Stay or Leave

Should I stay or should I leave? Am I trapped in the barrio or is the barrio an inescapable, yet beautiful part of me from which I should not flee (or even have the desire to leave)? Should the life-taking stories of my barrio take precedence (like they do in the news) or do I privilege only the life-giving (counter) narratives that dignify my city? If I stay, am I being a bad parent, allowing my son to remain in a potentially dangerous environment where opportunity and resources are scant? If I leave, am I being a bad Christian by opting for my family’s and my own comfort and safety?

These questions invaded my mind and the noises of my barrio played a conflicting melody where love, sacrifice, injustice, and pain entwined.

El ruido que amo (the noise that I love)

I love las cumbias, las rancheras y los boleros I hear desde mi ventana. I didn’t exactly request this music pero my neighbors’ music selection is everyone’s delight. Ok, maybe not everyone’s, but I like it. I’ll be hanging out in my back yard and suddenly la canción de Ana Gabriel que puso la vecina gets me going, and I start singing my heart out: ¿Quién como tú, que día a día puedes tenerle? It takes me back to the many road trips I took with my parents when I was a little girl. Ana Gabriel, Juan Gabriel, Los Bukis – those were my jams!

I love el ruido que mi gente makes when they’re hussling. Tamales, tamales, tamales. ¡Tamales de piña, de puerco, de pollo, tamales! I love when my son runs out yelling raspadooo when the street vendors pass by honking their horns announcing la llegada of those delicious raspados we all slurp with such gozo. I love hearing mi pueblo use their voice to try to make ends meet en el swapmeet: barato, barato, barato, pásele; ¿qué le damos, señorita, pásele a lo barato? 

I love la euforia que se escucha cuando la selección mexicana scores a goooooooool!

Whoever said my people have been silenced, has not set foot in my neighborhood.

El ruido que odio (the noise that I hate)

I hate that I can distinguish the sound of fireworks from gunshots. I hate that we have to run inside the house and lock every door when we hear shots fired. I hate that every other day police sirens and the noise of helicopters drown out the sound of my favorite TV show, reminding me that I am not safe. I hate the cries of yet another grieving mother as she pleas with the public to help her find her child’s murderer.

El ruido que amo y el ruido que odio are juxtaposed mainly because “U.S. barrios have been a source of cultural resistance; they function as reterritorialized spaces where it is possible to maintain one ́s culture and to resist assimilation. At the same time, the barrios are social spaces where ethnic lower classes are segregated thus impairing their economic development and creating a subculture of violence and poverty.”[1]

El silencio que mata (the silence that kills)

But the most murderous force in my neighborhood is silent. The culprit hides in plain sight. More than two thousand pounds of toxic chemicals are emitted in Wilmington, California every single day. My beloved city is surrounded by the largest concentration of oil refineries in the state and the third largest oil field in the contiguous U.S., and it is home to the largest port in North America (Grist 2022). Wilmington, which is 90% Latino and 40% immigrant, is a toxic wasteland; the dumping grounds of big oil corporations. The contaminants expelled daily create diseased bodies in a community where the median household income is 40% below the state’s average and where 28% of its residents are not medically insured, a number that represents three times more than the national average. The environmental hazard created by these companies also has an impact on violent crime. Several studies have found a link between violent crime and pollutant exposure: “air pollutants act as stressors, eliciting endocrine stress responses in our brains that lead to irrational decisions and violent tendencies and also disturb the physical, cognitive and emotional health of people exposed to it at high levels” (The Guardian 2022).

Wilmington, CA; they call it a “bad neighborhood” and bad neighborhoods are always bad because of the individuals that inhabit it. A “bad neighborhood” is never thought to be bad by virtue of systemic injustices that include racial and environmental inequalities. My family and I are from a “bad neighborhood,” but I don’t think we’re bad people. Jesus himself was from Galilea, a neighborhood deemed undesirable. Dr. Chao Romero asserts that if Jesus was from California, he would not come from Beverly Hills or Calabasas, but the most marginalized regions of the state, like East LA or the Central Valley.[2]

What we really mean when we say “bad neighborhood” is impoverished, and, often, Brown or Black. The “good neighborhoods” are strictly regulated. Associations determine rules about the colors in which you are allowed to paint your house, how often you’re supposed to do your lawn, and how much noise you can make. “Good neighborhoods” are wealthy, have good school districts, lower crime rates and are predominantly White. Language matters because language constructs truth. The use of “good/bad” as it refers to neighborhoods continues to strengthen the belief that the people who live there are inherently bad and completely disregards systemic issues that have created and continue to sustain the disenfranchisement of our barrios.

