests neither superiority nor cultural insulation, but cultural distinctiveness in the United States. Cultural distinctiveness is identical to the Latino/a awareness of being in the world. In the last analysis, cultural distinctiveness, or otherness, makes Latina/os the subject or the object (participant or oppressed) in any context. Liberation theologians have long held that all types of indigenous or contextual theologies are inimical to those systematic theological reflections practiced for centuries by Western theology. Since Latino/a theologies are daughters of Liberation Theology, this inimical aspect has conditioned the whole of Latina/o eschatology. Such a sense of distance between various forms of contextual theologies and Western theology becomes evident when viewed through the lens of the three models of contemporary theology outlined by David Tracy (1982). Tracy suggests that contemporary theology can be divided or categorized among three basic ideal types: foundational or philosophic theology, systematic or church-based dogmatic theology, and praxis or contextual theological systems. Each form of theological discourse has its own canon of interpretation, audience, authority, and warrants of rationality and argumentation. Contextual theologies, such as African (e.g., John S. Mbiti and John S. Pobee), Latin American (e.g., Gustavo Gutie´rrez and Leonardo Boff), Asian (e.g., Nam Dong Suh and Choan Sen Song), and more recently Latino/a theologies (e.g., Justo Gonza´lez and Virgilio Elizondo), are neither agreeable with nor analogous to the style of reflection indigenous to Western theology. For contextual indigenous theologians, theology is mostly a passion, and theology is to be lived in a given local situation. Experiencing God in a given oppressed situation or structure is the foundation of theological reflections of God. While systematic or unsystematic reflections intellectually help others to understand God and God’s relationship with the creation, contextual indigenous theologians reflect, and try to live their beliefs, in a particular context that could be Asian,

Eschatology

| 617

African, Latino/a, or North American. In this way, contextual theologies evolve from the practical living in a particular context. Contextualization means the application of the understanding of the Christian faith in a concrete location within a specific situation. Concrete location means a geographical scene that could be Latin America, Asia, Africa, or the United States. And the situation refers to that historic-existential condition from which Latina/o eschatology abstracts its truth claims. Contextual theologies such as Latino/a, Korean, Black, and Haitian are characterized and limited by having their own perspective and situation. This characterization is relevant because some issues and symbols that are significant in one culture are irrelevant in another culture. Also, by attempting to make the gospel relevant in a contemporary culture, we do not have to confuse or identify contextualization with implementation. Contextualization does not ascribe superiority to Western theology. But because the gospel is pliant, the context actively assumes an important role in interpreting the gospel and Jesus Christ as unique, in order to solve different cultural plights. Latina/o eschatology embraces this view as part of its truth claims. For Latino/a theologies, and particularly for Latina/o eschatology, context is fraught with three existential meanings: location, rejection of ethnocentrism, and knowledge of the culture. All of them expect a new state of things. Regarding location, Latino/a eschatology asks the question: What is the existential meaning of the place in which Latina/os live, namely, North America? The label ‘‘North America’’ bears two meanings, a literal one and a figurative one. Literally speaking, ‘‘North America’’ entails the whole of the geographic, social, economic, institutional, and political structures of the continental United States. It refers to the physical scene or historical arena in which the Latino/a experience is currently taking place and has also been shaped and developed. Figuratively speaking, ‘‘North America’’ implies more than a geographic place. For Latina/os, it has an existential meaning without a single focus, but with several locations. For instance, Latino/a theologians have identified ‘‘North America’’ with the following ideas: (1) the land where Latino/as forcefully experience a change in social status; (2) a place of desolation; (3) the land of oppression for Latinas; (4) a place for a new social location or immigration; (5) a land for becoming a Chicano/a after experiencing two-times mestizaje; (6) a place to live an imposed exile; (7) a place for being invisible; and lastly, (8) a place for an ambivalent identity in which Puerto Ricans, for instance, have been conquered in 1492 and colonized in 1898; Puerto Ricans are Latino/as, belonging to the United States involuntarily. In summary, ‘‘North America’’ is the place in which Latina/os have found cultural, sociological, and existential reasons for raising up new theological voices, striving for liberation. These voices have been nurtured by an existential engagement with the daily life of the Latino/a community in the United States. These voices are also unique in the sense that they are self-consciously non–North American. Ontologically speaking, Latina/o eschatology theologizes for moving the Latino/a community from nonbeing to a new being in the United States. This movement has not yet been achieved. Nonbeing is understood here as a by-product of Latina/o existential anxiety and, therefore, part of the Latino/a condition. In the Latina/o culture, awareness of nonbeing is

618 |

Eschatology

heightened when Latino/as realize they are a minority group struggling for cultural distinctiveness while resisting cultural and theological assimilation. In this regard, Latino/a eschatology asks the question, what does it mean to be Latina/o in the United States? Interestingly, in the United States, and not in their former homeland, Latino/as realize they are a mixture of being and nonbeing, and that the immediate existential situation is leading them to seek a new being. Latino/a eschatology functions here to bring hope today. Latina/o eschatology recognizes that cultural diversity is a constitutive element of ecclesiology. For this reason alone, Latino/as reject ethnocentrism: the assumption that the worldview of one’s own culture is central to all realities. The American way is not the only way. In the New Testament, for instance, Pauline churches function as an example of cultural diversity for us today. Such churches were not formed with a single homogeneous group, but with heterogeneous groups. The first Christians were not exclusively or even predominantly poor, and the Pauline churches gathered people from many of the social strata of the society. They came from high as well as low social classes. Many Latino/as are in the United States because of the problems they left behind, not because they want to stay here voluntarily. Part of this immigration is due to the U.S. political interventions in Latin America. Immigrations into the United States are a symbolic price that the United States is paying for being the police force of the world. In one way or another, Latina/o existential situations have pushed them to abandon their homeland to come to the United States, which supposedly is the land of social, political, and economic stability, in order to build a better life. In so doing, voluntary, along with involuntary, immigrants have to pay an existential price, being read by the society as merely ‘‘Latino/as.’’ Because many Latino/as have to work two or three part-time jobs to meet their material needs, ‘‘the American dream’’ has become the sleeping time one can get from midnight to five o’clock in the morning. The American dream is, in reality, a nightmare.

Truth as Realized in History The interpretation of history has had many participants who have assisted in the construction of a universal historical consciousness from different approaches. For instance, Augustine of Hippo reads human history as an ongoing struggle between two kingdoms: the city of God and the city of man. Georg W. F. Hegel reads human history as the place where God is at work in the world by unfolding the Spirit’s self-conscious, which is the self-realization of God in human history. John Wesley reads history as the arena of God’s saving work. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels read history as the product of economic class struggle. Paul Tillich reads history as the arena from which the human being is translated from the temporal to the eternal. More instances can be added to the list, but these illustrate how Western thinkers have approached history, providing an enormous contribution for the expansion and enrichment of historical consciousness. But, the contents of historical consciousness must serve a function, namely, to lead us to reason. Western thinkers have always seen reality as ontological; they attach to the fact that the human plight and its destructive nature appeared as a result of the fall of

Eschatology

| 619

humankind. This fact is understood and widely accepted in Christianity as the original sin incorporated into human nature since Adam and Eve’s times. But, the conviction that human beings can assist in God’s redemption plan, and in the construction of a more just society, have also been clearly understood and widely accepted in Christianity. Latina/o eschatology claims that ontology must be transformed into social action. The understanding of individual salvation must reverberate in community life today, not just tomorrow. Latino/a eschatology recognizes that perfect social conditions are utopian; on the other hand, it also recognizes that only a transformed individual can create new social actions. In this respect, Latina/o eschatological interpretations of history strive for both the transformation of the individual with regard to individual salvation (ontology), and for the transformation of society with regard to the search for a more just society (social action). Latino/a eschatology focuses on the natural rather than focusing on the supernatural. Approaching history from a Latina/o eschatological point of view suggests that history and historical consciousness are more than simple accounts of the past. History should function to define the future by changing the present. History has been read with an East-to-West orientation, misrepresenting the contents of the long history of injustice and pain with regard to Latino/a emigrations from all over Latin America to the United States. For this reason, Latina/o historical consciousness demands that history should also be read with a South-to-North orientation.

Immigrants from the Mexican-community group the Tepeyac Association demonstrate on Good Friday in front of Federal Plaza in New York City. The group demanded equal rights for immigrant workers and criticized Bush administration immigration policies. (Ramin Talaie/Corbis)

620 |

Eschatology

There are events in place merely by the Latino/a presence in U.S. history and society that have gained significance, but are eschewed by or not contained at all in, Western historical consciousness. This significance warrants that Latina/os be considered as an historical group. Latino/as should be responsible for interpretation. In this interpretation, Latina/os are aware that their history is embedded within the U.S. history, having invisible ties to their country of origin. The selection of events that are to be established as historically significant, before starting to think eschatologically, is the most important task for Latino/as to make such events visible. This selection will depend on the evaluations of its own importance for the establishment of the Latino/a culture and identity as an historical group, and for their contribution to expanding and enriching historical consciousness, but in a Latino/a way or Latinoly. Most of the Latina/os who dwell in the United States have been reading history and their plight from social, economic, and political points of view. Latino/a eschatology, therefore, serves a function, which is to care for the present Latina/o plight and not for ‘‘a pie in the sky when you die.’’ Latino/a eschatology is committed to claiming social, economic, and political rights. This struggle is fundamentally in search of equality, despite the inequalities imposed by what the majority culture perceive as its natural privileges. Latina/o eschatology is not tangential to this struggle; it acknowledges that the struggle is here and now, not just in the afterlife.

The Contents of Latino/a Eschatology There is a scarcity of writings about Latina/o eschatology. The subject is held in great abeyance in Latino/a scholarship. There is neither a specialized scholar nor a book on Latina/o eschatology that explains the contents fully. Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az, Virgilio Elizondo, and Justo Gonza´lez have made brief incursions into the study of Latino/a eschatology. In advancing the study on eschatology, these three scholars do not accept those eschatologies that jeopardize sociopolitical action undertaken by Latino/as. That is to say, Latina/o eschatology’s present discourse is focused on historical praxis, with the intention of changing history as it unfolds, rather than focusing on an explication of the conclusion of history, or the supernatural afterlife. Three characteristics delineate the contents of Latino/a eschatology in these three writers: Latina/o eschatology is (1) teleological in nature, (2) focused on sociopolitical action, and (3) based on a common vision of struggle.

Latino/a Eschatology as Teleological Latino/a scholars believe that an overall design or purpose in nature guides human history in which God alone has established the purpose. For example, Isasi-Dı´az (1993) believes in one human history that has at its very heart the history of salvation, dismissing in this way the idea of two separated histories, i.e., the secular and the sacred. What really counts for Isasi-Dı´az is not human history as history, but what is inherently tied to the salvation of humankind. More to the point, what really counts is the salvation of Latina women. She claims that by history of salvation, Latinas refer to what

Eschatology

| 621

they believe are divine actions—creation, incarnation, and redemption—as well as human responses to this, whether positive or negative. For Isasi-Dı´az, human history and salvation history are identical, having at the center the incarnation. Also, human history must be seen against the framework of God’s divine actions in three objective movements in history: creation, incarnation, and redemption. Gonza´lez (1992) sees history quite differently from Isasi-Dı´az. Following the scriptural narratives, he thinks that biblical history, along with church history, functions to illustrate what is happening today. He does not use history to elaborate a future eschatology, but to explain the contents of the present in order to insert Latino/a history into the context of general history. For him, biblical history is a history beyond innocence. Its only real heroes are the God of history and history itself, which somehow continues moving forward in spite of the failure of its great protagonists. In this definition, Gonza´lez holds that the Scriptures describe how great biblical heroes failed God. God then becomes the only true hero. He also sees history as a linear movement mostly characterized by failing people rather than full of novelistic idealizations. Gonza´lez claims that those who think of their own history in terms of high ideals and purity detract from the power and inspiration of Scriptures. This, however, is not the case with Latina/os. Because of the brutal conquest of Latin America by the Spaniards, Latino/as know that they are born out of an act of violence. He interprets Latina/o history not with idealistic assumptions, but by vicissitudes of contingency. His view of history is objective in which the brutal Spanish conquest and history itself function as verifiable truths. Through this method of reading history, Gonza´lez thinks that by looking only at the ideal heroes, we are falling into an innocent reading of history that must be surpassed. The reality is that history is fraught with pain, as Latino/a history demonstrates, and this pain functions as the starting point in Latina/o eschatology.

Latino/a Eschatology as Sociopolitical Action Latina/o scholars are concerned with their present predicament, but they are not concerned with an eschatological otherworldly view of reality. Specifically, Latino/a scholars are concerned for salvation as liberation in which they think God is particularly concerned to remove the restraints on the self-determination of Latino/as. IsasiDı´az, who is the feminist voice in Latina/o scholarship, rejects any concept of salvation that does not affect present and future reality of Latina women. Salvation occurs in history and is intrinsically connected to their liberation. In other words, liberation of Latinas and salvation are identical; if Latinas do not reach liberation, they are not going to be saved. For Latinas to talk about salvation, liberation, and the coming of the ‘‘kin-dom’’ of God are one and the same thing. Therefore, eschatology becomes sociopolitical action. If Latinas are not liberated, then the Kingdom is not here yet and salvation is only in the process of becoming a historical reality. Gonza´lez rejects all eschatologies that avoid social and political concerns today. For liberal theologians, both enlightened and sophisticated, eschatological expectation undercuts the social and political action of Christians. This is true only on the basis of a particular understanding of eschatology or of a particular understanding of social

622 |

Eschatology

and political action. He also blames those ‘‘spiritualist’’ eschatologies that prevent Christians from taking social or political action. There have been abusive eschatologies with strong political emphasis such as the Anabaptists. He then announces what he considers an eschatological alternative for Latino/as today: Man˜ana (tomorrow). As eschatological hope, ‘‘man˜ana’’ is much more than tomorrow, it is the radical questioning of today. By this he means a critical confrontation and evaluation of the Latino/ a predicament against the social and political structures of the U.S. society. Therefore, liberation is for today; thus transforming eschatology into sociopolitical action. This is a clear postulation of ‘‘sociopolitical action’’ as an a priori realm, which Gonza´lez exploits to explain the plausibility for freedom. Such a postulate seems to be valid for Gonza´lez, who sees sociopolitical action as necessary and applicable to all circumstances without an a posteriori verification. Latina/o eschatology is then sociopolitical —a radical questioning of today. Gonza´lez reinterprets the expression ‘‘a pie in the sky when you die’’ by claiming that if God’s intended order is that we have a pie, how come others get all the pies and Latino/as get all the pain? This question reflects Gonza´lez’s concern for social justice today. Gonza´lez sees the future sociopolitically and retrospectively. For him, anyone who believes that the future God promises has nothing to do with physical life, and with the social order, will hardly be overly interested in the political struggles of our day. In addition to Gonza´lez’s thinking, we need to include that God’s intended order is also to give justice in the eschaton, in the second coming of Jesus the Christ, or at the time we pass away. This is illustrated in the narrative of Luke 16:19–31 with the story of Lazarus and the rich man. But, how is it that Lazarus gets all the pain and the rich man all the pies? Latina/o eschatology would advocate for making justice for Lazarus while he was alive. In this case, Latino/a eschatology will hold as untenable the fact that Lazarus, in his earthly life, had all the pain and the rich man all the pies.

Latina/o Eschatology as Common Vision for Struggle Latino/a scholars, both Catholics and Protestants, share a common eschatological vision for struggle. They have transformed the future eschatological hope into a present sociopolitical hope, which is reflected in their common struggle for liberation. Each Latina/o scholar has taken a particular stance in order to struggle with a particular aspect of the present Latino/a predicament. In this way, mujerista theology adopts to struggle for the Latinas’ economic situation (Isasi-Dı´az 1993); barrio theology adopts to struggle for the Puerto Rican’s housing situation (Recinos 1989); sufferer theology adopts to struggle for the Puerto Rican Pentecostals’ suffering condition (Solivan 1993); and mestizo theology adopts to struggle for the Chicano’s socioeconomic condition (Elizondo 1983). The truth claims that lie behind this common vision for struggle is that Latina/o eschatology acknowledges there is something wrong in all of us and in society; and we need to be liberated from that sense of wrongness. In Latino/a eschatology, the theologian’s personal journey functions as a starting point for doing theology. Latina/o theologians are not detached from the realities of their own communities, they are fully engaged in the realities about which they theologize, and they, in themselves, are a source for theological reflection.

Eschatology

| 623

Issues Requiring Further Discussion Latino/a eschatology is still in the stage of chrysalis. It is a new theological voice just starting to have presence, and it must be credited for the remarkable success it has had in the short term. But the virtue to success is also a temptation to weakness. The following aspects require further reflection in Latina/o eschatology: First, Latino/a eschatology is driven by historical facts that are, in turn, conditioned by the Latina/o situation in the U.S. society. Latino/a scholars are concerned with the social, political, and economic situation today. For this reason, the notion of ‘‘a pie in the sky when you die’’ is approached with suspicion, because it distracts from the significance of history today. This is precisely why Nietzsche attacked Christianity; he did so because Christianity cared more for the next world and forgot about the beauty of the present world. When the ‘‘pie in the sky’’ notion is employed to legitimate oppression, it becomes sociopolitically suspect. From this point of view, eschatology is a changing or improving of Latina/o life conditions, becoming a representative of class struggle. But, since Marx is not a Latino/a discovery, but a European one, and since Latino/a eschatology belongs to the contextual theologies paradigm, then the questions arise: How much and why is Marx present in Latina/o eschatology? And, does Latino/a eschatology have a classless society as the aim of history? God understands the oppressed situation and needs to be portrayed as one who understands all conditions: the Latina/o condition and the non-Latino/a condition. All people need to know that God understands every single culture. This does not mean that God is a proponent of wealth and cultural domination; it means that God cares for all peoples equally as God does for the oppressed minority populations. Second, Latina/o eschatology is written with particular biases. Eschatology is being read with particular proclivities that consciously affect the view of eschatology. Mujerista theology reads eschatology through the lens of Latinas; barrio theology reads eschatology through the lens of Puerto Ricans’ poverty; and mestizo theology reads eschatology through the lens of Chicanos’ poverty. In Latina/o eschatology, the theologian is, in himself or herself, a source for theological reflection; his or her cultural and existential pedigree matters. Then the question arises: Is Latino/a eschatology a theology of introspection or internalization? Saint Augustine was criticized for grounding much of his theology in introspection, producing a theology based on personal experience. We cannot equate others’ experiences with our own. Other Latina/o scholars employ their personal backgrounds to highlight what they consider is the Latino/a predicament. Elizondo, a Chicano, is identified with the Chicanos; Solivan, a Puerto Rican, is identified with Puerto Ricans; Villafan˜e, a Puerto Rican, is identified with Puerto Ricans; Isasi-Dı´az, a Catholic Cuban, is identified with oppressed Catholic Latinas; and so forth. These biases are a virtue, but also a danger. It is a virtue because they are writing with passion, directly from the heart; but the danger lies in the fact that theology serves a particular function, and thus is deprived of the purity of impartial analysis. Latino/a eschatology fails to explain how eschatology, in a general sense, connects with those who are not Latina/os.

624 |

Eschatology

Third, Latino/a eschatology is written from the side of the victims. This aspect encourages some limitations via the plausibility of Latina/o scholarship. When the past, present, and future is centered on a particular plight of a particular Latino/a group, this creates a problem. History is reduced from its universal characteristic to a narrow point of view. The meaning, relevance, and characteristic of universal history (creation, incarnation, and redemption) cannot be derived from one small segment of the historical matrix, namely Latina/o history. History is meaningful and relevant when past and present history are related to the future, knowing what is at the end of history. Present history is incomplete if we do not make an effort to establish how history will be completed. In this way, eschatology becomes a necessary element for hope in the present. We can absolutize neither history nor eschatology as a function of the Latino/a predicament. This is especially true when we discover that Latina/o theologies do not appear open to the future in the light of present historical decisions. Establishing a communal hope of deliverance from oppression does not prevent one from having a personal hope for the future. Latino/as need both sociopolitical action today and a hope for the future. Latina/os die one by one, as individuals; they do not die in groups. General eschatologies are concerned with the future of every human being as an individual, including the cosmos. This does not suspend the fact that Latino/as, as a community, can develop a hope for the group. Koreans, Haitians, and African Americans are also history bearing groups, and they also have the right to social action and a hope for the future. Then the question arises: Is Latina/o eschatology exclusivist? Finally, Latino/a eschatology lacks ontological content. Eschatology is not only related to the ultimate end of humankind and the renewal of the cosmos, but it is also related to our inner being, as well as to the divine being. Latina/o scholars do not seem interested in developing an ‘‘enlightened’’ or ‘‘spiritual’’ eschatology, but a concrete eschatology. They want improvement in their standard of living now, but not in the afterlife. They are approaching the meaning of life with social justice as an agenda and not accepting life in the U.S. society as it exists. This is similar to what Latin American liberation scholars are doing. But neither Isasi-Dı´az, nor Elizondo, nor Gonza´lez defines eternal life and how Latino/as are related to it. This eschatology should be complemented with an adequate eschatology, in which both divine and human lives are successfully united, to the extent that in the present life human beings can participate partly in such divine life; and with a theory of how history will end by interpreting the destiny of humankind as a whole. This is a void left in Latina/o eschatology, since Latino/as are in one way or another related to the Catholic or Protestant tradition. Historically, they are in their inner being evangelicals by birth (believers of the Scriptures) and, as such, they still believe in the afterlife.

References and Further Reading Benavides, Luis E. Latino Christianity (Madison, NJ: United Methodist Church, General Commission on Archives and History, 2005). Elizondo, Virgilio. Galilean Journey (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991). Gonzalez, Justo. Man˜ana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990).

Eschatology Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. En la Lucha [In the Struggle] (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). Solivan, Samuel. The Spirit, Pathos, and Liberation (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academy Press, 1998). Recinos, Harold J. Hear the Cry (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989). Tracy, David. The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroads, 1981).

| 625

ETHICS

Ismael Garciá The categories ‘‘Hispanic American’’ and ‘‘Latino/a American’’ are a recent social construction that describe those people from Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean that have made the United States their homeland. These terms are comprehensive and at times ambiguous. Both of these terms make reference to people that represent over 25 countries and embody significant historical, cultural, and political differences. The terms also try to include people who have lived here for many generations as well as those who have recently resettled in the United States. A sign of the pluralism and diversity that exists within this group is indicated by the fact that they do not agree as to which term, ‘‘Latina/o’’ or ‘‘Hispanic,’’ best defines their self-identity. Some prefer the term ‘‘Hispanic’’ because it includes all those people for whom Spanish was the dominant language. This extends the net of inclusion to cover Europeans, particularly people from Spain. It does struggle, however, with the inclusion of Brazilians and indigenous populations within Latin America who resist making Spanish their dominant language. The term is quite prevalent in the southwest region of the United States. Others prefer ‘‘Latino/a’’ to emphasize the Latin American and Caribbean roots of the population. They struggle with the inclusion of non-Latin American Spanish speakers. While the term ‘‘Hispanic’’ tends to focus on cultural identity, in particular the politics of language, the term ‘‘Latino/a’’ tends to focus on questions of political engagement and empowerment. Both terms, however, do signal a deep desire of all these groups to find a way to define this new identity not by place of national origin but by the social, cultural, and political injustices most Hispanics confront within the United States. Both terms have gained political connotations. They signal a commitment to establish and sustain bonds of solidarity among the many different Latino/a groups, as well as a commitment to processes of social and political change aiming at greater social inclusion and political and economic equality. They signal that, in spite of many differences, there is a growing agreement that the preservation and enhancement of cultural identity is essential to bring the diverse Hispanic groups together, to achieve greater justice,

627

628 |

Ethics

and for members of the Hispanic community to flourish and enjoy a meaningful and good life. It should be clear by now that Latino/as are not a monolithic group. This is also true morally and ethically speaking. One finds both commonalities and differences among Latina/os themselves and among Hispanics and other North American racial ethnic groups. That Latino/as share with other racial ethnic groups many of the same ethical commitments, principles, and modes of making ethical decisions should come as no surprise given that they dwell within and share the same religious, social, political and cultural milieu. Sharing life together does shape one’s moral point of view. That they harbor different views about abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, the death penalty, the legitimacy of war and other such moral concerns should also come as no surprise. They belong to a pluralistic society with its competing social and moral values. Their moral and ethical diversity is also the result of the way different Latino/as prioritize competing moral principles and have been influenced by existential realities such as social class, experience of migration, gender, race, and political and religious commitments. Like other ethnic groups, Hispanics also have different conceptions of how to arrive at sound moral judgments and actions. For some, morality and ethics have to do mostly with duties and obligations that are in themselves binding. When asked ‘‘What should I do?’’ they reply, ‘‘Do those things which are in themselves right (truth telling, honesty, promise keeping) and avoid those things which are in themselves wrong (killing, lying, taking undue advantage).’’ Ethics, in this perspective, is mostly about respecting those laws, rules, and regulations that limit the ways we treat and relate to others. For others, morality is focused not so much on laws and regulations but on the consequences or goals of our actions. What goods are worthy of our pursuits and for whose benefit are these actions taken become the dominant moral questions. Morality and ethics, from this point of view, consist of the art of effectively choosing the right means to achieve the ends we pursue, not in the sense that the goal justifies the means but in the sense that worthy goals require fitting means. What matters morally is that we commit ourselves to contribute to enhancing the good that we are able Folk art depiction of Purgatory, Las to bring about and that our actions either Trampas, New Mexico. (Craig Aurness/ maximize the good or minimize harm for Corbis) the many.

Ethics

| 629

Finally, some claim that morality is not so much about formulating principles or external guidelines to rule our actions and decisions. Nor is ethics mostly about achieving particular goals. The dominant ethical concern relates to cultivating and internalizing those virtues, settled dispositions, and motives that define our character. Ethics is about formation of becoming a certain kind of person. From this point of view, being a moral person takes precedence over obeying rules and obtaining goals. More significant than doing a just act or telling the truth or acting courageously is forming moral agents who have the unshakable inclination and disposition to be just, truthful, and courageous. Good action flows from good character. Virtue ethics is equally concerned with the nature of the community that nurtures the agent and shapes his/her Striking janitors receive communion during being. An essential part of moral forma- a mass led by Cardinal Roger Mahony at tion is the creation of communities whose Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in Los members can both teach and model the Angeles, California. Cardinal Mahony, head of the largest diocese in the nation, has virtues we want to cultivate. Religion matters to most Hispanics and called for a mediator to help in does so for many reasons. Thus, religious negotiations. (Getty Images) organizations have a formative influence at the personal, communal, and even political levels. First, churches and other religious organizations have the capacity to congregate many members of the Hispanic community. They provide a public forum where many Hispanics gather information on what matters to them. They also provide the only public space where Hispanics feel they are heard and their views are respected. Churches and other religious organizations also provide multiple opportunities for Hispanics to serve their communities and to learn and develop leadership skills. Second, as they consider what moral principles ought to guide their actions, what goals are worthy of being pursued, and which virtues to nurture, many Hispanics seek guidance from their faith traditions, from their church leaders, from their congregations, and from the Scriptures. Religious beliefs and organizations provide and nurture their sense of meaning. They also play a formative role in their moral point of view. For some the Scriptures provide particular commands and laws that, having been given by God, define the values and moral obligations by which they ought to be bound. For others, more significant than laws the Scriptures provide narratives that make them aware of how God acts in the world and how the faithful should respond. The

630 |

Ethics

Scriptures provide us with examples of how to read the sign of the times and respond in a way fitting God’s Kingdom of peace and justice. Others find in Scripture narratives that describe the life and deeds of Jesus, of the Prophets, of the disciples, and of other heroes and saints that serve as examples of what it means to live a faithful and morally authentic life. These stories inspire and encourage us to imitate these saints and heroes. Imitation that, properly understood, consists not so much in mimicking what the saints and heroes did but rather in how to cultivate those virtues and habits that sustain our desire to be faithful to God’s purpose. The moral visions of Latina/os reveal significant diversity. Still, in spite of their diversity, one can identify common and widely shared motifs that dominate the Latino/as moral conversation. One common motif is the way Hispanics understand the relationship between ethics and morality. Many moralists make a distinction between ethics and morality. Morality, in their view, has to do with those practices a particular community identifies and claims leads to and sustains the good life. Thus morality is the practice of the good that a particular community has come to accept and is habituated to. Ethics, on the other hand, is more reflective and theoretical in nature. Ethics makes morality its subject matter. Its task is to question the customs and habits the community takes for granted as being good and critically analyze and evaluate them to see if they can, in fact, be justified as being the best moral practices. Latino/as do not establish such a sharp distinction and differentiation between the moral and the ethical. In their view, it is important that one keep theory and practice together, both informing and transforming each other. The doing of the good and the thinking of the good is part of a single process that ought not to be separated. Ethical theory and moral reflection are both at the service of sustaining moral practices and cultivating moral habits. Theory and practice constitute a single unity with practice being the beginning and end of this never-ending process. In this entry we shall honor this propensity and will not distinguish between these two terms. Another strong motif among Hispanics is the commitment and the belief in the importance of keeping an ongoing moral conversation within the community. It is particularly important to keep conversing with those members of the community with whom one has significant disagreements on key issues. What is at stake in this conversation is the quality of life and the sustainability of the community itself. When one stops speaking, one signals that one no longer belongs to or cares for the community. Latino/as emphasize this concern through their notion of doing ethics in conjunto. Morality and ethics is always to be done in the context of a covenant community that, while diverse in its value commitments, remains committed to wrestling with one another regarding those issues that matter to them. At a more substantive level, a motif that dominates Hispanic moral reflection is grounded in their experience of being victimized. The experience shared by many Hispanics of being economically exploited, unemployed or underemployed, limited to boring and underpaid jobs, politically powerless, socially marginal and lacking in recognition, and defined by negative stereotypes developed by dominant groups provides the core content of the ethical concerns of Latina/os. This is why one finds Hispanics primordially concerned with social ethical issues dealing with justice, human rights, and human dignity. The quest for justice has become a central moral concern of the

Ethics

| 631

Hispanic vision of the good life. There are, however, other ethical concerns that dominate the point of view of many Hispanics. At the personal level matters of responsibility for family, for one’s own self-development, for issues of self-discipline, and for responsibility to one’s neighbor also become important. Another characteristic of the Hispanic moral point of view is the centrality they give to the communal dimension of existence. Part of the trauma and maladjustment that many Hispanics experience when they come to the United States is due precisely to the shock they experience of moving from a culture that values extended family and intimate and broad-based communal relationships to a culture that is dominantly rights oriented, impersonal, individualistic, and radically private. Two dominant responses have emerged that seek to address the multiple challenges Hispanics confront: the ethics of identity and the ethics of the common good. These two moral points of view are shaping much of the moral discourse that is presently taking place within the Hispanic community. Those who abide by the ethics of identity argue that for Hispanic Americans to survive and flourish within North America they must create bonds of solidarity among the different Latino/a national groups. Their shared language and key cultural affinities, as well as their shared social and political challenges provide the context for this solidarity movement to take place. The ethics of identity focuses on the promotion of group loyalty and fraternal commitment toward those who share similar cultural traits. It is an ethics that emphasizes the centrality of recognition and respect of what is culturally unique to Latina/os as a history bearing group. This ethics rejects the dominant melting pot model of assimilation. It argues instead for social integration on the basis of shared power and recognition and preservation of differences. From a religious and theological point of view the ethics of identity uplifts biblical narratives of diasporas that depict the struggles of God’s chosen people to preserve their cultural and religious identity when, due to either migration or conquest, they find themselves living within a foreign nation. These stories provide analogies by which many Hispanics understand their present state of affairs. Biblical narratives and principles that affirm the diversity and the goodness of all cultural and ethnic particularity within creation are also appealed to as a source of inspiration to struggle for the preservation of identity and for the affirmation of cultural value and recognition. The ethics of identity, consistent with deeply ingrained values of Hispanic culture, calls on all members of this community to behave toward each other as if they were members of an extended family. This sense of extended family defines in a distinct way the nature of their basic moral actions and obligations. Family relationships do not follow the contractual model through which individuals relate to one another as autonomous and free agents who establish in clear and specific terms their mutual obligations aiming to satisfy their self-interest. Within the family, the language of individual rights is not normative, moral obligations are not expressed through impersonal universal rules or principles, much less are they impartially applied. Family ethics is covenantal in nature. The family is a given and so are the obligations we have within it. Our duties and obligations are defined by roles we do not choose, but in which we are born. As the language of rights, abstract principles and impartial judgments help and fit relationships between strangers. Within the family these are replaced by a normative sense

632 |

Ethics

of obligations and affective responsibilities toward those who depend on us, who have cared for us, and who have helped us become the particular persons we are today. Not self-interest but a sense of sacrifice, forgiveness, and service is what keeps us bonded to each other. Most importantly, family ethics assumes and affirms the preferential treatment we owe to our kin and to those with whom we have special bonds. Identity ethics claims that the preferential treatment owed those who have cared for us and who have defined our identity is a legitimate expectation and norm of human interaction. To disregard this commitment of preferential treatment toward kin would violate something basic to the human condition. Impersonal fairness and impartiality in the application of principles that dominate much of ethical theories within North American culture, far from being a virtue, is perceived as a vice. It not only fails to acknowledge the special obligations and the responsibility we owe to those who have cared for us, it also is a sign of lack of loyalty and gratitude. What is politically more significant, for Hispanics not to abide by the principle of preferential treatment towards kin, could very well undermine essential social relationships to our detriment. It can alienate those social groups essential for the protection of our survival and wellbeing. It would be an act of political suicide that can only undermine the possibility for Hispanics to gain and sustain the power they need to secure justice. The ethics of identity gives priority to virtues and character formation over universal principles. Among the virtues that are predominate are trustworthiness, friendship and loyalty, all of which sustain concrete forms of solidarity. Emotive empathy, attaching attentiveness to the needs of the oppressed and exploited, and feeling their pain also are central virtues. This particular care, obligation and empathy due to the oppressed or most vulnerable Hispanics, is expressed through the phrase ‘‘the preferential option of the poor.’’ There are a number of shortcomings that plague the ethics of identity. First, it cannot fully solve the tension that exists between its commitment to justice for the poor and the need for some dimension of impartiality and fairness that seems basic to any understanding of justice. Second, it has difficulty addressing the tension that exists between its commitment to the preservation of Hispanic identity and difference and the commitment to promote the common good that is foundational to achieve the economic, political, and cultural justice it seeks. Third, it tends to undervalue the appeal to universal moral principles and individual rights, and its strong sense of covenant and virtues is also a drawback. Public life always entails encounters between strangers. We inevitably must appeal to shared moral principles to motivate people to commit themselves to justice struggles, and we need principles to establish and regulate our mutual responsibilities and expectations. An alternative moral vision within the Latino/a community, that I will call the ethics of the common good, attempts to respond to some of the above-mentioned challenges and shortcomings of the ethics of identity. These two ethical visions share many of the same value commitments central to Hispanic culture and its moral point of view. For example, they both share a similar communitarian ethos. For both of these ethical visions, what is fundamental in ethics derives from communal values, from shared social goals, and from seeking to promote cooperative virtues. They also emphasize the social character of a life worthy of the name ‘‘good.’’ And they are both equally

Ethics

| 633

critical of the individualism and the private ethos that dominates life in the United States. They are equally committed to preserve the cultural identity of Latina/o Americans as one of their enduring contributions to this society. For the ethics of the common good, however, the good life requires more than promoting the well-being of racial ethnic groups. What we need to attend to is the quality and nature of our shared public life. Thus, not the ethnic group but the larger public realm constitutes the main community that needs to be addressed. In this view, it is not enough to substitute radical autonomous individuals left alone to pursue their self-interests, with radically autonomous small groups left alone to nurture their identity. Human flourishing and well-being require that all social groups cultivate a vision and understanding of society that depicts our shared public sphere as much more that the sum of its individual members or a sum of its different social groups. What is crucially needed is that it generates the kind of public spiritedness and citizenship that recognizes that the political community must be addressed as an integrated whole. The ethics of the common good does not deny that we need a new vision of the public sphere that affirms pluralism and differences. But in affirming pluralism and differences, it must also encourage a vision of social life that is both concerned and inclusive of all social and cultural groups, and that affirms our sense of belonging and of being bonded to each other within a shared body politics. We need the kind of political vision and a public disposition that stresses the fact that our lives are intrinsically intertwined and that we inevitably share a common destiny. A new vision that promotes the conviction that the value of our shared social life resides not in its being useful but rather in its being a constitutive part of what it means to be fully human. This vision and the practices that will make it come through is what must be nurtured among all citizens. Theologically speaking, this alternative emphasizes those Scriptural narratives that depict God’s universal love and care for all of humanity. It stresses the conviction that we are all children of God, thus, brothers and sisters, and very much each other’s keeper. Biblical narratives that depict visions of a natural law or order of creation structured within the fabric of creation are uplifted as foundational for the conviction that as humans we are more alike to each other than we are different. In terms of church life, concerns with confessional identity, while important, are given a secondary role to the need to promote ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, and dialogue and alliances with all people of goodwill committed to serve those in need within a context of our shared life. The promotion of personal virtues among church members and citizens must also be accompanied by the commitment to change those social structures that affect our life possibilities. Social structures must attend to the promotion of communal virtues and values. For the ethics of the common good, the injustices that plague Hispanics—poverty, powerlessness, the sense of not being members or not belonging, and the lack of hope and meaning—are also experienced by other social groups. Particular injustices experienced by one racial ethnic group must be framed and addressed in ways that are inclusive of the interests of other racial ethnic groups. In this view, whatever becomes an obstacle to the flourishing of one social group will also have a negative impact on the well-being of other social groups. The basic moral task, therefore, is not just to contribute to the empowerment of a given oppressed group, which must be done, but

634 |

Ethics

to do so in ways that also inspire and motivate other social groups to engage in the historical task of changing the basic institutions of society that shape and affect our lives together. More concretely, in minimizing poverty, racial discrimination, political powerlessness, and social marginalization, we contribute to expanding the possibilities of democratic participation for more people within more spheres of life. For the ethics of the common good, the need for intergroup solidarity is a pragmatic requirement for the promotion of justice and well-being. From a pragmatic point of view, given the pluralistic nature of our society, it is politically impossible for any one social group to enhance its well-being without the cooperation of others outside the group. Justice cannot be achieved, much less sustained, if we do not address the challenges we normally refer to as the common good. This is precisely the main danger of identity politics, that, in spite of itself, it contributes to the fragmentation that already exists within our society that constitutes one of the main reasons justice is denied to most citizens. The ethics of the common good, while not necessarily rejecting the free market, does take a strong critical stand against many of its negative consequences. It considers that the dominance of the free market in our society has too many significant negative effects. The dynamics of the free market, for example, perpetuates significant social inequality among the members of society that makes it possible for them to share life together and to participate fully in the opportunities granted by this society. The dynamics of the free market also force many of its citizens to accept social and geographic mobility that undermines family togetherness and the sustenance of strong neighborhoods. Market mechanism encourages the commodification and thus the promotion of impersonal relationships. It stresses individual achievement many times at the expense of cultivating the virtues of public care and service. At the political level, the promotion of individualistic concerns and self-interest, over and against social and political commitment, has led to a weakening of genuine and meaningful democracy. This move toward greater privatization of more and more dimensions of our life contributes to the deterioration of social life at the same time that we are losing the collective will to provide effective communal programs to address critical social ills. For all of these reasons, the ethics of the common good claim that what we urgently need to promote is education in citizenship and a commitment to the general welfare. For the ethics of the common good, what makes it imperative for a just society to strive for a wide distribution of its resources and its services is not primordially to encourage people to have more but to allow people to become citizens or active agents committed to a better quality of life for all citizens. The good life demands that we cultivate the Pauline virtues now redefined in terms of public spiritedness: love as emancipatory service to others, hope as a shared commitment to long-term goals greater than our personal interest and faith or belief that our commitments to each other are worthwhile and intrinsic to what it means to live a good life and as such will endure. Because we are citizens, and not family or kin, the ethics of the common good affirms the value of well-formulated universal ethical principles as these have been embodied within a particular political community. Principles such as justice, equality, freedom, and human rights can play a significant role in the process of Hispanic

Ethics

| 635

liberation. When these principles are defined in a concrete and inclusive manner, they can inspire diverse social groups to join together in the pursuit of common interest. They facilitate and encourage the kind of alliances and ties of solidarity with those outside of one’s main racial or ethnic group, which alone can bring about the empowerment identity ethics seeks. Well-defined political and moral principles enable us to articulate shared aspirations and hopes, and can motivate us to struggle in common for social justice. They support the kind of coalition activism that is indispensable for obtaining shared common goals. While strongly communitarian, the ethics of the common good also affirms the values of individual human rights. In its view, individual rights are an indispensable requirement for citizens to realize themselves as imaginative political actors committed and able to enhance the common good. In fact, from their perspective rights need be neither individualistic nor self-centered. On the contrary, communities that guarantee the protection of basic rights protect its citizens against the unscrupulous behavior of the state and other social groups. They also enable the sustenance of public spaces where citizens can gather to consider collectively new ideas and social possibilities of change. In so doing, rights can promote progressive change and do so in an orderly fashion. Rights also allow diverse communities and social groups to coexist peacefully within a single political state. From the perspective of the ethic of the common good, the signs of the times call for us to identify and address those challenges that affect all of us as citizens. It calls for a transcending ethics that, in affirming group difference, also encourages us to see ourselves as part of a broader social whole or body politics. It calls us to commit ourselves to improve the social character of the public sphere or the political community and encourage those communal values and relationships that better fit the social character of our being. At present, many of the ethical concerns and debates within the Hispanic community are framed within the parameters of these two dominant moral points of view: the ethics of identity that stresses the importance of loyalty to kin and group empowerment, and the ethics of the common good that promotes a vision that genuine empowerment and authenticity calls for changes in the attitudes of citizens and in the institutions that regulate our common life. It is not clear that these two views can be reconciled in a facile way, nor is it clear that we can readily say that one is preferable to the other. Latino/as are struggling to find ways to live in the tension of being loyal to kin and being responsible citizens.

References and Further Reading De La Torre, Miguel. Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004). Garcı´a, Ismael. Dignidad: Ethics Through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. En la Lucha: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). Valentin, Benjamı´n. Mapping Public Theology: Beyond Culture, Identity and Differences (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002).

GOD

Miguel H. Díaz The revelation of the divine name to Moses (Exodus 3:14) provides one of the most important biblical sources into the nature of God. Translations of the divine name into English as ‘‘I am Who Am’’ have often failed to evoke the dynamic and historically transformative nature of God. Given the centrality of the covenant in the Hebrew Scriptures and the emphasis given to God’s self-revelation in historical figures and events, the divine name cannot amount to anything less than a promise of divine presence. The answer that God gives when Moses questions the name of the one who has sent him to be the liberator of Israel best translates to: ‘‘I am the one who will be present in power (‘ehyeh) with my people.’’ One might grasp better the theological significance of the divine name if we consider the Spanish rather than the English translation. In Spanish, the English verb ‘‘to be’’ can be translated as ser or as estar. Ser refers to what something is (essence) while estar conveys how something is (condition). To affirm God as Yo soy el que esta´ (I am the one who is there with you), rather than as Yo soy el que es (I am who am) comes closer to the Old Testament understanding of God as a God who is revealed through mighty deeds on behalf of the marginalized and oppressed. For Christians, Jesus Christ and the Spirit offer two distinct and interrelated ways of understanding God’s self-revelation in history. Jesus who was conceived and empowered by the Holy Spirit contextualizes in a particular human way the reality of God. In his life-giving words and actions, especially on behalf of the poor and marginalized, Jesus makes known God’s divine name. The breathing of God’s Spirit unto all of creation continues to fulfill this promise of divine presence.

Methodological Presuppositions To consider U.S. Hispanic theological method is to consider the sources that undergird U.S. Hispanic theological reflections on God. Beyond the influence of biblical traditions and various theological contributions within Catholic and Protestant theological traditions, Latino/a theologies of God draw on a number of sociocultural and religious experiences. Among these experiences, mestizaje and mulataje have been two distinct 637

638 |

God

cornerstones of Latino/a theology. ‘‘Mestizaje’’ refers to the specific way of being Latino/a (in particular with respect to Latino/a communities that have Mesoamerican descent) that emerged from intercultural and interreligious asymmetric relations among Spanish and indigenous communities in the Americas. ‘‘Mulataje’’ refers to the specific way of being Latino/a that came about as a result of asymmetric Spanish-African interracial and interreligious relations. Because at the time of a conquest Spain had experienced its own mestizaje with respect to Spanish-Jewish and Spanish-Muslim relations, there is an often forgotten intercultural and interreligious aspect that precedes and accompanies the Spanish conquest of the new world. This history is also a source in contemporary Latino/a reflections on the reality of God. Theologians seeking to draw from ‘‘interreligious’’ sources can also turn to the ongoing resilience of religious practices associated with indigenous (e.g., curanderismo) and African communities (e.g., Lukumı´-Candomble´ and Vo´doun). But perhaps the central source for envisioning the reality of God from Latino/a perspectives is popular religion, whether related to Catholic or Protestant expressions. Among the many particular expressions that can be noted as central theological sources are the following: (1) popular and often public celebrations of faith (e.g., dramatic reenactments of the way of the Cross during Holy Week and the celebration of Las posadas during Christmas), (2) popular wisdom sayings (e.g., A Dios rogando y con el mazo dando, ‘‘Pray to God while hammering away’’), (3) popular songs or coritos (e.g., Pescador de Hombres), and (4) ordinary sacred spaces such as home altars. Among the most salient methodological affirmations of U.S. Hispanic theology is that God reveals God’s self in lo cotidiano. Revelation is not concerned with propositional statements but with the personal self-manifestation of God in the ordinary affairs of human beings. As a critical hermeneutical category, lo cotidiano underscores the theological importance of ordinary life experiences for naming and understanding the reality of God. Lo cotidiano embraces an integral understanding of daily life that bridges private and public relationships. Seen from a theological perspective, lo cotidiano offers a locus for tapping into what might be characterized as the Latino/a mysticism of everyday life. This mysticism situates God’s life-giving presence within ordinary struggles of Latino/a communities. What is ‘‘ordinary’’ in Latino/a theology is often associated with the marginalization that accompanies persons (undocumented immigrant, women, and children), places (home), relations (familial), and popular religious expressions. The failure to recognize particular persons, places, relations, and religious expressions is to some extent connected to the loss of aesthetic sensitivity. As a number of Latino/a theologians have pointed out, many enlightened persons who are heirs to modernity have privileged the ‘‘what’’ of God’s self-revelation (theological content) to the detriment of sufficiently attending to the ‘‘how’’ of God’s self-revelation (theological forms). Latino/a theology overcomes this dualism between theological content and theological form in the following two ways: (1) It critically recognizes as indispensible the forms of popular faith expressions (e.g., the crucified Christ, the Marys of U.S. Hispanic popular Catholicism, and popular coritos). (2) It embraces a preferential option, or perhaps to be more aesthetically precise, a preferential optic that highlights

God

| 639

seeing and knowing God in the face of the crucified, oppressed, and marginalized of history (Matthew 25).

Naming and Understanding God from Latina/o Perspectives Nosotros is a word that has been used to describe U.S. Hispanic anthropology. It is a word that names the reality of God from Latino/a perspectives. The literal English translation of nosotros is ‘‘we-others.’’ To name God as the divine We-other is to continue the long-standing Christian tradition that affirms God does not exist and cannot be conceived apart from interpersonal relations, that is, apart from the divine community of distinct others (Father/Mother, Wisdom/Word, and Holy Spirit). This focus on communal otherness offers a theological foundation for affirming that in Latino/a theology God must be understood apart from the distinct sociocultural and racial relations that have humanly mediated divine life to Latino/a communities. To name God as el Dios de nosotros conveys the sense that issues of naming and understanding God are profoundly connected to specific communal experiences. Indeed, God always turns God’s face and reveals God-self according to ‘‘our’’ particular communal needs and experiences. Five ways of understanding God within Latino/a communities follows. This discussion is not intended to exclude other ways of understanding the reality of God from Latino/a perspectives. It is simply one way of systematically correlating Latino/a experiences and the reality of God.

The God of the Galileans The image of God as a Galilean lies at the heart of Latino/a Protestant and Catholic theologies. For Latino/a theologians, the Incarnation is not merely an affirmation that God became flesh. Rather, the Incarnation is ultimately a doctrine that affirms the profound theological significance of the scandal of particularity: God assumed the existence of a marginalized Galilean Jew. It is from within the Galilean landscape (a place defined by its cultural, religious, geographical, and linguistic diversity and the home to outsiders and rebels) that God’s offer of universal salvation takes shape. Numerous implications flow from God’s Galilean face. The ‘‘incarnational’’ presence of God among rural and agricultural villagers of Nazareth means that God has assumed ‘‘insignificant’’ human realities and ‘‘insignificant’’ ordinary places. The question that the Gospel raises with respect to insignificant persons and places is the following: Can anything good come from Nazareth (John 1:43–51)? Latino/a theology answers this question in the affirmative: The faces of past and contemporary ‘‘Galileans’’ make known the goodness of God. The vanquished Jesus is a central signpost for understanding the God of the vanquished and vanquishment of God. Popular symbols of faith such as artistic depictions of the crucified Christ and rituals such as the practice of accompanying Jesus during the celebration of the Triduum offer glimpses into this Latino/a understanding of God. The wide appeal of these popular faith expressions among undocumented immigrants and documented exiles and immigrants of various socioeconomic backgrounds

640 |

God

suggests the strong correlation that Latino/a communities embrace between their lives and God’s paschal mystery. Latina/o Protestant and Catholic theologies creatively appropriate the classical attributes of God as omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. Clearly, Latino/a popular faith expressions strongly affirm the ‘‘always and everywhere’’ presence of God, the power of God to prevail over all injustices and human sufferings, and the God who knows and hears the cry of the poor. But the preferential optic preferred by these popular faith expressions also offers a powerful critique of the idols that comprise contemporary human experiences. To recognize God’s presence in the Galilean and in the ‘‘Galileans’’ who live among us is to embrace a different logic with respect to power relations. For instance, this logic challenges transnational corporations, communication overlords, and neocolonial national powers that have become god-like modern expressions of omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. Galilee’s reputation as a crossroads of peoples, religious experiences, cultures, and languages offers an opportunity to reflect upon the soteriological significance of human diversity. As many contemporary theological voices have pointed out, the doctrine of God is fundamentally a doctrine of salvation, otherwise it would not have been revealed (Rahner). Jesus’ inclusive sociocultural relations lays open the possibility for understanding that beyond personal sin and sociopolitical liberation, God’s salvation must be concerned with the survival of communal identities. In other words, reflection upon God’s offer of salvation must include reflection on how God wills the preservation and transformation of cultural, religious, gender, and racial human experiences. Since humans are embodied beings, and since it is the salvation of the flesh that God wills, these bodily realities cannot be dismissed from theological consideration. In this sense, the mestizo understanding of God as Teotl-Dios (‘‘Teotl-Dios’’ is the name used to identify God in the Nican Mopohua) and the Yoruban notion of God as Ashe´ (the principle of life that grounds divine and human existence) offer fruitful ways of understanding the saving presence of God within embodied cultural and racial experiences particular to Latino/as of being human.

The God of Ordinary Accompaniment ¡Caminemos con Jesu´s! (Let us walk with Jesus!). This often is the communal and public cry of Latino/a communities who gather in streets during Holy Week to proclaim that Jesus Christ is not an abstract notion or an individual but someone who walks and lives among persons in community. Evidence for this embodied and personal understanding of God can be found in the practice of gathering to pray to the saints in front of home altars or before the Word of God. These popular and domestic devotions suggest that God is someone who draws near to us in ordinary accompaniment. Common ways of addressing God as Papa Dio, Dios mio, and Diosito all suggest this intimate way of relating to God. Such Latino/a ways of addressing God correspond to Jesus’ familial address of God as Abba. U.S. Hispanic theology understands accompaniment as the act that constitutes persons. Accompaniment presupposes a dynamic, directional, and concrete orientation of one person to another. Relative to God, accompaniment can be understood as the

God

| 641

Good Friday services at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in San Diego. This Catholic Church serves a large segment of the Chicano community in San Diego. On Good Friday, they bring Jesus off the cross and they place him in a coffin for the parishioners to give reverence to him. (Karen Kasmauski/Science Faction/Corbis)

divine act that constitutes the communal life of God. But God’s communal life does not remain locked up unto itself. In other words, God does not only will to simply accompany God-self, God wills to share God-self with and accompany human beings. The Incarnation is ‘‘proof’’ that God, whom Christians proclaim to be love (1 John 4.8), out of love necessarily desires to accompany human persons, and in particular, as I have already pointed out, God desires to accompany oppressed and suffering human persons. One of the most salient characteristics of Latino/a Christianity is the celebration of Holy Week. In reenacting the way of the cross and accompanying Jesus, Latino/a communities proclaim their solidarity with the suffering Christ. This accompaniment is a sacramental sign that proclaims just as the crucified Christ is not abandoned by God, so will they not also be abandoned by God in their daily crucifixions. As Roberto Goizueta points out, beyond being with others and feeling with others, the act of accompaniment implies an ethics of doing with others (1995, 206). This focus on doing rather than simply being has implications for a U.S. Hispanic metaphysical understanding of God. Simply stated, God is S/he Who does for another. The ‘‘to be’’ of God and the ‘‘to act’’ of God are intrinsically related. Reading the prologue of John (John 1:1–14) in Spanish suggests this U.S. Hispanic understanding. The Christian biblical tradition holds that from the beginning the Logos was with God.

642 |

God

Through the Logos everything came into being. In Spanish the word ‘‘Verb’’ (Verbo) is often used to translate this Greek notion. To say that en le principio era el Verbo, el Verbo estaba frente a Dios, y el Verbo se hizo carne (In the beginning was the Verb, the verb was with God, and the Verb became flesh) is to argue that from the beginning it was an act (of accompaniment) that was with God and it is this divine activity that becomes flesh among us. As the Gospel makes clear, it is not the reign (a noun) but the reigning (an activity) of God among the sinner, the poor, and the marginalized that Jesus embodies.

The God Pregnant with Life In the midst of socioeconomic oppressions and cultural marginalization Latin American and Latino/a theologies share a common affirmation: God is the God of life. For U.S. Hispanic Catholics, popular Marian devotions and, more specifically, the popular devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe who appears pregnant with life, offer a gender inclusive understanding of the God of life. Among other things, the image of Guadalupe evokes the notion of the divine rachamim. The root of this Hebrew word lies with rechem (mother’s breast or womb). Rachamim associates God with mercy and ‘‘motherly’’ protection. The popular understanding of Guadalupe as mother and protector of the marginalized resonates well with this Old Testament depiction of God. Popularly understood as the mother of a new creation, Guadalupe reveals a God who labors to bring forth life (Isaiah 49:15, Isaiah 42:14). The Nican Mopohua, the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe, recounts the interactions between Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe. The story connects divine selfrevelation to social, cultural, geopolitical, and religious survival. From beginning to end the story of Guadalupe provides a distinct ‘‘American’’ intercultural rendition of who God is and how God acts on behalf of the marginalized of history. The meaning of the story is simple: God is the one who reaches out to and raises from the ‘‘dead’’ the Juan Diegos of this world. Indeed, in her intimate way of relating to Juan Diegito —and this as noted above is a central characteristic of the way that Latino/as relate to God and everything and everyone comes from God—the virgin of Guadalupe embodies God’s life-giving and transformative presence. The story of Guadalupe underscores the personal conversion and social transformation necessary to birth human communities in the image of God. Guadalupe’s desire to build a new Church does not primarily entail the construction of a building but, more fundamentally, the creation of a new way of relating to one’s neighbor that images the inclusive and life-giving reality of God. Furthermore, God shares God’s life not just with human creatures but as the story suggests with the predominant role that other creatures play in the story, God desires for all creation to be healed and participate in the presence of God’s life. Echoing Mary’s song of the anawim (Luke 1:46–55), the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe portrays God as defender of the oppressed and as the one who brings down the powerful from their thrones. Like other U.S. Hispanic Marian narratives (e.g., the Cuban devotion to Our Lady of Charity), the story of Guadalupe provides a profound theological critique of asymmetric power relations that affect humans and all other

God

| 643

creatures of God. As a symbol of God’s recreation, the Guadalupan tradition challenges the unnatural and sinful notion that God ordains some persons to exist above others. The story of Guadalupe invites us to imagine God pregnant with life, laboring to birth new persons and a new social order that holds in high regard the cultural and religious heritage of all people. As the beloved disciple and Mary stand with Jesus at the climactic hour of life-giving and community-building experiences (‘‘And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own home’’), Guadalupe stands with Juan Diego at the hour of his historical crucifixion. At this hour she summons Juan Diego and all other marginalized persons to be agents of a new ecclesia, an inclusive way of being human. As a pneumatological and cultural symbol of the Spirit of God, Guadalupe is a woman full of grace (Luke 1:28) sent to communicate to the ‘‘Juan Diegos’’ of this world that God is Lord and the giver of life.

The God of la Lucha God is life. In principle, Latino/a theology does not reject the metaphysical truth contained in this statement. However, Latino/a theology historicizes this truth when it affirms that life is a struggle (la vida es una lucha). God is the life force in all of us that struggles against all oppressive measures that reduce persons to objects of abuse and consumption. God is the life force encountered in la fiesta, those life-giving Latino/a celebrations that prophetically build community and resist marginalization and suffering. It is customary in Christian tradition to affirm that God is the fullness of Being. In turn, as a result of an analogical relationship between God and all of creation, Christian traditions affirm that human beings participate in, are sustained by, and reflect the divine Being. But Absolute Being and Existence, even in the classical Thomistic Catholic approach is not a static Being. Being is pure act, dynamism, and life-giving relationship. Thus, instead of conceiving the reality of God as stasis, la lucha opens up a way to conceive God as ectasis, as the divine Being who struggles to birth life and opposes all that denies life. Latino/a theology contextualizes life in terms of socioeconomic, cultural, gender, and racial experiences. Life is a struggle to overcome poverty. Life is a struggle to affirm cultural identity. Life is a struggle to reject sexism and racism. In these and other human struggles, Latino/a theology affirms that being human cannot be divorced from the everyday and concrete realities that engender or suppress life. Because of the communion between human and divine life that has been brought about through Jesus Christ, these ordinary concerns become God’s concerns. In this sense, God can be faithfully sensed (sensus fidelium) in the everyday struggles to survive and live fully as a human. Together with Irenaeus, the second-century theologian, Latino/a theology proclaims that the glory of God is the human being fully alive. Faced with homogenization and globalization—these are powerful social, cultural, and economic forces that strive to melt away and suppress particular expressions of human life—our challenge is the struggle to affirm the particular that glorifies God today. This struggle to affirm particularity in the midst of communal diversity is not foreign to God’s life. If one

644 |

God

understands la lucha in terms of creative and life-giving relations, then God’s life is lucha. God’s struggle involves the ongoing creative and life-giving relations of one divine person to another so that the divine community can eternally emerge from and be sustained in distinct familial relations (Mother/Father, Child, Spirit). The challenge today for us who seek to create human communities in the image of God ethically requires opposing the subordination and/or suppression of human differences. To struggle with God and in God’s image involves the struggle against all forces that undermine human diversity.

The God of Life-Giving Migrations The Old Testament paints a vivid picture of Israel as a migrating people searching for life. As pointed out at the beginning of this entry, the revelation of the divine name to Moses, which amounts to a promise of divine presence, anticipates the Exodus. In the Exodus God leads the people of Israel on a life-giving migration. God offers God’s life-giving (salvific) presence in the liberating migration of Israel from Egypt to the promised land. The memory of this event remains formative for the people of Israel, leading to various divine prescriptions that call upon Israel to act justly toward migrating foreigners who abide within its midst. Just as God remembered the Israelites when they were strangers in the land of Egypt so does God call them to remember those who pass through their deserts (e.g., Deuteronomy 5:15, 10:19). Relative to the Christian doctrine of God, Genesis 18, commonly referred to as the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah, offers a window into understanding how the human experience of migration can be iconic of the life of God. Upon being visited by three passing strangers, Abraham and Sarah hasten to prepare a meal. In the process of opening their home and sharing life’s necessities with migrating strangers, they discover that these strangers are messengers of God. Following the biblical motif of role reversals between guest and host relations, this biblical story ends with the stunning announcement that Sarah is pregnant with life. In the migrating strangers, Abraham and Sarah discover the presence of God. The story of the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah crystallizes the meaning of the biblical injunction: ‘‘Do not neglect hospitality, for through it some have unknowingly entertained angels’’ (Hebrews 13:2). The ongoing migration of documented and undocumented strangers across an arid desert or a shark-infested sea continues to evoke the memory of the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah. Liturgically speaking, the popular religious celebration of las posadas recalls a God who is hospitable and beckons hospitality. Based on Mary’s and Joseph’s search for an inn to birth Jesus (Luke 2:1–7), this ritual symbolizes the risk-taking and life-seeking migrations that marginalized families often undertake. The ritual taps into the most basic Christian understanding of God: The God of Jesus Christ is the God of life-giving migrations whose offer of life crosses over into human reality and stands in solidarity with life-deprived persons. Risk-taking, life-seeking, and life-giving migrations provide fruitful sources to revision God as the God of life-giving migrations. God ‘‘ex-ists’’ because of personal migrations and as a migrating community of distinct others. More specifically, within the context of Latino/a theology, Jesus Christ can be conceived of as God’s migrant

God

| 645

worker and the Spirit as the divine immigrant who permanently resides among us. Similar to migrants who often come to the United States to work the fields, Jesus comes into the world to labor in the fields on behalf of God. Like many migrants who endure risk-taking labors and often return to their homeland once their seasonal work is done, Jesus risks his life and returns to the Father upon completion of his earthly human labors. Jesus’ prophetic exile from this world, however, ushers the life-giving migration of the Spirit. As the one who crosses unto the human realm to permanently remain an advocate of the marginalized, the Spirit can be latinamente characterized as the divine immigrant among us.

Conclusion This brief exploration into the reality of God has shown how Latina/o theology envisions the ongoing revelation of the divine name. As I noted at the beginning of these reflections, the divine name connotes divine presence and the historical experiences under which this presence can be encountered. This exploration has offered various ways in which some communal experiences of Latino/as can anchor reflections on God. The human experiences of sociocultural identity (Galilean identity), ordinary accompaniment, pregnancy, la lucha, and human migrations offer new sources to name and understand who God is. And who God is can never be divorced from who God is pro nobis. Indeed, God is always el Dios de nosotros. In our methodological option to reflect on God latinamente, we Latino/a theologians mirror contemporary efforts to moor the doctrine of God in ordinary human experiences. The preferential optic that we have for socioculturally marginalized persons provides a distinct and refreshing angle of vision into the mystery of God.

References and Further Reading Aquino, Pilar. Our Cry For Life: Feminist Theology from Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). Costas, Orlando E. ‘‘Evangelism from the Periphery: A Galilean Model.’’ Apuntes: Reflexiones Teolo´gicas desde el Margen Hispano 2, no. 3 (1982): 53–59. Dı´az, Miguel. ‘‘Life-Giving Migrations: Re-visioning the Mystery of God through U.S. Hispanic Eyes.’’ E-Journal of Hispanic Latino Theology, http://www.latinotheology.org (accessed March 15, 2007). ´ Dıaz, Miguel. ‘‘Outside the Survival of Community there is no Salvation.’’ E-Journal of Hispanic Latino Theology, http://www.latinotheology.org (accessed March 15, 2007). Elizondo, Virgilio. Guadalupe: Mother of New Creation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). Elizondo, Virgilio. Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000). Espı´n, Orlando. The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). Espı´n, Orlando. Grace and Humanness: Theological Reflections Because of Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007). Espı´n, Orlando, and Miguel H. Dı´az. From the Heart of Our People: Latino/a Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999).

646 |

God

Goizueta, Roberto S. Caminemos con Jesu´s: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Gonza´lez, Justo. Man˜ana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. Mujerista Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996). Pedraja, Luis. Teologı´a: An Introduction to Hispanic Theology (Nashville: Abington Press, 2003). Rodrı´guez, Jeanette. ‘‘God Is Always Pregnant.’’ The Divine Mosaic: Woman’s Images of the Sacred Other, ed. Theresa King (St. Paul, MN: International Publishers, 1994).

HERMENEUTICS

Efrain Agosto U.S. Latino/a biblical hermeneutics is a work in progress. One can look back to the biblical interpretative work that Spanish conquistadores used to justify their conquests of native peoples in North, Central, and South America or to the always present subversive interpretations of conquered peoples as they learned the biblical tools of their masters and found in those tools a message of hope and liberation. However, it is in the past 30 years as Hispanics joined the ranks of biblical scholarship in larger numbers that some of the more fruitful and widespread work has been produced to tell the story of Latina/o biblical hermeneutics, including the interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. This essay will examine an overview of this recent movement in Latino/a readings of the Bible.

