Living in my Memory: Pastor Rich Perez on “In the Heights”

This article was first published by Rich Perez on his personal blog and can be read at here.

In the Heights, Warner Brothers 2021

Like everyone else, we were excited. Beaming with pride that any semblance of our story — our neighborhood story was being told on the silver screen. We were especially proud because our son, who has been acting for 6 years now, was able to land an on-screen background role in the movie. So, no matter what suspicions or reluctance some of us had about which story would be told, “In The Heights” had us all waiting with eager expectation.

And it delivered…kind of. Well, it’s complicated. Within a few days of its long anticipated premier, social media and news outlets like The Root exploded with criticism mainly about the movie’s misrepresentation of Washington Heights, a neighborhood that recently was canonized as “Little Dominican Republic” to pay homage to the many Dominican residents that call it home.

And that may be the source of the rub.

There are much smarter people than me talking about the nuances of Latinx identity. I won’t attempt to be scholarly about that. These are my reflections, most of which are birthed out of my experiences as someone deeply shaped by Uptown culture. The only other motivator here are my kids, who I feel the exciting responsibility to pass on the legacy of my identity so that they could discover who they are.

Art will always be complex

No matter how deeply a piece of art is connected to a real moment in history, place or person, its expression will always be at the mercy of the artist. As enjoyers of art, there will always be room to insert your observations or interpretations of the piece, but ultimately the artist decides — even if subconsciously — what the pen writes, what the brush strokes, what the camera captures. Lin-Manuel is the architect; he’s the artist. In The Heights was shaped by his experiences of Uptown (mainly Inwood, or Dyckman for us natives, which is the northern most part of the neighborhood. how that difference shapes his storytelling is also important, but for another time). For those of us that took to the theaters in celebration of what could be, we watched a movie about a neighborhood that existed in his imagination. and we didn’t leave with the level of satisfaction we had hoped for. Why? Because we don’t live in his imagination. Not as main characters, at least.

Art will always be complex, because art is birthed out of us. And we are complex beings who are shaped by nuanced experiences, privileges or lack thereof. We’re shaped by our desires and preferences — spoken or unspoken. As the architect Lin created what he imagined, a “mosaic.” But therein lies a fundamental obstacle. Washington Heights is not a mosaic. While it may be home to a variety of Latinx identities, Washington Heights is demonstrably Dominican; Afro-Dominican.

There have been so many Mexicans, Cubans, even Brazilians declaring their praise for In The Heights because they felt seen. And rightfully so, their flags and accents were in the movie. They felt seen because they were on screen. The movie’s effort to celebrate Latinidad (I don’t want any of the smoke that comes with this word) was beautiful but it minimized the Dominican story that lives in the very air of this community. Now, this is dicey, because I’d hate for this to be interpreted as a campaign to not celebrate those cultures. This is not that. We should celebrate them.

This is, however, an effort to show that Latinx expression varies across the different Latinx ethnicities, and this movie was an opportunity to put that on display.

Beyond the tasks of filmmaking

Casting, as much as the wardrobe, the script, the director, or any other department on the set of a movie, is not so much a task, but an opportunity. Better yet, it’s a responsibility to build the world of the film. And in the case of a movie about a neighborhood with such a unique expression, it is difficult to see the right cast in the backdrop of the wrong setting. It’s also devastating to see (on the big screen no less) our streets, our bodegas, our corners, our stoops with strangers occupying them. Even more — what the cast wears, how they sound, their accent, their syntax, their references, their isms, their music, their skin color, the smells of the movie, el sabor of the movie. All of those are special and important to the telling of our story. All of those serve as bricks in the construction of the world that the movie promised simply by virtue of its name. Oh, how i wished there was a perico ripia’o or a number with una bachatica ensendi’a!

But this is not In The Heights through my eyes, nor your eyes. It’s through the eyes of two Puertoriqueños, one of whose relationship to the Heights could perhaps be understood as periphery having grown up in West Philly. This may be the reason for a heavy presence of salsa music and a dominant Puerto Rican cast. Even if they played the role of Dominicans. This may explain why the beloved piraguero cooled los vecinos from the sweltering heat with piraguas and not frio frios. ¡Dame uno de chinola!… not parcha. When you know the artists, you better understand the art.

And as for the visual direction, well, that was in the hands of an Asian man and a white woman. Jon Chu and Alice Brooks are responsible for what, and more importantly, who, is captured by the camera. And listen, this is no indictment on them for those things. I could never. And I wouldn’t want to. But it is a call to awareness that they are the source of this art. And the truth is that perhaps for some of them, this wasn’t their story to tell.