I understand the ways in which systemic issues have worked against my community. I love my community for the ways in which it has shaped me to be resilient, humble, and faithful. I am grateful for the ties I have formed there and the life lessons that have been imparted to me: to not judge people by what they have or where they came from. Nonetheless, there is another competing truth: I have witnessed more gun violence than the average American, I attended low-performing schools in the area and do not feel safe letting my teenage son walk alone to the store that is 100 feet away from my house. I have lived in this city for over 30 years and there is a certain level of comfort granted to me by familiarity, but as a mother, I face a conundrum: do I stay or do I leave?

Deciding to leave our barrios is more than aspiring to a bigger, nicer house with abundant parking, and plentiful green spaces. Leaving our barrios means that our children will have better educational opportunities, access to resources that improve their livelihoods, and the probability of being less exposed to violent crime. Ironically, the dilemma many of us face is similar to the one experienced by our first-generation immigrant parents with one distinction: my socioeconomic status and educational levels have significantly improved while remaining in my native community.

The Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) emphasizes a ministry of presence in which believers are active members of the communities in which they serve. It is a way of doing ministry that decentralizes white saviorism and centers the voices of community members. They invite people to be wholly present in their areas of ministry by becoming (and remaining) a neighbor. As a Christian that understands the importance of serving the socially dispossessed, am I to remain and use my social and economic capital to help my community flourish or should I leave relocating in a city where my children will be safer and have access to opportunity?

I left. It might seem like that was the easiest decision to make, but it certainly didn’t feel that way. I wrestled with this decision for quite some time, asking the Lord for guidance: “Lord, help us; ayúdanos a entender tu voluntad.” Months later, my husband and I received an answer to our prayers that gave us the certainty that we were being called out of my beloved city. In very God-like fashion, he set the pieces in motion and directed our steps.

So, should you stay or should you leave? I don’t know, and I don’t think there’s a generic right or wrong answer. God directs our paths in unique ways in different seasons of our lives (Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8). For people of color, these decisions are especially difficult as we encounter survivor’s guilt. Dr. Piorkowski explains that survivor’s guilt, or success guilt, is prevalent amongst first-generation college students from marginalized communities. We often ask ourselves – and God – questions that are filled with remorse: Why did I succeed when so many others in my neighborhood didn’t? Why am I alive when many of my classmates aren’t? Why do I have the opportunity to live in better conditions when many of my family members don’t? How is it possible that I love my barrio, but still want to leave it?

Guilt and gratefulness collide, but this guilt is crippling because it doesn’t allow me to faithfully receive God’s blessings. Instead of viewing the earth as a punishment that we must endure to buy our way into Heaven, we must understand the earth as a good place created by God (Genesis 1:18; Genesis 1:31) and our salvation as a free gift from our Lord (Ephesians 2:8; Romans 6:23). Perhaps God is indeed calling you to stay, but the decision to remain should not be guided by guilt. Conversely, if we are being led to leave, we must not do so developing a posture where we see our former neighbors as less-than, or inherently lacking, because of their socioeconomic status, and in doing so, engaging in the further dehumanization of our barrios. Remember that “You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are” (The House on Mango Street). 

About Dra. Meduri Soto

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

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Footnotes

[1] Views of the Barrio in Chicano and Puerto Rican Narrative (Antonia Domínguez Miguela)

[2] The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology and Identity (2020) 

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Should It Stay or Should It Go?

As humans, our history is marked by wounds of the past. We fight one another. We exploit one another. We kill one another. Our history is shaped by human injury; so, it makes sense that in a retelling of this history we would perpetuate injury. Injury begets injury. History-telling always runs the risk of aggrandizing someone’s story at the expense of another’s. That is the tension that exists between history and injury. This tension can even find its home in tangible spaces. Today, that tension found a home at the sites of many U.S. monuments. One of these homes is in Brandenburg, KY.

“On April 29, 2016, Louisville announced the removal of the Confederate monument, but attorneys stopped the city by filing a temporary injunction to stop demolition, and a lawsuit.”

– “New Monument History” Plaque in front of “Our Confederate Dead” statue in Brandenburg, KY.

“Our Confederate Dead” monument, which once stood in Louisville next to the Ohio River, is now situated about 45 miles south of the river in Brandenburg. The plaque, quoted above, stands in complement to two others. The one mentioned has a heading that reads, “New Monument History,” which tells the story of the new placement of the old monument. The second contributes a haunting echo of history by commemorating a quote from Basil Duke, a Confederate General Officer, on the folly of forgetting history. And the third, a plaque titled “Southern Causes for the Civil War,” offers a 248-word proof of the South’s motivation for entering the Civil War. In the shadow of that monument, all three plaques—not yet 5 years rusted—make clear that we are still fighting remnants of a war that ended 151 years ago. As the third plaque alludes, the Civil War was a war of sentiment.