Some Early Voices Francisco Garcia-Treto is one of the early voices in the modern era of Latino/a biblical hermeneutics. In an essay written about Protestant Latina/o hermeneutics in particular, Garcia-Treto emphasizes two important points that are fundamental to understanding biblical hermeneutics in the Hispanic tradition. First, biblical hermeneutics is Latino or Latina because ‘‘a community of interpretation’’ is being established. One of the fundamental understandings of how Hispanics read the Bible is their engagement in a community of interpretation. Rather than being ‘‘lone rangers’’ in the task of interpretation, Latino/as read scripture in light of community. Garcia-Treto cites the concept of ‘‘interpretative community’’ in literary studies and concludes that the ‘‘emerging emphasis on contextual or ‘social location’ readings of the Bible converge’’ with ‘‘the teologı´a de conjunto being developed in U.S. Hispanic churches.’’ That is, theology as a function of community, implies that ‘‘new hermeneutical strategies and standpoints are being put in place’’ (1999, 161). A second aspect that Garcia-Treto celebrates about Hispanic biblical hermeneutics is its ecumenicity. In fact, the recent emergence of biblical Latina/o hermeneutics is due in part, argues Garcia-Treto, to the growing ecumenicity of Hispanic Protestant and Roman Catholic biblical scholarship, collaboration that transcends any separation 647

648 |

Hermeneutics

based on Reformation principles. He writes, ‘‘Today, within the U.S. Hispano/Latino churches, and specifically at the academic-theological professional level, a new ecumenical openness to cooperation, dialogue, and mutual acceptance has developed between mainline and other Protestant and Roman Catholic biblical scholars, to the extent that a true interpretative community . . . may already be identified’’ (1999, 164). Rather than doctrinal principles, the focus is on community and the cultural/social nature of that community. Thus, Garcia-Treto concludes that ‘‘just as a transnational Latina/o consciousness of being a people is emerging and setting a sociocultural agenda in the United States, so a transdenominational consciousness of being an interpretive community reading the Bible from the social location of our people has arisen and is beginning to bear noticeable fruit’’ (1999). Thus, an ecumenical Hispanic biblical interpretation has emerged, at least in the academic circles of biblical and theological scholarship, across the Catholic and Protestant ‘‘divide.’’ Biblical scholars have led that surge in sharing joint understandings of biblical hermeneutics in the Latino/a tradition.

Biblical Hermeneutics by Latino/a Theologians Some of those leading the early charge for a Hispanic-specific biblical hermeneutic have been Latino and Latina theologians engaged in interpreting the biblical text for the construction of a U.S. Latino/a theology. For example, the Mexican American priest and scholar Virgilio Elizondo writes about the ‘‘mestizo,’’ Galilean Christ, one who, like Mexican Americans, comes from the borderlands of mainstream religion and culture in ancient Israel (i.e., Galilee) to challenge the powers that be at the center of Jewish life and Roman domination in Jerusalem (1983). Elizondo interprets the historical Jesus, as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, as an outsider challenging the center. In this way, Elizondo demonstrates how to read the Bible from the perspective of ‘‘the margins,’’ as does Miguel A. De La Torre, another Latino theologian and ethicist, who reflects from a theological perspective on the function of scripture in Latino and other marginalized circles (2002). A similar hermeneutic is offered by a third Latino theologian, Harold Recinos, who writes about the ‘‘hard-hitting,’’ ‘‘barrio’’ Christ, thus engaging a hermeneutic that highlights the historical Jesus as depicted in the gospel record as one who challenges the ‘‘established leadership’’ of his day, both religious and political (1997). For Recinos, the fundamental fact of Scripture is this challenge from the margins to the center, and thus a hermeneutic that does not engage the political questions of power and privilege is a truncated hermeneutic and not Latino or Latina in orientation. Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az adds an important dimension to these questions of power, privilege, and the underprivileged or powerless, and that is the dimension of gender in the Hispanic context. Her ‘‘mujerista theology’’ focuses on the religious, theological, and cultural experiences and vision of Latinas, some with a complicated relationship to their faith communities, but who, nonetheless, engage the Bible from the perspective of liberation and antisexism, especially in light of their everyday struggles, what Isasi-Dı´az calls ‘‘lo cotidiano,’’ that which entails everyday life (1990). For Isasi-Dı´az and the women she works with in grassroots urban communities, the Bible is a tool for

Hermeneutics

| 649

liberation because of the struggles of marginalized women and men depicted in the stories of the various books of the Bible. However, there are also oppressive sections that have been used to marginalize women. No biblical interpretation that recognizes the sexist portions of the Bible as equally authoritative as the liberating portions, especially as it pertains to women, can be considered authentic biblical hermeneutics. Thus the lives of Latinas become the key to unlocking the authority of the biblical text. These theological readings of the Bible, therefore, what one might call a Latino/a theological hermeneutics, demonstrate what Fernando Segovia calls ‘‘a canon within a canon’’ approach to hermeneutics, which characterizes much of Latino/a biblical hermeneutics. That which is truly liberating in the scriptural traditions becomes the building blocks of a Hispanic theological, biblical, and hermeneutical tradition (Segovia 1994).

Segovia and the Critique of the Historical-Critical Methodologies Fernando Segovia critiques more traditional biblical hermeneutics, especially those that espouse a purely historical approach to the Bible, assuming that hermeneutics can be completely objective and divorced from social location, or those that hold the Bible in its entirety as authoritative without questioning the oppressive affirmations of scripture. In a seminal essay on biblical hermeneutics, one that is groundbreaking not only for Latino/a biblical hermeneutics, but for the entire enterprise, Segovia (1995a) argues that giving precedence solely to a historical exercise is not possible or advisable, given the interlocking relationships between reading texts and reading ourselves. Segovia offers a fundamental critique of the historical critical approach to biblical interpretation because the ‘‘text as means,’’ that is, as a source of history, usually does not incorporate the concerns or perspectives of the modern ‘‘flesh and blood’’ reader, including the Latino/a reader. Without awareness of the reader’s social context, his or her own social location will still predominate, albeit unconsciously. In reality, historical critical methods offer a scientific basis for what is fundamentally a personal, social, and theological exercise. Without concern for the social location of the reader, historical critical methodologies are often Eurocentric in their orientation, even as they seek to be ‘‘objective.’’ Latino/a biblical critics, like Segovia, have led the way, along with African American and Asian interpreters, in challenging a Eurocentric approach to biblical hermeneutics. Whether it is literary criticism—the ‘‘text as medium’’—that is a communication between sender and recipient that becomes a literary and rhetorical argument on its own right, regardless of historical background, or the ‘‘text as means and medium,’’ which refers to approaches that look at issues of social and cultural context, particularly in light of both ancient and modern social theory, Segovia challenges any hermeneutical method that excludes the role of the reader and his or her social context as a tool of interpretation. The influence of Latina/o biblical hermeneutics and its concern for a robust meaning of Scripture that engages both the ancient and modern context influences these contributions by Segovia. For example, in literary criticism, the communication (a ‘‘text’’) takes on a life of its own beyond the immediate historical

650 |

Hermeneutics

context. Yet, literary methods do not lack their own search for objectivity or a ‘‘canon’’ of truth beyond the interplay between reader and text. An implied author or implied reader is considered, but more abstractly, not the ‘‘flesh and blood’’ reader, by which Segovia means a consideration of the contemporary reader and his or her own social location, including the Latino/a reader. Even social scientific criticism, which Segovia calls ‘‘cultural criticism,’’ in which the biblical critic reads modern social theory back into the ancient biblical texts and contexts, but also uses cross-cultural and transhistorical anthropological theory to study ancient society and the texts it produced, as well as the people who produced them, is still couched in terms of the search for objectivity, this time through even more scientific means. For readers who engage these methods, ‘‘the economic, social or cultural dimensions of the biblical texts proved far more attractive than its theological or religious character’’ (Segovia 1995a, 22). Yet, Segovia points out that in this realm of cultural criticism only Marxist biblical criticism expressed concern for the modern reader, in particular the socially and economically marginalized, including the U.S. Latino/a readers of the Bible.

González and “Reading through Hispanic Eyes” What is it about the Latino/a reader that evokes these critiques of traditional methodology and calls for a more ‘‘intercultural’’ approach toward reading the Bible? Justo Gonza´lez suggests five hermeneutical points of departure that motivate Latino/a readings of scripture (1996). These include the paradigms of marginality, poverty, mestizaje and mulatez, exiles and aliens, and solidarity, all of which correspond in one way or another to the experience of Hispanics today. By marginality, Gonza´lez posits that those on the margins of society can often see things in the biblical text that those in power, or at the center of a society, cannot. For example, in the Gospels and Acts we read stories about Jesus, the Apostles, and those who opposed them, oftentimes referred to in the text as ‘‘the Jews.’’ Those who stand outside the center of power today can understand how such references do not somehow indict a whole race, but rather refer to the problems people on the margins of a society (Jesus and the peasant population he served; the earliest Christians) often face with those who hold power, such as the Jewish and Roman leadership in Jerusalem. With regard to poverty, Gonza´lez emphasizes that a Latina/o reading of the Bible, given the economic status of so many Hispanics in the United States, is not just about what the Bible says about the poor, but more about what the poor have to say about the Bible. Therefore, the question is, ‘‘What does the Bible say when read from the perspective of the poor?’’ or ‘‘What do the poor find in the Bible that the nonpoor miss?’’ Ultimately, it is not just a question of helping the poor by telling them what the Bible says about them, but realizing that the reading of the Bible by the poor can contribute to the whole church. Thus Latino/a biblical hermeneutics argues for wide-ranging opportunities in terms of who can read the text and give viable interpretative guidelines to a text.

Hermeneutics

| 651

Gonza´lez also explores ‘‘mestizaje’’ and ‘‘mulatez.’’ These key terms in Latino theology refer to the status of many Latino/a groups as mixed races. For example, Mexicans and Mexican- Americans are considered ‘‘mestizos’’ because of their mixture with native peoples and the conquering Spaniards, and later with the North American populations of the United States. In the Caribbean Latin American culture, the phenomenon of ‘‘mulatez’’ represents the mixture of African Black and European White races. Initially these were pejorative terms used by the dominate White culture against these ‘‘mixed races.’’ However, both terms have become points of pride. In fact, with increasing mestizajes all over the world, including the United States, the Mexican American and Caribbean experience can be models to lead the way toward mutual understanding and just, joint living. Living as a mestizo or ‘‘mulatto’’ is not easy. Struggles with identity abound. With what group does one most identify, especially in light of the pressures of the dominant cultures in which one finds oneself, which draws us into belonging, yet we never quite ‘‘belong’’? With these struggles for identity, the Latino/a reader of the Bible looks for answers, solace, and a historical and theological understanding in the Scriptures. Gonza´lez cites the example of the Apostle Paul as depicted in the Book of Acts. He calls Paul a ‘‘cultural mestizo,’’ because of his two names, ‘‘Saul,’’ reflecting his Jewish heritage, and the other, ‘‘Paul,’’ the name he used when relating to Greco-Roman culture. In the Book of Acts, when the Pauline mission turns to the Gentiles, ‘‘Saul’’ becomes ‘‘Paul.’’ Cultural mestizaje as a Hellenistic Jew helps the Apostle Paul accomplish his mission in the diverse world of the first century CE. Latino/a readers of the Bible often interpret these instances of multiculturalism quite well because of their experience with them. Being ‘‘exile and aliens,’’ Gonza´lez’s fourth set of interpretive lenses, also fits naturally in the lived experience of Hispanics today. Often cited with regard to Israel’s Babylonian exile, these terms speak to the fact and feeling of leaving one’s center to enter somebody else’s center. Thus, closely related to marginality, the state of being in exile and called ‘‘aliens’’ represents ‘‘a strange sort of marginalization’’ precisely because one leaves a center to enter the periphery. Among Latina/os such a move often implies that one’s beloved center, a homeland, has deteriorated due to external intervention, civil strife, economic decline, and political oppression. Thus our homeland no longer enjoys the peace and joy that God intends for all of us. We must leave it for somebody’s center. Latino/as understand when the prophets and poets of Israel lament these experiences among their people. In the New Testament writings, the author of 1 Peter describes the experience of Christian ‘‘exiles and aliens’’ in Northern Asia Minor as those who no longer feel like a people until God intervenes on their behalf and creates a ‘‘holy nation’’ (1 Peter 2:9–11). Such passages resonate with the biblical hermeneutics of a Latino/a immigrant community in the United States. Being an exile and an alien implies, therefore, that difficult experiences await those in this state, as expressed in the Psalmist’s lament over the Babylonian exile: ‘‘By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept . . .’’ (Psalm 137:1ff). Yet, the Bible also emphasizes several positive aspects and challenges with regard to exile. First, the notion of caring for the ‘‘stranger’’ is important in the Bible, especially because, in a sense, we are all ‘‘exiles and aliens’’ in one form or another. Israel,

652 |

Hermeneutics

formed out of a band of nomads, needed to constantly remember that history by just treatment of the immigrant, the ‘‘stranger.’’ Second, the Bible encourages the exile to make the best of his or her new situation, as noted in the words of the prophet Jeremiah to the exiles in Babylon: ‘‘Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce . . . But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare’’ (Jeremiah 29:5, 7). This is a challenge to Latino/a immigrants as well, to make their new home a safe and just one, confronting those in power to make the changes necessary to ensure the well-being of the new immigrant. The Bible, as read and understood by Latino/a interpreters, supports such action. Third, the Bible teaches that the center must understand the opportunity they now have with the new influx of new peoples who can help bless the land and improve on it, rather than consider these outsiders as a burden. The story of Ruth and Naomi is a narrative about a woman who becomes a stranger in another land for the sake of her husband, and then another woman who leaves her homeland for the sake of her mother-in-law. Out of such exile, painful though it may have been, arises a great king of Israel several generations later (David). Given such a reading of the biblical text, the Latino/a interpreter insists that the dominant culture take into account the contributions of the immigrant community that is now present in ‘‘their’’ land. A Latino/a biblical hermeneutic uses present experience to help interpret the ancient text, and ancient experience to help affirm present-day, liberative praxis. Solidarity is the last of Gonza´lez’s hermeneutical paradigms for reading the Bible through Latino/a eyes. Unlike the other terms that reflect in many ways the negative experiences of Hispanics in the United States, solidarity lies at the heart of the message of good news in the Bible. The companion terms of ‘‘family’’ and ‘‘community’’ constitute ways in which both the Bible and Hispanics also express solidarity. Unity is another related term. For example, the Apostle Paul seeks solidarity and unity for his congregations, including the troubled context of 1 and 2 Corinthians. The theme of family is prevalent throughout the Scriptures. It is an important theme for Hispanics as well, especially for many who have immigrated from abroad and lost the sense of extended family that is so important. For many Latino/as, the church becomes the extended family that was lost by coming to the United States, with its focus on the nuclear family. Citizenship is another related theme. Gonza´lez reminds us that in the Roman world of the early Christians, citizenship was no easy matter. It required not only legal residence, but a certain amount of social and economic status. Not many, therefore, were citizens of a local city, or Roman citizens, empire-wide. Most depended on slave or client relations with citizens in order to acquire some sense of belonging in a particular social setting. Those who were ‘‘strangers’’ (xenoi), with no such ties, were worse off than any other noncitizens. The Apostle Paul’s citizenship status, according to the Book of Acts, gave him an enormous amount of freedom to carry out his gospel mission across the Greco-Roman world. However, not everyone in his churches had this status. In Corinth, for example, conflict between persons of different citizenship status may have caused divisiveness as well as an elite, patronal attitude of some over against others (Agosto 2005).

Hermeneutics

| 653

Yet, the Christian assembly should be a home and a family for many who otherwise do not have a place that gives them a measure of status and community. It is this sense of community solidarity that Paul tries to build in Corinth, but experiences serious obstacles in doing so, according to both 1 and 2 Corinthians. Nonetheless, Gonza´lez describes the church, as understood especially by Latino/a participants today, as an integral part of the gospel; it is not a mere ‘‘instrument’’ or ‘‘vehicle’’ or an add-on. For many Latina/os it is the ‘‘extended family’’ that is missed so much as a result of our immigrant status, as ‘‘aliens’’ in a new land. Latino/a hermeneutics open up to this whole theme of solidarity and the search for unity and family in the Bible because of the Latino/a experience of alienation and the search for identity.

Intercultural Studies With a critique of traditional biblical hermeneutics and an examination of the motifs that motivate such rich Latino/a readings of the Bible, the call for intercultural studies in biblical interpretation seems a natural next step in the development of a Hispanic biblical hermeneutic. Latino/a biblical hermeneutics provides an ongoing conversation between the experience of the first believers and the experience of the modern-day reader around themes parallel in both the biblical text and the lives of Latino/as today. Both sides of the continuum feed off each other in the quest for meaning. Segovia calls such a dialogue ‘‘intercultural studies’’ (1995b). Segovia suggests that authentic biblical interpretation takes into consideration not just the cultural and historical situation of the original text, but the cultural and historical situation— the social location— of the reader. By taking fully into account the context of the modern reader, including the Latino/a reader, for the task of biblical hermeneutics, an interpreter thereby allows for the contextualization of culture and experience, both with regard to the ancient text and to the readers of such texts. Segovia, like all Latino/a biblical interpreters, agrees that historical critical analysis is a tool in biblical interpretation. It is not sufficient by itself for the hermeneutical task. In particular, a Latina/o reader represents not just an independent reader but also a member of a distinct community, a reader with an identifiable and meaningful social location. Latino/as in the United States, as bilingual, bicultural persons have the experience of being ‘‘the other’’ in whatever situation they are thrust into in this society. Many, whether Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, or Cubans (for example) are never fully comfortable, either in this world or the world in which they or their parents were raised. Such a phenomenon and the interpretative lenses that emerge from it must be deemed, Segovia suggests, as ‘‘a Hispanic-American hermeneutics of otherness and engagement, whose fundamental purpose is to read the biblical text as an other’’ (1995b, 58). In fact, as bilingual-bicultural persons, the Latino/a reader of the Bible is in an excellent position to interpret texts that come from a variety of complex social and cultural situations. The complexity and historical distance of the biblical text makes it an ‘‘other,’’ which compares well to the diasporic situation of a U.S. Latino/a. In short, the Hispanic reader, who navigates a complicated existence as a bilingual/ bicultural person, one who straddles two or more worlds—the First and the Third, at least—is well situated to confront biblical interpretation.

654 |

Hermeneutics

Thus Hispanic biblical hermeneutics entails intercultural studies. How does that encounter take place? Several steps may be cited. For Segovia, the first step in a reading strategy of intercultural criticism is to acknowledge the contextualization of our ‘‘texts,’’ both the text being read and the reader of the text. In both instances, we are engaging in the exchange of ‘‘others.’’ Both reader and text are contextual, and we must do interpretation of each in the hermeneutical task, renouncing the notion of a universal reading, where only the text is an ‘‘other,’’ and not the reader him/herself. Ultimately, meaning lies in the interaction between reader and text. Latino/a biblical interpreters like Segovia emphasize the reader’s social location in this engagement between ‘‘texts’’ because of the long-held tradition of focusing on the text as the object, rather than the interplay between the otherness of two equally engaged ‘‘texts’’—ancient text and modern reader. Given this Latino/a hermeneutic of textual engagement that involves recognizing contextualization on both ends of the spectrum, interaction between reader and text, and meaning making as the result of this ‘‘bicultural’’ interaction, Segovia posits three specific dimensions of intercultural biblical criticism. First, the reader must recognize the ancient text ‘‘as a socially and culturally conditioned other,’’ just like Latino/as, or any other social group must be recognized as such. This dimension recognizes that the biblical text, like all ‘‘texts,’’ is a product of a particular social context. Because the biblical text arose from a very different historical situation and cultural setting than Hispanics, it has its own character, it has its own agenda, and it must be understood on its own terms. It is not ‘‘atemporal, asocial, ahistorical, speaking uniformly across time and culture’’ (Segovia 1995b, 68). As a product of its own time, the biblical text must be viewed as an ‘‘other’’ to the modern reader and must be allowed to speak on its own terms. This, of course, is not too different from what a traditional historical critic might say about historical critical biblical exegesis. In fact, we must use a variety of historical, literary, social, and cultural methods to get at the multifaceted dimension of the biblical text. However, the Latino/a biblical critic argues that the other dimensions of a Latino/a hermeneutic are equally as important as the historical dimension. The second dimension involves the reader, who is also to be viewed as a product of his social and cultural environment, even as he or she engages the biblical text with its distinction dimensions. Both reader and text engage each other as ‘‘others.’’ Thus the reader’s strategy in engaging this ‘‘other’’ must be brought to the fore, just like the text’s rhetorical and ideological strategy must be investigated. No reader is immune to personal, social, theological, and ideological perspectives in the pursuit of biblical meaning. Readers are products of a specific context that has a particular social reality that influences the process of reading and interpretation. No reader can be ‘‘atemporal, asocial, or ahistorical’’ and thus speak ‘‘uniformly for all times and all cultures’’ (Segovia 1995b, 70). Thus what we have is an encounter, an intercultural engagement between two ‘‘texts,’’ an ancient one and a modern one. What makes this reading particularly Hispanic is first the acknowledgement of distinct cultural and social realities in conversation with each other across time, and second the lessons learned from U.S. Latino/a bicultural experience toward that end. For a Latino/a critic, reality is constructed from a variety of cultural and historical experiences in a bicultural context. Moreover, Latina/os know that it is possible to function

Hermeneutics

| 655

well in two worlds, moving from one to the other with ease. Thus we learn to appreciate and appropriate difference and diversity, as well as engage the other in ways that permit their voices to be heard. As a result of this posture, Latino/a biblical interpretation emerges with a hermeneutic of otherness and engagement that is committed to all readers and all readings, providing a rich diversity. The Latina/o reader interprets reality with more than one lens. Latino/a biblical hermeneutics should be a robust engagement of many readings, from both antiquity and the present, each with equal value in the quest for meaning making. Hispanic biblical hermeneutics understands that the factors that help identify the social location of readers and texts alike include religious tradition, sociopolitical and economic status, class, gender, racial or ethnic background, and educational attainment, among others. The reader, like the text, becomes understood on his or her own terms, in his or her own world, as a product or ‘‘construct’’ of his or her own context. The third and final element toward a Latino/a hermeneutic of intercultural engagement between readers and texts (context of text; context of reader) is that such interaction is not neutral. Rather, ‘‘an unavoidable filtering of the one world or entity by and through the other’’ occurs between reader and text (Segovia 1995b, 70). Thus the construction of a new ‘‘text’’ takes place rather than simply the reconstruction of an existing text (normally in traditional hermeneutics, the ancient text is the focus of historical reconstruction). Construction of a new text in Latina/o biblical hermeneutics takes place because both ‘‘texts’’ are influenced by each other in the encounter. Interpretation in this model is not a one-way encounter—a detached, ideal reader engaging a text to find ancient meaning without acknowledging his or her strategy, agenda, or social location. Rather, ‘‘the hermeneutics of otherness and engagement,’’ influenced by the Latino/a experience of otherness and engagement in an alien, multicultural context, ‘‘argues that the historical and cultural remoteness of the text as an other is in itself not a reconstruction but a construction of the past on the part of the reader’’ (Segovia 1995b, 71). Moreover, the reader, especially the Latina/o reader who is not neutral in her or his interpretative efforts carries an agenda, whether conscious or not. In the case of the Latino/a reader, a construction that facilitates liberation from oppressed situations is of utmost important. This is the ultimate goal of a Hispanic biblical hermeneutic. Such an agenda does not preclude historical research into the life and times of a text, but is one more element in the encounter between readers and texts as engaged others in the search for a liberative praxis. Such engagement is not without resistance, especially by those who experience the United States as ‘‘monocultural,’’ even though they are surrounded by the bicultural reality of Latino/as. Nonetheless, interpreters of texts, both past and present, become conversation partners in the construction of new ‘‘texts,’’ hopefully texts of liberation, as Hispanics experience the mixing of the biblical text, their social location as Latino/as, and the history of interpretation of said text. The key to Latino/a biblical hermeneutics lies in the process of engagement. We engage texts as constructs of their own reality, in whatever time period and with whatever ideological strategy they employ. We will construct a new reality of that ancient reading, using the tools of history, using the social sciences, and engaging the readings

656 |

Hermeneutics

of others, including an investigation of their social location, ideological agendas, and otherness. Segovia calls such a hermeneutic a ‘‘humanization,’’ an acknowledgement of human reality as it stands under a variety of categories and emphases, rather than trying to ‘‘dehumanize’’ without recognizing the variety of forces and diversities of the human condition, or ‘‘rehumanize,’’ such that some universal, all-encompassing categories are invoked, that preclude the reality of otherness. Such a vision of Hispanic biblical hermeneutics challenges the Latino/a interpreter, as well as like-minded partners, to address specific biblical texts from the perspective of intercultural studies, engagement of the other, and an agenda of liberation and humanization. In this way, Latino/a biblical hermeneutics will continue to be a contributor to the enterprise of biblical interpretation, theological construction, and liberative praxis.

References and Further Reading Agosto, Efrain. Servant Leadership: Jesus and Paul (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2005). De La Torre, Miguel A. Reading the Bible from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002). Elizondo, Virgilio. Galilean Journey: The Mexican American Promise (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983). Garcia-Treto, Francisco. ‘‘Reading the Hyphens: An Emerging Biblical Hermeneutics for Latino/Hispanic U.S. Protestants.’’ Protestantes/Protestants: Hispanic Christianity Within Mainline Traditions, ed. David Maldonado Jr. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999). Gonza´lez, Justo. La Santa Biblia: The Bible Through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. ‘‘The Bible and Mujerista Theology.’’ Lift Every Voice: Constructing Theologies from the Underside, ed. Susan Brooks Thistlewaite and Mary Potter Engel (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990). Recinos, Harold. Who Comes in the Name of the Lord: Jesus at the Margins (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997). Segovia, Fernando. ‘‘Reading the Bible as Hispanic Americans.’’ New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994). Segovia, Fernando. ‘‘‘And They Began to Speak in Other Tongues’: Competing Modes of Discourse in Contemporary Biblical Criticism.’’ Reading from This Place, Volume I: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). Segovia, Fernando. ‘‘Toward a Hermeneutics of the Diaspora: A Hermeneutics of Otherness and Engagement.’’ Reading from This Place, Volume I: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States., ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).

LATINO/A THEOLOGY Rodolfo J. Hernández-Díaz U.S. Latino/a theology (alternatively called Hispanic or Latina/o theology) consists of reflections on the practices and faith of the U.S. Latino/a community in light of the sociohistorical context of Hispanics. It stems from the need to articulate a theology reflective of and significant for the Latino/a faith community. While Hispanic theology owes a great deal to Latin American liberation theology, it also contrasts with it. Like liberation theology, Latino/a theology begins with concrete injustices, uses social analysis, and rereads the biblical narrative from the perspective of the oppressed. Unlike Latin American liberation theologians who define oppression in largely political and economic terms, Latino/a theology has expanded the notions of oppression to include social exclusion and cultural marginalization. Thus, Hispanic theology is its own theological enterprise committed to analyzing Hispanic American life and shaping Christian and Latino/a symbols in new ways for the betterment of Latino/as and the wider society. Far from being homogeneous, Hispanic communities are enormously diverse. Latino/as come from different racial, ethnic, cultural, and national backgrounds. Historically, some Hispanic families trace their origins in North America back centuries before parts of it became the United States, while other Hispanics are recent immigrants. Hispanics are also religiously diverse. The majority of Latino/as practice a form of Catholicism, though Protestantism, particularly in its Pentecostal/Charismatic manifestations, is growing at a phenomenal rate among Hispanics. U.S. Hispanics are not exclusively Christian; indigenous and African-inspired religious traditions also influenced the popular faith practices. There is diversity among Latino/as in terms of education and economic status as well. Though some Latino/as are highly educated and economically successful, most struggle financially and do not reach the necessary levels of education to effectively compete in the job market. Geographically, many Latino/as make their homes on the borderlands of the Southwest while others live in the barrios of the Northeast or in other major urban centers. Since Hispanic theology draws from the experiences of Latino/a communities, it reflects their diverse character. Despite the enormous diversity among Hispanics, they share enough cultural,

657

658 |

Latino/a Theology

JUSTO GONZALEZ (1937–) Justo L. Gonza´lez is a celebrated Cuban American historian, theologian, and United Methodist scholar with over 70 books published in English and Spanish on the history of Christianity, Hispanic biblical hermeneutics, and Latino/a theological studies. Gonza´lez was born in Cuba in 1937, and earned his PhD in historical theology from Yale University when he was just 23 years old. He taught at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia, for eight years, and later at Columbia Theological Seminary and the Interdenominational Theological Center. In 1984 Gonzalez published The Story of Christianity, a best-selling and highly readable two-volume survey of church history, which has been translated into several languages around the world. He is the founding editor of Apuntes, the first scholarly journal on U.S. Hispanic religious studies. During the 1990s Gonza´lez founded three institutions for promoting the presence of Latino/as in North American theological education. Among these are the Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH); the Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI), funding graduate study and academic mentoring for Latina/os across North America and now housed at Princeton Theological Seminary; and the Hispanic Summer Program (HSP), which brings together theological faculty with graduate students for two weeks of learning and fellowship every year during the summer. —AH

historical, and especially religious experiences to make possible an examination of a shared Latino/a theology. While Latino/a theology often mirrors and parallels the range of beliefs in mainstream (or traditional) theology, it also significantly contrasts and objects to mainstream theology. For example, Hispanic theology challenges the tendency in traditional theology to insist that its reflection is objective and value-free. In contrast to this discourse of theoretical abstraction and supposed objectivity, Latino/a theology highlights the importance of social and cultural context in shaping ways of thinking. Rather than focusing on the commonalties with mainstream U.S. theologies, the description here centers on the distinctive theological contributions of Latino/a theology to the wider theological enterprise.

Historical Development Though the history of Hispanics in what is now the United States is centuries old, only in the early 1970s did a distinct theological voice begin to emerge that can be called Latino/a theology. Hispanic theology emerged in the wake of Latin American liberation theology’s emphasis on the importance of perspective and social location. Liberation theology stressed that the view from a place of privilege is fundamentally different than from a place of poverty. Theological constructions developed from a place of privilege masks patriarchal, sexist, racist, and classist assumptions and denies the history of domination and oppression. Latino/a theology arose from the need to unmask cultural, social, and economic structures of oppression by articulating a theology from

Latino/a Theology

| 659

VIRGILIO ELIZONDO (1935–) Virgilio Elizondo is internationally renowned as a theologian, speaker, and pastor, particularly for his visionary work on the Mexican American religious experience. A native of San Antonio, Texas, and a Roman Catholic priest of the San Antonio archdiocese, his numerous leadership positions include his service from 1972 to 1987 as the founding president of the Mexican American Cultural Center and his tenure as rector of San Fernando Cathedral from 1983 to 1995. Widely acclaimed as the founder of U.S. Latino theologies, he is the author of 15 books and over 100 scholarly and popular articles. He also co-edited 15 volumes of the prestigious international theological journal ‘‘Concilium.’’ The documents and vision of Roman Catholic leaders at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) profoundly influenced Elizondo’s theology. Following the Council’s call for a return to the sources of faith, Elizondo’s writings and pastoral ministry are rooted in his creative reexamination of two foundational faith sources: the Jesus stories of the Gospels and the image and narrative of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In both of these sources he finds rich treasures for theological reflection on the life and mission of a mestizo people, more specifically his fellow Mexican Americans of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. —TM

the perspective of and meaningful for a community mired in poverty, discrimination, and marginalization. The initial stage of development of Latino/a theology took place between 1972 and 1990. During this time, three events loom large in understanding the growth and development of Hispanic theology: the founding of the Mexican American Cultural Center in 1972 by Virgilio Elizondo; the publication of Apuntes, the first professional journal dedicated to the elaboration of Hispanic theology in 1980; and the formation in 1989 of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS), founded in order to promote theological reflection within the U.S. Hispanic experience. Aside from Elizondo and Justo Gonza´lez, the key figures during this time were Allan Figueroa Deck, Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az, and Roberto S. Goizueta (among Roman Catholics) and Orlando Costas (among Protestants). In the period since 1991 Latino/a theology has experienced enormous growth, leading some to refer to the 1990s as a ‘‘boom’’ of Hispanic theology. A number of developments in this period have significantly advanced the study of Hispanic theology: the founding of the Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH) in 1991; the 1992 appearance of a second professional theological journal, the Journal of Hispanic/ Latino Theology; and the inauguration of the Hispanic Theological Initiative in 1996. Alongside these developments, there has been an explosion of theological publications, including over a dozen anthologies, a four-volume study of Latino/a religion by the Program for the Analysis of Religion among Latinos (PARAL), and numerous monographs by individual authors. While most of first generation Hispanic theologians continue to contribute to the field, a host of new Latino/a theologians have

660 |

Latino/a Theology

ORLANDO COSTAS (1942–1987) Orlando Enrique Costas was born on June 15, 1942 in Ponce, Puerto Rico. He obtained masters degrees in pastoral, biblical, and systematic theology as well as a master of divinity degree. His doctoral work was in missions and evangelism from the Free University of Amsterdam, Holland. Costas pastored in the United States and Puerto Rico. Among other things, he served on the Commission for Social Development of Milwaukee, was a founding member of the committee of Latin American Political Education, and was founder of a Hispanic community newspaper, La Guardia. He also founded the Latin American Civil Union for Civil Rights and the Universidad del Barrio. The governor of Wisconsin named him to the State Commission on Human Rights in the Division of Industry, Work, and Human Relations. As missionary to Latin America, he served as professor of communication and missiology, secretary of publications, and director of the Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies (CELEP). In 1980 Costas became the Thornley B. Wood professor of missiology at Eastern Baptist Seminary and in 1984 the academic dean of the Andover Newton Theological School. He authored 15 books along with numerous chapters and articles. His work and life are the topic of five dissertations, two books, and a variety of articles. He died in November 1987. —ECF

appeared. Among them are Marı´a Pilar Aquino, Orlando O. Espı´n, Ismael Garcı´a, Harold Recinos, Jeanette Rodrı´guez, Fernando Segovia, and Eldin Villafan˜e. Along with the growth in numbers of Latino/a scholars has come a proliferation in the richness and maturity of theological explorations of the complex U.S. Hispanic reality.

Methodological Foundations Because of the widespread marginalization, oppression, exploitation, and domination of Hispanics, Latino/a theology’s methodology largely coincides with liberation theology. Three methodological constructs give cohesion to the discussion of Latino/a theology: (1) social location, popular expressions and symbols of the faith, and the daily-lived experience of the people (lo cotidano); (2) a preferential option for the poor, understood broadly to include the culturally oppressed and socially marginalized; (3) liberating praxis, the confrontation of oppressive institutions and structures that give rise to colonialism/imperialism, assimilationist tendencies, rampant capitalism, machismo, sexism, and other forces that are antithetical to the reign of God. While the latter two methodological constructs reflect the influence of liberation, Black, and feminist theology, the first methodological move grounds the reflection of Hispanics in the daily struggles and hopes of their own communities. These three methodological constructs, honed by the extensive use of social analysis (whether from sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics, or otherwise) ensure continued connection to concrete Latino/a realities. Latino/a theologians see social

Latino/a Theology

| 661

RIVERSIDE MANIFESTO On March 12–14, 1981, a major gathering on urban ministry dubbed a ‘‘National Conference on the City’’ was held at the historic Riverside Church in New York City. The occasion was the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Riverside Church. While there were a number of participants, a group of Latino/a church leaders believed that a gross oversight and injustice occurred in the exclusion of Hispanics from the official conference program, especially given the then estimated 20 million Hispanics living in the United States in 1981, mostly residing in urban areas, including notably a few blocks from Riverside Church. On March 13th these Hispanic leaders, calling themselves the Coalition of Hispanic Christian Leadership, interrupted the conference proceedings in the sanctuary of Riverside Church, seized the microphone, and read a statement titled ‘‘Complaints and Demands Presented to Mainline Protestants, Conservative Fundamentalists and Establishment Evangelicals at the Riverside Church Conference on the City.’’ This document was later published formally and informally in denominational publications, as well as mimeographed copies in both English and Spanish. Although the document has been referred to as the ‘‘Shout’’ or ‘‘Cry of Riverside,’’ over the years it also has been referred to as ‘‘the Riverside Manifesto.’’ —EDA

science methodologies as instrumental in the analysis of reality in order to unravel the dynamics of oppression in all its forms.

Major Themes and Characteristics Latino/a scholars have contributed creative and original insights to such diverse theological topics as aesthetics, catechesis, epistemology, evangelization, hermeneutics, feminist theology, liturgy, missiology, Mariology, pastoral ministry, spirituality, and theological method. Throughout their diverse writings, certain major themes and characteristics have emerged as fundamental dimensions of Hispanic theology: an emphasis on theology as a shared task, known as teologı´a en conjunto (collaborative theology); a concern for culture, manifested in the discourses of mestizaje/mulatez (racial and cultural mixing) and the borderland; and explorations of identity captured by popular religion and la lucha (the struggle to survive). These dimensions are central to Latino/a theology and give it much of its distinct flavor. The phrase teologı´a en conjunto captures the collaborative spirit that characterizes Latino/a theological reflection. This collaborative spirit manifests itself in two distinct but interrelated forms. First, Latino/a theologians, in contrast to the hyperindividualism of dominant North American theologians, are convinced that theology must be done in collaboration with faith communities. This collaboration is exemplified by the methodology of Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church in which interviews with Hispanic women are interpreted to critically appropriate Hispanic women’s religious experiences. Maintaining open dialogue with communities of faith

662 |

Latino/a Theology

helps to keep Hispanic theologians grounded in the suffering and struggles of the people and avoids the Enlightenment error of doing theology as an abstract observer. Second, over and against the dominant culture’s view of the individual reflecting in isolation as the culmination of academic achievement, Latino/a theologians do their work collaboratively, as evidenced by their predilection for anthologies. These anthologies are not merely collections of the writings of individuals working in isolation, but result from intimate and enthusiastic gatherings of mutual sharing of their stories and theological insights from living as diasporic people within the United States. The concept of culture has been a central theme and characteristic of Hispanic theology from its beginnings. This Worshipers at the Santuario del Sen˜or de emphasis on culture manifests itself Esquipulas at Chimayo´, New Mexico. repeatedly in the form of discussions Believed to be the site of miraculous cures, about mestizaje/mulatez (both terms refer hundreds of faithful visit the Santuario to racial mixing), borderland, and more every Easter. (Kevin Fleming/Corbis) generally constructions of Latino/a social reality. Mestizaje/mulatez have been widely adopted by Latino/a theologians to highlight who they are as Hispanics and explain what is different and new about Latino/a identity and emphasize that hybridity, ambiguity, and pluralism are key dimensions in God’s revelation. These terms refer to the result of the violent and unequal clash between Native American, African, Spanish, and Euro-American cultures. Elizondo was the first to skillfully articulate mestizaje (1983). He argues that the clash of the particular bloods, faiths, and worldviews at Tepeyac, with the apparition of Nuestra Sen˜ora de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe), forged a mestizaje. As mestizo/as, Latino/as live in a fluid state by their participation in and rejection by two different cultures. It is precisely this double rejection that demonstrates God’s election (what the world rejects, God chooses as his very own) and offers a basis for their liberating and salvific efforts as agents for a new humanity, not only for themselves, but for others as well. The cultural concept of borderlands is historically related to but distinct from mestizaje/mulatez. In the Southern portions of the Americas, the Spanish were forced to live with the original inhabitants, creating a mestizaje. However, the colonists in North America, lusting for Native Americans’ land rather than their subjugation, pushed them westward, leading to the ‘‘frontier’’ myth of terra nullis (empty land). On this

Latino/a Theology

| 663

AETH The Asociacio´n para la Educacio´n Teolo´gica Hispana (AETH), was founded in 1991. Its main purpose is to promote and enhance theological education for Hispanics in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, at all levels. This includes seminaries and universities as well as Bible colleges, Bible institutes, and lay training programs. AETH now has over 900 individual members and 100 affiliated institutions. AETH itself is an affiliated member of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). From its inception, AETH has specialized in theological education in a very wide sense. This includes the intellectual as well as the spiritual disciplines of ministry, both for those currently enrolled in formal educational programs and those already engaged in pastoral and other forms of ministry. AETH also publishes and distributes books and other resources to support the tasks of theological education and the practices of ministry. Thus, it is particularly well placed to procure, produce, and/or distribute whatever materials may be needed for, or may result from, this project. AETH is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization as determined by the Internal Revenue Service. Its Web site is www.aeth.org. —JDM

side of the frontier was civilization, on the other a void. From the Latino/a perspective, the borderland is much more than a geographical space; it is an epistemological and cultural category defining the reality of their community. In contrast to the dominant perception of the border as unidirectional, Hispanics perceive the border as allowing for movement in two directions. Instead of a line demarcating savagery and civilization, the border is valorized as a place of growth, encounter, and enrichment. As a result of this borderland experience, Latino/as live simultaneously as insiders and outsiders. They exist as a bridge people between the minority and the majority world, between the center and periphery, between North and South America. In a world of increasingly porous and fluid borders, where ‘‘globalization’’ is seen as inevitable, Latino/as embody the possibility of peaceful reconciliation, hope, and life in the place of legitimized violence, rape, and murder. Strongly tied to the emphasis of Latino/a theologians on the concept of culture is the stress on identity. The concern for identity arises out of the need to defend Hispanic communities against overt racial and ethnic prejudices, the devaluation of Latino/a collective identity, and strong assimilationist tendencies that frequently demand cultural and linguistic repression in order to attain status as full U.S. Americans. Reflections on the popular symbols, myths, rituals, and practices of Hispanics serve as a major wellspring and bulwark for maintaining the integrity of Latino/a self-identity and culture. Orlando Espı´n understands popular religiosity as a cultural expression of the sensus fidelium (literally, the ‘‘sense of the faithful’’). Conceptions of Mary and Christ are his prime examples of the sensus fidelium (Espı´n and Dı´az 1999). Roberto S. Goizueta contends that popular religiosity embodies a unity of reason, beauty, and justice that offer a radical critique of mainstream North American Christianity and offers the latter avenues for transformation and renewal (1995, 18–46). Though it has

664 |

Latino/a Theology

been discounted by dominant Euro-American theologies as primitive, vestiges of an ignorant past, a product of syncretism, and an ideological tool to manipulate ‘‘simple folks,’’ Latino/as have validated popular religion as a legitimate and vital source of identity, liberative values, empowerment, self-determination, and a corrective to dominant values. The emphasis on identity in Latino/a theology also manifests itself in the recurrence of the struggle to survive. This stress on identity is legitimate given the shared historical experience of conquest, colonization, and cultural subjugation. In this hostile context, Hispanics struggle to survive as a people, to create a viable self-identity, and to enter into a state of self-determination. Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az refers to this struggle to survive as la lucha. La lucha has to do with the multiple facets of the oppression of Hispanic women manifest as economic, cultural, and gender disadvantage (IsasiDı´az 2004, 11–33). As Latino/as become authors of their own histories, they combat the denial of violent conquest and the justifications that legitimate culturally oppressive and assimilationist policies.

Contributions to the Formulation of Christian Doctrines Hispanic theologians have reinterpreted and reconstructed the meanings of doctrines of the faith in a manner that is specific to their cultural milieu. In grounding their reconstruction of Christian doctrines in their culture, Latino/as have reimagined these doctrines in ways that are more responsive to the Hispanic social realities. Rather than limiting the significance of their work, Latino/a theologians hold that their critical engagement with culture has yielded beneficial insights that can serve to empower and enrich the wider church. The task of reinterpreting the doctrines of the faith is perhaps best illustrated in the reconstruction of the doctrines of the Trinity, God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, theological anthropology, the church, and eschatology.

The Trinity Hispanic Trinitarian systems are less concerned with the ontological nature of God (a matter of philosophical speculation that can never be resolved) than with how God as the Trinity relates to humanity and works through history. Three theologians exemplify the contributions of Hispanics to Trinity thought: J. L. Gonza´lez, Luis Pedraja, and Zaida Maldonado Perez. Gonza´lez insists that people’s notions of the Trinity have drastic consequences for the ordering of society and economic relationships within it. When the Triune God was conceptualized in unchanging Platonic terms in the early church formulations, the status quo was sacralized in a way that benefited the ruling classes. In contrast, the nature of God as three in one reveals for Latino/as the centrality of giving and sharing in the life of the Godhead (Gonza´lez 1990, 101–115). Pedraja argues that the communal and relational nature of the Trinity reveals that God seeks out God’s people, accompanies them in their struggles, and stands in solidarity with them. Over and against the xenophobic assimilative tendency of the dominant culture, the diversity within the Trinity resists homogenization and celebrates diversity

Latino/a Theology

| 665

(Pedraja 2003, 117–120). Maldonado Perez extends the discussion of Trinity as relationship through the metaphor of La Santa Familia (the Holy Family). The Trinity is a familia because it shares together their essence, but also their work. This coequality serves as a corrective for the sexist view of el macho de la casa (the man of the house), whereby the macho sets the ‘‘law’’ of the home. To follow the example of the Trinitarian God is to live as a familia, in complete intimacy with one another, loving each other in the midst of struggling together (‘‘The Trinity,’’ in Aponte and De La Torre 2006, 32–39). What is in common in these Hispanic Trinitarian systems is a concern for practical implications of the Trinity: concern for socioeconomic status of Latino/as for Gonza´lez, relationship and affirmation of diversity for Pedraja, and the perspective of familia for Maldonado Perez. They are concerned not with ‘‘how’’ God is three persons in one but in the liberative and subversive sociopolitical and ecclesiastical implications of a God that lives with diversity within unity and unity within diversity.

God among Latino/as The statement ‘‘God is love’’ is the foundational affirmation of the Hispanic doctrine of God. Hispanics testify to the intimate experience of the active and relational God of love within the Latino/a community. Hispanics refer to God as Diosito, a term implying endearment and Amante, or lover, of the beloved community. ‘‘Diosito’’ also reflects this loving relationship with God as an affectionate friend or Amigo (Alanı´s, ‘‘God,’’ in Aponte and De La Torre 2006, 11–16). God from the perspective of Latino/as is not relegated to the realm of the metaphysical transcendence, changeless, impassible, and immutable, but is understood as an intrinsically relational and intimate God who actively accompanies people on their daily journeys, as made evident in the incarnational love and ministry of Jesus the Galilean (Elizondo 1983). J. L. Gonza´lez contends that the incarnation (much more than merely a Plan B for human sin) should serve as the basis for the Latino/a doctrine of God (1990). To a people who are constantly rejected or ignored, the sense of being loved and chosen is not merely good news but ushers in a whole new life. God understood as Amor, or love, creates in the community of faith the capacity for reciprocal love even as sin mars this love. The intrinsically relational God creates human persons who are in turn intrinsically related to other human beings, the cosmos, and God. The tendency of humanity to divide each other on the basis of differences and to establish hierarchies of one group over the other is opposed to the universality of God’s love. From this perspective, the failure to acknowledge relatedness to others, especially the ever-present poor, oppressed, and marginalized, represents a pathological interpretation of reality. Thus God from the perspective of Latino/as is the loving Diosito who intimately calls all into the beloved community and a loving relationship with others. As Amigo and Amante, God’s ongoing and dynamic work challenges the oppressive status quo.

666 |

Latino/a Theology

Jesus Latino/a Christologies stress the concrete historical reality of Jesus and the implications of that reality for understanding the relational and loving character of Jesus and his role as an advocate for the poor. Three dominant images of Jesus permeate Latino/a theology: Jesus as mestizo, Jesus as liberator, and Jesus as the one who accompanies (M. A. Gonza´lez, ‘‘Jesus,’’ in Aponte and De La Torre 2006, 18). Mestizaje serves as a major Christological image within Hispanic theology. Elizondo’s landmark work grounds his Christological reflection on the mestizo identity of Jesus as a Galilean Jew. Elizondo insists that Jesus’ birth—not in the center of power (Jerusalem), but on the border (Galilee)—is not accidental, but revelatory. Jesus’ mestizo experience of being ‘‘in between’’ connects the incarnate Christ with contemporary border reality of Latino/a experience and serves as a call to a new conception of community and church (1983). Jesus depicted as liberator breaks down the dividing walls among humanity. Foremost, perhaps, is the divide between rich and poor. Pedraja’s Christology, by focusing on the earthly incarnation of Christ (as opposed to a preexistent or heavenly resurrected Christ), highlights the liberating work of Jesus in the lives of the poor and oppressed (1999). Jesus’ incarnation as a poor person delegitimizes the structures that create unjust distributions of wealth. However, Jesus’ incarnation as one of the poor is not merely a means of comforting them, but to enable the poor and powerless to confront and transform the oppressor in society and restore their human dignity. A third Christological image is that of the crucified Jesus as victim that accompanies the Latino/a community through their struggles. Goizueta stresses that Jesus for Latino/as is foremost a flesh-and-blood person, characterized by the ritual act of accompaniment (1995). The widespread identification with the crucified Jesus among Hispanics does not cancel out the resurrection. Latino/as affirm the resurrection as the ultimate act of confrontation and victory over suffering. As Latino/as accompany Jesus on Good Friday, the emphasis on the hope of new life in the face of suffering empowers the community of faith. The crucified Jesus best captures the historic experience of Hispanics. Just as Jesus suffered unjustly, so Latino/as are suffering unjustly. From the Latino/a perspective, the dehistoricized Jesus has no place. Instead, Jesus, the mestizo from Galilee, whose concrete concerns for and accompaniment of the suffering poor breaks down the walls dividing humanity, calls Christians to walk in his footsteps in fellowship with the victims of society (M. A. Gonza´lez, in Aponte and De La Torre 2006, 22).

The Holy Spirit Discussions of the Holy Spirit among Latino/as have focused on the personhood of the Spirit and the presence of the Spirit as a means of affirmation, liberation, and transformation. Hispanics who are constantly at the mercy of forces and powers that dehumanize and objectify them testify, along with scriptures, to the Spirit’s personhood. The traditional depersonalization of the Spirit reflects a depersonalization of God that serves to dehumanize people who are created in the Imago Dei, the image of God

Latino/a Theology

| 667

(Solivan, ‘‘Holy Spirit,’’ in Rodriguez and Martell-Otero 1997, 53). The Spirit, as a person, endows Hispanics with the worth and dignity due to all peoples. As a sinful (broken) people and victims, Latino/as look to the person and work of the Holy Spirit as a healer of brokenness and enabler of social transformation. Villafan˜e emphasizes that God’s transforming love gives rise to the Spirit’s work in history. It is through the Spirit that Christians are called and empowered to break the chains of hate and injustice within human structures and institutions (1993, 200–202). The Spirit also serves as the guarantor or down payment of the hoped-for liberation and proof that ‘‘the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world’’ (1 John 4:4). The Holy Spirit affirms and empowers the diversity within the Latino/a church and community. The outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost affirmed diversity and cultural inclusivity as signs of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom. Neglect of the Spirit’s ministry has led to racism, bigotry, and sexism. The Spirit makes possible the diversity that God intends, but as long as the diversity expressed through language, culture, ethnicity, and gender is denied, the people of God will fail to experience the fullness of the Spirit. Since it was human and not just heavenly tongues spoken among those gathered in Acts 2, the Spirit affirmed the importance of language and culture. Rather than expunge God’s gifts of culture and language, the Spirit empowers the Latino/a community of God to use them for the good of all. The identity of Christian Latino/as depends on the personhood and presence of the Spirit. The Spirit’s relationship to Hispanics as persons (subjects) and affirmation of diverse languages and cultures empowers Latino/as to free themselves from those who seek to oppress and dehumanize them.

Theological Anthropology Hispanic theological anthropology seeks liberative answers to the question: what does it mean to be human? Their theological reflections on the relation between the human life and the divine life can be sketched along thematic lines. The doctrine of creation influences the formulation of an other-focused, inclusive, and diverse Hispanic anthropology. Drawing from Genesis 1–3, Hispanic theologians emphasize that human beings were not created to be alone (Genesis 2:18). To be made human in the image of God is to be created for others (J. L. Gonza´lez 1990, 125–138). In a society that tends to exclude and marginalize others, the recovery of the inclusivity emerging from creation offers a prophetic alternative conception of anthropology. Hispanic theological anthropologies reflect distinctively Hispanic Christologies. The conception of Jesus’ identity as a Galilean, the practice of accompanying Jesus, and the way Jesus reveals God’s agency in the world are all sources of anthropological thought. To be human after the pattern of the Galilean Jesus is to welcome an intercultural way of life (mestizaje) and to cross into the human experiences of others, especially the marginalized (Dı´az, ‘‘Theological Anthropology,’’ in Aponte and De La Torre 2006, 70–71). To be human is to be acompan˜ado (accompanied) by Christ and to imitate Jesus by accompanying our neighbors, especially the marginalized neighbors. The Spanish translation of the Greek Logos as Verbo rather than the more static English translation ‘‘Word’’ supports the U.S. Hispanic view of Jesus as revealer of God’s agency.

668 |

Latino/a Theology

Hispanic anthropologies embrace the communal character of humanity revealed in the communal life of the Triune God. While affirming the distinctive particularities of human individuals, Hispanic anthropologies challenge individualism and individualistic practices. To be human is to be created to live in community and embrace interpersonal dependence.

Ecclesiology Hispanic views of the church, while varying tremendously, have generally been more with mission (‘‘what is the church for?’’) than with definition (‘‘what is the church?’’). The distinctiveness of Latino/a ecclesiology lies not in its institutional organization, but in its praxis, or way of being church (Goizueta, ‘‘United States Hispanic Theology,’’ in Deck 1992, 2). J. L. Gonza´lez provides three helpful images that describe the Hispanic way of being church (‘‘In Quest of a Protestant Hispanic Ecclesiology’’ in Rodriguez and Martell-Otero 1997, 85–95). The first is the image of the church as a pilgrim people. As a pilgrim people, Latino/as are a people without a land, either for those who have been here for generations because their land was taken from them or for the recent arrivals because they feel that they do not have any permanent roots. Like the pilgrimage in the wilderness, or the exile and return, it is not a pilgrimage that is undertaken alone. It is a communal pilgrimage for those who share a common suffering, longing, and hope. Another image for understanding the Hispanic way of being church is that of the body of Christ. This image implies not only that all the members of the body of Christ are different, but also that they are all necessary. As Paul put it, if the whole body were eyes, there would be no hearing (1 Corinthians 12:17). The use of this image in the Latino/a church, however, contrasts with its use in the dominant community. ‘‘The church is the hands and feet of Jesus’’ is a phrase often heard in the dominant churches. Latino/as, who are generally helpless in a society that seeks to take advantage of the powerless, have no use for a Christ without hands or feet. A third image is that of the church as family. In the dominant culture, family often means nuclear family, and is therefore conceived as narrowly defined and closed. However, in the cultural context of Latino/as in which extended family is the norm, the image of church as family suggests a diffuse, wide, and ever-expandable group of people. This image of church as extended family has a close relationship to the Latino/a experiences of alienation, marginalization, and exile. The church becomes the new community and extended family for those Hispanics who have had to leave their own extended families behind. From the Latino/a perspective, the church provides companions in the pilgrimage of suffering and hope. Though these church companions are different, they are also necessary and accepted as members in the ever-expanding family that is the church.

Eschatology For Latino/as, eschatology, as the doctrine of last things, deals not with the end of life, but the end of sin, suffering, and death as well as the hope of liberation from sinful

Latino/a Theology

| 669

structures of oppression and marginalization. This hope permeates all of Hispanic theology, from Christology, to pneumatology, to ecclesiology. Thus, though eschatology deals with the last things, it is not relegated to the end in Latino/a theology. Latino/a theologians emphasize that the Lord’s Prayer/Our Father states ‘‘Your kingdom come’’ not ‘‘let us go into your kingdom’’ (Matthew 6:10). For Hispanic theologians, eschatology is about looking forward to a future in which God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven (Pedraja, ‘‘Eschatology,’’ in Aponte and De La Torre 2006, 116). The concepts of fiesta (celebration), man˜ana (tomorrow), and ‘‘kin-dom’’ offer distinctly Hispanic eschatological visions. Elizondo articulates ‘‘fiesta’’ as a symbol of eschatological celebration of the new mestizo humanity. Elizondo insists that as mestizo/as Latino/as occupy a privileged position to act as bridge people to both North and Latin America. Mestizo/as must reject rejection and exclusion and lead the way toward a new humanity that will participate in the festive table of fellowship among brothers and sisters (1983). J. L. Gonza´lez captures the Hispanic hopes for the coming reign of God from the perspective of man˜ana. Gonza´lez’s eschatological vision of man˜ana has two implications. First, it represents the hopes for a tomorrow that will be radically different from today. Second, God’s future vision of peace not war, of more egalitarian structures, and of the eradication of poverty and hunger places certain demands on the present. Hispanics, as a man˜ana people, must live out man˜ana today, in the tension of the already and not yet of the coming reign of God (Gonza´lez 1990, 28– 30). As in liberation theology, the reign of God represents hope for the radical transformation of the present. Isasi-Dı´az uses the term ‘‘kin-dom’’ to move away from the patriarchal domination evoked by the term ‘‘kingdom.’’ Kin-dom as an alternative vision reflects inclusion of family, in which all people are kin to one another. God’s eschatological kin-dom offers glimpses of hope and guidance for present actions (Isasi-Dı´az 2004). From the experience of marginalization, oppression, and exclusion in the present, U.S. Latino/as maintain hope of a radically different reality in which love and life eclipse hatred and death (Pedraja, ‘‘Eschatology,’’ in Aponte and De La Torre 2006, 119).

References and Further Reading Aponte, Edwin David, and Miguel A. De La Torre, eds. Handbook of Latino/a Theologies (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006). Aquino, Marı´a Pilar. Nuestro clamor por la vida: teologı´a latinoamericana desde la perspectiva de la mujer, Coleccio´n Mujer latinoamericana (San Jose´, Costa Rica: Editorial DEI, 1992). Deck, Allan Figueroa, ed. Frontiers of Hispanic Theology in the United States (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992). De La Torre, Miguel A., and Edwin David Aponte. Introducing Latino/a Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). Elizondo, Virgilio P. Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983). Espı´n, Orlando, and Miguel H. Dı´az, eds. From the Heart of Our People: Latino/a Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999).

670 |

Latino/a Theology

Goizueta, Roberto S. Caminemos con Jesu´s: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Gonza´lez, Justo L. Man˜ana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. En la lucha = In the struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology, 10th anniversary ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a, and Yolanda Tarango. Hispanic Women Prophetic Voice in the Church: Toward a Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology [Mujer Hispana voz profe´tica en la iglesia: hacia una teologı´a de liberacı´on de la mujer Hispana] (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988). Pedraja, Luis G. Jesus Is My Uncle: Christology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999). ———. Teologı´a: An Introduction to Hispanic Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003). Rodriguez, Jose´ David, and Loida I. Martell-Otero, eds. Teologı´a en conjunto: a Collaborative Hispanic Protestant Theology, 1st ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997). Valentin, Benjamin. New Horizons in Hispanic/Latino(a) Theology (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003). Villafan˜e, Eldin. The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1993).

LIBERATION THEOLOGY Loida I. Martell-Otero Theologies of liberation are associated so often with Latin American theologies that one could feasibly lose sight of the fact that they have their foundation in biblical texts. Throughout the Bible, narratives such as those about the exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and Esther’s liberative acts on behalf of her people from a planned Persian pogrom reflect underlying themes of salvation as experienced through concrete historical events. Similarly, historical narratives such as those recorded by slaves in colonial United States, the epistolary protests of Antonio Montesinos and Bartelome´ de las Casas on behalf of indigenous people, and the cries and prayers of the Civil Rights Movement are also theologies of liberation. They are, by and large, the reflections by those at the margins involved in prophetic movements for justice and freedom that seek the liberation of the oppressed. If such is the goal of these theologies, then one could posit that Jesus Christ is God’s ultimate liberative word, an incarnate ‘‘theos/logy of liberation.’’

General Comments There are many theologies of liberation. They exhibit distinctive as well as common traits, influenced by their particular contexts. Indeed, they are contextual theologies. ‘‘Contextual’’ means they are theologies that intentionally incorporate analyses of particular sociohistorical locations of their respective communities. Very often, these sociohistorical, political, and economic locations serve as the loci theologicus of reflection. The purpose of these starting points is to ensure that theologians speak from and to the concerns of their communities, and not in response to absolute questions that have no historical relevance to the needs of real ‘‘flesh and blood’’ people. Contextual theologians of liberation eschew any attempt to articulate theologies as ‘‘universal truths.’’ Rather they insist on the ‘‘scandal of particularity’’—that God speaks in particular ways to people within particular contexts. This principle of ‘‘particularity’’ not only implies that all theology is done within a specific social location but also that its scholars are obligated to consider their own perspectives and biases. If it is true that all human experience is interpreted reality (Schillebeeckx 1993, 31–32), then the 671

672 |

Liberation Theology

impact of context upon hermeneutics becomes a crucial methodological step for theologians of liberation. This paradigm shift to contextual hermeneutics is reflected in the number of theologies of liberation articulated in various forums. Asian and Asian American, African American, gay and lesbian, feminista, mujerista, Native American, Jewish, Latina/o, white feminist, womanist, and political theologies of liberation are but a small sample, each emphasizing particular themes, issues, and methodologies, and each articulating theologies that faithfully reflect the realities of their respective communities while maintaining a healthy dialogue with others. Theologies of liberation are also constructive theologies. They articulate holistic theologies that provide a sense of life and hope to the oppressed in particular, and to the human community as a whole. Its proponents often begin with the deconstruction of traditions that have proven to be detrimental to, or contain elements contributing to the oppression of, marginalized communities. Scholars then reconstruct these traditions from the perspective of the poor and marginalized. The dialectic of deconstruction and reconstruction uncovers the presence of those made invisible throughout history and in the present. Those dehumanized by unjust structures are humanized and the complicity of sinful institutions is made apparent. For example, white feminists have raised significant arguments regarding the Church’s complicit role in sustaining sexism, marginalizing women, and failing to legitimize a rich tradition regarding women’s leadership and contributions throughout its history. African American and womanist theologians point to societal and ecclesial structures that support racism. Womanist theologians in particular argue that white women are just as complicit in the oppression of African American women as men. As a constructive venture, theologies of liberation not only provide new ways of examining the tradition, they also raise questions about the interpretations of texts. Such hermeneutical methods as postcolonial readings and ideological criticism provide insights into the myriad ways in which God has spoken to, and through, those oftentimes rejected as ‘‘other.’’ Theologies of liberation can also be considered praxeological theologies. In his theses on Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx asserted that the purpose of philosophy is not simply to interpret the world but to change it (Marx 1978, 145). Theologians of liberation carry out their task in this spirit: not simply to be embroiled in abstract philosophical debates or obtuse ideological sparring, but rather to engage real human beings who seek God in the midst of concrete human experiences. These theologies often are accused unfairly of simply being a religious expression of Marxism. While it is true that they use a number of resources from social and political sciences, such accusations are a distortion of their purpose. What theologians of liberation seek to do is to understand the religious, biblical, and therefore theological implications of the eschatological Reign of God and understand its implications for human life and society in the present. They seek to be agents of transformation in the world rather than disinterested spectators. They are concerned particularly, though not exclusively, with those who suffer or are silenced in the world. They believe that God is present in a special way among the ‘‘least of these.’’ This latter belief has led them to articulate the well-known maxim regarding the ‘‘option for the poor’’—that God acts very specially in the midst of the hurting of the world. They affirm that the powerless of the world have an ‘‘epistemological privilege’’—that they have encountered and known God in

Liberation Theology

| 673

ways that are closer to the biblical witness about God and God’s purpose for creation than those who are in power. Consequently and above all, theologies of liberation can be considered inherently soteriologies. While ‘‘soteriology’’ may be defined as ‘‘the doctrine of salvation,’’ the meaning of ‘‘salvation’’ is not as clear. Theologians of liberation often criticize the tradition for emphasizing a soteriology that addresses solely the transcendent dimension of salvation—as an eschatological or futuristic hope that is divorced from the concrete realities that the oppressed face daily. They have counterbalanced this futuristic tendency by exploring how salvation is experienced in the here and now. It is not their intention to ignore the eschatological dimensions of salvation. Rather, they seek to articulate how the eschatological vision of the Reign of God as communicated through Scripture has implications for current social, political, economic, religious, cultural, and theological arenas. Simply put, how do the demands of God as expressed in the biblical concept of ‘‘basileia/Reign’’ commit communities of faith today to struggle for the transformation of a hurting, unjust world to one in which the fundamental elements of life thrive in human history? How can people of faith be faithful in the midst of a sinful world in which the ‘‘powers and principalities’’ of oppression and injustice seem to sway? These soteriological and praxeological foci lead to theologies that eschew the traditional divorce of theological reflection and ethical imperative.