Casting directors and other executive roles in the film-making journey are like the visual managers at retail stores. It’s their vision that decides which mannequins and outfits are considered most attractive for the windows that face the street. Yes, we got to see Latinos on the screen in ways that we never have, yet there still remains glass ceilings to be shattered for the Afro-Latinx community. Perhaps much of the frustration is coming from the expectations we had on this movie to deliver some of that shattering.

Nonetheless, as a Dominicano from Uptown, Lin-Manuel has given me sufficient reasons to be proud of my Latinx identity — no matter how nuanced it may be. But we shouldn’t make the conclusion that critique means that we hate the project and can’t appreciate it generally. I think Lin knows that. He’s also just an artist navigating all the heat his work is receiving. That’s no easy place to be in. I get that, too.

I won’t beat a dead horse. Afro-Latinos were desperately absent in the foreground of this story, and thus, in the present imagination of its creators. But it’s important to share that I won’t condemn anyone for not highlighting me in their imagination. None of us can, I suppose. We can only hope to inspire imagination, stretch it with truthful criticism — whether it spills out of us harshly or not. Though we hope it wouldn’t.

It’s a big deal to have this movie in Hollywood. And I’m thankful for that. There is nothing like In The Heights that has been memorialized into cinema history. That should be celebrated. As big, however, is the missed opportunity to tell the story more truthfully. Again, I think Lin gets that. His humility and active listening is a hopeful sign for great future projects and advocacy of the stories some of us felt fell short here.

If anything I’ve gotten from the loving relationship in my life is that mature love leads with celebration while holding space for growth, transformation, correction.

In the Heights, Warner Brothers 2021

The Gift of Becoming Yourself

Yes, Hollywood is watching us have our disagreements, but I want to strongly encourage us to reframe the way we have these discussions. It’s important that we don’t frame those bringing critique as “hating” on the movie and damaging our perception to Hollywood. And on that note — big production companies, like Warner Bros., with their white dollars, are not the only way to have our stories told. The film-making industry is like any other industry, I imagine. There are enough creators, writers, producers, actors, directors, DP’s of color telling our stories without the help of big wig executives. I’m hopeful for the stories In The Heights will give birth to, but I’m wary of adjusting ourselves to mass appeal. I know it produces dollars, but it dwarfs our stories into something foreign. The road to getting Hollywood to see the value in our stories is long and arduous. Surely, there are other ways.

Perhaps the next best thing that we can do is more simple than we imagine: create. Tell your story. Tell your ancestor’s story. Tell your block’s story as you know it; as you experienced it. Tell it truthfully. Don’t be held hostage by mass appeal. It’s one of the pitfalls we’ve inherited from the social media age. If you drink from the cup of mass appeal you risk the integrity of your story because you decide that what others think is more valuable than the deepest truth of your experience.

There’s no question that this movie has poured gas onto the on-going conversation about Latinx identity. And for that I’m thankful. Our Latinx identity is nuanced and complex, with Afro-desendencia and Indigeno-descendencia. Learn your story. Climb your family tree. Saca tu abuela del closet. With all its twists, painful turns and pleasant surprises, there is no journey more important than the one where you become yourself, as you’ve been made. To share both that journey and what you discover is a gift to the world. To experience that in your art, your stories, your movies is to construct a bridge that allows me; that allows us, the opportunity to enter your story. The only catch is that it must be done truthfully. No hiding the mess. Not forgetting a chapter. And not making anyone invisible.

Living in my memories

My teen years were all about basketball at Dyckman park, bread runs to Kenny’s bakery, and parties at Incarnation Catholic School’s gym on 175th and St. Nicholas. For over a decade I lived in Dyckman with my wife and two kids as a faith and community leader. In 2017 I debuted my memoir about what it meant for me to love this place that had changed so much over the years. I’ve had a number of non-native New York friends message me after watching the film: “Wow, I feel like I understand your story more” or some version of that sentiment. If I’m honest, these reflections are in large part to ensure that those unfamiliar with the place that shaped so much of me wouldn’t conclude that this film captured all what that place is.

If your conscience makes room for it, go buy a ticket. Watch this movie. Take with you what you can from this story. And trust me, you can. There’s plenty there for you. There’s plenty there for us. Beauty does not evade this movie. El fuego Caribeño wasn’t a stranger. To see the hydrants open, the streets flooded with kids, and the struggle to find our place in society — that was still especially beautiful and compelling.