I still remember my first time hearing the history of the Civil War explained to me by someone not from the South. It was like being told of a new war, one that was completely different from the Civil War that I had learned about. Having grown up in Florida, under the careful tutelage of southern evangelical curricula, my understanding of the Civil War was that it was a war of rights and not of slavery. Slavery was a footnote to the overall question: Who gets to enforce the rights of a man—God himself or man’s governing body? In fact, when reading the “Southern causes for the Civil War” plaque, it was like being reintroduced to an old memory. The plaque reads,

“Northern abolition movements with a goal to end slavery threatened to undermine the entire southern economy and culture free from northern interference, the south under pressure from the aristocratic plantation owners, seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America.”

According to the South, the North has painted over (or overwritten) the true economic and political issues behind the war with a manipulative picture of an evil slave state. The sentiment of the South is that they and their confederate kin are misunderstood, and the story of their fight is unfairly eclipsed by a history of slavery. Granted, it is quite hard to fit all that on one plaque, but this sentiment cannot be overlooked. Here is a history marked by injury. However, this injury is multi-faceted. What is not portrayed on this small plaque, is the exploitive reality of a South built on the backs of slaves. This an obtuse and glaring omission, which explains the contention of the very existence of the monument. For understandable reasons, the African American communities in the South want this monument torn down. Which brings us to our question: Should monuments like “Our Confederate Dead” stay or go?

Ghosts of the Past

Before we venture into the ethics of monuments, perhaps it is best to first ask: What are monuments? Why do we build them? What is their significance?

The monuments in our parks that we tend to overlook are not unassuming artifacts. Monuments capture history that we believe merit our remembrance in a significant, permanent way. Presumably, we create monuments to share memories with the generations that follow us. Built in stone, iron, or some other precious element that we believe can stand the test of time, we erect our monuments with the intent to provide a witness to history, but not just any history: our history, our nation’s history, our land’s history. Or at least, that is what we could hope for in our monuments. Through monuments, we attempt to speak beyond the grave. In a way, our statues surround us like ghosts begging to tell us a story.

We fashion our monuments with respectable facades, all so that we can bring resolve to the actions of our ancestors and expound their sentiments in hopes that they will still be relevant in the future. That is what I hear in the whispers of Southern Confederate statues, a plea to remember them in a perspective that regards their own inclinations and their own sentiments. I hear a cry of a people who never had the chance to publicly mourn the loss of their dead. The fallen confederate soldier wants to be remembered as having died a death that had purpose. This is indicative of a South that argues that it fought a war righteously regardless of its accused sins.

I think it is difficult for the South to dismantle its monuments because she has not yet grappled with her loss, both the loss of her dead and the loss of her conviction. Herein lies the problem; The South remains in limbo. She has not nursed her wounds. She continues to replay them over and over again like a trauma not processed. To nurse wounds would be to recognize them, and she has not quite reached that level of awareness because the world moved on after simply indicting her of her sins and leaving her destitute. While the work force she had was obtained by exploitive means, once the South lost the war, she had not a penny to her name and no means in which to gain it back. The South had nothing left but injury and history. So, she built monuments, erected legends, created myths to make it bearable to move forward in a new world.

This is history marked by a wound that was never dealt with, and now the buried grief resurfaces as generations pass and questions begin to be asked. There are other parts of the South’s history, not just the Confederacy’s, that have not been dealt with. Drowned out by the pleas of the dead proud confederate, is the forgotten cry of disenfranchised black slaves.

There must be a better way to build monuments that honors all of our histories and allows all of us to grieve the loss and the injury perpetuated on our kin.

Rest in Peace

In Washington DC, there is a memorial dedicated to the Veterans of the Vietnam War, which is arguably one of the most controversial wars of our modern day. The erection of a Vietnam Memorial caused a public outcry, and to add to the controversy, the architect chosen to design the memorial was an Asian-American.[1] Maya Lin, who was at that time 21-years old and unknown, created a stir in DC as she designed a memorial to look like what many could only describe as a wound in the earth.[2] Lin was attentive to everything from the material (black granite with a polished finish), to the way the names were displayed (chronologically by the deaths of the veterans and not alphabetically), to the way the memorial stood (sunk below the ground). She did all this so that we as a country could be attentive to the wound of that war. On the 35th anniversary of the memorial, then acting President Obama said this of the memorial:

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has changed the way we think about monuments, but also about how we think about sacrifice, and patriotism, and ourselves. Maya’s pieces have changed the landscape of our country and influenced the dialogue of our society, never more profoundly than with her tribute to the Americans who fell in Vietnam by cutting a wound into the Earth to create a sacred place of healing in our Nation’s capital.