U.S.-Based Latina/o Contextual Theologies There are various expressions of Latina/o theologies, including feminista and mujerista theologies. Some, such as evange´lica theologies, would hesitate applying the nomenclature of ‘‘theology of liberation’’ yet still consider themselves ‘‘contextual theologies.’’ Most fulfill the characteristics described in the previous section. Latina/ o theologians certainly seek the holistic well-being of their communities, and speak to and for a people who have suffered and continue to suffer. They, like other theologies of liberation, seek to articulate a theology that advocates for the liberation of all people and the transformation of our society. Nevertheless, these theologies are identifiably ‘‘Latino/a’’ based on the following. Context. Latina/o theologians reflect from, and for, a people whose biocultural roots originate in Latin America and the Caribbean, but who currently reside within the geographical boundaries of the United States of America. The almost 47 million people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Central and South American descent are usually among the poorest of this nation, living at the margins of many of their communities. Birthed from the ashes of conquest and violence, they deal with issues arising from a continuing history of colonization, discrimination, and exploitation. Many are im/ migrants who live invisibly at the margins of a society that professes to not want them as they use them for cheap labor. Latino/as are usually considered ‘‘other’’ by a dominant Eurocentric culture. Poverty, unemployment and underemployment, poor housing in high crime areas, poor educational attainment, lack of access to health care, along with cultural and language discrimination are part of the daily fabric of their lives. Latinas face the added onus of confronting the sexism that exists within and

674 |

Liberation Theology

outside of their communities. Yet their context is not solely about the social ills that beset their communities. It is also about the gifts that they contribute to the wider culture. These include a deep religiosity that is inherently part of the culture, a given joie de vivre that is expressed through their celebrations/fiestas, and a sense of community that is experienced in their generous hospitality—giving of themselves although they may not have much to give. Methodology. There are various expressions of Latina/o contextual theologies since they do not represent a homogenous group. Their particular contexts, in turn, influence the methods they employ. For example, feminista and mujerista theologians’ starting point for reflection is the quadruple oppression of gender, color, class, and culture experienced by Latinas. Some Latino/a scholars have explored ‘‘beauty’’ and cultural symbolism as interpretive lenses within the field of theological aesthetics. Catholic theologians incorporate the faith practices of popular religiosity as an essential foundation for theological reflection. While evange´lica/o recognize the importance of human experience in theological reflection, many insist on the priority of Scripture as the authority of faith and praxis. While diversity is a hallmark of Latino/a communities and their respective theologies, there are also some common approaches that identify them. First, these theologies are defined by the use of mestizaje/mulatez as a theological paradigm, which constitutes an ‘‘anthropological shift’’ from the Marxist and politico-economic analyses of Latin American theologies of liberation. They are also defined by their use of popular religiosity and lo cotidiano as important loci theologicus. Finally, they have a distinctive communal worldview that informs a methodological approach known as teologı´a en conjunto. When taken into account, these four important elements are what give Latina/o theologies their praxeological impulse: they respond to the needs of real people in real situations of life and death and are thus true ‘‘theologies of liberation.’’

Mestizaje/Mulatez Jose´ Vasconcelos (1882–1959), a Mexican philosopher, politician, and educator, used what had been a pejorative term to develop the concept of la Raza Co´smica (the Cosmic Race) within aesthetic philosophy. For Vasconcelos, mestizaje represented a future in which the ongoing fusion of people and cultures led the way to the ultimate goal of history. Within this historical and cultural framework, Virgilio Elizondo developed his concept of mestizaje as a theological category. Defining it as the process by which a new people arise from the encounter of two or more culturally or biologically disparate groups (Elizondo 2000, 5), he conceptualized it as the ‘‘border crossings’’ that Latina/os in general, and Mexican Americans in particular, experience existentially each day. It is not simply an ‘‘event’’ that takes place, but essentially ‘‘identity’’—who they are, and consequently how they live out their lives. While such a people are rejected for being impure and hated for overcoming the boundaries of difference erected by racist societies, mestizas/os are, in fact, the eschatological promise of God’s purpose for all of humanity. For Elizondo, this theological assertion is foundationally Christological: Jesus Christ is the mestizo incarnation of God in history. In and through the life and ministry of Jesus, one can detect the purpose of God. What the

Liberation Theology

| 675

world rejects as insignificant, impure, and hateful, God declares to be good, pure, and loved. In raising the crucified mestizo Christ, God declares God’s intention of life for all whom the world rejects and oppresses. Elizondo’s work became influential in the work of other Latina/o scholars. It represented a methodological shift from the Marxist/sociopolitical approach favored by Latin American theologians to anthropological/cultural analyses. Elizondo’s work was soon followed by other Latino/as who developed ancillary concepts. For example, some noted that mestizaje was an incomplete term that excluded African influences in the culture and suggested mulatez as a better term. Others suggested terms such as nepantla (Aztec and Amerindian concept that means the place in between) and sata (Puerto Rican term meaning ‘‘mutt’’). This fruitful avenue of exploration has led scholars to reflect on the theological importance of ‘‘in-between-ness’’—the liminal space that is the existential matrix of Latino/a life.

Popular Religiosity Latina/o scholars repeatedly have pointed out the essential religious nature of their culture. Latino/a religiosity transcends religious practice: it is not about calculating church attendance or denominational affiliations. Most Latina/os practice a form of ‘‘popular religion’’—religious traditions held primarily by marginalized groups to articulate their understanding of life and death through particular symbols, language, and forms of worship. It is a religion ‘‘of the people’’ rather than of any given institution. Among Latina/os, popular religious practices developed within a historical context, in which missionary enterprises partnered with agencies bent on conquest and colonization of the Americas. The cry of entre la espada y la cruz epitomized an evangelization that became entwined with the brutal coercion of indigenous and African people. This violent encounter and subsequent union of Amerindian, African, Iberian Catholic, and later North Atlantic Protestant spiritualities produced a worldview peculiar to the Latino/a people. It includes a deep sense of the abiding presence of the divine in all aspects of life, the relationality of all things created and divine, and the sacredness inherent in creation. This ‘‘sacramental’’ worldview (Espı´n 1995, 27) rejects any division between the sacred and the secular. God is present even in the minutiae of life. Religion permeates culture to the extent that it is impossible to divorce one from the other. Popular religiosity is, therefore, a defining component of latinidad and an important locus for theological reflection. This Latina/o sense of the sacred is expressed in everyday language through dichos/sayings as well as through cultural and religious symbols, beliefs, and values. While often rejected by dominant ecclesial institutions as pagan or superstitious, popular religiosity is the means by which the disenfranchised give expression to their suffering as well as their hopes in God as the author of salvation. Latina/o popular religious belief posits that God’s purpose will be and is being fulfilled in all aspects of their lives, in spite of the struggles and obstacles that arise. The expressions of popular religious belief among Catholic and evange´lica/o Latino/as as a foundational loci theologicus constitutes an important

676 |

Liberation Theology

defining characteristic of Latina/o contextual theologies and another significant difference from Latin American theologies of liberation.

Lo Cotidiano Closely related to the concept of popular religiosity, lo cotidiano is the third important distinctive feature of U.S.-based Latino/a theologies of liberation. Translated as ‘‘daily’’ or ‘‘every day,’’ lo cotidiano is a key epistemological tool as well as a locus theologicus, particularly for Latina theologies. The majority of the poor and marginalized inhabit these spaces of everyday life where they struggle to make coherent sense of a world filled with tragedy and death. Here they also experience God’s grace-full presence in visibly palpable ways, large and small. Lo cotidiano is the praxeological arena where life is lived in its totality. Indeed, life is the means by which God speaks and moves among ‘‘the least of these.’’ It is in these spaces that one can witness God’s ‘‘option for the poor.’’ The downtrodden and forgotten of our societies experience and know God in special ways here. Thus lo cotidiano is a sacred locus of God’s grace, liberation, and transformation in the face of the overwhelming structural injustice. As such it is a space that yields fruitful theological insight. Marı´a Pilar Aquino and Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az were the earliest proponents of the use of lo cotidiano as a paradigm in response to the sexism and male-oriented perspectives that predominated in most theologies of liberation, including Latino/a theologies. As an epistemological tool and a theological paradigm, it exposes the weakness of male-centric theologies of liberation that rely on sociopolitical, Marxist, and philosophical analyses in their discourse on structural sin while remaining blind to the sin of sexism and the impact of personal sins. Just as popular religious faith resists any attempt to dichotomize the sacred and secular, lo cotidiano is the means by which Latinas effectively reject any attempt to separate the so-called public square of theological discourse and the allegedly private/domestic domains of life. The first—which includes issues related to socioeconomics and politics—was assumed to be of immediate relevance to ‘‘real’’ theological and ethical reflection, while the latter had to do with ‘‘private affairs’’ often associated with women. Latina scholars challenge such thinking. They note that it is precisely in the spaces of daily living that the confluence of the public and the private takes place, and where the impact of macrosystems upon personal human lives is palpable, particularly among poor women and children of color who are the ones most often relegated to the margins of ‘‘domestic irrelevance.’’ Latina theologians recognize that lo cotidiano is more than just a paradigm. It is a concrete sociohistorical location where women struggle daily for the survival of their families and communities. These scholars affirm that no theology can truly be ‘‘liberating’’ in its intent unless it speaks to the full liberation of all people, especially the most oppressed.

Teología en Conjunto Latina/o cultures emphasize community and relationality over and above individuality. Familia/family and community are the basis for a holistic existence. This communal orientation is expressed in such refranes/popular sayings as mi casa es tu casa (my

Liberation Theology

| 677

CEHILA The Comisio´n de Estudios de Historia de la Iglesia en Ame´rica Latina y el Caribe (CEHILA) is an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars committed to recovering the historical dimension of Christianity in Latin America, in the Caribbean, and among U.S. Latinos. It was organized by CELAM (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano) in 1973 to promote the study of the history of the Church from the perspective of the poor and oppressed. U.S. Latinos became a part of CEHILA in 1975. The scholars are organized by geographic regions, including a continent-wide Protestant section. Over the years it has produced many books, study materials, conferences, and academic seminars on the subject. Enrique Dussel, CEHILA president for 20 years, has written or edited many of the most well-known books, including The Church in Latin America 1492–1992 (Orbis Books, 1992). Two books about the U.S. Latino Christian experience have been published under the auspices of CEHILA: Fronteras: A History of the Latin American Church in the USA Since 1513 (MAAC, 1983) and Iglesias peregrinas en busca de identidad Cuadros del protestantismo latino en los Estados Unidos (Kairo´s, 2004). —JMG

house is your house), do´nde come uno comen dos (where there is food for one there is enough for two), and dime con quie´n andas y te dire quie´n eres (tell me with whom you walk and I will tell you who you are). This relational emphasis is evident in Latino/a theological discourse. Teologı´a en conjunto—literally, a ‘‘conjoined’’ theology—is not simply an intellectual or philosophical exercise, but a truly collaborative dialogue among people of faith who seek to find the answers for the concerns and struggles that they face on a daily basis. This underscores the contextual and praxeological nature of Latina/o theology as a collaborative endeavor that seeks justice and salvation for a marginalized people in a hurting world. It is not isolated from faith, but rather gives expression to the hope of a believing people as they experience the presence of the divine in the spaces of their daily lives. As a collaborative endeavor, Latina/o theology is not limited to an academic setting nor is it the discourse of specialists who use technical jargon understood solely by the members of their guild. Rather, as a teologı´a en conjunto, it is a dialogue carried out among Latina/o scholars, grassroots communities of faith, pastoral leaders, and community activists. Latina/o theologians have no need to ‘‘discover’’ the poor and the marginalized since they emerge from these communities. Furthermore, as active members of their communities of faith, they engage in dialogue not to discredit the popular religious beliefs they have inherited, but rather to articulate and mine them for greater insight. Teologı´a en conjunto defines the Latina/o theological enterprise in a distinctive fashion. The acceptance of diversity through mestizaje/mulatez allows a greater sense of openness to a varying number of perspectives within the overall Latino/a community. It is therefore not surprising that its theologians approach their task with a truly ecumenical spirit. Religious differences that often prove divisive in other quarters only serve to enrich the dialogue among Latina/o scholars. This collaborative and relational

678 |

Liberation Theology

spirit permits Latinas and Latinos to engage in dialogue about sexism and the marginalization of women from ecclesial and theological centers of power. In this spirit, Latina/o scholars actively participate in dialogue with diverse other groups, particularly those engaged in the struggle for justice, thus contributing to the wider theological discourse of the Christian Church.

Conclusion U.S.-based Latina/o theologies are contextual theologies that seek the well-being of their particular communities and humanity in general. They are not new. However, their existence has not always been acknowledged for a number of reasons. According to Orlando E. Costas, these include the fact that they often were confused with Latin American theologies of liberation, and their use of a bilingual vernacular was rejected as a valid means of theological discourse (Costas 1992, 63). Most mainstream theologies discount Latino/a theologies as founded upon syncretistic or simplistic popular beliefs. Nevertheless, the situation has been changing since the early 1970s. The implications for the use of mestizaje/mulatez in light of globalization and of lo cotidiano as an important paradigm for women scholars are gaining the respect of other theologians. Such concepts have aided in defining with greater clarity the contours of Latina/o theologies. Furthermore, Latina/o theologians have begun to impact the national discourse on a myriad of issues such as im/migration, poverty, biculturalism, and sexism. In doing so, they contribute to theological insights such as the reading of Scripture from the margins, border crossings as the liminal space for reflection, the importance of popular religion and oral histories as a valid locus theologicus, and the importance of communal reflection as expressed through teologı´a en conjunto and praxis of accompaniment. They ceased to be irrelevant precisely because they are a collaborative enterprise that, while insisting on their distinction from other theologies of liberation, refuses to be isolated from them. In true conjunto spirit, Latino/a scholars engage others from oppressed communities as well as the larger Church in order to be agents of change as they struggle for the realization of the Reign of God in the midst of human history, especially in the daily lives of people who live in faith and with hope. In so doing, they claim their legitimate place amid the pantheon of theologies of liberation and other Christian theologies.

References and Further Reading Aquino, Marı´a Pilar. ‘‘Theological Method in U.S. Latino/a Theology.’’ From the Heart of Our People: Exploration in Catholic Systematic Theology, ed. Orlando O. Espı´n and Miguel H. Dı´az (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999). Costas, Orlando E. ‘‘Hispanic Theology in North America.’’ Struggles for Solidarity: Liberation Theologies in Tension, ed. Lorine M. Getz and Ruy O. Costa (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). De La Torre, Miguel A. The Hope of Liberation in World Religions (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008). Elizondo, Virgilio. Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000).

Liberation Theology

| 679

Ellacurı´a, Ignacio, and Jon Sobrino. Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). Espı´n, Orlando O. ‘‘Pentecostalism and Popular Catholicism: The Poor and Traditio.’’ Journal of Hispanic/ Latino Theology 3, no. 2 (November 1995): 14–43. Gutie´rrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, rev. ed., trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. En la Lucha/ In the Struggle: A Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). Marx, Karl. ‘‘Theses in Feuerbach.’’ The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978). Schillebeeckx, Edward. Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1993).

LITURGY AND WORSHIP Eduardo C. Fernández It has been said that all religions contain three basic elements: creed, code, and cult. Known also as the ‘‘three c’s,’’ these fundamentals, having to do with a belief system, a code of conduct, and some kind of worship or veneration, present a helpful structure for describing religious beliefs or structures. This entry focuses specifically on the third one, cult or worship, which, in many Christian denominations, in its more official and communal form, is sometimes known as ‘‘liturgy.’’ In fact, in many Spanishspeaking Protestant Latino/a congregations, worship or liturgy is described as culto. The primary emphasis will be on its Christian manifestations, especially as experienced among Latina/os in the United States. Of course, just as it is incorrect to maintain that all Latino/as are Christian, thereby overlooking a certain, albeit small, population of Jews or Muslims, at the present time, the literature regarding them is rather sketchy. Similarly, the growth of converts among Latinos/as to such newer religious groups as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, and the Mormons (or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) is drawing attention, but is not yet written about to a significant extent.

Historical Developments and Major Doctrinal Points In its most fundamental sense, worship is a complex experience, which has been described by Margaret Mary Kelleher as ‘‘a response of adoration evoked in one who has encountered the presence of God. It has also been depicted as the grateful rejoicing of those who have experienced God’s action in their lives. At times it has been equated with the formal services or rites of a particular religion, and it has also been set out as a way of life’’ (1987, 105). This definition of worship, a word often used synonymously with cult, one of the three c’s mentioned above, nonetheless integrates the other two elements of creed, in this case a belief in a personal God who acts in our lives, as well as code, which has been described as a way of life, a life lived in response to God’s gracious self-gift. Before exploring worship from a Hispanic perspective, it is essential, in order to understand the centrality of the goodness of created matter in Christian perspective, 681

682 |

Liturgy and Worship

to introduce two terms: one, sacramentality, and two, a derivation of it, cosmic sacramentality (which, incidentally, is making a bold appearance in contemporary writings around Latino/a sacramental theology). In general, ‘‘sacramentality’’ refers to the notion that humans relate to God through material signs, symbols, and gestures. Language, too, whether in written or oral form, is symbolic. Cosmic or creation-centered sacramentality, an inheritance of the Jewish religious heritage of Christianity, embraces the spirituality of Israel in the Hebrew Bible, which is filled with examples of how God becomes present through physical means in creation and the cosmos. Unlike some of the prevailing religious notions of neighboring tribes, the Hebrew Scriptures, beginning with the book of Genesis, point to the goodness of creation. The many berakoth, or blessing prayers, witness the goodness of creation as manifested in the material. Early Christians embraced such practices, seeing them as part of the new covenant that Jesus inaugurates. It is through this sacramental presence that Jesus became present in their midst (Luke 24:13–35). Eventually, the larger notion of sacramentality was reduced to the more formal rites surrounding times of initiation, maturity, commitment, healing, and Eucharistic table fellowship. Unfortunately, however, with the coming of Christendom in 392 CE, Christianity went from being a persecuted or barely tolerated sect of Judaism to the official religion of the Roman Empire. As more and more people became Christian, some whose motivations were more political than religious, the celebration of these sacramental rites underwent enormous changes. No longer were house churches able to accommodate the growing numbers at the Eucharist celebrations. These small, intimate settings were replaced by huge, Roman auditoriums known as basilicas. Lay people were gradually distanced from the Eucharistic table and, in many cases, the rigorous initiation process before Baptism, known as the catechumenate, was abandoned. As the laity became more separated from the physical celebration of the sacraments and less informed about their meaning because they had not been through the catechumenate of the earlier ages, they looked to other faith practices involving the material to experience the Divine presence in their lives. This growing separation from the material aspects of official sacramentality is one of the main reasons for the rise of popular piety, one that is not clergy centered. Among these practices are the Stations of the Cross, the Rosary, processions, etc. It was not uncommon, for instance, even up to recent times, to have people praying the Rosary quietly during the Sunday Eucharistic celebrations. Within this context, it is not hard to see how some ancient practices such as the celebration of the Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper, became tainted with certain superstitious practices, such as the belief that gazing upon the raised consecrated host (consecrated bread) during the Mass would bring good luck to the person: for example, the birth of a son. Both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations of the sixteenth century sought to correct these abuses. In many ways, the Protestant Reformation ushered in several changes that only came about in the Roman Catholic Church after Vatican II (convened in the 1960s), such as the importance of the priesthood of the faithful; the language of worship being in the vernacular, the language of the people; and the sharing of the cup at Eucharist, a strong reminder that the assembly is not just there to witness an event as spectators, but to participate in it. One of the greatest contributions of the

Liturgy and Worship

| 683

SANTOS PATRONES Patron Saints in the Catholic Catechism are spoken of as models and examples of Christian life, which the baptized are to follow. Often the faithful are given the name of a canonized saint who will be their patron. Church buildings, shrines, and even towns have santos patrones. Early Christians usually met in people’s homes; however, they eventually began to gather at the tombs of their martyrs. When Christianity became a free religion, many of these meeting places became basilicas, shrines, and churches and were named after the martyr being honored or commemorated at that location. This practice was eventually used to honor the confessors and virgins as well as the martyrs. By the time Christianity came to America in the sixteenth century, the practice of naming churches and towns in honor of saints was common place. As a result many cities in America are named after saints. In the United States we have San Agustin, Florida, Los Angeles, California, and San Antonio, Texas, to name a few. Many regions, towns, and villages celebrate their santos patrones. Patronal feasts are so popular that the small island of Puerto Rico, for example, has 75 fiestas patronales. —GCG

Protestant Reformation was that it stressed the role of personal faith and active participation in regards to worship. On the other hand, from a more Roman Catholic perspective, it downgraded the role of ritual, at times substituting the reading and reflection on the Bible for sacramental celebration. Many Protestants today, of course, would not see this as a negative development. All in all, even among Protestants, there is a wide range of perspectives in regards to worship and sacraments.

Latino/a Manifestations To this day, much of the Latino/a discourse around worship and liturgy, as might be expected, focuses on the two main currents: a more traditional, liturgical approach where sacrament and Word are both seen as equally important, and a newer, postReformation attitude, one which sees the Word as being primary in the tradition of ‘‘Sola scriptura.’’ Another reality, which, in a way, has been around since Christianity first came to the Americas with the Spanish and Portuguese, is that of religious mestizajes, or combinations that came about as Catholicism confronted African or indigenous religions, especially in the case where these nonorthodox expressions had to go underground to survive. Finally, more recent phenomena are the alternative religious expressions that are now part of the new religious landscape of Latina/os in the United States such as those who worship as Pentecostals, Evangelicals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Mormons. Despite these differences, might there be some general characteristics that describe Hispanic Christian worship? One of the traits of Hispanic worship is its multiplicity. The style of worship, particularly as manifested in music, decoration, or food surrounding church gatherings, reflects certain national origins. Second, the Latino/a

684 |

Liturgy and Worship

Mexican Americans celebrate Mass, led by San Gabriel Region Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala, at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on March 31, 2005, in Los Angeles, California. (Getty Images)

religious communities are often divided along generational lines. Because of constant immigration, and the rapidity with which younger generations learn English, within the same pew in church, or within the same family, for that matter, there will be those who are most comfortable in speaking only English or Spanish. Older, first-generation immigrants who often feel isolated in other public places take solace in being able to worship in Spanish, as well as to celebrate their national customs. Unfortunately, in a marked way, the same is no longer true for the younger generations. Another characteristic of the multiplicity of Hispanics in terms of worship is the denominational loyalties, which can be very destructive at times. Justo Gonza´lez notes that Latino Protestantism, both in Latin America and in the United States, has grown mostly on the basis of anti-Catholic preaching and teaching. Among many Hispanics, to be a Protestant means to be anti-Catholic, so often Roman Catholicism is depicted in the worst light possible—they are idolaters who worship the Virgin and the saints, they do not believe in the Bible, they believe that they can save themselves through their own good works, their interpretation of the Eucharist is cannibalistic, priests are tyrannical and immoral, and so on. (1996, 11–12)

At the same time, he points to those Catholics who view Latina/os who leave the Church as being traitors to a common heritage rooted in Catholicism. Thus, there are many faces to Hispanic worship. Among them, of course, are those Latina/os who, judging by all external means, have assimilated into mainstream U.S.

Liturgy and Worship

| 685

CORITOS Coritos literally are ‘‘little choruses’’ (coros) used in worship, often biblically based in wording and put to a variety of tunes and instruments. Simply defined, a corito is a short, popular chorus sung widely in Latina/o communal worship, although coritos also may be used in private devotional piety. The very term is instructive in that it is the diminutive of the word coro, a sign in Spanish for affection toward something, and is indicative of its popularity. Coritos are found in both Roman Catholic and Protestant settings, with some of the same coritos appearing in both contexts. While coritos have been collected into songbooks for ready reference, this does not appear to be where they first emerged. Rather than being initially textual creations, coritos arose from the life situations of the people and often the exact origin of specific songs is unknown. These coritos often appear in photocopied collections, in pamphlets, as overhead transparencies, or in slide presentations and in most cases without musical notation. Sometimes a well-known corito is given a new verse that reflects the specific life situation of a particular congregation. Coritos express the concrete manifestations of the supernatural in the everyday for various Latina/o faith communities. —EDA

culture. Their services, therefore, will all be in English and, particularly in some denominations, they have started to feel not as welcome as newer immigrants. Otherwise stated, Hispanic ministry in many places is basically ministry with and among newly arrived immigrants versus later generation Latino/as. Even these more assimilated Hispanics, however, in the words of Gonza´lez, probably have had the experience of ‘‘worshiping as pilgrims and exiles,’’ or, as otherwise stated, ‘‘the experience of belonging, yet not belonging’’ (1996, 14). Part of a group that is neither completely Latin American nor U.S. American, some have embraced the concept developed by Virgilio Elizondo known as mestizaje. Perhaps in the case of those Hispanics who have left their country in pursuit of a better life for themselves and for their children, the notion of being in exile is more acute. Gonza´lez, noting how these realities affect worship, highlights the Christian reality that this perspective embodies: our not quite belonging to the reign of this world, but that of God’s, which has been announced but not yet brought to fulfillment (1996, 19). A description of the various currents of liturgical worship found among Latino/as follows. In the case of those Christians belonging to more liturgical denominations, such as Roman Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Presbyterians, ecumenism has contributed a great deal toward a liturgical revival, much of it based on historical research about the early church, which surfaced particularly after Vatican II. In some ways, in regards to Roman Catholics who often tended to privilege Sacrament over Word, the mutual enrichment of ecumenical dialogue and occasional shared worship has enhanced the prominence of both. Protestants have become more versed in Sacrament, evidenced by attention paid to more frequent Eucharistic celebrations, the revision of liturgical texts, and the redesign of church architecture to give

686 |

Liturgy and Worship

VIA CRUCIS ‘‘Way of the Cross,’’ or ‘‘Stations of the Cross,’’ is a Catholic devotional practice— sometimes observed within the Anglican and Lutheran traditions—in which participants focus their prayer on representations of 14 scenes or stations of Christ’s Passion: (1) Jesus is condemned to death, (2) Jesus carries the cross, (3) Jesus falls the first time, (4) Jesus meets his mother, (5) Jesus is helped by Simon the Cyrenian, (6) Veronica wipes the face of Jesus, (7) Jesus falls the second time, (8) Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem, (9) Jesus falls the third time, (10) Jesus is stripped of his garments, (11) Jesus is nailed to the cross, (12) Jesus dies on the cross, (13) Jesus is taken down from the cross, (14) Jesus is buried. The custom of pausing in prayer at the places associated with the Passion of Jesus goes back to the early pilgrims to Jerusalem. Those who were not able to visit the holy places in person developed the pious custom of making a procession during which they paused to meditate upon the Passion. The tradition as church devotion began with Saint Francis of Assisi. The tradition was brought to the Americas by the first Franciscan missionaries and is practiced by Catholic Latino/as. —AC

more prominence to the Eucharistic table and baptismal font. At the same time, Roman Catholics have rediscovered the power of the Word through such means as proclamation and study in the language of the people, an inclusion of Scripture passages in all sacramental celebrations, equal reverence paid to the Word at Eucharistic celebrations in terms of gesture and architecture, as when the Lectionary, which contains the readings for the service, is enthroned in a place of dignity and respect. Such groups often have more formal, developed liturgies structured around a liturgical calendar. In the case of Roman Catholics, celebrations of feasts around titles of Christ, Mary, and the saints are an essential part of that calendar. Much of the literature produced by Latino/a Roman Catholics in the United States, therefore, presents ways of integrating the modern, post–Vatican II liturgy with more traditional, often medieval in origin practices of popular piety or religiosity, stressing that basically there is no contradiction between the two. In fact, according to these authors, these popular practices, often centered in the home where women play key roles, such as those around altarcitos, or small, devotional altars, actually enhance official sacramental expressions, particularly because of the sacred sensuality surrounding these manifestations of cosmic sacramentality. In recent decades, with the increased awareness that creed, code, and cult are not separate from culture, but rather intimately connected to them, there has been an attempt to recapture the cultural diversity that has characterized Christianity throughout the centuries. A word often used to point to this challenge is inculturation. The goal of inculturation is to allow the liturgy or worship to express more clearly the sacred realities that it signifies. Otherwise stated, it is proclaiming the Gospel in ways that the various cultures can understand and feel it.

Liturgy and Worship

| 687

In giving examples of various forms of inculturation, which are now part of these communities’ faith traditions, much of the literature speaks of the ‘‘people’s faith practices’’ or the many forms of popular piety, in this case ‘‘popular’’ often having a connotation of being characteristic of the poor, as is more readily seen in the Spanish word popular. At times, these manifestations among Latino/a Protestants take the form of Bible study groups, as previously mentioned, testimonies, vigils, singing or corritos, etc. Latina scholar Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, along with others, is paying attention to the connections between social justice and popular piety. Posadas, for example, can often be much more than a simple enactment of Joseph and Mary searching for an inn before the birth of Jesus. At a time of increasing homelessness and restrictions to immigration, they remind the participants of the challenge of providing a home for all. Public processions such as the Via Crucis, a ritual drama of Jesus’ passion, or those held around the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, not only speak of the Latino/a community’s presence in public areas, especially in the case when much of it is immigrant, but they also strengthen cultural identity, an identity connected to the Divine. This type of worship, which may include indigenous dancing, hymns, or a live marching band, is a reminder that there is more than one way to pray or to enter the sacred realm. The fastest-growing group of Christians worldwide today are Pentecostals whose style of worship is markedly different from that of the mainline churches described above. According to Arlene Sa´nchez-Walsh, ‘‘Pentecostalism is a movement within evangelical Christianity that stresses the manifestations of the gifts of the Holy Spirit as outlined in the book of Acts and chapters 12–16 of the first letter to the Corinthians’’ (2006, 199). In Pentecostal worship, testimonios, or oral testimonies by believers, play a key role in that they allow a person to testify to the power of God working in their lives and invite communal participation by assenting to the reality that the story conveys. Their overall effect is to accent God’s closeness to God’s people in the form of constant salvific intervention. Sa´nchez-Walsh continues by stating, ‘‘Testimonios bring God’s reality and presence into the everyday communications of congregants, who see that God cares about one’s health, one’s financial situation, and can deal with the most miniscule of concerns’’ (2006, 200). They can lead to prayer at the altar, which subsequently can provide an opportunity for someone to receive Spirit baptism and have hands laid on them for healing, a healing beneficial not only to them but also to the community. Sa´nchez-Walsh goes on to quote a Pentecostal theologian, mainly, Samuel Soliva´n, who stresses the Holy Spirit’s active role in bringing about this healing, a healing not unconnected to social transformation. ‘‘For Pentecostals, reaching out to the unwed mother, the homeless, the poor and the alcoholic is as politically important as electing a local official. From a Pentecostal perspective, the preaching of the gospel in [sic] the most politically and socially radical activity the world has known’’ (2006, 202). Pentecostal worship has influenced that of both other Protestants and Roman Catholics. At times, the phrase ‘‘Charismatic’’ denotes a preference among certain such members to integrate a more emotional, healing-centered, participatory, and spontaneous style of worship, one which has been widely received among Hispanics. Among many Roman Catholic Latino/a congregations, for example, ‘‘healing Masses’’ have become very popular. To the extent that Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism are rapidly

688 |

Liturgy and Worship

growing among Hispanics, these forms of Charismatic worship have the potential of being a bridge between Catholics and Protestants, especially to the extent that more spontaneous and indigenous forms of music and speech can welcome the immigrant who is feeling marginalized or disoriented in a new setting. This welcoming of the stranger, a historical example of when the church has been at her best, can provide a focus for liturgy or worship, one where creed, code, and cult take their inspiration from Jesus’ commandment to love.

References and Further Reading Deck, Allan Figueroa. ‘‘Hispanic Catholic Prayer and Worship.’’ Alabadle!: Hispanic Christian Worship, ed. Justo L. Gonza´lez (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996). Empereur, James, and Eduardo Ferna´ndez. La Vida Sacra: Contemporary Hispanic Sacramental Theology (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2006). Gonza´lez, Justo L. ‘‘Hispanic Worship: An Introduction.’’ Alabadle!: Hispanic Christian Worship, ed. Justo L. Gonza´lez (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996). Kelleher, Margaret Mary, O.S.U. ‘‘Worship.’’ The New Dictionary of Theology, ed. Joseph A. Komonchak, Mary Collins, and Dermot A. Lane (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1987). Sanchez-Walsh, Arlene. ‘‘Pentecostals.’’ Handbook of Latina/o Theologies, ed. Edwin David Aponte and Miguel A. De La Torre (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006).

ORTHOPRAXIS

Fernando A. Cascante-Gómez The word ‘‘orthopraxis’’ combines two Greek words: ortho´s, which means ‘‘right’’ or ‘‘correct,’’ and praxis, which means ‘‘practical action’’ as opposed to strictly mental activity. Thus, from the etymology of the word, ‘‘orthopraxis’’ means correct practice or right action. ‘‘Orthopraxis’’ is often compared with the term orthodoxy, that is, ‘‘right belief’’ or ‘‘correct doctrine,’’ a term more familiar in the English language, in which it is generally assumed that ‘‘doctrine’’ and ‘‘theory’’ preside over ‘‘practice.’’ But as a theological term, popularized in some European theological circles during the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Political Theology), and further developed in Latin American theological circles during the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Liberation Theology), ‘‘orthopraxis’’ takes a very distinctive meaning. First, it does not endorse the common separation made between theory and practice, between doctrine and practice, between faith and works. Second, it questions the assumption, particularly within Protestant Christian theological traditions, that right doctrine presides over right practice, the ruling of theory over practice. To understand the conceptual distinctiveness made by Latin American theologians (mainly Catholic, but also Protestant), and its impact in Latina/o theology in the United States, a look at the use and understanding of the term praxis is of central importance. Therefore, what follows will focus on two philosophical approaches to the term ‘‘praxis,’’ the theological meaning of the term in Liberation Theology and its relevance in the development of a Hispanic theology in the United States.

A Philosophical Approach The word praxis has its origins in ancient Greek. It referred to the public activity of free men, the only recognized citizens since women—like children and slaves—were excluded from the public realm. In Athens’ democracy, citizens were responsible for participating in the political life of the city. The realm of action was mainly the political realm, that is, the realm where the affairs of the city, Greek polis, were decided and carried out. Hence, Greek philosophers were the first to reflect on the problem of the

689

690 |

Orthopraxis

transformation of reality through intellectual means. Among them, Aristotle (384– 322 BCE) was the first who addressed the concept of praxis in a systematic manner. Important in Aristotle’s philosophical system was his conviction that pure reason is not the only trustworthy source of knowledge. The material worlds as well as lived experience, perceived through the senses, are reliable sources of knowledge, even of theoretical knowledge. With Plato, his teacher, Aristotle believed that ideas exist in and by themselves, available for discovery by rational means. But contrary to Plato’s belief, he maintained that an ordered study of the material world could bring about better or more complete ideas capable of guiding the political activities of the free men and the productive activities of humans in general. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, discusses three ‘‘ways of life’’ available to free men (1975, 1–11). Each way of life, or way of being in the world, involves particular forms of intellectual engagement, human action, and knowledge. Together they also reveal how Aristotle understands the relationship between theory and practice. Theoria refers to the life of rational contemplation exclusively concerned with the discovery of universal ideas, or first principles. This contemplative way of life is almost an exclusive prerogative of philosophers, who serve as its prototype. They are the ones who have the training and who enjoy the socioeconomic conditions that allow them to dedicate themselves to a life of contemplation and exercise their rational capacities. The knowledge that matters in this way of life is about the nonsensible eternal realities, the unchanging truths and first principles that help to explain the world and give meaning and guidance to humanity. Theoretical knowledge becomes an end in itself, as it aims at achieving divine wisdom, which for Aristotle is the greatest source of happiness. Praxis refers to the life that combines rational reflection and purposeful human activity within the political realm. It is a form of life that is not purely intellectual but relates to human conduct. Therefore, praxis is a form of reflective and ethical living in society, which is open to all citizens. The knowledge that praxis generates is more than intellectual knowledge, although it has its roots in human reason. It is a knowledge that needs to be appropriated by the individual and expressed in real life, in the interaction with others. The aim of praxis is achieving practical knowledge, or practical wisdom, which guides both reflection and the action such reflection requires. It is a knowledge that depends on phronesis, which Aristotle defines as a ‘‘true and reasoned disposition toward action with regard to things good and bad for men’’ (1975, 105). In sum, for Aristotle praxis is the Golden Mean between pure reason and pure action. Praxis is a deliberative activity (not just contemplative, not just productive) that requires both reflection and action and for the purpose of advancing knowledge and goodness in society. Praxis functions as a mediator between universal ideals about God, humans, and the world, for the making of a better social reality for all free citizens. This process generates more praxis, that is, more reflection and better actions. Therefore, the goal of praxis is more praxis. Not by accident Aristotle places praxis between a way of life that is strictly theoretical and another that is thought of as strictly practical. Poiesis is the third and final way of life Aristotle discusses. This way of life involves a form of knowing that is productive and creative in nature, exemplified in the

Orthopraxis

| 691

knowledge of an artisan, a poet, or a physician. This knowledge comes from the acquisition and use of skill, techne, which allows for the making of objects (e.g., a chair) or the achievement of a product (e.g., a poem or a healthy body). For Aristotle this was the lowest form of social life for a free man and also the least dependable way of knowing. Aristotle’s influence on Western theology was not evident until Thomas Aquinas (1125–1274) tried to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian doctrines in his Summa Theologica. Staying within the Greek philosophical tradition, Aquinas believed there are universal truths, and that God is pure reason. However, grounded in the Christian tradition he believed some universal truths are reached by reason while others are received by divine revelation. He maintained that Christian-revealed truths could be understood and reaffirmed through reason. Under Aristotle’s influence, Aquinas sustained we can obtain knowledge, even knowledge about God, through careful rational observation and study of the world. The impact of Aquinas’s theological thought was paramount in the development of Roman Catholicism, as well as other forms of Christianity after the Reformation. Paradoxically, his emphasis on the role of reason encouraged a rather rationalized version of faith, understood as the assenting to theological statements and doctrines. Even Reformers like Luther and Calvin, who emphasized God’s grace and not reason as the source of faith, popularized the use of catechisms with their rational and rote memorization format of question-and-answer. But Aquinas’s convictions about human intellectual capacities, in addition to his faith in Scripture and the authority of the teachings of the Church, gave rise to a method that would become crucial for future theological developments. Thanks to Aristotle, Aquinas helped to plant in Christian theology the seeds of a theological method that promotes reflection on life experience with reference to Scripture and teaching of the Church. The development and impact of this method was particularly evident in the emergence of Liberation Theology, to be considered later.

A Socioeconomic Approach Karl Marx (1818–1883) was the modern thinker who probably captured best the social and political dimensions of the term ‘‘praxis.’’ Marx, like Aristotle, saw public or political life as the realm of praxis and saw in the term the presence of both theory and practice. Nevertheless, they articulate their understandings of praxis with different social frameworks in mind. For his definition of praxis Aristotle had in mind the free men of Athens, a minority when compared with the rest of the population. What Marx had in mind was the exploited working class in England and other industrialized countries, a majority when compared with the rest of the population. In other words, Marx developed his concept of praxis in light of and in reaction to the social and economic effects of the Industrial Revolution taking place in Europe and already spreading to other parts of the world. This critical difference is translated into Marx’s understanding of theoria, praxis, and poesis. Contrary to Aristotle, Marx conferred theoria value inasmuch as it is verified in the material world, especially in the world of human interactions. Pure theory, as abstract elaboration, is not real theory, and it only has value for philosophers. In Thesis II of his

692 |

Orthopraxis

short 1845 essay ‘‘Concerning Feuerbach,’’ Marx affirms that ‘‘the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question’’ (in Raines 2002, 183). For him, the final truth of philosophy is expressed in political action, as it is summarized in his well-known Thesis XI where he says: ‘‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’’ (Raines 2002, 184). Therefore, the true realm of philosophy, of theories and ideas, is the material and social world wherein the interaction of people with nature and of people with people takes place. Theoria for Marx begins and ends with humans and their world. Theory as abstract speculation or contemplation is not only theory alienated from the world, but it is theory that alienates people from it. Again, contrary to Aristotle, Marx gives poesis, human productive and creative activity, a central value and an ontological one. He understands poesis as a ‘‘conscious life activity’’ that proves people are conscious beings. In their labor, and the products that result from it, people express their human spirit. In and through their productive activity people manifest their creativity, but also their agonies and their desire for something new and different. In another essay from 1844, ‘‘Estranged Labor,’’ Marx affirms that ‘‘man reproduces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created’’ (in Raines 2002, 123). With Marx, for the first time, humans are conceived as agents of social transformation, ‘‘historic subjects’’ capable of affecting reality, which is now seen as more than external and objective, unaffected by human action. He finds ontological value in human activity because in it people claim their role as subjects in history, as actors in the political life. There is no denying that human beings are conditioned by natural and historical circumstances. What is affirmed is that human beings are capable of modifying those conditions, if they understand the laws that explain those conditions and their role in changing them. In Thesis VIII on Feuerbach he says, ‘‘all social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice’’ (in Raines 2002, 184). This conviction is at the heart of Marx’s concept of praxis. Like Aristotle, Marx also understood praxis as reflective human activity within the realm of public life. But Marx, with his understanding of theoria and poesis, of philosophy and labor, gives praxis new levels of meaning. Praxis is more than the intelligent activity reserved for the ruling class that controls the life of the polis. Praxis is more than a desirable balance between pure theory and pure human activity. Praxis is more than a ‘‘reasoned disposition towards action.’’ For Marx, praxis is where all people, in particular the proletariat, exercise their essential condition as conscious beings and their role as subjects of their own history. Praxis is where the true value of theory and practice are united and manifested. Theory is praxis and praxis is concrete action for the transformation of the world. Hence, praxis, as a political activity is the ultimate criteria of truth for both theory and human actions. Finally, praxis is motivated not simply by an individual internal disposition towards good actions but by a concrete social commitment towards the transformation of the social world into a classless society. In regard to transforming nature, praxis is production, work, and technique. In regard to transforming society, it is political action, more concretely,

Orthopraxis

| 693

militant, organized, revolutionary action for the abolition of class structures and class exploitation (Gonza´lez 1983, 803–804). With the advancement of industrial societies, the influence of Marx’s revolutionary approach to praxis was questioned and eventually faded in European theological circles. European theological movements became mostly concerned with the Kantian challenge of freeing reason from all dogmatisms, including those coming from Scripture or from culturally enforced religious belief systems. Their theological task focused on demonstrating that the truths of Christianity are at the levels of natural and historical reason encouraged by the Enlightenment, as Aquinas did with Aristotle. Also, theologies produced in Europe and North America have been occupied with providing well-educated Christians with new interpretations of Scripture and Christian doctrines. These interpretations have aimed at responding to the rational and existential challenges presented by the modern world of science, increasing secularization and socioeconomic global realities. Accordingly, the ‘‘Marxist Enlightenment,’’ which calls for a liberation not of reason but from the oppressive realities of society, was not given serious consideration as part of their theological task. On the contrary, it was theologians from Latin America, and soon after from other parts of the ‘‘Third World,’’ who took up the challenge presented by Marx and his ‘‘philosophy of praxis’’ in their development of theologies of liberation (Sobrino 1984, 7ss).

A Liberation Theology Perspective Latin American Theology of Liberation can be described in part as a response to and a critical appropriation of Marx’s philosophy of praxis. On talking about the different factors that have influenced liberation theology, Gustavo Gutie´rrez, in his seminal book A Theology of Liberation, says: Be that as it may, contemporary theology does in fact find itself in direct and fruitful confrontation with Marxism, and it is to a large extent due to Marxism’s influence that theological thought, searching for its own sources, has begun to reflect on the meaning of the transformation of this world and the action of man in history. (1973, 9)

Two things are important in this confrontation of Christian faith and practice with Marxism. First, the renewed awareness that human action in history, in particular Christian action, can help with the efforts for better understanding Christian faith. In other words, orthopraxis (the right actions) can help to better understand orthodoxy (the right doctrine). Two, in the understanding of Christian faith there is meaning for the transformation of the world. Marxism is not the source for a Christian understanding of praxis. The source is a faith in God who loves us and in Jesus Christ’s call to love our neighbor, even our enemies (Matthew 5:38–48). Marxism is no more than a tool that helps Christians better understand the socioeconomic realities of the poor and oppressed in the world wherein Christians need to practice obedience to God’s call. Thus, as Marx did in his time, theologians and Christians in Latin America became painfully aware of the realities of exploitation, exclusion, and oppression of millions of

694 |

Orthopraxis

people on the continent. The critical question theologians, priests, pastors, and community lay leaders tried to answer was how Christians should live out their faith precisely in that context. It was a question about the living of faith, not about the meaning of faith. At its root, this question is not an intellectual question but a pastoral question because, as Jose´ Miguez Bonino explains, it invites a ‘‘reflection of what the church—the Christian and the Christian community—is doing and should do [in the world]’’ (Mı´guez Bonino 1985, 38). Theologians found in Marxism both a call and an impulse to go back to the biblical roots of the Christian faith to answer this question and to recognize the role of people in the transformation of the world. It became clear that in the Old Testament, Israel’s faith is focused not simply on knowing particular truths about God but especially on obeying God’s commandments. The Law, the Torah, describes the ways God’s people are expected to live in relationship with God, their neighbors, and nature. Central to the role of the prophets was to remind Israel when the Law became simple ritualism separated from the practice of love and justice, particularly towards the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner (Micah 6:6–8). The social demands and the practical dimension of faith also permeate many of the books in the Writings, the third section of the Hebrew Scriptures. In the New Testament, faith is described as doing God’s will in our relationship with others. Jesus is God’s Word (Logos) becoming real in history and the example of what it means to live by God’s word in the world. In the Gospels Jesus proclaims good news to the poor (Luke 4:18–19) and lives among and ministers especially to the poor and the outcasts of his society. In Jesus’ eschatological vision, those who enter into God’s kingdom are those who do his Father’s will (Matthew 7:21), those who feed Him, cloth Him, and visit Him in the hungry, naked, imprisoned people of the world (Matthew 25:31–41). The apostle Paul in his letters constantly calls Christians to a faith that works through love (Galatians 5:6), that shows the newness of life in Christ (Romans 12). The Book of James exhorts to be ‘‘doers of the word’’ and affirms that faith without works is dead faith (2:17). Professional theologians and Christians in the poor communities found that the Bible was replete with references to God’s actions on behalf of the poor and the oppressed (e.g., the exodus from Egypt) and with multiple visions of new heavens and new earth where justice and peace will reign (Revelation 21). The Bible’s emphasis on ‘‘doing the truth’’ and on the new people and new creation God wants, allowed for two critical understandings of the Christian faith: First, that it is in doing the truth that our faith (e.g., what we believe and confess in words) is verified in history. Second, that Christian praxis has a role to play in God’s reign to be manifested in the world. In other words, what we do or not do as Christians has an impact in this world and the world God wants to create. In addition to this biblical rediscovery, liberation theologians found, in the history of the Church in general and the Latin American church in particular, examples of committed Christians who gave their lives for the sake of the poor and the oppressed and for the transformation of realities of injustice, inequality, and exploitation. Therefore, liberation theologians began to understand theology and theological method in a new way. For them, in its most succinct expression, theology is ‘‘critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word.’’ Central in the definition is an understanding

Orthopraxis

| 695

of praxis as being Christian, that is, a practice of faith in response to the message of Jesus the Christ and God’s ultimate vision for the world. Christian praxis is informed by critical reflection both on previous Christian praxis and on the message of Scripture. Gustavo Gutie´rrez expands his own definition in the following way: Theology as critical reflection on historical praxis is a liberating theology, a theology of the liberating transformation of the history of mankind and also therefore that part of mankind— gathered into ecclesia—which openly confesses Christ. This is a theology that does not stop with reflecting on the world, but rather tries to be part of the process through which the world is transformed. (1973, 15)

This broader definition makes it clear that Christian praxis does not refer only to the communal practice of rituals and beliefs, and neither is it limited to the sanctuary of a church nor to individual private spiritual practices. Praxis is the living out of Christian faith in history, in the here and now, in the midst of and over against the oppressive forces of society, in order to change the world into a world of justice and peace, according to the vision of God’s reign. From both definitions it is also clear that theology as reflection, both on historical praxis and on the message of the Bible, comes as the second step. Historical praxis becomes the first methodological step for doing theology. Therefore, liberation theology should be understood more as a method for doing theology in which a living commitment with the poor and oppressed comes first and critical reflection on that commitment comes second. In this sense, as Clodovis Boff puts it, Any theory, hence also theology, is concretely subject to the influence of praxis as its vital milieu (medium in quo). This subordination is registered on three levels: that of the theologian’s social involvement, that of the historical relevance of a theme, and that of the political intent of a theology. (Boff 1987, 229)

This does not mean that ‘‘pure praxis’’ without reference to theory could exist, nor that critical reflection is secondary. Without critical reflection on historical reality, the church is in danger of supporting an oppressive social and ecclesial order. For this reason the ‘‘sciences of the social’’ (e.g., economics, politics, history, anthropology, etc.) become central to the task of the theologian. In the same manner, without critical reflection on the message of the Bible, the church faces the danger of holding on to outdated traditions and questionable or irrelevant doctrines and interpretations. Thus the traditional theological disciplines of Bible, theology, church history, and practical theology continue to be important. In other words, critical reflection is indispensable for a Christian praxis that is relevant to present realities of injustice and oppression and for a faithful interpretation of the Scriptures and tradition in light of these realities. The methodological importance of theory as a second step is that theory takes place in the context of practice and refers to it. Therefore, orthopraxis, more precisely Christian praxis, becomes more relevant to Christian faith than orthodoxy, holding on to right beliefs. Again, in the words of Gustavo Gutie´rrez,

696 |

Orthopraxis The intention, however, is not to deny the meaning of orthodoxy, understood as a proclamation of and reflection on statements considered to be true. Rather, the goal is to balance and even to reject the primacy and almost exclusiveness which doctrine has enjoyed in Christian life and above all to modify the emphasis, often obsessive, upon the attainment of an orthodoxy which is often nothing more than fidelity to an obsolete tradition or a debatable interpretation. (1973, 10)

Similar to that of Aristotle and Marx, Christian praxis is political—it touches all the areas of human interaction. Beyond Marx and Aristotle, praxis became the political action of the poor and others on behalf of the poor, which includes not only those who suffer from economic oppression (Marx’s proletariat) but all who suffer forms of racial, ethnic, and sexual discrimination as well. Praxis in Liberation Theology is more than an action/reflection process to deliberate on how to apply preestablished universal truths, as in Aristotle. Praxis in Liberation Theology is more than the historical verification of an absolute philosophical formulation about a future new social order that has little or no reward for the present lives of those suffering oppression and injustice, as in Marx. Praxis is the active participation of Christians in God’s plan for transforming the world, which has meaning for their present life and for the future. The motivation for Christian praxis goes beyond an ethical individual imperative for doing good (as in Aristotle), or a revolutionary commitment to a socioeconomic world order (as in Marx). The motivation for Christian praxis is love of God and neighbor as a response to God’s gratuitous love for the world. Once again, Gustavo Gutie´rrez states: In the first place charity has been fruitfully rediscovered as the center of the Christian life. This has led to a more Biblical view of faith as an act of trust, a going out of one’s self, a commitment to God and neighbor, a relationship with others. It is in this sense that St. Paul tells us that faith works through charity: love is the nourishment and the fullness of faith, the gift of one’s self to the Other, and invariably to others. This is the foundation of the praxis of the Christian, of his active presence in history. According to the Bible, faith is the total response of man to God, who saves through love. (1973, 6–7)

In sum, praxis in Liberation Theology integrates philosophical, sociohistorical, theological, and spiritual meanings. It is philosophical because praxis involves a dialectical relationship between theory and practice in which they constantly influence each other, and as they influence each other together they influence the reality praxis is exercised upon. In praxis human beings also exhibit the ethical and teleological nature of their actions and their self-understandings as actors in history. Praxis is sociohistorical because it refers to the concrete realities of injustice suffered by the oppressed and marginalized people of the world as well as to the concrete historical actions by people committed to the transformation of those realities. It is theological because praxis is the way Christians manifest the signs of the truth of their faith; through their historical actions they show their following of Jesus in the world. And finally, praxis is spiritual because it is ultimately in praxis where Christian love for God and neighbor is manifested; praxis becomes the concrete expression of active spirituality or, better, of Christian spirituality in action.

Orthopraxis

| 697

Praxis and Hispanic/Latino Theologies As a distinctive theological movement within the United States, Hispanic theologies have emerged and been recognized as such since the early 1990s. Not surprising, for these theologies the concept of praxis and what it involves have also become important for their development, since Latino/a theologians and Christians living in the United States confront issues and realities similar to that of Christians in Latin America. Although not all Hispanic theologies work out of a liberation perspective, many of them do. Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az affirms, ‘‘our theology grows out of the needs in our communities, out of the role that religion plays in the daily struggle to survive as a marginalized and oppressed group within one of the richest countries in the world . . . [We] understand doing theology as a liberative praxis’’ (1996, 369–370). But Latina/o theologies do not mirror Liberation Theology’s understanding of praxis. As Roberto S. Goizueta explains, ‘‘a genuine fidelity to this methodology will imply that the content of our theological reflection will differ from its Latin American counterpart’’ (2001, 62). The particular realities of Hispanic people and church in the United States require different manifestations of historical praxis as well as different understandings of the community of faith and its role in society. These realities refer to the experience of cultural, political, and economic marginality; of statehood, exile, and immigration; of ‘‘otherness,’’ self-identity, and racial discrimination; and in the particular situation of women, the added reality of sexism inside and outside the Latino/a community. These realities are also marked by the great diversity among the Hispanic community: as citizens, residents, refugees, or recent immigrants from Latin America and Europe; as direct descendants of Spanish ancestry and culture or as a result of the mixing of Amerindian and European cultures; as Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, or other religious practices. And yet, in the midst of this rich diversity, there is the basic claim that Hispanic people experience praxis as essentially communal and celebratory. That is what is revealed and expressed in the praxis of Latina/o religiosity and in the Hispanic ‘‘way of life.’’ This praxis involves a serious intellectual endeavor for the recovery of, as well as critical reflection upon, that praxis. However, this praxis also involves ethical and political implications. Goizueta says that ‘‘by affirming community in the face of oppression, and the beauty of creation in the face of de-creation and destruction, popular religious praxis becomes, indirectly, a crucial source of empowerment and liberation’’ (2001, 69). In addition to this indirect transformative dimension of praxis, various forms of direct historical praxis nurture Hispanic theological reflection, as rightly acknowledged by Justo Gonza´lez (1990, 74). Christians, from across denominational and church boundaries, have been involved in the struggle for the rights of farming laborers and maquila workers, in community organizing in the barrios, in the struggle of Puerto Ricans for independence, in the struggles for effective political participation in society and for access to better education, housing, and health services. As the Latin American Theology, and other theologies of liberation (e.g., Black, Feminist, Native American, Asian, etc.), Hispanic theologies are, for the most part, praxis-based theologies. This praxis aims at being both pastoral and prophetic. It is pastoral because it is a praxis that seeks to empower and liberate the Latino/a people

698 |

Orthopraxis

to face and transform the realities that oppressed them. It is prophetic because it is a praxis that seeks to engage the dominant theological and cultural paradigms that maintain and promote those oppressive realities. And central to the Hispanic praxis of theological reflection and action is the conviction that both should result out of a collaborative effort (Rodrı´guez and Otero 1997, 1). This way of doing theology, en conjunto, is a distinctive commitment among Latino/a Christians, theologians or not, to a particular way of thinking and acting their faith. More importantly, this way of doing theology, of humbly working together for integrating diverse realities, Christian perspectives, and human practices, is an invitation for emphatic dialogue to other theologians and the larger community to weigh and balance orthodoxy and orthopraxis in the common life all share together, both in light of the good news of God’s reign of love, peace, and justice, and in light of the best human values upheld in the constitution and laws of this country.

References and Further Reading Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics (Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1975). Boff, Clodovis. Theology and Praxis: Epistemological Foundations (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987). Goizueta, Roberto. We Are a People! Initiatives in Hispanic American Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992). Gonza´lez, Justo. Man˜ana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990). Gonzalez Ruiz, J. M. ‘‘Praxis.’’ Conceptos Fundamentales de Pastoral, ed. Casiano Floristan and Juan-Jose Tamayo (Madrid: Ediciones Cristiandad, 1983). Gutie´rrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Maria, and Fernando Segovia, eds. Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1996). Mı´guez Bonino, Jose´. ‘‘Theology as Critical Reflection and Liberating Praxis.’’ The Vocation of the Theologian, ed. Theodore W. Jennings, Jr. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985). Raines, John, ed. Marx on Religion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). Rodrı´guez, David, and Loida Martell-Otero, eds. Teologı´a en Conjunto: A Collaborative Hispanic Protestant Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997). Sobrino, Jon. The True Church and the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984).

PASTORAL CARE AND COUNSELING Rebeca M. Radillo The ministry of pastoral care and counseling encompasses all aspects of human life. It is interwoven and congruent with every expression of the ministry of the church and manifests itself in the entire life of the faith community. Healing, liberation, and empowerment form the matrix of pastoral care and counseling ministry. Pastoral care and counseling is theological, biblical, and educational. Because it is contextual, cultural, sociohistorical, religious, and political elements influence its meaning and praxis. Pastoral care and counseling from a Latino/a perspective must, then, reflect the particularities of a polycultural community. Although this entry is written from a Christian perspective, pastoral care and counseling are not the sole possession of Christendom, but are the expressions of many faith traditions, attempting to bring healing and wholeness to their communities. Pastoral care and counseling are always contextual, as praxis is a direct response to the particularities of individuals and groups at specific times within their unique sociohistorical, religious, and even political circumstances. The history and practice of the pastoral care and counseling ministries and the evolution of its theory and praxis represent the constant development of practitioners in the United States as well as in the international community. This development is reflected in the ongoing dialogue over the appropriate terminology for the practice of care within a congregational context. Pastoral care and pastoral counseling are typically considered interchangeable or synonymous. In fact, there are marked differences between the two concepts in terms of both methodology and educational requirements as well as the actual praxis of care, which will be addressed later in this essay. In Latin America the two prevalent concepts are asesoramiento pastoral and consejo pastoral. The focus of the ministry of pastoral care and counseling is to bring healing and wholeness to persons who are experiencing emotional and spiritual brokenness as the result of distressing physical, social, or psychological circumstances. Pastoral care and counseling is contextual and takes into account the complexities of individual lives, addressing the polarization, isolation, and fragmentation of persons and groups,

699

700 |

Pastoral Care and Counseling

both within faith communities and in the larger society. Sara Baltonado, a Costa Rican psychologist, states that ‘‘pastoral care and Counseling always occur within social, political, economic and religious contexts’’ (2002, 192). Relationships are at the core of Hispanic identity, and pastoral care and counseling must take into account the importance of the community in the process of healing. Because of the historical importance of the Church to Latina/o identity, it is not surprising that it continues to be a significant institution for Hispanics. Because the church is the spiritual community where people pray, sing, and speak in their own mother tongue, the fellowship of believers becomes home, a place of comfort and solace. The church sustains the family, cultural traditions, and familiar worldviews, while serving as an educational center for newcomers, and a place for multigenerational socialization, bringing a sense of hope and healing to a marginalized population. Hierarchy and authority are valued and held in high esteem by Latino/as. This, in part, explains why religious leaders are highly regarded and respected. The church is seen as an extension of the home and a ‘‘safe space,’’ regardless of immigration status, social context, or economic location. The church is the space where wholeness is most often experienced. At times of unrest and crisis, the church is the first place Latina/os will go for assistance and guidance, and the pastor is the first person with whom they feel free to share their predicament in confidence. Given the sociocultural and political realities of the Latino/a population, pastoral care and counseling ministry in the Hispanic churches must address with relevancy and intentionality the needs of individuals and groups that seek guidance and support from a trusted institution and faith community. It is critical that caregivers respond to the tangible and concrete expressions of spiritual-emotional-physical care and avoid the dichotomy between flesh and spirit. This care includes pastoral visitation; assisting the family in economic crisis; attending family celebrations; responding to physical needs, such as food or shelter; translations in courts or hospitals; presence during times of illness, unemployment, or death. In other words, a caregiver is very much involved, attentive, and sensitive to the totality of the entire life of a careseeker. Pastoral care has evolved, historically, as a responsible and effective response to the needs of people in their particular milieu. Traditionally, this ministry has been viewed through the lenses of Eurocentric theology and psychology. The precursors of this movement were true to their worldview and have with integrity and wisdom given the Christian church invaluable models for the care of people. Globalization and the enormous immigration patterns in this country and around the world have opened new avenues for understanding and responding to the needs of multicultural and racial or ethnic communities. These communities have contributed to an expanded vision and understanding of individuals in communities, and the need to address the totality of the person rather than one aspect of being. Contextualization has opened the field of pastoral care to include socio-political-economic factors that influence emotional and spiritual well-being. Religion and healing are inseparable and complementary; each social-religious context has interpreted and formulated its particular expression and practice of pastoral care. Although practical or pastoral theology, ecclesiology, and

Pastoral Care and Counseling

| 701

social-historical context are the underpinnings of this ministry, it is important to point to the contributions of the social sciences. Sociology, anthropology, and, especially, psychology have been extremely valuable in the development of a comprehensive caregiving ministry, reinforcing the relational and focusing on meaning and symbol. Caregivers in the United States who provide pastoral care and counseling in the Hispanic context must be sensitive to the importance of the extended family and the existing ties and responsibilities to and with families in Latin America. The phenomenon of immigration touches not only first-generation immigrants but secondgeneration families as well. Some pressing issues common to, but not unique to, immigrants are acculturation, biculturalism, and multigenerational family dynamics, including emotional and financial support of family members abroad. In addition, one must consider the stress produced by culture shock, the grief and sense of loss of ‘‘home,’’ and the memory of the land, familiar places, language, music, etc. A pastoral caregiver functions on multiple levels: as spiritual leader, social worker, and advocate for individuals and families. The respect and expectations of a spiritual leader by the community carries an enormous responsibility and positions a pastor in an advantageous position to respond to people in an informed manner. A caregiver must always be aware of the advantages of power and privilege that this respect creates, as well as the unrealistic expectations and immense burdens that it may demand. Unrealistic expectations placed upon caregivers, and the tendency of careseekers to attribute unrealistic skill and power to caregivers, may create a major obstacle in establishing a healthy and healing relationship. Subsequent transferential issues may result in painful confusion. Celia Jaes Falicov has done extensive work with Latino/a immigrants, and she believes that ‘‘perhaps the most fundamental and disruptive consequence of migration is the uprooting of cultural meaning’’ (1988, 52). She further notes Father Ruben Rios, a native of Argentina, ‘‘that migration involves at least three walks behind altar boys during the forms of uprooting of meaning systems: concluding procession at Immaculate Heart physical, cultural and social, all of of Mary Church Sunday in Phoenix. Rios is which have psychological implications. among a number of Latin American clergy These uprooting experiences are major serving the growing Hispanic population in contributors to spiritual brokenness. the United States. (AP Photo/Ross D. Leaving behind a home, family and Franklin) familiar images and symbols are major

702 |

Pastoral Care and Counseling

disruptive experiences that threaten the spiritual and emotional well being of any individual or group.’’ The practice of pastoral care from a Hispanic perspective in the United States must take into account the particularities of the phenomenon of immigration, including the vast range of cultural, historical, and sociopolitical and religious realities of each country of origin. Besides issues concerning the recent immigrant population, the church has a role to play in the healing of a community that continues to face the explicit and implicit expression of racism, a rapid growth of young Latino/a families, poverty, unemployment, and other socioeconomic realities confronted in a more pronounced way by this population. In addition, attention must be given to the regions where they reside, their educational level, economic status, employment opportunities, and history of migration, all of which impact their lives. The recent increase of immigrants in the United States presents an opportunity and a challenge to congregations and pastors. Immigration is a theological/spiritual reality as well as a social, political, and economic dilemma. It has been well documented that the process of immigration presents a challenge to the emotional, spiritual, and psychological well-being of a person. In order to do pastoral care with individuals who suffer from multiple stressors, a caregiver needs to be able to listen carefully and be prepared to nurture, guide, and support the development of interpersonal relationships and to communicate a genuine sense of caring for the careseeker. The understanding of the profound impact of pastoral care in the life of individuals, congregations, and communities is crucial to this unique expression of ministry. Pastoral care has been defined as a dialogue that seeks to delve into a person’s psychological and spiritual strengths. The dialogue is a powerful interaction between careseeker and caregiver, where verbal and nonverbal communication convey the depth of physical, social, spiritual, and psychological distress. This dialogical interaction is a ‘‘sacred’’ moment that necessitates a relationship that is centered in trust, mutuality, acceptance, and competence. It is through such interaction that healing and transformation are not only desirable, but also possible. The Spanish-speaking church can provide an essential space for the Latino community. Sergio Ulloa Castellanos raises a very real dilemma when he states that ‘‘the social spaces where the human being is able to find love and companionship are becoming increasingly scarce. Humanity claims for itself, in the midst of crisis, a faith community that will be supportive and guiding.’’ It is imperative that churches become a place of healing, a place of hospitality, and a place for transformation. In order to do so, the church has to be prepared to ‘‘welcome’’ the community. The role of caregiver must be expanded to the congregation, and it may be appropriate to review the image of a caregiver. Because of the multiple needs of the Latino/a population, faith communities must adopt an appropriate model of care and initiate training programs for mature and caring individuals willing to be a part of a ministry of care in their churches. The Instituto Latino de Cuidado Pastoral in New York City offers a number of training events and classes for pastors and laity in the ministry of congregational pastoral care. The training program uses the bio-psycho-social-spiritual model and is taught by pastoral counselors and pastoral psychotherapists. The program uses critical theological reflection

Pastoral Care and Counseling

| 703

and praxis as its methodology. It is a successful model where ‘‘shepherds’’ are given the opportunity to develop pastoral care skills. It also prepares members of the Latina/o community to work alongside their pastors as agents of healing and wholeness within the churches. Pastoral care ministry as understood by the New Testament community and by contemporary practitioners belongs to the ‘‘priesthood of all believers.’’ The church has the responsibility to train, develop, and oversee a cadre of people who may become ‘‘caregivers’’ for the congregation. The function of shepherding is not limited to the pastor, but is shared by the entire faith community. Although the shepherd metaphor suggests that pastors are caregivers, the faith community and the church as a whole are agents of healing. The term ‘‘pastoral care’’ emerged from the concept of ‘‘shepherding,’’ where the central content of shepherding is the shepherd’s solicitous concern for the welfare of the sheep. This Old Testament concept is an excellent paradigm for the practice of pastoral care. While it is a somewhat difficult metaphor for a postmodern urban society to appreciate in the fullest, it provides a model of care that is based on the love of a shepherd for his/her flock and the skills required to keep the sheep safe from predators and natural dangers. The characteristics of a skilled shepherd—caring, concerned, and committed—are not unlike those of a genuine, skilled, caring, and competent pastoral care provider. To this image we may add knowledge of the ‘‘terrain’’ and leadership capability to navigate the flock. A shepherd/pastoral care specialist needs practical knowledge of the context in which he/she serves, a basic understanding of the complexity of the human being, and an awareness of the profound spiritual and emotional impact that any disruptive experience can have on the lives of individuals, as well as the community(s) in which they are embedded. The extension of pastoral care ministry to include the laity reflects a significant redistribution of power and responsibility. Unfortunately, shared pastoral ministry often gives insufficient consideration to the training and reflection necessary to develop caregivers who understand the internal and external dynamics that impact behavior and the implications of such behavior on the development of a healthy emotional and spiritual life. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance that those persons who engage in the ministry of pastoral care learn the skills necessary to respond to people in distress in an informed and responsible manner. Properly trained caregivers facilitate the wholeness and health of individuals and their families and also foster the development of healthy congregations. Because of the multiplicity of difficult situations in churches and communities, there is need for the training of the caregivers. This training includes the biblical and theological foundation of pastoral care; pastoral care practical skills such as dealing with crisis; attentive listening; and basic understanding of personality disorders, family dynamics, referrals, etc. Training for this ministry does not require a formal education. Statistics continue to reflect the rapid, ongoing growth of Hispanic cultural ethnic groups, which provide increasing diversity within this population. Although each group has contributed to the well-being of the larger society, they also present a number of problems for that society. A ‘‘diverse’’ community may threaten the identity of

704 |

Pastoral Care and Counseling

members of the dominant society, producing anxiety expressed in ethnocentrism and racism. Immigrant communities confront poverty, multigenerational family issues, racism, and language limitation, especially among the elderly, which may produce major emotional and spiritual problems. Religious or theological tenets may help foster distrust in mental health practitioners. Hispanics are known to underutilize mental health services. This is due to, but not limited to, a lack of financial resources, negative experiences with professionals who are not culturally competent, insufficient knowledge of services provided by social agencies, and cultural and religious ambivalence regarding mental health or psychological treatment. It is important to remember that the growth of the Latino/a population does not necessarily translate into the power to effect significant changes in the delivery of services.