About Rich Perez

Rich is the author of Mi Casa Uptown: Learning to Love Again, a memoir of his experiences growing up in the inner city of Nueva York and the intersection of faith, family, identity and the significance of place. Founder and pastor of 10 years at Christ Crucified Fellowship in NYC before transitioning to Atlanta, GA with his wife, Anna, and their kids, Josiah and Hayden.

Double Punishment: Immigration and Anti-Blackness

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

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

Our Rich Diasporic Roots

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

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

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

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

Our Woundedness

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

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

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

Our Identity Crisis

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

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

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

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

Immigration & Anti-Blackness

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

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

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

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

Our Anti-Black Histories

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

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

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

Anti-Blackness Today

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

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

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

A Way Forward

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

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

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

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

Who Are We?

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

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

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

About Jon Aragón

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

Photo by Savannah Lauren

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

Are Black Bodies Cursed? Dominican Racial Identity and the Life of Oscar Wao

“The family claims the first sign was that Abelard’s third and final daughter… was born black. And not just any kind of black. But black black – kongoblack, shangoblack, kaliblack, zapoteblack, rekhablack – and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact. That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen.””

— Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 248

During the early stages of this project on Afro-Latin@s, I had a conversation with my cousin about Dominican racial identity. My cousin worked at a bank and often perplexed Dominican clients when she asked them to mark their race. “Dominican,” they’d respond. “No, your race.” The confused client would look at the list in front of them for a moment, read past the more common designations: White… Black, and self-identify as “Indio.” Not Black. Not White. Indio.

I recently had a similar conflict filling out the U.S. Census for me and my son. After looking over the list for far too long, I circled “other” and wrote “Hispanic/Dominican.” Dominican, and especially Dominican-American racialization is a complex subject mixed with a variety of understandings and histories.[i] Ginetta E.B. Candelario notes that “for much of Dominican history, the national body has been defined as not-black, even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. In the place of blackness, officially identity discourses and displays have held that Dominicans are racially Indian and culturally Hispanic.”[ii]

To many observers, this racial identification is a denial of what is visually undeniable (“Dominicans are Black”) and proves that Dominican histories, social hierarchies, and political policies have and continue to contribute to Dominican anti-Black sentiment - see Haitian immigration and citizenship in the Dominican Republic. Historians, sociologists and ethnographers have substantiated this claim to one degree or another. Literature also provides a unique lens to examine Dominican racial identity and its role in establishing anti-negritud (anti-Blackness) in our people. This article will consider the topic in conversation with the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscao Wao by Dominican-American author, Junot Díaz.[1]

The novel tells the story of Oscar de León, an overweight Dominican nerd living in Patterson, New Jersey. The novel goes to great lengths to explain that Oscar was not a “normal Dominican.” And yet his story unfolds within the landscape of the Dominican experience. Though he is the protagonist of the story, his story is told alongside the stories of his sister Lola, his mother Beli, and his abuelo Abelard Luis Cabral. Our characters are set in New Jersey, then in Dominican Republic and back again. And because this is a Dominican story, Rafael Trujillo and el Trujillato (The Era of Trujillo) shape the lives of our primary characters. But this isn’t typical historical fiction. This story is a Fukú story.

The Fukú: A Curse on Black Bodies

The narrator of the story is Yunior, a “proto-typical” Dominican who ends up dating Lola and rooming with Oscar in college. Yunior provides commentary throughout the story. In the first chapter he explains the prevailing belief in Fukú in Dominican culture. “Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú – generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.”[iii] The Curse came from Africa, but to Dominicans, Rafael Trujillo is its high priest. Yunior helpfully notes, “It was believed, even in educated circles, that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond.”[iv] So this is a story about a family that crossed Trujillo so badly, they had incurred a Fukú for at least three generations. Given our limited space, our focus will be on the curse itself rather than Abelard’s offense against Trujillo.

Throughout the novel, two realities are linked together. Our primary characters have black skin, and the unfolding of their lives suggests that a generational curse has in fact been placed over their lives. With the exception of Abelard and La Inca, attention is given to each of our primary characters’ black complexion. In school, Beli’s black complexion is noted by a classmate. “You black, [a classmate said], fingering Beli’s thin forearm. Black-black.”[v] Lola observes that she has her mother’s complexion which means “[she] is dark.” In D.R., a boyfriend calls her “his morena.” Oscar too is notably of dark complexion. His afro, along with his other “non-Dominican traits” confuse those around him and they question whether he actually is Dominican or not. Alone, these descriptions might seem insignificant: evidence of family resemblance. But they serve a more significant role in the novel and its examination of Dominican racial identity.