I am a daughter of immigrants. This land I grew up in does not know my family line. My family’s history in the United States is young. When I look up at most monuments in this country, I have no ancestral blood tied to it. There are, however, some monuments that do hold more weight to me as an Asian-American. The Vietnam Memorial is one such monument. A monument dedicated to a country’s fallen for a war of interference in a land nearer to mine echoes the sentiment of the third plaque from the statue of “Our Confederate Dead. The difference is that Lin’s monument, with all its raw ugliness, brings into greater focus the pain of warring sentiments and the human loss we create by our sins against one another. She allows the dead to truly rest by making us, the living, contend with the past. To her, monuments are more analogous to scars, in that they should be reminders of a past injury that have healed but forever marks us.

I believe that what Maya Lin’s monument provides for us is a better way forward. Her monument is a reminder that wounds can only heal if allowed to be exposed to air and sunlight. Moreover, it is strong proof that it is important to allow all parties of conflict and injury to have their say in the way we portray history. Imagine what the monuments in the South could look like if we had both Confederate descendants and African American kindred in open dialogue and empathetic construction. I think, if we employed both collaborative imagination and gracious sympathy more often and more earnestly, the monuments in our country could look much different.

It is time to restore our US monuments in a way that honors all parties. A collaborative restoration. Perhaps it is audacious, but I believe that in our world there is enough physical space for all of our dead to rest in peace, but only if the living are willing to fight for it.

“The absence of a narrative in which people of color are recognized for the contribution to society is dangerous because it leaves unquestioned the dominance of white people of the planet today, thus tacitly endorsing the notion of white superiority. People of color receive no credit for being an essential, although coerced, part of the development of the modern world.” ”

— Carl Anthony, Earth-City, 2017

About Jelyn Leyva

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

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Foootnotes

[1] https://www.biography.com/news/maya-lin-vietnam-veterans-memorial

[2] http://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/photos/maya-lin-ceremony-marks-35th-anniversary-vietnam-memorials-healing-power/

Is God Really Hiding In The Woods? Reflections on Urban Spirituality

“What man has not encountered, he has not yet destroyed.” ”

— Wendell Berry

In two short weeks Christmas films will release in mass. Husbands, boyfriends, and fathers will grimace, or secretly join in, while their wives and girlfriends, daughters and grandmothers turn to the Hallmark channel while decorating for the holidays. A timeless plot will follow; a big city business girl gets stranded in a small town and finds faith (and a handsome man in plaid), all before Christmas Eve. Disillusioned by life in the city, the main character will inadvertently experience a life pause. Her pause will take place, of course, in front of a snow-capped mountain, or along a reclusive shoreline, where she finds herself and God. This pivotal moment in nature becomes the climax, which restores the heroine’s hope in humanity and ultimately opens her heart to love. It is a story we know well, because many of us have experienced the same sense of restoration outdoors.

When feeling lost and needing to refocus, our culture, both in and outside the church, sends us to the woods. In the popular memoir turned movie, Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s wilderness journey is one of personal and spiritual transformation. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty shows Ben Stiller’s character Walter traveling to the furthest corners of the world in the pursuit of the meaning of life. Moses found his calling while on a mountain herding sheep. Christ himself prepared for ministry through the testing of isolation in the wilds of Israel. Today, countless of adults and children seek to find God in nature. Churches, rural, suburban, and urban alike, plan getaways to lakeside retreat centers. Young adults take journeys by hiking or biking across countries or continents, Instagraming their way with deep, spiritual reflections on encountering God. In pursuing these experiences, few stop to question the practical theology implicit in this means of experiencing God’s presence. If pivotal spiritual experiences happen in the woods, where does that leave God’s people when they find themselves dwelling among the sidewalks?

If we reframed this question to ask: “Does location matter when seeking to experience God,” I believe most would answer, in the most general sense, no. One can experience profound moments with the Lord when driving to work, as when in Sunday worship, as when vacationing in the Rockies. The ability to acknowledge this is rooted in a correct theology of the person of the Holy Spirit, whom indwells believers, testifying to their union with Christ, and therefore God the Father.[1] Yet, a prevailing sense within church culture (and the world) is that God is found in the quiet, open space, and therefore, outside the city limits. I remember feeling this way when I moved to Chicago. Coming from a valley with rolling hills and broad mountains, I grew to adulthood accustomed to the security and vastness of something other than and greater than myself. After moving to Chicagoland, I frequently sought out the openness of Lake Michigan when disoriented and desiring the presence of God.