Pastoral Care, Pastoral Counseling, and Pastoral Psychotherapy At this juncture it is appropriate to frame pastoral care and pastoral counseling. Each is distinct from the other and both meet very specific needs. As a movement, pastoral care calls providers to an awareness of the complexities and challenges of a postmodern society. Function and praxis of a caring ministry can never result from the placement of ‘‘new wines in old skins,’’ but must be an intentional merging of old and new functions and practices that can bring healing, wholeness, and transformation to today’s people. These changes have theological, ecclesiological, sociological, ecological, and psychological implications. The ministry of pastoral care is often confused with pastoral counseling and pastoral psychotherapy. In Latin America, psicologı´a pastoral is compatible with the pastoral psychotherapy in educational requirements, methodology, and practice. The American Association of Pastoral Counseling has a category for Pastoral Care Specialist. This particular category requires the ability to integrate the resources of faith and traditions in the practice of care. Training includes, but is not limited to, guidance regarding supportive pastoral care, crisis intervention, a consultation experience to enhance the pastoral caregivers’ skills in grief and loss, knowledge of methods for caring, and appropriate knowledge to make referrals to professionals. Pastoral care does not have educational requirements, although education is strongly recommended, nor does it necessitate a contract to delineate the nature of the caring process, such as a formal counseling session. Pastoral care happens during a coffee hour, a pastoral visit, and any other supportive, nurturing interpersonal relationship. Pastoral care encompasses all pastoral work inclusive of preaching, teaching, educational events, etc. Pastoral counseling integrates the disciplines of theology and psychology, and requires a Master’s of Divinity (or equivalent) that is approved by an accrediting body such as the Association for Theological Schools (ATS), as well as courses in the behavioral sciences. During the training process, the person must engage in a formal educational program and be supervised by an approved clinical supervisor, as well as undergo personal psychotherapy. Pastoral counseling is a contractual relationship in

Pastoral Care and Counseling

| 705

which the counselee and the counselor establish a time and place to meet and usually involves a fee. Pastoral psychotherapy demands the completion of a graduate program and evidence of proficiency in the counseling and psychotherapeutic process. In some states a person is not able to offer counseling or psychotherapy unless he or she is licensed by the state and fellow members of an accredited professional association. A pastoral psychotherapist also engages in a contractual relationship with a counselee that involves time, place, and an appropriate fee. It is important that churches establish boundaries in the understanding and practice of pastoral care, so that caregivers do not exceed the limitations of their skill and training and, with the best of intentions, cause more harm than good. It is also necessary that caregivers be aware of the complex relationship between a caregiver and a care receiver. As has been previously noted, because members of the Latino/a community have a high regard for their religious leaders, they tend to seek guidance from their priest or pastor before seeking out a mental health professional. In light of this, it is important that faith communities and their leaders have the skills necessary to provide care and support, including the ability and willingness to refer and/or encourage careseekers to make use of professionals who are culturally sensitive, willing to complement the initial support of the caregiver, and move the careseeker to the next level of caring. It behooves the caregiver to understand the importance of setting boundaries and to maintain a realistic understanding of her/his own capabilities and limitations. In order to engage in the ministry of pastoral care with Hispanics in the United States with a sense of integrity, one has to engage in a process of critical thinking based on how each discipline and methodology fosters liberation and empowerment that is inclusive of their spiritual, physical, and social lives, instead of contributing to the oppression and marginalization of the Hispanic community. It has also been noted that in the present expression of this ministry, theology, psychology, and the social sciences serve as foundational disciplines from which understanding, skills, and knowledge are acquired. A discussion of pastoral care and counseling is incomplete unless one takes note of the exciting developments and expressions of this ministry in Latin America. The continental movements for pastoral care and counseling have made profound contributions to this field, and these efforts continue to expand throughout Latin America. The next paragraphs will introduce the reader to some of the organizations that have made remarkable contributions to this ministry, the ongoing training events, and the direct services to persons in need of care and counseling. In 1975, the Fraternidad Teolo´gica Latinoamericana (FTL) organized a family conference in Quito, Ecuador. The outcome of that conference brought to the fore the need to establish contextualized theological reflection and action focused on the specific needs of Latin American families suffering from severe social pressures. By 1977, the word eirene (signifying peace, reconciliation, and harmony) was coined to describe the effort of the Quito conference. Eventually, eirene became a movement. The objectives of eirene include training and certification of pastoral family facilitators, research, and publications that lead to pastoral reflection and education regarding the family.

706 |

Pastoral Care and Counseling

In 1977, a pastor and psychologist in Argentina created a Programa de Enriquecimiento Matrimonial (PEM) that was soon followed by the formation of another group of professionals in the family field. From these three gatherings, eirene International was created. In 1982, visionaries from seven countries gathered in Costa Rica to establish the Programa de Entrenamiento y Certificacion de Asesores Familiares (Certificate Program for Family Facilitators), or PECAF. Literature was produced integrating scientific contributions and a profound Christian commitment to this ministry into a model that incorporated praxis, therapeutic techniques, and pastoral care for families. Another example of the ongoing development in the area of pastoral psychology and pastoral care and counseling is the work being done in Chile. In 1988, Ricardo Crane, after completing his studies in the United States, recognized the need for work with Chilean families. The demand for support and guidance sought by families prompted the addition of courses on pastoral care and counseling at the Evangelical Institute of Chile of the National Presbyterian Church. A number of other trained practitioners such as Plinio Sepu´lveda, Felipe Corte´s, Vladimir Rodrı´guez, and physician Jorge Sorbazo, were the founders of the Programa de Entrenamiento en Psicologı´a (P.E.P.P.), an organization that serves the evangelical community. Jorge A. Leo´n, the director of Psicopastoral–Programa Permanente de Psicologı´a Pastoral, has made a significant contribution to the field of pastoral psychology and pastoral counseling. This program has brought together an ecumenical team of psychologists who have theological training and a vast knowledge of the problems faced by members of faith communities. Recently, Leo´n was named the ‘‘Father of the Latin American Pastoral Psychology’’ at a theological gathering in Mexico. He has authored 17 books and continues to lecture extensively at different international conferences. Other Hispanic academicians and practitioners continue to provide rich intellectual and practical approaches to caring as well as theological and psychological foundations upon which this critical ministry rests. In Latin America, there continues to be a concerted effort to develop indigenous literature. This development has contributed greatly to the practice of pastoral care and pastoral psychology in the United States.

Conclusion The Hispanic church in the United States is faced with new and growing challenges: families separated due to immigration; undocumented parents fearing deportation and separation from their children; children joining gangs or becoming drug users or addicts; the parenting of bicultural children; and increasing numbers of persons dealing with depression or economic crisis. The church is the first place where parishioners seek guidance and support. This calls for a reformulation of the pastoral functions and ministries that provide educational, practical, and spiritual resources. The ministry of pastoral care makes it possible for the church to be better prepared to respond to its constituencies and to offer leadership beyond its walls. The church needs to rethink and revisit its mandate as a social and theological institution as it responds to this particular population. The new paradigms for ministry call for an interdependence between the church and social agencies that does not reduce its

Pastoral Care and Counseling

| 707

sense of identity or compromise its functions as a place of worship and ritual. New paradigms include envisioning the ‘‘new heaven and the new earth’’ as an intentional healing community. Pastoral caregivers have a history of listening to the people in their context. Pastoral care from the Hispanic perspective needs to address such issues as parenting children in a bicultural society, deportation, increasing economic crisis, and depression. The church as a healing community is in a position to respond by incorporating into its ministry an intentional programmatic effort that responds theologically, biblically, socially, and emotionally to this growing community. Such a ministry would assist careseekers in finding hope in the midst of their social dislocation or spiritual pain, within the church that offers a safe place where caregivers and careseekers can be healed, sustained, guided, and reconciled as well as nurtured, liberated, and empowered. Such an integrated ministry could serve as a source of transformation for the fulfillment of God’s intentionality for all people. As this article has shown, there is an expansion of such a ministry of pastoral care, counseling and pastoral psychology in Latin America. Major contributions have been made by academicians, pastors, and church leaders from South America and the Caribbean. Several different training programs are being offered by accredited seminaries in the region. The book Dimensiones en Cuidado Pastoral en Latinoamerica is a brilliant resource, authored by 17 leaders in Latin America. It is of great value not only for that geographical area but for work with Latino/as in North America as well.

References and Further Reading Baltonado, Sara. ‘‘Pastoral Care in Latin America.’’ International Perspectives on Pastoral Counseling (Philadelphia: The Haworth Press, 2002). Falicov, Celia J. Latino Families in Therapy: A Guide to Multicultural Practice (New York: Guildford Press, 1988). Maldonado, Jorge. Even in the Best of Families (Geneva, Switzerland: World Council of Churches Publications, 1997). Montilla, R. Esteban, and Medina Ferney. Pastoral Care and Counseling with Latino/as. Creative Pastoral Care and Counseling (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006). Radillo, Rebeca. ‘‘Pastoral Counseling with Latino/a Americans.’’ Clinical Handbook of Pastoral Counseling, Vol. 3, ed. Robert Wicks, Richard D. Parsons, and Donald Capp (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2003). Santos, Hugo, ed. Dimensiones del Cuidado y Asesoramiento Pastoral (Eagan, MN: Kairos, 2006). Ulloa Castellanos, Sergio. ‘‘The Church as a Holistic Healing Community.’’ Dimensiones del Cuidado y Asesoramiento Pastoral, ed. Hugo Santos (Eagan, MN: Kairos, 2006). Wicks, Richard D. Cuidado Pastoral, Contextual e Integral (Grand Rapids, MI: Libros Desafio, 2007).

PNEUMATOLOGY

Albert Hernández The English term pneumatology is derived from the Greek word pneuma, meaning ‘‘breath’’ or ‘‘wind,’’ and signifies the theological study of Christian doctrines, teachings, and revelations dealing with the person and work of the Holy Spirit. The equivalent Spanish word, pneumatologia, has the same meaning as the English term. The invisible, immaterial, and powerful nature of the Spirit of God was associated by the Hebrews with images like flames in a fire, a mighty wind, or the breath of life by a newborn child. Traditionally and historically, pneumatology functioned as the branch of Christian theology dealing with spirituality, personal piety, divine inspiration of saints and prophets, revelatory visions, spiritual gifts, Spirit baptism, and sanctification. The Holy Spirit is the relational intermediary between the other two persons of the Holy Trinity, and is often described as the mutual love, or ‘‘divine kiss,’’ between the Father and the Son. As the third Person of the Trinity, the Spirit’s intermediary function relates the particularities of the earthly and human realm of being to the heavenly realm of the Godhead empowering the people of God to carry out the mission and work of Jesus Christ’s earthly church. Theological and doctrinal questions aside, a comprehensive definition of pneumatology requires recognition of the Spirit’s dynamic relationship with both human particularity and the potential fullness of all things. The work of the Holy Spirit is best understood by recognizing its creative and empowering manifestations across a wide range of Christian denominations and regional traditions spanning centuries of interaction among different cultures and peoples, including specific manifestations of pneumatological spirituality among Hispanic cultures. The most significant attributes of the Holy Spirit, as well as the general contours of pneumatology, are based on New and Old Testament scriptural precedents together with the apostolic legacies of the Church Fathers. Given their familiarity with Hellenistic Greek, the early Christian Fathers associated pneuma with the birth of humanity since God created Adam by breathing into his nostrils and infusing him with the divine ‘‘breath of life’’ (Genesis 2:7). Jesus promised the Apostles that despite his impending

709

710 |

Pneumatology

departure following the trial and suffering that awaited him, the Father would send forth the Holy Spirit in his name as both Comforter and Counselor between humanity and the Godhead (John 14:16–28). Among the apologists and writers of early Christianity, pneumatology was closely aligned with ecclesiology (the doctrine of the Church). On the day of Pentecost the disciples began a new life when the flames of the Holy Spirit burst into the upper room, where all of the members of the apostolic community were prayerfully gathered and waiting, and when a miraculous form of communication as ‘‘tongues of fire’’ brought forth a new creation, the Christian Church (Acts 2:1–34). This foundational moment in the New Testament story of Christianity has been revisited over the past two millennia by Christians throughout the world as a deeply inspiring and powerful text, especially when facing questions of church reform, liberation and empowerment, transformative leadership, and spiritual revitalization. St. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, together with St. Augustine’s pneumatological formulations, became the classic Early Christian and patristic sources for teachings about the Spirit’s presence in the Church, in personal piety, and in the larger world. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, and the ensuing centuries of invasion, illiteracy, and turmoil known as the Dark Ages, monastic libraries emerged in the late ninth century as regional centers of learning, in which Classical and Christian texts were preserved for posterity. This climate of monastic textual preservation produced few theological or doctrinal innovations as traditional Christian conceptions of pneumatology, ecclesiology, and Christology coalesced with an increasingly conservative and reactionary hierarchy centered at the Papal Court in Rome by the turn of the first millennium. Later, the University of Paris emerged as a major center of Christian Scholastic teaching and philosophy during the thirteenth century. Most of the great medieval Scholastic theologians deviated little from official Christian pneumatological teachings while amplifying the doctrines the Church inherited from earlier patristic sources like St. Augustine and St. Basil, or from medieval theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure whose pneumatological ideas were supported by the Papacy. The great innovators of medieval pneumatology, such as the Calabrian Abbot Joachim of Fiore or the Franciscans Spirituals, both of which prophesied the coming of an ‘‘Age of the Holy Spirit,’’ were eventually accused of heresy and suppressed by the Papacy. Some of these movements of the Holy Spirit would later influence Catholic clergy in the Spanish colonies on issues of dignity and liberation among the indigenous peoples of the New World. Theologians and church historians have suggested that because of such tensions between pneumatological revelation and ecclesiastical authority, Latin Christianity, later known as the Roman Catholic Church, suffered from a ‘‘pneumatological deficit’’ and a tendency to push its spiritual visionaries and reformers underground. It is worth noting that Eastern Christianity, also known as the Greek Orthodox Church, developed a more open and dynamic pneumatological sensibility that informed both lay piety and monastic practices throughout the medieval era until the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The rise of Spain as a global political, military, economic, and ecclesiastical imperial power in the 1400s and 1500s would have definitive consequences for the

Pneumatology

| 711

religious sensibilities of Spain and its Spanish-speaking colonies around the world. If there is such a thing as a uniquely Hispanic pneumatological heritage, then its roots are to be found in the religious and political movements of early modern Spain and its colonies. Fifteenth century Spain was a land of religious visionaries and reformers, many of whom had been influenced by centuries of interreligious dialogue with Sephardic Judaism and Muslim mysticism from Islamic Spain (al-Andalus). There were movements across late medieval and early modern Christian Spain, like the Alumbrados of Toledo, who advocated an egalitarian pneumatology together with reflective personal readings of the Holy Scriptures, without the interpretive authority of a bishop or the pope. By the 1520s, many of the Alumbrados were accused by the Spanish Inquisition of having ideas that sounded too much like the ideas of Martin Luther, who, in their opinion, was then stirring up heresy and revolt in the German provinces of the Spanish Empire. Indeed Spain’s desire to construct and impose a strictly Roman Catholic and Spanish national identity on its Iberian and colonial subjects led to the diminution of pneumatological themes and concerns among Spain’s famous Roman Catholic Reformers: St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Ignatius of Loyola who founded the Jesuit Order. This is not to imply that the Holy Spirit is absent from the lives and works of these three magnificent Catholic religious writers and leaders. However, the general mood of suspicion and political persecution throughout Spain and its colonies at this time required that religious reformers be cautious about their pneumatology, especially if the Holy Spirit had inspired them in the struggle for liberation and justice against the excesses of Spain’s nationalistic and imperialist agenda. Among the leading twentieth-century Roman Catholic writers on pneumatology and spiritual experience are the Dominican priest Yves Congar (1904–1995) and the Franciscan Capuchin priest Raniero Cantalamessa, who has served as Preacher to the Papal Household since 1980. The Holy Spirit is that Person of the Trinity who manifests the presence of the Father and the Son in the particularities of the natural world (Nature) and among the local or contextual spiritualities of particular regions, cultures, and peoples. Despite the rigid social class barriers and religious power structures of the Spanish Empire, the colonial blending of translocal Christian pneumatological ideas and sensibilities with local indigenous beliefs and practices, such as Spiritism, Santerı´a, or ‘‘El Dia de Los Muertos’’ (Day of the Dead), produced the vibrant religious syncretism and hybrid spirituality that accompanied the racial mixing, or mestizaje, among the peoples and cultures that centuries later became Latin America and the Hispanic American Southwest. Such contextualized and culture specific pneumatological traditions are still evident today from the cities and countryside of South America to the annual religious festivals celebrated in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Perhaps the most intriguing development in modern pneumatology has been the recent emergence and recognition of ‘‘contextual pneumatologies,’’ which have challenged the dominance of Euro-Western theological categories. Among these new forms of pneumatological thinking and sensibility are African and Latino/a pneumatology, Feminist and ecological pneumatology, and the rapidly growing Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement and the Pentecostal pneumatologies, which represent the

712 |

Pneumatology

fastest growing sector of global Christianity. Although the vast majority of Hispanics living in the United States today self-identify as either Roman Catholic or Protestant, there is a rapidly growing Pentecostal presence throughout Latin America and portions of North America. These demographic and religious trends suggest that Latino/a Pentecostals, and Roman Catholic Charismatics, are poised to reshape the nature and scope of Christian pneumatology in the coming decades.

References and Further Reading Burgess, Stanley M. The Holy Spirit, Vol. II: Medieval, Roman Catholic and Reformation Traditions (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1997). Congar, Yves. I Believe in the Holy Spirit (New York: Crossroad Herder Publishing, 1997). Groppe, Elizabeth Teresa. ‘‘Yves Congar’s Theology of the Holy Spirit.’’ American Academy of Religion Academy Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Hinze, Bradford E., and D. Lyle Dabney, eds. Advents of the Spirit: An Introduction to the Current Study of Pneumatology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001). Ka¨rkka¨inen, Veli-Matti. Pneumatology: The Holy Spirit in Ecumenical, International, and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002).

POPULAR RELIGION Gilberto Cavazos-González Popular religion is often referred to as folk religion, family traditions, pious exercises, popular Catholicism, faith expressions, popular piety, popular devotion, sensus fidelium, or religiosidad popular (popular religiosity). In the not-so-distant past it was seen as belonging to the uneducated masses and was juxtaposed to the true religion of an elitist Christianity. Popular religion, however, is an elusive categorization given to a changing reality that can no longer be ignored or snubbed as superstition, unorthodox, or antiquated. Thanks to recent ecclesial documents and the work of various Latina/o theologians, and social scientists in the latter part of the twentieth century, popular religion is no longer simply tolerated as a cultural eccentricity. Popular religion has gradually become a place of theological and social reflection. Recognizing that Christian spirituality is nourished not only by the Sacred Liturgy of the universal Church, in its Constitution on the Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium 12-13) the Second Vatican Council (1963) encourages the use of what it calls the popular devotions, pious exercises, and religious practices of local churches. These, however, need to be harmonized with the liturgical seasons of the Church year and complement the liturgy as source and summit of all Christian worship. In their discussion on evangelization and pastoral ministry, the Latin American Bishops in Medellı´n, Colombia (1968), cautioned that popular religiosity is basically ‘‘vows, promises, pilgrimages, countless devotions, based on the reception of the sacraments’’ that have more to do with social activities than they do with ‘‘genuine’’ Christian life. They felt that popular religiosity needs to be purified and used as a point of departure for evangelization and catechesis. In 1975 Pope Paul VI wrote the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelli nuntiandi in which he espouses the use of popular religiosity as a means to a ‘‘true encounter with God in Jesus Christ’’ (EN 48). He describes popular religiosity as ‘‘particular expressions of the search for God and for faith.’’ He acknowledges that these expressions are often considered an inferior form of faith, yet he encourages the rediscovery of popular religiosity as manifesting ‘‘a thirst for God which only the simple and poor can know.’’ He claims that popular religiosity can make people generous in their sacrifices for others;

713

714 |

Popular Religion

PROMESAS Often promesas (promises) or mandas (to send) are made in hopes that God will take mercy on the petitioner or a loved one. This may appear to be bartering with God, but the petitioners need to remember that God’s mercy is a free gift. The manda is not so much to influence God but to show gratitude for the favor requested or what has already been received. Promesas help the petitioner grow freely as a Christian, and a person should not make a promesa requesting something from God that God would not approve. One should never make a manda for someone else to carry out and should always avoid promesas or mandas that would hurt the petitioner or someone else. Catholic Christians will sometimes make a promesa or manda to God, the Virgin Mary, or one of the saints. A person can offer to do extra prayers, go on pilgrimage, or read the Bible. Others might promise to avoid eating certain foods or discontinue watching telenovelas (soap operas). Still others pledge to give alms or help in a soup kitchen. In any case, promesas are meant to help the one making the promise through growth in at least one of the three pillars of Christian practice: prayer, fasting, and charity. —GCG

it has a profound awareness of God’s constant, loving, and providential presence; it engenders patience, detachment, openness to others, as well as a sense of the cross. Four years later, the Latin American Bishops in Puebla (1979) came to a better understanding of popular religiosity. In it they see a combination of profound beliefs, the seal of God, convictions, and expressions of faith. Popular religiosity is seen as the cultural expression that a particular people give to Christianity. Rather than being seen as an instrument the ‘‘official’’ Church can use to evangelize the masses, they claimed that it is a means by which ‘‘people evangelize themselves continually.’’ In 1992 the Latin American Bishops again spoke to the reality of popular religiosity, calling it the ‘‘inculturation of faith’’ involving faith expressions, values, criteria, behaviors and attitudes that come directly from Christian teaching. Many of these may have limitations and distortions that need to be purified, but they can still enhance local churches and pastoral activity. Since Vatican II and with the promotion of the Medellı´n and Puebla documents, Hispanic popular religion and religiosity has become the focus of much discussion and study among Christian leadership and theologians in the United States. As the numbers of Latino/as grow in this country, this study of popular religiosity has become an important topic in the social sciences as well, not simply as religious experience but as the expression of Latina/o resistance to assimilation and central to the formation of Hispanic identity. Popular religiosity is seen by these scholars as significant in Latina/o self-identity. It is at the root and can be a corrective to many Latino/a family practices/ traditions, social customs, and personal ways of being. Popular religiosity is about the process of becoming Christian in an inculturated manner through a process of traditioning.

Popular Religion

| 715

NUMEROLOGY Numerology is an interpretation of the meaning of numbers based upon systems from a variety of cultures and traditions, among them Babylonian, Hellenic, Egyptian, Jewish, Chinese, and Mayan. It is prevalent with some Mexican American practitioners of curanderismo, wherein the interpretation of tarot cards requires an intuitive understanding of numbers, and Cuban gamblers, wherein dreams are interpreted via a Chinese number system in order to select lottery numbers. In all these cases, numerology is a popular method of discernment. Among Mexican Americans, numerological understandings are based upon the cultures and traditions that formed them, particularly Spanish Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, and Mayan/Nahua influences. Though scholars debate the culture of Andalucian Spain (711–1492), relative tolerance characterized the relationship between Jews, Muslims, and Catholics, as well as members of occult societies that practiced numerology and occult arts. These societies were driven asunder after the Reconquista (1492), though the occult arts continued and transmigrated as Spain began colonization, blending with Spanish Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, and, eventually, Mesoamerican cultures. Among Cubans and Cuban Americans, cultures from Spain, Africa, and China contributed to the development of Cuba. Chinese culture, particularly ritual Taoism, emphasized the divining nature of numbers, dreams, and symbols, blending with Spanish Catholicism and African Yoruba religious systems. —OJN

Summing up the work of U.S. Hispanic theologians, popular religiosity is about the cotidianidad of faith, beauty, suffering, hardship, traditioning, and evangelization. It is the inculturation of the Gospel as found in the cotidiano and in relationships. As a result, popular religiosity is seen as the locus theologicus of Latina/o theology in the United States.

What Do We Mean by “Popular”? ‘‘Popular’’ has connotations of being widely accepted, loved, and appreciated. ‘‘Popular’’ in these cases is contrasted with rejection. Popular also has the connotation of being democratic instead of autocratic. Popular has often been considered as that which attracts the illiterate, uneducated masses as opposed to the refined, which belong to the educated elite. This has usually been the case when attaching the word ‘‘popular’’ to music, art, and religion. Unfortunately, when attached to the word ‘‘religion’’ by social scientists, it was in order to divide religion into a common, superstitious, familial, low religion at odds with an institutional, orthodox, official, high religion. Normally this dichotomy was seen to run along socioeconomic lines with institutional religion being the realm of the upper class and familial religion being that of the lower classes. This dichotomy often became a geographic one with institutional religion being well established in urban settings and popular Catholicism growing in rural ones. These dichotomies cannot be held in strict opposition to each other as involvement in either institutional or

716 |

Popular Religion

popular religion is also affected by race, ethnicity, education, economics, and personal preferences. In Latin America and the Southwestern United States this often meant that institutional Christianity would be led by an educated male clergy as the ‘‘fathers’’ of the faithful while grassroots Christianity was usually led by pious women, the mothers, aunts, and grandmothers of the faithful. Today, Latino/a social scientists and theologians are reminding us that ‘‘popular’’ primarily means ‘‘of the people.’’ While it is true that ‘‘of the people’’ should be all the people, over the course of the centuries ‘‘popular’’ has become of the general, ordinary, and simple people as opposed to the wealthy and the ruling class. For Hispanic theologians this is not a problem. ‘‘Popular’’ expresses a preferential option for the poor that recalls Jesus’ identifying himself with the least and the small. What God has hidden from the wise and the powerful has been given to ordinary everyday people.

What Do We Mean by “Religion”? Religion is often associated with organized faith, cultic worship, and sacred institutions. It is thought of as consisting of creedal and doctrinal positions, moral and ethical teachings, as well as the structured regulation of belief in a sacred and transcendent being or power. Religion is usually thought of as a stable, well-thought-out, and organized institution. While all of this is true in a variety of ways of all religions, we cannot forget that religion is originally about binding people together with each other and with the sacred. To Latino/as it should come as no surprise that religion, religiosity, and relationship have the same Latin root, religere (to bring together). Religiosity therefore cannot be a stable and private matter; it is about actively building up of familia, compadrazgo, friendship, faith, hope, love, and social justice. It is also about dealing with and overcoming death, infirmity, and evil, both personal and social. In the latter part of last century, Latina/o scholars in the United States adopted religiosidad popular or popular religiosity as the best way to define the religious experience of Hispanic in this country. It is an experience of diaspora, a Galilean journey, a Samaritan reality that is often hard to explain and define.

Roots of Hispana/o Popular Religion Scholars like Luis Maldonado and Jaime Vidal seem to think that popular religiosity has its roots in the coming together of Roman Catholicism and Amerindian Religion. They do, however, distinguish between syncretism and syncretization. Syncretism is what happens when a religious system takes on the trappings of another in order to survive clandestinely in a hostile environment; such is the case of Santerı´a according to Maldonado. Syncretization or what Vidal calls synthetization is possible only when a religious system retains its core message and identity while taking on complementary elements of another religion. Such is the case of Latin-American popular religiosity, which was born of a biological, spiritual, and cultural mestizaje. When we speak of Latino/as, we are speaking of people in the United States whose ancestry and origins are Latin American. This is a people of diverse cultures that come

Popular Religion

| 717

CHANES Chanes are water spirits who can reveal themselves to members of the Latina/o community. These malevolent spirits reside in bodies of water and can prove hazardous to children. Specifically, they prey upon children who ignore their mother’s warning of staying away from water. To protect children from the danger posed by chanes, they can be appeased either by leaving an offering of food at the edge of the body of water or by voiding the chanes’ spells by repeating certain chants that incorporate the child’s name. —MAD

from a mestizaje of Amerindian, European (primarily Iberian), and African cultures brought together as a result of the Spanish invasion and conquest of America in the early sixteenth century. The Spanish conquistadores and mendicant friars who first came to Mesoamerica brought with them a medieval Christianity based on a rich religiosidad popular that without ignoring the dogmas or the scholasticism of Roman Catholicism developed local customs and traditions that were more affective and archetypal. Some of the Amerindians consciously practiced syncretism by which they continued to worship Aztec, Mayan, Incan, and other deities under the guise of Christian saints. This they did so as not to raise the suspicion of the early missionaries. Still it seems that a true Amerindian Christianity was born of a process of syncretization or synthesization by which they took on the Christian faith, bringing to it their own religious expressions rooted in agricultural cycles, kinship relations, and rituals expressing joy, grief, and other deeply felt human emotions as well as a sense of the sacred present in the world and the cotidiano. These things were then transformed by rubbing shoulders with the Spaniards who brought their own culturally nuanced version of these elements. Jaime Vidal claims that in this way, Spanish conquerors, mendicant friars, and Amerindian converts shared a common ‘‘emotional and psychological grammar,’’ which helped the native Christian neophytes replace their ancient gods and goddess with the Most Holy Trinity, Mary, and other Christian saints. In this way a true internal theological conversion manifested itself with familiar native religious practices, offering continuity to the religious sentiment of the Amerindian. Processions, sacrifices, and gifts that in the past had been done in honor of a certain native deity become processions, sacrifices, and gifts in worship of Jesus Christ, his Father, and the Holy Spirit or in commemoration of a particular Christian saint. The liturgical celebrations and processions of medieval Christianity were elaborate and festive enough to compete with the pomp and grandeur of Amerindian religious ceremonies. Solemn Christian ceremonies required that the friars prepare choirs and musicians from among the native peoples. This was done so well that it is noted that Amerindian choirs could rival even Imperial European choirs. The use of music and song apparently was so important that in Mexico City it was noted that good song evangelized better than good preaching.

718 |

Popular Religion

DUENDES In many households in northern New Mexico, sometimes the dishes do not get washed nor are the beds made every day. Wherever there is a filthy corner in the house, there is an open invitation for los Duendes to come in and dance. Los Duendes are naughty little imps who love to play jokes on people. If someone helps out a duende, his charity is often repaid with little sacks of gold. However, if they happen not to like someone, duendes can cause that person to get lost in the forest. Sometimes duendes cause woodcutters to chop off a foot or leg if they are getting too close to their treasure. Whenever children do not clean their rooms, los Duendes come at night to pull on their hair or to dance in the filth. In the Hispano culture of northern New Mexico, if an elder comes into a room and asks, ‘‘Did los Duendes dance here last night?’’ this is coded talk for ‘‘Clean up your room.’’ Duendes, in the sense of being very little people, have historically been equated with dwarfs or midgets. In the Middle Ages duendes, especially if they were hunchbacked, were rubbed for good luck. In literature, Caldero´n de la Barca’s La Dama Duende also mentions that duendes tend to be phantasmagorical. —LT

While sixteenth-century Europe was dealing with the Reformation and the implementation of the Tridentine liturgy, America was being evangelized and catechized with the use of pre-Tridentine Spanish missals, ritual books, and catechisms that had originally been used in Spain for converted Jews and Muslims. These instruments attempted to use the ‘‘emotional and psychological grammar’’ of recent converts to Christianity. According to Hispanic scholar Jaime Lara, the most widely used ritual book was that of the Dominican Alberto Castellani who in 1523 published his Liber Sacerdotalis in which he adapted medieval monastic practices, prayers, and hymns for the newly converted Jews and Muslims. It eventually became the basis of the Roman Missal and in America it became the basis of the Manual de Adultos that adapted the liturgy to the Aztec and Maya catechumens including the use of feathers, flowers, and finery for various processions and rituals. It also became the basis of the Manuale Sacramentorum or Mexicanensis, which included rites from Salamanca, Toledo, and Sevilla. The use of ritual books became very popular, because ritual gives meaning and shape to the cycles of life and death as well as the cycle of time (days, seasons, years). Ritual also consecrates social constructs like society and its hierarchy. Ritual also focuses attention on the presence of God in the cotidiano by emphasizing special times and places for God’s external manifestation, for example, the real presence of Jesus in the consecrated Eucharist. The Catholic insistence on the body and blood of Christ being made present by the priest makes the Mass the highest form of Christian ritual. However, in many parts of America the lack of ordained priests made weekly celebrations of the Eucharist impossible. The mendicant friars of the sixteenth-century

Popular Religion

| 719

resolved the lack of clergy by training local lay leadership to celebrate dry masses in which an Amerindian leader would vest like a priest and recite the Mass for others to hear. In place of the elevation of the consecrated elements he would raise a crucifix. This practice of dry masses was used in Europe by priests who for some reason were missing either the wine and/or the bread for consecration or on ships where there was a great possibility of spilling the consecrated wine. At a time where visual communion with Christ was more important than actually consuming the consecrated host, the use of a substitute image of Christ was not unusual. Medieval Christians’ desire to see Jesus and the saints led to the practice of processions. There was a proliferation of Corpus Christi processions whereby people were able to gaze upon the real presence of Christ who came out to them in the streets. In some places the consecrated host carried in a monstrance was often replaced by an image of Christ who processed out of the church and onto the streets to the people. Oftentimes this image of Jesus would be accompanied by some or all of the images of the saints in a particular church. In America, processions became even more important as a means of getting the neophytes involved in their new religion. In the sixteenth century the installation of the image of Guadalupe in her newly built shrine at Tepeyac was accompanied by a procession of Aztec ceremonial costume and dancing of a song called the ‘‘Prego´n del Atabal’’ (Song of the Drum), which blended both Christian Mariology with Nahuatl imagery. The event also included an Epiphany play. Religious drama has been important to popular religiosity as a way of telling the story of God’s intervention in human history and as a means of promoting an affective spirituality that moves one to a deeper relationship with God in Jesus Christ and his Saints. The most common religious dramas center on the mysteries of Jesus’ Passion and Incarnation. As a result the Via Crucis or Live Stations of the Cross and the Pastorela or Nativity Play are probably the most common types of religious drama still in use today. Other plays revolve around the telling of the story of the Virgen de Guadalupe or other patron saints. Many of the rituals, processions, and religious plays of popular religiosity can be done without the help or leadership of a priest or consecrated religious. The lack of priests helped Amerindian Christianity to grow as a religion that focused on family and local community more than universality and the institution. As the Box of Jesu´s Malverde soap. centuries passed and Tridentine liturgy (David Agren)

720 |

Popular Religion

´ S MALVERDE JESU Revered throughout northern Mexico for nearly a century, the icon of Jesu´s Malverde has become popular in the United States since the start of the twenty-first century, particularly in California and the Southwest. According to folklore, Jesu´s Malverde was like Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He was killed in 1909 by the police. People, not the official church, made him into a saint. They began to believe that his image offered protection from the law and, as such, he became the patron saint of drug dealers. Hence, he is known as the ‘‘narco-saint.’’ The poor also venerate the image of Jesu´s Malverde, praying that he will provide either safe conduct into the United States or money. His image appears in statues, tattoos, and on T-shirts. There is Jesu´s Malverde cologne, Jesu´s Malverde beer, and even Jesu´s Malverde bathroom cleaners. —MAD

and clericalism became part and parcel of Catholicism, popular religion became more ingrained in the Latin American faithful. Institutional Catholicism was identified as an instrument of European colonialization in Latin America and eventually in the conquered Mexican land now known as Southwestern United States. With the U.S. conquest and colonialization of Mexican territory, institutionalized U.S. Catholicism clashed with Latin American Catholicism. The new missionaries were determined to root out medieval Spanish Christianity and replace it with a more ‘‘enlightened’’ anglicized form of Christianity. This only served to strengthen the Hispanic ties with popular religiosity.

Elements of Popular Religiosity Orlando Espı´n describes popular religion as an epistemology, a way that Latina/os come to know and construct the ‘‘real.’’ It is probably the most fundamental bearer of social and cultural identity for Latino/as. Through it Hispanic Christians attempt to ‘‘remember, symbolize and live by’’ their religious experience. Like all social constructs not everything in popular religiosity is consonant with the Christian Gospel. Still there are a lot of elements in popular religiosity that are truly evangelical and orthodox. I would like to consider a few of these here. (1) All embracing presence of the sacred. When looking forward to a future event, be it great or small, Latina/os are often heard to say ‘‘Si Dios quiere,’’ ‘‘Con el favor de Dios,’’ or ‘‘Ojala’’ (‘‘If God wills it,’’ ‘‘With God’s blessing,’’ ‘‘Allah willing’’). An essential component of Latina/o popular religiosity is the all-pervasive presence of God. God’s Spirit is all around us and is deeply involved in human life and in the world. Things happen if God desires them or allows them. God is on our side, helping us, molding us, and saving us. This element of popular religiosity is manifested in a number of ways. Besides dichos (sayings) like the ones mentioned above, Latino/as will usually have religious symbols like crucifixes, images of Mary, an image of a saint, or the name of Jesus

Popular Religion

| 721

AZABACHE Azabache, known in English as jet, is an intensely black shining lignite that can have either a soft or a rough texture. A mineraloid, rather than a mineral, jet is derived from decaying wood, hence making it organic. The mimeraloid comes from a tree fossil resin that existed during the Jurassic Period. Large deposits of jet are located in Spain, specifically Asturias and the coast stretching from Villaviciosa to Gijon. The mined material is usually cut and polished so that it can be used for ornaments or jewelry. For thousands of years the azabache has been prized as a talisman to ward off evil, envy, illnesses, and violence. Today, many Hispanic groups have fashioned jet into jewelry, which they call azabache. Usually azabache is made into a small pendant along with wood, gemstone, or semiprecious metals, which is either pinned to the clothing of babies or worn as necklaces by small children as protection from el mal de ojo (the evil eye). —MAD

hanging on a chain around their necks, or on the walls of their homes and businesses. Sometimes these images will even be tattooed on a Hispanic body. These images can often be found on an altarcito (home altar) in a visible corner of the home or business. Altarcitos are not meant to be in competition with the altar found in the parish church; rather they are seen as extensions of it. An altarcito is blessed by the local priest whenever possible and usually contains items like holy water, candles, images, palm fronds, prayer books, and a Bible that have been blessed in church. It is a place for prayer and devotion. It is where the family goes to implore the Divine Providence of God. (2) Affective spirituality. The predominant images of Christ in the first Christian millennium were those of the Pantocrator, the glorified master sitting on his throne teaching and judging the world. Whether on his mother’s lap or on the cross, Jesus is the divine emperor who dominates all things and rules with a strong arm. It is only in the twelfth century that Cistercian monks begin to stress the humanity of Jesus by writing of his kenotic birth into impoverished and harsh conditions or of his even more kenotic passion and death, stressing the physical and psychological suffering he must have endured for love of sinful humanity. This affective literature was taken by the mendicant friars of the thirteenth century and popularized by imaging the poverty that Jesus was born into in the cre`che and stressing the role of suffering through bloody and suffering images of Cristo upon the cross. In Spain the suffering image of the Ecce Homo and the crucifix began to show the horrible suffering of Jesus in very tangible ways, yet these images were known as the Sen˜or del Gran Poder (Lord of Great Power). This paradox of the suffering Son of Man reigning victorious even in death became a powerful image for the conquered Amerindians. Gone were their deities and in their place was a bloody and beaten man who reigned from a cross. Who could not love such a God? Who could not feel pity for such a God, especially when they felt in their own flesh the sufferings he endured?

722 |

Popular Religion

Affective spirituality and not a morbid sense of fatalism is what is at the corazo´n (heart) of practices like the Caribbean jibaros fasting all of Good Friday, the Via Crucis en vivo all over Latin America and the United States, the groups of penitentes of Spain carrying heavy statues atop wooden platforms through the streets in procession, and other sacrificial acts. Affectivity stirs the person to want to share in the cross of the Lord, to ‘‘make up for what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ’’ (Colossians 1:24). Affective spirituality is what lies behind the Latino/a love of images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Santo Nin˜o, and the Madre Dolorosa. It also takes on linguistic expression in the use of titles like ‘‘Diosito’’ and ‘‘Virgencita.’’ ‘‘Diosito’’ is a strange nomenclature whereby Jesus is recognized as the holy yet tender and small God. The addition of ‘‘ito’’ to the very category of God or Mary is one of bringing the Sacred into a relationship. ‘‘Ito’’ is added to names by parents to speak of their little children, by lovers to speak of the tenderness between them, by relatives to speak of the loving ties that bind them to each other, and by many Latina/os to speak of their affective relationship with God. The crucified Jesus and the Virgin Mary are the two most significant and affective symbols of religiosidad popular Latina. They are the two images that give the most important witness to the power of the Gospel message: God loves us and wants us to have a full and happy life. (3) Mary and the communion of the saints. Another dicho is ‘‘Jesu´s en la cruz; Marı´a en la luz’’ (‘‘Jesus on the Cross; Mary in light’’). The light in question is always the light of Jesus; la luz del pesebre, la luz de su misericordia, la luz de la cruz, la luz de su resurreccio´n (light of the manger, light of his mercy, light of the cross, light of his resurrection). Mary is human; granted she is a special human being who has received a singular favor from God the Father. Latina/os affirm that she is human, not divine. It is her humanity that attracts devotees. ‘‘She is one of us.’’ ‘‘She understands our sufferings.’’ Mary as representative of humankind is glorified in a sacred exchange between her and her son, between humankind and God. God takes on human flesh in her womb and in turn she is clothed in divinity in heaven. To paraphrase Athanasius: ‘‘The divine becomes human so that the human can become divine.’’ God takes on human limitation to share divine majesty with humankind. Mary as representative of humanity in the process of glorification is only one of many humans to participate in a sacred exchange between God and humankind. The light of Jesus’ manger, mercy, cross, and resurrection falls on the saints as well. Latino/as love the saints. These holy intercessors are often sought out for special requests. Among the popular saints we will find Martin Caballero who helped the poor, Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua who became poor, and Rosa de Lima and Martin de Porres who lived in Latin American poverty. Poverty seems to be a constant in the lives of many of the great saints. At the same time, it seems to be a constant in the lives of many who espouse popular religiosity. The communion of saints takes on a special significance when the poor saints on earth turn to the glorified saints in heaven for intercession, help, and testimony of life. (4) Relationships. La comunion de los santos (the communion of the saints) is probably the holiest of relationships to which popular religiosity can aspire. Relationship

Popular Religion

| 723

JUAN SOLDADO (1914?–1938) Juan Soldado was born Juan Castillo Morales. In turbulent Tijuana of 1938, eightyear-old Olga Camacho was found raped and murdered. An army private now known as Juan Soldado (John Soldier) was condemned amid mob riots, faulty investigation, and poor judicial practice. Although the Camacho family has always held him responsible, it is uncertain if he was guilty as proper procedures were not followed, and in fact he was shot to death in a cemetery through an extra judicial albeit public execution. Almost immediately miracles were attributed to his gravesite, which has become a shrine. Although never canonized and indeed sometimes opposed by Catholic authorities, his popularity grew, especially among those who believe he was executed to cover the guilt of his military superiors. Most adherents consider him a victim martyr, namely, a victim of injustice visited upon the poor masses by the wealthy and powerful but also a martyr to their cause. Hence, he is able to intercede for those who share his lot as well as denounce the consequences caused by such socioeconomic fault lines in society. His biography is mostly anonymous, his death ambiguous, his saintliness contiguous mainly with Christians who share his social class and likewise have survived through faith as well as resistance. —FAO & KGD

and religiosity as previously mentioned have the same root word. Hispanics are known for both of these things. Besides popular religiosity, another hallmark of Latina/o identity is a fondness for establishing ever-widening circles of relationships from familia, to extended family, to compadres, comadres, and friends. Even Jesus is seen in relationship. ‘‘Ay Jesu´s, Marı´a y Jose´,’’ a common phrase used by Latino/as to express frustration, exasperation, a quick prayer, and/or fatigue, shows the importance of familia and being in a relationship. In the Anglophone world, this phrase is simply ‘‘Jesus!’’ or ‘‘Jesus Christ!’’ as if Jesus stands alone, over and above relationships. To the Latina/o such a thing is unimaginable; Jesus cannot be removed from his parents, his disciples, his saints, his priests, or the laity. (5) Role of the laity. Despite the fact that the Tridentine period of Church history was dominated by the ordained priesthood, in many parts of America the lack of priests or a sympathetic clergy led to a continuation of the medieval involvement of the laity in the world of the sacred. In many parts of the world it became commonplace to think of the sacred as being the realm of priests and consecrated religious while the secular was the realm of the laity. In the traditional Latino/a worldview, such a distinction between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular does not exist. The sacred is everyone’s domain, just as everyone lives in a secular world. The lack of ordained priests in many parts of Latin America and the rejection by non-Hispanic clergy of Latino/a Catholics in the United States has led to a lay-led religiosity that in many ways promotes the priesthood of all believers, especially that of women. This is not to say that Hipanics do not need or want the presence of an ordained clergy. Quite the contrary, the absence of priests over the years has caused

724 |

Popular Religion

lay people to be creative in filling that lacuna in their religious practice, but it has also caused a longing for good priests who will provide the sacraments, especially the Eucharist on a more regular basis. The faithful insist on having houses, cars, Bibles, and religious items blessed by a priest whenever possible. They encourage the participation of priests as chaplains and spiritual directors in the lay-led cofradias and other fraternal societies. In these cases, however, the clergy needs to understand and accept that they are under the direction of a lay leader, and that they are simply there to serve the sacramental needs of the community. In many of the practices of popular religiosity, the role of leading people in prayer often falls to a woman and not to a priest. Latina scholar Ana Marı´a Dı´az-Stevens claims this is because ‘‘women . . . reminisce about the past, give each other counsel and consolation, discuss the events of the community, and plan for family and community celebrations which most often are also religious celebrations.’’ Unofficial ministries that have been held by Latina laywomen can easily be seen as an extension of the medieval beguines, women who lived a consecrated life at home as either married or single women, forming prayer groups, Bible studies, and charitable organizations. In Hispana/o popular religiosity these women take on the roles of rezadoras, salmeras, beatas, and even curanderas. The openness of Latina/os to the role of women in ministry is a long one and one that can certainly add to the discussion of women in Church ministry. Sadly, as result of this, many laymen see church involvement as womanish. And even though priests are obviously male, they vest in fancy robes like women and serve at table, which in Latino/a households is traditionally a woman’s role. Still, this does not mean that Latino men are not touched by popular religiosity. Men form cofradias to have a place where they can encounter the sacred in a more ‘‘masculine’’ way. They turn to priests, consecrated religious, rezadoras, and other pious women for advice, prayers, blessings, and consolation in times of need or grave danger. In the United States, many men turn to the local church and to religious movements as safe havens that remind them of home and keep them somehow connected to their own culture. This turning to institutional religion is resulting in a growing number of male lay ministers that share with women the responsibility for bringing popular religiosity into U.S. Catholic and Protestant churches.

Pastoral Responses Representatives of Institutional Catholicism and Mainline Protestantism need not be afraid of Latina/o popular religiosity. It is not a problem to be dealt with, but rather a blessing to be cherished. Many Protestant and Catholic pastors and professional lay ministers have begun adopting and institutionalizing Posadas, Quincean˜eras, Passion Plays, and other practices of Hispano/a popular religiosity as a way of attracting and serving Latina/os. Cursillo de Cristiandad, the Charismatic renewal, Pentecostalism, and other renewal/evangelical movements have sprung up in the Latina/o community as new manifestations of the elements of popular religiosity. These movements emphasize several of the elements mentioned above, namely an affective spirituality that sees

Popular Religion the omnipresence of the divine in the cotidiano (the everyday). They underscore the importance of relationships, lay leadership, and ministry.

References and Further Reading Avalos, Hector, ed. Introduction to the U.S. Latina and Latino Religious Experience (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004). Davis, Kenneth G., ed. Misa Mesa y Musa: Liturgy in the U.S. Hispanic Church, 2nd ed. (Schiller Park, IL: World Library Publication, 1991). De La Torre, Miguel A., and Gasto´n Espinosa, eds. Rethinking Latino Religions and Identity (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2006). de Luna, Anita. Faith Formation and Popular Religion: Lessons from the Tejano Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publisher, 2002). Espı´n, Orlando O., and Gary Macy, eds. Futuring our Past: Explorations in the Theology of Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 2006). Ferna´ndez, Eduardo C. La Cosecha: Harvesting Contemporary United States Hispanic Theology (1972–1998) (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000). Stevens-Arroyo, Anthony M., and Ana Marı´a Dı´az-Stevens, eds. An Enduring Flame: Studies on Latino Popular Religiosity (New York: Program for the Analysis of Religion Among Latinos, 1994).

| 725

SACRAMENTS AND SACRAMENTALS Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo The sacraments and the sacramentals are closely related to the rituals and symbols composed by Latino/a popular religiosity. In analyzing these elements as ‘‘religion’’ rather than merely as ‘‘culture,’’ however, theological precision is required. Sadly, this is not an easy task because there is disagreement about the theological definition of sacraments, how they operate, how many there are, and whether sacramentals contribute to or distract from Christian commitment. Most of these issues can be attributed to denominational differences between Catholics and most other Christians. With its ecumenical spirit, therefore, much of the current Latino/a theological reflection skirts argumentational issues in sacramental theology. However, in order to understand why sacraments are special components of Hispanic religious culture, it is necessary to examine the premise that sacraments are rituals that communicate grace and salvation. In four unequal parts, this entry addresses how sacraments gained a significant role in Latina/o religious experiences.

Historical Development The apostolic church organized itself around rituals such as the Eucharist, Baptism, the forgiveness of sins, the laying on of hands, and the charismatic experience of the Holy Spirit in the gift of tongues. Yet, except for the forgiveness of sins, these rituals were derived from preexisting Jewish practices such as the Passover meal, the mikvah (ritual immersion), and the transfer of tribal authority. Moreover, contact through the Hellenist world with Gentiles provided for other crossover similarities with religious rituals, the design of temples, the use of liturgical music and the like. Early Christian writers referred to Christian rituals with the terms mysterion among those writing in Greek and sacramentum among those using Latin. Augustine writes of the Eucharist (De Civ. Dei: x): ‘‘The visible sacrifice is the sacrament, i.e. the sacred sign, of the invisible sacrifice.’’ Moreover, although they understood that the sacraments had similarities with the rituals of other religions, these early Christian writers generally considered sacraments to have been derived from Christ’s directives to his Church. 727

728 |

Sacraments and Sacramentals

The development of the great medieval universities after the first Christian millennium gave impulse to systematic exploration of the nature and effect of sacraments. By then the number of sacraments had become generally accepted as seven: Baptism, Eucharist, Reconciliation, Orders, Anointing of the Sick, Marriage, and Confirmation. (Modern terms are used for references to ‘‘Confession’’ or ‘‘Penance’’ and ‘‘Extreme Unction.’’) Two tendencies can be found in the treatment of sacraments by the Schoolmen. On the one hand, there is an emphasis upon the effect of the sacraments producing grace through the use of material elements, proving sacraments were not merely culture. Taken to an extreme, however, this emphasis would reduce the sacraments to magic. The other emphasis was on the invisible, hidden, spiritual force of the sacraments. In the Pars Tertia of his Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas traced a middle ground between these two tendencies and laid the foundations for a sacramental theology, although the treatment of the sacraments was not completed until after the saint’s death. Aquinas had begun his sacramental theology relating Augustine’s visible/invisible linkage to the Aristotelian categories of body/soul so that, like the human being created by God, sacraments are constituted by joining spirit and matter. In Aquinas’s analysis, the words of the ritual constitute the spiritual ‘‘form’’ and the physical elements become the ‘‘matter’’ required for the effective dispensation of the sacrament. Both the matter and the form had to be intelligible and intentional to become sacraments, a requirement that inserted subjectivity into the ritual. The second contribution of St. Thomas was to interpret the maxim of St. John Damascene that ‘‘In Christ, human nature was like the instrument of the divinity.’’ Aquinas enlarged this view. By connecting the sacraments with the grace of Christ’s saving acts as instruments to principal cause (the stick held in one’s hand), Aquinas made sacraments into contact with Christ. The scriptural references to ‘‘be born again of water and the spirit’’ (John 3:3) or to ‘‘eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood’’ (John 6:53) were explained as necessary tools to receive the divine grace won by Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Without the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, one could not have eternal life, for these were the instruments by which Christ remained among believers and they were dispensed through his Church. Aquinas successfully linked the sacraments to the fundamental Christian belief in both the material humanity and the spiritual divinity of Christ as ‘‘true God and true man,’’ framing Christian sacramental theology by a Christological approach. The material components of sacraments like the water of Baptism or the bread and wine of the Eucharist are analogous to the incarnation of the Word made Flesh. To disparage the materiality of the sacraments is like denying the humanity of Christ. Thus, Christ is really present in the bread of the Eucharist and not merely in symbolic form, just as his risen body is a real physical body and not just a ghostly apparition (cf. John 20:27). At the same time, by attaching the Aristotelian concept of form and matter to the words and materials used in sacraments, Aquinas opened the door to the subjective factors of intention and understanding of ritual. The minister must grasp the meaning of the words in celebrating the sacrament and not treat the ritual as if it were magic. In addition to speculative aspects of sacramental theology, Aquinas also addressed practical issues, some of which would arise again during the Reformation. Was a

Sacraments and Sacramentals

| 729

BAUTIZO Baptism or bautizo is a sacrament of the church, among both Catholics and Protestants. When Hispanics participate in this ritual, the sacrament incorporates traditional symbols different from Euro-Americans. For example, an important part of el bautizo is the fiesta following the religious ceremony, where families and friends gather to honor the one baptized. If the one being baptized is a child, the child is usually dressed in el ropo´n, a long white gown used during the ritual. It is traditional, especially among Mexicans and Cubans, for el ropo´n to be passed down from generation to generation. One tradition, el bolo, is based on a Mexican custom. The padrino, the godfather, as a sign of future abundance, throws coins into the air when leaving the church for children to gather. Probably the most important aspect of the bautizo is the selection of godparents, los padrinos. The padrinos form a spiritual bond with the child and the child’s parents, becoming compadrazgo, co-parents. In the event the child’s parents are no longer able to care for the child, the godparents assume the responsibility. In some economically deprived communities, parents have been known to ask those who are in a financially better position to serve as padrinos. —MAD

sacrament invalid if the minister was in sin? No: the validity of the sacrament did not depend on the worthiness of the minister. Was it necessary to receive communion under both species of bread and wine? It was certainly preferable, but matters of health might intervene and communion with bread alone for the faithful was sufficient. How many of the sacraments derive from the Bible? All of them, but Christ gave his church the power to ritualize the sacraments, so that their form does not necessarily derive from the words of scripture. If Baptism confers the Holy Spirit, why is Confirmation needed? The adult confirmation strengthens the baptismal character received when an infant. Are the sacraments limited to those received by Jesus? He did not receive any, since neither did he need grace nor was grace possible until his Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Application to Latino/a theology touches on this last point—namely, that sacraments were only possible after the winning of salvation manifest in the Resurrection. If grace was imparted through sacraments only after Christ’s resurrection, then pious Jews of the Old Testament and good pagans who lived before Christ could not have received the Christian sacrament of Baptism, nor entered into Heaven. To resolve this dilemma, Aquinas developed the notion of ‘‘natural sacraments.’’ He reasoned that if the subjective dispositions required for the Christian sacraments were present among Jews and pagans when they underwent similar rituals of initiation in their own religions, the salvific grace of redemption would be applied to them. These persons had Baptism of Desire, and rather than send them to Hell, a kind and merciful God allowed them to await Christ’s Resurrection in limbo (i.e., ‘‘on the edge’’) before entering Heaven. Formed by Thomistic reasoning within the Salamanca School, Bartolome´ de Las Casas applied the natural sacraments and Baptism of Desire to the native people of

730 |

Sacraments and Sacramentals

the Americas. Las Casas was at pains to describe the rituals of native peoples by comparison with biblical practices such as first fruits. In his Apologe´tica, the Dominican friar offers a wealth of description about native religions, suggesting that they served for these peoples the same sort of function of preparation for the Gospel as did the rituals of the Old Testament for Jews. In effect, Las Casas conceded Baptism of Desire to the native American religions.

Sacramental Theology in Baroque America after Trent The Protestant Reformation presented serious challenges in Europe to sacramental theology. Luther and Calvin were inclined to decisively limit the role of the ordained clergy as sole dispensers of the sacraments. Moreover, focused more on a literal reading of the biblical texts than on traditional church practices, they accepted as sacraments only those rituals explicitly described in the New Testament. Finally, they placed the cause of grace exclusively on faith and God’s inscrutable will. Calvin described the sacrament as ‘‘a testimony of divine grace toward us, confirmed by an outward sign, with mutual attestation of our piety toward him’’ (cited in Osborne, 49). In this and similar formulations, the efficacy of the sacrament depended upon the ‘‘invisible’’ characteristics of testimony and piety rather than on the joining of matter and form, understood as an automatic effect independent of faith. Calvin rejected the material sense of the Real Presence in the Eucharist by sarcastically repeating sophistry about a mouse nibbling at the host. Actually, Calvin agreed with St. Thomas about the need for a subjective understanding requisite for a sacrament (which a mouse could never have), even though the intent by the author of the Institutes of the Christian Religion was to distance Reformation theology from that of the Schoolmen. Moreover, there was no attention to the American natives in Calvin’s Predestination theology. In polemic response to Protestant objections, post-Tridentine theology in Europe emphasized the requisite disposition of matter, even in such an arcane issue as to whether the Mass constituted a ‘‘sacrifice’’ until and unless the host was destroyed. Because Luther and Calvin minimized the centrality of the clergy to the Christian life, the European Catholic theologians emphasized those roles, especially in conferring the sacraments. Simple acceptance of these reforms would have reinforced the contention that the Church had been in error. In fact, Protestants had ridiculed the Middle Ages as an era of repression, ignorance, and superstition, claiming that the pure Christian message was set right by the Reformation. In rebuttal, Trent revisited the medieval period not as disaster but as a ‘‘golden age’’ of peace and social harmony. Christendom under one Church, it was suggested, was a more authentic reflection of Christ’s will than the religious wars, dissension, and social dissolution occasioned by the Reformation. Rather than examine doctrines and pronouncements, Trent can be evaluated by ‘‘material theology,’’ the empirical testing of material effects. For example, indulgences were attached to prayers officially approved for their orthodoxy and were printed on the obverse side of ‘‘holy cards’’ carrying the images of Christ, Mary, and the saints. These holy cards were virtually everywhere, including private home altars,

Sacraments and Sacramentals

| 731

but the approved prayers ensured that the devotions would not repeat the exaggerated excesses of an uncontrolled syncretism. In a similar way, popular festivals of the saints would begin by taking the statue from the church, processing around the town, and returning to the church for the celebration of Mass. On the high altar, the crucifix was placed in the most prominent place, but the statues of the saints were put on side altars. Historian Henry Kamen (1993) calls these regulated practices the ‘‘machinery of Trent.’’ They conjoined sacraments and sacramentals in a pastoral theology not always addressed in the polemic and speculative themes of formal theology, but more influential in shaping Catholicism. The post-Tridentine Church in the Americas adapted European trends to American needs. In the Americas, there was no Protestantism to repel and no medieval past to extol in asserting Catholic hegemony. The challenge came instead from the vestiges of native religions in the precolonial past of the Americas. Moreover, whereas Protestants were a minority in European Catholic countries, by 1565 when Trent ended its sessions the majority American population was composed not of Europeans but rather of criollos, mestizos, ladinos, and natives. In fact, until the middle of the eighteenth century the chief languages in most of the Americas were the native tongues, not Spanish. Incorporating rituals with signs and symbols into Latin American colonial religious culture faced two basic choices: repress the native past or syncretize with it. Although both approaches were used, the preference was for syncretism. Clearly, the precontact religions were not to be preserved in their entirety. But, as had been done in Europe with a Christian medieval past, Latin American theologians chose to recycle precontact religions. Given Trent’s emphasis on religious practice, the effect was to find symbols and rituals that qualified as natural sacraments. The existence of certain religious practices before the arrival of Christian missionaries were cast as prefigurements of the sacraments and as providentially willed predispositions of the native peoples to be Christians. As had already been suggested in the writings of Las Casas, the American nations could be compared theologically to the pious Jews and good pagans of the Old Testament. Thus, the native religions were ‘‘recycled’’ in baroque fashion as anticipations of a Catholic fulfillment in Christ and the Church. Consider, for instance, the Symbolo catholico indiano of the Peruvian-born Franciscan, Jero´nimo Ore´ (1554–1630). In this treatise, Ore´ interprets Incan prayers to Pachacamac as an undeveloped monotheism. His book includes Christian hymns in the Quechua language, with a commentary in Castilian. Echoing ideas from the neoplatonism of Richard of St. Victor, Ore´ viewed Incan rites as anticipations of the Trinity and the Resurrection. Moreover, in a critical spirit to be echoed by other Peruvians such as the mestizo, Gracilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), and the ladino Felipe Guama´n Poma de Ayala (c. 1538–c. 1620), Ore´ criticizes the established missionary Church as unresponsive to local needs and too overtly linked to imperial Spanish interests. By the end of the seventeenth century, Diego de Avedan˜o published a six-volume Thesarus indicus in Lima. His learned treatise examined the imperial conflicts with an evangelizing church, examined pastoral norms for imparting sacraments among natives, attacked Jansenists, and extolled the virtues of the recently beatified Dominican nun, Rose of Lima. His racial and cultural awareness also led him to call for the abolition

732 |

Sacraments and Sacramentals

of African slavery. Thus, Latin American theology during the baroque conjoined the aesthetic, syncretistic, cultural, and historical realities of Latin Catholicism with a strong sense of social justice. In Mexico, no less than in Peru, the same trends were to be found. The criollo priest Miguel Sa´ nchez composed in 1630 a baroque theology extolling the local image of a mestiza Lady of Guadalupe. This image, as so many others, ‘‘confused’’ native religious symbols with Christian iconography, placing Mexican flowers and indigenous clothing on the Virgin but arrayed about her the moon and stars of the Woman in Revelations. The embrace of syncretistic symbolism celebrated as prefigurement of Christianity uniquely characterized postPortrait of nun and poet Sor Juana Ine´s de Tridentine theology in the Americas. la Cruz. (Library of Congress) It is difficult to separate these theological and religious currents from the emerging cultural identity. Latin American baroque theology placed scientific observation and historical speculation in its service. ´ lvares Cabral landed in Brazil when trying to tack eastward to round Since Pedro A equatorial Africa, it was considered likely that the same thing happened in the voyage of St. Thomas the Apostle beyond the Mediterranean as described by Origen of Alexandria. It was postulated that the apostle had preached the Gospel in Brazil long before the arrival of the Europeans. The Mexican priest, Carlos Singu¨enza y Go´ngora, made Mexico the apostle’s destination, arguing that knowledge of how to build the Aztec pyramids had been filtered though the missionary preaching of the saint. For her part, Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz (1651–1695) argued in her auto-sacramental, El Divino Narciso, that the Aztec practice of human sacrifice was a contaminated memory of the Eucharist preached by St. Thomas in which the sacrifice of Christ’s body and blood brought salvation. With these and other affirmations, theologians attributed to an apostolic origin certain symbols found in native religion that shared similarities with Christian signs and sacraments. While the expansive post-Tridentine theology of baroque America differed from its polemicized European counterpart, there were constant exchanges, particularly on the level of popular religiosity. The holy cards, medals, and novenas of the period’s religious expression fell into the category of ‘‘sacramentals’’ and were considered means of preparation for the sacraments. While such had been present throughout the medieval period, technical advances of printing and communication during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries meant the same sacramentals were distributed around the

Sacraments and Sacramentals

| 733

world. Kamen reports, for instance, a confradı´a to the Peruvian madonna, Our Lady of Copacabana, in seventeenth-century Catalonia (Kamen 1993, 430–435). Rather than oppose their proliferation, the Vatican often encouraged and assisted the religious popularity of local American devotions. It was argued theologically that the miraculous apparition of Mary to people of color in Manila or Mexico City constituted proofs of the universality of Catholicism and its superiority to a missionary-less Protestantism. Ironically, while formal post-Tridentine sacramental theology conformed to centralized measures of orthodoxy, it promoted the informal material theology of culturally specific devotions. Thus, baroque Catholicism joined both centralization and diversification in a common message of superiority to Protestantism. Rather than rejection by the Church hierarchy, Latin American popular religiosity was extolled as evidence of ‘‘catholicity.’’ The technical proficiency of diffusion, the linkage with Church policy, and the global reach of these devotions were qualitatively superior to the resources of the medieval period. It can be suggested that the religious piety of the baroque deserves to be called ‘‘devotionalism’’ in order to distinguish it from the regionalized devotions of the Middle Ages. Devotionalism allowed the uniquely American popular religious expression to enter into the common cultural repertoire of the universal Church. For this reason, consideration of contemporary trends in sacramental theology requires understanding of the historical impact of Latin American devotionalism during the baroque as indeed is suggested by recent attention to ‘‘local theologies.’’