To family members, Beli’s dark complexion was evidence that the family had been cursed. Shortly after her birth, her mother stepped in front of a moving truck and her two sisters each died under unusual circumstances. Beli was left an orphan. “She was so dark [that] no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her… and no one outside the family wanted the darkchild to live.”[vi] Beli was eventually sold to strangers to work as a servant girl. She’s eventually rescued by La Inca, a cousin of her father who discovers that the girl is alive and being kept in a chicken coop after she is burned by hot oil for “skipping out on work to attend classes.”[vii]

A few years later, Beli falls for Dionisio who is married to none other than Trujillo’s sister. When la hermana Trujillo discovers the affair, she has Beli taken out to a sugar cane field where she is nearly beaten to death. Yunior reports that “they beat her like she was a slave. Like she was a dog.”[viii] While laying there she slides into a deep lonliness “[where] she would dwell forever, alone, black, fea.”

These descriptions are not accidental. The author intends for us to recall the slaves who worked the sugar cane fields during early Spanish Colonialism. During the Spanish conflicts with France and England, the economy of the Island of Hispanola collapsed. Eventually many Spanish Whites left the island. In their place descendants of White men and Indigenous and African women “ascended the social ladder.” Together with freed Blacks they became the “blancos de la tierra.” The term black “came to be used in Santo Domingo only in reference to those who were still enslaved.” Beli and later Oscar, in his final moments, become stand-ins for the the histories of Blacks who received violence in Sugar Cane fields on this island.[ix]  

The lives of these primary characters seem to confirm a sinister truth: our Black protagonists were under the fukú; they were cursed. It isn’t always clear whether their Blackness was the Curse itself or the evidence of their being cursed, but the problem remained. They were Black, and black bodies in the Dominican Republic have often been subjected to marginalization, violence, and trauma.

The novel also demonstrates another side of the Dominican racial imaginary: the identification as non-Black and more importantly non-Haitian. Throughout the novel, to be Haitian is viewed as an insult. When Oscar returns from his first trip to Santo Domingo, his uncle greets him, “Great… now you look Haitian.” Later, on his return trip to the Island, Oscar notices a group of peddlers on the street. “So dark,” he noticed, and his mother said, dismissively, “Maldito haitianos.”[x] On that same trip, Lola and Beli have an interesting exchange at a restaurant. The waiters look at their group strangely, Lola teases her mother and says “Watch out Mom… they probably think you’re Haitian.” In response her mother retorts, “La única haitiana aquí eres tú, mi amor.”[xi] Anti-Haitian rhetoric was a strategy implemented throughout Dominican Republic’s history, especially during Trujillo’s reign. Haitians were Black, not so Dominicans.

Fukú vs Zafa

Yunior began the story by framing it as a fukú story. But at the end of the first chapter he introduces a second folk word: the zafa, or the counter spell. The novel, as a whole, is tragic. Upon first reading, one is left with the impression that the fukú will remain over this family for generations to come. But when Lola’s daughter is introduced in the final pages of the novel, Yunior hints at the possibility of a more powerful magic: a zafa of sorts. Lola’s daughter is dark like her mother, uncle and grandmother before her. But on her neck she wears three pendants: “the one that Oscar wore as a baby, the one that Lola wore as a baby, and the one that Beli was given by La Inca… powerful elder magic.” Yunior is not completely convinced it will work. He imagines eventually she will hear the word fukú. Maybe then, he imagines, she will come to see him and he will bring out old photographs and papers. Yunior doesn’t name it, but I suspect behind this little dream of his, is the counter spell itself. In those photographs and the pendants is connection and memory.

Together the opening and close of the novel suggests a way out from under the Curse of the New World. The Curse isn’t Blackness. It is the racialization that we’ve experienced and participated in throughout our histories. The Curse is the trauma and the silence of a people who experienced violence and marginalization under Trujillo and then again in the Diaspora. The Curse finds expression in our loss of memory and our erasure of all of our history, especially our African history.

Junot Díaz has often noted that his life and writings have been shaped in large part by silence caused by trauma.[xii] Throughout the novel, his characters are also made silent. Beli never says a word about her childhood trauma. She never tells her children about Dionisio, nor about the night she was almost beaten to death. Oscar doesn’t get the chance to finish his own story. His last correspondence to Yunior and Lola are lost. So what is the counter spell? The counter spell is connection and memory. Yunior is right when he suspects that the book is his own sort of counterspell. The act of storytelling, when it is honest and embracing of the good and the bad parts, can become our counterspell.