In his doctoral dissertation with Liberty Theological Seminary, Philip Joseph Parker examines on a closer level why and how people encounter God through His creation. Parker defines encounter as: “an awareness of being in the presence of someone else whether that individual is another human being or God. This includes those experiences in which there is a sensory interchange involving, for example, hearing and seeing, as well as those instances in which a person is simply aware of another’s presence.”[2] Parker correctly explains that people often have a greater awareness of God in nature; the sights and sounds provide a kind of sensory experience of His presence and work in the world.[3]

Does it follow that these encounters with God are not happening within the city? In contrast to nature cities are an engine that incubate and intensify the production of human culture.[4] What we encounter in more densely populated areas is not a lack of the presence of God, but the intensity of the human spirit and what it creates. This intensity is alluring, drawing many to dwell in cities, seeking after the energy which drives the activity. This intensity is also, in the broad sense, human-driven activity, which overtime exhausts the human spirit. The answer then, for many, is to withdraw from the populated setting to a setting perceived to be more God-driven, more untouched by human enterprise. So we step outside of the activity, the hurry if you will, and the spirit of humanity, to breathe and listen to a voice beyond the echo of our own.

This desire to step away and reconnect with God is a healthy one. We are reminded of this as the psalmist laments the condition of the world and comes to a clearer understanding when he “came into the sanctuary of God.”[5] We see another example in Christ who removed himself from the crowds to pray to the Father. This concept of hurry and rest is also currently being addressed in evangelical writings. John Mark Comer’s recent book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry speaks to just that. Comer, along with countless other Bible teachers and theologians, are tapping into the exhaustion and distracted nature of the human spirit in today’s world. However, an issue arises when a change of locality becomes an essential pattern to spiritual refreshment, a lens by which we view the working of the Spirit in ourselves and in His people. In the development of the doctrine of retreat, I wonder, have we have forgotten the point is to pause?

I propose that we have for too long focused on the location and space of our encounters with God, rather than the heart posture which facilitates these occurrences. The problem then, is not our locality, but our willingness to stop and humbly open our eyes to see the greatness and goodness of the One who is other than us. Cities display a kind of intricate beauty and tragedy that the natural world—mountains, rivers and plains, cannot. While nature, a creation of God, reminds us of His character, cities express God’s very image. Both in humanity and in the work of humanity, the image of God is showcased every moment. Sadly this showcase, a living stage play of God Himself, is flawed—often quite ugly, violent, tired, and tearful. It is no wonder that it is said of Abraham that “he was looking forward to the city…whose designer and builder is God.”[6] This is why we, as the Church, look forward hopeful and sure. Eager to take part in the restoration of all things, we live now with creative hands, active minds, and interested hearts, ready to join in God’s work of making culture.

World Outspoken exists to equip the Church to make culture. We as God’s people embody the redeemed human spirit on earth, adding to the intensity a holiness which creates a new kind of beauty, a fresh form of flourishing. In attempting to retreat from humanity, are we diverting our eyes from God’s presence around us each day on the sidewalks?

Just last week something made me look up. Sitting crouched over my phone, headphones blaring on a bursting rush hour train, I lifted my head to see the lights. As I gazed out over the Chicago river and took in the sparkling skyline of the city, my heart paused. If anyone had been watching, they may have been puzzled by the sudden smile which filled my face. In that moment the noise of the world quieted, along with my cares and uncertainties. Surrounded by the complexity of God’s creation (mankind), looking out at something bigger than myself (high-rises), my heart rested, humbled by the greatness and goodness of God. This spiritual refreshment, available to us consistently through the presence of the Spirit, merely awaits our attention and willingness. I am here to say, that even without a mountain, God can be found.

About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily C. Alexander recently completed her undergraduate degree in Ministry to Women at the Moody Bible Institute. Emily lives in Chicago where she enjoys long walks admiring architecture and pondering theological and sociological issues. Her hope is to impact the lives of women and the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.

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Footnotes

[1] Romans 8.14-17.

[2] Encountering God Through Creation https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/58821668.pdf

[3] Due to the space and scope of this article, how unbelievers experience God in relation to creation will not be addressed.

[4] https://worldoutspoken.com/idea/babylon-by-choice/

[5] Ps. 73.17; Here, the psalmist doesn’t leave the city; he steps into the heart of it. The temple had significant garden imagery, reflecting an echo of the Garden of Eden (see Bible Project Video). This should challenge us about the importance of making beautiful church buildings that reverberate with a different voice, the voice of the Lord and His cloud of witnesses that went before us.

[6] Hebrews 11.10