Post-Vatican II Trends in Sacramental Theology The II Vatican Council produced new formulations for both sacraments and culture, particularly as reflected in the work of the Jesuit Karl Rahner and the Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx. Rahner called for a ‘‘Copernican revolution’’ in theology in which it was not that the Church waited for the world to recognize its message but that the Church reinterpreted its theology to reality in the modern world. Without divorcing his thinking from the broad outlines of Aquinas, Rahner introduced a Heideggerean notion of history into his description of how sacraments operate. In a sense, Rahner made the intelligibility of the Church in history a basis for sacramental efficacy, nudging aside the emphasis on the individual priest or the piety of the client. A liberationist perspective to Rahner’s thought was injected by Juan Luis Segundo. If Rahner was correct that the concept of ‘‘the church in history’’ must replace the ‘‘banking’’ concept of grace for each individual who receives the sacraments, argued Segundo, then the Church itself must become an instrument of liberation in history (Artisans for a New Humanity 1974, 4:97). The grace caused by the sacraments must be effective in real time and real history: it is not ‘‘stored up in heaven.’’ Segundo criticized the II Vatican Council for neglecting the linkage of liberation to liturgy and the sacraments. The title of his book, Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, is a straightforward statement of Schillebeeckx’s perspective. Whereas the Schoolmen were preoccupied with static metaphysical issues about essence and act, Schillebeeckx was focused on process and interpersonal reaction. In his definition, the ritual of the

734 |

Sacraments and Sacramentals

PRESENTATION OF CHILDREN Presentation of Children is a practice that evokes the presentation of Jesus in the temple (Luke 2:22–40). Its liturgical observance dates back to fourth-century Jerusalem. Around the fifth century, the East focused on the Savior child’s ‘‘encounter’’ with Simeon and Anna. Around the seventh century, Western churches meditated on Mary’s ‘‘purification’’ in fulfillment of the law. Yet Simeon’s confession of Christ as light to the Gentiles shapes the Western rite of the lighting and blessing of candles, known in Hispanic Catholicism as La Candelaria. Although the official feast is celebrated 40 days after Christmas (February 2), popular expressions are not always tied to this date or Christological themes. Emphasis falls on the unofficial custom of parents’ presentation of children at the age of three, a church celebration (November 21) with origins in the apocryphal account of the presentation of Mary in the temple at the same age. Official Catholicism and classical Protestantism generally allow for presentations, but interpret them sacramentally as baptismal reaffirmations. Evangelicals and Pentecostals see them as reenactments of the presentation of children to receive Jesus’ blessing (Matthew 19:13–15). The duty of parents and godparents to raise the child in the faith is promoted. —LAS

sacrament was defined not by the pronouncement of words (form) coincidentally with material substances, but in the engagement of the person and Christ. Schillebeeckx’s approach allows the instrumental causality in the Thomistic definition to better resonate with Protestant Reformation theology. If the static approach is used to define the Eucharist, for instance, the ‘‘moment’’ of consecration when the priest pronounces the words ‘‘This is My Body’’ confects the sacrament. The Eucharistic moment ‘‘ends’’ when the host dissolves in the mouth or stomach of the recipient. In Schillebeeckx’s new approach, the Eucharist as sacrament is celebrated in the entire liturgy and successfully completed in the continuing transformation of individual behavior to a Christlike model. In sum, while the static approach had identified the sacrament with consecrated bread and wine, the postconciliar stance made the sacrament into ‘‘sharing a meal with friends joined in Christ.’’ The most relevant effect of this new understanding of the sacraments has been the blurring of boundaries separating sacraments and sacramentals. The Council of Trent had followed the theology of the Schoolmen in distinguishing between the sacraments, which cause grace, and sacramentals (sacramentalia), which are ‘‘things set apart or blessed by the Catholic Church to manifest the respect due to the Sacraments, and so to excite good thoughts and to increase devotion, and through these movements of the heart to remit venial sin’’ (Session XXII, 15). Now, water is essential to the sacrament of Baptism, and traditionally, the holy water with which people bless themselves entering the church is only a sacramental. However, if the sacrament of Baptism is defined as an ongoing encounter with Christ renewed by the subject’s embrace of the Christian life, then holy water is an extension of the Baptismal encounter. Baptism

Sacraments and Sacramentals

| 735

˜ ERA QUINCEAN Quincean ˜era means 15 years old, but also refers to a rite of passage traditionally associated with girls that age. Both its history and value are controversial. Historical theories include Aztec roots, a connection to the Mozarabic rite, and the influence of the French invasion of Mexico. Critics charge it is too extravagant or mimics marriage (even invites sexual license). However, several denominations in many countries have official ceremonies for the rite, and families frequently also include receptions, meals, and dances as part of the fiesta. Likewise, some local churches have catechetical or other requirements. Several Hispanic scholars, however, dispute the critics and value the ritual as important to their culture and that it should be passed along to the next generation. Although variously interpreted, there is general agreement that it is a moment to give thanks for the girl, renew her Christian commitment, and receive a blessing. It strengthens family bonds, especially across generations, and helps the young lady start her own social network of compadres. As a rite of passage, it demonstrates to the newly pubescent how to negotiate her role as ‘‘jo´venes’’ (youth), and for the young lady so feˆted, celebrates her contribution to the community’s survival through her potential motherhood. —KGD

may be limited to a once-only reception because it bestows what the Schoolmen called a ‘‘sacramental character,’’ but the constant use of holy water is intended to recall this Baptism. Is grace bestowed not only in the one-time Baptism, but renewed with the pious use of the sacramental? This would mark an important distinction between merely cultural and profoundly religious practices.

Current Directions for Latina/o Sacramental Theology The original impulse for contemporary Latino/a theology was the work of Virgilio Elizondo. Writing from a pastoral perspective as a theologian of Christian education, Elizondo developed his theology by exploring the pastoral experience of Mexican American devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Without employing the name ‘‘material theology,’’ he took stock of the icons, statues, and the like that characterized the religious practice of his Latina/o faithful. Elizondo uncannily infused an emerging Latino/a theology with the same perspectives that centuries before Latin American theology had developed in Baroque America: racial awareness and call to social justice. He also posited popular religious devotion as a constituent element of cultural identity, a theme present in the writings of the early twentieth century secular pensador, Jose´ Vasconcelos. While none of Elizondo’s major works constitute a sacramental theology, he has prepared the way for a ‘‘theology of sacramentals.’’ He treats the devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe—its history, its icons, its practices—as an occasion for enrichment of the Christian life. While he never has claimed that devotion to Guadalupe ‘‘causes

736 |

Sacraments and Sacramentals

grace’’ the way that sacraments do, he has reimagined this Marian devotion as an ongoing touchstone of religious encounter. Adapting the conciliar notions of religion and culture to the Mexican American circumstances, Elizondo has established the nexus between religious experience and cultural expression. I interpret him to mean that disposition for encounter with Christ on the part of many Mexican Americans often rests upon the use of sacramentals such as in Guadalupan devotion. Understood from the post-Vatican perspective of sacraments, Elizondo invites consideration of these sacramentals as initiating phases of encounter with Christ. There is not space here to elaborate on the many theological explorations of Guadalupan devotion that have further developed the work of Elizondo. Significant development of other devotions and sacramentals are from Otto Maduro, Mapas para la Fiesta, and Roberto Goizueta’s exploration of the Stations of the Cross. Most of these works consider popular religiosity to be at odds with the institutionalized church that dispenses the sacraments, echoing the dichotomy expounded by Orlando Espı´n in his interesting essay about popular religiosity as a theological source of sensus fidelium. However, the linkage of Latino/a theology to sacramental theology would require not dichotomy between popular religiosity and the sacraments, but continuity between them. The goal is expressed straightforwardly by Leonardo Boff: The sacraments are not the private property of the sacred hierarchy. They are basic constituents of human life. Faith sees grace present in the most elementary acts of life. So it ritualizes them and elevates them to the sacramental level. . . . Today’s Christians must be educated to see sacraments above and beyond the confines of the seven sacraments. As adults they should know how to enact rites that signify and celebrate the breakthrough of grace into their lives and communities. (Boff 1987, 7; 5)

Elizondo generally avoids dichotomizing the sacramentals of popular religiosity and reception of the sacraments. Indeed his unifying perspective is reflected in the volume edited by Ana Marı´a Dı´az-Stevens, Enduring Flame, which brought an interdisciplinary light to bear on the Latino/a experiences. If Latina/o theology still has a task in examining sacramental theology through the prism of the Latino/a experiences, there is an even greater need to address the meaning of syncretism with native religions and the African influences in so many Latino/a cultures. But most of the theological reflection on the role of non-Christian religions or natural sacraments examines them as separate from Christianity. Based on the premise that the Latino/a experience exhibits syncretism rather than ‘‘pure’’ native religion, the result has been little attention to Latina/os in the literature of Comparative Religion. This premise may be changing as scholars become more aware of the syncretism of all religions with each other in a global age. For some, this is a reason not to consider sacraments and grace as substantially different from cultural expression and precontact rituals. The author of Mujerista Theology, for instance, places no importance on whether a person addresses in prayer the Aztec goddess Tonantzin or Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ. However, as indicated in the complementary essays by Gustavo Benavides and Jaime Vidal in Enigmatic Flame, there seem to be grades and degrees in syncretism and syncretizing. The notion of syncretism may lead to a new line of questioning in sacramental theology in which the Latino/a experience will be central.

Sacraments and Sacramentals

| 737

References and Further Reading Boff, Leonardo. Sacraments of Life, Life of the Sacraments (Beltsville, MD: The Pastoral Press, 1987). Dı´az-Stevens, Ana Marı´a, and Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo. An Enduring Flame: Studies in Latino Popular Religiosity, Volume I in the PARAL Series (New York: Bildner Center Books, 1994). Garrigan, Siobha´n. Beyond Ritual: Sacramental Theology after Habermas (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004). Kamen, Henry. The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Osborne, Kenan B., OFM. Lay Ministry in the Roman Catholic Church: Its History and Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1993). Pe´rez y Mena, Andre´s, and Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo. Enigmatic Powers: Syncretism with African and Indigenous People´s Religions Among Latinos, Volume III in the PARAL Series (New York: Bildner Center Books, 1995). Saranyana Saranya, Josep Ignasi, Carmen Jose´ Alejos-Grau, Elisaq Luque Alcaide, Luis Martı´nez Ferrer, Ana de Zaballa Beascoechea, and Marı´a Luisa Antonaya. Teologı´a en Ame´rica Latina, vol. 1, Desde los orı´genes a la Guerra de Sucesio´n (1493–1715) (Madrid: Interamericana, 1999). Stevens-Arroyo, Anthony. ‘‘The Evolution of Marian Devotionalism Within Christianity and the Ibero-Mediterranean Polity.’’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (1998): 50–73. Stevens-Arroyo, Anthony. ‘‘A Marriage Made in America: Trent and the Baroque.’’ From Trent to Vatican II: Historical and Theological Investigations, ed. Raymond F. Bulman and Frederick J. Parrella (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

SOTERIOLOGY

Loida I. Martell-Otero Soteriology is the area of theological inquiry that examines different doctrines of salvation. This entry examines the Latino/a understanding of salvation by discussing the soteriologies of Roman Catholic and evange´lico/a scholars. Specifically, the entry begins with Orlando E. Costas and Virgilio P. Elizondo whose early works led to a renewed resurgence of Latino/a theologies. Throughout their writing careers they developed specific Christological themes from a Latino/a perspective that have soteriological implications. Then briefly discussed are the Christologies of Justo L. Gonza´lez and Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az whose later works on ancillary themes, including Trinitarian theology, pneumatology, and eschatology provide further insights about salvation. The brevity of this entry precludes an adequate presentation of the research of many other Latino/a scholars relevant to this topic. However, some of their findings that hold promise in the development of a clearer conceptualization of the doctrines of salvation that prevail in the Latina/o communities of faith are discussed. The entry concludes with a summary of the common soteriological themes that function as a basis for Latino/a views of salvation.

Orlando E. Costas A Puerto Rican missiologist and pastor-scholar, Costas was the first Latino/a to serve as the academic dean of an accredited theological school in the United States. From the start of his career in the late 1970s until his untimely death in 1987, Costas’s overriding passion was evangelization; that is, the communication of the ‘‘good news.’’ This good news entailed God’s work of grace to save humanity from the power of sin and death. For Costas, salvation means bringing life, particularly to the places where death and injustice reign. It is a holistic process that involves personal and structural transformation. Costas believed that salvation is represented by the biblical rubric of the Reign of God, a new kind of society that is life-giving. It is a way of life that offers justice, peace, and shalom, particularly to the oppressed and marginalized. While the Reign and salvation are gifts of God—an act of divine grace—Costas never implied that humankind was simply a passive recipient of salvation. He believed that 739

740 |

Soteriology

humanity must play an active role. He perceived this role through the act of conversion. Conversion is the aspect of salvation that entails a process of personal and social transformation engendered by the Holy Spirit that leads people to struggle actively on behalf of the voiceless and powerless of society. One cannot claim to be saved and live indifferent to pain and death in the world. Thus for Costas an integral aspect of salvation is the God-given, Spirit-empowered ability to be agents of change and to struggle on behalf of those who cry out for justice. Costas believed that Jesus Christ is God’s means of salvation for the world. Jesus is saving as a marginalized poor man, a Galilean Jew who came to bring good news first and foremost to the ‘‘least of these’’—the voiceless and powerless poor of the world. They are the ‘‘sinned against,’’ described in the gospel as ‘‘the multitudes.’’ Costas claimed that the multitudes are found today throughout the world. They are considered ‘‘nobodies’’ and live within a context of death as part of their everyday lives. According to Costas, Jesus’ presence among them was an intentional salvific act of God: God resides in the margins. Through his ministry, Jesus brings life, healing, and humanization to their lives. He makes of the nobodies ‘‘somebodies.’’ However, Costas was careful to note that while Jesus directs his primary focus to the multitudes, it is not his only focus. The people in the centers of power who are caught up in a matrix of death-dealing structural sin must also be given new life and humanized. Costas believed that Jesus’ death on the cross was the result of his ministry on behalf of the victims of injustice and his effort to confront sinful social structures. In this event, once again, one can perceive God’s saving presence amid the suffering and forgotten of the world. Jesus could have walked away from the suffering, but instead ‘‘died outside the gate’’ where he remains, faithful to those who are outside the gates of justice and life (Hebrews 13:12–13). In so doing, he emptied the ‘‘powers and principalities’’ of their authority and overcame the power of sin and death. Costas interpreted Jesus’ resurrection as God’s rejection of hate, injustice, sin, and death. It was God’s affirmation of Jesus’ ministry of faithful love for the nobodies. Even here Costas understood that Jesus remains faithful to the marginalized. The resurrected Christ called the marginalized to Galilee, and issued there an invitation for them to become part of an eschatological community. It was at the margins of Galilee that they were empowered by the Spirit to go out as emissaries of the Reign. The nobodies have now become ‘‘somebodies’’ in God and for God. Thus God’s new order of life, the Reign of God, entered human history through the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Holy Spirit also plays an important role in Costas’s soteriology. The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, and therefore the Spirit’s mission is closely related to Jesus’ ministry. In this sense, the Spirit is deeply incarnational: the Spirit is present in human history, acting in the lives of persons to humanize them and transform them. Furthermore, the Spirit acts in the world, saving creation from death and decay. Costas considered the Spirit to be the One who empowers believers, transforming them to become a proleptic community that begins to anticipate God’s eschatological telos for all. They collaborate with the Spirit by becoming active agents for change, working on behalf of the marginalized and powerless and against oppressive social structures. Thus Costas’s

Soteriology

| 741

soteriology becomes a Trinitarian endeavor in light of the incorporation of this pneumatological (and eschatological) dimension.

Virgilio P. Elizondo Elizondo is a Roman Catholic priest and theological scholar who contributed to the reinvigoration of Latina/o theologies with the publication of Galilean Journey: The Mexican American Promise in 1983, a distillation of his earlier doctoral work. He broke ground with two specific contributions in this book. The first was his particular theological method in which he reinterpreted the gospel through the lens of Mexican American culture, and the second was his use of mestizaje as a theological paradigm. This allowed Elizondo to reevaluate Christology and Guadalupana theology, through the lens of mestizaje. For Elizondo, Jesus is a mestizo Galilean Jew, rejected by those in power who considered him both cultically impure and culturally compromised. As one so rejected by the ruling religious and political powers of his day, Jesus’ very life and ministry express God’s salvific intentions for humankind. According to Elizondo, God became flesh as a rejected one to demonstrate God’s rejection of rejection. In Jesus Christ, God extends a call of fellowship to all who are marginalized because they are somehow perceived to be impure. Elizondo perceives in the Paschal events further evidence of God’s love for the rejected and marginalized impure. Those deemed to be religiously pure and part of the cultural/political elite reject Jesus’ call to change the structural injustices of his time and are instrumental in his death. In raising Jesus from the dead, God reveals that the pure are, in fact, impure. Elizondo views in these events a reaffirmation of God’s acceptance of the marginalized impure, particularly of the rejected mestizos/as of the world. Thus Jesus is saving because he is God-incarnate-asmestizo, a marginalized person who has come to bring a word of acceptance to the oppressed mestizas/os of his day and to confront the oppressive religious and political powers. For Elizondo, Jesus is also saving as God’s resurrected One who brings a message of loving acceptance to the rejected while empowering them with a mission. They are called to be prophetic agents of change who confront the sinful social structures that marginalize those perceived to be impure. These same themes are present in Elizondo’s theology of la Virgen de Guadalupe/ the Virgen of Guadalupe. According to Mexican and Mexican American tradition, the Virgin appeared to the Amerindian, Juan Diego, on December 9, 1531—a decade after the final stages of the conquest of the Americas. Rather than appear in the guise of a white European, or as an Aztec deity, the Virgin appeared to Diego as a mestiza —a brown-complexioned woman with symbols in her dress that represented European Christian understanding of God, as well as Aztec religious beliefs. Elizondo sees in this important person the affirmation of a new mestiza people that have arisen from the ashes of the conquest. In la Virgen, God neither rejects totally the Christian beliefs of the conquistadores nor does God fully embrace them. Similarly, there is neither a total rejection of Aztec religiosity nor a total acceptance. Rather, for Elizondo, she embodies a divine acceptance and valuation of the mestizo realities that arise from the clash of these two worlds. Furthermore, Elizondo believes that God reaches out

742 |

Soteriology

Statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe appearing to Juan Diego, Indians, and Bishop. The statue is located at the Guadalupe Shrine in Mexico, where the Virgin Mary allegedly appeared to Juan Diego. (William Perry/Dreamstime)

through la Morenita (the Brown Virgin) to the marginalized Juan Diegos of the world who have been rejected by the political and religious powers of the day. Once again, in and through la Virgen, God asserts God’s abiding presence in the midst of the rejected and oppressed, while confronting those in power with their complicity in supporting social sinful structures. Through these two important mestizo/a persons, Elizondo asserts God’s love for the mestizas/os of the world, who are often the poor, forgotten, and disempowered of the world. Furthermore, Elizondo sees in Christ and in la Virgen an important eschatological motif. As mestizos, they represent God’s purpose to unite the cosmos into a diverse whole. Fragmentation and division are sinful realities that contradict this purpose. Elizondo claims that mestizos/as are also ‘‘eschatological’’ figures because in their very existence they represent a message of God to the world. In their very being, they are an announcement of ‘‘good news’’ (gospel) of holistic healing and salvation for the world, as well as a denouncement of human structures that divide, disempower, and dehumanize.

Justo L. González Gonza´lez is a Cuban-born evange´lico historian and theologian. In Man˜ana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (1990), he discusses important theological themes interpreted through the lens of Latino/a experiences of mestizaje, marginality,

Soteriology

| 743

and poverty. This allows him, for example, to reconsider the doctrine of the Trinity beyond traditional static formulas and to reflect upon its socioeconomic implications. According to Gonza´lez, just as God is three Persons who share equally the divine substance so that they are now One, as a society we are called to share our resources among all of creation. We are to live out the imago Dei by imitating God’s ‘‘forotherness’’ and loving spirit of sharing. The incarnation is also of paramount importance for Gonza´lez’s theology. The incarnation reveals to us that God is not a distant God of ontological formulation and intellectual reflection, but rather is the God of Jesus who is present before the cries of the suffering in human history. Jesus was a poor carpenter, and as such, demonstrates to us that God is not on the side of the powerful of the world, but has come to reside in the midst of the poor and the oppressed. For Gonza´lez, the incarnation demonstrates that God ‘‘speaks Spanish’’—that is to say, that God is the God of those rejected as ‘‘other.’’ He believes that this insight about God’s identification with the rejected, the oppressed, and the poor was lost or distorted in the various Christological positions ultimately rejected by the early Church. Although rejected, Gonza´lez insists that these positions should be remembered because they continue to tempt the contemporary world. For example, the disempowered are often tempted to fall into the Gnostic error of seeking to escape the oppressive evils of an unjust world, rather than seek social change. The resolution of the Christological controversies led to the assertion of Jesus’ full humanity and full divinity. Gonza´lez believes that to lose sight of either side of this dialectic is to lose sight of the fullness of God’s salvation for all, particularly for the oppressed. Gonza´lez continuously affirms two foundational principles: the theological importance of the incarnation, and God’s active presence amid the oppressed. The incarnation reveals God to us. It is not a passing event, but is constitutive of the very identity of God. It is because of the incarnation that Christianity can affirm that God is present in human history. It is because of who Jesus was, and what Jesus did that Christianity can affirm that God is on the side of the poor and marginalized. This incarnational emphasis in conjunction with Gonza´lez’s Trinitarian theology underscores the profound, but sometimes forgotten soteriological principle that it is God who saves through Jesus Christ. Gonza´lez affirms that the incarnation not only reveals who God is for us, but also who we are intended to be for God and others. It reveals that we are called to be like God, to share, to love, and to be ‘‘for-others.’’ Just as the Trinitarian God is relational, so we are called to be in loving relations, with God and with each other. One could say that for Gonza´lez, salvation is a process of humanization: to become more like God, we are called to be what God created us to be. We are called to be human beings in a world that seeks to take away our very humanity. It is clear through Gonza´lez’s discussion of Trinity and Christology that salvation is not a privatized or individualized event. This soteriological view is especially underscored in his understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the One who makes all things new, transforming sinful nature to make all of creation what it is not. Gonza´lez describes the Holy Spirit as the power of the future because the Spirit allows us to see the new order that God is bringing forth. This new order is the Reign

744 |

Soteriology

of God, which Gonza´lez calls the Reign of love. It is not a spatial reality, but a temporal one; it is not a different place, but a different way of living. According to Gonza´lez, the Spirit not only empowers us to envision this new way of being, the Spirit also transforms us so that we begin to live this new reality today. When we live today in light of the promise of this different reality, we live as a man˜ana (tomorrow) people. While Gonza´lez does not explicitly state it in quite the same way, one could infer that for him, the oppressed are made human in an inhumane society through Jesus so that they can live as agents of change, empowered by the Spirit to be a man˜ana people who live a new reality and struggle on behalf of that new reality in the present.

Ada María Isasi-Díaz One of the concerns for Latina scholars is that theologies articulated by their male colleagues at times fail to consider seriously the situations of oppression suffered by women. Latinas live under the quadruple oppression of race, culture, class, and gender. They are poor women who are treated often as if they had no intrinsic value. Latina feministas such as Marı´a Pilar Aquino and mujeristas such as Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az are concerned that theologies that emphasize ‘‘for-otherness’’ could only be more oppressive to women whose very cultures emphasize service to the other, often at the expense of their own well-being. Latina scholars often have argued that the questions of Latinas, particularly those of grassroots women, arise from the concerns about the well-being of their familias and communities, and out of their daily struggles (la lucha) for survival. Isasi-Dı´az is a Cuban Roman Catholic social ethicist who has dedicated her scholarly work to mujerista theology—which grants a privileged status to the experience of grassroots Latina women. Mujerista theology advocates for the liberation of oppressed Latina women and communities through the elaboration of a proyecto histo´rico/a historical project. In La Lucha Continues: Mujerista Theology (2004), she expounds on the socioethical themes related to this proyecto as well as to mujerista understandings of lo cotidiano, Christology, and reconciliation. For Isasi-Dı´az, lo cotidiano is an essential component of how women do theology because it represents the space where the oppressed live and experience God. It is not a theological paradigm per se, but rather an epistemological tool. It represents a liminal space where macrostructures—religious, political, and socioeconomic—meet the material realities of grassroots women, and where one can determine if structural change has resulted in a liberative and just world for the marginalized. According to Isasi-Dı´az, salvation must be experienced as a historical reality at the level of lo cotidiano. Salvation is reconciliation. Reconciliation entails the healing of broken relations between humanity and God and among human beings. It is integrally related to justice. Isasi-Dı´az defines injustice as all that separates us. Where there is injustice, there cannot be reconciliation, that is, the overcoming of broken relations. Therefore, injustice must be overcome so that God’s presence can then be perceived in the midst of community and community formed. Isasi-Dı´az believes that reconciliation is both a present task and future project, and therefore an intrinsic part of the

Soteriology

| 745

proyecto histo´rico—the struggle for a just society and for humane living under oppressive conditions. The fruit of reconciliation is embodied in what Isasi-Dı´az has referred to as the ‘‘Kin-dom’’ of God. She rejects ‘‘kingdom’’ language as an inappropriate metaphor that only sustains patriarchal values. The term ‘‘kin-dom’’ underscores that God calls us to be in interdependent relations with one another and with God. It also underscores that God is a personal God, rather than a distant and indifferent one. For Isasi-Dı´az, the Kin-dom is a metaphor that reminds us that liberation must take place at all dimensions of life. God’s shalom must be experienced at the personal level (lo cotidiano) as well as the macrostructural level. Liberation must be spiritual as well as social, personal as well as political. Furthermore, Isasi-Dı´az claims that the notion of Kin-dom supports the reconstitution of familia. The Kin-dom is a familia unlike the so-called nuclear family often celebrated in the United States and other First World countries. Rather, it is God’s extended family, where everyone can experience ‘‘being at home.’’ While Isasi-Dı´az considers Jesus Christ to be a mediator of the Kin-dom, she does not consider him its sole mediator. Noting that his name, Jesucristo, argues against facile dichotomies between his humanity (Jesus) and his divinity (Christ), Isasi-Dı´az insists that a serious Christology needs to consider him as the full expression of what is human. This is what his life and ministry communicated, and therefore it is how he mediated the Kin-dom. However, precisely because his mediation is an expression of his full humanity and part of being fully human is being in community, she argues that Mary and the disciples are also mediators of the Kin-dom. They are mediators because they not only learned from Jesucristo, they were also the teachers of his religious and cultural traditions. The mediating role of Jesus’ community allows IsasiDı´az to conclude that they too are ‘‘Christs.’’ Indeed, she asserts that anyone who lives and proclaims the Kin-dom is a mediator and therefore a Christ. In so doing, she does not consider that this diminishes Jesucristo’s uniqueness, nor does it diffuse each ‘‘Christ’s’’ essential role since each person carries within a seed of the divine, the imago Dei, which is necessary for the unfolding of the Kin-dom. The oppressed in particular become mediators of the Kin-dom when they refuse to lose hope in the face of overwhelming injustice, and when they demand that unjust social structures change rather than be complicit within such sinful systems. Others become mediators to the degree that they press on for justice and liberation and create structures in which everyone can live fully. For Isasi-Dı´az, this encapsulates what salvation means.

Continuing the Dialogue The four scholars discussed so far are not the only Latinas/os with important insights about salvation. While space does not allow a full discussion, it is important to note some key voices and their avenues of research that hold much promise in articulating Latina/o doctrines of salvation. Any conversation about salvation must take into consideration the contributions of Latina scholars. In addition to the contributions of mujerista theology discussed in the previous section, mention must be made of such Latina Catholic feministas as Marı´a Pilar Aquino, Jeanette Rodrı´guez, Carmen Marie Nanko-Ferna´ndez, and others

746 |

Soteriology

whose scholarly work is dedicated to the liberation of oppressed poor women and men. As such, their theologies are inherently soteriological in nature. Their contributions encompass areas such as cross-cultural dialogue to articulate a liberating paradigm for oppressed women, Guadalupana theology and its liberating motifs, and immigration issues and their impact on the Latino/a community. Latina evange´lica scholars such as Daisy L. Machado, Nora O. Lozano-Dı´az, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Zaida Maldonado-Pe´rez, and Loida I. Martell-Otero have offered constructive critiques of traditions that have proven to be oppressive for women and marginalized communities. They have reconceptualized notions of suffering, proposed new Trinitarian paradigms, and revisited the importance testimonios. Thus, these evange´licas have deepened the understanding of salvation for the Latino/a community of faith. Catholic Latino scholars such as Orlando O. Espı´n and Roberto S. Goizueta have contributed to the soteriological dialogue with their proposals about the pneumatological role of Mary and the communal role of saints. Evange´lico theologians such as Eldin Villafan˜e and Samuel Soliva´n have explored the liberating aspects of pneumatology in Pentecostal views of salvation, while others such as Luı´s G. Pedraja have provided a Christological analysis through the lens of Latina/o experience.

Summary and Conclusion: Latina/o Soteriology Among the different discourses about salvation from a Latina/o perspective, one can perceive some consistent themes. To begin with, most or all of the theologians discussed above understand that salvation is from God. It is important to underscore this aspect given the tendency among some Christian communities to distort this theological insight, and caricature a wrathful God whom Christ has come to appease on our behalf. For Latinas/os, implicitly it is the Trinitarian God who is present as part of the divine familia. Therefore, it is God who seeks to protect those who are desprovisto (deprived) of societal protections. Another common theme that is consistently raised is that the incarnation has theological as well as the soteriological implications. The affirmation that God would enter into human history through God’s enfleshment as a poor, marginalized (mestizo) person, Jesus Christ, whose ministry is dedicated to those marginalized in his time is a statement about who God is and what God represents vis-a`-vis the Latina/o community. It is incarnational not only in the sense of God’s presence in and through this historical person, but also in the sense that God’s salvation is actualized in human history in contextually specific ways. God is the One who stands on behalf of those abandoned by society in order to liberate them and transform the social structures that lead to their deaths. The insistence that there are real soteriological implications in the Christian affirmation of the enfleshment of the divine presence within a given sociohistorical locus allows Latina/o theologians to claim that God is also present in the ministry of the Holy Spirit, Mary, and the saints. Isasi-Dı´az goes as far as to claim that this incarnate presence is manifest in each of us. Thus Latina/o scholars reaffirm God’s communal nature, as well as God’s real presence amid community, for the re-creation of a diversely holistic community.

Soteriology

| 747

This communal emphasis is critical for defining salvation from a Latino/o perspective. The Latina/o theologians discussed in this entry tend to understand sin in terms of oppressive social structures that have caused irreparable harm to the Latina/o community. The sinful realities of racism, cultural/ethnic discrimination, sexism, and political, economic, and social exploitation have led to the rupture of community. Since this is a people whose identity derives from being community, their very humanity is distorted and denied. They become invisible and peripheral, with no voice or power. Salvation therefore entails two crucial events: the humanization of the dehumanized and the re-formation of community. Salvation is more than just a cosmic fix to a problem, however. While liberation from oppression is one dimension, it is not the only dimension that defines salvation. There is an aspect to salvation that is proactive: it entails becoming ‘‘somebody’’ with a vocation that inheres with God’s eschatological vision. Latinos/as are transformed by God in order to go forth and be prophetic agents of change. We are called to proclaim the good news that God has broken the barriers that separate humanity from God, human beings from each other, and humankind from God’s creation. We are called to become an intimate part of the divine familia and become a hospitable place of healing for those found homeless because of oppressive social structures. We are called to live out a new order of life, one that is defined by love, compassion, respect, and hope. We are saved to become a ‘‘light unto the world’’ and brothers and sisters in the Reign of God. Salvation is thus an act of loving grace from God for humanity, and a vocation of love from us to God and for all of God’s creation.

References and Further Reading Conde-Frazier, Elizabeth. ‘‘Hispanic Protestant Spirituality.’’ Teologı´a en Conjunto: A Collaborative Hispanic Protestant Theology, ed. Jose´ David Rodrı´guez and Loida I. MartellOtero (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997). Costas, Orlando E. Liberating News: A Theology of Contextual Evangelization (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1989). Elizondo, Virgilio. Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000). Gonza´lez, Justo L. Man˜ana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a. La Lucha Continues: Mujerista Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004). Martell-Otero, Loida I. ‘‘Of Satos and Saints: Salvation from the Periphery.’’ Perspectivas 4 (Summer 2001): 7–38. Martell-Otero, Loida I. Liberating News: An Emerging U.S. Hispanic/Latina Soteriology of Crossroads (PhD diss., Fordham University, 2005). Pedraja, Luı´s G. Jesus Is My Uncle: Christology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999). Villafan˜e, Eldin. The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993).

SPIRITUALITY

Gilberto Cavazos-González Spirituality—the word conjures up many thoughts in our contemporary Western world. To some, spirituality is the essence of human existence; to others, it is a ‘‘New Age’’ encounter with the occult or a form of curanderismo (faith healing). Yet to others, spirituality is the traditional devotional practice of some ancient religion, and finally to some academics it is a field of theology, somewhat akin to psychology. This academic field facilitates distinguishing between various spiritualities and between different ways of understanding spirituality. This entry will consider the history of the field, the corazo´n (heart) and arte (art) of spirituality and lastly look at some characteristics of Latina/o spirituality(ies).

Historical Development Many people claim to be spiritual, but what that means seems to vary from person to person. Sadly, spirituality is a much used and often misunderstood term. The English word ‘‘spirituality’’ has existed since the 1930s and became a part of the general parlance in the late 1950s. On the other hand, the Spanish equivalent espiritualidad has existed since the sixteenth century. It too has, however, only recently become a part of the general parlance. Very few Hispanic spiritual writers over the centuries have used the term ‘‘espiritualidad,’’ preferring to speak instead of ‘‘union with God,’’ the ‘‘life of perfection,’’ justification, sanctification, piety, devotion, mystica, and even popular religiosity. The great Spanish mystics Teresa de Avila and Juan de la Cruz did not use the term. This is probably due to the long and convoluted history of the Latin term spiritualitas from which both the Spanish ‘‘espiritualidad’’ and the English ‘‘spirituality’’ take their origin. As an academic science, spirituality is less than a century old and its initial manifestation as spiritual theology only dates back to the seventeenth century when scholars separated it from systematic theology. At that time spirituality as the lived expression of one’s theological belief became generally studied as a part of moral theology. Its supernatural component was studied as mystical theology.

749

750 |

Spirituality

Carmen Quintero sings at a Spanish Easter service at the Primitive Christian Church in New York City. A growing number of Latino/as are turning to Protestant denominations, particularly Pentecostal and Evangelical, finding the worship styles and Hispanic pulpit leadership is a better fit for their spiritual needs. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)

The term ‘‘spirituality’’ is a Christian term that was invented in the fifth century when a Christian leader exhorted the newly baptized to behave in a manner consistent with their baptism. He told them that like all Christians they are expected to act and grow in spritualitas. It is uncertain as to who wrote the exhortation, but some believe it might have originated in heretical circles. Still, with this new term, the adjective spiritualis becomes the subject ‘‘spiritualitas’’ that one can act and grow in. Patristic writers slowly began to use this new concept and eventually began to write about ways in which one could progress spiritually in their cotidiano (day-to-day life). At the time, spirituality was theology, because theology was the pastoral care of the faithful. ‘‘Until the Middle Ages all theology was spiritual theology, or the reflection of one’s experience of faith, and it found expression in liturgy, scripture, private prayer, and pastoral experience’’ (Conde-Frazier 1997, 125). By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, theology slowly became more scholastic and moved away from a pastoral focus. Scholastic theology preferred to study the relationship between faith and the critical understanding of faith and became considerably more dogmatic and doctrinal. In the thirteenth century Bonaventure, the mystical theologian, and other spiritual writers tried to reconcile the lived experience of faith with scholastic theology. However, by the fourteenth century, theology and spirituality became separate fields of interest. Theology was interested in objective doctrines that can be derived

Spirituality

| 751

MAL DE OJO The Spanish term ‘‘Mal de Ojo’’ means ‘‘evil eye,’’ an expression common in most cultures and ancient civilizations. A glance is believed to inflict harm on whom it falls, especially when the person casting it has intentions such as envy and jealousy. Children are considered particularly susceptible. The Greeks and the Romans had comparable expressions describing the same phenomenon, ‘‘baskania’’ and ‘‘fascinum,’’ respectively. Various amulets were thought to ward off the evil eye, for example, the Eye of Horus among the Egyptians. The Bible encourages protection against people with the evil eye (Proverbs 23:6–8). Among Hispanics, the evil eye is commonly diagnosed by curanderos or folk healers, and symptoms may include distress, sleep disturbance, diarrhea, vomiting, and/or fever. Treatment is holistic, addressing physical, spiritual, and psychological components. It can include the use of herbal remedies, religious rituals, or ceremonial cleansing. For instance, the use of an egg and herbs on the body of the afflicted person is believed to extract the evil influences. Preventive measures to protect against evil eye may include prayers, the sign of the cross on vulnerable children, and the use of holy water, incantations, and/or amulets. —FAO & KGD

and understood from divine revelation while spiritual writers turned instead to the subjective knowledge of faith as lived reality. Until the Council of Trent during the sixteenth century theology had been one science, but the demands of the modern period led to its being separated into distinct disciplines of study. Dogmatic or systematic theology came to study the mystery of God’s life and the economy of salvation. Moral theology studied how these theological beliefs could lead one to a moral life free of sin and pleasing to God. The sixteenth century was a dynamic time for the development of Latino/a spirituality. Several things were happening concurrently that were bound to influence how Hispanics do spirituality. The Latin term ‘‘spiritualitas’’ was translated into Italian and Spanish in order to write treatises in the vernacular meant to help pastors and other spiritual leaders develop the laity’s interest in the life of perfection and union with God. As European universities were dividing theology into various disciplines, the Spanish were setting up universities and schools in America to teach these varied disciplines. The Christian community was being divided by the Protestant and Catholic reformations, and the Spanish were running their infamous Inquisition. At the same time, Spain was in the midst of its Golden Age of Christian mysticism as a result of the Catholic reformation movements. This age gave birth to various schools of spirituality: the Franciscan Recollect movement, the Ignatian spiritual exercises, and the Carmelite way to union with God. These spiritual schools influenced how Latin Americans were being Christianized and how moral theology was developing. In the seventeenth century moral theology developed the subscience of spiritual theology as a way of studying how Christians could avoid sin and live a just and holy life. While moral theology considered universal techniques for human action in view of

752 |

Spirituality

MAL AIRE ‘‘Mal aire’’ literally means ‘‘bad or evil air.’’ It can also be referred to as mal viento, ‘‘bad wind.’’ Mal aire is a metaphysical disease caused by God, gods, or spirits. The term can either refer to a current of cold air that can carry and spread disease-causing germs or it can refer to bad spirit(s) that can invade the body and bring forth illness or bad fortune. Mal aire can be seen as the cause of anything from the common cold to cancer. It can occur due to excessive heat resulting from a fever or through heavy work or exercise. Mal aire can also be caused by excessive coldness, brought about by a draft or by water. For example, one way of getting mal aire is by too much outdoor walking either early in the cold morning or late at night. Another way of getting mal aire is by walking through a cemetery. Children are more susceptible to mal aire. Mal aire can be diagnosed by curandero/as or other folk healers who can then prescribe a healing. It can be treated by either an herbal remedy, a limpieza (ceremonial cleaning), and/or a ritual. —MAD

morality and ethics, spiritual theology considered the via (way/path), practices, and orientations that influence spiritual growth. At this time the French school translated ‘‘spiritualitas’’ into spiritualite` in order to speak of faith, hope, charity, love, abandon, respect, devotion, worship, venerations, piety, etc., in the life of the believer seeking perfection. The Spanish schools of spirituality (Franciscan Recollect, Ignatian Exercises, and Carmelite Reform) took seriously the psychological factor of the believer in his/her spiritual growth, and this led to spiritual theology’s study of the subjective dimension of Christian life. The spiritual journey conditioned by the objective mysteries of divine revelation as put forth by Biblical, Dogmatic, and Moral theologies came to be seen as intimately bound to the individual dispositions of the believer. Supernatural grace/ revelation impregnates the soul of the believer and develops in her/him as per his/her age, gender, psychological makeup, culture, and economic and social situation in life. During the 1800s, spiritual theology was studied as ascetical and mystical theology, the theology of perfection, and the theology of the spiritual life. It was considered ‘‘the theological science that studies the progressive development of Christian life, which is to say the life of grace animated by the dynamic impulse to attain perfect sanctity, under the life-giving action of the Holy Spirit’’ (della Trinita, 464). Like every academic discipline, spiritual theology has a subject of study that is (1) the life of grace (given to us in baptism) and (2) the spiritual life (the Holy Spirit in the believer). Spiritual theology is meant to study the agent of sanctification infused by God in the baptized and how it is meant to grow and develop personally and communally (cf. 1 Titus 4:1; Timothy 4:15; 1 Corinthians 9:24; Philippians 3:12–14; Ephesians 4:15–16). It studies the progressive and developmental stages of the spiritual life (of grace) as it is led by the Triune God, especially the Holy Spirit. It highlights the dogmatic principles involved, the laws that govern it, its successive stages, functions,

Spirituality

| 753

and psychological conditions, its various aspects/manifestations, and its ultimate aspiration/goal (cf. della Trinita, 466). Spiritual theology focused on studying the interior life or the life of perfection to discern methods of ‘‘normal’’ spiritual growth in comparison with the special ‘‘way’’ of the great mystics. This in turn led to the study of the need for ascetical practices and/or mystical experience in the Christian spiritual journey. In this latter development the life of the Christian as ‘‘life in the Spirit’’ became an object of study and theological discourse. This life was brought into conversation with the dogmatic discourse of theological anthropology and morality with a view of growth in virtue, especially charity (cf. Moioli 1597–1609). Spiritual theology has a speculative-deductive methodology, which considers the principles of Christian life to be sanctifying grace, infused virtues, charism of the Spirit, relationships with supernatural entities, and relationship between spiritual growth and beatific vision. Contemporary Latina/o spirituality is still very much influenced by this look to the supernatural in the cotidiano. The speculative-deductive methodology of spiritual theology references history and experience as part of theological discourse as another way of studying the cotidiano of Christian spiritual experience. In this way a new method began that tied theological method to the methods of empirical sciences, especially that of psychology. In the late nineteenth century, spiritual theology slowly grew to consider not only the theological sciences but also the social sciences as conversation partners in the study of the Christian spiritual life. This new development led to the writing of French manuals of spiritual theology in the 1920s. These led to the origin of a new theological discipline called Spirituality. With the translation of Pierre Pourrat’s La spiritualite´ Chre´tienne (1918–1928) and Adolphe Tanquerey’s La Vie Spirituelle (1923–1931) ‘‘spiritualitas’’ was finally translated into the English word ‘‘spirituality.’’ After the promulgation of Pius IX’s Constitution Deus scientiarum Dominus (1931), Catholic universities began to include spiritual theology or ascetics and mysticism not just as special or auxiliary disciplines but as a critical reflection on the lived experience of the faith that would then be brought into conversation with other theological disciplines, especially with moral theology. Iacobo Heerinckx published an important manual on spiritual theology entitled Introductio in Theologiam Spiritualem (Taurini-Romae 1931). This seminal work gathered the developments of this new theological discipline and focused on the content of the discipline: The spiritual itinerary and its three stages. Taking his cue from Pseudo-Dionysius, Bonaventure, and the Spanish mystics, he studied the Purgative Way, the Illuminative Way, and the Unitive Way. The Christian Spiritual Life, as the Spanish mystics had taught, is not so much a static reality as it is a journey or a pilgrimage with stages of development as one moves from sin to life. In this itinerary, the theologian can distinguish theologically valid criteria for the maturation process of Christian life. Since the 1930s spiritual theology has reflected on a speculative reading of spiritual documents in conjunction with the lived experience of individual Christians confronting theory with praxis. As a result, it has individuated not only a general Christian spirituality but Christian spiritualities, particular ways in which individuals, movements, schools of thought, ethnic groups, and others integrate Christian values in a

754 |

Spirituality

LIMPIAS Limpias are ceremonies of spiritual cleansing and ‘‘letting go’’ that have been part of indigenous tradition since before European contact, and are performed by a curandera/ o, healer, who brushes off the person to be healed with herbs, feathers, flowers, or other medicine. The curandera/o knows the qualities of plants such as salvia, hierba de burro, Chiantzotzolli, hierba martina, and hierba negra. S/he prepares tinctures, incorporates ritual and prayer, and might even make referrals. Limpias may also include platicas in which the healer assists a person in talking through his or her needs or a temezcal, a traditional sweat lodge involving prayer and song and using hot stones or Tatas and abuelita/os, to generate heat when water is poured over them or sprinkled on them with herbs such as mint and rosemary. Limpias are often combined with Christian prayer as a legacy of syncretism that made possible the survival of a living tradition. Typical is the Otomi combination of crosses, St. Michael the Archangel, St. James, the four cardinal directions, and winds, sacrifice, military conquest, and the ancestors. Similarly, Conchero velaciones combine Christian saints and hymns with the four directions, copal, the building of altars to Aztec deities, culminating in flower limpias. —MVS

lived manner according to their different circumstances in life. In this case it seems that the discipline Spirituality needs to continue studying how the traditional sources of Christian spirituality (Sacred Scripture, Liturgy, Christian Anthropology, Mysticism, the tension between Incarnation and Eschatology, etc.) are integrated or not by contemporary Christian spiritualities and how these traditional sources inform the lived Christian experience. This is done through a method of study that brings the discipline Spirituality into conversation with both theological disciplines and empirical sciences. As previously mentioned, the English word ‘‘spirituality’’ became a popular word in the latter half of the twentieth century. At the same time Christians came to realize that all humans have spirituality and that just as there is a Christian spirituality, there are Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist spiritualities (to name a few). This openness to the reality of non-Christian spiritualities has led Spiritualogians (theologians who specialize in the study of Spirituality) to be more serious about the reality of a variety of Christian spiritualities that stem from founders of spiritual schools, states of life, and even cultures. Spanish Catholicism was instrumental in the development of much of contemporary Christian Spirituality through is missionaries and mystics. These gave rise to much of the missionary spirituality that dominated the past five centuries of Christian evangelization. It also has led to Christian interest in prayer and mystical experience. However, it is only since spiritual theology gave way to Spirituality that we can speak of a Hispanic spirituality and a multiplicity of Latino/a spiritualities. All of this history leads to the varied ways in which spirituality is understood in our contemporary societies. Spiritualogians have determined four ways in which spirituality is understood: (1) ontological: spirituality is the whole of the human experience

Spirituality

| 755

SUSTO Susto is a spiritual imbalance or illness recognized by curanderos (some of whom describe it as ‘‘soul loss’’) and even contemporary psychiatrists (who label it a ‘‘culturebound syndrome’’). Susto is commonly recognized across all of Latin America where there is considerable agreement about causes and symptoms. Causes are fright or shock from an ambient source (e.g., witnessing a tragedy), and symptoms include trembling, crying, insomnia, and agitation. Although not a chronic illness, susto is acute and even fatal: it requires remedy. The best place for treatment is home or church, but although most healers agree on prayer, other kinds of cures differ especially by ethnicity (e.g., cleansings). Some believe susto is an ethnosomatic illness, that is, a culturally acceptable way for persons overwhelmed by circumstances to find a recognized respite (and recovery) that might otherwise be denied them due to the responsibilities of gender or social role. Certainly pastors can appreciate that a person’s emotional, biomedical, and spiritual dimensions are neither unrelated nor unaffected by gender and social roles. And since prayer is virtually always part of the cure, openness to this experience and sensitivity to its cultural components is helpful to good ministry whenever a congregant complains of susto. —FAO & KGD

because in various religious anthropologies human beings have a spirit and a soul as well as a body; (2) existential: spirituality is experienced in various ordinary and special ways, especially through relationships with others, particularly the transcendent or ‘‘divine Other’’; (3) communal: spirituality is formulated in the traditions and/or tradition of a people’s culture and/or religion; and finally (4) discipline: spirituality is a theological science or branch of learning that studies the phenomenon of a person’s or community’s spiritual reality and experience (cf. Downey 1997, 42–43). In a similar vein, Gustavo Gutie´rrez sees the development of Christian spirituality in three stages: (1) existential: life-changing experiences of certain saints and heroes; (2) communal: doctrines, devotions, art, schools of thought, and traditions that come from the community’s assimilation of these experiences; and (3) formational: the development of new ways of being Christian (1983, 52–53). Downey and Gutie´rrez’s understandings are not meant to be hierarchical, but rather descriptive of the way in which people speak of spirituality. Spiritualogians also understand that spirituality is a ‘‘self-implicating discipline’’ (cf. Frohlich 2001, 65–78), meaning that since the scholar participates in the field of study s/he cannot be completely separated from his/her subject of study.

Corazón: Spirituality According to the Real Academia Espan˜ola (RAE: Royal Academy of Spanish), espiritualidad (spirituality) is defined as that which is of a ‘‘spiritual’’ nature or condition and as the ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and/or inclinations related to the ‘‘spiritual life.’’

756 |

Spirituality

The key to understanding spirituality is to be found in the definition of espiritual (spiritual). Spiritual, from the Latin spiritualis, identifies those things related to the spirit. ‘‘Spiritual’’ people are seen as sensitive, religious, mystical, or idealistic people or persons not interested in material things. In keeping with the RAE, spiritual people are those who prefer the espı´ritu (spirit) to matter. But, what is espı´ritu? In chemistry, spirit is the subtle vapors that come from wine and liquor or the purest and the most subtle substances that can be extracted from plants and other living things. In writing, spirit is a Greek symbol that indicates breathing or lack thereof in pronunciation. In Christianity ‘‘espiritual’’ refers to spirit, which the RAE defines as an immaterial and rational being, as a supernatural gift, and as the generating principle or intimate character (essence) of something. Spirit is the natural vigor that animates, enlivens, and strengthens the body. In Spanish thought, espı´ritu is the breath, stamina, brilliance, valor, vivacity, and/or genius of a person. Although its root words (ruah, pneuma, spiritus) are found throughout the Scriptures of both Judaism and Christianity, the concept/term ‘‘spirituality’’ is not found in the Bible. In its place, Latina/os will notice that the Scriptures are about ‘‘relationship.’’ Relationship seems to be the key to the Latino/a understanding of espiritualidad. Usually when Hispanics are asked to give definitions or descriptions of spirituality, they rarely if ever mention the spirit. Instead they speak of relationships, of being in harmony with God, others, and creation or about how important relationships like the one has with God and/or the Church can give purpose and meaning to life. Many Latina/os will also describe the spiritual as being other than the material. Often this otherness can take on the European dualism of spirit versus matter but at the same time it has a touch of the Nahuatl concept of duality. Duality is not a conflictual philosophy like that of dualism. Rather, in duality there is complementarity; one reality needs the other. The spiritual and the material are two sides of the same coin. A human being cannot be spiritual without the material, and the material without the spiritual makes for a weak relationship. Spirituality is the corazo´n (heart) in which the soul nurtures and cares for both the spirit and the corporality that make it a person. Gustavo Gutie´rrez defines spirituality as ‘‘a walking in liberty according to the Spirit of love and of life’’ (Gutie´rrez 1983, 49). Basically, he is affirming that espiritualidad is nothing less than ‘‘life in the spirit.’’ For Christians ‘‘life in the spirit’’ is about the human spirit being in relationship or better en conjunto (union) with the Divine Spirit and other human spirits. This union is at the heart (corazo´n) of the mysticism of great Spanish mystics like Francisco de Osuna, Teresa de Avila, Pedro de Alcantara, and Juan de la Cruz. ‘‘Spirituality is all about relationship, for no one can live an authentic human life without relating to the ‘other’ who is God and neighbor. It is in relationship that we are formed and that we develop who we are’’ (CavazosGonza´lez 2004, 49). This sense of spirituality as the corazo´n of who we are in relationship is found in various stories from the book Ası´ Es: Stories of Hispanic Spirituality. The editors describe spirituality ‘‘as a way of life that reveals, helps, and builds our relationship with God through the Good News of Jesus’’ (Asi Es 1994, 4–5).

Spirituality

| 757

In the stories that follow Bishop Ricardo Ramı´rez calls spirituality ‘‘the inner space that allows people to come in touch with themselves as believers. It is the area where ‘the divine spirit touches the human spirit’ ’’ (Asi Es 1994, 5). Rosa Marı´a Icaza claims that spirituality ‘‘is translated into the love of God, which moves, strengthens and is manifested in love of neighbor and self’’ (Asi Es 1994, 5–6). Dominga Zapata claims that Hispanic spirituality ‘‘is rooted in life (it is) how I relate to the sacred, to others and to myself’’ (Asi Es 1994, 66). These descriptions of spirituality touch on two types of relationships: an internal one where I relate to God and to myself and an external one in which I am in relationship to world and neighbor. Spirituality is both root and branches of who I am. It is the corazo´n that stirs us to action and the corazo´n that sustains us in hard times. Spirituality is that which helps us to relate to God and to each other . . . An individual’s spirit relates to that of another and in that relating both spirits are touched and changed. As Hispanics meet and share faith with Latin Americans and Euro-Americans their spirits are growing and their corazones are being formed. A new Latino spirituality is being born through this process. (Cavazos-Gonza´lez 2004, 49–50)

Arte: Spirituality In the latter half of the past century, the separation of spiritual theology and Spirituality became complete. Spiritual theology is a speculative theology. Spirituality, thanks to the work of Spiritualogians like Michael Downey and Mary Frohlich, is seen as discipline that focuses on method, instruction, and appropriation instead of speculative theory. But more than an academic discipline or science, Spirituality is an art that helps direct the praxis of the journey to spiritual growth. Every art form has need for talent and study, grace and discipline, and so does spirituality. For Latino/as spirituality is first and foremost ‘‘life in the Spirit’’; it comes from baptism and is lived as a gift from God. Still, it demands training and discipline. As the Cursillo de Cristiandad reminds its adherents, growth in Christian life demands prayer, study, and action. Those who would grow spiritually need to practice prayer, study the Word of God and the lives of the Saints, as well as act upon what they have heard in prayer and learned in study. The Art of Spirituality is developed in the cotidiano. It is an art that needs to be practiced in the routine of life as well as in life’s special moments. It is to be found in Latino/a popular religiosity, in popular culture, and in the joys and struggles of everyday life. It is an art that is an understanding that emerges as the result of the way the same basic gospel dimensions are combined in the daily life of Christians. The understanding, as I am calling it, must be clear enough to encourage a particular and distinctive way of Christian living and knowing, while at the same time broad or generic enough to allow for growth and individuality (personal and generational). (Espı´n 1997, 26–27)

Like every art form, spirituality has its master artists. The saints are the master artists whose charitable, just, and miraculous works are masterpieces that inspire awe

758 |

Spirituality

and wonder. Of course, the only true master is Jesus, who is somehow present in his saints whom he has gifted and trained by his own example and continued inspiration. Spirituality also has its manual, which is the Word of God, especially as found in the Gospel. Orlando Espı´n reminds us that popular Catholicism reads the Gospel literally and combines it with noncanonical traditions and ‘‘commonsensical wisdom’’ (Espı´n 1997, 27). Jean-Pierre Ruiz claims that Latino/as read the Scriptures (printed, painted, and narrated) through a ‘‘process of inculturation and actualization that yields productive encounters with biblical texts’’ (Ruiz 1998, 105). The ways Latina/os encounter the Gospel produce different forms of spiritualities based on how God is perceived in and through the ‘‘human experience of Jesus of Nazareth’’ who in his humanity and passion understands and sympathizes with the poor and the oppressed. In much of Jesus’ mission he is reaching out to the marginalized. The most significant moments of Jesus’ life are those in which he is being oppressed and made to suffer (Espı´n 1997, 27).

Latina/o Spirituality(ies) Jesus’ life also reveals his connection to the religiosity of his own people. He and his family practiced the rituals of Judaism, and he worshipped in both synagogue and Temple as well as at home and in the desert. Hispanic theologians like Orlando Espı´n, Virgilio Elizondo, and Anita de Luna pay particular attention to Latino/a popular religiosity and traditions as manifestations of a mistica or espiritualidad Latina. A reading of the book Ası´ Es reveals that Latino/as ‘‘include the practices of popular religiosity as fundamental and expressive of Hispanic spirituality’’ (Asi Es, 7). These practices and devotions are steeped in history and tradition. They are handed on from one generation to the next, like a master artist teaches her/his trades to apprentices. Our traditions, devotions, customs, and struggles are the by-product of our spiritualities. Eduardo C. Ferna´ndez points out that Hispanic Spirituality is really a variety of spiritualities because of the diversity of Hispanic cultures and religions that make up the U.S. Latino population (Fernandez 1983, 338–341). These varied spiritualities share several important characteristics. They are relational, emotional, festive, Christocentric, and transcendent. Latino/a spirituality(ies) is relational, especially in that it is nurtured by and helps build up the family. Because of this the matriarchal nature of many Hispanic cultures can be seen in the important role of mothers, grandmothers, and aunts in leading the religious and emotional life of the household and extended family. This relational aspect of Hispanic spirituality is seen in how Hispanics image the holy (God, Marı´a, and the Santos). While many like to maintain that Latino/a spirituality is family oriented (Garcia 2000, 53–54), we need to contextualize that affirmation by saying that Latina/o spirituality is both popular and communal because of the sociocentered nature of many Hispanic cultures. ‘‘Popular’’ does not mean in the order of preference but rather that it comes from and belongs to the people. It is by being part of the people that the individual is formed and cultivated, ‘‘traditioned’’ if you will (Espı´n 2006, 10). Alvaro Da´vila affirms that the ‘‘spiritual experience can only be recognized, reflected upon, and understood when we live in continuous dialogue with the memories of a people.

Spirituality

| 759

Trying to define the essence of life without this dialogue would result in an incomplete reality’’ (Asi Es, 87). Many Latina/o spiritualities were born out of medieval affective spiritualities, and as a result Latino/a spirituality is an emotional spirituality. It focuses on the humanity of Christ and on the love that we can give to him. It comes from and touches the corazo´n of a person and a people. It is lived in the cotidiano with all of its emotional ups and downs. It is a festive spirituality built on flor y canto (flower and song, which is to say truth and beauty). Celebration is strong despite the reality of suffering and oppression found in the history and the present of many Hispanic cultures. This festive characteristic is nurtured by the Latino/a belief in Divine Providence or God’s generous presence and salvific action in the world. The festive spirit that is at the corazo´n of Hispanic spirituality turns Church feasts into communal celebrations with food, flowers, song, and dance in honor of Jesus, Mary, and patron saints. The art of Latino/a Spirituality(ies) stresses Christocentrism, which accentuates relationships over doctrine, action over liturgy. This stress can be a temptation to reduce spirituality to that which makes one feel good, and for this reason we need to constantly evaluate our spirituality, ‘‘to measure and balance our orthodoxy and orthopraxis’’ (Conde-Frazier 1997, 130). Relationships to God, neighbor, enemy, and self are where one shows her/his imitation of Christ. Jesus’ relationship to his Abba extended itself to relationship with others. His life and teaching are interpreted as stressing the preeminence of compassion and solidarity with the poor and marginalized. Knowledge of Scripture and participation in official liturgy are important, but they are nothing without the sequela Christi (walking in the footprints of Jesus). ‘‘Jesus will identify as his only those who have acted like him’’ (Espı´n 1997, 28). In recent times, the relational nature of Hispanic Spirituality has naturally moved it to the area of social justice. A Christian then is a person committed to the poor, marginalized and oppressed through a life of solidarity, charity, and justice. Finally Hispanic spirituality(ies) like all spiritualities is transcendent. It is a mistica or mystic in which people dwell, live, and have their being. Spirituality is ‘‘connecting to and being led by Christ through the Holy Spirit’’ (Conde-Frazier 1997, 144). The transcendent implications of this statement cannot be disregarded or ignored for the sake of the solidarity, charity, and justice spoken of above. The social implications of current Latino/a spirituality need to constantly be nourished by the transcendent roots of Christian Spirituality. The spiritual cannot simply be anthropocentric or even ecocentric; it must never forget that it is theocentric. Si Dios quiere (If God wills it), Ojala (Allah willing), and Gracias a Dios (Thanks be to God) are heard often in Latino/a conversations. These are constant reminders of God’s presence in the cotidiano and of people’s dependence on Divine Providence. The missionaries who taught us to say these things planted the seeds for a Latino/a Spirituality where the transcendent is here and now, already and not yet, where the duality of the sacred and the profane blend into one reality called life.

Conclusion Christian spirituality is an art that helps direct the praxis of the faithful toward spiritual growth and union with God. This occurs because of the ‘‘interaction and weaving

760 |

Spirituality

together of four dimensions: doctrine, discipline, liturgy, and personal action’’ (CondeFrazier 1997, 125). A Mexican dicho (saying) claims that Del dicho al hecho, hay mucho trecho (from the word to action there is a deep ravine), and the above description of Latino/a spirituality(ies) can remain simply printed words in the lives of many Hispanics. If people are to be traditioned in authentic Christian spirituality, they need parents, relatives, and communities who will do the traditioning. The spiritualogian needs to be an important member of the traditioning community. For this reason Juan Sosa insists that the Latino/a theologian, liturgist, and pastoral minister has a responsibility to her/his people. We are to be messengers of hope and life ‘‘ready to walk with them these extra miles by reaching out to them at the deepest core, their ‘circle of intangible,’ and help them experience the liberating present of the Spirit-at-work within and among them’’ (Sosa 1998, 77).

References and Further Reading Cavazos-Gonza´lez, Gilberto. ‘‘Cara y Corazo´n (Face and Heart): Toward a U.S. Latino Spirituality of Inculturation.’’ New Theology Review 17 (2004): 46–55. Conde-Frazier, Elizabeth. ‘‘Hispanic Protestant Spirituality.’’ Teologia en Conjunto: A Collaborative Protestant Theology, ed. Jose´ David Rodriguez and Loida I. Martell-Otero (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997). della Trinita, Beniamino. ‘‘Teologı´a Espiritual.’’ Diccionario de espiritualidad III, ed. Ermanno Ancilli (Barcelona: Herder, 1983). Downey, Michael. Understanding Christian Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1997). Espı´n, Orlando. Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997). ———. ‘‘Traditioning: Culture, Daily Life and Popular Religion, and Their Impact on Christian Tradition.’’ Futuring Our Past: Explorations in the Theology of Tradition, ed. Orlando O. Espı´n and Gary Macy (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006). Ferna´ndez, Eduardo C. ‘‘Hispanic Spirituality.’’ The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Philippe Sheldrake (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1983). Frohlich, Mary. ‘‘Spiritual Discipline, Discipline of Spirituality: Revisiting Questions of Definition and Method.’’Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 1 (2001): 65–78. Garcia, Alberto L. ‘‘Christian Spirituality in Light of the U.S. Hispanic Experience.’’ Word & World XX (2000): 52–60. Gutie´rrez, Gustavo. We Drink from Our Own Wells (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1983). Moioli, Giovanni. ‘‘Teologia spirituale.’’ Nuovo Dizionario di spiritualita`, ed. Stefano De Fiores and Tullo Goffi (Milano: Edizioni San Paolo, 1985). Pe´rez, Arturo, Consuelo Covarrubias, and Edward Foley, eds. Ası´ Es: Stories of Hispanic Spirituality (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1994). Ruiz, Jean-Pierre. ‘‘Biblical Interpretation from a U.S. Hispanic American Persepective.’’ El Cuerpo de Cristo: The Hispanic Presence in the U.S. Catholic Church, ed. Peter Casarella and Rau´l Go´mez (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998). Sosa, Juan. ‘‘Hispanic Liturgy and Popular Religiosity.’’ El Cuerpo de Cristo: The Hispanic Presence in the U.S. Catholic Church, ed. Peter Casarella and Rau´l Go´mez (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998).