Our racial histories are complex. How can they not be when we are the fruit of the “new world?” How can they not be when we are the heirs of Trujillos’s Santo Domingo? How can they not be when we are the Diaspora, seeds planted in United States and all over the rest of the world? We cannot deny our afrodescendencia. Nor can we deny our own complicity in anti-negritud. So we must speak the counter curse. We must break the silence of our past traumas and our own acts of violence and tell our full history.

About Kerwin A. Rodriguez

Kerwin A. Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Pastoral Studies at Moody Bible Institute. He teaches in the areas of preaching, cultural dynamics, spiritual formation, and Bible interpretation. He is currently a PhD in Preaching student at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary. His doctoral research will be on Caribbean Latin@ preaching with a particular focus on the Dominican Republic. Kerwin and his wife, Meredith live in the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago with their son Ezra Joél, where they serve in their local church, Good News Bible Church.

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Footnotes

[1] Note: It should be acknowledge that in May 2018 Junot Díaz was accused of sexual misconduct and verbal abuse by multiple women. In a statement made to the New York Times, Díaz stated, “I take responsibility for my past.” He later amended his statement and told the Boston Globe, “There is a line between being a bad boyfriend and having a lot of regret, and predatory behavior.” This article is not the place to give extensive commentary on the serious allegations made about Junot Díaz’s conduct. It should be noted that shortly before the allegations were made public he wrote about his own experience as a victim of sexual abuse, and a prominent theme throughout his writings is the relationship between sexuality and trauma.

[i] Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016).

[ii] Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 18.

[iii] Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 1.

[iv] Díaz, 3.

[v] Díaz, 84.

[vi] Díaz, 252.

[vii] Díaz, 255.

[viii] Díaz, 147.

[ix] Ashley Kunsa, “History, Hair, and Reimagining Racial Categories in Junot Diáz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54, no. 2 (2013): 211–24.

[x] Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 273.

[xi] Díaz, 276.

[xii] Junot Díaz, “Junot Díaz: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma,” The New Yorker, accessed October 12, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma.

Representando donde quiera: The Afro-Latin@ lived experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[7] Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erasing Afro-Latinos? Pt. 2

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

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

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

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

Flattening Difference

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

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

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

The Foremother of Mestiza Discourse

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

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

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

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

Mestizaje as Exile

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

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

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

Reducing Conflict

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

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

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

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

Mestizaje as Impurity (Non-Innocence)

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

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

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

Para el Mestizo y la Afro-Latina

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

ABOUT EMANUEL PADILLA

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

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Footnotes

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

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

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

[4] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 82.

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

[6] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 137.

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

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 100.

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

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

[12] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 61.

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

[14] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 132.

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

[16] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 62.

[17] Romero, Brown Church, 163.

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

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

[20] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 75.

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

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

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

Erasing Afro-Latinos? Pt. 1

In the evolving dialog on race, racialization, and identity formation, significant identity markers are reexamined. Debates emerge about how and to what degree people belong to a community identifying with a certain term.  In some cases, the meanings of these terms are critiqued and corrected. On other occasions, the history of a word might inspire a movement to cancel its use, purging it from the daily lexicon. Conversations about identity are intricately tied to language. And, as one philosopher notes, the meanings of our words are fluid throughout history.[1] These evaluations of words, their histories, and their meanings have introduced a tension for World Outspoken because of our use of the word mestizo. Some young scholars recently suggest that mestizaje served its purpose, that the changed conditions in the US make the word obsolete.[2] I do not believe that is right.

A theology of mestizaje is at the center of World Outspoken. It guides the articles we write, the topics we address, and our approach to addressing them. Our mission statement makes the goal clear: to prepare the “Mestizo” church; mestizaje is without doubt a key element in the ethos of the organization. In partnership with the Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH), we launched The Mestizo Podcast, but as the first season of the show was nearing its end, we started receiving submissions from fans asking, “By calling the show, The Mestizo Podcast, are you erasing Afro-Latinidad? How am I, an Afro-Latino, included?” While I was aware of a few scholars with critiques of mestizo theology, I did not anticipate this question, and while I gave a brief answer on the final episode of the season, I think a fuller response is due. My goal in writing this is to 1) acknowledge the critiques of mestizaje – no theological proposal is without its weaknesses – and 2) explain how we address these weaknesses.