TEOLOGIA EN CONJUNTO Daniel R. Rodríguez-Díaz Teologı´a en conjunto is a particular way of doing theology in a collaborative way. This method of doing theology relies on a polyphonic conversation where issues faced by the Latina/o diasporas, internally and in its relations with the larger American culture and the world, are addressed in light of the Christian faith. Through this method, Latino/a faith communities start by questioning the traditional way of doing theology, where modernity is assumed as normative and the standard narrative—beliefs and cultural trends—persists. It is a theology of and from the borderlands, one that mainly deals with the senses of life, where borderlands/diasporas become a discursive space to do theology. In this respect, the traditional ways of doing theology in the cultures of origin are also seen as suspect, particularly when the hermeneutics of dominance tend to prevail. This theological method requires a set of new lenses when ‘‘reading’’ Christian tradition, experience, and the cultures under consideration.

Historical Development We can trace a long history of doing theology in conjunction with the Hispanic experience, especially during key moments of that history when the hermeneutics of dominance and cultural exclusion have threatened to silence the many voices of faith. Yet these voices contained distinctive tones and lyrics revealing their humanity and spiritual quest, even though these voices are not monolithic. Latina/o communities are diverse in many ways—history, religious traditions, countries of origin, generational lines—and while making it difficult to define these communities as a whole by using such names as Hispanic or Latina/o, they do share many things in common. Two empires led the process—the Spanish was first, and in the nineteenth century the young ‘‘American Empire’’ took over. Centuries before the political formation of the United States, the first moment can be identified when members of religious orders and native people joined together their voices of faith. They sought to respond to the so-called ‘‘discovery,’’ which soon turned into conquest and colonization. For instance, Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolome´ de las Casas accused European 761

762 |

Teologia en Conjunto

Christian colonizers of injustice for imposing slavery upon indigenous peoples. During the rule of the Spanish empire, the Regal Patronage served as the theological and legal foundation of the dominant ecclesiology. The church sought to safeguard its presence through the mediation of the state, and vice versa, the state gained legitimacy through the mediation of the church. After independence in Latin America and the Caribbean to the present, a national oligarchy came to rule and plunder both human and natural resources. The European experience, assumed to be universally applicable, served to interpret Latin American/ Caribbean history. The source of their hermeneutics, derived from a providential theory of history, generated an ideology of dominance wrapped in a theological/ biblical language. The ecclesiology of Christendom—a particular way for church and civil society to relate to each other, where the state is the primary mediation— becomes the operating ecclesiology in this context. The whole European experience was assumed to be applicable to Spanish and Portuguese domination in America; the medieval legal and theological system was transferred and used as the valid one. This reality would impact the way non-Europeans do their theology, mainly because they assume as normative both the European values and historical experience. This European methodology, where the epistemological conceptualization of Western culture is superimposed upon Catholic history, is found in the writings of theologians and interpreters of Scripture who championed the struggles for justice and freedom. With an inherently faulty epistemology to interpret colonial history, these voices are heard all over America and Europe. In spite of the limitations, they are able to offer alternatives to the realities of oppression during a period of approximately four centuries. A type of teologia en conjunto results from this experience, lacking a Latin American history of salvation identical to the theoretical thinking of the official theology of the church. For this integration to occur, we have to wait until the 1960s with the emergence of Third World liberation theologies, particularly in Latin America, assuming praxis as the source of theological thinking.

The Anglo-American Christendom What occurs during the Anglo-American Christendom is ‘‘mainline’’ Protestantism playing a similar role and methodology in the task of doing theology. Instead of having just one single church or denomination mediating or legitimizing the state, we find many denominations, Protestant and Catholic. During the latter part of the twentieth century, evangelical Christianity is able to negotiate a new political/religious consensus with the present ruling elite intending to bring a modified version of cultural, political, and religious dominance. For most of the twentieth century, the expressions for doing collaborative theology were limited by several factors. The first limiting factor was availability of sources, primary and secondary, and as a result the history of most churches found limited opportunities to be studied. Archival materials were scattered, often preserved in less than optimal conditions, and generally inaccessible. Hence the urgency to continue working in projects related to the preservation of oral histories and the rescue of archival material that is being destroyed through inadequate preservation. The second

Teologia en Conjunto

| 763

limiting factor was related to the dominance of a particular narrative—the ProtestantPuritan tradition—and its superimposition on Latina/o Church history. The third limiting factor was related to access to publishing houses. All these began to change less than 20 years ago. Although we have to recognize many people who have collaborated for more than 20 years changing the theological map, two people need to be recognized as mentoring the whole process: Justo L. Gonza´lez, a Protestant historian, and Virgilio Elizondo, a Roman Catholic priest. With many others, women and men, a new school of collaborative theology was born. Always in conjunction with others, they helped in this process by their example—by trying to remain faithful to their vocation as theologians and pastors, and by leading in the organization and implementation of the most recent expression of doing collaborative Hispanic theology. Since teologia en conjunto requires dialogue, it must be grounded in community. To be good theology it has to be practical; this means grounded in the people’s senses of life up against the forces that seek to diminish or deny their humanity. In reality, what this represents is the recovery of the communal nature of Scripture, its principles, and its practices, where only a small portion of the Scriptures was intended for private reading. This represents a significant shift of the way theology was previously done. It is a theology from the people, by the people, and for the people, a theology of resistance, coming from the womb of an always reforming church, and by theologians who have discovered continuity with the origins of Christianity. The 1960s left a strong legacy with the Black Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, the emergence of a Black theology, and the civil rights struggles in Latina/o communities coalesced to empower oppressed peoples around the world. The struggle to organize the community led by Latino/a women and men challenged the myth of docility held by Anglo-American church leaders. After years of relative silence, Latina/o communities across the United States raised their voices in protest; the actions were directed at both the institutional church and the larger society. A long fought issue among Hispanic church people was the lack of institutional representation. There were few Hispanic Catholic priests or Protestant pastors in the churches. Little effort was made to encourage and recruit Latino/as to church vocations. Theological education was so culturally specific that the only way to be considered ready for ministry was surrendering to total assimilation. In the Catholic Church, the theology that resulted from Vatican II had a significant impact in Hispanic communities. Three basic theological principles were affirmed: (a) a church opened to the world with an evangelizing and humanizing mission; (b) the church present and ‘‘incarnated’’ in a culturally plural world that is also the world of the poor; (c) the church as the people of God where both laity and clergy work united in mission and ministry. What Vatican II gave to the Latina/o community was a theology congruent with their praxis in a context of exclusion. The reaction of many church leaders was opposite to the reforms presented by the Council. This meant a long struggle within the church, one characterized by a traditional discourse trying to maintain the status quo led by Euro-Americans, while on the opposite side was the new theology led by Latino/a pastors and lay. Organizations like PADRES, an acronym for Priests Associated

764 |

Teologia en Conjunto

for Religious, Educational, and Social Rights, defined their mission to be ‘‘the voice of the voiceless’’ Hispanics. In 1971, a group of Latina religious women gathered in Houston and organized Las Hermanas to work in the fields of education, health, pastoral work, and sociology. The same year another important organization was born, the Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC), led by Father Elizondo. This effort represented the belief that Latino/as needed their own institutions. MACC’s mission is to deal with issues of culture, pastoral service, preparation of missionaries, research and publications, media, and leadership development. This institution would become a center for promoting collaborative work in many fields, such as theology, Bible, Church History, Ethics, Pastoral Care, and Liturgy. In 1988, the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS) was founded as a forum for sharing and discussing ideas and projects among U.S. Hispanic theologians. Their work is en conjunto; they understand that Latino/a theology cannot be anything but en conjunto. Nor can it be a copy or a ‘‘translation’’ of Latin American or Euro-American theologies. The theological method applied requires academic rigor and is not satisfied with merely seeking understanding, but how it impacts people’s lives and histories. From the beginning, ACHTUS’s journal defined itself as a forum of and for Hispanic scholarship centered on ‘‘ideas that affect and/or enrich U.S. Latino theology.’’ It has become a truly ecumenical journal where Protestant Latino/a theologians are important partners in an important project. Here both theologians and social scientists are continuously engaged in serious dialogue. During the 1960s, Protestant participation in social issues was limited. Typically it was more based on the individual participation of Latino/a Protestants, lay and clergy, and few congregations. This was due in part to the internal struggles faced by the Hispanic churches in their denominations that showed little regard and commitment to a Latino/a church. The growth and vitality of the churches was dependent on their own resources and leadership imported from the countries of origin, more than on the connectional system of the denomination. The values and strategies of some denominations were more an obstacle than a help during this period. The theological response to this situation came from people like Orlando Costas. His works were clearly written in the key of we-hermeneutics. Other collective voices were also heard during those years. For example, in 1981 the ‘‘Coalition of Hispanic Christian Leadership,’’ a group of pastors, headed by Benjamin Alicea, which also included a laywoman, attended a conference at Riverside Church in New York City to protest the exclusion of Hispanics from the conference program. The group disrupted a panel on ‘‘Liberation Theology’’ by chanting ¡Basta ya. No nos pueden ignorar! (Enough. You cannot ignore us!). This was followed by the reading of a document the group called the ‘‘Riverside Manifesto.’’ The Manifesto included five complaints and demands: (1) social issues of the Hispanic community were not seriously addressed; (2) the contributions of Hispanic people were ignored; (3) the American religious establishment must assume its share of the responsibility; (4) Hispanic liturgy and theology had been denied its rightful place in the American religious community; and (5) theological seminaries and graduate schools of religion had discriminated against Hispanics.

Teologia en Conjunto

| 765

LA COMUNIDAD The organization La Comunidad (The Community) was founded on November 19, 1989, originally as La Comunidad of Hispanic American Scholars of Theology and Religion, and was reorganized and revitalized in 2000–2001. As an ecumenical association of Latina/o scholars of religion, La Comunidad proactively advances the interests and scholarship of Latinas and Latinos in biblical, theological, and religious studies. Membership in La Comunidad is open to Hispanics and non-Hispanics in sympathy with the stated mission and objectives of the organization and residing in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. La Comunidad affirms the multilingual and multicultural scholarly expressions of its members; regularly hosts meetings and/or conferences of its members and interested parties; and seeks to be a supportive advocate for the employment, tenure, and promotion of Latina/os in biblical, theological, and religious studies. The majority of its members also hold membership in the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, or both scholarly organizations. La Comunidad is Related Scholarly Organizations (RSO) of the American Academy of Religion and works in supportive collaboration with the Latino/a Religion, Culture and Society Group of the American Academy of Religion (formerly the Hispanic American Religion, Culture and Society Group). —EDA

In the Southwest, the Mexican American Program at Perkins School of Theology represents another effort in building communities of collaboration. In 1975, Dr. Roy D. Barton started the Hispanic Instructors Program; its members meet at least once a year for formation and for sharing experiences from diverse teaching settings. Among the many accomplishments of this collaborative effort are the following: the journal Apuntes—a journal of Hispanic theology; a series of symposia under the title of ‘‘Redescubrimiento,’’ planned around the theme of the Quincentennial of 1492; and programs for the training of laity in theology and in the practice of ministry. In the spring of 1993, a national conference of Latina/o scholars and church leaders met at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, under the leadership of Daniel R. Rodriguez, Professor of Church History at the Seminary. The purpose was to form a network of persons working on Latino/a Protestant Church History, to exchange information, to assess needs, and to begin planning future steps. As an outcome of the event, a book was published under the title Hidden Stories: Unveiling the History of the Latino Church. New initiatives were undertaken that included the organization of the Asociacio´ n para la Educacio´ n Teolo´ gica Hispana (AETH), the Hispanic Summer Program, La Comunidad, and the Hispanic Theological Initiative. Another example of this collaboration was the event held early in the summer of 1995, when a group of Latina/os Protestant theologians, ethicists, pastors, and students gathered at Princeton Seminary with a very particular agenda: to discuss the distinctiveness of doing theology in a collaborative way. Two main characteristics were recognized during this event: First, that it is plural; it is as diverse as the communities

766 |

Teologia en Conjunto

HISPANIC SUMMER PROGRAM The Hispanic Summer Program, Inc. (HSP), also known as el Programa Hispano de Verano, is a graduate ecumenical program in theology and religion established in 1988. Noted historian and theologian Justo L. Gonza´lez with others created the HSP in response to a report he wrote on the state of Hispanic theological education, including the deplorably low numbers of Hispanic seminary graduates. While originally part of the Fund for Theological Education (FTE), in 1995 again, through the leadership of Gonza´lez, the HSP was relaunched as an independent consortium of sponsoring institutions including seminaries, university-related divinity schools, and graduate departments of religion. The HSP provides study and fellowship with Latino/a peers and non-Hispanics interested in Hispanic ministry through an intensive program of study, celebration, and cultural awareness. Approximately 100 students and eight Hispanic faculty gather at one of the sponsoring host sites, the location of which changes yearly. Typically, half of the courses are taught in Spanish and half in English. Additionally, the HSP offers another program for faculty of the sponsoring institutions, ‘‘Through Hispanic Eyes: A Seminar for Non-Hispanic Faculty,’’ which provides an opportunity for non-Hispanic faculty to explore issues related to the teaching, contributions, recruitment, support, and participation of Latinos/as in academic programs, in churches, and in communities. —EDA

where the method of doing theology is practiced. Second, that it is communal; as such it is inspired by a collaborative spirit. The themes discussed reflected their experiences as members of particular communities of faith. At the same time, the interactions during the encounter raised new questions and challenges to the participants, as well as a confirmation of the significance of doing theological work collaboratively.

The Theological Method This theology has as its purpose to give both a foundation and an order to the faith of people from a plurality of cultures. It also enables them to interpret and project their lives, while engaging with the larger society where they find a particular cultural group that has assumed their way of doing theology as normative to the whole. The method defines a particular discursive space—borderlands/diaspora—to do theology. This means that theologians are located, side by side, with the oppressed and marginalized when doing theology. They take clues from a theology of the incarnate word (John 1:13)—‘‘and lived among us.’’ So it is a theology whose method seeks to be incarnational. For this reason, doing theology from your place also becomes autobiographical. It is not ‘‘talking’’ about ‘‘the oppressed’’ or ‘‘the people’’ (the objects of theology), it becomes more ‘‘we,’’ thus requiring the use of we-hermeneutics in the shaping of a theological discourse. People on the move with a plurality of cultures, traditions, and experiences require a portable method when doing theology. Any attempt to do theology runs into the

Teologia en Conjunto

| 767

HISPANIC CHURCHES IN AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE The Pew Charitable Trusts funded $1.3 million for a research project to be conducted from 1999 through 2002. The project was named the Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL). It brought together Jesse Miranda, a Pentecostal, and Virgilio Elizondo, a Roman Catholic. Gasto´n Espinosa was asked to develop and manage the study. The HCAPL project was the largest study ever conducted in the United States that specifically focused on Latino/a religions and politics. It surveyed and profiled the attitudes of 3,000 Latinos across the United States and in Puerto Rico and commissioned 16 original essays that explored the influence of Hispanic religions on political, civic, and social action. It was an ecumenical and nonsectarian study that sought to examine the impact of religion on political, civic, and social engagement among U.S. Latino/as. The Pew Charitable Trusts first approached Miranda about directing the study himself; however, in an effort to build bridges with the Latina/o Catholic community, he informed the Trusts that he would not accept the project unless they brought on a Latino Catholic leader like Elizondo to co-direct the project. The Trusts agreed. Miranda and Elizondo agreed to work together to address the social, political, and civic needs of the Latino/a community without having to set aside or ‘‘water-down’’ their deep theological convictions. —GE

challenge presented by the wide variety within the Latina/o spectrum. When you consider the peoples of the southwestern region of the United States, you have to take into account centuries of constructing a narrative inspired by Spanish missions that were far away from the political centers of power of church life. Geography in great part required a portable method of doing theology. The isolation of many communities forced pastors to celebrate Mass in a community chapel only a few times a year. The major responsibility for evangelization rested in the families or a group of local laypersons. The daily life of the church was in the hands of lay leaders. They conducted burials, the ceremonies of Holy Week, including a reenactment of the events of Good Friday, as well as other religious activities of the Christian calendar. This kind of religious and social autonomy generated liturgies, hymns, and beliefs grounded in a communally inspired and constructed theological narrative. As it was in the past, the same is today. Hispanic people are always on the move, always in search of jobs, better housing, schools, working conditions, safe neighborhoods, and places of worship. As in the past, religious institutions are not always prepared to offer the kind of hospitality and spiritual life for people who are already ‘‘walking with Jesus’’ or with ‘‘my virgencita.’’ Many become ‘‘tent makers,’’ releasing from their treasured memory the wealth of their spirituality, believed to come from the presence of God’s Spirit in them. As in the past, today we find the laypeople carrying a major responsibility in the production of liturgies, hymns, and belief systems grounded in communally inspired theologies.

768 |

Teologia en Conjunto

A Challenge to the Dominant Narrative This theology is critical of both U.S. and Latin American/Caribbean historiography. It seeks to give a new meaning to the United States history—in particular it exposes the origins of the ideology of Manifest Destiny and sense of superiority characteristic of the dominant narrative. In American historiography the interpretative center of the dominant school has been the Protestant-Puritan tradition. It becomes primarily an emphasis on the religion transplanted by European immigrants, to the exclusion of the varying histories of Native Americans, African Americans, women, Latino/as, Catholics, Jews, Asian Americans, and ethnic Whites, whose identities have been obscured by the historical hegemony of the White Anglo-Saxon narrative. The resulting theologies tend to be shaped by the same ideology. The language used becomes the expression of a hermeneutics of conquest and suppression. It is a language that conceals domination and renders invisible all those who fail to participate in the same narrative and its underlying cultural experiences. It is the story centered on the telling and retelling of the mighty acts of the White conqueror. The Euro-American religious history is still the center of interpretation for American Christianity in both Protestant and Catholic historiography. Catholic Church historians have given little attention to Latina/os, in spite of the fact that the church had been in the Southwest for more than 250 years when the United States seized the entire territory from Mexico in 1846. Most historians still imply that non-Hispanic clergy established the church. In their narratives, when Hispanics are mentioned, their stories are told with a functional ‘‘plot.’’ The tendency is to make the selection that ‘‘best’’ represents the other stories. Many contemporary historians work with a reformed version of the old canon where the religious values and vision of ‘‘America’’ as defined by the old paradigm are now extended to the other stories. Here the criterion is to identify the ‘‘contributions’’ of other traditions to the values defined by the standard narrative. The parts that do not fit into the scheme are treated as marginal. The conquest and colonization of the Americas was also based on the same premise, a providential interpretation of the historical events with a theological-legal language that offered its rationality. The Protestant-Puritan tradition and the institution of the Regal Patronage were grounded in the premise of having God’s favor. A sacred Mayan prayer from the Popul Vuh represents the voice of the majority of the conquered and colonized: ‘‘Remember us after we are gone. Don’t forget us. Conjure up our faces and our words. Our image will be as a tear in the hearts of those who want to remember us.’’ The recovery of the historical memory is at the heart of doing theology en conjunto. It is an important tool for the critical dialogue with 500 years of colonial and neocolonial relations. Among the key elements in the process of recovery we find the resistance to submit to injustice and cultural annihilation. The present response and questioning of those who claim cultural and historical dominance with a corresponding theology becomes the next chapter in that long history to maintain the vitality of Hispanic culture and the dignity of those who are still forging it.

Teologia en Conjunto

| 769

When doing theology in context the challenge is to be open to the possibility that cultures are also under judgment and that they are in need of transforming. The experience of recovery brings both dangerous memories as well as the joy of naming the fruits of our labor under duress. This experience goes both ways, remembering the struggles of our ancestors, and remembering the struggles and the history of resistance of the many who suffered slavery, discrimination, and exclusion in North America since the founding of Jamestown in 1607 in the territory of the Great Powhatan Confederacy. This experience helps us connect with other people and their histories, allowing for the enlargement of the social space where life informs theological reflection. Through this process, new theologies of convergence keep emerging and the experience of living in community with a liberating vision expands beyond Latina/o communities. The method of doing theology en conjunto serves as a tool to respond to a major epistemological problem created by the cultural and social walls separating the many communities constituting the United States. This theology does not represent an attempt to add another theology to the mix, this way leaving the dominant narrative as normative, perhaps with a few modifications to give room to the ‘‘best’’ of what the ‘‘others’’ can contribute. The result of this effort is deceiving because the old standard prevails. The religious values and vision of the United States as defined by the old paradigm are now extended to other narratives, and the parts that do not fit into the scheme are treated as marginal. What this method of doing theology intends to do is go beyond the issue of the hermeneutics of historical and theological inclusion or exclusion, and explore theologically the question of how the history of both the excluded and the included reveal the underlying contradictions of American society. This is why we need the kind of social analysis that offers critical insights into multiple religious histories of the American people. At the same time we need to examine the question of how far the traditional narrative has served to reinforce certain values, cognition, and symbols as a way to impose a particular worldview, social order, and values, while not ignoring the fruits of other cultures around the same national table, though many times in the same space but separate rooms. This conversation forces one to address issues related to Hispanic tradition, theology, and culture. It becomes a conversation in which the community is confronted with the contradictions that are part of their particular pasts. These contradictions cut across denominational and confessional lines. Latina women speak of issues and experiences that Hispanic men, and members of the dominant culture, tend to ignore or misinterpret. Dominicans, Salvadorans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Cubans, and many others bring their own agendas relevant to their communities. While the conversation with the dominant culture continues, theologians, biblical scholars, historians, and people in the practice of ministry engage in conversations in/with their communities and they task themselves with taking a critical view of the community’s theological legacy. They discover that traditional themes do not disappear or lose interest; it is only that they are presented differently in light of their reality. Since the point of departure for doing collaborative theology is marked by the concrete practices of Christians, questions related to issues of faith are raised about specific

770 |

Teologia en Conjunto

interpretations of revelation. Using this method, theology is concerned with and engaged in exploring transforming actions and social relations in light of the revelation. Simultaneously, theology asks the question on the impact that Hispanic reality has on the interpretation of revelation itself. Revelation interprets practice, while practice makes possible a new interpretation of revelation. Out of this communal effort emerges a new theological vein called Latina/o theology. For some, Latino/a theology can only remain alive when it is narrated by members of the community. The crisis of the grand postmodern narrative as told in the United States opens the space for small theological narratives to be told and valued. In this regard, the work of Hispanic biblical scholars is essential. The significance of their effort lies in the fact that they listen attentively to the original story of the Jesus Christ event, and they tell it again to women, men, and children today. Telling and retelling the story requires an active memory in a community. By so doing, new generations will receive in an intelligible way God’s saving events. This kind of narrative, based on the incarnational model, demands a great deal from the reader or listener, in great part because it is based on life experiences. More than an intellectual exercise where the goal is the accumulation of information, it is more an opportunity to be open to the message of the narrative. On the side of the theologian, it is less demanding academically but more demanding existentially, since it assumes that the theologian must incarnate the narrative. Other theologians rely more on the identification of theological themes without too much regard for finding a unifying paradigm. We find such themes as the theology of la fiesta, the table, hymns/coritos, etc. There are still others more inclined to theologize novels, short stories, and other works of art.

Collaborative Theology and Mission Collaborative theology is missional rather than definitional in its foundation. Among the challenges faced by theologians one finds the question of how to relate to the institutional church, which seems to be encapsulated in the worldview, values, and cognitions of the traditional American narrative. In this entry, we reviewed history with its contradictions, and how diasporic faith communities are claiming to possess new experiences of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. When considering that many Hispanic Catholics are not active in the church, and church growth in mainline Protestant denominations is less than significant, theologians are starting to explore clues to help identify the reasons. One clue is found in the need to create community. Our faith proclaims that God is a communion of persons—different persons, but equal and living together in perfect communion. The present North American neoliberal context declares the value of the individual as supreme. The tendency of the individual is to isolate and seek her or his own welfare with limited or no concern for others. The end result is social fragmentation and a ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ attitude. Borderland/diasporic communities are always struggling with the forces of fragmentation. The experience of moving from their communities of origin entails a fragmentation from the core of their cultural

Teologia en Conjunto

| 771

systems; in their pilgrimage they depend on their memory and all the cultural objects accompanying them. This is why the focus to mission includes the recovery of what is at the heart of Christianity. Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, the building of a just and affirming community is central; Jesus of Nazareth calls a group of disciples to a community and, through God’s Spirit, promotes the formation of communities. In the midst of a religious culture that places high value on narrow satisfactions of individual needs or wants, borderlands/diaspora communities need to promote the well-being of the entire community. The temptation to deny it is also present, manifesting itself in ecclesiologies of isolation and churchism. For this reason, a collaborative theology promotes the creation of Christian communities congruent with the message and practice of Jesus. The promotion of this value becomes a high priority when defining mission in the North American context. Good theology ratifies the value of the community, and help breaks the power of subjective individualism that sacrifices the well-being of the community. Collaborative theology tries to balance the value of the individual and the collective. Living in community, persons should find space for their own subjectivity, as well as enough room for life in solidarity with others. Another clue is found in the affirmation that cultural plurality is God’s gift to humanity, followed by a critical analysis of human cultures, based on the assumption that the seeds of human brokenness grow and destroy community. A typical danger is to ‘‘see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye.’’ Borderland people are not exempt from just seeing the speck in their neighbor’s eye; this ‘‘neighbor’’ could be the Anglo-American, a Latin American nation, gender, education, or religion. This limitation could lead to practices of exclusion, when in fact the idea of being critical is to enter into a creative dialogue in which both sides should expect renewal and the forging of an inclusive community. The reality is that these communities are all influenced by the enlightenment culture of modernity. This culture is based on the idea/power that human reason has unlimited power to guide and build an always better future, by means of a self-clarifying process of enlightenment. In summary, teologia en conjunto is a theology of and from the borderlands, done in a collaborative way, working in unity and resistance with groups, sectors and leaders across gender, generations, racial-ethnic, nationalities, and denominational boundaries. This theology seeks to transform the church in order to become a church with a preferential option for the poor, seeking peace, justice, and reconciliation in the world. The method requires a critique of the interpretive lenses used when looking at Christian tradition, human experience, and culture.

References and Further Reading Aponte, Edwin David, and Miguel A. De La Torre, eds. Handbook of Latina/o Theologies (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006). Ferna´ndez, Eduardo C. La Cosecha: Harvesting Contemporary United States Hispanic Theology (1972–1998) (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2000). Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a, and Fernando Segovia, eds. Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

772 |

Teologia en Conjunto

Padilla, Alvin, Roberto Goizueta, and Eldin Villafan˜e, eds. Hispanic Christian Thought at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Apuntes in Honor of Justo L. Gonza´lez (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005). Rodriguez, Jose David, and Loida I. Martell-Otero, eds. Teologia en Conjunto: A Collaborative Hispanic Protestant Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997).

About the Editor

Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre immigrated to the United States from Cuba with his family in 1959 and grew up as a practitioner of Catholicism and Santerı´a. An ordained Southern Baptist minister, he holds a doctorate in social ethics and is associate professor for social ethics at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. He has also served as director of the Society of Christian Ethics and the American Academy of Religion. Dr. De La Torre has specialized in applying a social scientific approach to Latino/a religiosity within the United States, Liberation theologies in the Caribbean and Latin America, and postmodern/postcolonial social theory. He has written numerous articles and authored more than 17 books, including Reading the Bible from the Margins; Santerı´a: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America; and Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins.

773

List of Contributors

Anna Adams, Muhlenberg College (AA) Efrain Agosto, Hartford Seminary (EA) Alan Aja, Brooklyn College of the city University of New York (AAA) ´ lvarez, Christian Theological Seminary (CEA) Carmelo E. A Edwin David Aponte, Lancaster Theological Seminary (EDA) Hector Avalos, Iowa State University (HA) Eric Daniel Barreto, Luther Seminary (EDB) Luis E. Benavides, First United Methodist Church, Pittsfield, MA (LEB) Fernando A. Cascante-Go´mez, Union-PSCE (FCG) Daniel Castelo, Seattle Pacific University (DC) Gilberto Cavazos-Gonza´lez, Catholic Theological Union (GCG) Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Esperanza College of Eastern University (ECF) Alejandro Crosthwaite, Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (AC) Kenneth G. Davis, Saint Meinrad School of Theology (KGD)

775

776

|

List of Contributors

Miguel A. De La Torre, Iliff School of Theology (MAD) Neomi DeAnda, Loyola University, Chicago (NDA) Miguel H. Dı´az, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University (MHD) Ana Marı´a Dı´az-Stevens, Union Theological Seminary (ADS) John-Charles Duffy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (JCD) Orlando O. Espin, University of San Diego (OOE) Gasto´n Espinosa, Claremont McKenna College (GE) Octavio Javier Esqueda, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (OJE) Eduardo C. Ferna´ndez, Jesuit School of Theology, Graduate Theological Union (ECF) Arelis M. Figueroa, Union Theological Seminary, New York City (AMF) Daniel F. Flores, Sociedad Wesleyana, (DFF) Ismael Garcia´, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary (IG) Oscar Garcı´a-Johnson, Fuller Theological Seminary (OGJ) Roberto S. Goizueta, Boston College (RSG) Rau´l Go´mez-Ruiz, Sacred Heart School of Theology (RG) Rudy D. Gonza´lez, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (RDG) Juan Martinez Guerra, Fuller Seminary (JMG) Andre´s Quetzalco´atl Gonzale´s Guerrero, Aims Community College (AQG) Albert Herna´ndez, Iliff School of Theology (AH) Rodolfo J. Herna´ndez-Dı´az, University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology (RHD) Anne Hoffman, Brooklyn College (ADH) Jose´ Irizarry, Seminario Evange´lico de Puerto Rico (JI)

List of Contributors Ada Marı´a Isasi-Dı´az, Drew University (AMI) David Manuel Lantigua, University of Notre Dame (DML) Salvador A. Leavitt-Alca´ntara, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley (SLA) Luis D. Leo´n, University of Denver (LDL) Virginia Loubriel-Che´vere, Iglesia Cristiana (Discipulos de Cristo) en Puerto Rico (VLC) Nora O. Lozano, Baptist University of the Americas, (NOL) Rafael Lue´vano, Chapman University (RL) Ramo´n Luza´rraga, University of Dayton, Ohio (RL) David Maldonado Jr., Perkins School of Theology (DMJ) Loida I. Martell-Otero, Palmer Theological Seminary (LMO) Juan Francisco Martinez, Fuller Theological Seminary (JFM) Hjamil A. Martı´nez-Va´zquez, Texas Christian University (HMV) Timothy Matovina, University of Notre Dame (TM) Lara Medina, California State University, Northridge (LM) Ne´stor Medina, University of Toronto (NM) David M. Mellott, Lancaster Theological Seminary (DMM) Jose´ Daniel Montan˜ez, Asociacion para la Educacion Teologica Hispana (JDM) Nathaniel Samuel Murrells, University of North Carolina, Wilmington (NSM) Carmen M. Nanko-Ferna´ndez, Catholic Theological Union (CMN) Adriana Pilar Nieto, University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology (APN) Oswald John Nira, Our Lady of the Lake University (OJN) Eloy H. Nolivos, Regent University (EHN)

|

777

778

|

List of Contributors

Elias Ortega-Aponte, Princeton Theological Seminary (EDA) Fernando A. Ortiz, Gonzaga University (FAO) Luis G. Pedraja, Middle States Commission on Higher Education (LGP) Laura E. Pe´rez, University of California, Berkeley (LEP) Leopoldo Perez, Oblate School of Theology (LP) Ernesto Pichardo, Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Hileah, FL (EP) Santiago O. Pin˜o´n, University of Chicago (SOP) Jose T. Poe, Casa Bautista de Publicaciones, El Paso, TX (JTP) Rebeca M. Radillo, New York Theological Seminary (RMR) Ricardo Hugo Rangel, University of California, San Diego (RHR) Sarah J. Rangel-Sanchez, Washington State University, Pullman (SJR) Elizabeth D. Rios, Center for Emerging Female Leadership and Save the Nations (EDR) Luis Rivera-Rodriguez, McCormick Theological Seminary (LRR) Daniel A. Rodriguez, Pepperdine University (DAR) Joanne Rodrı´guez-Olmedo, Princeton Theological Seminary (JRO) Daniel R. Rodrı´guez-Dı´az, McCormick Theological Seminary (DRD) Leopoldo A. Sa´nchez M., Concordia Seminary (LAS) Ben Sanders III, University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology (BS) Teresa Cha´vez Sauceda (TCS) Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Brooklyn College (ASA) Ada´n Stevens-Dı´az, Brooklyn College (ASD) Christopher Tirres, DePaul University (CT)

List of Contributors Hector Luis Torres, The Chicago School of Psychology (HLT) Larry Torres, University of New Mexico, Taos (LT) Theresa L. Torres, University of Missouri, Kansas City (TLT) Benjamin Valentin, Andover Newton Theological School (BV) Alicia Vargas, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Berkeley (AV) Manuel A. Va´squez, The University of Florida (MAV) Marta Vides Saade, Ramapo College of New Jersey (MVS) Philip Wingeier-Rayo, Pfeiffer University (PWR)

|

779

Index

Acosta, Oscar Zeta, 61, 330 Activism. See Political activity Adam (Genesis), 709 Adams, Don, 312 Addison, Joseph, 6 Adelantados, 149–150, 161 Adoptionism, 591–592 Advent celebrations, 456–457 AEMINPU (Asociacio´n Evange´lica de Misio´n Israelita del Nuevo Pacto Universal), 519 Aesthetics, 6–10, 612–613. See also Art AETH (Association for Hispanic Theological Education), 73, 75, 147, 658, 659, 663 Affirmative Action, 141, 321, 362 African Americans: black civil rights movement, 61, 138, 763 black women in ministry, 255 Diaspora theology, 204 on feminist movement, 253–254 racial hierarchy during colonial period, 356, 385 zambo, 352

Abalos, David, 291–292 Abbasid rulers, 483 Abelard, Peter, 591 Abeyta, Bernardo, 437 Abilene School Board, 413 Abortion, 447, 516, 517, 563 Abraham (Old Testament), 644 Abrams, M. H., 7 Abu al-Walid I, 482 Abuelita (little grandmother) theology, 347 Abuelos, 350 Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS), 112, 147, 257, 259, 659, 764 Acatec people, 124 Accommodationists, 136 Accompaniment (acompan˜amiento), 3–5, 119, 142–143, 551, 640–642 Acculturation, 21–22, 53–54, 55, 57, 248, 250, 325–326, 359 ACHTUS (Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States), 112, 147, 257, 259, 659, 764 Acompan˜amiento, 3–6 I-1

I-2

|

Index

Africans/African slave labor, 11–21 Afro Cuban poetry, 390 Afro-Hispanic religiosity, formation of, 16–20 ancestor worship, 223–224 bishops, 8–9 Cuba, 162 culture, 386 emergence of African slavery in the Iberian West, 12–13 Hispanics as descendants of, 355 Las Casas on, 216 limpieza de sangre, 15 the Middle Passage and African existence in the Iberian New World, 13–16 negritude and negrismo, 18 Palo brought to Americas by, 417 Puerto Rico, 263 San Miguel de Guadalupe, 153 statistics, 417 syncretism of Christianity with Yoruba religious beliefs, 263–264 See also Mulatez Afterlife, 196–199 Agnes of the Fields, Saint, 458 Agosı´n, Marjorie, 316–317 AGPIM (Association of Graduate Programs in Ministry), 77 Aguanile (Colo´n), 494 Ahumada, Francisco de, 574 Ajiaco Christianity, 21–23, 242 Alarco´n, Norma, 254, 255–256 Alcance Victoria (Victory Outreach), 23–25, 88, 423, 433 Alexander VI, Pope, xiii, 149, 368, 513, 522 Alfonso VI, King, 484 Alfonso VIII, King, 484 Alianza de Ministerios Evange´licos Nacionales (AMEN), 231 The Alianza Dominicana, 206 (photo) La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (The Federal Land-Grant Alliance), 136, 139–140 Alicea, Benjamin, 764

Alienation, 26–28, 203, 265, 271, 305, 539, 668, 747 Alien Enemy Act, 46 Alien Land Laws, 45, 46 Alinsky, Saul, 131, 138 Allende, Salvador, 232, 520 Alliance for Progress, 519–520 All Saints’ Day, 197, 266 All Souls’ Day, 195, 197, 199 Almagro, Diego de, 152 Almohads, 484–485 Almoravids, 484 Al Qaeda, 192 Altarcitos, 686 Altars and Icons (McMann), 32, 33 Altars and shrines, 28–36 altarcitos, 686 in businesses, 32, 34 construction, 32–33 defined, 28 for Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), 197–199 history of, 28–32 home altar making by mestizos, 29 home altars in Latin America, 31 for Latinas who have left organized religion, 33 Lucumı´, 33 passive vs. active creations, 32 at pilgrimage sites, 30 of Protestants, 33 public, 32, 34–36 retablos, 8 Santerı´a, 33, 506 (photo), 508 shrines, 34–36 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 223, 224 Alumbrados, 711 Alurista, 61, 63, 407 Alvarez, Julia, 334 ´ lvarez De Toledo, Fernando, 79 A Alves, Rubem, 241 Amat, Thaddues, Bishop, 31 AMEN (Alianza de Ministerios Evange´licos Nacionales), 231 American Association of Pastoral Counseling, 704

Index American Baptist Churches (AMS), 121 American Baroque, 401 American Jewish Committee, 317 The Americano Dream (Sosa), 56 American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS), 187 Amor, 665 AMS (American Baptist Churches), 121 Amulets, 751 Anawim (the poor of Yahweh), 70 Anaya, Rudolfo A., 63, 331 Ancestor worship, 223–224, 507, 578 Andalucı´a, 483, 484 Andean Messianism, 519 . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (Rivera), 330–331 Anglo conformity model, 49, 55, 56, 58 ANHS (National Association of Hispanic Priests), 110 Animal sacrifices, 168, 280, 508, 509, 511, 578 Annacondia, Carlos, 433 ‘‘Anonymous Christianity,’’ 36–37 ‘‘Anonymous Santerı´a,’’ 36–38 Anousim, 315 Anthony, Saint, 458, 510, 722 Anthropology, 176–178 Antidicomarianites, 568, 570 The Antilles, 101–102 Anti–Vietnam war movement, 135–136, 140 Anzaldu´a, Gloria, 87–88, 254, 255–256, 259, 331, 404–405, 536 Aparecida, Brazil, 117–118 Apartheid, 441 Apologe´tica (Las Casas), 730 Aponte, Edwin D., 214–215 Apostolic period, 68 Apuntes (journal), 547, 658, 659, 765 Aquino, Marı´a Pilar, 10, 159, 252, 256– 258, 259, 260, 676, 744 Aragon, 484–485, 525, 530. See also Ferdinand II, King of Aragon Arango, Doroteo (Pancho Villa), 80, 81 (photo), 82 Arauca people, 396

|

Arbenz, Jacobo, 120 Archibeque, Don Miguel, 422 Arellano, Elvira, 499 Argentina/Argentineans: Catholic Charismatic movement, 425, 427 education, xviii gaucho, 340 household demographics, xvii immigration, 518, 520 income, xviii melting-pot phenomenon, 480 Nuestra Sen˜ora de Lujan, 571 pastoral care and counseling, 706 Pentecostal movement, 433 Protestants, 372 shrines, 440 Argu¨elles, Jose´, 398, 407 Arguinzoni, Sonny, 23, 24 Arguinzoni, Sonny, Jr., 24, 25 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 579–580 Aristotle, 6–7, 690–692, 696 Arizmendi, Juan Alejo de, 473–474 Arizona, xv Armageddon, 312 Armas, Carlos Castillo, 120 Arroyo Seco, 350 Art, 6–10, 277, 285–286, 757–758. See also Aesthetics Aryan supremacy, 480 Asamblea Aposto´lica de la Fe en Cristo Jesu´s, Inc., 429 Ascent of Mount Carmel (John of the Cross), 392 Asesoramiento pastoral, 699 ASH (Association of Hispanic Priests), 109 Ashe´, 37, 503, 511, 640 Ash Wednesday, 381 Asians, 38–47; Chinese Cubans, 43–44 ‘‘chino macaco,’’ 39 Diaspora theology, 204 Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), 47 Japanese Latin Americans, 38–42

I-3

I-4

|

Index

Mexican Filipinos, 42–43 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 44–46 time line, 46–47 Ası´ Es: Stories of Hispanic Spirituality, 756, 758 Asociacio´n Cultural Me´xico Americana, 377, 379 Asociacio´n Evange´lica de Misio´n Israelita del Nuevo Pacto Universal (AEMINPU), 519 Assemblies of God, 95, 192 Assemblies of God Higher Education Institutions, 72 Assembly of Christian Churches, 192 Assimilation, 47–58; Americanization programs for borderlands regions, 86–87 Anglo Protestant missionary policy, 295 Chicano Theology vs., 134, 135, 136 of children of Pedro Pan, 412 conversion associated with, 157 cultural affirmation of Hispanics vs., 321 cultural assimilation (acculturation), 48–49, 53–54 defined, 47, 57 Diaspora theology vs., 204 double consciousness, 321–22 generational differences in worship as result of, 684–85 goal systems, 49–50, 55, 56, 58 ‘‘hyphenated identities,’’ 296 ‘‘la familia’’ redefined by, 250 melting-pot phenomenon, 49–50, 55, 56, 58, 480 mestizaje as umbrella term, 355 obstacles to, 51 perceived as positive good, 359 polycentric identities, 54–55, 57–58 stages of, 48–49, 53, 55 Who Are We? Challenges to America’s National Identity (Huntington), 55 Assimilation in American Life (Gordon), 48–51, 53, 55–56, 58

Assis, Bishop Raymundo Damasceno, 115 Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH), 73, 75, 147, 658, 659, 663 Association for Theological Schools (ATS), 704 Association of Graduate Programs in Ministry (AGPIM), 77 Association of Hispanic Priests (ASH), 109 Association of Theological Schools (ATS), 545–547, 663 Asturias, Kingdom of, 483 Asylum, 443, 444, 499. See also Sanctuary Movement Atemoztli, 195 Atheists, xvi, 515. See also Unaffiliated populations Atkinson, Marı´a, 279 Atlantis, 481 Atonement, 538–539, 591 At-risk urban youth, 426 ATS (Association of Theological Schools), 545–547, 663 Attitude receptional assimilation, 49 Audiencia, 217 Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, 7, 618, 623, 710, 727 Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (Acosta), 330 Auto-blood sacrifice, 517 ´ vila, Pedrarias de, 157 A Avila, Pedro Menendez de, 370 Aymara Nation, 195, 519 Azabache, 721 Azevedo, Marcello de C., 145, 146 Aztecs: altars and shrines, 28–29 conquest of, 148, 151, 153, 368–369, 482, 527 corn, 400; departure from Aztla´n to Chapultepec, 58–59, 62, 63 Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), 195–197, 199

Index dieties, 63–65 human sacrifice, 732 Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (Little Book of the Medicinal Herbs of the Indians), 180 nagual/nahualli, 537 pyramids, 732 Quetzalcoatl, 368 significance of Virgin Mary to, 534 teo´tl, 400 Utah territory, 374–375, 379 warrior bravado, 340 Aztla´n, 58–65 Congreso de Aztla´n, 62 dieties, 63–65 El Plan Espiritual de Aztla´n, 61–62, 63, 140 La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (The Federal Land-Grant Alliance) on regaining land, 140 location of, 58–59, 62, 63, 375 MECHA (El Movimiento Estudiantil de Atzla´n), 141 psychological, identity, and political impact of, 60–63, 61–63, 134 symbolic meaning, 59 Aztla´n: The History, Resources and Attraction of New Mexico (Ritch), 59–60 Azusa Street Revival, 409, 423, 424, 428, 429, 430 Baba, Saint, 509 Babalawos, 275, 280, 502, 504, 508 Babalu´-Aye´, 280, 509 Babylonian exile, 412, 651–652 Bacon, Sumner, 460 Baile de las ma´scaras, 403 Baker, James, 411–412 Bakongo, 17 Balboa, Vasco Nun˜ez de, 153, 368 Balderas, Eduardo, 376 Ball, Henry C., 72, 428 Baltasar (Three Kings), 265 Baltonado, Sara, 700 ‘‘Banana republics,’’ xix–xx

|

Bantu people, 417 Baptism/bautizo, 31, 37, 682, 729 Baptist Spanish Publishing House, 462 Barbara, Saint, 19, 510, 541 Barca, Caldero´n de la, 718 Barna Research Group, 487, 488 Barnes, Bishop Gerald R., 98, 189–190, 191–192 Baroque period, 10, 401, 730–733 Barr, E. L., 132–133 Barrida (‘‘sweeping’’), 277 Barrie, J. M., 411 Barrios, 140, 209, 214, 297, 493, 623 Barrios, Justo Rufino, 128 Bartolo, 419–420 Barton, Dr. Roy D., 765 Basch, Linda, 554 Baseball, 207 Base Communities (BCs), 67–71, 98, 115, 117, 145–146, 190–192, 285, 523–524 Basil, Saint, 710 Basilicas, 682 Bastoneros, 350 Batista, Fulgencio, 165, 172 Battle of Alcama, 483 Battle of Covadonga, 483 Battle of Dos Rio, 164 Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, 484 Battle of the Guadalete River, 483 Baudrillard, Jean, 450 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 6 Bautista, Margarito, 376, 379 Bay of Pigs invasion, 173 BCs (Base Communities), 67–71, 98, 115, 117, 145–416, 190–192, 285, 523–524 Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (Turner), 32, 33 Beauty. See Aesthetics Bebbington, David, 445 Becoming Mexican American (Sa´nchez), 360–361 Beezley, William H., 31 Behar, Ruth, 316–317

I-5

I-6

|

Index

Behavior receptional assimilation, 49 Bele´n Jesuit, 170, 456 Belize/Belizeans, 120, 122–123, 126– 127, 350 Beltran, Dr. Gil, 170 Bembe´, 507 Benavides, Gustavo, 736 La bendicio´n, 247–248 Benedict XVI, Pope, 114–115, 117 (photo) Benin, 501 Benı´tez, Morales, 401 Benson, Clarence H., 72 Bernalillo, New Mexico, 350 Bewitched victims (enbrujada), 537 Bible. See New Testament (Christian Bible); Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics (Gottwald), 241 Bible conference, 72 Bible institutes, 71–77; cost, 74, 77 curricula, 75, 76–77 development of, 72–73 educational purpose, 73 enrollment, 74 Lay Ministry Formation Programs, 75–77 pedagogy, 75 teachers, 74 types of, 73–74, 76 See also Education/schools Bible study groups, 687 Bifocality, 555 Bilingual Manual Guide (FIP), 76 Bilingual religious services, 54 (photo), 467 Biola University, 73 Black civil rights movement, 61, 138, 763 Black Cubans, 44 Black Legend, 78–80 Blades, Ruben, 494, 495 Blanqueamiento (whitening), 162, 387, 472, 480

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 481 Blessing requests, 247–248 Bless Me Ultima (Anaya), 331 Blood Court, 79 Boff, Clodovis, 695 Boff, Leonardo, 71, 736 Bolı´var, Simo´n, 79–80, 494 Bolivia/Bolivians: colonialism, 177 education, xviii immigration, 518 Inca Empire, 152 income, xviii Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 La Virgen de Copacabana, 571–572 shrines, 440 Bolswert, Schelte Adams, 391 (photo) Bolufer, Bobby, 509 Bonaventure, St., 710, 750 Bonino, Jose´ Miguez, 284, 694 Bonnı´n, Eduardo, 97 Book of Mormon, 375, 378, 407 Border Saints, 80–83 Borderlands, 83–88 alienation as result of artificial borders, 26–28 Americanization programs, 86–87 border as metaphor, 87–88 border saints, 80–82 culture, 296 described, 83 forces of fragmentation, 770–771 frontier myth of terra nullis, 662–663 imbalance of power within, 85 maquiladoras (border factories), xx, 26 (photo) nepantla, 403–407 as result of Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo, 83–84 settlement houses, 86 Teologı´a en conjunto (collaborative theology), 118–119, 661, 676– 678, 761, 761–771 theoretical foundations of borderlands religion, 87–88

Index transnational Southwest border, 553 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Anzaldu´a), 87–88, 331, 404–405 Born-again Christians, 190, 192, 230, 233–234, 235–236 Bota´nica, 179, 180, 280, 506 Boturini, Lorenzo Benaduccie, 58, 59 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10 Bourgeois, Patrick, 426 Bourke, John G., 273–275, 276–277 Bourne, Randolph, 553 Bovedas, 223, 224 Bracero Program, 361, 442 Braulio of Zaragoza, 382 Brazil/Brazilians: Candomble´, 223, 502, 504 Catholic Charismatic movement, 427–428 Catholic-Pentecostal cooperation, 434 colonial history, 518, 732 comunidads de base (CEBs), 145, 146 French Huguenot settlement, 370 immigration, 520 Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 Macumba, 223 Marian Patroness, 572 Pentecostal movement, 431–432, 433 Protestants, 425 self-identification, 518; shrines, 439 slave trade, 12, 13 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 221 Umbanda, 223 University Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), 564, 565 Breaking (bboying, dancing), 285–286 Bregar, 335 A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas), 78–80, 154, 216, 217, 369, 397–398 British Honduras, 122–123 British Virgin Islands, 313

|

Brown, Buffalo Z., 330 Brown, Joseph Epes, 400 Brown, Robert McAfee, 284–285 Brownell, Herbert, 61 Brownsville Revival, 433 Brujerı´a (witchcraft), 193, 274–275, 417–419, 503, 537 Buddhism, xvi, 42, 89–93, 193 Burgess, E., 47 Burns, Jeffrey, 359 Burns, Ruth, 177 Bush, George H. W., 41 Bush, George W., 231, 470 Byrne, Archbishop Edwin Vincent, 422 Caballero, Jose´ de La Luz, 162 Caballero, Martin, 722 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nun˜ez, 153–154 Cabildos (social clubs), 417, 502–503 Cabral, Manuel del, 18 ´ lvares, 732 Cabral, Pedro A Cabrera, Lydia, 275, 418 Cabrera, Omar, 433 Cabrera, Rafael, 128 Cabrillo, Juan Rodriguez, 154 Cacique natives, 575 ‘‘Cada Dia’’ (Cofer), 332–333 Caesar Augustus, Emperor, 457 Caı´da de mollera, 274 California, xiv, xv, xix, 45 California Gold Rush, 89, 518 California Migrant Ministry, 138 Called and Gifted (Catholic Church), 75–76 Calles, Plutarco Elı´as, 82 Calvin, John, 590, 691, 730 Camacho, Olga, 723 Caminemos conservative Jesu´s (Goizueta), 242 Camino Real, 155 Canada, 440 Canales, Emmy, 97 Canary Islands, 162 La cancio´n del final del mundo (Blades), 494 Candomble´, 223, 502, 504

I-7

I-8

|

Index

CANF (Cuban American National Foundation), 170 Cano, Melchior, 159 Cantalamessa, Raniero, 711 Cantı´nflas, 137 Canto a Yemaya (Cruz), 493 Capilla del Santo Nin˜o de Atocha, 437 Capitalism, 176, 177 Caracalla, 381 CARA (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate), 76, 191 Carbia, Ro´mulo, 80 Carcan˜o, Bishop Minerva G., 466 Cardenal, Ernest, 174 Cargo, David, 140 Caribbean/s: African heritage, 16, 355 ‘‘banana republics,’’ xx diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 386–387 early roots of Latina/os, xix gender roles, 247 slave trade, 12, 15–16 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 221–222 Taı´nos people, 396 See also specific nations by name Caridad, 343–344 Carlos I of Spain (Carlos V), 79, 153 Carmelite Order, 391–392, 752 Carpinteria, California, 312 (photo) Carrasco, Davı´d, 9, 29, 405 La Carreta Made a U-Turn (Laviera), 332 Carroll R., M. Daniel, 298 Carta de Jamaica (Bolı´var), 79–80 Casa Bautista de Publicaciones, 462 La Casa del Carpintero Church, 54 (photo) Castaneda, Carlos, 396 Castellani, Alberto, 718 Castellanos, Sergio Ulloa, 702 Caste War of Yucata´n, 123 Castile, 483–485, 525, 530 Castillo, Ana, 254, 255–256, 331 Castro, Fidel: Camp Columbia speech, 172

Communism and alliance with USSR, 165 education, 170, 456 Elia´n Gonzalez as symbol of nationalism, 167 Fidel y la religio´n (Fidel and Religion) (Castro), 175 Marxist-Leninist declaration, 173 motivation for Cuban Revolution, 171–172 relationship between government and the church, 169, 173–174, 523 U.S. relations with Cuba following revolution, 505 See also Cuba Catalonia, 533 Catechumenate, 682 Cathedral of La Habana, 173 Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, 99 (photo), 684 (photo) Catherine of Siena, 523 Catholic Action movement, 97, 535 Catholic Charismatic movement, 95–98, 425–428 Charisma in Missions, 96–97 described, 95 emphasis on spiritual gifts, 96, 97 growth of movement, 433–435, 489, 711–712 healing Masses, 687–688 history of, 425–427 immigration of members, 434 influence on gender roles, 341 origins, 96 Pentecostals vs., 95–96 on prosperity gospel, 211 in Puerto Rico, 431 as reaction to perceived threat of modernity, 110–111 statistics, 98, 424, 425, 427–428 women within, 95–96, 97 Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR), 96–97, 426, 433–434, 711–712 Catholic Church/Catholics: anti–Catholicism of Protestants, 51, 434, 460–463 apparitions, 344–345

Index assimilation of Catholics in U.S., 51–53 attempt to ‘‘Americanize’’ Latino/as, 106 Base Communities (BCs), 67–71, 98, 115, 117, 145–146, 190–192, 285, 523–524 Bible banned in Latin America during Spanish colonial rule, 231 biblical reading, 109–110 Catholic-Pentecostal Cooperation, 434–435 church attendance, 445 colonial heritage, 100–101 commitment to the poor, 67, 70, 452– 453, 591, 616, 638–639, 660, 716 vs. communism, 412 Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM), 112–119 converts from, 110–111, 156–157, 229, 230–233, 307, 363–365, 425, 514 Council of Trent, 100, 103–105, 246, 343, 730–733, 751 Counter-Reformation, 370, 391–392 in Cuba, 17, 172, 173–174, 502–503, 523 Cuban Americans, 167–168 Curanderismo identification, 224–225 current ‘‘multiculturalizing’’ trend within U.S. Church, 106–107 devotion to saints, 19, 534–535, 683 Dominican Republic, 206–207 ecclesiology, biblical-theological framework, 295–298 Encuentros, 108 on exile and exodus, 240 finances, 513, 522 foreign-born priests within U.S. Church, 191 future of, 111–113 Las Hermanas (The Sisters), 107, 213, 363, 413–414, 764 history of Christian Scholastic teaching, 710

|

home altar making by mestizos, 29 on homosexuality, 270–271 Iberian colonizers, 18–20 Irish Catholics vs., 104–105, 332 Japanese Mexican Americans, 42 language of church services, 327, 531–532 Las Pastorelas, 419–420 Latino/a Catholicism, 98–113 Lay Ministry Formation Programs, 75–77 Liberation theology vs., 114–116 marginalization of Hispanics within, 364–365 marginal status of Latino/as, 106–113 mass media’s influence upon, 106 on Mexican Catholicism, 359 Mexicans, xvi missionaries, 29, 29–30, 31–32, 86– 87, 246, 358–359 modern attitude toward indigenous religious traditions, 399 Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 National Catholic Association of Diocesan Directors for Hispanic Ministry (NCADDHM), 52 national parishes, 240 ‘‘New Ecumenism,’’ 215, 101–103 Operation Pedro Pan, 167, 410–412 Padres Asociados Para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales (PADRES), 109, 213, 363, 763– 764 papal bulls of 1493, 368 parallel Latino/a church within broader Catholic Church, 108 parochial schools, 454–456 Penitentes, Los Hermanos, 421–422 Philippine Islands residents, 42 political activity, 445, 446–447, 562– 563 popular Catholicism, 98–100, 101– 102, 366–367 post-Tridentine reformed Catholics, 103

I-9

I-10

|

Index

post-World War II trends, 106 post-1960s: the Impacts of Modernity, Vatican II, and Social Movements, 105–111 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 45 Reformation, 103–105 Renewalist movement, 489–490 Rerum Novarum, 31 right-wing military dictators in South America and, 522–523 Roman Catholic Catechism system, 461 Roman Catholic Cursillo program, 138 scholarship, 112 seminaries, 548 sexism within, 258 of slave masters, 12 on social justice, 317 socioeconomic status of Hispanic Catholics, 209 South Americans, xvi Spanish-speaking priests, 191 statistics, xvi, 98, 156, 191, 233–235, 363, 487, 488 syncretism, 19, 502–503 as transnational religious organization, 555 Treaty of Tordesillas, 513 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), 52 Vodou influenced by, 577 See also Vatican II Catholicism, 98–113 Caudillos (military dictators), 340, 531 CBCs (Christian Base Communities), 67–71, 98, 115, 117, 145–146, 190– 192, 285, 523–524 CCR (Catholic Charismatic Renewal), 96–97, 426, 433–434, 711–712 Cedric, Saint, 457–458 CEFL (Center for Emerging Female Leadership), 255 CEHILA (Comisio´n de Estudios de Historia de la Iglesia en Ame´rica Latina y el Caribe), 677

CELAM. See Conference of Latin American Bishops Cemeteries, 34–36, 752 Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), 76, 191 Center for Emerging Female Leadership (CEFL), 255 Center for Urban Theological Studies (CUTS), 73–74 Central America/Central Americans, 119–130 ‘‘banana republics,’’ xix–xx Catholic-Pentecostal cooperation, 434 celebrations, 126, 129, 197 culture and folklore, 123–126 defined, 119 diversity of, 119–120 early roots of Latina/os, xix Evangelicals, xvi, 129–130 Federal Republic of Central America, 119 gender roles, 247 immigration background, 120–123 literature, 334 on mulatto/as, 386–387 religion, 126–130 slave trade, 12 unaffiliated population, 514 See also specific nations by name Central Japanese Association of Peru (CJAP), 39 Centzon Totochtin (Four Hundred Rabbits) harvest, 65 Cervantez, Yreina, 33 Ce´saire, Aime´, 18 Ce´spedes, Carlos Manuel de, 163 Chabebe, Father, 172 Chalma, Mexico, 30 Chamorro people, 536 Chanes, 717 Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion. See Pew Hispanic Center survey

Index Chango´ (god of lightening and fire), 275, 510, 512, 516, 541 Characteristics of Hispanic religiosity, xx–xxi Charismatics, xxi, 179, 189–190, 210– 211, 427, 490–491. See also Catholic Charismatic movement Charles V, King of Spain, 154, 369 Charro/cowboy, 340 Chavero, Alfredo, 59 Cha´vez, Arturo, 213 Cha´vez, Ce´sar, 130–133 commitment to nonviolence, 63, 131, 138, 219, 442 fasts, 131–132 influenced by Catholic spirituality, 219, 442 lack of identification with Chicano Movement, 137, 138 ‘‘Letter from Delano’’ (Cha´ vez), 132–133 photograph of, 130 (photo) popular religious practice utilized by, 132 religious symbolism employed by, 138 UFW founded by, 219 Cha´vez, Cuco, 495 Cha´vez, Fray Ange´lico, 330, 350 Chavez, Linda, 56 Chesapeake Bay, 153 Chesnut, R. Andrew, 427 Chiapas, Mexico, 401, 424 Chicaflips, 43 Chicago, Illinois: World’s Columbian Exposition, 89, 150 World’s Parliament of Religions, 89–90 Chicano/as, 135–141 aesthetic themes, 9 altars and shrines, 33–34 borderlands theory, 88 Chicana feminist movement, 64, 140, 253–254 Chicano/a Theology, 133–135

|

connection with broader Latino/a perspective, 254 cultural legacy, 141 defined, 135, 141, 290 ethnographic studies of, 177–178 Halloween rejected by, 197 Las Hermanas (The Sisters), 107, 213, 363, 413–414, 764 ‘‘Hispanic’’ and ‘‘Latino/a’’ vs., 135 historical origin of term, 362 history of movement, 362–363 La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), 62–63 Latina feminist theory developed by, 254 leaders of movement, 138–141 literature, 330–331 mainstream American perception of, 362–363 Mexican American campus activists, 135–136 Mexican Filipinos, 43 Mormons, 377 racism and racial self-hate confronted by, 137 raza co´smica, 479–481 self-identification, 254 significance of ‘‘Chicano/a’’ term, 135 sı´ se puede, 335 student movement, 135, 137–138 violent methods, 136 See also Aztla´n; Mexican Americans Chicano Moratorium (1970), 140 Chicano/a Movement, 135–142 Chicano National Liberation Youth Conference, 59, 60, 61, 140 Chicano Theology, 133–135 Chicapinos, 43 Chicomo´ztoc, 59 Chicunauhmictlan, 196 Chihuahua City, Mexico, 26 (photo), 375 Children. See Youth The Children of Sanchez (Lewis), 176 Chile/Chileans: Allende, Salvador, 232, 520

I-11

I-12

|

Index

Arauca people, 396 Catholic Charismatic movement, 425, 427 Catholic-Pentecostal cooperation, 434 education, xviii immigration, 518, 520 Inca Empire, 152 Nuestra Sen˜ora del Carmen (Mount Carmel), 572 pastoral care and counseling, 706 Pinochet, Augusto, 520 Protestants, 425 shrines, 440 Chimayo´, New Mexico, 30, 437, 662 (photo) China/Chinese populations: in Belize, 123 Chinese Cubans, 43–44 Chinese Exclusion Act, 46 ‘‘chino macaco,’’ 39 Coolies, 44 immigration during California Gold Rush, 89 mestizos on the Philippine Islands, 42 number system, 715 Pacific Middle Passage, 43–44 Peruvian Chinese colony, 39 Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), 38 The Chingo´n, 340 La Chinita, 522 Choc, Victor, 350 Chopra, Deepak, 278 Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Schillebeeckx), 733–734 Christenson, Allen J., 398 Christian, William, 534–535 Christian Base Communities (CBCs), 67–71, 98, 115, 117, 145–146, 190– 192, 285, 523–24 Christian Science, 274 Christmas celebrations, 46, 169, 419– 420 Christology, 589–598

Christological heresies and Latino/a Christology, 591–592 key paradigm, 596–598 language, culture, and borderland, 593–596 person, work, and states of Christ, 589–591 Chuj people, 124 Church attendance, 281, 327, 445–446, 535 The Church in Latin America (Dussel), 677 Church Missionary Society, 72 Church of Christ, 487 Church of God, 279 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). See Mormons Church of the Lukumı´ Babalu´ Aye, 508, 509 Cihuacoalt (earth goddess), 402, 407, 517 Cisneros, Cardinal Francisco Xime´nez de, 382, 383 Cisneros, Henry, 441 Cisneros case, 362 Civic assimilation, 49 Civic environmentalism, 219 Civil religion, 240 Civil rights movement: black civil rights movement, 61, 138, 763 Cha´vez, Ce´sar, 130–133 Chicano Movement and, 43, 60, 135–136 Filipino Americans, 43 as liberation theologians, 525 Protestant churches on, 240 CJAP (Central Japanese Association of Peru), 39 Classic Son, 495 Clavijero, Francesco Saverio, 59 Clement X, Pope, 523 Clement XII, Pope, 574 Clinton, Bill, 166–167 Coalition of Hispanic Christian Leadership, 661, 764

Index Coatlaxopeuh, 404, 570, 573 Coatlicue (Snake Skirt), 63–64, 407, 517 Cobre, Cuba, 168 Co´dice Boturini (Boturini), 58, 59 Cofer, Judith Ortiz, 332–333 Coffee, 501 Cold War. See Communism Colegio de Belen (Belen School), 170 Colindres, Alejandro, 124, 573 Collaborative pastoral ministry (pastoral de conjunto), 118–119 Collaborative theology (teologı´a de conjunto), 118–119, 661, 676–678, 761–771 Collins, Wayne M., 40 Collyridians, 568 Colombia/Colombians: African heritage, 355 Catholic Charismatic movement, 425, 427 diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 386–387 immigration, 518, 521 Nuestra Sen˜ora de Chiquinquira, 572 revolution, 174 shrines, 440 Colon, Diego, 152 Colo´n, Jesu´s, 332 Colo´n, Puchi, 495 Colo´n, Willie, 494 Colonial period, overview, xiii–xiv, xviii–xix, 9, 12–13, 18–20, 100–101, 356, 385. See also Spain/Spaniards Colonization Act (1824), 373 Columbus, Christopher: expulsion from Hispaniola, 216 land claimed by Spain as result of voyages, 148, 160–161, 351, 368, 470, 472 Las Casas on second voyage, 216, 369 portrait, 151 (photo) significance of expeditions, 150–151, 485, 525–526

|

slavery following 1492 journey, 13, 15 as suspected convert, 157 systematic invasion, 397 time line of voyages, 152, 153 The Comeback (Vega), 332 Coming-of-age ceremonies: Quincean˜era, 126, 144 (photo), 241, 245, 257, 266, 735 Xilonen, 241 Comisio´n de Estudios de Historia de la Iglesia en Ame´rica Latina y el Caribe (CEHILA), 677 Communism: Catholic Church and Catholics vs., 412 within Cuba, 165, 166–167, 172–174, 444 (photo) refugee status of communist nations, 499 in South America, 519–520 Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), 441 Community Service Organization (CSO), 131, 138 Compadrazgo (godparenthood), 126, 245, 246, 248, 729 Compadre Mon (Cabral), 18 Compostela, Spain, 97 Comunidads de base. See Base Communities (BCs) La Comunidad (The Community), 142– 147, 765 Concepcı´on, 146 Concepts and Practical Instruments for Pastoral Institutes (FIP), 76 Concerning Feuerbach (Marx), 692 Concilium (journal), 659 Conde-Frazier, Elizabeth, 299–300, 329, 687, 750 Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM), 68, 113–119, 145–146 Comisio´n de Estudios de Historia de la Iglesia en Ame´rica Latina y el Caribe (CEHILA), 677 impact on U.S. Hispanics, 118–119

I-13

I-14

|

Index

Medellı´n Conference, 3, 114–117, 145–146, 237, 302–303, 452, 523, 713 ‘‘preferential option for the poor’’ and ‘‘preferential option for the young,’’ 452 Puebla, Mexico, 3, 114, 115–116, 117, 146, 303, 452, 714 Confianza (trust), 248 Congar, Yves, 711 Congreso de Aztla´n, 62 Conner, Randy, 536 Conquistadores, 147–156 Adelantados, 149–150 Christianity spread by, 149, 150, 155, 397 Columbus’s voyages as beginning of the ‘‘Age of the Conquistadors,’’ 151 Cuba explored by, 161–162 described, 527–529 encomienda system, 78, 149, 215– 217, 368, 369 financial support for, 530 goals, 152, 397 indigenous collaboration with, 527–529 machismo, 340 modern views of, 152, 155–156 not exclusively Spanish, 527 origin of term, 147–148 parodies of, 403 requerimiento, 149 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas), 397–398 systematic invasion, 397 time line of major events, 152–155 See also Reconquista; specific individuals by name Consejo pastoral, 699 Constantine, Emperor, 67–68, 381, 436 Constitution Deus scientiarum Dominus (Pope Pius IX), 753 Contraception, 517 Contra War, 121, 122 Converts/conversion, 156–158

anousim, 315 assimilation associated with, 157; from Catholic Church, 110–111, 156–157, 229, 230–233, 307, 363–365, 425, 514 coexistence of old and new traditions, 328 conversion of Jews by, 157, 314–315, 459 described, 156 to Islam, 306, 307 as justification for encomienda system, 216–217 primary language of, 326 reasons, 156–157, 232–233 See also Missionaries Convivencia, 486 Cook, Stephen, 426 Coolies, 44 Copernican revolution, 733 Copil, 64 COPS (Communities Organized for Public Service), 441 Corazo´n (heart), 755–757 Corbett, Jim, 442–443, 499–500 Cordero, Gil, 358, 438, 575 Co´rdoba, Francisco Herna´ndez de, 153 Cordoba (Umayyad Caliphatef), 483–484 Coritos, 685 Corn, 400, 405 Coronado, Francisco Va´squez de, 154, 370 Corte´s, Felipe, 706 Corte´s, Herna´n: ‘‘Age of Conquistadors’’ led by, 84, 151 Aztecs captured by, 368–369, 482, 527 The Dance of Cortez, 350 indigenous collaboration with, 528 La Malinche, 148, 402, 517 La Virgen de Remedios, 65, 152 ships burned by, 482 Corte´s, Rev. Luis, Jr., 232, 234, 562 Cortese, Aimee, 255

Index Corte´z, Ernesto, Jr., 219, 441 The Cosmic Race: The Mission of the Ibero-American Race (Caldero´n), 479–481 Cosmology, 17 Costa Rica/Costa Ricans: Catholic-Pentecostal cooperation, 434 celebrations, 129 culture and folklore, 125 ‘‘machismo’’ usage, 339 migration patterns, 120, 122 pastoral care and counseling, 706 populations in the U.S., 125 religion, 127–128 ´ ngeles, 572 Santa Marı´a de los A shrines, 440 Costas, Orlando Enrique, 660, 678, 739– 741, 764 Costoya, Manuel Mejido, 451 ‘‘Costumbre’’ (Cofer), 333 Cotera, Marta, 137, 140, 254 Lo cotidiano (daily living), 158–160 aesthetics, 10 at the center of Latino/a theological analysis, 611–612, 676 described, 118–119 within feminist theology, 5, 252, 257 God reveals God’s self in, 637 as Latino methodological construct, 551, 660–661 leading scholars on, 158–160, 648– 649, 744–745 the Trinity understood through, 559 Cotton, 45–46 Council of Chalcedon, 589, 592 Council of Elvira, 381 Council of Ephesus, 342, 568–569 Council of Nicaea, 381 Council of Trent, 100, 103–105, 246, 343, 730–733, 751 Councils of Toledo, 382 Counseling. See Pastoral care Counter-Reformation, 370, 391–392 Coutinho, Osvaldo de Azeredo, 222 (photo)

|

Coyolxauhqui, 64 Coyote, New Mexico, 136 Crane, Ricardo, 706 Creation, 682 Cremin, Lawrence A., 71–72 Criollos (Creoles), 30, 78, 101, 123, 162, 356, 530–531 Cristero Wars, 82, 299, 375 Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Kant), 6 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 6 Cro´nica Mexica´yotl (Tezozo´moc), 58 The Cross and the Switchblade (Wilkerson), 426 Las Cruces, 403 Crumrine, N. Ross, 437, 439 Crusade for Justice (Gonzales), 140 Cruz, Bobby, 495 Cruz, Celia, 493, 494–495 Cruz, Juan de la, 749 Cruz, Marcial de la, 429 Cruz, Nicky, 24, 332, 426 Cruz, Nilo, 333 Cruz, Ronaldo, 52 Cruz, Samuel, 388, 389 Cruz, Sor Juana Ine´s de la, 732, 732 (photo) Crystal City, Texas, 141 CSO (Community Service Organization), 131, 138 Cuauhtemoc, 368 Cuautli, Juan Ce, 65, 152 Cuba/Cubans: African heritage, 355 Africanization of marginalized Whites, 504–505 Ajiaco Christianity, 21–23, 242 baseball, 207 Battle of Dos Rio, 164 Bay of Pigs invasion, 173 black, 44 blanqueamiento (whitening) policy, 162 Caridad, 343–344 Catholic clerics, 17, 523 Chinese Cubans, 43–44 church-state relations, 173–175

I-15

I-16

|

Index Colegio de Belen (Belen School), 170 Columbus’s expedition to, 151, 160– 161 Communism within, 166–167, 172– 174, 444 (photo) conditional freedoms, 502 criollos (Creoles), 162 cubanidad, 21–22 Cuban Revolutionary Party, 164 demographics, xvii De Soto, Hernando, 369 education, xviii, 250 Elia´n Gonzalez custody battle, 167, 443, 444 (photo) as English-speakers, xvii first Euro-American Protestant worship service held in, 233 foreign born, xvii as former colonial possession of Spain, xix gamblers, 715 Hatuey’s resistance to Spanish colonizers, 161 immigration and citizenship status, xvii income, xviii indigenous population, 160–161, 162 intellectuals influenced by Jefferson and Lincoln, 163 Jesuit priests expelled by, 456 La Virgen de la caridad del cobre, 402 lo cotidiano (daily life), 10 Martı´, Jose´, 161 (photo), 164 median age, xvii mulattos, 162 natural resources, 161 New Orleans trade, 163 Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Caridad, 572 October Missile Crisis, 411 Peruvian Embassy, 165 Platt Amendment, 164 political affiliation, 562 Protestant population, 234, 463 Republican Period, 504 resolver, 335

returning natives who converted while away, 233 salsa worship, 493–495 Santerı´a, 17 secular, xvi shrines, 440 slavery, 13, 17, 43–44, 162, 216, 417, 501–502 Spanish-American War, 373 Spanish conquest and colonization, 102, 153, 160–162 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 222 spiritual revival, 175 strategic position, 161–162 Ten Years’ War, 163, 528 unaffiliated population, 514 U.S.-relations, xix, 150, 160, 164– 165, 174 See also Cuban Americans; Cuban Revolution Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), 170 Cuban Americans, 160–171; ancestors, 163 Balsero (Cuban Rafters) Crisis of 1994, 165–167, 238 biblical themes of exile and immigration experience, 167, 169, 243, 411, 412, 443 Bota´nica, 506 concentrations in U.S. cities, 160, 165, 170–171, 505 Cuban exile private schools, 170 Elia´n Gonzalez custody battle, 167, 443, 444 (photo) espiritismo (Spiritism), 224 exile community network system (ile system), 505–506 graduation rates, 455 historical background, 160–167, 238 hyphenated identities, 296 immigration following Cuban Revolution, 160, 165–166, 238 Jewbans, 316 key concepts, ritual structures, and institutions, 167–171, 173 literature, 333

Index Mariel Boatlift, 165 Nuestra Sen˜ora de La Caridad de El Cobre (Our Lady of Charity), 168–169 Operation Pedro Pan, 167, 410–412 poverty rate, 209 Protestants, 373 Roman Catholic identification, 167–168 Santerı´a, 168, 505–506 shrines, 412, 439 statistics, 160 la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, 168 waves of immigration, 238 Cuban Children’s Program, 411 Cuban Revolution, xix, 171–175 Camp Columbia speech, 172 Castro’s motivation, 171–172 early martyrs of, 172 Evangelicals’ support for, 232 gradual emergence of, 162–165 Grito de Yara, 163 migration following, 44, 160, 165–166 Military Units for Assistance to Production (UMAP), 174 participation of Catholic leaders within, 172 protests vs., 172–174 as threat to Christianity within Cuba, 172–174 U.S. relations with Cuba following, 505 Cue´llar, Diego Vela´zquez de, 153 Cuetlaxochitl (poinsettias), 64 Culhuacanos, 58 Culto, 681 Cultural Citizen Project, 178 Cultural Memory: Resistance, Faith, Identity (Rodriguez), 259 Culture: aesthetics, 11 American culture affected by Hispanic presence, xiv, 49 cultural affirmation, 321

|

cultural anthropology, 176–178 cultural assimilation (acculturation), 48–49, 53–54 cultural criticism, 650 cultural pluralism, 50, 55, 56, 58 Curanderismo (healings), 179–185, 273–282 art in healing, 277 Catholic Charismatic movement, 687–688 Curandera/os (healers), xvi, 31, 34– 36, 276 (photo), 276–277 Espiritualismo as institutionalized curanderismo, 224–229 for the evil eye, 751 explaining illness, 274–725 healer cults, 278 health of churchgoers, 281 Latino/a population, 193 limpias (spiritual cleansing), 537, 752, 754 major traditions detected in, 273–274 for mal aire, 752 Olaza´bal, Francisco, 409–410 origin of term, 224 Pentecostalism as a health care system, 278–279, 281–282 Santerı´a as a health care system, 279– 280, 509 science and religion, 280–282 sin associated with illness, 275 Spiritism as a health care system, 279 tarot cards, 715 testimonios, 544 therapeutic strategies, 275–278 via pastoral care, 699–707 women as healers, 278 Cursillos de Cristiandad, 97, 98, 190, 490–491 Cuzco, Peru, 177, 369 Cyclical church dramas, 419–420 Daily living experience. See Lo cotidiano (daily life) Dalton, Frederick, 132

I-17

I-18

|

Index

La Dama Duende (Barca), 718 Damas, Le´on-Gontran, 18 Dammen, Rev. Karen, 270 Dance of Los Matachines, 348–351 Dark Ages, 710 Dark Night of the Soul (John of the Cross), 392 Darley, Rev. Alex M., 422 Darwin, Charles, 480, 481 Da´vila, Alvaro, 758–759 Da´vila, Arlene, 292 Davis, J. E., 462 Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos), 9, 33, 195–199, 266, 403 De Alva, Klor, 405 Dealy, Glen, 531 Death rituals: Dı´a de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), 9, 33, 195–199, 266, 403 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 45 Santerı´a, 224 De Avedan˜o, Diego, 731–732 DeBry, Theodorus, 78 Deck, Allan Figueroa, 9, 365 The Decline of the West (Spengler), 480 Decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches, 380 Deculturation, 21–22 Deejaying, 285–286 De la Cruz, Sor Juana Ine´s, 253 De La Torre, Benigno Dominguez, 509 De La Torre, Miguel A.: on aesthetics, 10 ajiaco, 22 ‘‘anonymous Santerı´a’’ coined by, 36 on Chinese Cubans, 43 on Elia´ n Gonzalez custody battle, 443 ‘‘exilio’’ coined by, 242–243 on function of scripture in Latino and other marginalized circles, 648 hermeneutical circle, 285 on ‘‘mulatez,’’ 388, 389 nepantla, 405 on ‘‘New Ecumenism,’’ 214–215

Rethinking Latino Religion and Identity (De La Torre and Espinosa), 194 De La Vega, Gracilaso, 731 De locis theologicis (Cano), 159 ‘‘Democracy Versus the Melting Pot’’ (Kallen), 50 Democratic Party (U.S.), 234, 562–563 Demographics, 187– Denmark, 12 Denver War on Poverty, 140 De Porres, Saint Martin, 520 (photo), 521 Descartes, Rene´, 450 Desegregation, 454 De Soto, Hernando, 154, 369 The Devil, 401 The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Taussig), 176–177 Dharmadhatus (meditation centers), 91 Dı´a de la Raza, 574 Dı´a de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), 9, 33, 195–199, 266, 403 Diakonia, 214 Diaspora theology, 200–204, 295, 315. See also Exile and exodus Dı´az, Miguel, 264, 551–552 Diaz, Noel, 97 Dı´az, Porfirio, 81 Dı´az-Stevens, Ana Marı´a, 724, 736 La dicha mı´a (Cruz), 494–495 Dimensiones en Cuidado Pastoral en Latinoamerica, 707 Diosito, 722 Diphrasism, 404 Disenfranchisement. See Alienation Distributive-reformist approach, 319– 320 Divino Redemptoris, 412 Divorce, 249 Dobbs, Lou, 378 Docetism, 591 Doctrine of the Faith, 453 Doctrinero, 215 Dominga, Madre Marı´a, 474 Dominican Americans, 205–207

Index baseball, 207 bota´nica, 179 Dominican American National Round Table, 206 Dominican Day parade, 206 (photo) Dominican Studies Institute, 206– 207 as economic immigrants, 206 education and occupational status, 250 graduation rates, 455 Mormons, 377 poverty rate, 209 shrines, 440 Tatica from Higuey, 209 U.S. officeholders, 206 Dominican Republic/Dominicans: African heritage, 355 binational status, 206 demographics, xvii diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 387 as English-speakers, xvii foreign born, xvii income, xviii Jehovah’s Witness, 313 literature, 333–334 Our Lady of Altagracia (Highest Grace), 572 Pentecostal movement, 207 Roman Catholicism as official religion, 206–207 Santerı´a, 207 Trujillo assassination, 205 Voodoo, 207 Don˜a Marina, 148 Donjuanismo, 339–340 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 263 Los Dorados organization, 4 (photo), 456 (photo) D’Orbigny, Alcide Dessalines, 395 Double consciousness, 28, 321–322 Double loyalty, 206 Downey, Michael, 755, 757 Down These Mean Streets (Thomas), 332

|

Drama, 419–420, 719 Dreaming in Cuban (Garcia), 333 Drug-rehabilitation programs, 23–25 Duality, 756 Du Bois, W. E. B., 28 Los Duendes, 718 Duns Scotus, John, 569 Duquesne University, 426 Dura´n, Diego, 404 Durkheim, Emile, 176 Dussel, Enrique, 677 Duvalier, Franc¸ois, 579, 580 Easter celebrations, 402, 662 (photo), 750 (photo) East Los Angeles student walkouts, 61 Ecclesial base community model, 118– 119 Ecclesiogenesis, defined, 69 Ecclesiology, 599–668 Echaniz, Sylvia, 226 Echevarrı´a, Jose´ Antonio, 172 Ecology and environmental issues, 118, 218–220 Economics, 209–213 Economic Trinity, 558 Economy, 209–212; accumulated buying power of the Latino/a community, 209 barrios, 140, 209, 214, 297, 493, 623 diversity within communion, 657 economic justice, 319–320 government benefits and services, 209, 211, 446–447, 563 liberationist theology and, 210, 211–212 maquiladoras (border factories), xx, 26 (photo) prosperity gospel, 210–211 role of religion in global economy, 581 See also Poverty/poor communities Ecuador/Ecuadorians: Catholic Charismatic movement, 425 immigration, 518, 521 Inca Empire, 152

I-19

I-20

|

Index

Nuestra Sen˜ora del Quinche, 573 shrines, 440 Ecumenism, 213–215 Edict of Expulsion (1492), 314–315 Edict of Milan, 67–68 Editorial Mundo Hispano, 462 Education/schools: Chicano Studies programs, 140–141 collaborative programs, 765–766 demographics, xviii diversity within communion, 657 education reform, 141 established by Protestant missionaries, 461 graduation rates, 455 increasing levels of, 250 New Testament on, 74 private religious schools, 454–456 public, 454–455 Sunday Schools, 461 theological and religious education, 71–77, 545–550, 704–705 Urban Training Centers (UTC), 24– 25 See also Education/schools Edwards, Jonathan, 415 18th Street Gang, 126 Eirene, 705–706 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 410 Ekklesia, 69, 143–144 El Bronx Remembered (Mohr), 332 El Cid the Champion, 484 El Coloquio de San Jose´ (New Mexico folk play), 420 El Cristo negro de Esquipulas, 401 Elders, respect for, 340 El Dios de nosotros, 639 El Divino Narciso (Cruz), 732 El Dorado, 152 Electronic Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology (journal), 112 Eleggua (Elegbara/Eshu), 510 ‘‘El Grito’’ (Romano), 177–178 El Habanero (newspaper), 163 El hombre americano (D’Orbigny), 395 Elias, Padre (Roque Rojas Esparza), 225, 226–229

Elizondo, Virgilio: aesthetics, 11 biographical information, 623, 659 collaborative theology, 763 criticism of, 624 on eschatologies that jeopardize sociopolitical action undertaken by Latino/as, 620 on fiesta (celebration), 264–265, 669 Galilean Journey, 241–242, 353–354, 741 on Guadalupe, 401, 575–576, 735– 736, 741–742 Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL), 97–98, 187, 767 on Jesus as a Galilean Jew, 241–242, 296, 353–354, 648, 666, 741 mestizaje as a theological category, 551, 662, 674–675 Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC), 213, 659, 764 on soteriology, 741–742 on unity, 214 Elliott, J. H., 529 El movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA), 361–362 El Norte (film), 181 El Padre Antonio y el monaguillo Andre´s (Blades), 494 El Paso, Texas, 209 ‘‘El Plan de Barrio’’ (Gonzales), 140 El Plan Espiritual de Aztla´n, 61–62, 63, 140 El Salvador/Salvadorans, 496–498 barrios, 297 culture and folklore, 124, 334, 497–498 demographics, xvii education, xviii gangs, 126, 497–498 immigration, xx, 120–121, 124, 238, 297, 442–443, 496–497 Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 language, xvii, 124

Index religion, 128, 129, 425, 427, 440, 496–497, 572–573 Salvador del Mundo, El, 497 soccer war, 121 violence and oppressive regime, xx, 120–121, 297, 496, 498, 499–500 Emceeing, 285–286 Empacho, 274 Empowerment, 5 Encomiendas (forced labor), 78, 149, 215–217, 368, 369 Encuentro de Pueblos Indigenas de las Americas (Encounter of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas), 399 Encuentro Latino (Latin Encounter), 96–97 Encuentros, 108 Encyclopedia Britannica, 47 Enduring Flame (Dı´az-Stevens), 548, 736 Engagement (Segovia’s diaspora theology), 203–204 Engels, Friedrich, 618 England: Black Legend used as propaganda vs. Spain, 79 British Honduras, 122–123 cultural values and norms brought to U.S., 49, 55 Enlightenment, 176 Moorish Dancers, 349 slave trade, 12 English (language), xvii, 55, 141, 325, 326, 378, 685 Enigmatic Powers (Benavides and Vidal), 548, 736 The Enlightenment, 176, 450 Enriquez, King Alfonso, 484 Environmentalism, 218–220 Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus, 568 Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA), 373, 487 Epistemology, 611–613 Erasmus, Desiderius, 539

|

Ermita de la Caridad, Miami, Florida, 439 Escando´n, Maria Amparo, 331 Eschatology, 615–624, 668–669 contents of Latino/a eschatology, 620–623 defined, 615 truth as contextually bound, 616–618 truth as realized in history, 618–620 Escobar, Samuel, 488–489 Escuela Dominical, 461 Esparza, Ofelia, 33 Esparza, Roque Rojas, 225, 226–229 Esperanza’s Box of Saints (Escando´n), 331 Esperanza USA, 232, 234, 562 Espı´n, Orlando, 112, 159, 262–264, 297, 551, 663, 720, 758 Espinosa, Gasto´n, 97, 157, 187, 405 Espiritismo, 220–224 See also Spiritism Espiritistas, 221, 225, 226, 269 Espı´ritu, 756 Espiritualidad, 224–229, 749 Espiritualismo, 224–230 Esteve y Toma´s, Bishop Gill, 472 ‘‘Estranged Labor’’ (Marx), 692 ETA (Evangelical Training Association), 75 Ethics, 10, 11, 627–635, 751–752 Etiology, 274 Euangelion, 230 The Eucharistic table, 682 Evangelicals: Bibles sent to Latin America by, 231 Central America, xvi, 129–130 church attendance, 445 ‘‘evangelicos’’ vs., 236, 328, 463 Great Commission (Mark 16:15), 231, 236 Hispanics, xvi political affiliation, 445, 562–563 proselytism, 363 Puerto Rico/ans, xvi on social justice, 317–318 socioeconomic status of, 209 statistics, 487

I-21

I-22

|

Index

testimonios, 544 See also Protestantism/Protestants Evangelical Training Association (ETA), 75 Evange´lica/os, 230–236 as contextual theology, 673 conversion to, 230–233 demographics, 233–234 described, 234, 328 Euro-American evangelicals vs., 236, 328, 463 historical roots, 231–233, 463 within Liberation Theology, 146 National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), 236 political views, 235 religious activities, 234–235 social services provided by, 232–233 Evangelli nuntiandi (Pope Paul VI), 713–714 Evil eye (mal de ojo), 275, 537, 721, 751, 752 Evolution, 480, 481 Exile and exodus, 237–240; Biblical interpretation, 237, 238–240, 295, 296–297, 412 biblical narratives, 237, 412, 644, 651–652 described, 295 God of life-giving migrations, 644–645 Jesus’ prophetic exile from this world, 645 Jewish pilgrim festivals during, 436 key figures, 241–243 major doctrinal points, 238–241 metaphor used to describe plight of the poor, 237–238 origin of term, 242–243 reconciliation between Exilic Cubans and Resident Cubans, 23 ritual structures, 241 See also Diaspora theology; Immigration Exilio, 237–243 Eximiae Devotionis, 368

‘‘The Exodus as Event and Process’’ (Gottwald), 241 Exorcism, 564–565 Fact Book on Theological Education (ATS), 545 Faith expressions. See Popular religion Faith healing. See Curanderismo (healings) ‘‘The Faith of Hispanics Is Shifting’’ (Barna Research Group), 488 Falicov, Celia Jaes, 701–702 Fallen fontanelle, 274 Faltas tu´, faltas tu´, Timoteo faltas tu´ (Cruz), 495 Family, 245–250 Central American values, 126 church as family, 668 compadrazgo (godparenthood), 126, 245, 246, 248, 729 familismo, 340 family ethics, 631–632 sizes, 515, 517 the Trinity, 559 Fania All Stars, 493 Los Fariseos (Cruz), 495 Farmworkers: the Great Grape Strike, 47, 131, 363 migrant workers, 130–133, 212 (photo), 399 United Farm Workers (UFW), 107, 131–133, 137, 138, 219, 363, 442, 514 Fatima, Portugal, 344 Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, 344 Feast of San Isidro, 457–458 Feast of the Assumption of Mary, 342 Feast of the Three Kings, 266 The Federal Land-Grant Alliance (La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes), 136, 139–140 Federal Republic of Central America, 119 Federation of Pastoral Institutes (Federacio´n de Institutos Pastorales, FIP), 76

Index Feminist movement/theory, 251–260 Chicana feminist movement, 64, 137–138, 140, 253–254 contributions to the field of epistemology, 612 empowerment emphasized by, 5 ‘‘feminism,’’ interpretations of, 251, 252 Hermeneutics of Suspicion, 257–259 Latina/Chicana Feminism vs. Euro-American Feminists, 253–254 Latina Feminist epistemology, 254–256 as liberation theology, 673, 676 lo cotidiano (daily life), 10, 252, 257 marianismo challenged by, 348 Mujerista theology, 158–159, 259– 260, 335–337, 383–385, 552, 673, 736 Mujerista theology, Isasi-Dı´az on, 242, 252, 258, 648, 744–745 overview, 251–252 political activity in support of women’s rights, 446–447 praxis methodology and option for the poor, 259–260 rooted in the ordinary, 256–257 suffragists, 253 See also Women Ferdinand II, King of Aragon: Edict of Expulsion (1492), 314 right to fill high ecclesiastical posts within her domain, 513, 522 Spanish Reconquest, xiii, 147–148, 161, 368 Ferguson, Adam, 176 Ferna´ndez, Eduardo C., 758 Fernando II, King of Castile, 485 Fernando III, King of Castile, 484–485 Feudal contracts, 148 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 672 Fiance´e Act (1946), 43, 47 Fichte, Johann G., 480 Fidelity, 517 Fidel y la religio´n (Fidel and Religion) (Castro), 175

|

Fidencio, El Nin˜o, 34–36, 80, 82, 181, 182, 278 La Fiesta de la Santa Cruz, 458 Fiesta of Santiago, 9 Fiestas, 261–267, 402–403, 643, 669 Fife, John, 442–443, 499–500 Filipinos. See Philippines Findlay, Eileen, 469 FIP (Federation of Pastoral Institutes), 76 ‘‘First Communion’’ (Rivera), 332 First Hispanic Baptist church, Santa Barbara, California, 464 (photo) First Holy Communion, 457 First Spanish Methodist Church, 584–585 Flipsicans, 43 Flores, Patricio Fernandez, 105 Florida, xiii, xiv, xv, 102–104, 153–154, 168, 369, 370 Florida water, 224 Flor y canto, 404 Folk saints, 80–82 Fontela, Diego, 509 Foraker Act, 474 ‘‘The Foreign-born Population in the United States’’ (U.S. Census), 488 Fortier, Ted, 259 ‘‘Fountain of Youth,’’ 153 Four Hundred Rabbits (Centzon Totochtin) harvest, 65 Fowler, James, 259 Fox, Geoffrey, 291 Fox, Vicente, 378 France, 12, 163, 176, 292, 370 Franciscan friars, 371–372, 373, 710, 751, 752 Francis of Assisi, St., 512, 572, 686, 722 Franco, Francisco, 490 Frank, Jerome, 259 Frankfurt school of philosophy, 283 Franz, Frederick, 312 La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesu´s Nazareno, 421–422 Fraternidad Teolo´gica Latinoamericana (FTL), 705

I-23

I-24

|

Index

Free speech movement, 132 French Huguenot settlements, 370 Friedzon, Claudio, 433 Frohlich, Mary, 757 From the Heart of the People (Aquino), 258 Fronteras (CEHILA), 677 Frontier myth of terra nullis, 662–663 Frui, 7 FTL (Fraternidad Teolo´gica Latinoamericana), 705 Fuentes, Carlos, 407, 533, 534 Fujimori, Alberto, 519 The Future Is Mestizo (Elizondo), 353–354 Gadsden Purchase, 357 Galilean Journey (Elizondo), 241–242, 353–354, 741 Galilee and Galileans, 241–242, 296, 353–354, 639–640, 648, 666, 741 Gallardo, Sister Gloria, 107, 413 Galvan, Elias Gabriel, 270 Galva´n, Juan, 308 Gamblers, 715 Gamonal, Ezequiel Ataucusi, 519 Gandhi, Mohandas, 131 GANG (God’s Anointed Now Generation), 24–25 Gangs, 23–25, 126, 426, 497–498, 583–585 Garcia, Cristina, 44, 333 Garcı´a, Ismael, 214 Garcı´a, Espı´n and Sixto, 552–553 Garcı´a-Rivera, Alejandro, 9 Garcia-Treto, Francisco, 647–648 Garinagu/Garifuna people, 123, 124, 125, 128 Garza, Reverend Nick, 236 Garzo´n, Esther, 96 Gaspar (Three Kings), 265 Gaucho, 340 Gautama, Siddhartha, 89 Gautier, Mary, 191 Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender

(GLBT) communities, 256, 269–271, 350, 447, 516, 563 Gender roles, 246–247, 249, 250, 255, 270, 339–341, 346–348. See also Women Gentlemen’s Agreement (1907), 46 George, Saint, 19, 533 Getting Home Alive (Morales), 333 G.I. Bill, 135, 361 Gilligan, Carol, 259 GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) communities, 256, 269– 271, 350, 447, 516, 563 Globalization, 57, 297, 556 Glossolalia (speaking in tongues), xx, 95, 189, 423, 489–490 God, 637–645; Hispanic reinterpretation of, 665 methodological presuppositions, 637–639 naming and understanding God from Latina/o perspectives, 639–645 revelation of divine name to Moses, 637 Godparenthood (compadrazgo), 126, 245, 246, 248, 729 God’s Anointed Now Generation (GANG), 24–25 Goizueta, Roberto S.: accompaniment, 142–143, 159, 242, 641, 666 on Fiesta, 265–266 on language and culture, 531, 551 on popular religiosity, 9–10, 663 on praxis, 10, 697 on Puebla Conference, 452 sacramental theology, 736 Gomez, Oba´ Oriate´ Victor Manuel, 509 Go´ngora, Carlos Singu¨enza y, 732 Gonzales, Rodolfo ‘‘Corky,’’ 61, 62, 133, 140–141 Gonzalez, Elia´n, 166–167, 411, 443, 444 (photo) Gonzalez, Elisa, 90–91 Gonza´lez, Juan, 292, 441 Gonza´lez, Justo L.:

Index Apuntes (journal), 547, 658, 659 Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH), 73, 75, 658, 659 biographical information, 202, 658 collaborative theology, 763 on contributions of Hispanics to Trinity thought, 664 criticism of, 624 on eschatologies that jeopardize sociopolitical action undertaken by Latino/as, 591–592, 620, 621–622 Hispanic Summer Program (HSP), 658, 766 Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI), 147, 546, 658, 659 on Hispanic way of being church, 668 on the incarnation, 665 on Latina/o reading of the Bible, 650–653 on man˜ana, 669 on mixture of cultures, 213 paradigms of Hispanic Diaspora theology, 202–203 on soteriology, 742–744 The Story of Christianity (Gonza´lez), 658 on unity, 214 on worship, 684–685 Gonza´lez, Michelle A., 10, 23, 252, 388–389 Gonza´lez, Saint Toribio Romo, 80, 82, 299 Gonza´lez, Sister Marı´a Elena, 213 Gonzalez-Quintana, Juan Miguel, 167 Good Friday, 4 (photo), 5, 456 (photo), 457, 619 (photo), 641 (photo) Good Government Law, 417 Gordon, Milton, 48–51, 53, 55–56, 58 Gordon College, 73 Gottwald, Norman K., 239, 241 Government aid, 209, 211, 446–447, 563 Gracia, Jorge, 292, 526, 530 Grafitti, 285–286, 390

|

Granada, 367–368, 484–485, 525 Grassroots transnationalism, 556 Gravesites, 34–36 Gray, James M., 72 Great Antilles Blacks, 387 Great Commission (Mark 16:15), 231, 236 Great Depression, 240, 360–361 The Great Grape Strike, 47, 131, 363 ‘‘The Great Nation of Futurity’’ (O’Sullivan), 150 Greece (ancient), 7, 12, 689–691 Greeley, Andrew, 187–189, 190 Green phenomenon, 218 Gregory I, Pope, 358 Gregory XIII, Pope, 344 Gregory XVI, Pope, 472 Griffin, Mark, 296 Griffith, James S., 35–36 Grijalva, Juan de, 369–370 Grito de Yara, 163 Gross, Jeffrey, 147 Growth rate of Latino population, xv, xvi Gruzinski, Sergei, 400–401 Guadalajara, Mexico, 556 Guam, xix, 150, 536 Guama´n Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 731 Guanahani, 150–151, 368 Guatemala/Guatemalans: Catholic Charismatic movement, 427 celebrations, 129 civil war, 120 earthquake of 1976, 120, 128 education, xviii El Cristo negro de Esquipulas, 401 as English-speakers, xvii gangs, 126 household demographics, xvii Ladino and Indian populations, 48 migration patterns, 120, 121, 123, 123–124 Pentecostal movement, 433 Protestants, 425 Sanctuary Movement, 442–443 shrines, 440

I-25

I-26

|

Index

violence, 498–500 la Virgen del Rosario, 573 Xinca people, 123 Guerra, Juan Luis, 495 Guest worker program, 442 Guevarra, Rudy, 43 Guillen, Nicolas, 18 ‘‘Gunboat diplomacy,’’ xix–xx Gutie´rrez, Gustavo: on Christian praxis, 3, 695–696 on exodus and exile, 238–239, 241 Liberation Theology introduced by, 114, 237, 523, 524, 693 ‘‘preferential option for the poor,’’ 453 on relationships with the poor, 5 on spirituality, 755, 756 Gutie´rrez, Jose´ Angel, 62, 141 Gutie´rrez, Ramo´n, 32 Guzman, Domingo de, 573 Habsburg Dynasty, 79 Haiti, 387, 502, 577–581 Hall, Linda, 534 Halloween, 197 Handbook of Religion and Health (Oxford Press), 281 Harlem Renaissance, 18 Harvest of Empire a History of Latinos in America (Gonza´lez), 292, 441 Harwood, Thomas and Emily, 86, 460 Hatuey, 161 Hawaii, 43, 528 HCAPL (Hispanic Churches in American Public Life), xvi, 97–98, 187–194, 425, 432, 446, 767 Healings. See Curanderismo Health Care, 273–283 Health insurance, 209 Heart of Aztla´n (Anaya), 63 Hebrew Bible. See Old Testament Heerinckx, Iacobo, 753 Hegel, Georg W. F., 6, 480, 618 Hellenistic Empire, 12 Henschel, Milton, 312

Las Hermanas (The Sisters), 107, 213, 363, 413–414, 764 Los Hermanos Penitentes, 421–422, 457, 462 Hermeneutical Circle, 283–285 Hermeneutics, 203–204, 282–285, 647–656 Biblical hermeneutics by Latino/a theologians, 648–649 Garcia-Treto, Francisco, 647–648 Gonza´lez and ‘‘reading through Hispanic eyes,’’ 650–653 immigration studies, 298–300 intercultural studies, 653–656 Segovia and the critique of the historical–critical methodologies, 649–650, 653–654 Hermitan˜o, 419–420 Hernandez, Alejo, 373 Hernandez, Esteban, 172 Hernandez, Esther, 33 Heschel, Abraham, 415 Heurta, Dolores, 219, 219 (photo) Hidden Stories: Unveiling the History of the Latino Church (McCormick Theological Seminary), 765 Higashide, Seiichi, 40, 41 Hijuelos, Oscar, 333 Hindus and Hinduism, 44, 45, 123, 193 Hinojosa, Gilberto, 358 Hip-hop culture, 285–286 Hippocratic theory, 179 Hispania, 482–483 Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL), xvi, 97–98, 187–194, 425, 432, 446, 767 Hispanic Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity, 232, 234 The Hispanic Condition and Latino USA (Stavans), 292 The Hispanic Databook, xvii, xviii Hispanic/Latino Identity (Gracia), 292 Hispanic Ministry at the Turn of the Millennium (Barnes), 98, 189–190, 191–192 Hispanic Nation Culture, Politics, and

Index the Construction of Identity (Fox), 291 Hispanic Summer Program (HSP), 658, 766 Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI), 147, 546, 658, 659 Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church, 661–662 Hispanic World Publishers, 462 Hispaniola, 149, 151, 216 Hispano-Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 Holiness movements, 225 Holland, 12, 78–79 The Holy Spirit, 666–667, 709–712 Holy Thursday, 457 Holy Week, 266, 640–642 Los hombres de maı´z, 129 Home altars, 31–32 Home chapels, 30 Home Missionary Societies, 373 Homosexuality, 256, 269–271, 350, 447, 516, 563 Honduras/Hondurans: culture and folklore, 124–125 Garinagu/Garifuna people, 128 migration patterns, 120, 122 Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Concepcio´n de Suyapa, 573 patron saint of, 124 populations in the U.S., 124–125 poverty levels, xviii Protestants, 425 religion, 128 shrines, 440 soccer war, 121 street gangs, 126 U.S. military base within, 125 Los Hoodios, 317 Hoodoo, 580 (photo) Hordes, Stanley, 315 Hosius of Co´rdoba, 381 Hospitality, 644 House churches. See Base Communities (BCs) How the Garcı´a Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvaraez), 334

|

Hoyos, Juan and Rodrigo, 168, 168–169 HR 4437, 336 (photo) HTI (Hispanic Theological Initiative), 147, 546, 658, 659 Hudu, 580 (photo) Huerta, Dolores, 138, 442 The Huichols, 9, 396 Huitzilopochtli (God of the Sun and War), 29, 58, 63, 64–65, 407 Human rights, 78–80 Human sacrifice, 578, 732 Humboldt, Alexander von, 59 Hunt, Larry, 446–447 Huntington, Samuel, 55–56, 515 Hurricane Mitch, 122 IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation), 138, 219 The Ibo, 17 Icaza, Rosa Marı´a, 534, 757 Identificational assimilation, 49 Identity: defining blackness, 386 ethics of, 631–632 Latino/a identity, 289–294, 323–324, 325, 327, 344, 362, 472–473 polycentric identities, 54–55, 57–58 Ifa´, 502, 507, 512 La Iglesia de la Gente, 442 Iglesia La Luz del Mundo, 556 Iglesias peregrinas en busca de identidad Cuadros del protestantismo latino en los Estados Unidos (CEHILA), 677 Ignatian Exercises, 751, 752 Ignatius of Loyola, Saint, 392, 533, 711 Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, 555–556 Ildephonse of Toledo, 382 Ile system, 505–506 Illegal immigrants, xv, 361, 362, 378, 397 (photo), 442–444, 446. See also Sanctuary Movement Illness. See Curanderismo (healings) The Illuminative Way, 753 Imago Dei, 666–667, 745

I-27

I-28

|

Index

IMF (International Monetary Fund), 521 Immaculate Conception, 569 Immaculate Heart of Mary Church Sunday, 701 (photo) Immigration, 294–300 Alliance for Progress, 519–520 from ‘‘banana republics,’’ xix–xx during California Gold Rush, 89 calls for reform, 55, 322, 443–444, 561, 619 (photo) Catholic ecclesiology, 297–298 Central Americans, statistics, 120, 122, 123 concentrations in U.S. cities, 160, 165, 170–171, 505, 519 descendants of Hispanics as earliest immigrants, xiv exilio (exile), 237–238 ‘‘The Foreign-born Population in the United States’’ (U.S. Census), 488 generational gaps resulting from acculturation, 248–249, 684 hermeneutics, 298–300 history of U.S. immigration laws, 289, 336 (photo) ‘‘hyphenated identities,’’ 296 Immigrant Responsibility Act (1996), 498 Immigration Act (1917), 44, 46 Immigration and Nationality Act (1952), 47 Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), 43, 46, 47, 553 Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), 121 Luce-Celler Bill, 46 marginality and questions of identity, 295–296 National Origin Act (1924), 46, 61 Operation Pedro Pan, 167, 410–412 pastoral care for immigrants, 467, 699–707 of Pentecostals and Catholic Charismatics, 434 plans to return to homelands, 521

political conflicts between home nations brought to U.S., 521 quotas, 553 remittances, 206, 553, 556 as result of U.S. political interventions in Latin America, 618 Sanctuary Movement, 442–443, 444, 496–497, 498–501 Shrine of Saint Toribio, 299 South Americans, 518, 519, 519–521 Temporary Protected Status (TPS), 121, 122 transnationalism, 553–557 undocumented ‘‘immigrants,’’ xv, 361, 362, 378, 397 (photo), 442– 444, 446 uprooting of meaning systems, 701–702 urbanization and, 106 U.S. history of conquest and annexation, xix voting rights, 253 See also Assimilation; Diaspora theology; Exile and exodus; specific nationalities by name Imperial Valley, California, 45–46 Inca Empire, 151–152, 154, 369, 395– 396, 519, 527 (photo), 731 Income statistics, xviii Inculturation, 686–687 Inda, Jonathan Xavier, 178 Independent/nondenominational Christians, 487 Independent Party (U.S.), 562 India, 44–45 La India, 493–494 Indigenous peoples. See Native peoples Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), 138, 219 Industrial Revolution, 691 Ine´s del Campo, Saint, 458 Infancy Gospel of James, 265 Informes (newsletter), 107 Initial Evidence Theory, 95 Inkarri, 519 Innocent XI, Pope, 393

Index In Search of Bernabe´ (Lı´mon), 334 INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services), 121 Institutionalized violence, 301–306 Instituto de Liturgia Hispana, 112 Instituto Latino de Cuidado Pastoral, 702–703 Inter Caetera I and II, xiii, 368 Interdenominational cooperation, 434– 435 InterGen, 220 The Interior Castle (Teresa of Avila), 392 Intermarriages, 15, 44, 45, 216 Internalizing the Vision (Arguinzoni), 25 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 521 Introductio in Theologiam Spiritualem (Heerinckx), 753 Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel), 6 Irarra´-zabal, Diego, 401, 402 Irenaeus, 643 Irish Catholics, 104–105, 332 Isabel I, Queen of Spain, xiii, 148, 161, 314, 368, 485, 513 Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a: biographical information, 242, 252, 623, 744 criticism of, 624 on eschatologies that jeopardize sociopolitical action undertaken by Latino/as, 620–621 on incarnation, 746 on kin-dom of God, 159, 597, 621, 669, 745 on la lucha, 664 on liberative praxis, 697 on lo cotidiano (daily life), 158–159, 256–257, 383, 648–649, 676 mujerista theology, 242, 252, 258, 259, 260, 383, 552, 648 on soteriology, 744–745 theorizing of mulatez, 388 Iscariot, Judas, 532 Isidore, Bishop, 382

|

Isidore, Saint, 457–458 Islam/Muslims, 306–309 Caliphate of Granada, 147, 152–153 demographics, xvi, 488 expulsion from Spain, 157 history of slavery, 12 Latino/a population, 192–193, 306–307 migration patterns, 123 Moors, 263, 307, 339, 367–368, 482– 483, 526, 532, 534 Puerto Ricans and, 332 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 44 Reconquista, 480, 482–486, 526 Israel (ancient): cities of refuge, 500 conquest of Jericho, 368 exile and exodus, 239–240, 644 Lamanites, 375, 376, 377, 378 pilgrimages, 436 See also Jews and Judaism Israelite Mission, 519 Ita´, 280 Italy, 349 Ixtapalapa, Mexico, 228–229 Jabao, 387 Jacaltec people, 124 Jacaltenango Maya, 399 Jackson, Jesse, 175 Jamaica, 13, 578 James, Saint (Santiago de Compostela), 437–438, 485 James, William, 259 James (apostle), 263, 265, 437–438, 574 Janitors strike, 629 (photo) Janitzio Island, Mexico, 34 (photo) Japan/Japanese: California Gold Rush, 89 Gentlemen’s Agreement (1907), 46 Japanese Latin Americans, 38–42 migration encouraged by government, 38 Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), 38 World War II, 40–41, 46 Jaramillo, Don Pedro (Healer of Los

I-29

I-30

|

Index

Olmos), 34–35, 80, 81, 182, 184 (photo), 278 Jayme, Father Luis, 371, 372 Jehovah’s Witness, xvi, 157, 192, 311– 313, 363, 487 Je´mez, 350 Jeremiah, prophet, 652 Jericho, 368 Jesuit Order, 392, 456, 711 Jesus Christ: adoptionism, 591–592 apostles, 144 baptism, 262 as Christ Moreno, 524 Christology, 589–598 Church as the Body of Christ, 145 Docetism, 591 as Galilean Jew, 241–242, 296, 353– 354, 648, 666, 741 gifts brought by Three Wise Kings, 169 God’s divine name made known by, 637 Hispanic reinterpretation of, 666 on illness, 275 Jewish rituals practiced by, 758 Logos, 694 Lordship of, 230, 235–236 marginal status of, 354 Mary’s and Joseph’s search for an inn, 644 Mayans on, 401 mestizo experience, 666 ministries, 144 as the New Adam, 569 pilgrimage to Jerusalem, 436 prophetic exile from the world, 645 salvific life and message, 337, 538–539 second coming, xxi transfiguration at Mount Tabor, 497 Jet (azabache), 721 Jewish Identity Project, 317 Jews and Judaism, 314–317 anousim, 315 cities of refuge, 500

conquest of Jericho, 368 conversos (marranos), 157, 314–315, 459 exile and exodus, 169, 238–240, 315, 412, 644 expulsion from Spain, 157, 314–315, 367–68, 526 immigration, 314–316 Jewish Cuban Americans, 168, 316 Jewish rituals practiced by Jesus, 758 Ladino, 315 Lamanites, 375, 376, 377, 378 Latino/a population, 192–193, 314, 315–317 Palo Mayombe/Palo Monte as ‘‘Jewish’’ witchcraft, 418–419 pilgrimages, 436 Puerto Ricans, 332, 333 Sephardic Jews, 314–315 within Spanish population in the Southwest, 459 statistics and demographics, xvi, 488 Jime´-nez, Jose ‘‘Cha Cha,’’ 583–584 Joachim of Fiore, 710 Job (Book of the Old Testament), 78, 275 John, of Damascus, Saint, 728 John of the Cross, St., 391, 392, 711 John Paul II, Pope: call for a new evangelization, 116 Cuba visit, 175 (photo) Our Lady of Altagracia (Highest Grace) crowned by, 572 on Pentecostal movement, 434 popular Church condemned by, 114–115 ‘‘preferential option for the poor,’’ 453 Johnson, Lyndon B., 253 John the Apostle, 144–145, 146 John the Baptist, Saint, 262, 511 John XXIII, Pope, 523, 575 Jones-Correa, Michael, 535 Joseph (father of Jesus), 644 Journal of Hispanic/ Latino Theology, 112, 659

Index Juana Ine´s de la Cruz, Sor, 10 Juan Diego, Saint, 84–85, 134, 241, 343, 358, 534, 642–643, 741–742 Juan en la Ciudad (Cruz), 495 Juarez, Benito, 372, 373 Judas Tadeo, San, 532 Juderı´as y Loyot, Julia´n, 78 Julian of Toledo, 382 Justice, 317–324, 612–613 Kallen, Horace, 50 Kamen, Henry, 528, 529, 731, 733 Kanjobal Mayans, 124, 129 Kant, Immanuel, 6 Kaq’chik’el people, 124, 128 Kardec, Allan (Rivail), 220, 223, 225 Kardecism. See Spiritism (Espiritismo) Karuna (compassion), 92 Keifer, Ralph, 426 Kelleher, Margaret Mary, 681 Kelly, Jana Morgan, 445 Kelly, Nathan J., 445 Kerygma (core of the Gospel), 97, 490 Ketchup, xiv Kimball, Spencer W., 377, 379 Kin-dom of God, 159, 337, 385, 597, 621, 669, 745 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 131, 138, 442, 525 Kit Carson National Forest, 136, 139–140 Knorr, Nathan H., 312 Knowing, 612–613 Koenig, Harold, 274, 281 Koinonia ecclesiological model, 69–70, 214 Kole Kole, 516 Kramar, Glenn, 96, 427 Kramar, Marilynn, 96–97, 427 Kumeyaay, 371–372 La Bamba (film), 181 LABI (Latin American Bible Institute), 72, 74 Labor market. See Economy Laboure, Catherine, 569

|

Labyrinth of Solitude (Paz), 340 Ladino, 48, 315 LADO (Latino American Dawah Organization), 308 Laity, 75–77, 95–96, 105, 145, 464, 723–724, 767 La lucha, 257, 335–337, 384, 552, 643– 644, 661, 664 La Lucha Continues: Mujerista Theology (Isasi-Dı´az), 744–745 La Luz School, 170 Lamanites, 375, 376, 377, 378 Lamy, Jean Baptiste, 422 Land rights: Alien Land Act (1913), 46 Chicano activists on, 133, 134, 138– 140 under encomienda system, 216 Gonzales, Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’ on, 140 La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (The Federal Land-Grant Alliance), 136, 139–140 Native Americans, 373 post-Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 84 of Punjabi Mexican Americans, 45 Treaty of Mesilla, 441 Language, 325–327 acculturation and, 325–326 affect on spirituality, 326–327 Arabic influence on Spanish, 532 assumption that all Hispanics speak Spanish, xv of church services, 54 (photo), 327, 381, 467, 531–532, 685 cultural significance of, 325, 531–532 English-Only Movement as, 55, 141, 378 English-speakers, xvii of evange´lica/os, 234 Ladino, 48, 315 Latino identity and, 325 Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 Nahuatl, 403–404 religious affiliation related to spoken languages, 514 in schools, 455

I-31

I-32

|

Index

Spanglish, xv, 53, 326, 473 Spanish-speaking priests, 191 statistics, 325 Tex–Mex, 53 Lara, Jaime, 718 Larson, D. B., 274 La Salette, France, 344 De Las Casas, Bartolome´: African slave trade advocated by, 13 biographical information, 216, 369 as convert, 157 ‘‘Las Casas-Sepu´ lveda Controversy,’’ 369 objection to encomiendas system, 216, 217, 369 portrait, 78 (photo) as ‘‘Protectorate of the Indians,’’ 78– 80, 153, 369, 761–762 renewed attention to, 535 vs. requerimiento, 149 on rituals of native peoples, 729–730 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas), 78–80, 154, 216, 217, 369, 397–398 as source of the Black Legend, 78–80 Las Trampas, New Mexico, 628 (photo) Latina evange´lica theology, 327–329 Latinamente, 612 Latin America: anticlericalism and church-state conflict, 31 ‘‘banana republics,’’ xix–xx caudillos (military dictators), 340, 531 democratization of, 118 ecumenical movement in, 145–147 encomienda system, 215–217 Japanese Latin Americans, 38–42 retablos, 8 secularization of, 31 Latin American Bible Institute (LABI), 72, 74 Latin American Episcopal Conference, 68 Latinas in Ministry (LIM), 255

Latin Encounter (Encuentro Latino), 96–97 Latin-language liturgies, 381 Latino American Dawah Organization (LADO), 308 Latino/a population, overview: average household size, 515, 517 characteristics of Hispanic religiosity, xx–xxi demographics, xiv–xv, xvi, xvii–xviii, 454 diversity within, xv, xvi, 628, 657–658 economic stratum, xvi, xviii education, xviii foreign born, xvii growth rate, xv, xvi home ownership, xviii immigration and citizenship status, xv–xvi Latino/a identity, 289–294, 323–324, 325, 327, 344, 362, 472–473 overview of history, 761–762 poverty levels, xviii terminology to describe, 289–291, 290–294, 627–628 U.S. history of conquest and annexation, xix Latino/a theology, 657–669 contributions to the formulation of Christian doctrines, 664–669 described, 657–658 historical development, 658–660 Latin American liberation theology vs., 251–252 major themes and characteristics, 661–664 methodological foundations, 660–661 Latino Jews (Martini), 317 Latino National Survey (LNS), 187 Latino Pastoral Action Center (LPAC), 255, 446 Latinos Inc. (Da´vila), 292 Latinos in the United States (Abalos), 291–292

Index Latter-Day Saints. See Mormons Laviera, Tato, 332 Lavoe, He´ctor, 494, 495 Lay Ministry Formation Programs, 75–77 Lazarus, Saint, 280, 509, 622 LDS (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). See Mormons Leadership training, 76 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 61 Leal, David, 535 Leander, Bishop, 382 Lebanese people, 123 The Lectionary, 686 Lee, Fr. Bernard J., 71, 143 Leo, Mama, 255 Leo´n, Jorge A., 706 Leo´n, Luis, 88 Leon (medieval kingdom), 483–484 Leon-Portilla, Miguel, 85 Lesbians, 256 ‘‘Letter from Delano’’ (Cha´vez), 132–133 Levitt, Peggy, 555 Lewis, Oscar, 176 Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (Little Book of the Medicinal Herbs of the Indians), 180 Liberation theology/theologians, 671–678 biblical foundation, 671 Catholic Church vs., 114–116 of Christian Base Communities (CBCs), 523–524 Civil Rights movement as, 525 as constructive theologies, 672–673 as contextual theologies, 671–672, 673–674 continuing relevance of, 524 described, 210, 522, 671–673 economics and, 211–212 exilio (exile), 237–240 goals, 524 grounded in friendships with poor persons, 5

|

hermeneutical circle, 283–285 historical background, 237 justification for revolutionary justice, 240 la lucha, 257, 335–337, 384, 552, 643–644, 661, 664, 744–745 as Latino methodological construct, 660–661 lo cotidiano, 676 on mestizaje/mulatez, 674–675 Mujerista Theology, 242, 258, 383–385 on orthopraxis, 693–696 Pentecostal and charismatics movements, 491 popular religiosity, 675–676 postcolonial analysis, 449 postmodern conceptions, 451–452 Preferential Option for the Poor, 67, 70 Puerto Rican theology, 476 Segovia’s Diaspora theology, 204 on social justice, 318–319 teologı´a en conjunto, 676–678 Third World liberation theologies, 762 U.S.-based Latina/o contextual theologies, 673–678 See also Social justice Liber Commicus, 382 Liber Sacerdotalis (Castellani), 718 Lilly Endowment, 546 Lima, Peru, 146, 524 LIM (Latinas in Ministry), 255 Limo´n, Graciela, 334 Limpias (spiritual cleansing), 537, 752, 754. See also Curanderismo (healings) La limpieza de sangre (the washing of the blood), 15, 387 Linares, Guillermo, 206 Lincoln-Marti Schools, 170 Literature, 330–335, 390 The little black man Jose, 224 Liturgy, 681–688

I-33

I-34

|

Index

historical developments and major doctrinal points, 681–683 language of church services, 54 (photo), 327, 381, 467, 531–532, 685 Latino manifestations, 683–688 Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 Living Flame of Love (John of the Cross), 392 Living in Spanglish (Morales), 292 Llorente, Francisco, 429 La Llorona (Weeping Woman), 402, 570–571 Locus theologicus, 159 Logos, 694 Lola, Mama, 580–581 Lo´pez, Luı´s, 429 Lo´pez, Narciso, 162, 163 Lo´pez, Abundio L. and Rosa, 424, 429 Lo´pez de Legazpi, Miguel, 154 Lo´pez de Palacios Rubios, Juan, 149 Lord’s Prayer, 669 Lorenzo, San, 350 Los Angeles, California, xiv, 361 Louisiana Purchase, 373 Lourdes, France, 344, 345 Love, 665 Lozano, Agrı´col, 376 Lozano-Dı´az, Nora, 329 LPAC (Latino Pastoral Action Center), 255, 446 LRUP (La Raza Unida Party), 60, 62, 140, 141, 362 Luce, Alice E., 72 Luce-Celler Bill, 42–43, 46, 47 Lucey, Archbishop Robert E., 111 Lugo, Father Ismael de, 173 Lugo, Juan Leo´n, 430–431 Lukumı´: ancestor worship, 507 animal sacrifices, 508, 509 Bembe´, 507 cabildos, 417 Church of the Lukumı´ Babalu´ Aye, 508 described, 17

dieties, 509–513 doctrinal points, 506–508 healings, 509 key figures, 509 reincarnation, 507 ritual structures, 33, 508–509 See also Santerı´a LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), 61 Luther, Martin, 370, 691, 730 Lutherans, 487 Lveda, Juan Gine´s de Sepu´, 369 Lynchings, 84 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 450 MACC (Mexican American Cultural Center), 76, 105, 107, 213, 659, 764 Macedo, Bishop Edir, 432, 564, 565 Machado, Daisy L., 295, 329 Machismo, 339–341, 346–348, 517 Machista attitudes, 247 MacKay, Angus, 534 Macumba, 223 Madero, Francisco I., 226 Madres y huachos (Montecino), 570 Madrigal, Father, 172 Maduro, Otto, 736 Maelo, 495 Magellan, Ferdinand, 153, 154 Magic, 274–275 Mahayana Buddhism, 92 Mahony, Cardinal Roger, 629 (photo) Maize culture, 213 Mal aire, 752 Malcom X (autobiography), 583 Mal de ojo (evil eye), 275, 537, 721, 751, 752 Maldonado, Luis, 716 Maldonado, Rigo, 33 La Malinche, 148, 350, 402, 516–517 Malverde, Jesu´s, 80, 81, 719 (photo), 720 Mammon, 134 Mam people, 124 Man˜ana, 622, 669, 744 Man˜ana (Gonza´lez), 591–592

Index Mandas (to send), 714 The Mandike, 17 Mandilo´n, 340–341 Manifest Destiny, 86, 103, 150, 204, 233, 375, 460, 768 Manning, Cardinal Timothy, 96–97, 427 Manual de Adultos, 718 Manuale Sacramentorum, 718 Manuscript Beato de Libeana, 380 (photo) Maoism, 583–584 MAPA (Mexican American Political Organization), 361 Maquiladoras (border factories), xx, 26 (photo) ´ scar Andre´s Maradiaga, Cardinal O ´ Rodrıguez, 115 Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), 126 MARCHA (Metodistas Asociados Representando la Causa de los Hispano Americanos), 465 Marginality. See Alienation Marı´a de la Cabeza, Santa, 458 Maria Lionza (Blades), 494 Marian devotions, 341–346567–576 Antidicomarianites, 568, 570 dark-skinned Madonnas, 533 doctrines and dogmas, 568–570 Elizondo on devotion to, 735–736, 741–742 four mothers of Latin America, 570–571 of indigenous people, 401–402 Marian patronesses of Latin America, 571–575 popular religion, 722 Protestants on, 570 short history of Marian devotion, 567–568 Spanish tradition of veneration, 533–535 U.S. Hispanic Marianism, 575–576 See also Virgin Mary Marianismo, 341, 346–348 Marico´n, 341 ‘‘Mariel Boatlift,’’ 165

|

Marimacha, 339 Marins, Jose, 71 Marital assimilation, 49 Marranos (converses), 157, 314–15, 459 Marriage, 15, 44, 45, 49, 216 Martell-Otero, Loida I., 329 Martı´, Jose´, 161, 163, 164, 166 Martı´n, Cardinal Marcelo Gonza´lez, 380, 382, 383 Martin, Ralph, 426 Martin de Porres, Saint, 510, 722 Martı´nez, Antonio Jose´, 421–422 Martinez, Demetria, 334 Martinez, Felipe, 397 (photo) Martı´nez, Jorge, 573 Martı´nez, Juan Navarro, 429 Martı´nez, Juan Ramo´n, 375–376 Martı´nez, Luis Aponte, 115 Martini, Carlos, 317 Marto, Jacinta and Francisco, 569 Martyrs, 437–438 Marx and Marxism: biblica criticism, 650 contemplation model, 7 Cuba, 173 described, 176 ethnographic studies of the poor, 176–177 on growing role of economic relations and financial institutions, 481 within Latina/o eschatology, 623 on philosophy, 672, 692 reading of history, 618 on reason, 450 socioeconomic and political analysis informed by, 305 understanding of praxis, 691–693, 696 Vatican on, 70, 114–116 Young Lords Organization (YLO), 583–584 Mary, mother of Jesus. See Virgin Mary Masvida, Eduardo Boza, 173 The Matachines, 348–351 Matador (bullfighter), 340 Matos, Luis Pale´s, 18

I-35

I-36

|

Index

Matovina, Timothy, 534 Matthew, 265 Mayahuel (diety), 65, 152 Mayans: corn, 400 indigenous languages, 124 on Jesus, 401 migration patterns, 123–124 Popol Vuh, 129, 398, 768 religion, 29, 128, 129 Spanish conquest, 153, 528 Maynard-Reid, Pedrito, 261–263 Mayombe, 223, 417–419 MAYO (Mexican American Youth Organization), 141, 361–362 Mayo people, 183 McCormick Theological Seminary, 584–585, 765 McDonnell, Father Kilian, 427 McKinley, William, 42, 474, 528 McMann, Jean, 32, 33 MECHA (El Movimiento Estudiantil de Atzla´n), 63, 141 Medellı´n Conference, 3, 114–117, 145– 146, 237, 302–303, 452, 523, 713 Median age of Hispanics, xvii Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity (Morales), 333 Medina, Lara, 85, 536 Mediodia, 226–228 Mediums. See Spiritism (Espiritismo) Medjugorje, Croatia, 344 Megachurches, 565 Melchor (Three Kings), 265 Mello, Bishop Manoel de, 434 Melting-pot phenomenon, 49–50, 55, 56, 58, 480 See also Assimilation The Melting Pot (Zangwill), 50 Memorias de Bernardo Vega (Vega), 331–332 Men: legal system of Roman law, 339; machismo, 339–341, 346–348, 517 sexual behavior of, 348 Mendozo, Antonio de, 154

Mene´ndez de Avile´s, Pedro, xiii, 154, 410 Merced, Jose, 506 (photo) Mercedarian Friars, 574 Mercy, 642 Merton, Thomas, 583 Mesa-Baines, Amalia, 33 Mesa blanca, 224 Mesoamerican religion, 9, 30 Messianic movements, 564–565 Mestizaje, 351–356 Christological image within Hispanic theology, 666 contemporary meaning of, 352–356 described, 20, 22, 327–328, 351, 354–355 early history of, 351–352 within Latino methodological construct, 662 mulatez vs., 386 Reconquista roots, 486 resistive and liberatory possibilities, 354 self-understanding of, 387–388 as umbrella term, 355, 551 Mestizos: altars and shrines, 29–31 described, 213–214, 327, 352 history of, 148, 214, 217, 369, 398 indigenous women as victims of Spanish invasion, 398, 529, 570–571 Jesus Christ’s experience as, 666 nepantla, 29 pigmentocracies, 398–399 popular Catholicism of, 100–101 raza co´smica, 479–481 tejano/as, 291 Methodist Church/Methodists, 372–373, 393, 464–465, 466, 467, 487, 489, 548 Metodistas Asociados Representando la Causa de los Hispano Americanos (MARCHA), 465 Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC), 76, 105, 107, 213, 659, 764

Index Mexican American Political Organization (MAPA), 361 Mexican American Program at Perkins School of Theology, 765 Mexican Americans, 357–367 assimilation, 295 barrioization, 358 Bracero Program, 361 Chicano and new immigrant generation (1965–1985), 361–363 Cisneros case, 362 civil rights movement, 60 dispossession and occupational dislocation of (1848–1900), 357–359 espiritualismo, 226 as first major influx of Hispanics to the U.S., xix graduation rates, 455 The Great Grape Strike, 47 legacy of the immigrant generation (1900–1940), 359–360 legacy of the Mexican American generation (1940–1965), 360–361 literature, 330–331 Mexican American religious experience (1980–), 363–367 migration patterns, 360 pachucos, 61 poverty rate, 209 Repatriation Program, 360–361 Roman Catholic Church on, 359 shrines, 439 statistics, 360, 425 United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 131 within U.S. armed forces, 361 See also Chicano/as Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900–1965 (Hinojosa), 358 Mexican-American War: barrios formed after, 209 border created by, xix, 26 compensation paid by U.S. to Mexico for war damages, 84 Manifest Destiny following, 86

|

missionaries to border region following, 51, 86–87, 358–359, 372, 373 Mormon Battalion, 375 new Mexican American dioceses created following, 31–32 post-treaty violence, 84 start of, 150 tejano/as, 291 U.S. territory increased following, 59–60, 357 See also Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), 141, 361–362 ‘‘The Mexican Catholic Community in California’’ (Burns), 359 Mexicanensis, 718 Mexico/Mexicans: Advent tradition, 266 Caste War of Yucata´n, 123 Catholic, xvi, 31–32 Catholic Charismatic movement, 425, 427 as center of Spanish colonial rule in the Western Hemisphere, 154 charros/cowboys, 340 Colonization Act (1824), 373 Constitutional Reformation, 372, 373 Cristero War, 82, 375 demographics, xvii early roots of Latina/os, xix education, xviii, 250 encomienda system, 215–217; as English speakers, xvii; espiritualismo, 221, 224–229; exilio (exile), 237–238 flag, 64 foreign born, xvii Gadsden Purchase, 357 gender roles, 247 Halloween, 197 immigration and citizenship status, xvii income, xviii Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 Japanese Mexican Americans, 41–42