I am going to do this in two articles. The first will summarize a history of how the term mestizaje and its variants came to be used as theological tools. Many of the critiques of mestizaje stem from this history and how theologians glossed over or completely detached the terms from it. In the interest of charity, it is as important to remember the historical origin of mestizaje-the-term as it is the historical context of the theologians who tried to redeem it; there is value in acknowledging the pressures and motivations that drove their work. I hope to reframe key theologians to demonstrate why their errors may be rooted in attempts to solve problems in their own day. After reviewing this history, I intend in the second article to provide my own construal of mestizaje, defining the term and the theological formulations key to my understanding of it; I still believe in the value of mestizaje for theological discourse and ministry. As with many WOS projects, these articles flow from my own explorations of identity and theology, so I begin this with a history of Puerto Rico.

Constructing Race in Puerto Rico

In an essay titled “Constructing Race in Puerto Rico: The Colonial Legacy of Christianity and Empires, 1510-1910,” Dr. Angel Santiago-Vendrell presents a critique of mestizaje. According to Santiago-Vendrell, mestizaje and mulatez perpetuate racism based on notions of sameness. By returning to the earlier history of the Spanish empire, Dr. Santiago-Vendrell demonstrates how the purity-of-blood laws implemented by the Spanish to keep conversos (converted Jews) from political, economic, and religious rights, evolved to serve a similar exclusionary purpose against black and indigenous Puerto Ricans. While it was common for Spanish colonizers to take wives from the variety of ethno-racial groups on the island, Spanish origin and whiteness “were prized commodities to secure a place in the upper strata of society.”[3] Dr. Santiago-Vendrell writes:

“The amalgamation of the races did not create a better society, which was always ruled by White elites because for them racial impurity disqualified individuals from citizenship and responsibilities.”[4]

Since whiteness was the measure by which people were given or withheld civic rights and responsibilities, the Spanish created a system of 14-20 official categories of racial mixture.[5]  Mestiza/o was one of those lesser racial designations given to those mixed children of Indigenous and Spanish blood. “Other categories included:  Castizo (light-skinned mestizo); Morisco (light-skinned mulato); Zambo (Black-Indian); “ahí te estás” (there you are); and, “tente en el aire” (hold yourself suspended in mid-air).[6]” These racial categories were fluid, but they were rooted in phenotype (i.e. skin color and other physical features). Some people managed to move up via the accrual of wealth, becoming a priest, or being appointed to serve in government, and they received certificates of “racial purity” as they arrived at the status of “pure” Spanish.[7]

The Introduction of the US ProtestanT

Dr. Santiago-Vendrell goes on to cite the words of US protestant missionaries who arrived to the island and praised the harmonious relations between races, revealing how these missionaries failed to see the nuance of racism therein. What developed in Puerto Rico was a system of whitening where the focus was “purificar la raza” (purifying the race). This notion of purity persists in the colorism entrenched on the Island and in the diaspora. “Whitening was accomplished through marriage or illicit relationships, as White came to represent honor, prestige, and social standing.”[8] When US American missionaries arrived, they reinforced these ideas and social values. Still, as is often the case with Latinas/os, “white” Puerto Ricans were considered a lower class than European and North American whites, proving that black and brown people can never make it to the very top of the white anglo scale. The entire social arrangement was built around oppressing and/or erasing black and indigenous roots, and Dr. Santiago-Vendrell brilliantly exposes this in his historical writing.

The Forefathers of Mestizo Discourse

Discussions of mestizaje commonly trace their origin to the work of Jose Vasconcelos, specifically his essay La Raza Cosmica. Vasconcelos was a Mexican politician, philosopher, and theologian writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1848, Mexico and the US signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and Mexico relinquished all or parts of their entire northern territories. With the signing of this treaty, an estimated 100,000 Mexican citizens became strangers in their own land. In his writing, Vasconcelos resisted the imperialist expansion of the US. His essays were complex interdisciplinary works pulling from church mystics, science, history, and politics. Despite his resistance to Anglo expansion, Vasconcelos was blind to the ways his writing echoed the racial logic of the Spanish empire.