I-37

I-38

|

Index

Jewish population, 316 Ladino and Indian populations, 48 median age, xvii Mexican Filipinos, 42–43, 47 Mexican Independence, 228 Mexican Revolution, 80, 81 (photo), 82, 430 Mexipino, 43 Mormons, 375 Operation Wetback, 61 Pentecostal movement, 424–425, 429–430 popular Catholicism within, 101, 103 poverty levels, xviii Protestants, 234, 373, 425, 460–463 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 44–46 rationalist mentality, 101–102 shrines, 31, 299, 439 Toltecs, 28, 29, 407 U.S.-Mexico border, 80–82, 220 See also Mexican Americans; Mexican-American War Mexiflips, 43 Mezcla, 551 Mezcolanza, 298 Miami, Florida, xiv. See also Cuban Americans Michael, St., 19 Michael the Archangel, 419–420 Mictlan, 196–197, 199 Middle Ages, 68 Midwives (parteras), 31 Mi Familia (film), 181 Migrant workers, 130–133, 212 (photo), 399. See also Farmworkers Migration. See Diaspora theology; Immigration Mining, 352 Ministry training programs. See Education/schools Mint (yerba buena), 275–276 Miracles, xxi, 342–343, 345, 543–545. See also Curanderismo (healings) The Miraculous Day of Ama´lia Gome´z (Rechy), 331 Miranda, Ismael, 495

Miranda, Jesse, 97, 187, 231, 767 Miron, Louis, 178 Misas de Aguinaldo (Masses of the Gift), 457 Missale Hispano-Mozarabicum, 382 Missionaries, 367–373 to border region following MexicanAmerican War, 51, 86–87, 358– 359, 372, 373 Charisma in Missions, 96–97 Christian Spirituality via, 754 churches built by, 29–30 Colonization Act (1824), 373 Conquistadores and, 149, 150, 155, 367–370, 397 destruction of public temples by, 29; financial support for, 370, 371 following Spanish-American War, 528 Great Commission (Mark 16:15), 231, 236 Home Missionary Societies, 373 in Latin America, 231–232 the Matachines brought by, 349–350 mission system, described, 370–371 Mormons, 375 Protestants, 460–463 in Puerto Rico, 473–475 returning natives who converted while away, 233 San Diego Revolt, 371–372 schools established by, 461 as spiritual dimension to Manifest Destiny, 233 Student Volunteer Movement, 72 Swedish Pentecostal missionaries, 429 Western civilization introduced by, 370 See also Converts/conversion Mission Santa Barbara, 372, 372 (photo) Mission System, 367–374 Mi Tierra restaurant, 34 Mixe-Poluca people, 401 Moctezuma, 59, 368 Modernism theory, 450 Mogrovejo, Bishop Toribio de, 521, 523

Index Mohr, Nicholasa, 332 Mojados (wetbacks), 361, 362 Molinos, Miguel de, 393 Monanca, 350 Monastic textual preservation, 710 Monkey Hunting (Garcia), 44 Monroe Doctrine, 372 Montecino, Sonia, 570 Montesinos, Fray Antonio de, 78, 217, 761–762 Montesquieu, Charles, 176 Montgomery, George and Carrie Judd, 409 Moody, Dwight L., 72 Moody Institute model, 75 Moors, 263, 307, 339, 367–368, 482– 483, 526, 532, 534 See also Islam/Muslims Mopan Mayans, 123 Moraga, Cherrı´e, 254, 255–256 Morales, Alejandro, 331 Morales, Aurora Levins, 316–317, 333 Morales, Ed, 292 Morales, Juan Castillo (Juan Soldado), 80, 82, 723 Moral theology, 176, 751–752 Moreno, Juan, 168, 168–169 Morinis, E. Alan, 437, 439 Mormons/Latter-day Saints, 374–379 beginnings of Hispanic American Mormonism, 375–376 Black Spanish speakers, 377, 379 Book of Mormon, 375, 378, 407 contemporary issues, 376–379 conversion to, 157 founding, 374 industries created by, 375 initial Mormon-Latino contacts, 374–375 Lucero Ward, 375–376, 377, 379 polygamy, 375 Popol Vuh, 398 statistics, xvi, 192, 363, 374, 376, 377, 379, 487–488 Third Conventionists, 376 timeline, 379

|

Morocco, 482–483, 486 Moses (Prophet), 637, 644 Mother Tongue (Martinez), 334 Mottessi, Alberto, 433 Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztla´n (M.E.Ch.A.), 63, 141 Moya, Francisco Sanchez de, 169 Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 Mpungus, 418 Mr. Ives’ Christmas (Hijuelos), 333 Mujerista theology, 158–159, 259–260, 335–337, 383–385, 552, 673, 736 Isasi-Dı´az, Ada Marı´a, 242, 252, 258, 648, 744–745 Mulatez, 20–21, 385–390 within Cuba, 162 defined, 22, 352, 385, 386 diverse attitudes toward, 20–21, 386–387 within Latino methodological construct, 662 mestizaje vs., 386 popular Catholicism of, 100–101 racial hierarchy during colonial period, 385–386 racist connotation, 20–21, 22, 355 as religious identity, 388–389 self-understanding of, 387–388 Multiculturalism, perceived threat of, 56 Mun˜oz, Carlos, 138 Music, 125, 285–286, 386, 390, 493– 495, 685 Muslims. See Islam/Muslims Muxerista Pedagogy (Revilla), 256 Mysticism, 390–393, 751, 754, 756 Nagual/nahualli (male witch), 537 Nahua people: Dı´a de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), 195–199 duality, 756 on God and the Devil, 401 mythology, 30–31, 241, 406–407 Nahuatl language, 403–404 nepantlah, 297, 403–407 origins, 124

I-39

I-40

|

Index

philosophical conceptions of the Trinity, 558 Nanko-Ferna´ndez, Carmen, 299 Naomi (Book of Ruth), 652 Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, 292 Nardal sisters, 18 Narvaez, Alonso de, 522, 572 Narvaez, Panfilo de, 153–154 Nasrid Caliphate of Granada, 482 National Association for Lay Ministry, 77 National Association of Hispanic Priests (ANHS), 110 National Catholic Association of Diocesan Directors for Hispanic Ministry (NCADDHM), 52 National Catholic Council on Hispanic Ministry, 112 National Catholic War Council, 111 National Catholic Welfare Council, 111 National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, 59, 60, 61, 140 National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), 131 National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), 236 National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and Conference, 232, 562 National Hispanic Scholarship fund, 105 National Origin Act (1924), 61 ‘‘National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic Ministry,’’ 108 National Plan for Hispanic Ministry (1988), 453 National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, 571 Nation of Islam, 306 Native peoples, 395–400 of Belize, 123 cathedrals built by, 400–401 continuous struggle, 399 corn as lifeblood of, 400 diversity of indigenous communities, 395 early roots of Latina/os, xviii–xix

encomiendas (forced labor), 78, 149, 215–217, 368, 369 the encounter, 397–399 fiesta, 262–263 The Great Mysterious, 396–397 indigenous women as victims of Spanish invasion, 398, 529, 570–571 Ladination, 48 Lamanites, 375, 376, 377, 378 land rights, 373 Latino/a religiosity influenced by, 399–403 Manifest Destiny vs., 150 Marian devotions, 401–402, 534 military alliances with Spanish Conquistadors, 527–529 modern attitude of Catholic Church toward indigenous religious traditions, 399 peyote, 9, 396 premodern aesthetic sensibilities, 8–9 prior to the encounter, 395–397 as source for curanderismo, 179; spiritual traditions, 193 syncretism, 399–401 treaties violated by U.S., 133 zambo, 352 See also specific ethnicities by name Nativity Posadas, 65 Nattier, Jan, 89 Natural resources, xix Nava, Antonio Castan˜eda, 429 Navarre, 484 Navarro, Juan Martı´nez, 429 Nazareth, 639–640 Nazis, 480 NCADDHM (National Catholic Association of Diocesan Directors for Hispanic Ministry), 52 Negrear, 387 El negrito Jose (the little Black man Jose), 224 Negritude and negrismo, 18 Neoculturation, 21–22

Index Nepantlah, 29, 85, 88, 297, 327, 403– 407, 675 NEP (New Ecological Paradigm), 218–219 Nevada, xix New Age Movement, 479 New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), 218–219 New Laws of the Indies, 216 New Mexico, xv, 59–60, 86 New Orleans, Louisiana, 163 New Sanctuary Movement, 444, 496– 497, 499 New Testament (Christian Bible): banned in Latin America during Spanish colonial rule, 231 on community, 143–145 early Christian communities, 69 foundation of liberation theology, 671 Gonza´lez on Latina/o reading of the Bible, 650–653 on illness, 275 on immigrants and neighbors, 297, 298 magical phrases, 564 on Mary, 567–568 Pauline churches, 618 post-Vatican II biblical reading, 109–110 presented graphically through art, autos sacramentales, storytelling, and preaching, 109 of Protestant missionaries, 461–462 on relationships with others, 694 as source for curanderismo, 179 Spanish Bible, 460, 461–462 New York City, xv, 206–207 New York World’s Fair (1964), 376 NFWA (National Farm Workers Association), 131 Nganga christiana, 418–419 Nganga judı´a, 418–419 NHCLC (National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference), 236 Nican Mopohua, 642

|

Nicaragua/Nicaraguans: Contra War, xx, 115, 121, 122, 174 exilio (exile), 237–238 Hurricane Mitch, 122 immigration, xx, 120, 121–122 Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 ‘‘machismo’’ usage, 339 religion, 128, 129, 425, 440, 573–574 Somoza regime, 238 Nichiren Buddhism, 90, 92–93 Nicholson, E. F. G., 460 Nicky Cruz Outreach, 426 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 690–691 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 480, 623 Nigeria, 501 9/11 Terror attacks, 306, 307 Nin˜os de Marı´a, 457 Noah’s flood, 495 Noble, Mercedes, 509 Noche Buena (The Good Night), 169 Noche de griterı´a, 129 Noe´ (Blades), 495 North America, described, 617–618 Nosotros, 637 Novenas to patron saints, 257 Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Altagracia, 207 Nuestra Sen˜ora de La Caridad de El Cobre (Our Lady of Charity), 30, 168–169, 412 Nuestra Sen˜ora de Suyapa, 124 Nueva Esperanza, 232, 234, 562 Nuevas Leyes de Espan˜a (New Laws of Spain), 78 Numerology, 715 Nun˜ez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar, 370 Nuyoricans, 390, 473, 493–495 Obatala´ (Oddua/Orisha-nla), 37, 510–511 Obea, 126 Obejas, Achy, 333 Occupational fatalities, 220 Ochu´n, 411, 513, 516 October Missile Crisis, 411

I-41

I-42

|

Index

Octogesima Adveniens (Pope Paul VI), 115 Oddua, 37, 510–511 Ofrendas, 33, 198 Oggu´n, 263, 511, 512 Ojeda, Carlos, 509 Olaza´bal, Francisco, 409–410, 430, 431 Old Masks, New Faces (PARAL), 548 Old Spanish Rite, 379–383 Old Testament (Hebrew Bible): Absolute Beauty, 7 animal sacrifices, 280 on community, 143 depiction of God, 275, 642 exodus and exile, 237, 238–240, 243, 644 focus on obeying God’s commandments, 694 foundation of liberation theology, 671 on goodness of creation, 682 Hebrew enslavement in the book of Exodus, 146 imago Dei, 243 Jesus as the New Adam, 569 Mary as the New Eve, 568, 569 pilgrim festivals, 436 ‘‘shepherding’’ concept, 703 sin associated with illness, 275 as source for curanderismo, 179 on welcoming the stranger, 297, 298 Olodumare (‘‘the Lord of all destinies’’), 37, 280, 505, 506, 507, 510, 511 Olofi, 510 Olorisha priesthood, 508 Ometeotl, 406–407 On˜ate, Don Juan de, 154–155, 421 Onderdonk, Frank, 460 Oneness Pentecostal movement, 192, 429 On the Holy Spirit (St. Basil), 710 Operation Pedro Pan, 167, 410–412 Operation Wetback, 61 Ore´, Jero´nimo, 731 Oregon Territory, 150

Oregon v. Smith, 396 Orellana, Francisco de, 150, 152 Organization of Peruvian Catholic Brotherhoods, 524 Orisha-nla, 37, 510–511 Orishas, xvi, 37, 168, 275, 280, 502, 504–507, 508 Orozco, Jose´ Clemente, 407 Ortega, Gregoria, 107, 413–414 Ortega, Juvenal, 509 Orte´ga, Ruben, 429 Orthopathos (right suffering), 300, 414–416 Orthopraxis, 689–698 Ortiz, Alfonso, 383 Ortiz, Fernando, 21–22 Ortiz, Rev. Frank, 430 Oru´nla, 512 Orunmila, 508, 512 Oshossi (god of hunting), 19 Oshun, 275 O’Sullivan, John L., 150 Other Sheep Multicultural Ministries, 269 Our Islands and Their People, 474 Our Lady of Candlemas, 512 Our Lady of Charity Shrine (Nuestra Sen˜ora de La Caridad de El Cobre), 30, 168–169, 412 Our Lady of Copacabana, 733 Our Lady of Guadalupe: annual pilgrimage in honor of, 342 (photo), 438 (photo), 438–439 Catholic Charismatic movement on, 97 Catholic Church claim of ownership, 228 celebrated in Espiritualista temples, 225 as Chicana/o symbol of identity, 134 as dark-skinned Madonna, 358, 533 Elizondo on devotion to, 401, 735– 736, 741–742 feast day, 225, 344 Guadalupanas, 344, 573 installation, 719

Index Juan Diego, 84–85, 134, 241, 343, 358, 534, 642–643, 741–742 pregnant with life appearance, 642–643 Santa Fe mural, 200 (photo) significance of daily devotion to, 85 ‘‘Statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe appearing to Juan Diego, Indians, and Bishop,’’742 (photo) syncretistic symbolism, 30–31, 64, 732 as Tonantzin (revered mother), 30– 31, 64, 85, 196, 241, 407 on UFW banners, 132, 138 See also Marian devotions Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, San Diego, 641 (photo) Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women (Rodriguez), 259 Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, Salt Lake City, Utah, 296 (photo) Our Lady of Regla, 513, 516 Our Lady Queen of Angels Church, 629 (photo) Our Lord of Chalma, 30 Out of the Barrio (Chavez), 56 Ovando, Friar Nicola´s de, 216, 572 Oviedo, Damiana, 225 Oya´, 512 Ozteotl (deity), 30 Pachamama, 401 Pacheco, Johnny, 493, 494 Pachon, Harry, 97 Pachucos, 61 Pacific Islands, 536 Pacific Middle Passage, 43–44 Padilla, Gil, 138 Padilla, Jose´, 192 Padres Asociados Para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales (PADRES), 109, 213, 363, 763–764 Padrinazgo, 246

Padrinos. See Compadrazgo (godparenthood) Paganism, 193 Pais, Frank and Josue´, 172 Palestine, 436 Palma, Toma´s Estrada, 164 Palm Sunday, 436, 457 Palo, 223, 417–419 Panama/Panamanians: African heritage, 355 culture and folklore, 125 education, xviii as English-speakers, xvii migration patterns, 120, 122 populations in the U.S., 125 religion, 127, 425, 440, 574 Spanish conquest, 153 U.S. presence, 127 World War II internment camps, 40 Panchimalco, 124 Pan de muertos, 198 Parada y Festival de Los Reyes Magos (Three Kings Day Parade and Festival), 127 (photo), 169–170 Paraguay/Paraguayans: as English-speakers, xvii immigration, 518, 520 Nuestra Sen˜ora de Caacupe, 574 poverty levels, xviii shrines, 440 La Virgen de los Milagros, 574 Para Ochun (Lavoe), 494 Paredes, A., 178 Parentesco, 245 Parham, Charles, 423 Park, R. E., 47 Parochial schools, 454–456 Parteras (midwives), 31 Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), 471 Partido Popular Democra´tico (PPD), 471 Pastoral care and counseling, 699–707 Pastoral de conjunto (collaborative pastoral ministry), 118–119 Las Pastorelas, 266, 419–420 Paterfamilias, 339

|

I-43

I-44

|

Index

La Patria Libre (The Free Nation) (newspaper), 164 Patriarchy, 10 Patrick, Saint, 349 Patristic era, 68 Patron saints, overview, 402–403, 683. See also specific saints by name Paul (apostle), 69, 145, 652–653 Paul VI, Pope, 114–115, 472, 574, 713–714 Paz, Octavio, 340 Pearl Harbor, attack on, 40 PECAF (Programa de Entrenamiento y Certificacion de Asesores Familiares), 706 Pedraja, Luis G., 214, 526, 559, 664– 665, 666 Pelagio, 438 Pelayo, Don, 483 PEM (Programa de Enriquecimiento Matrimonial), 706 Penitentes, Los Hermanos, 421–422, 457, 462 Pentecostalism, 423–435 apocalyptic nature of, 278–279 Azusa Street Revival, 409, 423, 424, 428, 429, 430 beliefs and teachings, 110, 189, 423 Catholic Charismatic movement vs., 95–96, 434 Catholic-Pentecostal Cooperation, 434–435 contextual pneumatologies, 711–712 Dominican Republic, 207 Evange´lica/os as, 230 fragmentation of movement in Latin America, 428–429 as growing trend, 110–111, 365, 423– 425, 687 health care, 179, 275, 278–279, 281–282 history of movement, 278, 423, 428–432 immigration of members, 434 leading figures, 409–410, 428 major denominations, 423

proselytism, 363, 429 on prosperity gospel, 210–211 as response to social and economic repression, 491 Santerı´a, 389 speaking in tongues, 95, 189, 423 statistics, 189–190, 192, 423–424, 427, 430, 431–432 theological education for ministers, 548 University Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) as alternative to, 564 women, 429, 433 worship, 687 Peralta, Pedro de, 155 Pereira, Juana, 572 Pe´rez, Brı´gido, 429 Perez, Demetrio, Jr., 170 Perez, Emma, 88 Pe´rez, Laura E., 536 Pe´rez, Zaida Maldonado, 329, 559, 664, 665 Perez y Gonzalez, Maria, 255 Perkins School of Theology, 547, 765 Permı´tanme hablar, 257 Personalismo, 177, 340 Peru/Peruvians: Andean Messianism, 519 China immigrants, 39 colonialism, 177 conquistadores, 369, 527 (photo), 527–528 diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 386–387 education, xviii immigration, 518, 521, 524 Inca Empire, 151–152 Japanese Peruvians, 38–41 Organization of Peruvian Catholic Brotherhoods, 524 Peruvian Embassy in Havana, 165 poverty levels, xviii race riots (1940), 39–40 El Sen˜or de los Milagros, 524 El Sen˜or de Quyllur Rit’i (Quispicanchi), 401

Index shrines, 439–40 the Virgen de la Merced (Mercy), 574 Peter, St., 511 Peter Pan (Barrie), 411 Petro´polis, Brazil, 237 Pew Charitable Trusts: Alianza de Ministerios Evange´licos Nacionales (AMEN), 231 Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL), xvi, 97–98, 187–194, 425, 432, 446, 767 Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI) founded by, 546 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey (2008), 444–445, 446, 487–488 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) breakdown in faith affiliation, xvi, 487–488 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) emphasis on ethnic-oriented worship, xx Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) household incomes, 209 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on abortion, 516, 563 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on changes in faith affiliation, xx, 53, 156, 157–158, 233–235 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on gay marriage, 516, 563 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on language and spirituality, 326–327 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on political affiliation, 561–563 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on prosperity gospel, 210–211 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) on religious identification, 363–364 Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) ‘‘spirit-filled’’ religious experiences, xx–xxi Pew Hispanic Center survey (2007) unaffiliated population, 514–515

Peyote, 9, 396 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 232, 234 Philip II, King of Spain, 79, 154 Philip III, King of Spain, 154–155 Philippines/Filipinos: Catholic missionaries, 246 children born in U.S. to Filipino immigrants, 42 conversion to Catholicism, 43 de facto segregation in the U.S., 42 Fiance´e Act (1946), 43, 47 independence, 42–43, 46 Luce-Celler Bill, 42–43, 47 Mexican Filipinos, 42–43, 47 pensionado program, 42 Philippine-American War, xix The Repatriation Act, 46 Spanish conquest, 153, 154 spiritual hybridity, 536 Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934), 42–43, 46 United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 131 U.S. control of, 46, 150 War Brides Act (1945), 43, 46 Phoenix, Arizona, 46 Phronesis, 690 Piarro, Francisco, 154 Pichardo, Ernesto, 508, 509 Pidgin English, 125 Pigmentocracies, 398–399 Pilgrimage, 30, 35–36, 436–440 La Pin˜ata, 403 Pinchbeck, Daniel, 398 Pineda-Madrid, Nancy, 254, 256, 259 Pinochet, Augusto, 520 Pinoys, 43 Pious exercises. See Popular religion La Pirojundia, 350 Pitts, Rev. Fountain E., 372 Pius IX, Pope, 102, 104, 422, 753 Pius V, Pope, 573 Pius VII, Pope, 522 Pius XI, Pope, 102 Pius XII, Pope, 124, 573, 575

|

I-45

I-46

|

Index

Pizarro, Francisco, 150, 151–152, 369, 527–528 Plasencia, 383 Pla´stico (Blades), 494 Plato, 7, 690 Platt Amendment, 164 Plaza of Three Cultures, 369 Plotinus, 7 Plutarch, 539 Pneumatology, 709–712 PNP (Partido Nuevo Progresista), 471 Pocho (Villarreal), 330 Poetics (Aristotle), 6–7 Poiesis, 690–691 Political activity, 440–447 brief historical development, 441–444 church attendance linked to, 445– 446, 535 ethics of the common, 634–635 growing political strength of Latinos, 561 immigration policies, 322, 443–444, 446, 619 (photo) not practiced by Central American Evangelicals in the U.S., 129 political affiliation, 562–563 religious conviction and, xxi, 444–447 by religious organizations, 514 social capital, 444 U.S. political parties, 561–563 voter registration drives, 361, 561 Political asylum, 443, 444, 499. See also Sanctuary Movement Political justice, 322–323 Poluca people, 401 Polycentric identities, 54–55, 57–58 Polygamy, 375 Polysynthesis, 400 Ponce de Leon, Juan, 152–153, 368, 470–471 Poor. See Poverty/poor communities Poor People’s March, 140 Popol Vuh, 129, 398, 768 Popular religion, 257, 264, 366–367,

545, 675–676, 687, 713–725, 758–759 The Porciuncula, 96–97 Portes, Alejandro, 556 Portola´, Gaspar de, 155 Portugal: Brazil colonized by, 518 indigenous peoples of Americas decimated by, 13 Reconquista, 482–483, 484–485 slave trade, 12–13, 15, 577–578 Treaty of Tordesillas, 513 La Posadas, 266, 457, 644, 687 Postcolonial theories, 447–449 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard), 450 Postmodernism, 449–452 Poststructuralist philosophers, 283 Pourrat, Pierre, 753 Poverty/poor communities: acompan˜amiento, 3–5 Aparecida on, 117–118 Catholic commitment to, 3, 114, 115 consequences of, 27–28, 212 empowerment of, 146 ethnographic studies of, 176–177 exile metaphor, 237–238 government benefits and services, 209, 211, 446–447, 563 liberationist theology and, 210, 211–212 Marian devotions as symbol of, 344, 345, 346 Preferential Option for the Poor, 67, 70, 452–453, 591, 616, 638–639, 660, 716 prosperity gospel, xxi, 210–211, 564–565 Santo Domingo document on, 116–117 statistics, xviii, 209–210 struggles during the 1970s and 1980s, 4–5 See also Economy PPD (Partido Popular Democra´tico), 471

Index Praxis theology, 10, 259–260, 284, 689– 698, 762 Preferential Option for the Poor, 67, 70, 452–453, 591, 616, 638–639, 660, 716 Preferential Option for the Young, 452, 453 Pregnancy, 249 Prendas, 418 Presbyterian Church, 174–175, 372, 465, 487, 489 Presbyterian Menaul School, 86 Presentation of Children, 734 Priestless parishes, 69 Priests Associated for Education, Social, and Religious Rights (PADRES), 109, 213, 363, 763–764 Primitive Christian Church, New York City, 750 (photo) Princeton Seminary, 765–766 Private religious schools, 454–456 Las Procesiones de Corpus Christi, 458 Procesiones del Domingo de Ramos, 457 Processions, 456–458, 719 Programa de Enriquecimiento Matrimonial (PEM), 706 Programa de Entrenamiento en Psicologı´a (P.E.P.P.), 706 Programa de Entrenamiento y Certificacion de Asesores Familiares (PECAF), 706 Program for the Analysis of Religion Among Latinas/os (PARAL), 548, 659 Promesas (promises), 714 Property rights. See Land rights Prophesying, xx Prosperity gospel, xxi, 210–211, 564–565 Prostitution, 23 Protestant assemblies of CLAI (Latin American Council of Churches), 146 Protestantism/Protestants, 458–469 Africanization of, 389 as alternative to Spanish rule, 232

|

anti-Catholicism, 51 assimilation of Protestant Latina/os, 48–49, 52–53, 55 Black Legend used as propaganda vs. Spain by, 79 Central Americans, 129–130 conversion rates from, 156 converts to, 192, 363–365 on Cuba, 174–175 Cuban Americans, 373 Cursillos de Cristiandad, 490–491 denominations, list of, 463 on exile and exodus, 240 family altars, 33 fundamentalism, 72 Hispanic clergy, 464, 467–468 historical context and origins, 459 on homosexuality, 270 house churches, 68 issues and challenges, 466–469 laity, 464 language of church services, 327, 467 language of Hispanic Protestants, 326–327 Latina evange´lica theology, 327–329 Latino/a identity as, 328 Manifest Destiny, 460 on Marian devotion, 570 missionary work, 86–87, 230–232, 460–463, 528 modernism and industrialism addressed by, 72 ‘‘New Ecumenism,’’ 215 political activity, 446–447 Reformation, 370, 682–683, 728– 729, 730 religious iconography at home of Hispanic Protestants, 247 settlement houses, 461 significance of Latino/as within mainline Protestant denominations, 463–466 social Christianity, 72 socioeconomic status, 209, 467–468 during Spanish Inquisition, 459–460 statistics, 233–234, 363, 425, 487

I-47

I-48

|

Index

superimposition on Latina/o Church history, 763 See also Evangelicals Proyecto histo´rico, 744–745 Psicologı´a pastoral, 704 Psicopastoral-Programa Permanente de Psicologı´a Pastoral, 706 Public schools, 454–455 Puebla Conference, 3, 114, 115–116, 117, 146, 303, 452, 714 Pueblo Nation, 195, 437 Pueblo Rebellion, 155, 350, 486 A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (Colo´n), 332 Puerto Rico/Puerto Ricans, 469–476 African heritage, 355 alienation as result of artificial borders, 26 baseball, 207 bregar, 335 carnivals, 263 Catholic Charismatic movement, 427 Columbus’s arrival, 470, 472 converts, 157 demographics, xvii diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 387 education and occupational status, xviii, 250 as English-speakers, xvii espiritismo (Spiritism), 222, 224 Evangelicals, xvi, 234 Foraker Act, 474 foreign born, xvii graduation rates, 455 historical background, xix, 470–471, 471–476 immigration and citizenship status, xvii, 471 income, xviii Irish Catholics vs., 332 jabao, 387 Jehovah’s Witness, 313 Jews and Judaism, 332, 333 literature, 331–333 median age, xvii

Methodist Church, 465 Muslims and, 332 Nuestra Sen˜ora Madre de la Divina Providencia, 574 Nuyoricans, 390, 473, 493–495 patron saints, 262, 472 Pentecostal movement, 430–431 political activity, 442, 471, 563 Ponce de Leon, Juan, 153, 470–471 popular Catholicism of, 101 poverty levels, xviii, 209 Protestant population, 425, 463 remittances from, 206 San Juan Fiesta, 262 second major influx of Hispanics to the U.S. from, xix shrines, 440 size, 469 slavery, 13, 263 Spanish-American War, 474 Taı´nos, 470, 472, 475–476 teologı´a puertorriquen˜a vs. teologı´a puertorriquen˜ista, 476 as U.S. colony, xix, 150 Vieques, 470, 471 Virgen del Pozo, 345 whitening of, 386, 472 World War I, 471 Young Lords Organization (YLO), 583–585 Pulido, Alberto Lo´pez, 422 Punjabi Mexican Americans, 44–46 Punto Guanacastero, 125 Pupil (nomadic tribe), 124 The Purgative Way, 753 Purgatory, 628 (photo) La purı´sima, 129 Pyramids, 29 Al Qaeda, 192 Q’eqchi’ Mayans, 123, 128 Quecholli (festival), 64 Queen of May, 457 Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent God), 63, 65, 196–197, 349, 368, 404, 407, 570

Index Quiche communities, 124, 399 Quichua, 519 Quietism, 393 Quincean˜era, 126, 144 (photo), 241, 245, 257, 266, 735 Quintero, Carmen, 750 (photo) Quinto Sol (press), 330 Quito conference, 705 Quivira, 154 Race: blanqueamiento (whitening), 162, 387, 472, 480 la raza co´ smica (the cosmic race), 479–481, 674 La limpieza de sangre (the washing of the blood), 15, 387 sangre azul (blue-blood), 526, 529 See also specific races by name Rachamim, 642 Racism: ‘‘chino macaco,’’ 39 confronted by Chicano/as, 137 environmental, 220 historical reality of, 355–356 internal racism among marginalized communities, 387–388 racial hierarchy during colonial period, 356, 385 racialization as legacy of Spanish Reconquest, 486 White supremacy, 16–17, 20 RAE (Real Academia Espan˜ola), 755–756 Rag Doll Plagues (Morales), 331 Al-Rahman I, Abd, 483 Rahner, Karl, 36–37, 733 Rain of Gold (Villasen˜or), 331 Ramı´rez, Jose´ Fernando, 59 Ramı´rez, Ricardo, 264, 757 Ramos, Maria, 522 Rancheras (Mexican polkas), 340 Ranchero/a class, 373 Rankin, Melinda, 460 Rapping, 286 Rastafarianism, 578

|

Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph, 114–115, 117 (photo) Ray, Ricardo ‘‘Richie,’’ 495 La Raza Cosmica/The Cosmic Race (Vasconcelos), 353, 479–481, 674 La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), 60, 62, 140, 141, 362 Raza Womyn, 256 Reagan, Ronald, 121, 317, 499 Real Academia Espan˜ola (RAE), 755–756 Recarred, King, 532 Rechy, John, 331 Recinos, Harold, 9, 297, 648 Recognizing the Latino Resurgence (PARAL), 548 Reconquista, 480, 482–486, 526. See also Conquistadores Regla de Ocha-Ifa. See Santerı´a Reglas de Congo (Rule of the Congo), 223, 417–419 Regular Clerks of the Congregation of Saint Paul, Barnabites, 472 Reina, Casiodoro de, 460 Reincarnation, 221, 225, 507 Reissig, Jose´ Luis, 92 ‘‘Religion and Latino Partisanship in the United States’’ (Kelly and Kelly), 445 Religious affiliation, 487–489 Religious drama, 348–351, 419–420, 719 Religious freedom, 508, 509 Religious iconography. See Altars and shrines Remittances, 206, 553, 556 Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 484 RENEW programs, 71 Renewalist movement, 489–491 Reno, Janet, 167 Repatriation Program, 360–361 Repentance, 538–539 Reposition of the Blessed Sacrament, 457 Republican Party (U.S.), 234, 562–563 Republic of San Joaquin del Rio Chama —Echo Amphitheater, 136

I-49

I-50

|

Index

Requerimiento, 149 In re Ricardo Rodriguez, 60–61 Rerum Novarum, 31 Resolver, 335 Respect for elders, 340 Retablos, 8, 277 Rethinking Latino Religion and Identity (De La Torre and Espinosa), 194 Return to my Native Land (Ce´saire), 18 The Revolt of the Cockroach People (Acosta), 330 Revolutionary violence, 240 Rezadora (female prayer leaders), 31 Richard of St. Victor, 731 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 372, 555–556 Rio Grande Valley, 273–275, 276–277 Rios, Father Ruben, 701 (photo) Rios, Rev. Dr. Elizabeth D., 255 Ritch, William G., 59–60 Rivail, Hippolyte Le´on Denizard (Allan Kardec), 220, 223, 225 Rivera, Charlie, 236 Rivera, Diego, 407 Rivera, Edward, 332 Rivera, Ismael, 495 Rivera, Jose´ ‘‘Papo,’’ 495 Rivera, Orlando, 377, 379 Rivera, Pedro de, 155 Rivera, Raymond, 446 Rivera, Toma´s, 330–331 Rivera-Paga´n, Luis, 476 Rivera sisters, 375 Riverside Manifesto, 661, 764 Robles, Diego de, 573 Rock of Gibraltar, 482–483 Rodrigo, King, 483 Rodriguez, Carmen Pla´, 508, 509 Rodriguez, Daniel R., 765 Rodrı´guez, Edmundo, 413 Rodrı´guez, Jeanette, 256–257, 258–259, 552 Rodrı´guez, Luis Rivera, 298, 476 Rodrı´guez, Richard, 296 Rodriguez, Samuel, 236 Rodrı´guez, Vladimir, 706 Rodrı´quez, Carlos Manuel, 475

Rojas’s Final Testament (Esparza), 226–229 Roma´n, Bishop Agustı´n, 412 Romanists, 86 Roman Missal, 718 Romano, Octavio, 177–178 The Romantics, 6 Rome (ancient), 68, 339, 381, 482 Romero, Archbishop Oscar, 297, 334, 453, 494, 496, 497, 500 Roosevelt, Theodore, 46, 50, 373 Rosa, Ambrosio, 313 Rosa de Lima, Santa, 523, 722 La Rosa de los Vientos (Blades), 494 Rosaldo, Renato, 178 Rose of Lima, Saint, 393 Roshi, Ejo Takata, 92 Ross, Fred, 130–131 Rouse, Roger, 555 Royal College and Seminary of San Carlos, Havana, 162 Rubens, Peter Paul, 391 (photo) Ruiz, Jean-Pierre, 112, 758 Run, Baby, Run (Cruz), 332, 426 Russell, Charles Taze, 312 Ruth and Naomi, 652 Rutherford, Judge, 312 Rzano, Armando Solo´, 374 Saco, Jose´ Antonio, 162 Sacraments and sacramentals, 727–736 in Baroque America, 730–733 current directions, 735–736 derived from Jewish practices, 727 historical development, 727–728, 727–730 post-Vatican II trends, 733–735 Sacrifices: ancient temple platforms for, 29 animal, 168, 280, 508, 509, 511, 578 ashe´, 503 auto-blood sacrifices, 517 human, 578, 732 La Sagrada Familia, 247 Saint Augustine, Florida, 154

Index Saints, 19–20, 80–82. See also specific saints by name Saint Vincent (island), 123 Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, 91 Salamanca, 383 Salazar, Ruben, 136 Saldivar, Jose´ David, 178 Salpointe, Archbishop Jean Baptiste, 422 Salsa (food), xiv Salsa worship, 493–495 Salvadorans, 496–498See also El Salvador/Salvadorans Salvation, 673 ‘‘anonymous Christianity,’’ 36–37 Catholic faith on, 19 as individual act, 538–539 Protestants on, 19 soteriology, 673, 739–747 Salvatrucha, Mara, 497–498 Samoe´, Cardinal Antonio, 114 San Antonio, Texas, xiv, 34, 102, 107, 209 San Antonio Meditation Center, 91 San Augustine, Florida, xiii, xiv Sa´nchez, George, 360–361 Sa´nchez, Miguel, 732 Sa´nchez, Samantha, 308 Sa´nchez-Walsh, Arlene, 687 San Cristobal, 129 Sanctuary Movement, 442–443, 444, 496–497, 498–501 San Diego, California: Mexican Filipinos, 43 Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, San Diego, 641 (photo) San Diego California Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, 378 (photo) San Diego Revolt, 371–372 Sandinistas, 115, 121, 122, 174 Sandoval, Chela, 88 Sandoval, Moises, 531–532 San Fernando Cathedral, 102 San Francisco, California, 342 (photo) Sangre azul (blue-blood), 526, 529

|

San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, 349 (photo) San Juan Basilica in McAllen, Texas, 364 (photo) San Juan Fiesta, 262 San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico, 350 San Miguel Acata´n, 129 San Miguel de Guadalupe, xiii, 153 San Salvador, 150, 368 Santa Anna, Antonio Lo´pez, 84 La Santa de Cabora (Urrea, Teresa de), 34–35, 80, 81–82, 183, 278 Santa Eulalia (parish), 383 Santa Fe, New Mexico, xiv, 60, 155, 200 (photo) Santa Marı´a de Guadalupe in Extremadura, 438 ‘‘Santa Marı´a del Camino’’ (hymn), 576 Santas Justa y Rufina (parish), 383 Santerı´a, 501–513 altars and shrines, 33, 506 (photo), 508 in America, 505–506 ancestor worship, 507 animal sacrifices, 168, 280, 511 ‘‘anonymous Santerı´a,’’ 36–38; ashe´, 37, 503, 511, 640 babalawos, 275, 502, 504 baptism, 37 bota´nica, 280 Chango´ (god of lightening and fire), 275 Cuban Americans, 168 death rituals, 224 described, 168 desyncretized in America, 280 dieties, 505, 509–513 divination systems, 508–509 doctrinal points, 506–508 Dominican Republic, 207 healers and healing, 179, 277, 279– 280, 509 historical background, 168, 279–280, 501–505 on homosexuality, 269 Ifa´, 502, 507, 512

I-51

I-52

|

Index

key figures, 509 Lucumı´, 17 olorisha priesthood, 508 origin of term, 17 Pentecostal movement, 389 ritual structures, 508–509 salsa worship influenced by, 493–495 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 223–224 symbolic religious value of Elia´ n Gonza´lez, 411 syncretism, 264, 540–541 on truth, 37 Santiago de Cuba, 161–162 Santiago de Tlatelolco Catholic Church, 369 Santiago (Saint James) de Campostela, 437–438, 485 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 116–117, 153, 303 Santos, Lucia, 569 The Santuario, 437 Santuario de Chimayo, 457 Santuario del Sen˜or de Esquipulas, 662 (photo) Sao Paulo, Brazil, 146 Saracen Moors, 339 Sarah (Old Testament), 644 Sardn˜as, Father, 172 Satanism, 193 Sata/o, 327, 329, 675 Sauhmador, 198 Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (Thomas), 332 Schillebeeckx, Edward, 733–734 Schiller, Nina Glick, 554, 556 Scholastic theologians, 710 Schoolmen theology, 733–734 Schools. See Education/schools Schopenhauer, Arthur, 480 Schulenburg, William, 343 Seabrook Farms, 40 Seattle, Washington, 281 Second Vatican Council. See Vatican II Secularism, xvi, 158, 327, 363, 513–515 Sedillo, Pablo, 52

‘‘See–judge–act,’’ 114 Segovia, Fernando F., 202, 203–204, 242, 295, 298, 649–650, 653–654 Segregation, 454 Segundo, Juan Luis, 284, 733 Selena (‘‘Queen of Tejano music’’), 34 Self-appropriation, 203–204 Self-definition, 204, 518 Self-direction, 204 Sembrador, El, 97 Senghor, Leopoldo Se´dar, 18 Sen˜or de Esquı´pulas, 437 Sen˜or del Gran Poder, 721 El Sen˜or de los Milagros, 439, 524 El Sen˜or de Quyllur Rit’i (Quispicanchi), 401 Sensus fidelium. See Popular religion Sensus fidelium, 643, 663 Separation of church and state, 17, 513–514 Sephardic Jews, 314–315 September 11, 2001, terror attacks, 306, 307 Sepu´lveda, Plinio, 706 Serantes, Archbishop Pe´rez, 172 Serra, Father Junı´pero, 155, 371 Settlement houses, 86 ‘‘Seven Cities of Gold’’ (Cibola), 154 Seven Story Mountain (Merton), 583 Seventh-day Adventists, 192, 274, 312 Sevilla, Don˜a Marı´a de, 572 Seville, 483, 485 Sexuality, 515–518 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Anzaldu´a), 87–88 ethical connections of sexuality and race, 612 female slaves as sexual objects, 387 homosexuality, 256, 269–271, 350, 447, 516, 563 machismo and sexual practices, 348 religious teachings, 515–516 sexual identity, 256, 269–271 stereotypes about Latina/os, 515–517 Tlazolteotl, 517 Seymour, William J., 410, 423, 424

Index Shambhala Meditation Center, 90–91 Shango (god of thunder and lightning), 19 Shell Oil, 220 Sherrill, John, 426 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas), 78–80, 154, 216, 217, 369, 397–398 Shrine of Our Lady of Charity, 169 Shrine of Saint Toribio, 299 Shrine of Santiago, 97 Shrines, 30, 34–36, 81–82, 437, 439. See also Altars and shrines Sikh, 44, 45, 46 Silva, Jose Inacio da, 565 Simpatia, 340 Sin, 275, 538–539 Sinaloa, Mexico, 183 The sinner’s prayer, 230 Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), 38 Sı´ntora, Jose´ Fidencio Constantino (‘‘El Nin˜o’’), 34–36, 80, 82, 181, 182, 278 Siqueyras, Don˜a Ana Mattos de, 571 Sı´ se puede, 335 Slaves/slavery, 11–21 Black Legend, 78 cabildos (social clubs), 417 Catholicism of masters, 12 Chinese laborers as alternative to African slaves, 43–44 Cuba, 501–502 domestically bred slaves in U.S., 16 emancipation of, 418 Europe’s imperial status reinforced by, 15 female slaves as sexual objects, 387 Hellenistic Empire, 12 justification for, 368 mining labor, 352 Mulatez controversy, 20–21 persistence of African religiosity in the face of Iberian colonization, 16–20, 18–20, 577–579 Portugal, 577–578 slave trade, history of, 12–16, 43–44 Tippu Tip, 14 (photo)

|

treatment of, 14–16 underground railroad, 500 Sleepy Lagoon Case, 361 Smith, Adam, 176 Smith, Brian H., 191, 434, 435 Smith, Joseph, 374, 375, 378 Smith, Oregon v., 396 Snake Skirt (Coatlicue), 63–64 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 138 Sobrino, Jon, 297, 453 Soccer war, 121 Social capital, 444 Social Christianity, 72 Social justice, 70, 109, 129, 317–324, 687. See also Liberation theology/theologians Social theory, 176 Social transformation (orthopraxis), 300 Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, 315 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 548 So Far From God (Castillo), 331 Solano, Francisco, 375–376 La Soldadera (soldier woman), 570–571 Soldado, Juan, 80, 82, 723 Solivan, Samuel, 300, 415–416, 623 Somosa, Anastasio, 121 Songoro Cosongo (Guillen), 18 Sonny (Arguinzoni), 24 Sonora, Mexico, 183, 375 Sorbazo, Jorge, 706 Sorcery. See Witchcraft (brujerı´a) Sosa, Juan, 760 Sosa, Lionel, 56 Soteriology, 673, 739–747 South America/ns, 518–525 Catholic, xvi diverse attitudes toward mulatto/as, 386–387 diversity of, 519 geographic groupings, 518 immigration, 518, 518–519, 519–521 Japanese American internees during WWII, 40 liberation theologians, 522

I-53

I-54

|

Index

literature, 334 religious contributions, 522–525 slave trade, 12 statistics, 518–519 See also specific nations by name Southern Baptist Convention, 373, 465, 487, 489 Southwest Pastoral Institute, 76 Soviet Union, 165. See also Communism Spain/Spaniards, 525–536 altars and shrines, 29–30 Audiencia, 217 Bible banned in Latin America by, 231 Black Legend, 78–80 blanqueamiento (whitening), 480 cathedrals, 400–401 Catholicism during colonial period, 100–101, 532–533 celebrations of independence from, 126 chivalry and male honor, 339–340 colonies, overview, xiii–xiv, xviii, xix Colonization Act (1824), 373 conversion of Jews by, 157, 314–315, 459 Cuba colonized by, 161–162 Cursillos de Cristiandad, 490 devotion to saints, 534–535 discovery of new medicines, 273 encomienda system, 149, 215–217 encouraged by the Crown to marry Amerindians, 217, 398 expulsion of Jews from, 157, 314– 315, 367–368, 526 Fiesta, 262 Hispanic pneumatological heritage, 710–711 home chapels, 30 household demographics, xvii income, xviii indigenous collaboration with, 527–529 indigenous peoples of Americas decimated by, 13

indigenous women as victims of conquest, 398, 529, 570–571 institutional contributions, 530–531 Islamic invasion of, 381, 382–383 Kingdom as amalgamation of kingdoms and regions, 530 language, xvii, 531–532 legacy for Hispanic American religious culture, 525–535 median age, xvii mining, 352 as mixture of people and cultures, 526 Moors, 263, 307 Mozarabic Rite, 379–383 national messianism as result of Columbus’s discoveries, 485 Philippine Islands ruled by, 42, 43 Popol Vuh, 398 popular Catholicism vs. rule of, 100–101 prelude to Spanish Conquest, 525–527 Puerto Rico, 263, 470–471, 473–474 racial hierarchy in America, 356, 385 Reconquista, 147–149, 367–370, 480, 482–486, 526 retablos, 8 Romanization of, 381 sangre azul (blue-blood), 526 Santa Marı´a del Pilar, 574 slave trade, 12–13 Spanish Bible, 460, 461–462 Spiritism’s appeal to freedom fighters, 222 Treaty of Tordesillas, 513 Tridentine Catholicism, 103–104 union of church and state, 513, 522 Virgin Mary, 533–535 warring tribes of Native Americans, 396 White Legend, 80 See also Conquistadores Spanglish, xv, 53, 326, 473 Spanish-American War, xix, 26, 46, 150, 154, 164, 474, 528

Index Spanish Inquisition: vs. Alumbrados, 711 Black Legend, 79 brujeria, 503 conversos (marranos), 157, 314–315, 459 loyalty and faithfulness to the Catholic Church during, 459–460 Quietism censored by, 393 Santerı´a, 503 violent measures of, 79 Spanish (language): Arabic influence, 532 assumption that all Hispanics speak Spanish, xv Latino identity and, 325 Spanglish, xv, 53, 326, 473 Spanish-speaking priests, 191 statistics, 325 Tex–Mex, 53 See also Language Sparks, David, 536 Speaking in tongues (glossolalia), xx, 95, 189, 423, 489–490 Spellman, Cardinal Francis, 473 Spencer, Herbert, 480 Spengler, Oswald, 480 Spiritism (Espiritismo), 220–229 African-based religions influenced by, 223 beliefs and teachings, 221 demographics, 190 described, xx–xxi healers and healing, 179, 279 Latino/a population, 193 for marginalized communities, 223 origins, 220–221, 225, 749 progressive and individualist underpinnings, 221 See also Spirituality Spiritist Codification (Kardec), 220, 223 Spiritual Canticle (John of the Cross), 392 Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius of Loyola), 392 The Spiritual Guide (Molinos), 393 Spiritual hybridity, 536–537. See also Syncretism

|

La spiritualite´ Chre´tienne (Pourrat), 753 Spirituality, 749–760 arte (art), 757–758 Christocentrism, 759 corazo´n (heart), 755–757 historical development, 749–755 latina/o spiritualities, 758–760 origin of term, 750, 754, 756 Spiritualogians, defined, 754 stages of, 754–755 Stanley, Henry Morton, 14 (photo) Stations of the Cross, 686 Stavans, Ilan, 292, 316–317, 356 Stereotypes of Hispanics, 27, 515–517 Stevens, Evelyn, 348 Stock, Simon, 572 The Story of Christianity (Gonza´lez), 658 Street knowledge, street fashion, and street entrepreneurialism, 285–286 Structural assimilation, 49, 58 Structural sin, 538–539 Student Association, 138 Student movement, 135, 137–138 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 138 Student Volunteer Movement, 72 Suarez, Ursula, 393 Suenens, Cardinal Leon Joseph, 427 Suffragists, 253 Sugar plantations, 12, 13, 501, 577–578 Sugar rituals, 198 Suicide, 281 Summa Theologica (Thomas Aquinas), 691 Sunday Schools, 461 Supernatural phenomenon. See also Spiritism (Espiritismo) Sur 13, 498 Susto, 274, 755 Sutherland, Alexander, 460 Swedish missionaries, 429 Symbolo catholico indiano (Ore´), 731 Syncretism, 539–541 described, 85, 399–401, 417, 536– 537, 540

I-55

I-56

|

Index

Enigmatic Powers (PARAL), 548 imbalance of power, 85 limitations of term, 19, 405 origin of term, 539–540 slaves, 417, 540–541 Syrians, 123 Szanton Blanc, Christina, 554 Tabasco, Mexico, 424 Taifa Kingdoms, 483 Taı´nos, 396, 470, 472, 475–476, 558 Tamborito, 125 Ta´mez, Elsa, 407, 453 Tanquerey, Adolphe, 753 Taoism, 193, 715 Tarango, Yolanda, 383–384 Tariq Ibn-Ziyad, 482–483 Tarot cards, 715 Tatica from Higuey, 207 Taussig, Michael, 176–177 Taxes, 211, 446–447 Teachers. See Education/schools El Teatro Campesino, 132, 137 Techne, 691 Teen Challenge, 24, 426 Tehueco people, 183 Tejano/as, 291 Temple platforms, 29 Temple Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, 65 Temporary Protected Status (TPS), 121, 122 Tenochitlan, 29 ‘‘Ten Years’ War,’’ 163, 528 Teologı´a de conjunto (collaborative theology), 118–119, 661, 676–678, 761–771 Teologı´a de la liberacio´n (Gutie´rrez). See A Theology of Liberation (Gutie´rrez) Teotl-Dios, 640 Tepeyac Association, 619 (photo) Teresa de Jesus, Santa, 512 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 391–392, 574, 711, 749 Terms of Survival (Cofer), 333 Testimonios, 543–545, 687

Tewa people, 30 Texas: annexation, 150 Colonization Act (1824), 373 independence, 357 Latino/as population, xiv, xv natural resources, xix tejano/as, 291 Tex–Mex (language), 53 Tezcatlipoca, 537 Tezozo´moc, Alvarado, 58 Theological and Religious Education, 545–550 Theological anthropology, 551–553, 639, 667–668 A Theology of Human Hope (Alves), 241 A Theology of Liberation (Gutie´rrez), 3, 5, 114, 241, 523, 693 Theoria, 690, 692 Theosophy, 479, 481 Theravada Buddhism, 89–90, 91 They Speak with Other Tongues (Sherrill), 426 Third World liberation theologies, 762 Third World products, 115 Thomas, Piri, 332, 473 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 246, 691, 710, 728–729 Thomas the Apostle, Saint, 407, 732 Thompson, James, 372 Thomson, John Francis, 372 Three Kings, 265 Three Kings Day Parade and Festival (Parada y Festival de Los Reyes Magos), 127 (photo), 169–170 Tibetan Buddhism, 91 Tijerina, Reies Lo´pez, 63, 133, 136, 138–140, 139 (photo) Tillich, Paul, 7, 618 Timoteo (Cruz), 495 Tippu Tip, 14 (photo) Tirres, Chris, 9 Tlaloc (rain god), 29, 195 Tlazolteotl, 517 Tobacco plantations, 13, 501

Index El Todopoderoso (Lavoe), 495 Toledo, Spain, 379–380, 381, 483, 484, 711 Toltecs, 28, 29, 407 Toma´s Rivera Policy Institute, 97 Tomorrow’s Child (Alves), 241 Tonantzin/Coatlicue, 30–31, 64, 85, 196, 241, 407 Topiltzin Quetzalco´atl, 407 Toribia, Marı´a, 458 Toribio, San, 299 Toronto Blessing Revival, 433 Torres, Camilio, 174 Torres, Nestor, 93 Torres, Rodolfo, 178 Torrey, Reuben A., 72, 409 Tortillas Again (film), 181 Tortugas, 351 Totonicapa´n, Guatemala, 129 ‘‘Toward a Hermeneutics of the Diaspora’’ (Segovia), 242 ‘‘Toward a Theology of Ecclesial Lay Ministry’’ (University of Dayton), 76 Toxcatl Panquetzaliztli ceremony, 64–65 Tozozontli (festival), 63–64 TPS (Temporary Protected Status), 121, 122 Tracy, David, 616 Trade. See Economy Traditioning, 612 Transculturacio´n, 21–22 ‘‘Transnational America’’ (Bourne), 553 Transnationalism, 553–557 Treasures Out of Darkness (Arguinzoni), 25 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: citizenship granted to Mexicans by, 59, 60–61 formative years following, 59, 357 La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (The Federal Land-Grant Alliance) on regaining land, 136, 139–40 land ceded by, xix, 59–61, 83–84, 375, 379, 553

|

post-treaty violence, 84 terms, 84 Treaty of Mesilla, 441 violated by U.S., 133, 138–139 Treaty of Mesilla, 441 Treaty of Paris, 46, 474 Treaty of Tordesillas, 513 Trejo, Alonso y Antonio, 207 Los Tres Juanes (the Three Johns), 572 Tres Reyes Magos, 265 Trinidad, 387 The Trinity, 558–560 diversity as quality of, 559–560 familia, 559 Hispanic reinterpretation of, 559, 664–665 oppressive societal structures as dysfunctional Trinitarian systems, 559 rejected by Oneness Pentecostals, 192 retablos, 8 through the experience of community, 145, 558–559 Trinitarian controversy, 589 Triplex munis (triple offices), 590 Triumph of the Holy Cross, 458 Tropico Negro (Cabral), 18 Trujillo, Bishop Alfonso Lo´pez, 114 Trujillo, Horacio, 97 Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas, 205 Trungpa Rinpoche, Cho¨gyam, 91 Tucson, Arizona, 4 (photo) Tuncap, Michael, 536 Tun tun de pasa y griferia (Matos), 18 Turks, 123 Turner, Kay, 32, 33 ‘‘Two Places and No Place on Which to Stand’’ (Segovia), 242 Txotxile people, 401 Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934), 42–43, 46 Tzeltal communities, 92 Tzoalli, 195 Tzotzopaztli, 195 Tzutujil Maya, 9

I-57

I-58

|

Index

UCKG (University Church of the Kingdom of God), 564–565 UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara), 63, 140–141 Umayyad Caliphs, 482–484 Umbanda, 223 Unaffiliated populations, xvi, 514. See also Atheists Unamuno, Miguel de, 532 Un bembe pa’ Yemaya´ (Colo´n), 494 Undocumented ‘‘immigrants,’’ xv, 361, 362, 378, 397 (photo), 442–444, 446. See also Sanctuary Movement Unio´n de Cubanos en el Exilio, 173 United Farm Workers (UFW), 107, 131– 133, 137, 138, 219, 363, 442, 514 United Methodist Church, 466, 467, 489, 548 United States: armed forces, 361 Catholic Charismatic movement, 425 expansion of Christianity within, xiii–xiv history of conquest and annexation, xix home ownership, xviii Japanese immigrants, 38–39 natural resources, xix Philippines claimed by, 42 political interventions in Latin America, 443, 496–497, 618 political parties, 561–563 tax code, 211 World War II, internment of Japanese people, 40–41 World War II, war with Japan, 40–41 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), 52, 111 Unitive Way, 753 Unity, 215, 266, 323–324 University Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), 564–565 University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), 63, 140–141 University of Dayton, 76 University of Notre Dame, 426

University of Paris, 710 Urbanization, 106, 229 Urban pastoral, 117–118 Urban Training Centers (UTC), 24–25 Urrabazo, Father Rosendo, 213 Urrea, Teresa de (La Santa de Cabora), 34–35, 80, 81–82, 183, 278 Uruguay/Uruguayans: immigration, 518, 520 income, xviii La Virgen de los Treinta y Tres, 575 median age, xvii poverty levels, xviii shrines, 440 war of independence, 575 USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops), 52, 111 U.S. Census, 38, 487, 487–489, 518 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 219 USS Maine, 528 U.S. political parties, 561–563 U.S. Virgin Islands, 313 Utah, 374–379 UTC (Urban Training Centers), 24–25 Vajradhatus (meditation centers), 90–91 Vajrayana Buddhism, 90, 91 Valdez, A. C., 429 Valdez, Juan de, 460 Valdez, Luis, 137 Valdez, Susie, 424 Valencia, 484 Valenzuela, Romanita Carbajal de, 429 Vallejo, Linda, 33 Vann, Diana Siegel, 317 Van Praagh, James, 278 Varela, Maria, 138 Varela y Morales, Fe´lix, 162–163, 166 Vargas, Don Diego de, 155, 486 Vasconcelos, Jose´, 9–10, 353, 479–481, 674, 735 ´ Vasquez, Fray Francisco, 497 Va´squez, Manuel, 300 Va´squez de Ayllo´n, Lucas, xiii, 153 Vatican I, 455

Index Vatican II: ‘‘anonymous Christianity,’’ 37 basic theological principles affirmed by, 763–764 on biblical reading, 109–110 on Christian unity, 146–147 Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) to promote, 112–114 on diversity in the liturgy, 380 ecclesial life and doctrinal formulations updated by, 68, 69 ecumenicalism brought about by, 455 on lay participation and leadership, 105, 145 on popular religion, 713–714 purpose of, 523 reaction of church leaders to, 763–764 on social justice, 129 on worship and sacraments, 682–683 Vazquez, Cristina, 144 (photo) Vega, Bernardo, 331–332 Vega, Ed, 332 Vega, Inca Garcilaso de la, 395–396 Vega, Toni, 495 Vejigantes, 263 Velazquez, Refugio, 409 Vela´zquez de Cue´llar, Diego, 161, 216 Venezuela/Venezuelans: African heritage, 355 baseball, 207 Cacique natives, 575 Catholic Charismatic movement, 425, 427 education, xviii foreign born, xvii German Lutheran settlement, 370 immigration, 518 Nuestra Sen˜ora de Coromoto, 575 shrines, 440 Verbo, 667 El Vez, 88 Via Crucis, 4 (photo), 5, 686, 687 Via dolorosa (sorrowful way), 415

|

Victory Outreach (Alcance Victoria), 23–25, 88, 423, 433 Vida cotidiana. See Lo cotidiano (daily life) La Vida de la Santa Madre Teresa de Jesus (Teresa of Avila), 392 Vidal, Jaime, 716, 736 Vieques, 470, 471 El Viernes Santo (Good Friday), 4 (photo), 5, 456 (photo), 457, 619 (photo), 641 (photo) La Vie Spirituelle (Tanquerey), 753 Vietnam Era, 135 Villa, Pancho, 80, 81 (photo), 82 Villafan˜e, Eldin, 491, 623, 667 Villarreal, Jose Antonio, 330 Villasen˜or, Victor, 331 La Violada (raped woman), 570–571 Violence: gangs, 23–25, 126, 426, 497–498, 583–585 institutionalized, 300–306 oppressive regimes, xx, 120–121, 297, 496, 498, 499–500 permitted by hermeneutical circle, 284 revolutionary violence, 240 Virgen de Chiquinquira, 522 La Virgen de Guadalupe. See Our Lady of Guadalupe La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, 168, 402, 439 Virgen del Pozo, 345 La Virgen de Remedios, 65, 152 La Virgen de San Juan de los lagos del Valle de Texas, 439 Virgen de Suyapa, 124 Virgin de San Juan de Los Lagos in Mexico, 439 Virgin Mary, 567–577 Assumption, 569 Catholic Charismatic movement on, 97 Christocentric dimension, 568 as Coatlalopeuh, 358 doctrines regarding Mary, 341

I-59

I-60

|

Index

Ecclesiotypical dimensions, 568 as ideal symbol of virgin and mother, 247, 341, 347–348 Immaculate Conception of, 569 incorporated within Santerı´a, 37 Native Americans on, 534 as the New Eve, 568, 569 as Our Lady of Providence, 472 Perpetual Virginity, 569 as Queen of May, 457 respect for feminine deities symbolized by, 87 search for inn, 644 song of the anawim, 642–643 Virgin-Whore dichotomy, 516–517 as warrior figure for the Spanish, 534 See also Marian devotions Virgin of Guadalupe. See Our Lady of Guadalupe Virgin of Montserrat, 533 Virgin of the Rosary, 522 Visigothic era, 381, 382, 482–483, 532 Vivar, Rodrigo Dı´az de, 484 Voodoo, 207, 577–582, 580 (photo) Voter registration drives, 361, 561 Voting Rights Act (1965), 253 Voudoun, 502 Wahlberg, John, 313 Walker, Theron, 296 Walkout (film), 442 Walsh, Monsignor Bryan O., 410–412 The War Brides Act, 43, 46 War on Poverty, 135 Watchtower (Russell), 312 Water spirits, 717 The Way of Perfection (Teresa of Avila), 392 Way of the Cross, 686 Weber, Max, 176, 450 Wesley, John, 415, 618 West, Cornel, 16 Whipple, Bishop Benjamin, 233 White Legend, 80 White supremacy, 16–17, 20 Whitson, R. E., 145

Who Are We? Challenges to America’s National Identity (Huntington), 55– 56, 515 Wilkerson, David, 24, 426 Wilson, Woodrow, 50 Witchcraft (brujerı´a), 179, 193, 274– 275, 417–419, 503, 537 Women: Abuelita (little grandmother) theology, 347 abuse vs., 125, 398, 529, 570–571 altars, 33 within Catholic Charismatic movement, 95–96, 97 Chicano Movement, 137–138 education and occupational status, 125, 250, 257–258, 321 Espiritualistas, 224, 226 extended families, 126 female slaves as sexual objects, 387 gender roles, 246–247, 249, 250 grassroots Christianity usually led by, 716, 724 as healers, 278 Las Hermanas (The Sisters), 107, 213, 363, 413–414, 764 Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church, 661–662 Latina evange´lica theology, 327–329 Latino/a literature, 331 legal system of Roman law, 339 machista attitudes, 247 Marianismo, 341, 346–348 marimacha, 339 Mujerista theology, 158–159, 259– 260, 335–337, 383–385, 552, 673, 736 Mujerista theology, Isasi-Dı´az on, 242, 252, 258, 648, 744–745 Muslims, 307–308 parteras (midwives), 31 Pentecostal movement, 429, 433 rezadora (female prayer leaders), 31 sexual behavior of, 348 as single parents, 249, 250 El Teatro Campesino, 137

Index Virgin Mary mystique as ideal, 347– 348 See also Feminist movement/ theory Wood, Leonard, 164 Workers’ rights campaigns. See United Farm Workers (UFW) World’s Columbian Exposition, 89, 150 World’s Fair (New York, 1964), 376 World’s Parliament of Religions, 89–90 World War I: National Catholic War Council, 111 Puerto Rico, 471 U.S. demand for labor during, 121 World War II: Bracero Program, 361 Fiance´e Act (1946), 43 Filipinos in U.S. military, 42 internment camps, 40, 46 Pearl Harbor attack, 40 Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals, 40 War Brides Act (1945), 43, 46 X, Malcolm, 525, 583 Xilonen, 241 Xinca people, 123 Xiuhcoatl (serpent), 64 Xochiquetzal, 517 Xolotl (Lord of the Underworld and the God of Lightning), 63, 407 Yaqui people, 183 Ybor, Vicente Martinez, 163 Ybor City, Florida, 163 Yemaya´, 512–513 Yemaya y Ochun (La India), 493–494 Yerba buena (mint), 275–276 Yerberos/yerbateros, 180, 277 Yip, Mike, 44 Yoruba people, 17, 263–264, 279–280, 417, 501–505, 507, 512, 540–541. See also Santerı´a Young Lords Organization (YLO), 442, 583–585

|

Young Lords Party (YLP), 583–585 Youth: acculturation of, 248 baptism, 729 at Bible institutes, 74 family structure, 249–250 gangs and violence, 497–498, 583–585 hip-hop culture, 285–286 Hispanic school-age children statistics, 454 immigration, 518 la bendicio´n sought from older relatives, 247–248 Operation Pedro Pan, 167, 410–412 preferential option for the young, 452, 453 Presentation of Children, 734 Quincean˜era, 126, 144 (photo), 241, 245, 257, 266, 735 susceptible to the evil eye and mal aire, 751, 752 youth movement, 72, 135, 137–138, 140, 141, 361–362 youth organizations, 361–362, 426, 442 See also Education/schools Yuba Sikh Parade, 46 Yucatan Peninsula, 153 Yupanqui, Francisco Tito, 571–572 Zaccaria, Saint Anthony Mary, 472 Zacchi, Cesare, 174 Zambo, 352 Zangwill, Israel, 50 Zapata, Dominga, 757 Zavala, Bishop Gabino, 684 (photo) Zempoalxochitl, 198 Zen Buddhism, 91, 92 Zion’s Watchtower and Herald of Christ’s Presence (Russell), 312 Zoot-suit riots, 361 Zubirı´a, Bishop, 421–422 Zumarraga, Bishop, 570, 573 Zuni Nation, 195

I-61