In La Raza Cosmica, Vasconcelos articulates a reading of history where he interprets the European expansion as predestined by God. It was his view that human history was moving toward a future mixed (mestizo) people that would inherit all the best qualities of the previous races. His critique of the Anglo, US nation was their refusal to mix with the indigenous. On the other hand, “Vasconcelos contended that the Spaniards desired to intermix with the indigenous peoples and, in so doing, provided a solution to the problem of the indigenous peoples being an inferior group.”[9] Nestor Medina provides a helpful summary of the racist contradictions in Vasconcelos’ writings. It reads as follows:

The already mixed people of Latin America are only an imperfect shadow of what is to come. Moreover, Vasconcelos does not mean intermixture in the most general, unqualified sense … this racial fusion means that the “inferior” and “uglier” groups – African descendants and the indigenous groups – will have to be elevated by mixing with superior ones. Since inferior groups cannot escape their inferiority by themselves, once conscious of the divine intent, they will see in intermixture their redemption. These groups have little to contribute to the [future] race, so their passage from inferiority to superiority will have to be a “voluntary extinction.”[10]

Medina concludes his summary by writing, “The operating assumption was that the closer the Latin American people got to the cosmic [i.e. future] race, the more they abandoned their “backward” indigenous and African roots.”[11] Both in Mexico and Puerto Rico, the influence of Spanish racial logic persisted even when the peoples of both nations started to formulate their own national identities. For Vasconcelos, if Mexicans were to be one people, they had to all be mestizos. Functionally, to adopt Vasconcelos’ vision, Mexicans had to relegate the indigenous and African to relics of the past. They are not erased from history, but they are removed from the present. This damaged vision of the world is built on the promise of a future mestizo people that will be the culturally rich inheritors of the land.

Virgilio Elizondo and The Future is Mestizo

Quite reasonably, many scholars connect Vasconcelos’ essay with Virgilio Elizondo’s writings, particularly his book The Future is Mestizo. Most notably, the title of the latter seems to be an echo of the futurist vision of the former. To my knowledge, there is no evidence of Vasconcelos’ essay directly influencing Elizondo’s book. Still, like Vasconcelos, Elizondo was arguing for a future reality. However, unlike Vasconcelos, Elizondo was working from observations of his local context. Elizondo was a Roman Catholic priest serving in San Antonio, Texas. While Vasconcelos wrote to define and shape the Mexican, “mestizo” identity, the people in view for Elizondo were primarily Mexican Americans living on the borderlands between the US and Mexico. He was considering those who, as we noted before, were stranded between two worlds. Therefore, Elizondo developed the idea of a double mestizaje.

According to Elizondo, the first mestizaje remains the cultural, religious, and biological mixture primarily between Indigenous and Spanish. However, something unique occurs for the Mexican Americans in the Southwest. “Like the womb of a woman receiving the seed of a man to produce new life, so in Mexico and subsequently in the Southwest of today's U.S., a new child had been conceived and born.”[12] Much like W.E.B. Du Bois’ depiction of the African American as having a double-consciousness, Elizondo describes the Mexican Americans in the southwest as being of two worlds, judged by both, and never truly at home in either. Others use the Nahuatl word nepantla, meaning between two worlds/lands, to describe a similar experience. This second mestizaje, produced by the encounter with a new imperial power (i.e. the US), shapes in the people a unique lens with which to see the world. This new, mixed people can see the work of the Lord in and among the poor and the oppressed. Indeed, they can see the Lord as King who chose to identify with the oppressed.

In Galilean Journey (1983), Elizondo explores the parallels between Christ’s journey on earth and the experience of the Mexican American people, and he identifies Jesus as a mestizo living on the borderlands of his society and culture. “Galilee represents marginalization and rejection, but it also represents the birthplace of salvation in the person of Jesus. The Galilean (mestizo) Jesus, understood as the historical in-breaking of God in human affairs, represents at once the rejected and the divine siding with the rejected ones.”[13] This rich idea became a hermeneutical key for Elizondo and for the theological reflection of the wider Hispanic community. It shaped much of the theological development that would follow, and it was used to raise questions of culture, power, and justice in biblical scholarship. From Elizondo onward, the meaning and use of mestizaje and “mestiza/o” changed.

The meanings people attributed to these terms changed from being the historically grounded description of the process that resulted in the mixed children of Spanish colonizers to something redemptive. Like the African Americans who repossessed their blackness and used phrases like “black is beautiful” to take agency of their identity, Elizondo provided the Hispanic community in the US a vision for reclaiming the wealth inherent to their uniqueness. He writes, “As the white/black discourse has become multilayered and commercialized, it has also become an agent of exclusion of the many emerging narratives of race and class in the history to the United States, or the struggles, oppressions, cultural traditions, and creative engagements of Latino peoples.”[14] Elizondo mobilized groups to support the creative engagement of Latinas/os. The movements that developed around Elizondo and his work are worth reexamining here since they reveal how mestizaje and mestiza/o became prevalent theological devices almost immediately. Today, many see in Elizondo and others a reductive, homogenizing theology that flattens the experience of Latinas/os and erases variances therein. There is, however, an important context that led to the adoption of Elizondo’s ideas.

How Mestizaje Became Theological

Elsewhere, I wrote about the US American tendency to reduce conversations about race and justice to a black/white binary. This tendency is not new. Elizondo wrote in his own day about the ways the dialog was limited in scope, conspicuously missing the contributions of Latina/o people. This hints to the problem that inspired Elizondo and a group of Latina/o theologians to gather at an hacienda in Ruidoso, New Mexico to imagine an association for Latina/o theologians. There, they discussed the challenging realities of the immigrant in the US and the faith experiences of their people. In a summary of an interview with Orlando O. Espin regarding this meeting, Medina writes, “Aware of their differences and of the wrong perceptions they had of each other’s communities, they decided to downplay the differences that divided them and instead emphasize the suffering and marginalization they had in common.”[15] Elizondo had already written about mestizaje, so the language was ready and available for their discussion. This is where mestizaje was first adopted by a wider theological guild.

The expanded context that motivated this meeting further clarifies this group’s willingness to adopt Elizondo’s language and framework. In the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, Latinos across the US began to mobilize and collaborate in coalitions – organized associations like the farm workers movement led by César Chávez – to address social injustices facing their distinct communities. The 1970 Census in the US was the first occasion in which Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and other Central and South Americans were subsumed in one category: Hispanic. In addition to the term, “U.S. Latina/o activists and scholars adopted mestizaje as the common ethnocultural and religious banner of unity.”[16] Medina elaborates, writing:

In the context of exclusion from the social imaginary of the United States, and in the search for creative ways to name their reality, the category of mestizaje provided these scholars with a way to name themselves as social subjects in resistance to the assimilatory policies of the U.S. government. As a collective of diverse ethnic and cultural groups, mestizaje served as the symbolic term for cohering as a people and for engaging the struggle for sociopolitical and economic justice. They found in mestizaje a useful category for articulating people’s experiences of faith in God … their discussions of mestizaje marked the intersecting spaces of “race,” ethnic and cultural identities, and people’s experience of marginalization and oppression.[17]

The social pressures of the moment inspired their gathering under one identity. They intentionally minimized difference and homogenized into a single group, advocating for their shared needs. Today, scholars are examining the relationship between this US-specific use of mestizaje and its variants and how it relates to the use of these terms in Latin America. More work needs to be done to identify and articulate the continued usefulness of terms like mestizaje. The concept must be employed with caution to avoid repeating the exclusion and racism present in the world imagined by Vasconcelos. However, given the value and meanings of these word for exiled Latinas/os in the US and the continued black/white binary that ignores their racialized experiences, a contextualized conversation about mestizaje is critical. What is left is to ground the use of mestizaje and mestiza/o in history and explain its utility today. Is there a way to use mestiza/o theological language without minimizing the variety of Latin American and US-born Latina/o experiences? This will be the topic of our next article in the series.

ABOUT EMANUEL PADILLA

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

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Footnotes

[1] See Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work Philosophical Investigations (1953).

[2] Nestor Medina and Nstor Medina, Mestizaje: Remapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/O Catholicism (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2009), 87.

[3] Willie James Jennings et al., Can “White” People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission, ed. Love L. Sechrest, Johnny Ramírez-Johnson, and Amos Yong (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2018), 160.

[4] Ibid.

[5] As cited by Dr. Robert Chao Romero in Brown Church. Magali M. Carrera, (1998) Locating Race in Late Colonial Mexico, Art Journal, 57:3, 36-45; 38.

[6] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race,” 572-573.

[7] Robert Chao Romero, Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity, n.d., 113.

[8] Jennings et al., Can “White” People Be Saved?, 160.

[9] Nestor Medina and Nstor Medina, Mestizaje: Remapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/O Catholicism (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2009), 66.

[10] Ibid., 67.

[11] Ibid., 70.

[12] Virgilio Elizondo, Davíd Carrasco, and Sandra Cisneros, The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, Revised Edition, Revised, Subsequent Edition (Boulder, Colo: University Press of Colorado, 2000), 40.

[13] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 29.

[14] Elizondo, Carrasco, and Cisneros, The Future Is Mestizo, xxi.

[15] Medina and Medina, Mestizaje, 145.

[16] Medina and Medina, 5.

[17] Ibid., 6.